"Marijuana has been a medicine for 5,000 years. It's only for the last 70 years that it hasn't been a medicine in this country."An appeal to tradition is no more conclusive for marijuana than it is for gay marriage. There could, potentially, have been new information prompting its prohibition—just as new understanding of homosexuality has led to its equal rights movement seeking to reverse an ancient intolerance.
—Dr. Donald Abrams of San Francisco General Hospital
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."
"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."
"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."
"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"
"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."
"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
"In the year 1090, there was founded in Persia the religious and military order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty, barbarity, and murder, and for good reason: the members were confirmed users of hashish, or marihuana, and it is from the Arabs' 'hashashin' that we have the English word 'assassin.'"
"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust."
"By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."
"Users of marijuana become STIMULATED as they inhale the drug and are LIKELY TO DO ANYTHING. Most crimes of violence in this section, especially in country districts are laid to users of that drug."
"Was it marijuana, the new Mexican drug, that nerved the murderous arm of Clara Phillips when she hammered out her victim's life in Los Angeles?... THREE-FOURTHS OF THE CRIMES of violence in this country today are committed by DOPE SLAVES -- that is a matter of cold record."
At one point in the segment, Lesley Stahl suggests that the “conundrum” for policymakers is that raising the drinking age has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but may be contributing to fatalities associated with underage binge drinking.Education is always good. And Prohibition bad, even when it only applies to under-21s. All data I've seen supports these principles on balance.
But there may not be a conundrum at all. When I interviewed McCardell for the February issue of Reason, he explained why the argument that raising the drinking age is responsible for the 20-year drop in highway deaths doesn’t hold water:There has been a decline in traffic fatalities. But it began in 1982, two years before the law changed. It has basically been flat or inching upward for the last decade.Not to mention the enormously successful public awareness campaign Mothers Against Drunk Driving began in the early 1980s. MADD today has veered off into neoprohibition. But there’s no question their PR campaign changed attitudes about drunk driving.
More interestingly, the decline has come in every age group, not just people between 18 and 21. And if you look at Canada, where the minimum drinking age is 18 or 19 [depending on the province], the trend in highway fatalities has almost exactly paralleled ours. It’s far more likely that the reduction in deaths is due to seat belt use, airbags, and safer cars.
Even before today’s sobering news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for pancreatic cancer in a New York hospital, the only woman currently on the court had been routinely listed by court watchers as a likely candidate to retire from her lifetime appointment sooner rather than later.I wish her well, but she looks headed for retirement given the circumstances.
Her age (she is 75), past health scares (she was treated for colon cancer a decade ago) and more recently the ascension of a Democratic president and Senate served to fuel that speculation. And now this. The Supreme Court announced that she will be hospitalized for a week to ten days but the legal and political ripples caused by her illness are likely to splash around the nation’s legal system for weeks and months and years to come.
Before the sun sets today, indeed, between the time that I write this and the time it is posted online, there will be published and posted here, there and everywhere lists of potential Supreme Court candidates who would replace Justice Ginsburg should she retire or become too ill to serve. I refuse to go down that premature path except to say that there are many qualified candidates, including many brilliant women, who ought to be considered first to replace the second woman ever to serve on the High Court.
As it now stands, the departure of Ginsburg from the Court probably wouldn’t change its ideological dynamic very much. President Obama likely would select someone who would vote as Justice Ginsburg has; that is to say in a consistently “liberal” or “moderate” way against the expansion of capital punishment, against the restriction of abortion rights and with great suspicion toward the aggrandizement of executive branch authority and corporate protections.
If she were to retire, and be replaced by an ideological clone, we’d be seeing the liberal version of the Rehnquist-for-Roberts trade we saw a few years ago.
In other words, a Ginsburg retirement now would not be an earth-mover in the larger scheme of Supreme Court power. But let’s chew, law school style, on a hypothetical. Think about what a monumental story we would now have if John McCain were president. In that scenario, a Ginsburg departure from the Court, and the concomitant conservative successor who would arrive there under a McCain Administration, would reverse many of the Court’s recent 5-4 votes.
Conservative-moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy would no longer be the swing vote and the Court’s liberal wing would be down to three. The uneasy balance of power between right and left that currently exists on the Court would be gone for quite some time. This will not happen. But the thought of it—good or bad, depending upon your view—is yet another reason for us to remember how and why elections matter.
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