Fuck Yeah Drug Policy: Archive

Fuck Yeah Drug Policy

February 2012

38 posts

'I Wanted To Live': New Depression Drugs Offer... →

[Christopher Stephens, who was diagnosed with depression when he was just 15] has vivid memories of the day he got ketamine. It was a Monday morning and he woke up feeling really bad, he says. His mood was still dark when doctors put in an IV and delivered the drug. “Monday afternoon I felt like a completely different person,” he says. “I woke up Tuesday morning and I said,...

“Many users of psychedelics report the experience as a consciousness-expanding one, and conventional wisdom suggests that such drugs should increase brain activity and blood flow to the brain. Instead, the research in PNAS showed that psilocybin decreased blood flow to specific regions of the brain that act as “connector hubs”, where information converges and from where it is...

More prisoners, more profit

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of...

Exploring the causes of the US incarceration...

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of...

“For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is...”

– Adam Gopnik writes about the modern-day shame of the American Prison State (via aheram)

The Fastest Growing Population in Prison? The...

occupytheprisonindustrialcomplex: A new report by Human Rights Watch found that the elderly are the fastest growing population in our prisons: Long sentences mean that many current prisoners will not leave prison until they become extremely old, if at all. Human Rights Watch found that almost 1 in 10 state prisoners (9.6 percent) is serving a life sentence. An additional 11.2 percent have...

“In a free country, consenting adults ought to be able to do with our own...”

– featured tag: #john stossel

Whether we're discussing drug prohibition or sugar...

“It’s one thing to advise the population on what may be good or bad for our health. Many people have chosen to quit smoking, for example, for health reasons even though they enjoy it. But it is quite another thing to demand that adults should change their habits at the whim of medical researchers, politicians or campaigners. How we lead our lives should be our choice. If we enjoy smoking,...

“There are over 2 million people incarcerated in local, state, and federal prisons in the United States, an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 people, which is high for a democracy (the incarceration rate is 325 in Israel, 217 in Poland, 154 in England and Wales, 96 in France, 71 in Denmark, and 32 in India). The number of people in jail has increased dramatically since the 1980s....

January 2012

69 posts

Marijuana legalization measure certified in WA |... →

A measure to legalize the recreational use of marijuana is likely to be on the November ballot, after the secretary of the state’s office certified the initiative Friday, saying the campaign had turned in enough valid petition signatures. Initiative 502 now goes to the Legislature, but lawmakers are not likely to take up the issue during the short 60-day session that ends on March 8,...