black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             

“Apparently Barack Obama is a very unforgiving person. In his first term, he pardoned 22 people. In FDR’s first term, he pardoned about 600, with a hell of a lot fewer inmates to choose from. During Clinton’s two terms, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of 459; George W. Bush: 200.

Obama commuted the sentence of only one person in his first term. According to ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer, who’s done a lot of great work on this, “Under Reagan and Clinton, applicants for commutations had a 1 in 100 chance of success. Under George W. Bush, that fell to a little less than 1 in 1,000. Under Obama, an applicant’s chance is slightly less than 1 in 5,000.”

Why is he so stingy? Does being the first black president make him overly afraid of having a Willie Horton situation on his watch? Because he’s gotta get over that shit. I mean, I’m not asking him to do a prison break, but couldn’t he be at least half as merciful as George W. Bush, a man famous for putting people to death and not giving a shit? 

There are about 219,000 people in federal prison (presidents can pardon only federal crimes), almost half on non-violent drug offenses. If he can’t find a few slam-dunk cases of innocence there, he’s not trying hard enough. One case that’s pending is a guy named Clarence Aaron, who’s been sentenced to three life terms for introducing drug dealers. Not buying, selling, or supplying. Introducing. Both the prosecutor and the judge in his case sought immediate commutation of his sentence. Obama knows this. So what’s taking him so long to give the poor guy a break? […]

Keep in mind this is a president who’s admitted to at one point in his life being a huge stoner and doing cocaine. He must know how lucky he was not to have his life and career ruined by our stupid drug war. Doesn’t he owe a debt to the unlucky?

I was hoping he’d get better in the second term, so I was happy to read a headline earlier this month that he pardoned 17 people, almost as many as in his entire first term. Then I looked at the details, and 12 of those people weren’t even serving jail time. It’s a big nothing, and his record on this is still deplorable.

When he nominated Sonia Sotomayor, he was eloquent about the need for empathy in a Supreme Court justice. Somebody ought to remind him that’s a pretty important quality for a president, too.”

Bill Maher

“There’s been relatively little analysis of what a legal marijuana industry might look like. One key but little-appreciated fact is that, according to persuasive research by Jonathan Caulkins, Angela Hawken, Beau Kilmer, and Mark Kleiman in their new book Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs To Know, is that legal pot would be amazingly cheap. In fact, midgrade stuff would be so cheap that it might make sense for businesses to give it away like ketchup packets or bar nuts.

Conventional thinking about pot pricing is often dominated by people’s experience buying weed in legal or quasi-legal settings such as a Dutch “coffee shop” or a California medical marijuana dispensary. But this is badly misleading. Neither California nor the Netherlands permit growing or wholesale distribution of marijuana as a legal matter. If pot were fully legal, its growth, distribution, and marketing would work entirely differently. […]

How cheaply could pot be grown with advanced farming techniques? One potential data point is Canada’s industrial hemp industry, where production costs are about $500 per acre. If the kind of mid-grade commercial weed that accounts for about 80 percent of the U.S. market could be grown that cheaply, it implies costs of about 20 cents per pound of smokable material: Enough pot to fill more than 800 modest-sized half-gram joints for less than a quarter!. Those numbers are probably optimistic, since in practice recreational marijuana is grown from more expensive transplanted clones rather than from seeds. Even so, the authors note that “production costs for crops that need to be transplanted, such as cherry tomatoes and asparagus, are generally in the range of $5,000-$20,000 per acre.” That implies costs of less than $20 per pound for high-grade sensimilla and less than $5 a pound for mid-grade stuff. Another way of looking at it, suggested by California NORML Director Dale Gieringer, is that we should expect legal pot to cost about the same amount as “other legal herbs such as tea or tobacco,” something perhaps “100 times lower than the current prevailing price of $300 per ounce—or a few cents per joint.”

This would make pot far and away the cheapest intoxicant on the market, absolutely blowing beer and liquor out of the water. Joints would be about as cheap as things that are often treated as free. Splenda packets, for example, cost 2 or 3 cents each when purchased in bulk.”

Get High for Free | Slate

Cocaine Incorporated: drug-trafficking has never been so clever | NYT

One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad. 

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”

The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.

Read on.

[Illustration: 1. Emma Coronel gave birth to Chapo’s twin girls in the U.S. 2. Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán, the C.E.O. of the Sinaloa cartel, did a comfortable stint in a Mexican prison, before supposedly escaping in a laundry basket.]

The American Medical Assn. Changes Its Marijuana Classification
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research. The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD. In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug. The AMA is not the only major doctors organization to rethink marijuana. Last year, the American College of Physicians, the second-largest physician group, called for “rigorous scientific evaluation of the potential therapeutic benefits of medical marijuana” and an “evidence-based review of marijuana’s status as a Schedule I controlled substance.”

The AMA has also come out in favor of sweeping health care reform -with 72.5% of physicians supporting a public health care option- despite its many years of trying to block similar reforms, and opposes the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, declaring that gay marriage bans contribute to health disparities.

©2011 Kateoplis