alias Bruce.

Nebraska and Oklahoma's lawsuit against Colorado's legalizing marijuana raises the question:

What part of the legacy of the Volstead Act do they not understand?

Nebraska and Oklahoma complain that neighboring Colorado's legalization of pot has overflowed into their states as their residents cross the border to buy legally regulated marijuana and then bring it home to enjoy. Police and prosecutors in the two states say they have seen a huge spike in pot usage and arrests since Colorado legalized recreational use.

I believe them. What pot smoker in his or her right mind would not consider crossing the state line to safely and confidently buy a government-regulated drug rather than a black-market version, despite whatever good experience they might have had with their illegal dealer? Cross-border buying and usage are up? Well, yeah. They ought to be. Customers aren't dumb. Neither are states that seize the opportunity to tax and regulate pot for the sake of the public treasury and the public interest.

The only dumb actors in this picture are states like Nebraska and Oklahoma that cower in the shelter of outmoded convention and then squeal in pain when their residents cross the border to embrace reality. In the view of these addled states, Colorado has some damn nerve thumbing its nose at written federal law outlawing marijuana. From a reality-based view, though, Nebraska and Oklahoma are dunces to expect other states to kowtow to unenforceable policies that the feds have made it clear they are no longer eager to police.

We learned all of this nearly 100 years ago when Prohibition, AKA the federal Volstead Act and its legions of armed agents, strove vainly to enforce criminalization of alcohol before finally facing reality. Nebraska and Oklahoma choose to repeat history by making a protest camp at the base of the crumbling dam. They hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene on their behalf. It will be interesting to see the reaction of a Supreme Court majority caught between its claim of free-market liberty and its leaning toward regressive social policy.

But whether in the short or the long run, the outcome will be the same. Drink up. I mean, light up.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

The fatal flaw in the Obama health care mandate is not its constitutionality.

Sure, one can argue that it is constitutional on the grounds that mandated health insurance, similarly to mandated car insurance, is necessary to avoid unfair distribution of the cost of illness. Or one can argue that the health mandate is unconstitutional in placing an undue burden on people to buy something, since one can choose not to drive but no one will be exempt from the health law.

But constitutionality is not the real problem.

The real problem is that the Obama health mandate forces people to buy from a completely unworkable private health care system – in a purported attempt to spare people the unworkability of the very same private health care system. It's absurd, of course. But that is how a corporate-financed electoral system works: only ideas considered tolerable by the corporate sector stay on the table. That is why Obama, after arguing eloquently for a public option during his presidential campaign, dropped it and fled the issue after taking office when he met resistance from his sponsors (and from the even more shameless corporate shills across the aisle).

And so our president, under the watchful eye of the health care industry, offers his version of health care reform: force Americans to buy it from the very mechanism that broke it. This at a time when so much of the industrialized world has evolved to the basic realization that public health care is the most economically logical and humanly fair approach.

Yes, there is good in the Affordable Care Act. Expanding eligibility for coverage is good. Forbidding the savage denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions is good.

But the entire Act is built upon a flagrant lie: the assumption that the American corporate health insurance system can deliver care affordably and efficiently to all Americans. This is a fantasy that only corporate-financed politicians – and some gullible citizens seduced by the hallucination of mega-corporate market "freedom" – can believe. It has forced Obama into a box where he is staking his claim of full access to health care on the pointless premise of forcing people to buy health coverage in a rapacious private-ruled market. And, ironically, even this laughable version of "reform" may very well be trashed by a Supreme Court that sometimes seems nostalgic for Dickensian capitalism.

So the grand question that the top court in the land will now decide for us is: Shall we remain free to suffer without health insurance, or shall we be required by law to suffer the cruel price of purchasing it from our masters?

Hi from El Paso, TX.

El Paso, ranked the safest city for its size (about 700K) in the U.S., is directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico's deadliest city, where there were 3,000 murders in 2010. This is the bridge where pedestrians walk across to Juarez. Someone was shot here two nights ago. (I'm here to give a talk, BTW.)

 


People park here to walk across the bridge (in background) to Juarez. Many also work in El Paso and live in Juarez. A woman from Juarez told me that the state of terror there (routine execution of families and children; on a single day, 6 kids between 8 and 16 were shot) continues because the Mexican government is in bed with drug gangs and can't or won't intervene in any real way.

 

The difference between the tourist zone (note slick building in background) and the section proximate to Juarez is striking. A half-mile from this sign, everything is different.

This is a half-mile from that arrow sign on the same street. See what I mean? An interesting thing is that everyone here stands and waits for "walk" signs, even if there's no traffic. I wonder if cops use jaywalking... or maybe it's more innocent than that.

 

Speaks for itself, baby!

Brand-name drug prices rose 8% in July,

and over the last five years prices of the most popular brand-name drugs skyrocketed 41.5 percent, while the consumer price index went up by only 13.3 percent, according to AARP.

Pharma companies, continuing to gorge on fat profits, tried to counter this latest incriminating news with the lame explanation that more consumers are saving money with cheaper generics.

Note that "saving money" with generics often means a customer's simply giving up fewer pounds of flesh at the pharmacy cash register.

<RANT> Hey, Fat Pharma: why do you suppose customers are flocking to generics in the first place, given that generics are sometimes not the equal of brand-name drugs? Could it be because of your brand-name price gouging itself? Could it be because your insatiable greed has rendered the American brand-name drug market completely dysfunctional? Funny, isn't it, how the prices set as "fair" by drug companies in the U.S. are often spectacularly higher than the same companies' "fair" prices for the very same drugs in other countries, including other industrialized nations.

The only folks for whom America's health care system now works are: 1.) Big drug and medical equipment manufacturers and their large shareholders; 2.) To a lesser degree, insurance companies, who do indeed profit but feel driven to screw policyholders because of the insane costs of drugs and private-sector medical care; and 3.) Rich people.

And oh, yes, senators and congresspersons, including those who call Obama a socialist, receive terrific health care -- at the expense of American taxpayers who don't.

It has now reached the point where the pharmacists and clerks where I pick up my bank-busting prescriptions heartily agree with me when I growl that American health care is completely broken.

Campaign finance reform, anyone? </RANT>

David Simon on Drugs.

Here's an irony: For the kind of ruthlessly frank discourse on drug crime and drug policy that most of our journalists won't touch, watch the in-depth interview with screenwriter -- that's right, screenwriter -- David Simon on the April 17 edition of Bill Moyers' Journal.

Simon, a former police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was creator of the HBO series The Wire and The Corner (both set here in Baltimore), among others. As I recently wrote while devouring episodes of The Wire on DVD, Simon is the consummate example of how incisive social-drama fiction can be more truthful than the offerings of journalists whose outlooks (and job prospects) are wedded to officially-accepted assumptions about how the world works. Sure, artists have always served as truth-tellers via the decidedly mixed blessing of their disenfranchisement. But Simon is a rare animal: a social reformer who found a commercially successful dramatic vehicle for his political message. Again, the irony is that Simon left journalism because of how insistently the profession closed its eyes and ears to the stories he found needed telling.

In the interview with Moyers, Simon talks with brutal clarity and conviction about what drove him to leave the corporate newsroom; how and why the War on Drugs is a long-dead-and-buried policy failure that today's police embrace solely for the cynical sake of arrest statistics and coveted federal funding; how the narrative of real-life drug addiction and drug crime blatantly contradicts the Page One and Evening News stories; and what it will take to actually get a firm and effective handle on America's criminal and medical drug addiction problem.

If you wonder how a purveyor of TV drama can wade in such deep water and keep his footing, watch the interview. You will not be disappointed.

There is also, by the way, an interesting March 30 profile of Simon -- and his indictment of corporate journalists for their not holding bad policy and corrupt leadership accountable to the public -- on the British news and commentary site The First Post.

True Fiction.

As I like to do with TV from time to time, since I have never had cable, I have recently been mainlining DVD episodes of The Wire, HBO's late great series about the Baltimore street drug trade. It strikes me with this show, as it often does with wickedly well-done social issue drama, how much better a job alleged fiction does at conveying reality than does alleged journalism. This is not a unique irony; it is true of fiction, poetry and music pretty much wherever you'd care to look, from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Percival Everett's novel Erasure to the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and Lucille Clifton to Grandmaster Flash's proto-hip-hop classic The Message and the millinenial global thread of myths and folk songs. Official news reciters with lapel microphones may do better with the names and dates, but storytellers and troubadours do better at telling the underlying truths.

As does The Wire (pictured above, from season one). In a town like Baltimore, where drug addiction and drug trade rivalries account for most of the city's 300 yearly homicides, coverage by the Baltimore Sun and the what-bleeds-leads local TV news affiliates gives us a blinding stream of seemingly meaningless atrocities, with each news account duly supplying dates, locations, details of death, and the requisite quotes from shell-shocked neighbors and agonized loved ones. The Wire, however, gives us the story: Who ends up on junk and why; Who sells it and why; How the marketing operations (two-for-one days, name-brand reputations, wildfire rumors of potent product on X block on X day) entice strung-out customers to literally line up for sales; How and why certain addicts decide to try to kick and how they succeed or fail or both; How the local drug CEOs handle their mega-million-dollar empires and their tiers of managers and employees with various psych-ops, incentives and intimidations; How the sellers think and the codes they observe; How addicts feel and how they address real life; How cops work in a culture that can include slaving at trying to do an impossible job, showing care or abusive contempt toward citizens, lying about evidence, kicking the crap out of suspects in interrogation rooms, or sabotaging other cops' cases for personal position or perceived self-preservation; How teenaged kids take care of households full of young children, feeding and supervising them and sending them off to school, before leaving for their own day's work at the neighborhood drug operation. Yes, this is television drama. But at its core it is truer than most of what you'll see in the news media about street drugs and the people who use, sell, and police them.

So this is a story that today's frightened commuters and urban professionals, sadly, hardly ever get from journalists. Yes, the Baltimore Sun has, every once in a great while, run a story or a series that gets at some of the actual lives and real human decisions behind the proffered daily circus of the Page One narrative on drugs. But what does it say about corporate news media that they literally make it their business to chronicle the carnage and occasionally profile a dealer while telling us little or nothing about how and why the drug life persists? Meanwhile, David Simon, a former Sun police reporter, decided that someone needed to tell the real drug story. So he took it to HBO – an entertainment network.

Don't get me wrong. I am not deifying the routine parade of TV melodramas and sneering laff fests. But it so happens that in this case the one getting it right on the drug problem is, if you like, the troubadour.

At least somebody is telling the story.