Talk Left details another victory in Seattle:
Voters in Seattle today approved a measure strongly opposed by Drug Czar John Walters. It directs police and prosecutors to make marijuana arrests and prosecutions their lowest priority. Walters personally campaigned against the measure in Seattle on September 10.
Good.
Harry
The drug war is a waste of money and an outright attack on civil liberties. Talk about fighting a senseless non-winnable war. We should have quit this long ago. But it seems our politicians are addicted to power and MONEY.
David Perron
I’m thinking if marijuana being illegal is good on some scale of morality, then booze being illegal is more than twice as good.
I don’t have those particular moral values, but those who do are being awfully inconsistent.
cameron
And the “latte tax” failed miserably.
Damn damn good!
Francis W. Porretto
We might well be approaching a true reopening of the conversation about the dubious merit of the War on Drugs. Of course, it’s hazardous to use Seattle as a weathervane, but there have been other indications along these lines as well.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the privacy and civil liberies back? You know, the ones we surrendered because the government said they got in the way of tracking drug dealers? I know, I ought not to drink before bedtime. Still, I can dream.
Kimmitt
I suppose it depends on whether this is important enough to you to be worth the horrific sacrifice of paying slightly higher taxes so poor kids can get health care.
Gotta have your priorities, I suppose.
David Perron
OT, I had a fellow over the other night who’s a pediatrician AP at the UT hospital in Memphis. He’s for some sort of institutionalized healthcare, so we had a full evening of conversation that was, well, remarkably civil. I brought up the argument (a good one, too) presented by someone here whose name I can’t recall regarding the idea that we’re all paying for at least some healthcare burden for the poor anyway, because the hospitals counterbalance the loss due to nonpayment by elevating rates to those who pay. He agreed with that, to an extent.
Not to put words in his mouth, but the real points of contention are what exactly are the rules of care? Does the government micromanage or just set guidelines? And how do you keep cost of care down without direct intervention in people’s lives? Do you give an alcoholic that third liver transplant with the same priority as someone with, say, liver cancer? That sort of thing.
Then he brought up the real killer. He said all those things we had discussed would be utterly dwarfed by the Next Big Thing: Type II diabetes due to obesity. According to the doc, obesity is not only really bad in the U.S., it’s getting worse. In my lifetime, he says, we’ll see close to 50% of the population with obesity (at current rates of increase). The attendant care cost of the number of Type II diabetes cases is going to make everything else into a minor concern.
What do we do about it? Aside from exercise, and cutting out a few thousand calories? Well, he had some ideas, but they’re not present-day options. And the idea that the medical profession can intrude into people’s lives to the point that you can be forced to exercise and eat right or forfeit your healthcare benefits is…probably counter to values most of us hold dear.
My only decent idea was having healthcare as a local service, like police and fire. He mentioned a couple of trends that might invalidate that (like communities tailoring new housing for a specific tax base; I can see the opposite being true too: communities actively trying to discourage settling by high-cost groups like seniors). Nice evening; I learned a lot.