Portside

An amendment that would prohibit the Fed from interfering in state medical pot laws is still up in the air.

I always find it amazing that whether it be in the bedroom or the den, “conservatives” like Brooks so often want to use the law to enforce their own perception of what is morally correct, what are “satisfying pleasures” and what they deem “lesser pleasures.”

We should anticipate more progress toward rational drug policies in 2014. Here are three key developments.

Sir Archibald Mapsalot III. OUR Walmart Theme Song. Defined Lines (Feminist Parody). Just Another Cog in the Machine. NASCAR Fans: Marijuana Is Safer. Our Generation in Two Minutes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta says we have been "systematically misled" on marijuana, and apologizes for his role

According to arrest numbers obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department and crunched by a statistician, between 2005 and 2011, D.C. cops filed 30,126 marijuana offense charges. A staggering number of those—27,560, or 91 percent—were filed against African-Americans. Only 2,097 were filed against whites. Folklore contends that pot-arrest asymmetries are about Blacks smoking outside and getting their getting their pot on street corners. Recent studies contradict that.

Drugs are ubiquitous in this country, and yet we know that some people have the privilege of doctor-prescribed intoxication, while others are thrown into dungeons for seeking the same relief. We know that the war on drugs is heavily inflected with Jim Crow–ism, economic inequality, gun culture myths and political opportunism. The result: the war on drugs has metastasized into a war on children.