Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- 5 Things You Should Know About Yesterday’s Big Health Care Announcement
- Lifetime of Reading Slows Cognitive Decline
- The Strange, Sustaining Power of Civil War Reenactments
- What ‘Literacy Tests’ Looked Like in Louisiana Before the Voting Rights Act
- Egypt’s Sexual Violence Epidemic
- Will China Ever Be Able to Support Itself Agriculturally?
- Radical Activism and the Future of Animal Rights
- A Back Door Opens to Tahrir Square
- Building a Legal Marijuana Industry From the Ground Up
- The Importance of Kissing Beyond the Beginning
| 5 Things You Should Know About Yesterday’s Big Health Care Announcement Posted: 03 Jul 2013 04:12 PM PDT  People are freaking out because of a Treasury Department post announcing that what is called the “employer mandate” component of the Affordable Care Act is being delayed for a year. This mandate is a provision that allows the government to penalize companies with more than 50 full-time employees that do not offer their employees insurance, with a $2,000 fine per employee (more specifics here). Opinions are rolling in on what the delay means for the long-term success of the sweeping law; but how is this part of the insurance system currently working, and who will the delay affect? A big chunk of the full-time workforce gets their insurance from large companies* From 1997 to 2010, the number of workers that were offered health benefits from employers declined from 70.1 percent to 67.5 percent of the workforce.Insurance at large firms may be more ubiquitous, but employees pay more of their premiums Well Before the Employer Mandate, All Employers Were Paring Back On Offering Health Insurance Firms Don't Seem to Be Reducing Their Number of Full-Time Employees—Yet Is the Mandate a Solution to a Problem That Doesn't Exist? *Unless otherwise indicated, these numbers come from the United States Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (and analyses of their numbers by the bureau itself and the Employer Benefits Research Institute), and the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. |
| Lifetime of Reading Slows Cognitive Decline Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:00 PM PDT  The more time you spend on cerebral activities, the better prepared your brain is to withstand the ravages of age. That's the takeaway from research just published in the journal Neurology that confirms—and helps explain why—people who habitually read, write, and otherwise process information are less likely to experience mental declines late in life. The study suggests that while a mentally active lifestyle may not prevent formation of the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease, it makes it less likely their presence will impair one's mental functioning. "Individuals with high lifetime levels of cognitive activity show slower decline, despite the presence of underlying pathology.""Habitual participation in cognitively stimulating pursuits over a lifetime might substantially increase the efficiency of some cognitive systems," writes a research team led by neuropsychologist Robert Wilson of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. This efficiency apparently counteracts the often-devastating effects of nervous system diseases. Wilson and his colleagues describe a study of 294 elderly people, who began by reporting their level of cognitive activity—not only at the present time, but also during childhood, young adulthood, and middle age. They specifically noted how often they performed such activities as reading books, writing letters, or visiting a library at each stage of their lives. Their cognitive functioning was then examined on a yearly basis up until their death. Tests were given to measure a variety of skills, including long-term memory, working memory, and visuospatial ability. Finally, within hours after their deaths, their brains were removed and examined for evidence of various diseases. The key result: "More frequent cognitive activity can counterbalance the cognitive loss associated with neuropathological conditions." In the words of an accompanying editorial, the researchers found that "individuals with high lifetime levels of cognitive activity show slower decline, despite the presence of underlying pathology." "Interestingly," the editorial continues, "both more frequent current and early-life engagement in cognitively stimulating activities were shown to independently slow late-life cognitive decline." This suggests it’s never too late to start, but earlier is better. A study published last year also reported a link between mental activity and old-age neurological disorders. It found people who were mentally active throughout their lives had, in their later years, lower levels of beta-amyloids—clumps of proteins that build up into the plaques associated with Alzheimer's Disease. That would certainly be a good thing. But even if it's ultimately disproved, this new research suggests regular mental stimulation is still extremely valuable in that it reduces the insidious ability of such neurological disorders to impair our thinking. Either way, the studies point toward the same prescription. As the Neurology editorial notes, we all "ask ourselves from time to time, can we do anything to slow down late-life cognitive decline? The results suggest yes—read more books, write more, and do activities that keep your brain busy, irrespective of your age." |
| The Strange, Sustaining Power of Civil War Reenactments Posted: 03 Jul 2013 12:48 PM PDT  Over the next 10 days, some 200,000 people are expected to flood Gettysburg to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the infamous Civil War battle. And what's the best way to celebrate the anniversary of Gettysburg? With 15,000 Civil War reenactors. Indicators suggest that, yes, those sticky days from your childhood filled with women in off-white dresses and men with bushy sideburns are still kind of popular. There's a robust calendar of reenactments scheduled through the end of the year all across the country. And in late September, a scheduled reenactment of the Battle of Chickamauga is being billed as the largest American reenactment of the year with 15,000 participants ready to duplicate the clash. What's the best way to celebrate the anniversary of Gettysburg? With 15,000 Civil War reenactors.While this fascination with history-by-mimicry extends beyond our borders and beyond the Civil War, that particular era stands apart with its commitment to accuracy. Civil War reenactors will try to simulate the bloating of the recently deceased. It is a world ruled by "threadcounters" and burdened by "farby"—reenactment lingo for anything not typical of the period and the "worst critique that a Civil War reenactor can receive." It's an arena where you work your way to the top in a $318 civilian frock coat, and passion is valued only second to authenticity. Also: They prefer "living historian" or "historical interpreter" to "reenactor." A reasonable question in response to all of this: Why? Civil War reenactments began in the 1950s, but their continued popularity causes academics to consider the war's role in modern-day psyche. In his 2011 paper, Mitchell Strauss argues that Civil War reenactments allow people who "lead lives of alienation" to respond to that level of dissatisfaction by "seeking an authentic experience based upon a carefully scripted emulation of the past." While some believe a portion of "living historians" take up the practice for the joy of "living" in a country still dominated by the South, Randal Allred argues that it's a much deeper desire to understand what it means to be American that compels most. "It is the yearning," he writes, "to understand our being American that compels many tens of thousands of Americans to be Civil War 'buffs' and try to understand a thing too profound and dire perhaps to be fully comprehended." It helps that the Civil War is one of the earliest photographed moments in the nation's history, allowing “strikingly modern" faces to pull us in and feel empathy with another time. Although Allred's argument was made during the Clinton-era of the ’90s, his belief that a divided nation can spur the desire to learn about and recreate moments of the Civil War still seems relevant today. A recent poll sponsored by The Atlantic states that 59 percent of the country believes the U.S. is "heading in the wrong direction," with one in five doubting America will remain united as a nation. Gallup states that party approval ratings are significantly lower than their historical averages, with approval ratings for Democrats in Congress sitting at 34 percent and Republicans at 26 percent. Meanwhile, Lincoln was both a commercial and critical success. Whether the remaining popularity of reenactments is a reaction to unhappiness with the current state of the country, an attempt to regain some kind of identity, or something else, there's some economic value, too. The tourism revenue Gettysburg expects to bring in over the 10-day anniversary period? $100 million. |
| What ‘Literacy Tests’ Looked Like in Louisiana Before the Voting Rights Act Posted: 03 Jul 2013 11:00 AM PDT  Last week the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required states with a documenting history of discrimination to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. When the law was passed in 1965, one of its main targets were "literacy tests." Ostensibly designed to ensure that everyone who voted could read and write, they were actually tools with which to disenfranchise African Americans and sometimes Latinos and American Indians. Minority voters were disproportionately required to take these tests and, when they did, the election official at the polling place had 100 percent jurisdiction to decide which answers were correct and score the test as he liked. The point was to intimidate and turn them away from the polls. If this sounds bad, you should see the range of disturbing and terrifying things the white elite tried to keep minorities from voting. The tactics to manipulate election outcomes by controlling who votes is still part and parcel of our electoral politics. In fact, since most voters are not "swing" voters, some would argue that "turnout" is a primary ground on which elections are fought. This is not just about mobilizing or suppressing Democrats or Republicans, it's about mobilizing or suppressing the turnout of groups likely to vote Democrat or Republican. Since most minority groups lean Democrat, Republicans have a perverse incentive to suppress their turnout. In other words, this isn't a partisan issue; I'd be watching Democrats closely if the tables were turned. Indeed, states have already moved to implement changes to voting laws that had been previously identified as discriminatory and ruled unconstitutional under the Voting Rights Act. According to the Associated Press:
So, yeah, it appears that Chief Justice John Roberts' justification that "our country has changed" was pretty much proven wrong within a matter of hours or days. This is bad. It will be much more difficult to undo discriminatory laws than it was to prevent them from being implemented and, even if they are challenged and overturned, they will do damage in the meantime. In any case, here are two examples of literacy tests given to (mostly) minority voters in Louisiana circa 1964. Pages from history (from Civil Right Movement Veterans):
This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Egypt’s Sexual Violence Epidemic Posted: 03 Jul 2013 10:23 AM PDT  Remember when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was raped by a mob of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, back during the first days of the Arab Spring? Well, in this latest round of unrest it’s happening again, and again, and again. A young Dutch journalist was raped in Tahrir Square last Friday (as reported by Egypt 25 News and more or less confirmed by the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo). Meanwhile, the United Nations has collected reports of 25 cases of sexual assault in Tahrir Square, while the Egyptian group Op Anti-Sexual Harassment says it received 46 such reports on June 30 alone, and at least a dozen more since. Things have gotten so bad that some men are apparently forming protective human shields around groups of women protesters. That’s a nice gesture, but not exactly a solution to what is obviously a deep-seated problem. |
| Will China Ever Be Able to Support Itself Agriculturally? Posted: 03 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  The discovery of dangerous levels of toxic cadmium in rice sold in the southern city of Guangzhou, the latest in a series of food scandals, has piled more pressure on China to clean up its food chain—possibly at the expense of Mao Zedong’s cherished goal of self-sufficiency. The ruling Communist Party has long staked its legitimacy on its ability to guarantee domestic staple food supplies, and has pledged to be at least 95 percent self-sufficient even as demand increases and the fastest and biggest urbanization process in history swallows up arable land. That has led to a drive for quantity rather than quality—securing bumper harvests even from land contaminated by high levels of industrial waste and irrigated with water unfit for human consumption. “China has a big population and we used to face food shortages so the government has focused on quantity,” said Li Guoxiang, a researcher at the state-backed Rural Development Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences. Some researchers say as much as 70 percent of China’s farmland is affected by pollution. After decades of contamination, land must be restored if it’s to return to agriculture.But food safety is becoming a bigger worry than food security after a series of scandals ranging from melamine-tainted milk to toxic heavy metals in rice and vegetables—and raising the share of imports may be the least-worst option. The government, under increasing public pressure and facing anti-pollution protests, has promised to reverse some of the damage done to the environment by three decades of breakneck industrial expansion. But the scale of the problem is huge, especially as China looks to maintain its economic growth, find jobs for millions of new urban residents and ensure that just nine percent of the world’s land can feed a fifth of the global population. “Quantity is still a precondition, but the government is now putting lots of effort into safety, and high-quality food imports will definitely increase,” said Li. “People will realize there are more advantages than disadvantages regarding rising food imports and things are turning in that direction.” China is already the world’s biggest soybean importer after making a strategic decision to outsource production, mostly to the United States. Some predict Beijing might have to do the same with other land-intensive farm products like beef—a move that would benefit big producers like Australia. While it has vowed to remain self-sufficient in major staples, imports of rice and corn are expected to hit record levels this year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts. Wheat imports, too, are seen at a near record. LAND STRAINS Though experts insisted the health risks were very low and China’s standards for rice, its staple food, are far higher than the rest of the world, authorities swiftly came under attack from users of China’s popular microblogging service Weibo. Guangzhou was eventually compelled to reveal the tainted rice originated from central China’s Hunan province, the country’s biggest rice-producing region. Hunan produces 30 million metric tonnes (33.06 million tons) of rice a year, 15 percent of the national crop, but it is also a big miner of nonferrous metals and toxic elements such as arsenic and cadmium. In many cases, wastewater run-offs from the mines are used directly to irrigate farmland, and tailings also tend to be badly managed. Yin Lihui, an official with the provincial environmental protection administration, told state media that nonferrous metals mining in Hunan has caused heavy pollution in a region dubbed the “home of rice and fish”. “We call it ‘integrated food and mining complexes’—basically food production and mining happening at the same place together, and this isn’t rational,” said Chen Nengchang, a researcher at the Guangdong Institute of Environmental and Soil Sciences who works on projects to rehabilitate land damaged by mining and heavy metal pollution. “The problem is that China has a big population and scarce land and soil, so we need to figure out another way of dealing with this.” To ensure food supplies, China has said it will limit the amount of land given to development. This will not only require the government to declare farmland out of bounds to industry, but also require ruined wasteland to be returned to life. Some researchers say as much as 70 percent of China’s farmland is affected by pollution. After decades of contamination, land must be restored if it’s to return to agriculture. That takes time and money. High real estate prices in urban areas make it relatively easy to find the money to clean up land contaminated by chemical or heavy metal waste, but cleaning up the countryside is a greater challenge, said Richard Fuller, president of the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based non-profit group that helps clean up polluted sites in China and elsewhere. “There are solutions for the majority of damaged sites but it’s going to take time, technology and money.” RURAL POLLUTION “Sea and river pollution, heavy metal pollution of the soil and atmospheric pollution are very serious causes of environmental damage, but we should say that the biggest contributor is agriculture,” said Wen Tiejun, dean at the School of Agricultural Economics at China’s Renmin University. Experts say 60 percent of the pesticides used on China’s severely overworked farms are used improperly, further contaminating the food chain. Chinese farmers are also known to use arsenic in animal feed to help fight disease and speed growth, raising levels of the toxin in rice to dangerous levels in some regions. With all this pressure on China’s farmland and water supplies, senior agricultural officials are beginning to question the long-held goal of self-sufficiency. “An appropriate increase in imports, if it doesn’t affect our country’s security, will be of benefit in easing domestic resource and environmental pressures,” Chen Xiwen, head of the Communist Party’s top working group on rural policy, told a forum this month. “We do need to consider a more positive strategy towards going overseas, and make full use of the global market.” |
| Radical Activism and the Future of Animal Rights Posted: 03 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Last week, thousands of animal rights activists converged on Arlington, Virginia, for the 33rd annual Animal Rights National Conference. Over 90 presenters from 60 organizations discussed strategies central to the goal of reducing animal exploitation. The event garnered scant coverage from the mainstream press—always does—but it nonetheless brimmed with a rare kind of selfless ambition coming from very decent people who want animals to be treated with a modicum of dignity. While the media paid little attention, there's no doubt that meat industry moles were trolling the halls of the Hilton with their ears pricked for the merest mention of an idea that might pierce the brainbox of a public so culinarily apathetic that, to date, it has voluntarily consumed seven billion cans of Spam. Mass consumption of a gelatinous rectangle of a ham-like product reflects a collective unthinking decision that the industry wants to protect with every cynically contrived resource at its disposal. Although the meat industry has no clue otherwise, it has virtually nothing to fear. Its paranoia is misplaced. The "animal rights movement"—a motley coalition that incorporates a multitude of approaches to helping animals—is currently a Babel of dysfunction. Not unlike the Greek hero Achilles, it is at once colossally powerful but ultimately hobbled by a weak spot both miniscule and fatal. If attractive women and men want to use their good looks to make the world a better place for animals, I'm willing to step aside and let them pose with seduction until their hearts are content.That colossal power emanates from hundreds of thousands of everyday activists who justifiably believe that conscientious consumers can, through a wide variety of measures, take gradual steps toward removing animal products from their diet. These true believers do the grunt work of activism: they hand out pamphlets, write books, blog, make documentaries, start campus veg societies, publish vegan recipes, open vegan food carts, work for animal sanctuaries, run veganic farms, and do basically anything they can to encourage consumers to contemplate the face on their plate. I consider myself a member of this noble tribe. The heel of the movement, by contrast, consists of a handful of radicals, mostly academics, who do little more than set an unrealistic benchmark of success and effectively crucify activists who do not join them in dreaming the impossible dream. It's a mess of an arrangement; the tyranny of the minority at its very worst. The fundamentally unachievable position that the radical fringe adopts as the one-and-only approach to ending animal exploitation has two components. First, it seeks to eliminate all animal exploitation, in every realm of life, immediately, and without compromise or strategic capitulation; and second, it aims to eliminate all forms of oppression because, it argues, we cannot have animal liberation while the merest residue of racism, sexism, and other discriminatory "isms" continue to muck up the project of helping animals. The heel does not want the good, or even the better. It wants perfection. And that's a problem because, as much as I hate to admit it, perfection is not possible. Of course, it's hard to deny the utopian optimism of such a vision—who on Earth, after all, would oppose a world free of oppression? But it's also childishly naïve to think that these principles could even remotely serve as an exclusive guide for reform here in the orbit of the real world. Ours is a reality in which billions of animals are slaughtered every year to feed us food that the entire apparatus of modern culture (and agriculture) tells us it's perfectly fine to eat. It's a reality that aggressively rejects the dictatorial presentation of moral imperatives while allowing social change to happen in fits and starts, driven by a sputtering and necessarily imperfect engine of reform, powered by both intentional and unintentional consequences. It's a reality in which people respond not to a decree for moral purity but to incessant and concrete little reminders about the dreadful lives led by the vast majority of the animals we eat for pleasure and what we can do to change that awful situation. The tension between rank-and-file and the radical-fringe approaches routinely negates pragmatic efforts to help animals live better lives. Take the Humane Society of the United States. Among other goals, HSUS works diligently to improve conditions for animals raised in factory farms. They do this largely through political channels, working actively with corporations and legislative bodies to eliminate battery cages, create "enriched environments," and reduce the horrors of slaughter. While HSUS says far too little about the benefits of a vegan diet, there's no disputing the fact that its successful record of improving housing conditions has, however nominally, improved lives for billions of animals. There's also no disputing the fact that the organization's emphasis on animal welfare has inspired conscientious consumers to rethink their personal choice to eat animals from factory farms and, in some cases, to question whether or not to eat them at all. By no means does HSUS seek to eliminate all animal exploitation and all forms of oppression. However, it lays down important stepping stones for those who want to start hiking in that direction. In essence, they do a lot of good without bowing to the enemy of perfection. Although the meat industry remains oblivious to this fact, HSUS is often vilified within the animal rights community. This vilification persistently comes from the radical heel, which roundly condemns HSUS and its supporters as "welfarists." The implication behind this slingshot of verbal mud—one that leads to huge fights in Internet-land—is that advocates of measures improving the living conditions of factory-farmed animals are implicitly aiding and abetting factory farming. It may be true in a theoretical sense that by working to reform agribusiness rather than explicitly seeking to shut it down altogether, HSUS is indirectly complicit in the exploitation of animals. But with the United States alone killing 10 billion animals a year in one of the nation's oldest and most entrenched industries—that is, with the reality of animal exploitation being as endemic to life as hot dogs on July 4—there's simply no possible way, at this point in time, to end animal agriculture as we know it. You can declare it wrong to own and exploit animals until the cows come home. You can scream out justice from the mountaintops. But it won't make a lick of difference in the daily consumption habits of the general public. Recognizing this reality, HSUS has chosen to fight battles it can win. And they have won many of them. And, as a result, animals that continue to be slaughtered to feed us food we don't need have led somewhat better lives before dying. For this compromised accomplishment, HSUS is viciously deemed by the radicals to be a gang of "opportunists" making a killing by promoting "happy meat." Combining steadfast denial of carnivorous reality with slavish dedication to an idealized cause, radical animal rights activists have been even more dismissive of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), an organization that's far more assertive in promoting veganism and the inherent rights of animals. Nothing they do passes muster. PETA's problem, as the radicals see it, is less "welfarism" than sexism. Routinely, as you likely know, PETA enacts sex-infused stunts that practically beg—and receive—a deluge of media attention. The tactic, I suppose, thrives on a savvy combination of the slogans "sex sells" and "there's no such thing as bad publicity." I agree that deploying crass sexual imagery as a tool to reduce animal exploitation is problematic and offensive, and I generally appreciate the eagerness of the radicals to critique such a method of raising awareness. However, in its extreme form, the radical critique ends up once again allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good and, in so doing, harming the long-term prospects of animal advocacy. For example, when PETA recently sponsored a relatively harmless "sexiest vegan" contest—one that included men and women—I blogged a phrase that quickly got me dragged to the woodshed of moral perfection. I wrote, "Sex does sell, there is no doubt, and perhaps it's overly ambitious to take on the evils of speciesism and sexism at once, especially if a little sexism can help alleviate a lot of speciesism. I don't know. Honestly, I don't." Fact is, I still don't. But I do know that if attractive women and men want to use their good looks to make the world a better place for animals, I'm willing to step aside and let them pose with seduction until their hearts are content. According to the movement's backlash meter, however, this was clearly the wrong position to take. The response from those who adhere to the sacred premise that activism must be uncompromising and morally impeccable was so deafening in its condemnation of my genuine doubt ("I don't know. Honestly, I don't") that I chose to shutter the blog after two years of daily posting rather than endure the tidal wave of verbal invective that was starting to crash with tremendous distraction. As cheap accusations of sexism and welfarism continue to careen across the blogosphere and, I'm sure, creep into the conferences where pragmatic activists try to pull it all together, billions upon billions of animals continue to suffer immensely and unnecessarily in order to feed consumers products that are unethical, unhealthy, ecologically disastrous, and often disgusting. The fact that the movement best poised to drive a wedge between the producers and consumers of animals spends more time fighting over the moral superiority of tactics rather than bucking up and using every single strategy without discrimination is the best insurance of future success that Spam could ever hope to have. |
| A Back Door Opens to Tahrir Square Posted: 03 Jul 2013 07:58 AM PDT  If we’ve learned anything in that last 15 years of the Internet, it’s that the Web is only as worldwide as one’s language skills. If you want to read about an incident in France, do you read it in your usual place, or in Le Monde? The deadline for the current government to step down just passed in Egypt, and the rumors of what happens now range from a negotiated settlement, to arresting president Mohamed Morsi—to a coup. It’s a complex crisis that, to be frank, non-Arabic speakers can’t hope to grasp in real time, though any number of non-Arabic speaking pundits will certainly try to claim they can. And they’ll be able to claim that, in part, because it will be difficult to prove otherwise. A group of volunteers has taken to the livestream of ONtv, an Egyptian television station, to narrate the events on the station’s screen.Translation in news is an obscure topic. Newspapers and news agencies treat translation as more of an administrative function than a journalistic one, typically. Outside experimental efforts (Storyful is one of note), and cumbersome machine efforts like Google Translate, most of humanity’s understanding of events like today’s drama in Egypt will be affected more by a search engine algorithm than any sort of informed judgement. From there, it will rest on the best efforts of each region’s domestic news service. The aggregate, often redundant work of an ever-thinner correspondent corps, is still the way to get to Tahrir, despite the hours of video and millions of tweets, status updates, and other digital information the people in the square are throwing into the aether right now. It’s a bit of a broken system. But: They seem to know this in Egypt today. A group of volunteers has taken to the livestream of ONtv, an Egyptian television station, to narrate the events on the station’s screen. Writing live in the comments stream of the station’s live video from Cairo, a few bilingual contributors are attempting to describe the chants and general tone of the dramatic imagery coming out of Tahrir Square for an English- and, from time to time, French-speaking audience. It’s fascinating, and it’s here. Can we trust these translations—most by someone with a screen name “Mubarak” and another called “meshmeshaa”—and can we confirm any of the conjecture flying through this conversation? Not at all. This is all live, and looks very seat-of-the-pants. But it’s probably a fair mirror of what the square feels like too: rumors, worries, bits and scraps of information, parsed within an inch of their lives by people who have no idea what the next five minutes will bring. Is this news? Not precisely. Is it what a first draft of history looks, sounds, and reads like in 2013? Yeah, pretty much. |
| Building a Legal Marijuana Industry From the Ground Up Posted: 03 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  If all goes according to plan, by the end of this year farmers across Washington State will begin large-scale cultivation of a commodity they've never been allowed to mass-produce before—marijuana. Washington won't just have the kind of quasi-legal medical marijuana regime now operating in 18 states and the District of Columbia. We're talking about a place where weed can be produced, sold, and consumed as openly and legally as milk. As a result, state officials are also getting down to the business of cultivating pot, but in a different sense. Now that the voters have spoken, the government's task is to establish the regulatory furrows and field boundaries that will shape the growth of the legal marijuana industry itself. Governments invariably help shape markets through rules, subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions designed to promote some priorities at the expense of others. Do you want factories that produce as much as possible? Then make it easy for big manufacturers to buy up smaller ones. Do you want to preserve jobs? Then do the opposite. But when it comes to marijuana, the question of what kind of garden it's best to grow is particularly complex. That's why Washington has hired Mark Kleiman, a jovially argumentative professor of public policy at the University of California-Los Angeles. Kleiman is a burly, gray-bearded man whose office is cluttered with haphazardly shelved texts on drug policy and criminology, his own books on those topics, and a paperback edition of The Hobbit. He has assembled a team of some 40 researchers to analyze the key issues confronting the Washington State Liquor Control Board, the body overseeing the whole legal-marijuana endeavor, and sketch out the potential outcomes of various approaches the board might take. "This isn't just about making marijuana use legal," says Kleiman. "It's about creating a legal industry. Very different proposition." For the industry to succeed, prices need to settle at a just-right "Goldilocks point"—not so high that they drive people to the black market, but not so low that they promote overindulgence and an illegal export market.Initiative 502 (PDF), the ballot measure that legalized marijuana, spells out only a few guidelines. Producing, processing, and retailing weed will each require a license and will each be taxed at 25 percent. The product will be sold only to adults over 21, and only in government-licensed stores that carry nothing but pot products and related paraphernalia. "They can't even sell the Doritos," deadpans Kleiman. That leaves several key questions unanswered. How many licenses do you hand out? Who gets them? How big can a retailer, processor, or grower get? One route Washington could take would be to issue lots of grower licenses and limit farm size to end up with a large number of small producers. Call it the mom-and-pop, artisanal-weed option. That would generate competition, which keeps prices low, encourages innovation, and makes it much more difficult for the industry to accumulate the kind of political power wielded by, say, Big Tobacco—the three companies that control 85 percent of the national cigarette market. On the other hand, it's more difficult to monitor and regulate hundreds of small businesses than a few big ones. "And," points out Kleiman, "they're not making as much, so each of them has a stronger incentive to push stuff out the back door"—into the black market. If the state instead allowed only a few big growers to operate, they might get rich enough to become powerful players in state politics. But their centralized operations would be much easier to keep tabs on, and they would have a powerful incentive to abide by the law. "Otherwise they could lose their oligopoly position, which is basically a license to print money," says Kleiman. The first round of draft regulations, issued in May for public comment, seems to at least leave the door open for the mom-and-pop option. The rules don't mention any cap on the number of producers' licenses to be issued. But nor do they set a limit on how big grow operations can get. And the rules could well change before they are finalized in late summer. One major advantage of having a few big growers is it would likely keep prices high. That's a plus not only for state tax revenues, but for public health as well, because of the way price influences the behavior of a particular group—serious potheads. "The daily and near-daily users are the ones who really drive the market," says Beau Kilmer, the co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, who is working with Kleiman. "They're about 20 percent of total users, but they account for about 80 percent of total consumption." The proportions are similar among alcohol drinkers. Studies have found that higher prices keep a lid on how much those hard-core boozehounds imbibe, says Kleiman. Which is a good reason to keep weed prices up too. Marijuana may be a relatively benign drug, but it's not harmless. But here's where the legal-pot industry runs into a unique and fiendish challenge: Washington can't let the price drift too high because, of course, marijuana is not really a "new" industry. There is already a well-established system of marijuana producers, processors, and consumers—it's just not a legal one. Coaxing the estimated half-million-plus Washington residents who currently get their ganja from either the black market or the grey medical market to switch to a new, regulated industry amounts to a social-engineering project something like trying to divert a wild river into an improvised canal. A certain amount of illegal trade is pretty much guaranteed to continue. About a quarter of total cannabis use is by people who are under 21, for whom marijuana won't be legal even after legalization, Kleiman noted in a recent radio interview. "It means we're only legalizing about three-quarters of the market," he said. For adults, the legal market will have the huge advantages of being, well, legal, and of providing reliable, tested products. But prices are bound to be higher than in the medical and black markets. Producers in those systems don't have to shoulder the costs of complying with regulations and paying taxes. The multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling business attests to how many people are willing to run a little risk to get something cheap. Or think about digital music: iTunes has cut down on illegal file sharing by offering fans music that is easily procured, reasonably priced, and of guaranteed quality. But millions of songs are still illegally downloaded for free every year. And scoring a joint in Washington is almost as easy as pirating a song on your laptop. "Anyone who wants a medical card can get one," says Kleiman. Which raises the question: Suppose they threw a legalized pot industry and nobody came? For the industry to actually succeed, prices need to settle at what Kleiman calls a just-right "Goldilocks point"—not so high that they drive people to the black market, but not so low that they promote overindulgence and an illegal export market. Regulations can't set those prices; they can only try to influence them. All of which makes it exceedingly difficult to figure out how much tax revenue Washington will actually pull in from legal pot—a key point in selling the initiative. The state's Office of Financial Management recently published its best guess on how Initiative 502 will impact Washington's bottom line. Regulating the pot industry, the report points out, will certainly incur millions of dollars in administrative costs, as well as lots of other potential bills. (Don't forget the teensy detail that the federal government still considers all marijuana flat-out illegal. That means it's possible Washington will find itself having to pay for the legal defense of state employees targeted by federal prosecutors.) Best case, the report estimates, the state could gross nearly $2 billion over five years. Worst case? "The total amount of revenue generated to state and local government could be as low as zero." |
| The Importance of Kissing Beyond the Beginning Posted: 03 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  At 11 p.m. one recent Friday, my boyfriend and I are snuggled on a faux suede ottoman at a bar in lower Manhattan called Madame X—a typical night out, you might think, except that we're here for a Lip Service party. Billed as a monthly "pansexual kissing & cocktails" event, attendees (admitted only in pairs) pay $10 a head to mingle and make out in an open environment. Though we're not a shy duo when it comes to public displays of affection, we're not in the habit of patronizing sexy gatherings populated by strangers, either. As I digest our surroundings, I have to remind myself that we've come for a reason: Two-plus years into dating, we've decided to test the sensual power of kissing—a fundamental sex act some scientists believe may be instrumental to perpetuating long-term passion. Could mindful smooching—and not naughty sex toys—really be the answer to barring boredom from the bedroom? In accordance with the strict "flirty and fun" dress code (an impressively dapper bouncer denies entrance to several "insufficiently festive" couples), my boyfriend is wearing a fedora and a hot pink boa. I'm in four-inch Mary Janes, a short black skirt, too many bangles, and a sparkly headband. Though I had initially scoffed at the idea of dressing up, upon entering the red-drenched, split-level space punctuated by copious seating arrangements, I understood immediately that costumes can promote playfulness and a sense of kinship. In addition to coaxing those early stage stomach butterflies into action, locking lips can have physiological effects—on heart rate, blood pressure, and even pupil size—whether you're a month or a decade into dating.Tequila helps, too. A couple of shots make it seem less odd that almost every nook—including an elevated, cushioned cubby accessible by ladder—is occupied by a twosome engaged in an aggressive round of necking and/or heavy petting. But, perhaps surprisingly, as accustomed as I grow to the atmosphere, voyeurism doesn't inspire me to kiss my boyfriend. I'm startled when he pulls my chin toward him and engulfs me in the kind of long, drawn out kiss even the most touchy-feely couple reserves for private. As he withdraws, he holds eye contact for several beats while sliding his hand from the nape of my neck to my breast, where it lingers before continuing down my side. I can't recall the last time he's kissed me so masterfully, if ever. I am definitely turned on—at least until an observer's penetrating gaze rips me from the moment. People in committed relationships tend to assume that "spicing things up" requires handcuffs, a whip, or a third party. But according to the Kinsey Institute's Dr. Justin Garcia, the author of Evolution & Human Sexual Behavior, we may be underestimating our ability to connect through more benign sex acts. Our lips, which are packed with useful sensory neurons, constitute our most exposed erogenous zone. So in addition to coaxing those early stage stomach butterflies into action, locking lips can have physiological effects—on heart rate, blood pressure, and even pupil size—whether you're a month or a decade into dating. It's not that our tendency to associate kissing with beginnings is without merit. Kissing is a "gage of connectivity," says Garcia, referencing research by evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., of the University at Albany, who discovered that college students could be turned off by someone they lusted for right after a bad first kiss. Puckering up also plays a role in the mate screening process by forcing us to lean in, which lets our olfactory system make critical judgments. An oft-cited study by Claus Wedekind demonstrated that women prefer the scent of men whose major histocompatability complex (MHC), a group of genes related to our immune system, is most unlike their own. The less immune overlap, the better equipped a pair's potential offspring. Hence the importance of taking a whiff before committing. But while it may not be possible to recreate the transcendence of a first kiss with the immune compatible mate of your dreams, Garcia urges that "kissing—a behavior common across cultures, whether defined as blowing or nibbling on lips, rubbing noses, or exchanging saliva—may be key to long-term relationship contentment." In an extensive 2011 study involving committed, middle-aged to older couples in five countries, Dr. Julia R. Heiman found that tenderness in the form of kissing and cuddling was positively correlated to sexual satisfaction for both men and women. Partly prompted by Heiman's findings, Garcia plans to compare the biological impact of kissing on people who identify as passionate couples versus those who are complete strangers. On the back of my boyfriend's impossibly seductive kiss, I begin to appreciate the eroticism in the air. Happily, I follow him to a window seat to make out some more. When a shriek erupts directly to my left, I turn to find a girl in a long skirt and bunny ears bent at a 90-degree angle, receiving a series of spankings. She clearly enjoys each smack and the disciplinarian's embrace that follows, but I'm flat out uncomfortable being forced into the role of spectator. I'm not at all against sexy spanking, but it's distracting, and I'm not attracted to either party. My boyfriend finally guides us to the back, where we speak to a man who's waiting for his girlfriend to return from the bathroom. "I'm a regular," he tells us, a line we hear at least five times throughout the night, making it tough not to feel like outsiders. By the time we take off around 2:00 a.m., neither of us is interested in returning. The next day I report our experience to Garcia, who emphasizes the importance of environment. Researchers at Lafayette College led by Dr. Wendy Hill studied changes in the levels of oxytocin (a hormone associated with attachment) and cortisol (a hormone linked to stress) in people before and after kissing their long-term partner. After finding that oxytocin levels in female participants failed to increase as expected, they hypothesized that their laboratory's sterile environment was likely to blame and planned a second experiment in a more romantic setting. In an interview with NPR, Sheril Kirschenbaum, the author of The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us, echoes this notion: "A good kiss is very much about the individuals involved … but environment is so important." Pressure and discomfort cause an increase in cortisol, and "kissing and cortisol don't mix," Kirschenbaum says. After sharing this with my boyfriend, he surprises me that evening with a "kissing party" of our own. We experiment with different types of kissing and with kissing body parts that are typically overlooked—all within the confines of our home, while listening to music of our choice. It works. Can you reproduce the magic of your first personal kissing party? Probably not. But kissing certainly seems worth attention—even years after that first telling lip lock. There may be many factors to consider, but perhaps it's the complexity behind an act we take for granted as simple that makes it so rewarding. |
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