cannabisnews.com: Reefer Madness Reefer Madness Posted by CN Staff on November 29, 2002 at 19:28:53 PT By Bill Keller Source: New York Times We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban — helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws.Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month. Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot. Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational — boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the line, "This is not your father's marijuana.") Some may have been a reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by Mr. Walters.The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.The drug liberalizers — an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians and potheads — dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs. Also, marijuana has provided them with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering of AIDS and cancer patients. Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking.The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with marijuana. The memorable achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. You'll find it at: http://www.mediacampaign.org Watch it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Mr. Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine. He offers two arguments, both of which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic.One is that marijuana is a "gateway" to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters, who is a political scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that pot use is an "increased risk factor" for other drugs. The point in our conversation when my nonsense-alarm went off was when he likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and heart disease. In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears to be unfounded. On the contrary, an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs.Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number of people hooked on cannabis. But common sense and the government's own statistics suggest an alternative explanation: if you're caught with pot, enrolling in a treatment program is the price of avoiding jail. And marijuana arrests have doubled in less than a decade, to 700,000 a year, even as use of the drug has remained static. In other words, the stampede of pot smokers into treatment is probably not a sign of more dependency, but of more aggressive enforcement.So what's really going on at the White House drug office? I can think of three answers. One is that they are sincerely worried about pot. Marijuana is not harmless. Regular pot smoking can mess with your memory and attention span, your immune system and fertility. Mr. Walters may feel the dangers justify a lot of hyperbole.A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative. To justify a $19 billion drug control program you need a threat that touches middle-class voters — not just the few million mostly wretched, mostly inner-city, mostly nonvoting users of heroin and cocaine. And you want to be able to claim success. When he appointed Mr. Walters, President Bush announced he wanted "measurable results," and the measure would be a reduction in the number of people who admit to being recent drug users — 10 percent by 2004. Well, since three-fourths of illicit drug users are pot smokers, the easy way to get the numbers down is to attack the least important aspect of the drug problem. That will give President Bush some bogus victories to boast about when he runs for re-election.The third reason is the culture war. Mr. Walters is a veteran of the conservative political bunkers, where pot is viewed as a manifestation of moral degeneracy. "It's still about the war in Vietnam and growing your hair long," says Mark Kleiman, a drug law expert at U.C.L.A. and a thoughtful centrist in a debate monopolized by extremes. "It's the 60's being replayed again and again and again — the S.D.S. versus the football team." For this White House, to give ground on pot would be a moral surrender.Mr. Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with marijuana is to remove criminal penalties for possession, use (recreational or medicinal) and cultivation of small amounts, but not to legalize sale. It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws for enjoying a drug that is roughly as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than tobacco or alcohol. At the same time, the inexorable logic of a legal marketplace would mean a lot more consumption and abuse. Consider this statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived from alcoholics — people who down at least four drinks every day. The sin business, whether it's a private liquor company or a state-run lottery, may preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction.Once you're past pot, you face the gloomy landscape of hard drugs, along with newer chemical worries like Ecstasy. If your experience of the hard-core drug world is mostly from movies like "Traffic" or two splendid HBO series, "The Corner" and "The Wire," you may be inclined to despair of easy answers. You would not be wrong. The moralistic drug war has overstuffed our prisons, left communities fatherless, fed corruption, consumed vast quantities of law enforcement time and money, and led us into some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs scarcer or more expensive. Legalization, on the other hand, means less crime and inner-city misery, but more addicts. The things worth doing are incremental and unglamorous and lacking in demagogic appeal. They aim not at winning a spurious war but at minimizing harm — both the harm caused by drugs, and the harm caused by draconian enforcement. Almost everyone (including Mr. Walters, in principle) agrees that diverting drug users into treatment, preferably backed by the threat of jail, is much better than consigning them to prison. But liberalizers are all carrot, and drug warriors are all stick. The drug czar who so eagerly intervened in Arizona and Nevada has kept his distance from efforts to humanize New York's merciless and failed Rockefeller drug laws.Drug reform requires not only money, creativity and patience, but also the political courage to face down ideologues. And political courage, you may have noticed, is a lot harder to come by than drugs. Source: New York Times (NY)Author: Bill KellerPublished: November 30, 2002Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company Contact: letters nytimes.com Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Related Articles:Marijuana Debate Heats Uphttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14839.shtmlThe Myth of Potent Pothttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14785.shtmlThe Roots of Reefer Madnesshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14653.shtml Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Comment #25 posted by afterburner on December 01, 2002 at 21:35:17 PT: This Link Shows Why We Reformers Cannot Let Up. re/ The link in Richard Lake's comment #24:The ever increasing media coverage of John Walter's inevitable meltdown after his Pinnochio lies is a breath of fresh air. After the near ignoring by the media of all but the most sensational prohibitionist cruelties (namely the WAMM raids), the prohibitionists and their so-called drug education cronies were given nearly free rein to poison the minds of the public. Now that the election is over, "the truth with out." But come the next election, more of the media will be more aware of the truth about cannabis and more skeptical of drug czars and their lies because of our efforts.ego destruction or ego transcendence, that is the question.Hemp for victory! [ Post Comment ] Comment #24 posted by Richard Lake on December 01, 2002 at 20:56:56 PT: Alert on this column now on line Click the linkhttp://www.mapinc.org/alert/0257.html JOHN WALTERS' REEFER MADNESS [ Post Comment ] Comment #23 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on December 01, 2002 at 16:01:03 PT The Changing 'Times' For those of you who have noticed a change in the Times lately, you're not alone: http://www.msnbc.com/news/841753.asp?cp1=1 [ Post Comment ] Comment #21 posted by Richard Lake on December 01, 2002 at 09:03:51 PT: The New York Times always has been liberal-leaning Well, not always. In the days when A. M. Rosenthal had substantial say at the NYT, until he left 5 Nov 1999, the Gray Lady was not liberal leaning on drug policy.In the early days of MAP, even when it was simply a list on DRCNet's listserve, some efforts were made to get Rosenthal to see our side.Didn't have much impact. Today Rosenthal's OPEDs written for other papers are still prohibitionist.But if the NYT is liberal on drug policy, and it has moved our way (then so have a lot of newspapers since their Just Say No days), that can be measured from Rosenthal's departure.Richard [ Post Comment ] Comment #20 posted by FoM on December 01, 2002 at 08:05:15 PT Good Morning Everyone! I wanted to comment to let you all know I'm looking for news but I haven't found any so far. It always gets slow around the holidays but I'll sure keep looking. Richard I tried and still got an 8080 error. It worked good with Pot-TV just not C-Span.Back to looking for news! What's New [ Post Comment ] Comment #19 posted by Toad on December 01, 2002 at 01:07:12 PT Good News Good News How great is it to hear this kind of lean from the NYT. Hopefully this will trickle down [ Post Comment ] Comment #18 posted by CorvallisEric on December 01, 2002 at 01:02:18 PT Apparently Bill Keller is important Excerpts from commentary on an interesting-seeming conservative page. I know nothing about them or anyone discussed here.----WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN. On the op-ed page of today's New York Times is a column by Bill Keller about the war on drugs, and particularly the ever more aggressive war on marijuana, which surely is one of the great idiocies of our age (the war, not the column). Keller's piece is pretty good. ...... The New York Times always has been liberal-leaning, of course, but on Howell Raines's watch as executive editor it has plunged over the edge into a more startling and shameless brand of partisanship. ...... The last time the executive editor's job at the Times was open, the contest for it was between Raines and Keller. Raines won; the Times and its readers lost. Every time I read Keller's stuff, I thus cannot help but wonder what the result would have been if Keller rather than Raines had become top dog. Philippe DeCroy's commentary from The Volokh Conspiracy [ Post Comment ] Comment #17 posted by Richard Lake on November 30, 2002 at 23:17:26 PT: Just worked for me, FoM So I added this note to the item in the MAP archives:Note: This article was discussed by callers for 25 minutes on C-SPANs Washington Journal Saturday morning http://www.c-span.org/journal/ journal c-span.org It starts at 1 hour and 35 minutes into the show at this video file: http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/idrive/wj20021130.rmIf you try again and it still does not work email me, and I will contact you about possible solutions, FoM.Steve Heath of the Drug Policy Forum has drafted a DrugSense Focus Alert on the column, which I need to finalize so we can get it out to our LTE writing Focus Alert list by evening today, Sunday.But it's past my bedtime now. How time flies when I get going in front of this computer screen.Richard Info about Focus Alerts [ Post Comment ] Comment #16 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 21:32:54 PT p4me I thought it was interesting that The GAO report was compiled for Rep. Marc Souder. It doesn't appear to be helping the prohibitionist very well. I am very anxious about what will be happening in Canada soon. If they allow personal gardens that will be so good for Canada and almost impossible for Walters to do much about I think. I hope you are having a nice long weekend. We've had a lot of extra time on our hands and have been watching HBO Movies. It's a treat since we don't get HBO but it's a free preview weekend so we are taking advantage of it. [ Post Comment ] Comment #15 posted by p4me on November 30, 2002 at 21:22:35 PT Look at all the words- The NYTimes acknowledges the incoming tide. Maybe the Washington Post sees the New York ice melting and they will have to melt too. Only the fools are supporting prohibition now and it the Times does not want to be a fool in the Institutional sense- and journalism at that. I think this a milestone event. It is about like the medical case in the UK a couple weeks ago that was really huge in a sense like this. It is a milestone for sure just as the submission of GW Pharma of its clinical studies.It looks like the milemarkers are coming faster, and most people do not want to be called fools much less be proven fools. Richard Cowan might say "Two words is 'bad journalism', three words is 'quack, quack, quack' and four words is 'The New York Times."Prohibition is the fools way, and the United States is in the lead. Sad isn't?FoM, I noticed you jumped in on this one. I think it is astounding and this is but the beginning of the rising tide Only prohibitionist demand to stay on the shrinking beach. When will they see they must change their position. Can they not see the rising tide. Fools and people of blissful ignorant stay on the Prohibition Beach. I am ready for that rapture, then maybe you could smoke a joint in peace. Its big, really big. It really is. 1 [ Post Comment ] Comment #14 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 18:28:06 PT AlvinCool I went ahead and checked but it said something like an 8080 error? I checked a few of the links and it did the same thing. I probably missed it. Maybe Pot-TV will have it up on their site later and then I will be able to see it. Thanks again. [ Post Comment ] Comment #13 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 18:10:19 PT AlvinCool Thank you! I'll check it out a little later on tonight. Pot TV worked fine so maybe C-Span will too. I'll keep my fingers crossed! [ Post Comment ] Comment #12 posted by AlvinCool on November 30, 2002 at 18:05:29 PT C-Span from this morning You can go here and check out the journal from this morning. Just jump to 1 hour and 35 minutes into the show for the start of the "should marijuana be legalized" section. Runs about 25 minutes. Make sure it's the journal for Nov 30th. Catch it before it's gone http://www.c-span.org/journal/ [ Post Comment ] Comment #11 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 17:02:46 PT BGreen Thank you! I got it! I just watched Pot-TV and it was great to see. I really have enjoyed the programs I saw on Pot-TV before my real player went wacky on me. I only watched the one show and am going to go slow and see if it keeps working ok. Thanks again. [ Post Comment ] Comment #10 posted by BGreen on November 30, 2002 at 14:58:17 PT I'd be happy to help you, FoM I'd just need to be able to chat with you to find out the specifics of your problems.Bud Green [ Post Comment ] Comment #9 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 13:35:56 PT Thanks Richard It would be nice but I still am not sure how to get real video to work right on my computer. Maybe I need to find a technical site that might know why it doesn't work for me. My computer is working fine and I am concerned about causing it problems so I always hesitiate to try something new but I am missing Pot TV too and I really like what I have been able to see in the past. Since the news is slow I think I'll go try to figure it out. Thanks. [ Post Comment ] Comment #8 posted by Richard Lake on November 30, 2002 at 12:24:25 PT: Some On Line Radio Shows for Activists While not perfect, it is good to get a story that hits the Kzar this hard in the NYT. Below is a list I posted to a few email lists that you all may find of interest, or maybe not.I listen over the net to the following radio shows while I am doing other things around the house. Helps me to learn more about all that is going on in our efforts. Perhaps you will find the programs of interest, also.Cultural Baggage - "The Unvarnished Truth" on Drug Prohibition hosted by Dean Becker is broadcast and netcast every other Friday evening from Pacifica Radio: KPFT, Houston, 90.1 FM http://www.kpft.org/Below is a list of the guests in this one hour radio show so far, along with a link to the show's archive for your listening enjoyment in low bandwidth (ok for modems) RealAudio .ram format. Besides the guest(s), each show features news, commentary, interviews with newsmakers, listeners calling in to ask questions of the guests and more.More information on the past shows and announcements of future shows are at http://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft.htm----Friday, Nov. 22Nora Callahan, Director of The November Coalition http://www.november.org/ , publisher "Razorwire" and national organizer (with Common Sense for Drug Policy) of the ongoing "Journey For Justice" http://www.journeyforjustice.org/ that seeks the end of the drug war and the freeing of thousands of prisoners sentenced to mandatory minimums.http://www.cultural-baggage.com/tonov22.ram----Friday, Nov. 15Al Giordano, Noted Journalist and publisher of NarcoNews http://www.narconews.com/ The politics of Colombia, the investigative reporting that alerts us all to the real truth in Mexico, Central and South America.http://www.cultural-baggage.com/tonov15.ram----Friday, Oct. 25Rev. Alan Bean discusses the news from Tulia, Texas, where 39 black people were arrested in one night. Local newspaper headlines said: "Taking out the Garbage." These people were tried by all-white juries and given prison sentences ranging to the hundreds of years. See Friends of Justice http://fojtulia.org/ and http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htmhttp://www.cultural-baggage.com/cb1025a.ram----Friday, Sep. 13Canadian Senator Pierre Nolin and Eugene Oscapella of the discuss Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy the Canadian Senate Committee on Illegal Drugs Report which calls for legal cannabis and other Canadian reform efforts. See http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/Committee_SenRep.asp?Language=E&Parl=37&Ses=1&comm_id=85 and http://www.mapinc.org/find?218http://www.cultural-baggage.com/cb0913.ram----Friday, Aug. 30Wes Fager discusses Drug Treatment Abuse and Straight Inc. http://www.thestraights.com/Atty. Greg Schmid and Doug Leinbach on remembering Rainbow Farm Campground http://rainbowfarmcamp.com/ Rainbow Farm owner Tom Crosslin, 46, and his partner, Rolland Rohm, 28, were killed by police Labor Day weekend 2001. See also http://www.mapinc.org/find?200http://www.cultural-baggage.com/0830.ram----Friday, Aug. 16G. Alan Robison, Ph.D, Founder & Executive Director of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas http://www.dpft.org/ and Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science CenterGeorge McMahon, Federally Supplied Medical Marijuana Patient http://www.trvnet.net/~mmcmahon/http://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft081602.ram----Friday, Aug. 2Howard Woodridge of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition http://www.leap.cc/ ( a 2 minute high bandwidth video of a TV interview "Retired Cop Howard Woodridge Rides for Cannabis Legalization" is at http://www.drugpolicycentral.com/real/leap/howard.rm )Charles Thomas, executive director of Unitarian Univeralists for Drug Policy Reform http://www.uudpr.org/Chris Davies Member of the European Parliament spoke of drug reform occurring in Great Britain and throughout Europe. http://www.chrisdaviesmep.org.uk/http://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft080202.ram----Friday, 19 Jul.Judge James Gray, Superior Court of Orange County California and author of "Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It" http://www.judgejimgray.com/http://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft071902.ram----Friday, 21 JunDaniel Forbes, award winning investigative reporter. His reports are archived at http://www.mapinc.org/forbes.htmhttp://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft062102.ram----Friday, 7 JunKevin Zeese, President of Common Sense for Drug Policy. Websites http://www.csdp.org http://www.drugwarfacts.org/http://www.cultural-baggage.com/kpft060702.ram----That's all of them so far, I think, folks. Enjoy!Richard Lake, Sr. Editor, DrugNews www.mapinc.org [ Post Comment ] Comment #7 posted by CorvallisEric on November 30, 2002 at 11:56:02 PT This article and Kleiman One article like this in the NYT is worth hundreds of college-paper op-ed's, many of which are poorly written. Sorry if you find this attitude offensive.Mark Kleiman, mentioned here, has a cool blog (weblog) dealing very thoughtfully with all sorts of political stuff including his "moderate" take on drug policy. Tiny, atypical sample to entice you: Skip this [a link] unless you're as deranged a Bush-hater as I am. It will just annoy you. Kleiman's blog [ Post Comment ] Comment #6 posted by Naaps on November 30, 2002 at 07:39:28 PT Bill has the Gist! In a well written, high profile article he punches many of the pertinent buttons citing “The moralistic drug war has overstuffed our prisons, left communities fatherless, fed corruption, consumed vast quantities of law enforcement time and money, and led us into some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs scarcer or more expensive.” Not to mention forfeiture laws influencing police priorities, accidental SWAT team shootings, the accent of the urine testing industry, concurrent erosion of civil liberties, all while the average age of cannabis introduction remains 15 years, and 50% of youths will try it.Interestingly, there’s agreement with VitaminT regarding the contentious, distorted nature of the paragraph, “Mr. Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with marijuana is to remove criminal penalties for possession, use (recreational or medicinal) and cultivation of small amounts, but not to legalize sale.” Why stop at the selling? Regulated sales and letting people cultivate personal quantities is a very good step toward knocking down the exorbitant price – the true driving force behind much of the crime associated with cannabis prohibition. However, at the end of the paragraph he ties the legal market to abuse, citing alcoholics, predicting increased dependency. Please, it is an unfair comparison. Alcoholic, stirs images of belligerent, hostile drunks perhaps involved in an assault, drawing resources from emergency services. The increased use of cannabis in a tolerant legal environment could well be at the expense of alcohol consumption as people are given the opportunity to make an intelligent choice. It was noted a couple years ago by the British press that soccer hooliganism in Amsterdam appeared to be nonexistent among cannabis enjoying spectators, compared with the alcohol-imbibing spectators. [ Post Comment ] Comment #5 posted by FoM on November 30, 2002 at 07:38:23 PT mayan Thanks! I turned on C-Span but it isn't on. It's already over. I looked for a link to a video but I didn't find one so far but I'll look again later on and if I find one I'll post it. If you find a link please post it if you want. [ Post Comment ] Comment #4 posted by mayan on November 30, 2002 at 05:43:28 PT C-SPAN! 8:40 A.M. ET They are getting ready to take calls. Today's question:Do you think marijuana laws should be liberalized? [ Post Comment ] Comment #3 posted by VitaminT on November 29, 2002 at 23:55:05 PT This is the part of decrim . . . . that just makes no damn sense to me. Ignoring the ample evidence from Holland that a legal marketplace would NOT mean A LOT more consumption and abuse - if it makes no sense to cage users, then how does it make sense to cage suppliers?Personally I'd be happy if I were free to grow my own without fear of legal entanglement - but plenty of people might have serious difficulty producing a crop - I'm probably one of them. This guy mentions "logic" in the quote below - I just wish he'd apply a little more of it in his arguement."the inexorable logic of a legal marketplace would mean a lot more consumption and abuse. Consider this statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived from alcoholics — people who down at least four drinks every day. The sin business, whether it's a private liquor company or a state-run lottery, may preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction."It seems a non sequitor that this statement would follow the one below."It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws for enjoying a drug that is roughly as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than tobacco or alcohol."Unless of course the author is in an off-hand way suggesting that coffee producers are just drug pushers.ridiculous! I can quit any time, reallyI can! [ Post Comment ] Comment #2 posted by AlvinCool on November 29, 2002 at 20:36:29 PT Letter to the editor A lot of things are said to promote and sustain prohibition of marijuana. I've heard it all and from your article you have heard the same things. So lets just throw it all out and take a look from, can you believe it, a new angle.Tomorrow there is no marijuana in the whole world. No seeds, no sticks no weed.The Canadians and most of Europe know what will happen next but America can't see it. Addiction like we never imagined would reign supreme. Those 30 million people that use marijuana now would look for a substitute (forget that 6.5 million crap just look at what is smuggled in and grown here). Take your pick of heroin, cocaine, meth, estacy or some other designer chemical. Marijuana is demonized but it's really the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke. Remove marijuana and disaster will follow. Think the Canadian Senate don't see this? Think the Europeans don't see this? How is it WE don't see it? [ Post Comment ] Comment #1 posted by FoM on November 29, 2002 at 19:43:38 PT Interesting Article from The NYT I was surprised to see this article in the New York Times but it does say a lot. [ Post Comment ] Post Comment