Club Troppo

Not so long ago economist Paul Frijters mused about drug legalisation here at Troppo.

It seems that Paul is an international trendsetter.  Now economist elder statesman Gary Becker and the world’s most prolific judge/legal academic Richard Posner are musing on the same topic at their joint blog.  Becker is unequivocally pro-legalisation though not especially analytical, while Posner attempts an economic analysis based on a recent paper by Miron and Waldock resulting in a couple of reservations and a proposed field study to resolve them:

Most important, the authors also do not consider the possible social benefits of prohibition. Prohibition reduces the consumption of mind-altering drugs. Of course there are mind-altering drugs that are not prohibited, and many of these are close substitutes. These include the numerous prescription drugs that have mind-altering effects very similar to those of the illegal drugs, and of course there is alcohol and cigarettes. Moreover, a tax on legalized drugs would raise the price to the consumer and thus moderate the effect of legalization on consumption. But if the tax is too high, it will result in reviving the illegal industry. And the authors probably underestimate the increased consumption that would result from a lower price or even the same price (brought about by a particularly stiff excise tax) because they don’t mention concerns with impurities and with the stigma of being a “drug addict” that are created by the prohibition and would be substantially reduced by its repeal.

The question would then be whether the external costs of increased consumption of mind-altering drugs would exceed the savings in law enforcement costs from legalization. It seems doubtful that marijuana consumption generates significant social costs, but legalizing it would generate only modest cost savings–$8.7 billion a year, according to the authors’ estimates. But cocaine, especially the crack form, along with heroin, ecstasy, LSD, methamphetamines, and perhaps others, may induce behavioral changes that cause social damage. Most leaders of black communities believe that rampant drug usage is highly destructive to their communities, and not only because of the gang activity that prohibition induces. Drug gangs would disappear with legalization and that would reduce the violence in those communities, but the effect might be more than offset by the effects of greater drug use.

Concern with the huge budget deficits of our federal, state, and local governments may gain the authors a more sympathetic reading than advocacy of repealing the drug laws usually does. From a budgetary standpoint, the authors are estimating an annual savings of almost $90 billion. But without an estimate of the social costs of increased drug usage, the path to repeal is blocked. It would a step in the right direction if the Justice Department would take the position that it will not enforce a federal drug law in any state that repeals its parallel prohibition of that drug; that way we might obtain experimental evidence of the social costs of illegal drugs.

NSW government criminologist Don Weatherburn addressed these questions in a recent address to the Medico-Legal Society of NSW.  It’s relatively short anyway but I’ve extracted the most relevant passages over the fold:

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Quoth (someone apparently imitating) Bronwyn Bishop:

Mr Assange should be aggressively interrogated until he reveals the location of the stolen cables, so they can be retrieved.

This is wrong on at least two levels. Given Australia’s record in matching MPs and ministries she’ll wind up as Attorney-General and Minister for Communication.

Update: That said, I might be the victim of a most excellent troll.

Bravo, trolls. Bravo. The art of high quality trolling demands that the trolling be entirely believable. IHBT. IHL. HAND.

Nicholas Gruen posted on the weekend about a South Australian defamation matter called Manock v Channel Seven Adelaide Pty Ltd which has been going for almost 7 years and still hasn’t even reached trial.  Nicholas quite rightly cited the case as a good example of the deplorable tendency of Australia’s legal system to foster/tolerate gross delaying tactics and utterly unnecessary complexity and expense resulting in systemic unfairness.

However, the context for the Manock case is itself fascinating and well worth a blog post in its own right.  Dr Colin Manock is a veteran forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on a 29 year old Adelaide lawyer named Anna-Jane Cheney after her death in 1994.  Ms Cheney had drowned in her bath at home.  Dr Manock concluded that she had been murdered by someone using a technique effectively identical to the notorious UK Brides in the Bath murders in the early 1900s.  One George Joseph Smith had killed three wives in succession by suddenly grabbing their ankles and pulling their heads under water while they were in the bath.  Smith was convicted of all three murders in 1915 after some pioneering forensic work.  Dr Manock found bruises on Ms Cheney’s ankles consistent with a grip mark.  Ms Cheney’s fiance former bank manager Henry Keogh, who found her body, was subsequently charged with and convicted of her murder.

There is no doubt that Dr Manock’s testimony was a significant part of the circumstantial case against Keogh, although arguably at least as significant was the fact that shortly before her death Keogh had taken out 5 separate insurance policies on her life totalling some $1 million and had allegedly forged her signature on some insurance documents.  There was also evidence that Keogh had romantic relationships with two other women at the time of Ms Cheney’s death, and statements he made subsequent to the death in relation to the insurance policies to members of the deceased’s family. Keogh certainly had both motive and opportunity at the very least.

Subsequent to Keogh’s conviction a small group of people led by ex-Adelaide University law lecturer Bob Moles formed the view that Keogh had been a victim of a miscarriage of justice and began campaigning for a retrial or at least an independent re-examination of the evidence.   Their main arguments appear to revolve around alleged inadequacies in Dr Manock’s autopsy and his evidence at Keogh’s trial.  Unfortunately for them (and Keogh) the High Court twice rejected these arguments as did a SA Medical Board enquiry which found:

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Fatuous Sydney 2UE radio reporter Latika M Bourke not only won the 2010 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year award but has now been employed by the ABC as its Social Media Reporter.  I’ve unwillingly been inflicted with Ms Bourke’s vacuous style of  “journalism” while using Nicholas Gruen’s Twitter feed to disseminate Missing Link Daily blog and alternative media reading recommendations.

I can only heartily endorse the sentiments of a commenter at the ABC blog where Latika’s appointment was announced:

This is truly remarkable. A person “tweets” anything and everything they see, without analysis, without discretion and often without an even basic understanding of the issues at hand and they get a job with the ABC.

There are any number of bloggers who would have made better ABC appointees because they have a strong understanding of social media and an infinitely superior grasp of politics, current affairs and logical thought processes to that of Ms Bourke.

PS Now here’s a story about a real journalist doing real journalism (and winning a Walkley for it). Strangely enough, he doesn’t seem to have done any wittering away on Twitter.

American conservatives hate welfare. But under President Bush, they willingly expanded food stamps — a program that hands out over than 64 billion of dollars worth of assistance a year to low-income Americans and legal immigrants.

The reason? Many conservatives don’t think the food stamps program is welfare.

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I guess the coming of Master Chef was 9 parts good and one part bad. Great that people got into cooking, but all that stuff about ‘plating up’ was a bit much for me. A nicely presented meal is nice of course, but ‘plating up’? A tad overblown methinks.

Anyway, I just thought I’d let all Troppodillians know that I’ve found the restaurant of my dreams. The Darna Authentic Moroccan Restaurant. What’s so good about it? Well pretty much everything. Every dish that was served a group of four of us tonight was superb. Even those dips that turn up as the initial course were truly delicious. Of course dips often are, but these were a bit different to your usual. And truly delicious.

The main courses were slow cooked lamb with prunes and other sweet things, and onions, and roasted almonds; Artichokes stuffed with veal and lamb meat in lemon dressing and a couple of other specials that don’t turn up on their internet menu.

The food was so delicious we were full, but managed one desert between four. It was Toubkal delight – Sweet pastry with vegetal milk, citrus water, garnished with baked ground almonds in cinnamon. Sublime with mint tea. Had we wanted more there were plenty of alternatives like dates stuffed with marzipan, crescents of toasted almonds, shbakia, coconut cookies, almond balls, ground nuts and dates in powdered sugar, phyllo leaves stuffed with marzipan and dipped in honey.

The bad news? Darna Authentic Moroccan Restaurant is in Jerusalem. So it will be some time before I make it back there. In the meantime, if you’re in town, make sure you go. It’s wonderful. Prices are normal – say high twenties, low thirties for a main. It completely lacks preciousness. Everything was presented in a very appetising way, without much sign of ‘plating up’.

I can’t think of a better restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. Ever.

In a piece of news some will regard as predictably disappointing, the Cancun Climate Conference has reached an agreement, but its targets are both non-binding and fairly modest (reputedly a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16% by 2020), and include both developed and developing nations.  While that’s less than needed to avoid a global temperature rise of much more than 2 degrees C by 2100, it’s at least a good start if the commitments can be converted to binding ones in the next few years.

Agreement about the $100 billion per year commitment of developed nations to assisting the developing world is even better news:

The Green Climate Fund is intended to raise and disburse $100bn (£64bn) a year by 2020 to protect poor nations against climate impacts and assist them with low-carbon development.

I always thought the expectation of a universal binding climate agreement either at Copenhagen or Cancun was a wildly optimistic, utopian fantasy.  International politics, conflicting national interests and understandable mutual distrust mostly militate against quick, neat, global scale agreements.

However, that doesn’t mean major progress is impossible in a rather more messy, chaotic, ad hoc way.  In fact significant progress has already been made since Copenhagen despite its seeming failure.  For example, Brazil has achieved an impressive reduction of almost 60% in the rate of Amazon deforestation over the last 2 years:

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Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan tyrant here.

LP’s domain name has expired. Consequently it is no longer possible to navigate directly to larvatusprodeo.net.

I have reactivated larvatusprodeo.ozblogistan.com.au in the meantime while the domain issues are sorted out.

Update: normal service has been resumed.

Canberra Times readers were left to think up their own 5 deck headline for this story by AAP medical writer Danny Rose.