Jacob Sullum discusses the ‘gateway effect’, concluding:

A few years ago in the Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin, the social psychologist Robert MacCoun laid out seven – count ’em, seven – different versions of the gateway theory. “Given our current state of knowledge,” he concluded, “one can coherently argue that (a) the gateway is a myth – it doesn’t exist; (b) the gateway is very real and it shows why we must sustain or strengthen our ban on marijuana, or (c) the gateway is very real and it shows why we should depenalize or even legalize marijuana.”

A theory that versatile will never die.

Have I told you my favorite gateway story? Some years ago, a passing mention of marijuana in conversation prompted a friend to say that he didn’t care for the stuff at first, preferring LSD, but socializing with other acidheads who also used marijuana led him to a more sophisticated appreciation of the latter. I repeated this to another acquaintance (who had acquired a nicotine addiction while drying out from heroin); he pondered for a moment and observed that for him cocaïne had analogously been a gateway to beer.

Which in turn reminds me that, as I was signing up for pistol training a few years later, I was told to get someone of “good moral character” to vouch for my not being especially likely to misapply the knowledge that I was about to acquire. “You probably don’t know any people of bad moral character,” said the guy on the phone. I managed not to mutter, “That’s a matter of opinion.”

Takes one to know one:

Derided by the White House as “nothing more than a cheap political stunt,” marijuana advocates’ attempt to hold Office of National Drug Control Policy head John P. Walters’ feet to the fire for his overt, taxpayer-funded political campaigning against drug-reform state ballot initiatives bore some small fruit this week.

(Reason, relayed by Rational Review)

Do you enjoy dictionaries as much as I do? The Office of National Drug Control Policy (boo hiss) publishes this one: Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade.
(Link provided by Michael Travers, as an aside from a digression about drugs as metaphor for programming languages.)

Freezerbox: This Is American History On Drugs

California now imprisons more people than do France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. It has more people in jail for drug offenses than were in jail in the entire United States in 1978.

Got a spam today for police-seized cars, and gotta admire the symmetry: using ‘legally’ stolen bandwidth to sell ‘legally’ stolen goods.

(They tell you that the cars belonged to “drug kingpins”, which even if it were true would not justify plunder; but four out of five drivers thus robbed at gunpoint are never charged with any offense.)

Medical marijuana refugees in Canada. So that’s what happened to Kubby! (Link from Alex Knapp.)

Go get ’em! The LP responds to the notorious infamous “if you buy dope you’re supporting terrorism” spot with this newspaper advertisement. (Thanks to Ananda, who credits Declan McCullagh.)

Pet peeve nº 17000: false precision. When you write “boosts . . . by 17,000 percent” do you really expect anyone to divide the original number (if it were available) by 100, multiply it by 17000 and add it back? Do you really expect me to believe that the increase is known to be neither more than 17005% nor less than 16995%? Would it be harder to write “171-fold”?

The funniest example I’ve seen of pseudo-precision was a package of sandwich-bags marked “25% free! 32 for the price of 25.”