The reliably sage Jim Meek comes a cropper this morning with a column plucking nits off Canada's medical marijuana policy. The occasional Herald columnist, Nova Scotia's best, professes shock that the number of Canadians with federal permission to smoke dope for medicinal purposes has swelled to 10,000. Well, that's 0.03 percent of Canada's population, or about the number who support Elvis for Prime Minister—not exactly a blown floodgate. Nor is the other number Meek decries, the 1,400 Canadians who received permission to grow the drug after Ottawa proved incompetent to deliver reliable quality. Along the way, Meek finds one grower who...

25 June, 2011

Bruce Wark, writing from an HRM neighborhood where the ban on overnight parking is not enforced, critiques my critique of the ban: [Y]ou use "reasonable accommodation" as though you have proved it. It is as though you are saying that your assertion in the first paragraph is sufficient to support what you're saying in the second. The rules of logic say that he who asserts must prove. Furthermore, your assertion that "traffic tsar" Ken Reashor "evinces no interest in reasonable accommodation" is a neat, but logically unconvincing way of first, labelling Reashor as a Russian dictator, then glossing over necessary proof...

24 January, 2011

British scientists are up in arms about the Labour government's sacking of Dr. David Nutt as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after he refused to toe the government's strident line against marijuana and ecstasy. On Friday, Home Secretary Alan Johnson dismissed Nutt, head of the Psychopharmacology Unit in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Bristol, after the Centre for Crime and Justice at King’s College London published a paper containing criticisms he had made of the Brown government’s drug policies in a lecture last July. In the talk, Nutt said ecstasy...

01 November, 2009

.. .. .. .. First coffee prevented Alzheimer's. Then beer, wine, and spirits prevented Alzheimer's. Now, according to the Journal of Neuroscience, a big fat doobie prevents Alzheimer's. Can sex be far behind? Moneyquote: Our results indicate that cannabinoid receptors are important in the pathology of AD and that cannabinoids succeed in preventing the neurodegenerative process occurring in the disease. [Emphasis contrarian's] Hat tip: D. Parsons. UPDATE: Devastating development. [Hat tip: W&G]...

14 July, 2009