Tag Archives: law

Dangerous Mistake

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The Trump administration is completing its move to change the classification of marijuana from a Schedule I drug…alongside LSD and heroin…to Schedule III, making it obtainable with a prescription.

This is a mistake on two fronts. The first is that marijuana is a highly dangerous drug, having been bred explicitly to strengthen its effects. Those effects include brain damage on developing brains, and human brains are always developing; although the pace of development slows markedly in a human’s middle twenties. The damage done, too, isn’t like a smoker’s damage to his lungs, which can be mostly repaired if the smoker stops smoking. Despite the plasticity of our brains, damage done chemically by the materials in marijuana is permanent.

That leaves aside the slowed reflexes and impaired judgment of a marijuana user while he’s using. Driving or operating machinery while under the influence of marijuana is just as dangerous to the user and to others as is driving or operating machinery while drinking alcohol.

The other front is that this is the wrong place to make money. The profits from universally legal cultivation and sale of marijuana qua marijuana is just chump change compared with the profits available from commercializing marijuana for medicinal use. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence that marijuana helps with pain management, PTSD, depression, and the like. That warrants serious research to determine the specific chemicals and chemical combinations in marijuana that have these and potentially other medicinal benefits.

With that successful research, and I submit that with concerted effort by a variety of pharmaceutical companies, success is within five years, the cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes and the extraction of those chemicals and chemical combinations can be done under license (which we already know how to do in the narcotic medicine venue). Those actual medicines then can be sold under prescription or over the counter, depending on the specific combination. (I’m eliding here the fact that herbal medicine—which is what marijuana would be, even by prescription—suffers badly from inconsistent dose control.)

A Thought on Income Taxes and Equal Treatment under Law

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It occurs to me that many of our States’ income tax codes violate our Constitution. Here’s the relevant clause, from the 14th Amendment’s Article I:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any income tax law that taxes citizens differentially plainly does not afford all citizens equal protection of the (tax) law. Such laws confiscate the incomes of some people far more than it does others, and such laws that exempt some people from paying the tax favors those folks over others who must pay.

States’ income tax laws that do not tax every one equally must be found unconstitutional. That such a ruling would disrupt State budgets is no reason to continue this violation.

That principle applies, or should apply even if not strictly constitutionally, to our Federal income tax code, also. In particular, the 16th Amendment authorizes a Federal income tax, but it in no way authorizes the Federal government to tax Americans differentially from each other.

A Thought on Farmworkers and Welfare

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Pity the poor American farmworkers. That’s what Jason Yarashes, Legal Aid Justice Center‘s Director of its Worker Justice Program, wants us to do. He was responding to an earlier Letter in which that letter-writer was lamenting the troubles that farmers are having as a side effect of our government regaining control of our borders and the ensuing lack of illegal aliens coming in to do those farmers’ farm work.

Yarashes is correct that such labor is backbreaking, and most of it goes unaccompanied by Social Security benefits or health insurance, despite paying taxes. Never mind that the illegal laborers are happy to get the work and most of them succeed in sending some of their pay back to their families in their home countries.

There’s an obvious solution to this conundrum, although it’s one that Leftists like Yarashes will decry to the heavens.

The US has a bloated collection of welfare programs, each of which is itself bloated. Most of those on these programs are able-bodied, healthy, and unemployed, even with the light work requirements attached to these programs.

Put these folks to work on the farms. Let them pick the lettuce, detassel the corn, harvest the apples and oranges, and on and on as a criterion for collecting welfare payments.

Let the farmers pay these modern day CCC workers the wages they would have paid their illegal alien workers—not Yarashes’ precious minimum wage rate—and collect their welfare payments on top of that, which the illegal aliens do not get. The kicker: the farm work is heavily seasonal, but these farm CCC-ers would be eligible for their welfare collections year-round. And: boost the farm workers’ welfare payments by some amount—say 10% as an opening move—to reward them for their actual, and harder, work than skating by on volunteering, entering “work training” programs, or scattering around resumes like so many advertising fliers.

One onus on the farmers: they would have to rate these farm CCC-ers on the quality of their work, with their eligibility for continuation in the next year’s farm work contingent on getting satisfactory ratings this year.

Failing Public Schools

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And failing teachers union schools, but I repeat myself. These are the favorites of the Progressive-Democratic Party, and that favoring is independent of teacher performance. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the latest example.

Only 18% of Los Angeles eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compared to 27% nationwide.

That’s OK, though. Here’s those teachers’ and their union’s participation ribbon:

United Teachers Los Angeles increases salary scales by 11.65% over two years—double the rate of inflation—plus four weeks of paid parental leave….

And

The agreement comes after the district warned in February that a looming $877 million deficit could require thousands of layoffs.

Guess, though, who will pay for this. The parents on the lower end of the area’s economic ladder. These are the ones who can’t afford to move away from these failures and move to live and work in jurisdictions with better schools. But the ones who will pay the biggest priced are those parents’ children. These are being consigned to a lifetime of ignorance, inability to perform the most basic functions of managing their own lives, and so to a lifetime of continued poverty and dependence.

A Thought on Physician-assisted Suicide

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The headline and subhead laid out the case in extreme terms:

Physician-Assisted Suicide Isn’t Healthcare
We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.

In the article the writer made the case against physician-assisted suicide in Biblical terms, and it’s a valid one:

Cain should have been put to death for what he did. But the Lord spared him, proclaiming that life and death belong to the Lord alone.

And

Medicine shouldn’t be entangled in the business of death. Killing isn’t healthcare.

Certainly. But what the Hippocratic Oath actually says is this:

I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman….

But that’s not what physician-assisted suicide does. If the patient wants to short-circuit an end-of-life period of misery, assisting his suicide isn’t “killing the patient;” it’s helping him move on. Withholding that assistance is most assuredly deeply injurious to the patient’s continuing body, and to his mind. Beyond that, it’s disastrous to the patient’s and his family’s emotional and economic well-being, consigning the latter, especially, to an extended life of impoverishment that could have been avoided. Physician-assisted suicide is palliative care in the extreme, but it is still palliative care.

The killing is the patient’s act, and that’s between him and God. Do no harm includes not getting between the patient and God. A doctor’s role assuredly does not include suggesting suicide; although, some governments do encourage it. A doctor’s role does, absolutely, include palliative care.

Along these lines, the Hippocratic Oath explicitly enjoins the physician from doing abortions:

Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

I have to ask: how many abortions has this writer of the article at the first link performed? Plenty of his colleagues have done them, and proudly so, many even proclaiming abortions as “health care.”