government

By. Jane Tabe, Globe and Mail

1. A breathtaking shift. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would lose 33 seats if an election were held today and only maintain a tenuous hold on minority government, according to a new EKOS poll.

“From comfortable majority and kudos in October to the razor’s edge of losing government altogether,” says pollster Frank Graves, whose new survey finds that Canadians simply don’t like the Parliamentary shutdown.

“Clearly it has a significant impact. It has become a proxy and a catalyst for a whole bunch of broader frustrations and anxieties that the public are feeling about the government.”

Indeed, the EKOS data is consistent with two polls released yesterday showing the Tories and Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals effectively tied for support and that Canadians are displeased with Mr. Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament.

By STEVEN GREENHUT

To the extent that anyone still thinks about the former Soviet Union and its satellite communist states, they understandably think about the suffocating oppression – the Berlin Wall, the gulags, the KGB, the political prisoners, the persecution of religious people and minorities. Yet, in talking to refugees from that nightmarish world, it's clear that one of the worst aspects of communism was the endless waiting in line, the ceaseless bureaucracy and the incomprehensible rules and regulations that governed every aspect of everyday life.

Despite some real assaults on civil liberties in America (by Republican and Democratic administrations alike), Americans aren't facing too many serious dangers of the first kind mentioned above. But, as government expands its reach, we are facing bigger lines, additional nonsensical rules and more bureaucracy. You can barely do anything these days without getting approval from the authorities these days, and this touches on even the smallest, most inconsequential areas of our existence.

Marijuana's addiction potential may be no big deal, but it's certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence."

Nevertheless, it is pot -- not booze or cigarettes -- that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for AlterNet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which overseas more than 85 percent of the world's research on controlled substances, recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers' dollars to establish the nation's first-ever Center for Cannabis Addiction. Its mission: to "develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction."

Johnson: I did not mislead the House

By Ian Dunt, Politics.co.uk

Alan Johnson is facing serious accusations of misleading MPs when he explained why he had sacked the government's chief advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt.

He received a letter from Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem science spokesman, over the weekend, saying he had been made aware of an article and presentation on Prof Nutt's views on drug classification and harm before they occurred.

When the home secretary told MPs about the sacking in the Commons last week, he stressed he was unaware of the paper, published in January, and a speech Prof Nutt then made in King's College London.

By Steve Fox, AlterNet

Professor David Nutt didn’t play the game. As the chief drug policy advisor in the British Government, an unspoken part of his job description was to help maintain a public fiction about marijuana – or cannabis, as it is known in the U.K. and other parts of the world.  Specifically, he was expected to further the misperception of cannabis as a substance worthy of being classified and prohibited in a manner similar to more dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine.  

He made a big mistake at the end of last month. In a lecture at King’s College in London, he spoke honestly – and truthfully – about the fact that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and urged the government to factor the relative harms of substances into their policy-making.  Moreover, he accused the British government of ignoring the evidence about the true harms of cannabis in order to reclassify the drug and increase penalties for possession.