Author: Ed Gogek

  On January 28, 2018, the Freakonomics show on NPR was a series of questions answered by Steven Levitt. One question asked what one thing would you do to decrease violent crime, and Levitt’s answer was to legalize all drugs. He gave no explanation as...

  I’m a lifelong liberal. I voted for George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Jerry Brown, and more recently Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I marched with Occupy, support the Sierra Club, and laughed when Jon Stewart exposed the bias on Fox News. But I’m...

The June 8, 2017 British election has something in common with last year’s American election: the winner lost the popular vote and lost it by a similar amount. 14,636,679 votes —  Conservatives, Unionist Parties, UKIP 16,913,451 votes — Labour, SNP, Liberal Dems, Green, Plaid Cymru...

During last week’s Democratic debate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said the United States should model its social policies on Sweden, Norway and Denmark—countries that provide free health care and free college. But by saying he’d vote to legalize marijuana, Sanders made it much harder to...

Pro-marijuana forces will spend millions over the next year to convince voters in Arizona, California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine to completely legalize marijuana. In Ohio, marijuana businessmen who planned to get even richer selling pot spent $20 million promoting legalization, and will probably try again. However,...

  Governor Chris Christie recently spoke about treating substance abuse like the disease it is and the video went viral. He was spot on except at the very end when he said, “we need to start treating people in this country, not jailing them.”  It’s...

  In the CNN town hall just before the South Carolina primary, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush gave a reasoned argument against legalizing marijuana. But then he said something completely untrue, that 50 percent of federal inmates are in prison for drug use. Fifty percent...

State legislatures across the country are legalizing medical marijuana, but the nation’s physicians aren’t demanding these laws. The AMA doesn’t support them, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Society of Addiction Medicine both oppose these laws. The American Cancer Society hasn’t demanded...

  There might be no better example of the malevolent power of money in politics than the pro-legalization movement. Funded by billionaires who get their way by spending so heavily they drown out other voices, it wields the sort of unfair influence Vermont Sen. Bernie...

According to news reports, Canadian scientists often feel pressured to support bad science and harmful government decisions, especially regarding climate change. Is something similar happening with marijuana? One year ago, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) released its Cannabis Policy Framework recommending that...