Life’s a draft

I spent at least 90% of my life implicitly thinking: “I don’t have time to do this properly right now, but I will get around to it eventually”. I rarely feel like what I am doing is the final and official version of that thing, or the best version of the thing I could produce.

And yet, opportunities vanish and our time is not infinite. It’s pretty rare that I actually get to go back and make another attempt at something.

Restricting purchase locations and pricing options for drugs

When it comes to recreational drugs, the objective of policy should be to prevent suffering while respecting the sovereignty individuals possess over their own bodies and minds. Our current approaches do not do that. Rather, they seem designed to either raise money or punish people. Neither of those objectives really serves the objective of reducing harm.

If you really want to restrict problematic usage of a drug, here are a couple of ideas for things you could do:

  • Restrict where it can be used to exclude desirable places like restaurants. For really dangerous drugs, restrict their use to medically supervised settings like InSite, Vancouver’s safe injection site for heroin.
  • Make selling them unprofitable. Do this by making the drug legal to sell, but illegal to profit from. You need to sell it for exactly the price you bought it for, and there are government stores like the LCBO that sell it for a low set price. This would eliminate any profit from producing or importing drugs, as well as eliminate criminal distribution networks for them with money flowing up and inward while drugs flow out and downward.

Imagine if convenience stores could only sell tobacco at cost. There would be no incentive to carry it, except perhaps the hope that customers who come in for tobacco will buy something with a mark-up on it as well. Requiring restaurants to sell alcohol at cost would hugely change the incentives they face. Right now, restaurants make so many profits from alcohol that the owners and servers both have a strong financial incentive to encourage people to drink. If they had to sell alcoholic beverages at cost, fewer restaurants would choose to be licensed and they would push alcohol on customers less. Given that alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs, that would have significant societal benefits.

Of course, there would be enormous resistance to any such policy. Restaurants and convenience stores want to hang onto their alcohol and tobacco profits, just as various organized crime groups want to hang on to profits from marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, etc. Still, society may well be better off in a world where drug policy seeks to encourage responsible use (which may mean no use at all) while simultaneously working to reduce the harm caused within society by drugs.

Firefox avoiding duplicate tabs

Firefox 4.0.1 seems to have a new behaviour. If you try to enter an exact URL that you already have open in another tab, it jumps to the first instance rather than opening a new one.

That seems rather sensible, though the jump seems a bit abrupt. Still, it’s better than having piles of redundant and confusing content in your many Firefox windows. It’s especially confusing for me, since I am usually running Chrome and Safari for testing purposes at the same time.

Beaver Barracks – 160 Argyle Tenant Meeting

Notices went up today of a tenant meeting for inhabitants of 160 Argyle. Presumably, it will mostly be about the malfunctioning heating/cooling system, though people will probably bring up the lack of a laundry room and other issues.

The meeting is Thursday, May 26th at 6:00pm. It will be in the common room on the ground floor of 464 Metcalfe.

I cannot attend because I will be photographing an event, but if anyone can provide a debrief on the discussion I would be glad for it.

Preventing accidental nuclear war

One of my biggest fears is that a nuclear war could start by accident, or as the result of a miscalculation. Some national leader could push a threat too far, an exercise could be misinterpreted, things during a conventional war could get out of control, and cities could suddenly get incinerated.

It seems quite likely that Canada’s major cities are the targets of ex-Soviet missiles spread around Russian subs and silos. We may be the targets of Chinese bombs, as well.

Two important policy objectives seem to be (a) keeping additional countries from developing nuclear weapons (b) reducing the stockpile of weapons possessed by existing nuclear weapon states and (c) building systems that reduce the chances of accidents, including permissive action links to prevent unauthorized use of bombs and delays in hair-trigger systems.