I’m honored to have been asked by Walter Olson to guest blog here at Overlawyered this week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I’m a family physician in solo practice in Northeast Ohio. I usually blog at Medpundit on all topics medical. I’ll be confining my guest blogging here to ways in which the law touches the practice of medicine, which in this day and age of soaring malpractice insurance premiums and litigation is a touch too much.
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Happy Trails
Well folks, thanks for letting me part of the Overlawyered community for a week. Though come to think of it, I have been part of the Overlawyered community on the reading side for the entire year or so since I discovered blogs, and hope to continue in that role for a long time. If you have suffered through my guest posts, things are looking up for you as the guest guard changes. (Incidentally, a guest blogger at Crescat Sententia has some musings on guest blogging generally; he also has been thinking about blog crushes.) If you ever find yourself nostalgic for vice talk, please visit us at Vice Squad.
I’ll depart with one further observation, one that shouldn’t be surprising given my week o’ posts, or to anyone who follows Vice Squad. Here are some of the happenings during the past week — happenings so common, so mundane, that they almost manage to fly under the radar: 38 arrested in Chicago; 42 arrested in Chatham County, Georgia; 4 arrested in Reno; 10 arrested in Decatur, Alabama; 9 arrested in Willimantic, CT; 16 arrested in Elmore County, Alabama?
And what is the noble purpose served by this frenzied feeding into the maw of the insatiable criminal justice system? To make it a little bit harder for some of our friends and neighbors to consume a substance that they choose to consume.
Thanks again to Walter Olson and Ted Frank, and be sure to check in tomorrow for a new, improved guest blogger.
Honest mastheads, cont’d
If Fox News is going to have to hire lawyers to defend the accuracy of its “Fair and Balanced” against MoveOn.org’s silly and abusive complaint (see Jul. 20), how many other media outfits are going to need to worry about backing up their puffish slogans? David Giacalone, guest-posting at Legal Underground, has a funny post (Jul. 24) listing various newspaper slogans that publishers might wish to reconsider, from the Atlanta Journal’s “Covers Dixie Like the Dew” (substantiation, please) to the Toledo Blade’s “One of America’s Great Newspapers — In One of America’s Great Cities”.
Guestbloggers going and coming
Today will mark the end of Jim Leitzel’s (Vice Squad) week as guestblogger at Overlawyered. Check back tomorrow, when a new guestblogger — a well known figure in the blog world — joins us for a weeklong stint.
“Sudden wealth syndrome”
It’s said to afflict many lottery winners, resulting in impulsive spending and social isolation. What about lawsuit winners? I raise the question on PointOfLaw.com (Jul. 23), where my dialogue with Michael Krauss on gun suits and federalism is also now complete.
Welcome CFOX listeners
The Vancouver radio station lists us as one of its “Geek of the Week” sites (Jul. 25). First-time visitors often enjoy our personal responsibility items, and we’ve got a section for items from Canada.
More on Alcohol Taxation
My initial Overlawyered guest post calling for higher excise taxes on alcohol in the US motivated a particularly thoughtful and lengthy reply from Radley Balko over at The Agitator, and his post has been followed by a fair number of comments. While I agree with many of the arguments that Radley and his commentators raise, there are a few points of contention. I will make a couple of remarks here, and then move any further discussion on my part to Vice Squad. If you are already tired of this, do not click on the ?Continue reading?? link.
Beach blanket bankruptcies
The meter in the Enron bankruptcy just hit $700 million (Brendan I. Koerner, “Explainer: Who Pays Enron’s Legal Bills?”, Slate, Jul. 15)(see Dec. 6 and links from there). And it’s not as if the execs in the Pacific Gas & Electric bankruptcy are doing too shabbily for themselves either (David Lazarus, “Bankruptcy has its rewards for PG&E execs”, San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. 23).
Alcohol Prohibition v. Drug Prohibition
While national alcohol prohibition in the US is widely (if not quite universally) regarded as a failure, there remains substantial support for our current tragic folly, drug prohibition. The respective prohibitions are not identical, however, and I want to point out two ways in which drug prohibition is worse than alcohol prohibition. First, during alcohol Prohibition, purchase and (for the most part) possession of alcohol were not crimes. (People often seem surprised to learn this these days, as if the drug war has made a firm link in their minds between prohibition and the criminalization of possession and purchase.) In other words, what we refer to as a “decriminalization” regime with respect to drugs today is pretty much what we had with alcohol prohibition: drug prohibition is much more severe than alcohol Prohibition.
The second major difference is that alcohol prohibition was restricted to a handful of countries, whereas drug prohibition is global. As a result of the limited geographical scope, there was plenty of legally produced alcohol during Prohibition, such as that made in Canada (and then illegally smuggled into the US) by Seagrams. But more importantly, the fact that other countries had legal alcohol — and were often just as successful in reducing consumption and alcohol-related problems as the US — provided ongoing evidence of the extent to which Prohibition was a policy blunder. With global drug prohibition, we are very limited in the types of policy experiments that can be run; even in the Netherlands, marijuana is technically just as illegal as it is in the US. This helps to explain the odd “self-justifying” nature of drug prohibition. Bad outcomes under drug prohibition should tend to discredit prohibition as a policy. This is what would likely occur if there were a visible alternative policy with outcomes that were better. Instead, bad outcomes under drug prohibition are met with the logic that if there were fewer drugs, there would be fewer bad outcomes. So to reduce bad outcomes under prohibition, we need… a stronger, more committed prohibition!
Vermont and Alberta radio
On Monday I was again a guest on Laurie Morrow’s True North Radio show reaching listeners around Vermont and nearby states. And yesterday I was a guest on QR77 in Calgary, Alberta, on the afternoons with Dave Taylor, with guest host Rob Breakenridge substituting for Taylor. To book a broadcast interview on my book The Rule of Lawyers, email me directly or contact Jamie Stockton at the St. Martin’s/Griffin publicity department: 212-674-5151, ext. 502.