"How Did the United States Entangle Itself in a Policy of Drug Prohibition That Has Yielded So Much Misery and So Few Good Results?"

"I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. 'You want to know what this was really all about?' he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.'
"I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
"Nixon's invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since—Democrat and Republican alike—has found it equally useful for one reason or another."

Dan Baum in Harper's investigates drug legalization.

"It Cost Him His Political Career"

"The Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen... If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened [pointing to various audience members] the happiness of you and you and you."

Seth Masket at Vox reminds readers of Colorado's Governor Ralph Carr, who is 1942 "welcomed Japanese Americans while his peers shunned them."

"We Aren’t Sorry Enough to Lift a Finger to Prevent It from Happening Again"

"The new wrinkle in the Aurora, Colo., tragedy is that we now learn that the purchase of tear gas grenades is perfectly legal in Colorado, even though there is no legitimate need—none—for someone not in law enforcement or the military to engage in 'control and disbursement of crowds,' to quote an ad selling tear gas grenades online for a mere $16.95 a pop."

Timothy Noah in The New Republic reacts to the Friday morning massacre at a Colorado cinema.


"Piecing together a profile of the typical perpetrator, Mullen noted that among “pseudocommandos” (another term from the literature) feelings of guilt and worthlessness were conspicuous for their absence. These were invariably young men with a high (if deluded) self-regard, who believed they had been grossly undervalued by the world—so much so, their lives had become one long psychic injury. They had often been bullied or neglected as children, had grown up into loners, and often had recently lost their last shred of emotional connection or support (job, girlfriend) with the world. But their dominant experience was one of persecution; their dominant affect, one of resentment."

As does Stephen Metcalf in Slate.

There's Not a Line That Goes Here That Rhymes with Anything

"Klebold suffered severely from what appears to have been undiagnosed depression. Harris had an undiagnosed ailment too, but it doesn't sound as though it caused him a lot of suffering. The consensus among psychiatrists is that he was a psychopath."

Lev Grossman in Time reviews Dave Cullen's Columbine.

Slate publishes excerpts from Cullen's book, and Cullen reflects.

Never to Return

"Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat—and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game."

George Johnson in The New York Times reports on how investigators are searching to find out what happened to the Anasazi of southern Colorado during the 1200s.