Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Possibilities in Drug Policy?

By Fester:

Stealing an entire post from Mark Kleiman:

The issue of the New Yorker on the newsstands tomorrow has
a John Seabrook profile of David Kennedy and his focused
deterrence/targeted zero tolerance/pulling levers approach to reducing
gang and drug-market violence. Jeremy Travis, who runs John Jay College
(where Kennedy teaches) has put together a national network of cities willing to try out the new strategies, and has raised some serious foundation money to help out.



Meanwhile, Angela Hawken has crunched the numbers on the HOPE
probation-enforcement program in Hawai'i. We now know that it's
possible to get people with serious drug habits and serious criminal
histories to behave themselves: if you learn how to deliver swift and
certain sanctions, the sanctions don't have to be severe and you don't
have to deliver them very often. And since the criminally-active
population accounts for the bulk of drug sales, not only does that
reduce crime, it also shrinks the markets.



Back at the ranch, we have an Attorney General and a drug czar who
don't think that locking up everyone in sight is the solution to
anything, and Jim Webb seems to be serious about doing something on the over-imprisonment problem.

There are two big problems with the current war on drugs. 

First, it does not work.  If I wanted to, I could find at 'reasonable' prices pretty much anything that I wanted to smoke, snort, shoot, crush, chew or inhale in under two days (yeah, I am old and respectable now as I used to be able to make that claim 'in under twelve hours').  Secondly, it produces several massive public policy externalities including massively disproportional justice system interactions, the evisceration of the 4th Amendment and tens of billions of dollars in direct, recurring costs as well as significant destabilization of drug producing nations. 

So if there are a couple of programs that are offering the promise of controlling most of the negative externalities of the drug trade (controlling gang violence, reducing property crimes, reducing recidivism) that would be excellent news if these programs are expanded to scale. 



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