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"By taking lists of potential side effects out of the hands of the drug makers, the startup is letting people know what their pills might be doing to them in a more open way than big pharmaceutical companies ever have. "

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Must-read article about heroin, Afghanistan, war, and Canada...
QUOTE
“Opium is the problem in Afghanistan. A corrupt narco-elite runs the country,” [Amir Attaran] said.

Attaran is a University of Ottawa law professor and development expert who has studied Afghanistan’s drug trade.

He said both sides in the country’s war have an interest in perpetuating the conflict because of their involvement with opium. “You cannot grow opium and traffic it on a large scale in peacetime. You need a fog of war,” he said.

“If you want to understand the conflict in Afghanistan, you have to understand this is a gang war.”

Attaran’s solution: Legalize Afghan opium and sell it for medical uses, joining countries such as India and Turkey that grow legal opium crops for the pharmaceutical market.

The result, he thinks, would be to turn warlords into regular businessmen and reduce the country’s violence and corruption. “I don’t really see an alternative that would succeed,” Attaran said.
UNQUOTE

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Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.

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Maclean's will no doubt get trashed by all the usual suspects for this article, but there's a lot of truth in it. The underground economy, the black market, the "cottage industry" that takes on the mantle of natural rights, the exporting of the problem to other countries, the cavalier attitude toward "BC Bud" ... it can't be swept under the rug or discounted.

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