Quote Food for Thought (plus a questionable ad campaign and flying the future)

A 2005 cost-benefit analysis of marijuana prohibition by Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, calculated that ending marijuana prohibition would save $7.7 billion in direct state and federal law enforcement costs while generating more than $6 billion a year if it were taxed at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco. The drug czar’s office says that a gram of pure cocaine costs between $100 and $150; a gram of heroin almost $400; and a bulk gram of marijuana between $15 and $20. Those transactions are now occurring off the books of business and government alike.

* Should the point of Nick Gillespie's NYT column come true -- legalizing vices to cull mo' taxes -- the inside-back-page-EW ad from a Philly agency marketing, as best my drug-free mind could discern, Pennsylvania to outsiders might actually be entertaining or, um, effective. Then again, I could only bear 10 seconds of one video.
But hey, they're trying to bring gossip-minded house-fraus to our fine commonwealth. They spend money too, right?
Oh, they aren't spending these days? Damn.
** FYI: I'm totally digging my newest subscription, Popular Science. Where else can you read about:
-- making the White House more-green-efficient,
-- the super-next-level N+3-generation airplane (and what we'll be flying on in 2050),
-- how England's greenifying their double-decker buses pre-2012-Olympics,
-- robot bartenders!!!, and
-- how Chinese hackers will render websites useless at just about the same time as newspapers get put out of business, rendering us useless, newsless and helpless. (Way to go, aggregators!)