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The “Just Say No” campaign in the late 1980s increased the severity of sentencing for drug offenders in the U.S. Since that time, particularly since the mid-1990’s, incarceration rates have […]

Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, in his interview with Big Think, confirms what we know: crime, like global capital markets, is uniquely, irrevocably networked. The rare drug crime might be […]

No country publishes more scientific research in reputable journals than the U.S.A. but China has now passed it in the I.T. field and is breathing down America’s neck in others.

I started reading Norwegian mystery writer Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman while on vacation over Memorial Day in Maine.  Four of Nesbo’s Harry Hole crime novels later, I find myself wondering, […]

When Greg and I started this blog, we vowed that it wouldn’t be war, terrorism, economic chaos and other depressing things all the time. In this goal we have been: […]

Baby Boomers have had it easy in many ways. One of the advantages of being born during a baby boom is that your generation is always going to be large […]

Veteran Waq al-Waq readers can probably skip this post, as it reiterates things we’ve been saying on the blog for about a year now (and to our incredibly lucky family […]

“Eliminate the costs, fiscal and otherwise, of the drug war.” The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman says the war on drugs is a sinkhole; the government should change policy.

In a new study, U.C.L.A. life scientists report that veterans of war, rape victims and other witnesses to horrific crimes could have the traumatic memories that haunt them weakened in their brains.

With his appointment of Chris Cerf as Commissioner of Education, Chris Christie is rebuilding New Jersey public education using sweeping, data-driven methods that have been tested (and sometimes bitterly contested) in New York City and Washington, DC.   

“Geopolitical interests are behind the so-called war on drugs and terrorism,” says the Bolivian president, who is disappointed that the American president has not joined him to “work for justice […]

If we are truly worried about mitigating the social effects of drug use, we are likely to have more success regulating it than prohibiting it entirely.

“Liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the ‘war on drugs’ there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s tearful apology for sending revealing pictures of his chest and underwear-covered genitalia at his press conference yesterday was agonizing. Painful for him, sure, but much more so […]

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, […]

How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet? Dr. Rick Hanson identifies the key reasons: biological evolution, culture, economics, and personal history.

Animal smuggling has grown to a $9.8 billion-a-year criminal industry, and is exceeded only by the drugs and arms trades. Profits help to fund terrorism and civil wars, says The Independent.

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón has militarized his country’s war on drugs, a task once reserved for the police. The consequences have been dire, says the editor of Mexico’s La Jornada.

It was an elegant accident of editorial timing: two major articles on post-traumatic stress (and the attendant increase in prescription pill use among members of our military), and a beautiful, […]

When it comes to the Libyan revolution and the peculiar madness of Colonel Gadaffi, what is the right move?

The new cancer stem cell theory has forced scientists to reevaluate the efficacy of our own weapons as we wage war against the disease.

The nature of security has changed, says Gary Hart. The former senator calls for the drafting of a new National Security Act, one which confronts today’s real security concerns.

Writing in the Yemen Observer, Nasser Arrabyee- to whose blog we have linked here, and to which you should go every day- has a brief article about the drug trade […]

Dr. Norman Frost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison tells Big Think “drug-testing policies in professional sports are completely illogical.”

Harvard University economics professor Jeffrey Miron thinks all drugs—including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and LSD—should be made legal and widely available.

“Satire works by inference,” cartoonist G.B. Trudeau says in Brian Walker’s new book Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau. “What you condemn should reveal what you value, what you […]

Performance art usually receives condescending smirks in the United States as the last kid picked for the cultural game of kickball. With Charlie Sheen’s big adventure, however, maybe performance art has finally come to the colonies.

The Mexican government has been using the army to fight the nation’s drug cartels for about four years. It isn’t working. Some critics say the army is part of the problem.

I have a gun. I have had it for several years now, and it lives in a heavy metal cabinet in my sitting room. In owning a gun, I am […]

It isn’t a secret that one of Yemen’s most pressing, apocolyptic problems is not any of the rebellions, nor even the economy (though it is related to it), but rather […]