An extremely silly opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal argues against the legalization of soft drugs such as ecstasy on the grounds that–get this–new studies show it may be bad for you if you take a lot of it.

Yep, taking an overdose of ecstasy not only leads to a whole lot of euphoria in the user, but possibly an increased likelihood of depression and Parkinson’s disease in later life. Here is the damning nut graph:

Unlike cocaine or heroin, ecstasy isn’t at the heart of street crime, gangs or Third World drug cartels, but that doesn’t make it safe.

OK, stop laughing. What this amounts to is a wonderful argument for banning smoking and drinking.

First off, lung cancer and liver cirrhosis have much higher levels of mortality than a bout of not remembering that you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Second, second-hand ecstasy is much safer than either alcohol or cigarettes: whereas all that an ecstasy user wants to do is hug you, a drunkard will just as likely hit you. And whether or not it causes cancer, second-hand smoke does gets in your eyes; all that ecstasy users cause is is longer queues at nightclubs.

A more cynical view of the rhetorical public health policy question that is asked (“Are we spawning a new generation of people who will struggle with depression over their lifetime?”) is that the problem with ecstasy is precisely that it doesn’t kill you. Smoke too many cigarettes and you get lung cancer, die and stop bothering society. But take ecstasy, get depressed and live till 90; now that’s selfish of you.

I propose giving ecstasy users subsidized cigarettes. Studies show that nicotine alleviates depression and helps prevent the onset of Parkinson’s. And they’d die sooner.

What will actually happen, I can almost guarantee it, is that next year you will see ecstasy/nicotine combo pills on the market. In fact I think I might go look for some VC funding.

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I was never really sure until this weekend whether Al Qaeda had it in for Americans or for the West. I have always suspected that Bin Laden is anti-Western (for want of a better word) rather than anti-American. It’s a distinction that has so far been lost on many Europeans, who have found it easier to compartmentalize what happened in New York as a kind of pay-back (deserved or not) for the perceived arrogance of the US as a superpower.

It was possible, I thought, that Osama Bin Laden was naive or insane enough not to know the difference between anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism. Or perhaps he is “just” anti-American, but showed a serious lack of judgment (in addition, if that’s possible, to the lack of judgment displayed by engaging in terrorism in the first place) in targeting New York, the world’s most international city. He managed to kill scores of nationalities, and the outrage in capitals around the world led to a wave of sympathy for the initial phase of the US’ response.

The question was, had this been intentional? Because there are two possible goals for Osama Bin Laden: engage the US, or engage the entire Western world. Either work towards building a cleavage between the US and its traditional allies over the differences in their approach to the Muslim world (including their stance vis-a-vis Israel), or look to pick a fight with everything that is not pure Muslim, in his eyes.

His rhetoric has always implied the former goal. And it is echoed even today. But Al Qaeda’s actions over the past week point to a grander ambition. By bombing a French oil tanker and by attacking tourists in Bali, the group is helping diminish what hesitance there may be on the part of the non-US West.

This will turn the tide of opinion in Europe towards a harder line against terrorism, and it will help harden the line against Iraq. This time, I am sure it’s what Al Qaeda wants.

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The past few months have seen some fascinating new cleavages emerge in the post-September 11 policy community. I hadn’t chronicled them here through sheer being on vacation-ness, but it’s time to catch up. I expect all future fellow disputants in matters political to have read up.

The most recent was the very public split between Christopher Hitchens and The Nation. Hitch is his usual articulate self as to the reasons why, but by being relatively polite by his own standards, he is actually trumped by this piece in the New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum did not need to bring up Enron and Bush’s intelligence, in part because lefties do have a point in both cases, albeit an irrelevant one in the context of how to act post-September 11. These are diversions from an otherwise excellent polemic; the piece makes me wish I had had a subscription to the New York Observer when I lived there. I suspect it and the New York Review of Books are two publications I will slowly ease into over the coming years.

The must-read foreign policy article of the summer was Robert Kagan’s piece in Policy Review. Fareed Zakaria issues a rebuttal of sorts in the New Yorker, but with the American left too much in disarray to offer a credible contribution to the debate, the disagreements that are left are more about degree than kind.

If anybody has any other candidates for must-read policy articles from past few months, especially from the left (European or American), I’d love to hear about them. I’m still digesting the implications of the conclusions these articles draw.

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The World Health Organization put out its first annual World Report on Violence and Health last week. Reuters used the data annex to construct this “graphic”. Take a good look at it. How many things wrong with it can you find?

First off, the statistics in the upper half of the graphic are not per 100,000 deaths, but per 100,000 people, per year.

Second, comparing the European region to the region of the Americas might lead you to conclude that Europe and America have similar rates of violent death. But if you read the report you’ll find that the statistics for the European region include all of the former Soviet Union, while the Americas includes all of Latin America.

What are the statistics for the US vs. Western Europe, then? The WHO does not break down the figures according to region, but according to income, into high and low/middle subgroups. The high income subgroup for the Americas includes only The Bahamas, Canada and the US–basically, the US. The high income subgroup for Europe is pretty much just Western Europe.

Suicide in the rich Europe stood at 10.5 per 100,000 people per year, vs. 10.6 in rich Americas. On the graphic, it appears that a lot more Europeans than Americans are offing themselves. Apparently, this is because in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe it’s the done thing. In South America, however, a strongly Catholic ethic against preempting the Lord seems to prevail. This explains the discrepancy.

Regarding homicides, rich Europe killed at a rate of 1.0 per 100,000 people per year, vs. 6.5 in the US. The rest of Europe murdered at a rate of 14.8/100,000/yr, while the rest of the Americas shed blood at the rate of 27.5/100,000/yr.

Combined figures how that in the US 17.2/100,000/yr die through “intentional injury”, vs. 11.5 in Western Europe. (Deaths caused by war were negligible in both regions).

So here is some news you can use: You are 50% more likely to die a violent death in the US than in Western Europe. However, if you do kill someone in Western Europe, the victim is 10 times more likely to be you than somebody else. Now that’s civilized.

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The French government has banned my iPod from store shelves because it’s too loud, according to French Law. I’m only allowed to hear up to 100 decibels of music in France, as opposed to the 104 my iPod can muster, and the caring French nanny state has decided my ears may not take that kind of abuse. Never mind that European law says it’s perfectly fine (they have a law about this at all? Do they also cap the noise level at hard rock concerts? Silly me, they soon will). Never mind that the noise level depends on the impedance of the headset rather than the iPod. So Apple will have a software fix in place next week that will bring the iPod back in line with fragile French sensitivities. But who took the time to go test an iPod in the first place?

Yes, the French government has been on a roll lately when it comes to annoying people. As for the Common Agriculture Policy championed by the French, it is simultaneously the EU’s biggest single expenditure at 45% of its total budget and its most anti-free market, anti-capitalist, anti-third world, market-distorting, anti-competitive embarrassment. But at least the French and their cronies have begun to feel the need to justify this obvious swindle. In a letter to European newspapers 2 weeks ago (noticed and skewered by this week’s Economist) the French agriculture minister defended CAP not just on the grounds that he wants to preserve the inefficient ways of small farmers, whose sole contribution to society is to make the French feel warm and fuzzy about themselves in their belief that they are all quaint rural types deep down. They also defend it on the grounds that the third world should be dissuaded from growing the kinds of crops that EU farmers grow because, well, you figure it out:

Some also claim that the CAP is responsible for hunger in the third world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Agriculture in a number of these countries, particularly in Africa, is primarily concerned with promoting self-sufficiency in food. This is seriously undermined by the destruction of traditional agriculture, which encourages an increase in imports and in the indebtedness of these States.

In other words, We the EU are slapping all these tariffs and quotas on your imports because we believe you are making a terrible mistake in trying to develop. Wow. The audacity of these poor people, trying to weasel their way into our markets.

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