http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening#.11WykNgUl

In 2001, the Portuguese government did something that the United States would find entirely alien. After many years of waging a fierce war on drugs, it decided to flip its strategy entirely: It decriminalized them all.

If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty.

Fourteen years after decriminalization, Portugal has not been run into the ground by a nation of drug addicts. In fact, by many measures, it's doing far better than it was before.

The background: In 1974, the dictatorship that had isolated Portugal from the rest of the world for nearly half a century came to an end. The Carnation Revolution was a bloodless military-led coup that sparked a tumultuous transition from authoritarianism to democracy and a society-wide struggle to define a new Portuguese nation.

The newfound freedom led to a raucous attitude of experimentalism toward politics and economy and, as it turned out, hard drugs.

Portugal's dictatorship had insulated it from the drug culture that had swept much of the Western world earlier in the 20th century, but the coup changed everything. After the revolution, Portugal gave up its colonies, and colonists and soldiers returned to the country with a variety of drugs. Borders opened up and travel and exchange were made far easier. Located on the westernmost tip of the continent, the country was a natural gateway for trafficking across the continent. Drug use became part of the culture of liberation, and the use of hard narcotics became popular. Eventually, it got out of hand, and drug use became a crisis.

At first, the government responded to it as the United States is all too familiar with: a conservative cultural backlash that vilified drug use and a harsh, punitive set of policies led by the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1980s, Portugal tried this approach, but to no avail: By 1999, nearly 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, and drug-related AIDS deaths in the country were the highest in the European Union, according to the New Yorker.

But by 2001, the country decided to decriminalize possession and use of drugs, and the results have been remarkable.

What's gotten better? In terms of usage rate and health, the data show that Portugal has by no means plunged into a drug crisis.

As this chart from Transform Drug Policy Foundation shows, the proportion of the population that reports having used drugs at some point saw an initial increase after decriminalization, but then a decline:



(Lifetime prevalence means the percentage of people who report having used a drug at some point in their life, past-year prevalence indicates having used within the last year, and past-month prevalence means those who've used within the last month. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the more reliable the measure.)

Drug use has declined overall among the 15- to 24-year-old population, those most at risk of initiating drug use, according to Transform.

There has also been a decline in the percentage of the population who have ever used a drug and then continue to do so:



Drug-induced deaths have decreased steeply, as this Transform chart shows:



HIV infection rates among injecting drug users have been reduced at a steady pace, and has become a more manageable problem in the context of other countries with high rates, as can be seen in this chart from a 2014 report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction Policy:



And a widely cited study published in 2010 in the British Journal of Criminology found that after decriminalization, Portugal saw a decrease in imprisonment on drug-related charges alongside a surge in visits to health clinics that deal with addiction and disease.

Not a cure but certainly not a disaster: Many advocates for decriminalizing or legalizing illicit drugs around the world have gloried in Portugal's success. They point to its effectiveness as an unambiguous sign that decriminalization works.

But some social scientists have cautioned against attributing all the numbers to decriminalization itself, as there are other factors at play in the national decrease in overdoses, disease and usage.

At the turn of the millennium, Portugal shifted drug control from the Justice Department to the Ministry of Health and instituted a robust public health model for treating hard drug addiction. It also expanded the welfare system in the form of a guaranteed minimum income. Changes in the material and health resources for at-risk populations for the past decade are a major factor in evaluating the evolution of Portugal's drug situation.

Alex Stevens, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent and co-author of the aforementioned criminology article, thinks the global community should be measured in its takeaways from Portugal. 

"The main lesson to learn decriminalizing drugs doesn't necessarily lead to disaster, and it does free up resources for more effective responses to drug-related problems,"  Stevens told Mic.

The road ahead: As Portugal faces a precarious financial situation, there are risks that the country could divest from its health services that are so vital in keeping the addicted community as healthy as possible and more likely to re-enter sobriety.

That would be a shame for a country that has illustrated so effectively that treating drug addiction as a moral problem — rather than a health problem — is a dead end.

In a 2011 New Yorker article discussing how Portugal has fared since decriminalizing, the author spoke with a doctor who discussed the vans that patrol cities with chemical alternatives to the hard drugs that addicts are trying to wean themselves off of. The doctor reflected on the spectacle of people lining up at the van, still slaves of addiction, but defended the act: "Perhaps it is a national failing, but I prefer moderate hope and some likelihood of success to the dream of perfection and the promise of failure."

Let us measure

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/11/hillary_clinton_keeps_smearing_bernie_sanders_as_a_sexist_now_she_is_reaching.2.html

On Oct. 23, Hillary Clinton opened a new front against Sen. Bernie Sanders: She framed him as a sexist. Clinton took a phrase Sanders had routinely used in talking about gun violence—that “shouting” wouldn’t solve the problem—and suggested that he had aimed it at her because “when women talk, some people think we’re shouting.”

Several journalists called out Clinton for this smear. But she refuses to withdraw it. Instead, her campaign officials and supporters have escalated the attack. And now, Clinton is adding a new dimension to the controversy: race.

Some feminists applauded Clinton’s initial zinger. “Hillary Baits Bernie Beautifully,” said a headline in Salon. Another article accused Sanders of “old-fashioned tone policing and dogwhistling about women’s shrillness.” On Oct. 27, Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, conceded that Sanders hadn’t singled out Clinton. But Schriock insisted that Sanders “was referring to a lot of folks who have been very adamant about [guns] and a lot of women who have been leading the fight on gun violence across the country. And I do think that is disrespectful.”

The next day, Clinton sat down for an interview in New Hampshire. Josh McElveen of WMUR asked her about Sanders: “Do you believe that he’s attacking you based solely on your gender?” Clinton replied: “When I heard him say that people should stop shouting about guns, I didn’t think I was shouting. I thought I was making a very strong case. … And I’m not going to be silenced.” McElveen followed up: “But as far as the implication that Bernie Sanders is sexist—you wouldn’t go that far?” Clinton shrugged, smiled, and sidestepped the question. “I said what I had to say about it,” she concluded.

That day, Bloomberg Politics published an article in which Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, joked that Clinton would “make a great vice president” for Sanders. Weaver offered to interview her for the job. As Jonathan Chait has pointed out, that’s a standard put-down among candidates: Clinton said the same thing about Barack Obama in 2008. But when Weaver tried it on Clinton, her supporters erupted. Christine Quinn, a Clinton backer, accused the Sanders campaign of sexism. Quinn pointed at Sanders himself: “I’m stunned that a man like Bernie Sanders, who has clearly committed his life to making the country a better place, would get sucked into this very dangerous rhetoric, which perpetuates sexist and misogynistic stereotypes.”

Clinton used her initial sound bite—“when women talk, some people think we’re shouting”—in at least six places. She posted it on Twitter, Facebook, and her campaign website. She also delivered it in three speeches: in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, on Oct. 23, and in Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 24. After that, I didn’t hear it, except in her interview in New Hampshire. I thought she might be done with it. But then, on Friday, she raised a new issue.

Clinton was in Charleston, South Carolina, addressing the local NAACP. She spoke against a tragic background: the massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church by a white racist. Naturally, she talked about guns. But she added a new line: “There are some who say that this [gun violence] is an urban problem. Sometimes what they mean by that is: It’s a black problem. But it’s not. It’s not black, it’s not urban. It’s a deep, profound challenge to who we are.”

The idea that urban is code for black has been around a long time. It’s often true. And it’s not necessarily derogatory: In 1920, the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes shortened its name to the National Urban League. But why would Clinton suddenly bring up, in a damning tone, people who call guns an urban problem? Who was she talking about? It can’t be the Republican presidential candidates: They haven’t disagreed enough to debate the issue at that level of granularity. The only recent forum in which guns have been discussed as an urban concern is the forum that inspired Clinton’s initial accusation of sexism: the Oct. 13 Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Pull up the transcript of that debate, search for “urban,” and you’ll see whom Clinton is talking about: Sanders.

In fact, it’s from the same moments of the debate that Clinton had already seized on. In the debate, Sanders began by saying, “As a senator from a rural state, what I can tell Secretary Clinton [is] that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want.” A couple of minutes later, Sanders told former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley: “We can raise our voices, but I come from a rural state, and the views on gun control in rural states are different than in urban states, whether we like it or not.” O’Malley insisted that the issue was “not about rural and urban.” Sanders replied: “It’s exactly about rural.” Only one other candidate used the word “urban” during the debate: former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. A week later, on Oct. 20, Webb quit the campaign. So when Clinton, on Friday, spoke scathingly of people who call guns an “urban problem” but mean it’s a “black problem,” it’s obvious to whom she was referring.



This line of attack is rich in irony. When Clinton ran for president in 2008, she explicitly used race against Obama. She told USA Today that she should be the Democratic nominee because “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Clinton cited an article that, in her words, showed “how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in [Indiana and Pennsylvania] who had not completed college were supporting me.” A reporter asked Clinton whether this argument was racially divisive. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat,” Clinton replied dismissively. “Everybody knows that.”

Now Clinton accuses others of playing the race card. In Charleston, she told the NAACP, “Some candidates talk in coded racial language about ‘free stuff,’ about ‘takers’ and ‘losers.’ And boy, are they quick to demonize President Obama. This kind of talk has no place in our politics.”

Clinton, too, speaks in code. But in this election, her coded phrases—“some people think we’re shouting,” “some who say that this is an urban problem”—aren’t designed to veil racism. They’re designed to veil her meritless insinuations that her Democratic opponent is sexist and racist. You can argue, based on power or privilege, that playing the race card or sex card from the left isn’t as bad as playing it from the right. But even if you believe that, Clinton’s smears bring discredit on the whole idea of bigotry. If accusations of misogyny and racism are casually thrown at Sanders, voters will conclude that these terms are just rhetoric.

Seven years ago, when Clinton’s own campaign was accused of prejudice, her husband was outraged. “She did not play the race card, but they did,” Bill Clinton said of the Obama campaign. The former president went on: “This is almost like, once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something, the facts become irrelevant.” Three months later, Mr. Clinton was still fuming. “They played the race card on me, and we now know from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along,” he protested. “This was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere. … You really got to go some to try to portray me as a racist.”

Now Hillary Clinton is doing to Sanders what her husband said was done to her. She’s taking Sanders’ remarks out of context and twisting them to breed resentment. You’ve got to twist the facts pretty hard to portray Sanders as a racist or sexist. But politically, it’s easy, because once you start throwing around charges of bigotry, the facts become irrelevant. You’re just another beautiful baiter. And you won’t be silenced.

So the Democrat smearing begins

>tfw the democraps win

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/30/the-ghostly-explanation-for-how-a-mans-unborn-twin-fathered-his-child/

The Washington state couple (whose names have been withheld for privacy reasons) initially thought that their child, conceived in vitro, had been created with a stranger’s sperm.

What else could explain their discovery last year that their newborn son’s blood type didn’t match either of theirs? Or the subsequent paternity test confirming that the man of the pair was not the child’s biological father? The mother became pregnant through artificial insemination, so it only made sense that the fertility clinic had made a terrible mistake and used the wrong sperm sample.

Except staff at the clinic told them that the 34-year-old father was the only white man who had donated sperm at the facility on the day the child, who appears white, was conceived, Buzzfeed reports.

In some ways, though, the couple was right. Their child did bear the DNA of another man — but he wasn’t quite a stranger, at least in biological terms.

The DNA matched that of the man’s unborn twin, essentially making the man the biological uncle of his own wife’s child.

The couple was understandably confused when they received this explanation from genetic testing company 23andMe and Barry Starr, a Stanford University geneticist who runs the “Ask a Geneticist” blog on which the new parents first posed their query.

The familial definitions are a matter of genetic makeup. Starr told TIME: “It just leapt out at me: uncle. If it was a parent-child relationship, you would see 50 percent of the DNA related. If it is an uncle to a niece or nephew, it’s 25 percent related. This man and his son are 25 percent related.”

According to Starr’s research into the matter, the baby’s mysterious origins are a product of the genetic phenomenon of “chimerism,” in which one fetus that dies early in pregnancy is subsequently “absorbed” by the remaining sibling. This process, called “vanishing twin phenomenon,” is believed to be much more common than people think: a 1998 study found that one out of every eight single births begins as a twin or other multiple at conception.

The vanishing twin effect occurs when, instead of producing twins, two zygotes fuse into one. Starr believes that this is what happened to the Washington man, who ostensibly absorbed some of his fraternal twin’s cells while in the womb, becoming a “chimera” — a spectral blend — of himself and his unborn brother.

The term comes from Greek mythology, which tells the story of a fire-breathing hybrid creature, the Chimera (or “Chimaera”), comprised of a goat’s head coming out of a lion’s back and a dragon’s head coming out of its tail.

The name today is generally used to refer to the fantastical and imaginary, though, as it turns out, chimeras in biological science are both astonishing and real.

Previous chimera cases have been found in mothers who retained some of the cells of their children. Per the Daily Beast, chimeras can also arise through blood transfusions or organ transplants.

The Washington couple’s case is extraordinary because the cells that the man took from his twin were germline cells — cells with the capacity to grow into eggs or sperm, TIME reports. Thus, the man’s sperm took on a mixture of his DNA and his brother’s, with his immune system recognizing both as “the self” because the absorption of cells occurred while the man was still inside the womb.

As a result, 90 percent of the man’s sperm is comprised of his own DNA, and 10 percent is that of his twin. The man has another child whose DNA does match his.

“What is interesting is to explore in what way this affects the person’s feeling of identity,” Columbia University stem cell scientist Dieter Egli told TIME. “These are questions that are more important as we start to use cell therapies and cell transplantations as well.”

In the U.S., over 382,000 legal paternity tests are ordered annually, usually with the most unexpected results pointing to infidelity. In this couple’s case, however, their test results yielded even more perplexing questions about the man’s relationship to his DNA, his unborn twin (who is also a part of him) and the child to whom he is biologically an uncle even though he or she was in many ways created with his sperm.

The implications of this conclusion are slightly eerie, as if to say that the man’s unborn sibling continues to haunt his body — and now lives on through a child who shares more physical traits with the twin who never took a single breath than with him.

But while all this sounds like a salacious romance-turned-science-fiction plot, most people just aren’t aware of the chimeras among them, or even if they might be chimeras themselves.

The man in this case has two-toned skin, a common mark of chimerism. As a child, he was so embarrassed by the marked difference in shades on his body that he told people he was a burn victim, according to Medical Daily.

Other chimeras may have two different eye colors, or even two sets of sex organs.

The medical curiosity is perhaps even stranger when it manifests in a woman, as Lydia Fairchild (also of Washington state) learned in 2003 after a test revealed that she was not her children’s biological mother.

The results were inexplicable, the Daily Beast details, as Fairchild insisted that she had given birth to all her kids. She was applying for public assistance at the time, and the state accused her of fraud and threatened to have her children removed by child services.

The court only believed her after a court officer was present at the birth of her third child, after which an immediate DNA test revealed that Fairchild wasn’t the biological mother of that newborn, either. But, after her case was championed by an attorney determined to get to the bottom of her medical mystery, it was discovered that Fairchild was a chimera who carried the DNA of her demised twin. And it was that maternal DNA that had been passed onto the three children she had borne.

Starr’s statement notes that while chimerism causing confused paternity tests have historically been quite unusual, it may become increasingly common as more people use fertility clinics to conceive. These assisted reproductive technologies raise the chances of one pregnancy resulting in multiple births — or, sometimes, one birth that happens to contain a chimeric, unborn parent of the living sibling’s future child.

How do you explain to your child that your both his uncle and father?

Yes, that means we're talking down to you

It seems like everyday I get 20 or 30 emails saying something to the effect of "Irrelevant organization X is having an irrelevant bakesale. Come and buy shit." I'm getting pretty tired of it honesty.

This happen to anyone else?

But we have your remedy

I switched majors to political science yo

Inb4lol

tbh fam

I legit am not sure.