With insightful research, Mallinson and Hannah unravel the patchwork of marijuana policy across the country.
A comprehensive assessment of the conflicting marijuana policies across the U.S.
As of the end of 2023, 38 states have legalized the medical use of marijuana and 23 have legalized recreational use. Mallinson and Hannah, academic specialists in political science and public policy development, delve into the sea change in marijuana policy from prohibition to acceptance. While the federal government has shown little interest in changing long-standing policies, state governments have blazed their own trails, pushed by interest groups and activists. The specific arrangements vary widely among states, and Mallinson and Hannah explain the reasons behind many of these decisions. The strangest aspect of any policy discussion of marijuana is that it remains illegal at the federal level. It is listed as dangerous and addictive under the Controlled Substances Act, which dates back to 1970. Since the mid-1990s, presidents have mainly turned a blind eye to state policies, especially because in many states, liberalization has occurred through ballot initiatives such as referendums. In some cases, legalizing marijuana for medical reasons has led to recreational use, but there are numerous counterexamples. The authors remain guarded about their own policy views, but they suggest ways to address the anomaly, ranging from changes to the Controlled Substances Act that would allow marijuana to be regulated like alcohol to broad decriminalization. It should be said that anyone who approaches this book expecting to find ringing advocacy for national marijuana legalization will be disappointed. The authors provide a detailed examination of how public policy is made, and readers interested in this field will find it to be a useful, layered case study. Within this context, the authors have many useful things to say, but anyone seeking pro-marijuana advocacy should look elsewhere.
With insightful research, Mallinson and Hannah unravel the patchwork of marijuana policy across the country.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781479827930
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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