Scared of Ebola? Consider The Flue Pandemic of 1918-1919

I'm in the midst of reading Dennis Lahane's excellent novel, Any Given Day. It gives a harrowing account of what happened in Boston after American troops came home from World War I carrying the flu virus with them.

He describes the health care system in Boston as so overwhelmed, that they could do nothing beyond picking up the dead bodies. It sounds exactly like what is happening in West Africa today.

Lahane did the historical research, of course, that makes a novel like this more than just a good story--which it most certainly is. According to the U.S. Public Health Service, 675,000 people, out of a population at the time of 105 million, died from the flu in just a few months. Hundreds of thousands of others were left orphaned or widowed. And, workers in those days, when they were trying to organize, had no health insurance and no pensions, so those widows and orphans were impoverished beyond our imaginations. Lahane, in this 2008 novel, offers a good look at those working conditions as well.

So, scary as Ebola is, let's take a deep breath and put this in perspective as people living in a country with a highly-developed health care system. And that goes in spades for the media outlets, both broadcast and in print, that are scaring people silly both for profit and to try to pin the outbreak of this disease on President Obama. ##

Phelps Getting Punished--for Nothing!

The anti-drug moralists are in full cry after Michael Phelps, as predicted.

All hail the idiot sheriff of South Carolina's Richland County, who says he'll charge Phelps criminally if he can muster the evidence. Y'all know how it is down south there, where no crime goes unpunished, right? And Sheriff Leon Lott can't find anything more important to do, or at least nothing else that might make the national news.

Then there are undoubtedly the tee-totalers at USA Swimming who suspended Phelps from competition for three months. Not because smoking a bit of pot would enhance his performance--never a suggestion about pot, which of course, has been surrounded with a mythology that it makes recreational users, well, losers. Phelps a loser? Well, not exactly.

But there's some good news just now on the marijuana front. The Drug Policy Alliance asked folks to protest to the Obama Administration about the latest raids on medical marijuana providers in California, and a whole bunch of losers somehow managed to stay awake long enough to send so many emails and faxes that they got our new prez's attention.

According to the Drug Policy Alliance, this was the response:

"The President believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind."

So it looks like some freedom from DEA hardball tactics may be on the way.

Now all we need is for the Obama Administration to stand up for rational discourse on the overall subject of marijuana. It's way past time.