Remove Universities, Tax People Outside Cities (and Other Extreme Ideas For 2010)

The new issue of Wired features a great collection of short radical manifestos from different authors for new policies in 2010 Britain. However, they are so extremely great, that they could be easily applied anywhere else. I strongly recommend you to read all of them, but below I made a review of my favorite ones.

1. Tax People Who Live Outside Cities, because it's not sustainable - rural households have much higher CO2 emission per person (larger houses, more cars per houshold, etc.). If we tax cigarettes to reflect the harm, we should also tax lifestyles that are damaging health of our planet (by PD Smith).
2. Turn Cities Into Self-Sufficient and Carbon Neutral Jungles, with eliminating using cars (walking, cycling and public transport is sufficient to move in the cities) and applying genetically modified (GM) crops everywhere, with making vertical farms on buildings (thick plantings of trees would absorb CO2 and extra luminescence genes would remove the requirement for city lights). Office building should be turned to high-tech beehives, shopping malls into bazaars and majority of buildings refurbished using bioarchitectural solutions, without building a new ones to save space and decrease the carbon footprint (by Paul McAuley).
3. Promote Another Credit Crunch, our economy is based too much on financial services, which consume themselves. Let is collapse. (by John Lanchester).
4. Slash Universities and Go Virtual, because it's too expensive and irrational to maintain the current system of higher education. Only 99 universities in England and Wales cost £8 billion of UK public money. Students graduate with an average debt of £20,000. To cut the costs we should revise and eliminate the pointless, non-vocational courses, make as much as we can online based, create more options for skill trainings. National service should be restored to promote social cohesion and civicmindedness in youngsters to get them out of negative circulation - we don't need university for this (by Glen Newey).
5. Recycle dead and introduce them back into the food production :-) (by Dinos Chapman).

[photo credits: Wired]

The Future of Drugs - Part 1

Society seems to have a problem with deciding what to do with drugs. Certainly it seems that liberalization and legalization is increasingly possible scenario for the future. Status of cannabis in Netherlands, therapy models for heroin addicts in Switzerland, return of research on healthy participants with THC, LSD for anxiety related treatment and MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder or all drugs decriminalization experiments in some Portugal cities... Those are just a few examples showing that open minded and objective approach to drugs can work better than law enforcement and criminalization.

There has been a heated discussion in the recent days in UK regarding sacking of Prof David Nutt, who was a Head of Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). It was related with Prof Nutt’s lecture at King’s Collage, where he suggested that decision to reclassify cannabis from class C to class B drug was politically motivated against the suggestions of scientific advisers (and that overall cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco). After Home Secretary decision to sack Prof Nutt, two other advisers resigned in protest, and the whole scientific panel is raging.

Professor Nutts actually gave a very good review during this lecture which you can read in this briefing from Center of Crime and Justice Studies. I strongly recommend you to read it. Prof Nutt argue that such factors as harm assessment bias, media bias and political stigmatization are just some of the problems that so far prevented most countries from application of multicriteria decision-making in classification and general approach to drugs.

Governments applied this multicriteria decission-making model in case of nuclear waste disposal or terrorist threat assessment so why is scientists’ voice so badly ignored regarding drugs?