Crazy shit.

High times with legalized pot? It all depends.

If recreational marijuana is legalized in California, prices of the drug could plummet 80 percent and the number of dope-smokers would rise, but the amount of money the state would bring in through taxes and fees is a big question mark, according to a study released Wednesday. What's more, while the state could save more than $300 million a year by not enforcing laws outlawing weed, it may lose that much or more in federal funding if Washington decides to punish California's defiance of the U.S. prohibition of dope, the study found. The upshot of the six-month study by the nonpartisan Rand Drug Policy Research Center is this: It's anybody's guess as to whether the state will suffer or prosper if voters approve Proposition 19 on the November ballot. The measure would allow local governments to regulate and tax pot sales and controlled cultivation, and to let adults over 21 possess as much as an ounce.Link

Kiss This War Goodbye.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.Link