Bitcoin News Australia

British Columbia, Canada, is conducting a three-year experiment with drugs.

Starting today, small amounts of drugs are decriminalized, including hard drugs like cocaine and heroin (cannabis is already legal in Canada).

• Instead of facing criminal charges, people caught with less than 2.5 grams will receive info on treatment or other resources.
• Drug trafficking is still illegal.

Will it be a successful social and economic decision?

Decriminalization advocates…

…see substance use and addiction as a health issue, not a crime. People who fear punishment are less likely to seek help.

Criminalizing drugs is also expensive and often doesn’t work:

• The US has spent $1T+ on the war on drugs, largely considered a failure.
• But investing $1 in a syringe exchange program saves ~$6 in costs associated with HIV in the US, per The New York Times.

Has this been done?

Yep. Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001 and, aside from a brief uptick in experimentation, usage is down, although exactly why is unclear.

So are opioid deaths, diseases associated with injection use, prison overcrowding, and drug-related crimes. (For an in-depth look, check out this long read from The Guardian.)

Oregon also did this in 2020, but the state has been slow to fund services.

Critics of Oregon’s policy have the same concerns about BC’s: decriminalization must be paired with treatment programs and resources, like Portugal’s. They also question whether it can succeed as the economy weakens, according to Bloomberg.

It’s worth noting…

… not all drugs are alike. For many, the desired outcome is treatment, but others reach legalization.

Remember how your DARE instructor used to warn you about the dangers of the devil’s lettuce, but now you can buy weed from bougie boutiques?

The global market for once-illegal cannabis was worth $17.8B in 2021. Like cannabis, researchers are seeing the benefits of psychedelics, too. Magic mushrooms — already legal for therapeutic use in Oregon — could be next.

In September, we wrote about Gautam Adani, the Indian business magnate whose net worth had catapulted him to the second spot on the world’s richest list at one point last year.

Adani is the chairman and founder of Adani Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate with arms in gas, power, ports, media, and others, worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Last week, a lengthy — and we mean lengthy — report from short-seller firm Hindenburg Research accused the business of fraud. The report slashed ~$70B of value off Adani’s companies.

In the report, Hindenburg…

• Identified what it believes are multiple offshore shell entities Adani uses for manipulating finances.
• Shed light on a seemingly miniscule accounting group, with 11 employees, responsible for auditing Adani Enterprises.
• Listed 88 “easy questions to answer” for Adani.

Over the weekend, Adani Group issued a brief 413-page response — creatively titled, “Adani Response.”

Adani said its rebuttal answered 65 of Hindenburg’s questions, but Hindenburg said it failed to answer 62 of them and was “obfuscated by nationalism.”

Shares of Adani firms sank lower Monday, though Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Co. voiced confidence in the group, saying it’ll be investing $400m into Adani Enterprises.

Latin is a dead language. Depending on the source, the number of fluent speakers globally ranges from ~2k to ~2m people.

But everybody who’s spent time on the internet is familiar with at least one Latin phrase: “lorem ipsum,” the first two words of the dummy text designers use to gauge the layout of a page. It tends to appear in the wild when somebody forgets to replace the Latin with their intended message (often in hilarious fashion).

The backstory of how “lorem ipsum” appeared in our lives is complicated, according to Slate’s Jack Shepherd.

The full passage is attributed to Cicero

The famous Roman philosopher penned it as a long-winded way of saying, “No pain, no gain.”

From there, the story goes that a 16th-century typesetter used “Lorem Ipsum dolor…” in a book of typefaces, and the tradition continued for hundreds of years.

But Shepherd found those origins unlikely because the popular translation of Cicero’s text didn’t appear until 1914.

So who introduced lorem ipsum?

The British design company Letraset, which used the phrase to advertise its services in the 1960s.

Why? Nobody really knows. Probably because an employee was a fan of Cicero.

Their decision led to years of lorem ipsum-ing, as well as lots of fun recent spinoffs: Online text generators let designers use everything from Hipster Ipsum to DeLorean Ipsum for planning layouts.

BTW: Until 2014, Latin was the official language of Vatican City.