A legal factory of death in your pocket by Nathan Jones

As of today, it is legal for any person in British Columbia older than 18 to carry up to a combined 2.5 g of cocaine (crack and powder), methamphetamine, MDMA, and opioids (including fentanyl, heroin, and morphine) for personal consumption. Let us pause to consider that the lethal dose of fentanyl is approximately 2 mg (see photo above for an illustration of what that quantity looks like.) Therefore, 2.5 g of pure fentanyl could kill 1,250 people. The BC Coroner’s Office has just released a report finding that 2,272 people died from illicit drug consumption in British Columbia in 2022—all of whom could have been killed by less than a single person’s legal stock of fentanyl over 2 days (4.54 g.) And yet there are “experts,” users, and advocates declaiming that the limit of 2.5 g is not high enough and that decriminalization is only a “half measure.”

No escaping history by Nathan Jones

In philosophy there is no escaping history. Ideally, I sometimes think, I would just like to tell my students the truth about a question and send them home. But such a totally unhistorical approach tends to produce philosophical superficiality. We have to know how it came about historically that we have the questions we do and what sorts of answers our ancestors gave to these questions.
— John Searle in Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004)

Democracy: The God that failed by Nathan Jones

What happens in other forms of government–namely, that an organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority–happens also and to perfection, whatever the appearances to the contrary, under the representative system. When we say that the voters “choose” their representative, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected. In elections, as in all other manifestations of social life, those who have the will and, especially, the moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others take the lead over the others and command them.
— Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class (1939)