New mayor of Sunland Park is 24-years-old.
Kirtland is going to look a little harder for leaked jet fuel.
Dick Clark made stars. R.I.P.
Paramedics in N.M. work 72-hour shifts.
DOH to medical board: You can't ask the feds to reclassify marijuana.
Romney says something weird about cookies.
Killer swan.
Sex robots are our future.
Vatican cracks down on feminist nuns.
"Hopefully" may spell the end of grammar.
Passengers say an American cruise ship ignored a drifting fishing boat, leaving two men to die.
Today's secret chess piece: the Teamsters Union.
Midgame premise: Doctors' opinions on medicine are actually political activism. But doctors' opinions on fatigue, while contrary to every other layperson's experience in the world, are to be trusted. But when truck drivers say the same thing (drivers staying up 3 days straight are perfectly safe and would never dream of -- no wait scratch that last verb -- they would never D.A.R.E. to drift across a dividing line), it's bullshit.
Strategic Insight: There are possibilities in an alliance between two very different professions.
Execution:
What doctors ought to do is argue that it is their unanimous professional opinion that a driver staying awake for 3 days straight is no risk to other drivers on the road. Then the teamsters union can argue that it's their professional opinion that intern physicians and ambulance drivers also aren't a risk to anyone's safety when they are up 3 days straight, and furthermore, DEA's schedule 1 should be be updated to not include marijuana.
Since the truck drivers making this argument wouldn't be employed by the government nor would they be regulated by the DEA or FDA, they'd be free to lobby for the drug policy update. It would be a medical argument rather than a political argument, and guaranteed to be untainted by conflict of interest (i.e. expertise in the subject matter).
The drug cartels would then counter-attack, by lobbying Congress to redefine DEA's schedule 1 as drugs with "high potential for abuse and no currently accepted transportation use" and making the DEA a subdivision of the Department of Transportation. That would get the teamsters' lobbyists off the DEA's backs.
But that would cause drugs to finally fall within the purview of doctors (because doctors have no conflict of interest in making statements about transportation), and then checkmate: doctors would be back in charge of medicine again, because the government would have said their opinions don't matter.
Potential Flaw: are we sure teamsters union and drug cartels are separate entities?
