Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor, has written an important piece about crime, drugs, marijuana, and prison sentences.  She pokes holes in the marijuana myths that are gaining momentum nowadays, especially within the Obama administration. First, she tackles the bad stats about crimes and the prison sentences meted about by race, which Obama buys into: Naturally, Obama said nothing about crime rates. It is not marijuana-smoking that lands a skewed number of black men in prison but their elevated rates of violent and property crime. A 2011 study of California and New York arrest data led by Pennsylvania State University criminologist Darrell Steffensmeier found that blacks commit homicide at 11 times the rate of whites and robbery at 12 times the rate of whites. Such disparities are repeated in city-level data. In New York City, blacks commit over 75 percent of all shootings, according to the victims...(Read Full Post)