There’s a long-standing Irish tradition observed in bars and pubs far from the Emerald Isles: If offered a pint of Guinness beer outside their native land, Irish drinkers may mutter about unpleasant aftertastes and provide scathing commentary on the bartender’s tapping technique. Guinness, they say, doesn’t travel well. That oft-repeated assertion was tabled several years ago at a pub in Oxford, where members of the Brisbane Initiative, an international primary care research leadership program, had gathered. Liam Glynn, of the National University of Ireland in Galway, was reluctant ... Read More
‘Shooting Galleries’ Take Aim at Illicit Drug Market
March 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a late essay on the Reagan drug war, the Beat novelist William Burroughs gave a surprising statistic. Heroin was freely available by prescription in Britain in 1957, he wrote, so addicts could shoot up from a government stock of junk dispensed by the National Health Service. "There were about 500 addicts in the U.K.," in those days, Burroughs wrote blandly, "and two narcotics officers for metropolitan London." When the U.K. criminalized heroin in 1971, he argued, it lapsed into "the same dreary spectrum as the USA — thousands of addicts, hundreds of drug agents, some of them on the ... Read More
Contending With Afghan Heroin (And How Not To)
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One open secret about the war in Afghanistan is that it has led to a flood of pure, cheap heroin in the world’s cities since 2001. “Despite reported decreases in white heroin production in most source countries,” the U.S. Justice Department admitted in 2006, “increased production in Afghanistan has resulted in an overall increase in worldwide white heroin production.” The production of white (or pure) heroin, in other words, had generally receded around the world — but supplies from war-torn Afghanistan more than picked up the slack. Now, according to some estimates, Afghanistan ... Read More
Why Should I Buy Health Insurance?
March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As judges around the U.S. weigh the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — Obama’s sweeping health care reform law — it’s worth asking how Europe navigated the same questions. The problem in most state challenges to the new law is the un-American-sounding mandate, the requirement that everyone in the nation must buy health insurance. Europeans have had similar mandates for decades, but you hear very little soul-searching here about fairness or freedom of choice. Is it because Europeans are all a bunch of socialist weenies who don’t mind an overregulated market? Not ... Read More
The Swiss and Their Guns
January 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
While the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona revived a predictable and unchanging round of gun control debate in the U.S., a referendum in Switzerland — Europe’s best-armed nation — is showing a shift of opinion away from private gun ownership. Every third household in Switzerland has a firearm, normally government-issued, because every male citizen under about 50 is also a reserve soldier. Instead of a standing professional army, the government maintains a well-armed militia to be called up in case of war. The tradition goes back to at least 1291, when several ... Read More
Combining Heat and Power
January 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most unexciting but obvious ideas for cutting pollution and making a nation more energy-independent is a simple concept called “combined heat and power,” known as CHP or cogeneration, which traps heat from a power plant and sends it around to local buildings as, well, heat. The technology started with Thomas Edison, but the European Union has surged ahead of America in putting it to use. Power plants give off huge amounts of heat as a by-product of burning coal, oil or gas to move turbines. “Cogeneration” plants just install the necessary pipes to catch and recycle the ... Read More
Funding Mosques from the State Treasury
December 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A recent push by the German government to educate a generation of European-born (and Enlightenment-minded) imams — to wean the nation's Muslim population from a class of religious leaders trained and paid by Turkey — belongs to a controversial strain of thinking in Europe. The idea is to commit tax funds to mosque-building and other integration efforts with the goal of drying up foreign, and sometimes radical, streams of money. Some programs are more promising than others. Nicolas Sarkozy argued in a 2004 book (before he became president of France) that Paris should make an exception to ... Read More
Europe’s Muslims Get to be the Continent’s New Jews
December 12, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In part two of the Miller-McCune interview with Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, we explore the various manifestations of Islamophobia in Europe, from the banning of minarets and religious clothing to the rise of ultra-right wing anti-Islam parties. Aslan — the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, published this month — addresses the mythos surrounding Europe's Muslim population while offering some positive alternatives to the negative rhetoric and fear-mongering perpetrated both in Europe and ... Read More
Mixing Europe and the Middle East
December 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
It's fashionable now to say that anti-Muslim sentiment is the new anti-Semitism. Arabs, after all, are Semitic people, so the rash of ugly rhetoric that spread this year during election campaigns in the United States and Europe might resemble a new mutation of an old disease. "I'm afraid that we are going through a process like the beginning of the '30s of the last century," said Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, head of a huge international Muslim group called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in early November, "when an anti-Semitic agenda became politically a big issue (together with) the ... Read More
Does Europe Need to Be More American?
November 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
After the French race riots in 2005, Abdelkarim Carrasco, a Muslim leader in Spain, gave a resonant warning in a much-reprinted article from the Associated Press. “Either Europe develops and supports the idea of a mixed culture, or Europe has no future,” he said. “Europe has to learn from what the United States has done. It is a country that has taken in people from all over the world.” Really? Does Europe need to learn from America? Since 2001, we in the West have grown so used to referring to “the West” as a cultural monolith it can be hard to remember the profound ... Read More
