Is the Recession increasing drug use?

In a recent study reported on by the BBC 95% of the dollar bills in DC have traces of cocaine on them and other major cities in America have similar numbers. This is up 20% form two years ago, the reason is thought to be due to people turning to drugs to get away from the stress of the recession.



I can't help but to think that if this is true and the reason drug use is up right now is due to the poor economy, then really the best thing for these people to do is to take the money they spend on drugs and spend them in other parts of the economy we could get a nice little boost. thought I guess even if the money is going into the black market it will end up in the main economy eventually (drug dealers do buy things)

Cash for clunkers failure of success?

The Cash for clunkers (officially called Car Allowance Rebate System or CARS) program comes to an end Monday.

Looking at the coverage of the is program I was always surprised with the number of people that thought the program was failing.

looking at the goal of the program that is far the from the cause.

The program was in acted because car sales where lagging and dealerships across the nation had lots full of cars that they couldn't sale.

This program was enacted to move those cars, as well as make sure people upgrade to more fuel efficient cars.

and under those terms the program worked, car sells went up enough that American car companies re-open some car plants that they had closed. Putting people back to work.


in fact it work so well that the CARS program ran out of money because they the demand was much higher then they thought and the government needed to add money to make sure the program could make it to it's end date. Maybe that's the closet thing this program was to a failure, if you count reaching your set goals at much faster rate then you thought you would as being a failure.

But with the program coming to and what do you think was Cash for clunkers a success or a failure?

Free by Chris Anderson Is giving stuff away really the new economic model?

Here is the first 50 something pages of Chris Anderson's book Free.

in the book Anderson talks about how giving stuff away is revolutionary (not so) new economic model