The Case for Legal Magic Mushrooms

Mark Kleiman, a professor at New York University who was one of the nation’s most respected scholars of criminal (and especially drug) policy, died last week after a kidney transplant from his sister Kelly failed to take. As one of the many journalists whose work was improved by Kleiman’s ideas (this September 2010 Atlantic feature on alternatives to prison was inspired by his book When Brute Force Fails), I have been happy to read the tributes to him from diverse sources, and am eager to include my own.

Nothing I could write could add or detract from his own eloquent and informed opinions on prisons or cannabis legalization. As pet causes go, these were Kleiman’s bullmastiffs. But he had a few Chihuahua-sized ones, too, that with Sally Satel’s arguments about compensating kidney donors, and called out bioethicists’ unwillingness to contemplate such measures for being irrational, a quasi-theological position similar to abortion foes’ failure to distinguish, morally, between zygotes and babies.