A Shameful Start

The assiduous reader of Five Drafts will recall that the deadline for Draft One is January 31, 2011. I trust that such a reader also will recall my weaselwording, the qualifier "This might be a well-less-than-complete draft." Well, it certainly is -- well less than complete, that is. Not even hinting at completion, really.

But here is a capsule summary of what has taken place. I have followed to some extent the plan as laid out in the previous post. I have looked at what I think have been some milestones in terms of designing legal regimes for prohibited drugs. I have not written much about them (the entire "draft" is less than 1800 words), in part because I have not read them fully and carefully yet. At this point, I have only a short introduction and a few sentences on some of the previous contributions. But one of the nice surprises for me was how interesting I find the 1933 guide to alcohol re-legalization, Toward Liquor Control. My working title for my paper, therefore, is Toward Drug Control.

So my progress has been limited, and I expect that some of the writing that has taken place will not survive through to the final draft. (The eventual literature review should be more about creating a context for my paper than simply summarizing earlier contributions.) I have not started to write what I think will be the heart of the paper, the discussion of consumer licensing and self-exclusion. Nevertheless, this blog managed to help me make more progress than I would have made in its absence, so I am not entirely disheartened. I think that I will try to offer weekly progress reports up to the deadline for the second draft, which occurs on the Ides of March. In the meantime, I will post what little I have, in three posts. I imagine.