Month: January 2020

My colleague Kal Raustiala—who is writing a biography of Ralph Bunche, an American diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and UCLA valedictorian—found this in Bunche’s personal notes:

At a Finnish mission lunch Thursday 17 oct 68, Gunnar Jarring, Swedish diplomat working for UN, says to Romanian dep FM, talking about film, “The Russians Are Coming was quite funny”

Romanian says, “It isnt so funny in my country”

(I’ve seen the quote in the title of this post credited to Mel Brooks, though not in any definite way; English writer Angela Carter has a version of it, as I imagine others do, too.)

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2vvOllT
via IFTTT

Opioid-related deaths in the United States, which had been rising steadily since 1999, fell slightly in 2018, from 47,600 to 46,802, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That 1.7 percent drop was mostly due to a decline in deaths involving pain pills, which decreased by 13 percent, from 14,495 to 12,552.

Does that mean the government’s crackdown on prescription analgesics is finally having the desired effect? Probably not. The decline in opioid-related deaths is more plausibly attributed to harm reduction measures such as wider access to the overdose antidote naloxone and treatment programs involving methadone and buprenorphine. Ham-handed efforts to reduce the supply of pain pills, by contrast, have deprived bona fide patients of the medication they need while driving nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, which are far more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable.

That hazard has only been magnified by the increasing prevalence of illicit fentanyl, a cheaper and much more potent substitute for heroin. While heroin-related deaths fell by 3 percent in 2018, from 15,482 to 14,996, deaths involving “synthetic opioids other than methadone,” the category that includes fentanyl and its analogs (some of which are even more potent), rose by 10 percent, from 28,466 to 31,335. That category of drugs was involved in 67 percent of opioid-related deaths in 2018, up from 60 percent in 2017.

The share of all drug-related deaths that involved opioids rose from 48 percent in 1999 to 69 percent in 2018. But while the share of opioid-related deaths involving prescription analgesics (excluding methadone) rose from 34 percent in 1999 to 52 percent in 2010, it has been declining since then. In 2018, pain pills were involved in 27 percent of opioid-related deaths, many of which also involved heroin or fentanyl.

Heroin’s role in opioid-related deaths increased from 14 percent of cases in 2010 to 39 percent in 2015 but had fallen to 32 percent by 2018. Fentanyl’s share, meanwhile, increased more than five-fold between 2013 and 2018. You can start to see why the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated after the total volume of opioid prescriptions began to decline in 2011, which coincided with the rising prominence of heroin and fentanyl.

The increase in opioid-related deaths during the last two decades is part of a broader long-term trend. The total number of drug-related deaths fell by 4 percent between 2017 and 2018, from 70,237 to 67,367, a change that helped reverse recent declines in life expectancy. But the 2018 total was still 11 times the number in 1980. The death rate was 20.7 per 100,000 people in 2018, compared to just 2.7 in 1980. And even as opioid-related deaths fell by about 2 percent in 2018, deaths involving cocaine and “psychostimulants” such as methamphetamine rose by 5 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

The upward trend in drug-related deaths goes back further than the 1980s. A 2019 report on “deaths of despair” from the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) notes that drug-related deaths were falling by the early 1900s, before Congress banned nonmedical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914. But “drug-related deaths have been rising at an accelerating rate since the late 1950s,” notwithstanding the government’s increasingly expansive and aggressive efforts to suppress the illegal drug trade.

“The increase has been especially sharp over the past 20 years,” the JEC notes. And while “the proliferation of opioid deaths was initially a result of oversupply and abuse of legal prescription narcotics,” the report says, “the crisis…shifted toward illegal drugs—first heroin and then more lethal synthetic opioids like fentanyl”—after “policy changes restricted the supply and form of prescribed opioids.”

Humans have always been attracted to psychoactive substances, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. While governments cannot stop people from using drugs, they can always make drug use more dangerous. Maybe it is time to consider a different approach.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2UbAPOE
via IFTTT

In September 2019, I wrote a long Reason feature about how New York City politicians and education bureaucrats, particularly Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor Richard Carranza, were pushing through their preferred policy changes in part by weaponizing charges of “racism” against opponents, skeptics, and parents. So what’s Carranza been up to since then?

Weaponizing charges of “racism” against opponents, skeptics, and parents!

The kerfuffle currently making local headlines concerns a raucous Jan. 16 Community Education Council meeting in Queens that Carranza cut short after being booed and yelled at by parents of middle-schoolers who had been assaulted on campus. Critics contend that Carranza’s new “restorative justice” approach to discipline is leaving violent perpetrators unpunished.

“It was unproductive,” Carranza explained to CBS News the next morning. “People were yelling. People weren’t allowing anybody to answer. They weren’t allowing me to answer. And it was grandstanding.”

Italics mine, to emphasize the next phase of the controversy. “How can you say a parent is grandstanding when their child has been sexually harassed and assaulted?” NYC Parents Union President Mona Davids told the New York Post, which has been calling for the chancellor to be fired. “I empathize with the anger and frustration of parents and families when they’re not being heard,” added City Councilman Mark Treyger from Queens.

Nine City Council members last June called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to fire Carranza unless the chancellor cuts back on his “divisive rhetoric,” so you might think that the embattled educrat would choose his next words carefully. If so, his ensuing choice speaks volumes about Carranza’s judgment, or the tilt of the intended audience, or both.

At a press conference with Mayor de Blasio Tuesday, the chancellor called the Queens meeting a “setup,” claiming that protesters were “brought in vans to agitate” from outside the district, and then accused his critics of being “racist.”

“This is about some voices in the community that don’t like me,” he said. “Just look at the abject racist things that are said about me: ‘Go back where I came from,’ ‘taco-eating Carranza,’ ‘fire Carranza Ai Yi Yi,’ with the exclamation points in Spanish. Absolutely, they’re racist.”

Faced with pushback from Rep. Grace Meng (D–N.Y.)—”please don’t accuse [parents] of pretending or grandstanding,” Meng tweeted. “They are hurt and deserve to be treated with compassion”—Carranza clapped back: “No. Enough,” he tweeted. “No more politics.”

N.Y. State Senator John Liu (D), chair of the Senate’s New York City Education Committee, also was not impressed. “Chancellor Carranza’s comments today displayed at best lack of judgment and at worst woeful disregard for parent concerns,” Liu said in a statement. “It’s disturbing that he would marginalize the voices of hundreds of parents at an education town hall meeting by characterizing the meeting as a ‘set up’ and fixating on some participants as ‘outside agitators.'”

What about Bill de Blasio? “This is just unfair,” the mayor said in Carranza’s defense. “Some people have it out for the chancellor because he is ideologically different than them and because he is trying to shake things up.” Last June, de Blasio spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein called the lawmaker criticism of Carranza a “racially charged smear campaign.”

It’s worth noting, as CBS New York did this week, that six of the nine previous New York City school chancellors have been either Latino or African-American. Provided anonymity, those former chancellors have such advice for Carranza as “Put on your big boy pants,” and “Playing the race card is [expletive], a cop-out.”

As I argue in a video today, and in that September piece, the idiosyncratic politics of New York are sadly not contained within the boundaries of the five boroughs. Not only are gifted and talented programs being shuttered around the country in the name of addressing racial disparities, but those who object to policy changes that are adopted in the name of “desegregation” are also commonly accused of, at the very least, perpetuating an unjust system anchored in racism.

For those parents unaccustomed to being in the public eye, the prospect of getting labeled a racist even by random people on social media, let alone powerful government officials, is an effective deterrent to public participation. The provision of education is challenging enough—due in no small part to the very real history of racism both in the country as a whole and particularly within the development of the K-12 system—that discouraging entire categories of parental involvement is unlikely to produce either wise policy or widespread participation. By so freely denigrating his ostensible customers, Richard Carranza is sowing discord and planting the seeds for his own eventual failure.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2GEUNt7
via IFTTT

Last May, John Cox was worried he had accidentally hurt his newly adopted infant by rolling into her when they both dozed off. Erring on the side of caution, he brought her to Children’s Wisconsin hospital—where he worked, coincidentally, as a pediatric emergency doctor—just to make absolutely sure she was fine. It turned out she had suffered a minor fracture that is common in babies and heals on its own.

Two weeks later, child protective services declared him a child abuser and took the baby from him and his wife.

The child has been in foster care now for eight months. She is only nine months old.

What happened? According to a remarkable investigative story by ABC’s Mike Hixenbaugh, it’s possible for the authorities to interpret almost any bump or bruise as evidence of evil intent:

Those misjudgments—and a deep suspicion of all parents with injured kids—led to the child being taken.

“In hindsight,” Cox said in a recent interview, “taking her to our own hospital was the single most harmful decision that we made for our baby.”

Children’s Wisconsin, like many hospitals, has bought into the theory of “sentinel injuries”—the idea that minor bruises can be warning signs of future abuse, so each bruise must be treated as suspicious. But as Hixenbaugh writes:

Several emergency room doctors described an “out of control” child abuse team that is too quick to report minor injuries to authorities and that is too closely aligned with state child welfare investigators. …

Five doctors told a reporter they’re even afraid to bring their own children to their hospital after accidental injuries, fearing that a misdiagnosis or miscommunication might lead Child Protective Services to break their family apart.

“This is a disease in our hospital,” one physician said. “The way John’s case has been mishandled has opened all of our eyes to how big the problem is.”

In part, the problem can be traced to the advent of the child abuse pediatrician, who claims to be able to tell adult-inflicted injuries from innocent ones.

“Child abuse pediatricians very often operate under secret contracts with police, child protection, and prosecution offices—never disclosed to the parents bringing their children in for emergency treatment,” Diane Redleaf, the legal consultant at Let Grow, tells Reason. “These individuals have been billed as having special superhuman powers to tell abuse from accidents and rare diseases, superior to the powers of other doctors because they ‘know child abuse when they see it.'”

Added NBC, which joined The Houston Chronicle in an investigation of this new pediatric specialty:

Some of the doctors have at times overstated the certainty of their conclusions, the investigation found. Child welfare agencies and law enforcement officials often rely on their reports as the sole basis for removing children and filing criminal charges, sometimes in spite of contradictory opinions from other medical specialists.

In Cox’s case, the family could afford to get outside doctors to review the records, and many were shaken by what they saw. They pointed out not just several stone-cold mistakes, but how eager the authorities seemed to be to find abuse.

A police detective who grilled both Cox and his wife—Sadie Dobrozsi, also a pediatric doctor—said he didn’t understand how the hospital could have concluded they did something wrong. That didn’t stop child protective services, though: The authorities insisted on a safety plan for the baby, involving supervised visits monitored by grandparents.

Eventually, child services removed the baby from the home, anyway:

As the caseworker was leaving with the child, Dobrozsi asked what was making them so certain that she and her husband were abusive? The caseworker mentioned a new bruise on the baby’s foot.

Mom was completely baffled. She had no idea where that bruise came from, until she obtained her baby’s medical records. It turned out the hospital itself had pricked the child’s heel for a blood test. The mom didn’t know this because she had not been allowed in the room when it happened.

At this point, the baby is still in foster care. The couple’s other two kids are terrified that they may be taken, too. (One keeps his favorite toys in a backpack in case he’s suddenly taken away). Now the father faces a possible six years in jail on felony charges of child abuse.

The prosecutor is bolstering his case with a report prepared by a yet another child abuse pediatrician, this one in nearby Minnesota, whom he hired to look over the files. “In summary,” this child abuse pediatrician wrote, “there is no explanation for [the baby’s] injuries other than trauma.”

And yet the trauma of separating an infant baby from her loving parents for months does not seem to concern the authorities.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/38WFZ59
via IFTTT