Category: reason

Study Finds Vapers Not More Likely To Get COVID-19


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Vapers are at no greater risk of being diagnosed with COVID-19, and smokers are significantly less likely to be infected. That’s according to a new study published in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health.

The study’s authors are researchers at the Mayo Clinic who wanted to investigate whether electronic cigarette use might affect risk for testing positive for COVID-19. One of the difficulties in determining the relationship between vaping and COVID-19 has been a lack of data. There is a plethora of data on smoking status among those infected and hospitalized, but the same cannot be said for e-cigarettes.

To remedy this problem, from September 15, 2019, to November 30, 2020, the researchers screened 78,547 patients seeking medical care for e-cigarette and cigarette use during ambulatory appointments at their medical facility. After removing patients below the age of 12 and those who didn’t want to be a part of the research, 69,264 patients were analyzed.

Patients who used only e-cigarettes were no more likely to have a COVID-19 diagnosis than those who don’t smoke or vape. Those who smoked only cigarettes, on the other hand, were 57 percent less likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19. The results may come as a surprise to many as it was widely thought at the beginning of the pandemic that both smoking and vaping would cause more COVID-19 infections with worse symptoms.

But as the Mayo Clinic researchers make clear in their study, “the impact of tobacco use on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity remains unclear.”

There’s been little research on whether vaping increases one’s risk of testing positive for COVID-19. The most widely reported study was published last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which claimed young people who vaped were significantly more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than those who didn’t. The study was severely criticized for faulty methodology and communication of results, including by Reason Foundation Policy Analyst Jacob James Rich who co-authored one of several letters to the journal highlighting the study’s flaws. The study was used as justification by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D–Ill.) to demand a federal ban on all e-cigarettes during the course of the pandemic.

E-cigarettes were an early villain of the pandemic, despite no evidence of how they were affecting infections or hospitalizations. In February 2020, the New York State Academy of Family Physicians urged Gov. Andrew Cuomo to ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes. The justification for the prohibition was an early study that found smokers were at increased risk of a severe outcome after being infected with COVID-19. Considering e-cigarettes are not combustible cigarettes and have been proven to be significantly safer and effective at helping smokers quit, it’s hard to discern why the initial data on smoking from China would justify banning flavored vaping in New York. Nevertheless, flavored e-cigarettes were banned in New York in May 2020.

Appearing on NBC’s Today Show on March 23, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams postulated, without evidence, that vaping could be the reason young people may be at higher risk from COVID-19 than previously thought. “There are theories that it could be because we know we have a higher proportion of people in the United States and also in Italy who vape,” said Adams.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine that vapers could be at high risk for COVID-19. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey went so far as to issue an advisory warning that vaping could worsen the spread of COVID-19. In March 2020, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed, “If you are a smoker or a vaper that does make you more vulnerable.” These claims essentially went unchallenged, aside from a handful of scientists and tobacco harm reduction advocates who raised the alarm.

The finding that smokers are less likely to be infected with COVID-19 is not a novel one. The vast majority of studies across the world show a similar result. These results hold in the majority of studies that adjust for factors such as age and gender.

The lack of clear and accurate communication about the relationship between smoking, vaping, and COVID-19 from public health authorities such as the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration has had real-world consequences. Smokers were prioritized for vaccination despite there being no clear evidence they were at increased risk compared to the elderly or the obese.

Erroneously linking vaping to COVID-19 may have also increased skepticism among smokers about the benefits of switching to safer nicotine alternatives like e-cigarettes. Thanks to bad data and unsupported assumptions, members of Congress demanded the full-scale prohibition of a product that has helped millions of Americans quit smoking.

Smoking is widely known to be bad for your health, and everyone agrees youth should not be vaping. These messages don’t need to be augmented with noble lies about COVID-19 to achieve a beneficial public health outcome.

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Study on Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Finds ‘Conclusions Were Often Erroneous’


crime scene

The largest-ever black-box study on the accuracy of bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a widely used forensic technique, has found concerning error rates and disagreement among analysts.

The study, published in the August 2021 volume of Forensic Science International, is the most rigorous attempt so far to measure the accuracy and reproducibility of BPA, in which analysts interpret bloodstains at crime scenes.

“Our results show that conclusions were often erroneous and often contradicted other analysts,” the report found. “Both semantic differences and contradictory interpretations contributed to errors and disagreements, which could have serious implications if they occurred in casework.”

For the study, researchers collected 192 examples of blood spatters from controlled samples and actual casework and presented pictures of them to 75 practicing BPA analysts for classification.

“On samples with known causes, 11.2 percent of responses were erroneous,” the study found. “The results show limited reproducibility of conclusions: 7.8 percent of responses contradicted other analysts.”

BPA is one of several forensic disciplines that has come under increased scrutiny over the last decade, along with other methods—such as bite mark, hair, and shoe print analysis—that do not have established error rates and rely on pattern matching or subjective interpretation. Yet they are widely accepted in courtrooms across the country, despite concerns over reliability and a number of wrongful convictions.

In 2018, ProPublica published a series of investigative stories on the history and use of BPA. It found a disturbing amount of questionable casework, exonerations, and investigators with no more than 40 hours of BPA training testifying in court. (For the story, the reporter herself went through a 40-hour class on BPA.) It also noted that there were few scientific studies on the reliability of the methods.

A 2009 National Academy of Sciences study was, at the time, the most extensive done in the U.S. on the scientific validity of several commonly used forensic techniques, and it was critical of blood spatter analysis.

“In general, the opinions of bloodstain pattern analysis are more subjective than scientific,” the study said. “Extra care must be given to the way in which the analyses are presented in court. The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous.”

The Justice Department came under pressure to improve forensic standards after the FBI admitted in 2015 that two dozen examiners in one of its hair analysis labs had given flawed testimony in hundreds of cases. In those cases, 32 defendants were sentenced to death; 14 were eventually executed or died in prison.

A 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) found that reviews of several commonly used forensic methods “have revealed a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity.”

In the case of bite mark evidence, for example, the report stated that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark.”

However, both the Obama and Trump administrations resisted calls to improve forensic standards. The Obama Justice Department rejected PCAST’s recommendations to require expert witnesses to disclose error rates in their testimony and, where methods haven’t been scientifically verified, not use them at all. 

In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions disbanded the National Commission on Forensic Science, an independent panel of scientists, law enforcement, judges, and defense attorneys created by the Obama administration in 2013 to review the reliability of forensic science used in trials.

The authors of the most recent study on BPA noted that it differed from actual casework, where analysts have additional context from the crime scene, and that the majority of respondents almost always arrived at the correct conclusions, suggesting multiple independent verifications may help. However, the authors recommend standardizing BPA methodology and terminology to reduce contradictory interpretations.

“Although the error and reproducibility rates measured here should not be taken to be precise measures of operational error rates,” the study said, “their magnitude and the fact that they corroborate the rates measured in previous studies, should raise concerns in the BPA community.”

They should raise concerns for defendants, too.

The study was conducted by researchers at the private Virginia-based firm Noblis, the Kansas City Police Department Crime Laboratory, and Indiana University.

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Study on Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Finds ‘Conclusions Were Often Erroneous’


crime scene

The largest-ever black-box study on the accuracy of bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a widely used forensic technique, has found concerning error rates and disagreement among analysts.

The study, published in the August 2021 volume of Forensic Science International, is the most rigorous attempt so far to measure the accuracy and reproducibility of BPA, in which analysts interpret bloodstains at crime scenes.

“Our results show that conclusions were often erroneous and often contradicted other analysts,” the report found. “Both semantic differences and contradictory interpretations contributed to errors and disagreements, which could have serious implications if they occurred in casework.”

For the study, researchers collected 192 examples of blood spatters from controlled samples and actual casework and presented pictures of them to 75 practicing BPA analysts for classification.

“On samples with known causes, 11.2 percent of responses were erroneous,” the study found. “The results show limited reproducibility of conclusions: 7.8 percent of responses contradicted other analysts.”

BPA is one of several forensic disciplines that has come under increased scrutiny over the last decade, along with other methods—such as bite mark, hair, and shoe print analysis—that do not have established error rates and rely on pattern matching or subjective interpretation. Yet they are widely accepted in courtrooms across the country, despite concerns over reliability and a number of wrongful convictions.

In 2018, ProPublica published a series of investigative stories on the history and use of BPA. It found a disturbing amount of questionable casework, exonerations, and investigators with no more than 40 hours of BPA training testifying in court. (For the story, the reporter herself went through a 40-hour class on BPA.) It also noted that there were few scientific studies on the reliability of the methods.

A 2009 National Academy of Sciences study was, at the time, the most extensive done in the U.S. on the scientific validity of several commonly used forensic techniques, and it was critical of blood spatter analysis.

“In general, the opinions of bloodstain pattern analysis are more subjective than scientific,” the study said. “Extra care must be given to the way in which the analyses are presented in court. The uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous.”

The Justice Department came under pressure to improve forensic standards after the FBI admitted in 2015 that two dozen examiners in one of its hair analysis labs had given flawed testimony in hundreds of cases. In those cases, 32 defendants were sentenced to death; 14 were eventually executed or died in prison.

A 2016 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) found that reviews of several commonly used forensic methods “have revealed a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity.”

In the case of bite mark evidence, for example, the report stated that “available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners not only cannot identify the source of bite mark with reasonable accuracy, they cannot even consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bite mark.”

However, both the Obama and Trump administrations resisted calls to improve forensic standards. The Obama Justice Department rejected PCAST’s recommendations to require expert witnesses to disclose error rates in their testimony and, where methods haven’t been scientifically verified, not use them at all. 

In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions disbanded the National Commission on Forensic Science, an independent panel of scientists, law enforcement, judges, and defense attorneys created by the Obama administration in 2013 to review the reliability of forensic science used in trials.

The authors of the most recent study on BPA noted that it differed from actual casework, where analysts have additional context from the crime scene, and that the majority of respondents almost always arrived at the correct conclusions, suggesting multiple independent verifications may help. However, the authors recommend standardizing BPA methodology and terminology to reduce contradictory interpretations.

“Although the error and reproducibility rates measured here should not be taken to be precise measures of operational error rates,” the study said, “their magnitude and the fact that they corroborate the rates measured in previous studies, should raise concerns in the BPA community.”

They should raise concerns for defendants, too.

The study was conducted by researchers at the private Virginia-based firm Noblis, the Kansas City Police Department Crime Laboratory, and Indiana University.

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When Is a Civil Forfeiture Based on Drug Offenses Excessive? Always.


Tyson-Timbs-IJ

The Indiana Supreme Court yesterday concluded that civil forfeiture of a Land Rover “worth at least $35,000” that was used to sell small amounts of heroin violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “excessive fines.” As Reason‘s Billy Binion noted, the decision suggests a promising new avenue for constitutional challenges to civil forfeiture of allegedly crime-tainted property. But the court’s analysis in Indiana v. Timbs also shows how subjective the question of proportionality can be in such cases and the extent to which that judgment depends on dubious assertions rooted in the morally bankrupt logic of drug prohibition.

In 2013, Tyson Timbs was charged with two counts of dealing in a controlled substance, a Class B felony punishable by six to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000, based on two heroin sales to an undercover officer in which he exchanged a total of four grams for $385. He pleaded guilty to one count and received a six-year sentence, including a year of home confinement and five years of probation. He also paid $1,023 in costs and fees. In addition to those penalties, police seized the Land Rover, which Timbs had purchased with the proceeds from his father’s life insurance policy. He used the remaining insurance money, about $30,000, to buy heroin for his own use.

After Timbs challenged the forfeiture, his case, which was championed by the Institute for Justice, made its way up and down the legal system, including three decisions by the Indiana Supreme Court and a landmark 2019 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to the states via the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. The Court had previously ruled that the Excessive Fines Clause constrains civil forfeiture, even though that process is officially “remedial,” because confiscating property tied to criminal activity is at least partly punitive.

In its latest decision, the Indiana Supreme Court rejects the trial court’s conclusion that Timbs’ offense was “victimless.” Although he “didn’t harm a specific victim,” it avers, “distributing or possessing even small amounts of drugs threatens society.” The court nevertheless agrees that the seizure of Timbs’ Land Rover was “grossly disproportional” based on “the totality of the circumstances.”

While Timbs’ culpability in the heroin sales was undisputed, the court says, “the gravity of the underlying offenses” was “minimal.” It notes that Timbs received the minimum sentence allowed by law, that he was struggling with addiction, that he agreed to sell heroin only to pay for his own habit, and that “he dealt drugs to an undercover officer” rather than “someone who would use them.” In assessing the proportionality of the forfeiture, the court also deemed it relevant that Timbs was poor, that the Land Rover was his only significant asset, that the car was “essential to him reintegrating into society” because it enabled him to “maintain employment and seek treatment,” and that “the vehicle’s value was three-and-a-half times the maximum fine for the underlying offense.”

The state, by contrast, argued that seizing the Land Rover was plainly proportional given Timbs’ history of drug law violations, which extended far beyond the heroin sale to which he pleaded guilty. As Justice Geoffrey Slaughter notes in a concurring opinion, Timbs made “dozens of lengthy trips to buy heroin to feed his drug habit” before escalating to heroin distribution.

“In just four months’ time,” Slaughter writes, “Timbs poured more than $30,000 into Indiana’s heroin trade. After [he committed] $30,000 of ‘wrongdoing,’ the State seized the $35,000 vehicle that was the instrumentality of his offenses. Given the near parity of these sums—the extent of Timbs’s criminal activity versus the value of his vehicle—another court might reasonably conclude that forfeiting this instrumentality was neither harsh nor disproportionate at all, much less grossly so.”

In the state’s view, Timbs was responsible for a “staggering volume” of “extremely serious” criminal conduct. “The State contends that Timbs was on a path to engaging in increasingly dangerous criminal activity to fund his addiction,” the majority notes. “For these criminal activities, criminal sentencing laws could have imposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and placed him in prison for the rest of his life.”

Slaughter concurred in the judgment because he viewed the majority’s analysis as a “plausible and defensible” application of the “excessiveness test” that the court established the last time it considered Timbs’ case. But he warns that the test invites subjective judgments that may lead to strikingly different outcomes in cases with similar facts: “By crafting a test that relies so heavily on a judge’s subjective sensibilities, the Court has removed the inquiry almost entirely from a judge’s core area of expertise—objective analysis—and placed it instead where judges have no special insight: where only highly subjective, value-laden judgments prevail. By doing so, we have created a test largely insulated from principled debate and review.”

Dissenting Justice Mark Massa goes further, rejecting the majority’s conclusion about the gravity of Timbs’ offense. “The forfeiture here was indeed harsh, perhaps even mildly disproportionate, given all the facts in mitigation,” he writes. “But I part ways with the Court’s holding that it was grossly so. Such a conclusion can only be sustained by finding the severity of the underlying felony to be ‘minimal,’ as the Court holds today. I am skeptical that dealing in heroin can ever be a crime of minimal severity. No narcotic has left a larger scar on our state and region in recent years, whether overly prescribed or purchased illicitly on the street.”

Despite their differences on the question of exactly how grave Timbs’ offenses were, the majority, Slaughter, and Massa all agree that it was appropriate to punish him for what he did, because (as the majority put it) “distributing or possessing even small amounts of drugs threatens society.” But if anyone was victimized here, it was Timbs, whom “an acquaintance” tricked into selling heroin to a police officer. The sole purpose of those transactions was to implicate Timbs in “crimes” for which he could then be punished—crimes that “didn’t harm a specific victim,” as the majority notes. The dispute about the forfeiture of Timbs’ car looks like mere quibbling compared to this egregious abuse of state power.

The justices emphasize that heroin use causes harm. But Timbs is no more responsible for that harm than a liquor retailer is responsible for the damage caused by alcohol abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alcohol causes something like 88,000 deaths a year in the United States, compared to about 14,000 deaths involving heroin in 2019. The only reason that Timbs, unlike the folks at Total Wine & More, was arrested and punished is that politicians have drawn a morally unjustifiable distinction between these two intoxicants.

Once you ignore that reality, the question of proportionality is bound to generate the sort of disagreement that Slaughter predicts. The government can create a black market with artificially high prices, then cite the exorbitant sums spent by drug users as a measure of the injury they supposedly have inflicted on “society.” It can impose draconian criminal penalties for the crimes it invented, then cite those penalties to justify civil forfeitures like this one.

Consider the case of Kevin McBride, a Tucson handyman whose $15,000 Jeep was seized last year because his girlfriend allegedly used it for a $25 marijuana sale to an undercover cop. Unlike Timbs but like many victims of civil forfeiture, McBride was not at all culpable in the offense that the cops cited to justify taking his property, which helps explain why prosecutors quickly agreed to return the Jeep after the Goldwater Institute threatened to sue. But suppose that McBride himself had sold the pot. You might think the forfeiture still would be clearly disproportionate. But that is not obvious given the criminal penalties that Arizona legislators had deemed appropriate for this sort of offense.

“If the forfeiture of a $15,000 Jeep over $25 worth of marijuana is not excessive,” Goldwater Institute senior attorney Matt Miller said at the time, “then it is difficult to imagine what would be.” Yet under Arizona law, selling less than two pounds of marijuana was punishable by up to three years in prison and a maximum fine of $150,000. In other words, the maximum fine was 10 times the value of McBride’s Jeep, which suggests such a forfeiture would not be so disproportionate after all. Arizona legislators evidently thought that exchanging even a small amount of marijuana for a small amount of money was a pretty serious crime against society.

As a result of a ballot initiative that voters approved last November, selling marijuana for recreational use is no longer any sort of crime under Arizona law, provided the seller has obtained the necessary license and follows the state’s regulations. That sudden transformation underscores the utterly arbitrary nature of drug prohibition, which has nothing to do with real injuries inflicted on identifiable victims. When the government proscribes peaceful conduct that violates no one’s rights, any punishment is excessive.

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When Is a Civil Forfeiture Based on Drug Offenses Excessive? Always.


Tyson-Timbs-IJ

The Indiana Supreme Court yesterday concluded that civil forfeiture of a Land Rover “worth at least $35,000” that was used to sell small amounts of heroin violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “excessive fines.” As Reason‘s Billy Binion noted, the decision suggests a promising new avenue for constitutional challenges to civil forfeiture of allegedly crime-tainted property. But the court’s analysis in Indiana v. Timbs also shows how subjective the question of proportionality can be in such cases and the extent to which that judgment depends on dubious assertions rooted in the morally bankrupt logic of drug prohibition.

In 2013, Tyson Timbs was charged with two counts of dealing in a controlled substance, a Class B felony punishable by six to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000, based on two heroin sales to an undercover officer in which he exchanged a total of four grams for $385. He pleaded guilty to one count and received a six-year sentence, including a year of home confinement and five years of probation. He also paid $1,023 in costs and fees. In addition to those penalties, police seized the Land Rover, which Timbs had purchased with the proceeds from his father’s life insurance policy. He used the remaining insurance money, about $30,000, to buy heroin for his own use.

After Timbs challenged the forfeiture, his case, which was championed by the Institute for Justice, made its way up and down the legal system, including three decisions by the Indiana Supreme Court and a landmark 2019 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to the states via the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. The Court had previously ruled that the Excessive Fines Clause constrains civil forfeiture, even though that process is officially remedial, because confiscating property tied to criminal activity is at least partly punitive.

In its latest decision, the Indiana Supreme Court rejects the trial court’s conclusion that Timbs’ offense was “victimless.” Although he “didn’t harm a specific victim,” it avers, “distributing or possessing even small amounts of drugs threatens society.” The court nevertheless agrees that the seizure of Timbs’ Land Rover was “grossly disproportional” based on “the totality of the circumstances.”

While Timbs’ culpability in the heroin sales was undisputed, the court says, “the gravity of the underlying offenses” was “minimal.” It notes that Timbs received the minimum sentence allowed by law, that he was struggling with addiction, that he agreed to sell heroin only to pay for his own habit, and that “he dealt drugs to an undercover officer” rather than “someone who would use them.” In assessing the proportionality of the forfeiture, the court also deemed it relevant that Timbs was poor, that the Land Rover was his only significant asset, that the car was “essential to him reintegrating into society” because it enabled him to “maintain employment and seek treatment,” and that “the vehicle’s value was three-and-a-half times the maximum fine for the underlying offense.”

The state, by contrast, argued that seizing the Land Rover was plainly proportional given Timbs’ history of drug law violations, which extended far beyond the heroin sale to which he pleaded guilty. As Justice Geoffrey Slaughter notes in a concurring opinion, Timbs made “dozens of lengthy trips to buy heroin to feed his drug habit” before escalating to heroin distribution.

“In just four months’ time,” Slaughter writes, “Timbs poured more than $30,000 into Indiana’s heroin trade. After [he committed] $30,000 of ‘wrongdoing,’ the State seized the $35,000 vehicle that was the instrumentality of his offenses. Given the near parity of these sums—the extent of Timbs’s criminal activity versus the value of his vehicle—another court might reasonably conclude that forfeiting this instrumentality was neither harsh nor disproportionate at all, much less grossly so.”

In the state’s view, Timbs was responsible for a “staggering volume” of “extremely serious” criminal conduct. “The State contends that Timbs was on a path to engaging in increasingly dangerous criminal activity to fund his addiction,” the majority notes. “For these criminal activities, criminal sentencing laws could have imposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and placed him in prison for the rest of his life.”

Slaughter concurred in the judgment because he viewed the majority’s analysis as a “plausible and defensible” application of the “excessiveness test” that the court established the last time it considered Timbs’ case. But he warns that the test invites subjective judgments that may lead to strikingly different outcomes in cases with similar facts: “By crafting a test that relies so heavily on a judge’s subjective sensibilities, the Court has removed the inquiry almost entirely from a judge’s core area of expertise—objective analysis—and placed it instead where judges have no special insight: where only highly subjective, value-laden judgments prevail. By doing so, we have created a test largely insulated from principled debate and review.”

Dissenting Justice Mark Massa goes further, rejecting the majority’s conclusion about the gravity of Timbs’ offense. “The forfeiture here was indeed harsh, perhaps even mildly disproportionate, given all the facts in mitigation,” he writes. “But I part ways with the Court’s holding that it was grossly so. Such a conclusion can only be sustained by finding the severity of the underlying felony to be ‘minimal,’ as the Court holds today. I am skeptical that dealing in heroin can ever be a crime of minimal severity. No narcotic has left a larger scar on our state and region in recent years, whether overly prescribed or purchased illicitly on the street.”

Despite their differences on the question of exactly how grave Timbs’ offenses were, the majority, Slaughter, and Massa all agree that it was appropriate to punish him for what he did, because (as the majority put it) “distributing or possessing even small amounts of drugs threatens society.” But if anyone was victimized here, it was Timbs, whom “an acquaintance” tricked into selling heroin to a police officer. The sole purpose of those transactions was to implicate Timbs in “crimes” for which he could then be punished—crimes that “didn’t harm a specific victim,” as the majority notes. The dispute about the forfeiture of Timbs’ car looks like mere quibbling compared to this egregious abuse of state power.

The justices emphasize that heroin use causes harm. But Timbs is no more responsible for that harm than a liquor retailer is responsible for the damage caused by alcohol abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alcohol causes something like 88,000 deaths a year in the United States, compared to about 14,000 deaths involving heroin in 2019. The only reason that Timbs, unlike the folks at Total Wine & More, was arrested and punished is that politicians have drawn a morally unjustifiable distinction between these two intoxicants.

Once you ignore that reality, the question of proportionality is bound to generate the sort of disagreement that Slaughter predicts. The government can create a black market with artificially high prices, then cite the exorbitant sums spent by drug users as a measure of the injury they supposedly have inflicted on “society.” It can impose draconian criminal penalties for the crimes it invented, then cite those penalties to justify civil forfeitures like this one.

Consider the case of Kevin McBride, a Tucson handyman whose $15,000 Jeep was seized last year because his girlfriend allegedly used it for a $25 marijuana sale to an undercover cop. Unlike Timbs but like many victims of civil forfeiture, McBride was not at all culpable in the offense that the cops cited to justify taking his property, which helps explain why prosecutors quickly agreed to return the Jeep after the Goldwater Institute threatened to sue. But suppose that McBride himself had sold the pot. You might think the forfeiture still would be clearly disproportionate. But that is not obvious given the criminal penalties that Arizona legislators had deemed appropriate for this sort of offense.

“If the forfeiture of a $15,000 Jeep over $25 worth of marijuana is not excessive,” Goldwater Institute senior attorney Matt Miller said at the time, “then it is difficult to imagine what would be.” Yet under Arizona law, selling less than two pounds of marijuana was punishable by up to three years in prison and a maximum fine of $150,000. In other words, the maximum fine was 10 times the value of McBride’s Jeep, which suggests such a forfeiture would not be so disproportionate after all. Arizona legislators evidently thought that exchanging even a small amount of marijuana for a small amount of money was a pretty serious crime against society.

As a result of a ballot initiative that voters approved last November, selling marijuana for recreational use is no longer any sort of crime under Arizona law, provided the seller has obtained the necessary license and follows the state’s regulations. That sudden transformation underscores the utterly arbitrary nature of drug prohibition, which has nothing to do with real injuries inflicted on identifiable victims. When the government proscribes peaceful conduct that violates no one’s rights, any punishment is excessive.

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Feds Restore $929 Million in Funds for California’s Billion-Dollar Bullet Train Boondoggle


highspeedrail_1161x653

California’s wasteful high-speed rail project is getting a predictable boost under train-loving President Joe Biden. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced it was restoring $929 million in grants that had been revoked by the U.S. Department of Transportation under President Donald Trump.

Trump used the terrible state of the rail project—years behind schedule, billions over budget, and without a realistic plan for actually connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco—as a reason to shut the funding down. His feud with California political leadership certainly played a role in the decision, but the reality is that the entire train project has been an expensive disaster that has lined a bunch of contractors’ and consultants’ pockets.

California sued the Trump administration to try to get the money back. Yesterday’s announcement is the result of a settlement agreement between California and the Biden administration to restore the grant.

This is bad news for taxpayers, but hardly unpredictable. The Biden administration is looking to spend trillions on infrastructure projects that include high-speed rail. Biden imagines citizens traversing the country on these expensive trains, even though they can already travel more efficiently on airplanes.

The $929 million is actually a drop in the bucket compared to the $75 billion Amtrak is begging for to expand its money-losing routes across the country. But at this point, California’s bullet train is estimated to cost somewhere between $69–100 billion, and California voters only initially authorized a $10 billion bond for the program. Cap-and-trade auctions, in which companies purchase pollution credits, have not been bringing in nearly as much revenue for the project as had been hoped. California will likely be going to the feds, hat in hand, looking for even more grants to pay for the project to continue.

Below, Reason TV explains what supporters of high-speed rail should be learning from California’s costly mess (which to be clear, is to not throw more money at it):

 

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Feds Restore $929 Million in Funds for California’s Billion-Dollar Bullet Train Boondoggle


highspeedrail_1161x653

California’s wasteful high-speed rail project is getting a predictable boost under train-loving President Joe Biden. On Thursday, the Biden administration announced it was restoring $929 million in grants that had been revoked by the U.S. Department of Transportation under President Donald Trump.

Trump used the terrible state of the rail project—years behind schedule, billions over budget, and without a realistic plan for actually connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco—as a reason to shut the funding down. His feud with California political leadership certainly played a role in the decision, but the reality is that the entire train project has been an expensive disaster that has lined a bunch of contractors’ and consultants’ pockets.

California sued the Trump administration to try to get the money back. Yesterday’s announcement is the result of a settlement agreement between California and the Biden administration to restore the grant.

This is bad news for taxpayers, but hardly unpredictable. The Biden administration is looking to spend trillions on infrastructure projects that include high-speed rail. Biden imagines citizens traversing the country on these expensive trains, even though they can already travel more efficiently on airplanes.

The $929 million is actually a drop in the bucket compared to the $75 billion Amtrak is begging for to expand its money-losing routes across the country. But at this point, California’s bullet train is estimated to cost somewhere between $69–100 billion, and California voters only initially authorized a $10 billion bond for the program. Cap-and-trade auctions, in which companies purchase pollution credits, have not been bringing in nearly as much revenue for the project as had been hoped. California will likely be going to the feds, hat in hand, looking for even more grants to pay for the project to continue.

Below, Reason TV explains what supporters of high-speed rail should be learning from California’s costly mess (which to be clear, is to not throw more money at it):

 

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CW’s The Republic of Sarah Is No Free State Project


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The Republic of Sarah. The CW. Monday, June 14, 9 p.m.

Created only in 2006, The CW is America’s youngest broadcast network, and a lot of its audience (target demo: women ages 13 to 34) isn’t much older. It’s the sort of network where you’re much more likely to see potential Pussycat Dolls than Lysander Spooner wannabes. And yet there it is: The Republic of Sarah, the new CW drama in which a mob of hardbody high-school kids and their state-smashing history teacher stage an anarchist revolt, secede from the United States, and make out a lot, too, which I’m sure Spooner would have agreed was a righteous blow against the state.

You think I’m exaggerating, and perhaps I am, just a bit. (Spooner didn’t think hookers should go to jail, but I’m not sure he had an official position on French-kissing.) But The Republic of Sarah is the most deliriously goofy TV political mashup since a soon-to-be-vanished Brit satellite channel aired a sitcom called Heil, Honey, I’m Home! about you-know-who.

Stella Baker (Tell Me Your Secrets) plays Sarah Cooper, an instructor in cute-as-a-rustic-button Greylock, New Hampshire. She’s right in the middle of teaching a unit on the Revolutionary War when a mining company rolls into town after striking valuable coltan ore nearby. (If you remember that coltan is what some of the robots in the Terminator movies were made of, your damage is beyond anything we can do for you here. Seek help immediately.)

What the townfolk lack in intelligence—”You don’t have to dumb yourself down to fit in,” Cooper counsels a kid transferring from Los Angeles—they make up for in belligerence. “We don’t need a bunch of flatlanders taking over!” one of them shouts at the miners before they’ve actually done so much as a blow a leaf in the air.

But, like the four-flushing, mustachioed villains of dinner-theater melodrama, the corporate stormtroopers live down to expectations. Naturally the first thing they do is crush a quaint pagoda in the town square because, as everybody knows, there’s a lot of profit in pagoda-crushing. And Cooper, still stirred from by her Revolutionary War lesson plans, decides they must be stopped before they declare war on park benches, flower boxes, and playful kittens.

First she tries standing in front of company bulldozers as if she’s in Tiananmen Square. Then she hits on a cartographic loophole in the Constitution: A river changed course while Canada and the United States were mapping the border, and nobody bothered to correct the discrepancy. And the town of Greylock sits squarely in the unclaimed parcel of riverside land. Secession! No gods, no masters! Taxation is theft! Cute girls for everyone!

My first impression of the pilot episode of The Republic of Sarah was that it was written by screenwriters oblivious even by Hollywood’s generous standards: nothing about the Border Patrol encircling Greylock and arresting illegal immigrants crossing the border to their jobs in other towns; nothing about punitive U.S. tariffs on maple syrup or whatever else Greylock—which, after all, is not a signatory to NAFTA—might have to export; nothing about Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont joining NATO to protect themselves from their bellicose new neighbor. And then there’s the small matter of 18 U.S. Code § 2385, which takes a dim view of overthrowing the United States government.

To my frank amazement, a lot of these issues actually are addressed in later episodes. (Well, not the point about NATO, but I only watched three hours.) And, for a moment, I thought The Republic of Sarah‘s writer-producer Jeffrey Paul King (the creative wrangler of CBS’ modern-Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary) might be offering up some serious political commentary. No spoilers, but I half-expected the musical score of the second episode to feature The Who screaming, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss… .”

Alas, what I mistook for incipient coherence was mere creative flatulence. Whenever serious ideological disputes come up in The Republic of Sarah, they’re resolved in favor of the heroine on the grounds of her sheer moral authority. Along with the old order, logic has been dissolved; Cooper and the kids believe in the sanctity of borders when used to protect them from the rapacious corporation, but dismiss them as irrelevant “lines drawn on a map” when they pose a threat. Most interestingly, in these days of ascendent anti-racism, there’s not a word about the moral or legal validity of secession when it’s mounted in support of something more yucky than corporation-bashing—say, slavery.  The Republic of Sarah treats ideas as fashion accessories. And anybody who remembers bellbottoms or saddle shoes knows what happens to those.

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CW’s The Republic of Sarah Is No Free State Project


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The Republic of Sarah. The CW. Monday, June 14, 9 p.m.

Created only in 2006, The CW is America’s youngest broadcast network, and a lot of its audience (target demo: women ages 13 to 34) isn’t much older. It’s the sort of network where you’re much more likely to see potential Pussycat Dolls than Lysander Spooner wannabes. And yet there it is: The Republic of Sarah, the new CW drama in which a mob of hardbody high-school kids and their state-smashing history teacher stage an anarchist revolt, secede from the United States, and make out a lot, too, which I’m sure Spooner would have agreed was a righteous blow against the state.

You think I’m exaggerating, and perhaps I am, just a bit. (Spooner didn’t think hookers should go to jail, but I’m not sure he had an official position on French-kissing.) But The Republic of Sarah is the most deliriously goofy TV political mashup since a soon-to-be-vanished Brit satellite channel aired a sitcom called Heil, Honey, I’m Home! about you-know-who.

Stella Baker (Tell Me Your Secrets) plays Sarah Cooper, an instructor in cute-as-a-rustic-button Greylock, New Hampshire. She’s right in the middle of teaching a unit on the Revolutionary War when a mining company rolls into town after striking valuable coltan ore nearby. (If you remember that coltan is what some of the robots in the Terminator movies were made of, your damage is beyond anything we can do for you here. Seek help immediately.)

What the townfolk lack in intelligence—”You don’t have to dumb yourself down to fit in,” Cooper counsels a kid transferring from Los Angeles—they make up for in belligerence. “We don’t need a bunch of flatlanders taking over!” one of them shouts at the miners before they’ve actually done so much as a blow a leaf in the air.

But, like the four-flushing, mustachioed villains of dinner-theater melodrama, the corporate stormtroopers live down to expectations. Naturally the first thing they do is crush a quaint pagoda in the town square because, as everybody knows, there’s a lot of profit in pagoda-crushing. And Cooper, still stirred from by her Revolutionary War lesson plans, decides they must be stopped before they declare war on park benches, flower boxes, and playful kittens.

First she tries standing in front of company bulldozers as if she’s in Tiananmen Square. Then she hits on a cartographic loophole in the Constitution: A river changed course while Canada and the United States were mapping the border, and nobody bothered to correct the discrepancy. And the town of Greylock sits squarely in the unclaimed parcel of riverside land. Secession! No gods, no masters! Taxation is theft! Cute girls for everyone!

My first impression of the pilot episode of The Republic of Sarah was that it was written by screenwriters oblivious even by Hollywood’s generous standards: nothing about the Border Patrol encircling Greylock and arresting illegal immigrants crossing the border to their jobs in other towns; nothing about punitive U.S. tariffs on maple syrup or whatever else Greylock—which, after all, is not a signatory to NAFTA—might have to export; nothing about Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont joining NATO to protect themselves from their bellicose new neighbor. And then there’s the small matter of 18 U.S. Code § 2385, which takes a dim view of overthrowing the United States government.

To my frank amazement, a lot of these issues actually are addressed in later episodes. (Well, not the point about NATO, but I only watched three hours.) And, for a moment, I thought The Republic of Sarah‘s writer-producer Jeffrey Paul King (the creative wrangler of CBS’ modern-Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary) might be offering up some serious political commentary. No spoilers, but I half-expected the musical score of the second episode to feature The Who screaming, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss… .”

Alas, what I mistook for incipient coherence was mere creative flatulence. Whenever serious ideological disputes come up in The Republic of Sarah, they’re resolved in favor of the heroine on the grounds of her sheer moral authority. Along with the old order, logic has been dissolved; Cooper and the kids believe in the sanctity of borders when used to protect them from the rapacious corporation, but dismiss them as irrelevant “lines drawn on a map” when they pose a threat. Most interestingly, in these days of ascendent anti-racism, there’s not a word about the moral or legal validity of secession when it’s mounted in support of something more yucky than corporation-bashing—say, slavery.  The Republic of Sarah treats ideas as fashion accessories. And anybody who remembers bellbottoms or saddle shoes knows what happens to those.

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Propaganda Art Gets Boost in Biden Budget


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The astonishing $6 trillion budget proposed by President Joe Biden includes a 20 percent increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While that $201 million sounds like real money, it’s admittedly a pretty small slice, just 0.003 percent of the whole. And it is surely one of the most innocent of federal expenditures: supporting mega-museums and community orchestras is about the least dangerous piece of government spending I can think of. (It beats a new weapons system or internment facility.) 

Proponents of more funding for the arts often point out that many “developed” countries, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, spend much more government money supporting the arts than the U.S. does. But leaving aside the question of whether the U.S. should emulate Germany’s history of state support for the arts, one might worry that arts expenditures do not seem practically to do much in the way of securing the common defense or ensuring the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. There’s no sign that the founders of the Republic regarded support of the arts as the business of the federal government whatsoever.

And yet, it is often said, the arts are central to any culture, to the unity and character of any people. The NEA is constantly hinting with an anodyne wave that it is telling the story of who we are as Americans: “The arts are a powerful and important part of what unites us as Americans. The arts celebrate our differences while connecting us through a communal experience….[NEA grants seek to] enrich our humanity by broadening our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a society.” Well, it’s hard to argue with that, I suppose, and who would endorse disenriching humanity? Giving some federal support, I have heard it said, expresses that we, as Americans, are concerned not just with guns and butter but with meaning.

But if arts funding is to show “who we are as Americans,” or to narrate our alleged communal experience, it is going to have to respond to the tastes of the American people, which at the moment run to autotuned hip hop and bro country. Perhaps the tastes of we, the American people, should be somewhat reshaped through arts education, or through the intervention of the New York Philharmonic. But you may, after a bit of reflection, agree with me that the government is an implausible agent of our refinement, maybe not who we ought to appoint as our critic-in-chief. The bureaucracy as tastemaker: Well, it just does not appear plausible, and it has an unwholesome history.

In 1989, Sen. Jesse Helms (R–N.C.) and others of what was then known as “the moral majority” held up NEA funding over a series of grants to avant-garde artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley. They were offended by the sexual or supposedly blasphemous content of works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artists’ urine.

The whole controversy almost ended the NEA, and emblematized the culture wars of that moment, pitting southern evangelical Christians against New York curators. Ever since, the NEA’s grantmaking has been much safer; it’s basically turned from funding individual artists to funding community arts organizations. It has largely avoided controversy over the last 20 years.

But if the arts are part of the federal budget, they are subject in a democracy to political processes, and ought to be. And as federal spending increases (and increases), keep in mind that it is liable to be supervised, after the next election or the one after that, by people whose tastes you deplore. Less than two years ago, the Trump administration promulgated the executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Architecture,” condemning modernism and instructing that all new federal buildings be designed in a classical style. A later administration might drive a revival of brutalism.

Government-funded art, that is, descends into propaganda almost no matter what its content: It expresses all sorts of things about what the ruling party wants you to be and what it wants you to see. It expresses, at best, an elaborate set of political negotiations about what sorts of creative expression are appropriate. That is very unlikely to contribute to the intensity or sincerity, the diversity and the funk, that we should associate with creativity.

Every form of arts funding (foundation grants, private sales, crowdsourcing) brings with it certain pressures and distortions, and I know artists and organizations who have done good work with NEA grants. But government funding, in which state coercive power (taxation, to begin with) underlies the grant-making, makes for art that directly serves political power and raises particularly excruciating problems with regard to the possibilities of creative expression, seen in authoritarian regimes but also in democracies. The will of the voters is only a marginally more reliable aesthetic guide than the will of the ruler, but the will of the voters should guide federal expenditures.

Almost any other way of funding the arts is preferable.

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