Incoming Teen Vogue Editor Forced To Resign Over Old Tweets


alexi

Alexi McCammond is a 27-year-old political writer and the recipient of a 2019 award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She was slated to become the next editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue.

But on Thursday, McCammond announced her resignation from that position, following outrage from staff members—and two advertisers—over some tweets that made fun of Asian people. She wrote them in 2011, when she was a teenager.

“I should not have tweeted what I did and I take full responsibility for that,” said McCammond in a statement. “I wish that talented team at Teen Vogue the absolute best moving forward.”

Conde Nest, the media company that owns Teen Vogue, was aware of the tweets when it hired McCammond, who had already apologized for them. The bosses evidently did not expect such furor from Teen Vogue staff—though that’s rather shortsighted on their part, given the large number of similar uprisings at progressive media workspaces. Even so, the perception that anti-Asian hate crimes are rising—including the possibility that the Georgia massage parlor murders were motivated by anti-Asian bias—meant it was bad timing for an incoming editor to be involved in an even tangentially related controversy.

We should be clear about a couple things. First, McCammond apologized. She apologized profusely, and she apologized repeatedly. And she did not just apologize this week, when her job was in jeopardy. She apologized back in 2019.

Second, the tweets in question are indeed offensive: a mix of anti-Asian stereotypes, and even some homophobia. But they were written when she was 17. She should not have said those things, and she is right to be sorry about it. But I doubt you could find a teenager on the planet who has never uttered something mean-spirited. We are beginning to hold people to unattainable standards. Kids are not perfect, and they make mistakes all the time. The point is to learn from them, apologize when necessary, and grow past them. Lots of people said offensive things in their adolescence; it’s just that in this case, thanks to Twitter, there is a record of her comments.

Is there no room to forgive someone for a youthful, decade-old transgression? Just look at the thoroughness of McCammond’s apology:

It wasn’t enough. It never will be. The new enforcers of morality—the pitchfork-wielding employees of progressive media companies and their swarms of social-media allies—have decided that no one may dwell in their midst unless they were born without sin. This poisonous approach will, if anything, make people more reticent to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing. Instead they’ll shrug and say, “What’s the point?”

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Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine’s Benefits Far Outweigh Risks, Say E.U. Regulators


CarVaxDreamstime

Several European countries recently paused vaccinating their citizens with the Oxford-AstraZeneca (AZ) COVID-19 vaccine, in light of scattered reports that a few patients had developed blood clotting after being inoculated. Meanwhile, the continent has been experiencing a third wave of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Now the European Medicines Agency has evaluated the risks and the benefits of being inoculated with the AZ vaccine. “The benefits of the vaccine in combating the still widespread threat of COVID-19 (which itself results in clotting problems and may be fatal) continue to outweigh the risk of side effects,” it concludes. Furthermore, “The vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots…in those who receive it.” The agency’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee added that it “was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing” blood clots.

The United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency notes that with 11 million doses of COVID-19 AZ vaccine administered so far, only five possible cases of blood clotting have been reported among the recipients.

One unfortunate side effect of the blood clot uproar will be a greater reluctance to get vaccinated with the AZ vaccine. Earlier this month, a Harris Poll in France found that just 43 percent of respondents trusted the AZ vaccine. A new poll by the Elabe Institute, published Tuesday, shows only 20 percent of the French people trusting the vaccine.

In his brilliant essay, “What is Seen and What is Unseen,” the 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat pointed out that the favorable “seen” effects of any policy often produce many disastrous “unseen” consequences. Bastiat urges us “not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen.” Unfortunately, politicians in 16 European countries focused on the few “seen” blood clots while ignoring the “unseen” thousands of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths that timely vaccination could have averted.

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Derek Chauvin Jury Selection Process Highlights Need to Stop Dumbing Down Juries


Jury

Jury selection is now proceeding for the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, in a horrific incident that touched off nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. Many aspects of the process seem calculated to exclude not only potential jurors who have strong feelings about the specific case (and thus might be biased), but also those who have any kind of relevant background knowledge about criminal justice, scientific evidence, chokeholds, and other matters. In recently published articles, both Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman and The Week columnist Bonnie Kristian argue that this situation highlights the need to change selection policies that have the effect of dumbing down juries by excluding those with the greatest potential knowledge and insight.

Here’s Kristian:

Though in some ways unusual because of the high profile of this case, the long and onerous process by which the Chauvin jury is being chosen is a window into broader dysfunction of jury selection in the United States. In theory, we are tried by a jury of our peers. In practice, however, juries are significantly selected for ignorance using standards that are increasingly unworkable in our omnipresent media environment, and the strain of jury duty is borne disproportionately by people who often don’t want to be there and can’t afford it. This is hardly conducive to justice…

Potential Chauvin jurors were sent a 16-page questionnaire in December. It probed their knowledge of the case, their media habits, political views (this isn’t a death penalty trial, but if it were, anyone with even slight moral qualms about execution would be rejected), hobbies, religion, and more….

Our jury system’s “efficiency,” as Mark Twain snarked in 1873, “is only marred by the difficulty of finding 12 men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.”

Twain was only exaggerating a little. The Chauvin questionnaire, for example, inquires if jurors have been to a Black Lives Matter protest and, if so, what their sign said. It asks if they have martial arts or chokehold training or experience in law enforcement, criminology, forensics, health care, mental health care, or civil rights issues. Any juror answering “yes” will probably be dismissed for cause.

In fact, manuals on jury selection outright advise lawyers to exclude anyone who could play the Henry Fonda role in 12 Angry Men, reasoning with fellow jurors and guiding them to a conclusion. “You don’t want smart people,” a Philadelphia prosecutor once explained, because they’ll “analyze the hell out of your case.”

Many of the questions presented to potential Chauvin jurors seem designed to screen out the very sorts of people most likely to be able to make thoughtful, well-informed decisions about  the issues in the case. That is especially true of those that focus on the respondents’ knowledge of health care, forensics, criminology, and other simlar issues. And, while the extraordinary publicity and political tensions surrounding this case are unusual, efforts to exclude knowledgeable jurors are common in more typical cases, as well.

Feldman explains how this tendency undermines a key function of jurors in the Anglo-American legal tradition, which was in part to bring to bear the collective knowledge and insight of the community:

The logic [of current practices] is understandable. We don’t want jurors to have made up their minds before hearing the evidence presented at trial. But the result is all too often the selection of jurors who are nominally neutral because they have their heads in the sand.

Choosing jurors with no meaningful knowledge of public affairs has consequences. Among other things, it entails selecting jurors who might not be able to draw upon the moral intuitions of the community that we want jurors to embody….

The criminal jury in the Anglo-American tradition used to have a very different purpose…. The medieval purpose of a jury of peers drawn from the vicinity was to make sure that the jury was full of local people who already knew the facts of the cases they would hear.

That’s right, the jurors were picked not because they were ignorant of the facts but precisely because they could be expected to know what was going on. In an era before modern police or criminal investigation, juries were proxies for detectives….

Over time, the jury gradually changed from a body that knew the facts already to a body intended to judge the facts afresh….

Under [modern practices],….  judges can keep from the jury certain information — like the fact that a crime victim has previously been arrested…. The rationale is reasonable: It could influence how the jury thinks about the case against Chauvin. Similarly, the fact that the city of Minneapolis has reached a $27 million settlement with Floyd’s family could also shape the jury’s thinking. Again, judicial exclusion might be the right answer.

The fundamental problem is that anyone who reads the news may have come across these facts already. In theory, knowing this information shouldn’t bar anyone from the jury, provided that the potential juror can credibly say that she will keep an open mind. But in practice, a judge who wants to avoid reversal on appeal has a strong incentive to exclude jurors with relevant prior knowledge.

The upshot is that it may be appropriate to take a fresh look at jurors’ level of knowledge, with the full recognition that jurors bring all kinds of prior biases to hearing cases — not just factual information.

It’s one thing to keep jurors in a bubble once the trial has begun. It’s quite another to choose jurors who have chosen to live their lives in self-imposed bubbles. Those may not be the cross-section of the public whom we want to entrust with our most high-profile criminal cases, the ones where justice is on the line not only for victims and defendants, but for the country as a whole.

For reasons I explain in a 2014 article, jury ignorance is not as severe a problem as political ignorance among voters. But it is a significant problem, nonetheless, particular in cases requiring analysis of complex evidence and those touching on broader policy issues (the Chauvin case might be an example of both). Thus, there is good reason to reform the jury selection system so as to minimize  exclusion of people who supposedly have “too much” knowledge, and perhaps even to promote greater participation by such people.

I outlined some ways to do that in a 2015 post, where I advocated limiting the ability of lawyers and judges to remove potential jurors because of their background knowledge. I also suggested this problem strengthens the case for making jury service voluntary, a reform that should be combined with paying jurors much higher wages for their time, so as to incentivize participation by more knowledgeable members of the community:

The problem of juror ignorance also strengthens the case for making jury service voluntary. As in the case of voters, those who choose to serve voluntarily may well be more knowledgeable than those who do so only because they are forced to. States could incentivize more knowledgeable citizens to serve on juries by compensating those who serve for the full value of their time.

Juries play a vital role in the legal system. But that doesn’t mean participating must be coerced, any more than we have to draft lawyers, judges, court reporters, police officers, and others who participate in the administration of justice.

Concerns that a voluntary jury system would undermine representativeness can be addressed by using randomized lotteries and (where needed) specialized sampling techniques to alleviate this problem. Compensation levels can be adjusted to ensure adequate participation by various groups. For example, the state could offer higher jury pay to those who would forego more income by serving, or to parents of small children who would have to pay additional daycare costs. The resulting jury pool might actually be more demographically representative than the current mandatory version, which includes a variety of “hardship” and other exemptions.

Kristian builds on some of my ideas in ways that I hope policymakers will consider:

Current jury pay is absurdly low: Chauvin trial jurors will be compensated the Minnesota rate of $20 per day, or $2.50 an hour for an eight-hour day. Federal jurors usually make $50 a day, which works out to $6.25 an hour, a dollar below the federal minimum wage. Pay this low unfairly imposes the cost of jury trials on an unlucky few instead of the whole citizenry. It also creates a strong incentive to avoid jury duty or perform it without due care to speed the return to normal life.

Beyond a voluntary system with decent pay, I also wonder if capping the size of jury pools could be useful. A 2015 Associated Press report on a murder trial in Louisiana said an initial jury pool of 200 people was reduced to 80 by the usual exemptions. Those remaining were considered too few to assemble a jury. Lawyers have a right — a duty — to pick the best jury they can for their client, but that degree of selectivity beggars belief.

In a more recent case, the exemptions combined with the pandemic reduced a jury pool of 150 to 19, well below the far more reasonable minimum of 31 people the court wanted to pick 12 jurors and one alternate. For all but the most unusual trials, like Chauvin’s, a post-exemption jury pool of 30 or 40 seems like enough to get a good community cross-section. It might even force attorneys to keep a few more knowledgeable jurors around.

In sum, much can be done to reduce the dumbing down of juries, while simultaneously making jury service less unfair and coercive. Perhaps the Derek Chauvin case will lead to more serious consideration of potential reforms.

NOTE: A couple short passages in this post are adapted from a 2015 piece I wrote on making jury service voluntary.

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Incoming Teen Vogue Editor Forced To Resign Over Old Tweets


alexi

Alexi McCammond is a 27-year-old political writer and the recipient of a 2019 award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She was slated to become the next editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue.

But on Thursday, McCammond announced her resignation from that position, following outrage from staff members—and two advertisers—over some tweets that made fun of Asian people. She wrote them in 2011, when she was a teenager.

“I should not have tweeted what I did and I take full responsibility for that,” said McCammond in a statement. “I wish that talented team at Teen Vogue the absolute best moving forward.”

Conde Nest, the media company that owns Teen Vogue, was aware of the tweets when it hired McCammond, who had already apologized for them. The bosses evidently did not expect such furor from Teen Vogue staff—though that’s rather shortsighted on their part, given the large number of similar uprisings at progressive media workspaces. Even so, the perception that anti-Asian hate crimes are rising—including the possibility that the Georgia massage parlor murders were motivated by anti-Asian bias—meant it was bad timing for an incoming editor to be involved in an even tangentially related controversy.

We should be clear about a couple things. First, McCammond apologized. She apologized profusely, and she apologized repeatedly. And she did not just apologize this week, when her job was in jeopardy. She apologized back in 2019.

Second, the tweets in question are indeed offensive: a mix of anti-Asian stereotypes, and even some homophobia. But they were written when she was 17. She should not have said those things, and she is right to be sorry about it. But I doubt you could find a teenager on the planet who has never uttered something mean-spirited. We are beginning to hold people to unattainable standards. Kids are not perfect, and they make mistakes all the time. The point is to learn from them, apologize when necessary, and grow past them. Lots of people said offensive things in their adolescence; it’s just that in this case, thanks to Twitter, there is a record of her comments.

Is there no room to forgive someone for a youthful, decade-old transgression? Just look at the thoroughness of McCammond’s apology:

It wasn’t enough. It never will be. The new enforcers of morality—the pitchfork-wielding employees of progressive media companies and their swarms of social-media allies—have decided that no one may dwell in their midst unless they were born without sin. This poisonous approach will, if anything, make people more reticent to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing. Instead they’ll shrug and say, “What’s the point?”

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Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine’s Benefits Far Outweigh Risks, Say E.U. Regulators


CarVaxDreamstime

Several European countries recently paused vaccinating their citizens with the Oxford-AstraZeneca (AZ) COVID-19 vaccine, in light of scattered reports that a few patients had developed blood clotting after being inoculated. Meanwhile, the continent has been experiencing a third wave of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Now the European Medicines Agency has evaluated the risks and the benefits of being inoculated with the AZ vaccine. “The benefits of the vaccine in combating the still widespread threat of COVID-19 (which itself results in clotting problems and may be fatal) continue to outweigh the risk of side effects,” it concludes. Furthermore, “The vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots…in those who receive it.” The agency’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee added that it “was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing” blood clots.

The United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency notes that with 11 million doses of COVID-19 AZ vaccine administered so far, only five possible cases of blood clotting have been reported among the recipients.

One unfortunate side effect of the blood clot uproar will be a greater reluctance to get vaccinated with the AZ vaccine. Earlier this month, a Harris Poll in France found that just 43 percent of respondents trusted the AZ vaccine. A new poll by the Elabe Institute, published Tuesday, shows only 20 percent of the French people trusting the vaccine.

In his brilliant essay, “What is Seen and What is Unseen,” the 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat pointed out that the favorable “seen” effects of any policy often produce many disastrous “unseen” consequences. Bastiat urges us “not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen.” Unfortunately, politicians in 16 European countries focused on the few “seen” blood clots while ignoring the “unseen” thousands of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths that timely vaccination could have averted.

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Derek Chauvin Jury Selection Process Highlights Need to Stop Dumbing Down Juries


Jury

Jury selection is now proceeding for the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, in a horrific incident that touched off nationwide protests against racism and police brutality. Many aspects of the process seem calculated to exclude not only potential jurors who have strong feelings about the specific case (and thus might be biased), but also those who have any kind of relevant background knowledge about criminal justice, scientific evidence, chokeholds, and other matters. In recently published articles, both Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman and The Week columnist Bonnie Kristian argue that this situation highlights the need to change selection policies that have the effect of dumbing down juries by excluding those with the greatest potential knowledge and insight.

Here’s Kristian:

Though in some ways unusual because of the high profile of this case, the long and onerous process by which the Chauvin jury is being chosen is a window into broader dysfunction of jury selection in the United States. In theory, we are tried by a jury of our peers. In practice, however, juries are significantly selected for ignorance using standards that are increasingly unworkable in our omnipresent media environment, and the strain of jury duty is borne disproportionately by people who often don’t want to be there and can’t afford it. This is hardly conducive to justice…

Potential Chauvin jurors were sent a 16-page questionnaire in December. It probed their knowledge of the case, their media habits, political views (this isn’t a death penalty trial, but if it were, anyone with even slight moral qualms about execution would be rejected), hobbies, religion, and more….

Our jury system’s “efficiency,” as Mark Twain snarked in 1873, “is only marred by the difficulty of finding 12 men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.”

Twain was only exaggerating a little. The Chauvin questionnaire, for example, inquires if jurors have been to a Black Lives Matter protest and, if so, what their sign said. It asks if they have martial arts or chokehold training or experience in law enforcement, criminology, forensics, health care, mental health care, or civil rights issues. Any juror answering “yes” will probably be dismissed for cause.

In fact, manuals on jury selection outright advise lawyers to exclude anyone who could play the Henry Fonda role in 12 Angry Men, reasoning with fellow jurors and guiding them to a conclusion. “You don’t want smart people,” a Philadelphia prosecutor once explained, because they’ll “analyze the hell out of your case.”

Many of the questions presented to potential Chauvin jurors seem designed to screen out the very sorts of people most likely to be able to make thoughtful, well-informed decisions about  the issues in the case. That is especially true of those that focus on the respondents’ knowledge of health care, forensics, criminology, and other simlar issues. And, while the extraordinary publicity and political tensions surrounding this case are unusual, efforts to exclude knowledgeable jurors are common in more typical cases, as well.

Feldman explains how this tendency undermines a key function of jurors in the Anglo-American legal tradition, which was in part to bring to bear the collective knowledge and insight of the community:

The logic [of current practices] is understandable. We don’t want jurors to have made up their minds before hearing the evidence presented at trial. But the result is all too often the selection of jurors who are nominally neutral because they have their heads in the sand.

Choosing jurors with no meaningful knowledge of public affairs has consequences. Among other things, it entails selecting jurors who might not be able to draw upon the moral intuitions of the community that we want jurors to embody….

The criminal jury in the Anglo-American tradition used to have a very different purpose…. The medieval purpose of a jury of peers drawn from the vicinity was to make sure that the jury was full of local people who already knew the facts of the cases they would hear.

That’s right, the jurors were picked not because they were ignorant of the facts but precisely because they could be expected to know what was going on. In an era before modern police or criminal investigation, juries were proxies for detectives….

Over time, the jury gradually changed from a body that knew the facts already to a body intended to judge the facts afresh….

Under [modern practices],….  judges can keep from the jury certain information — like the fact that a crime victim has previously been arrested…. The rationale is reasonable: It could influence how the jury thinks about the case against Chauvin. Similarly, the fact that the city of Minneapolis has reached a $27 million settlement with Floyd’s family could also shape the jury’s thinking. Again, judicial exclusion might be the right answer.

The fundamental problem is that anyone who reads the news may have come across these facts already. In theory, knowing this information shouldn’t bar anyone from the jury, provided that the potential juror can credibly say that she will keep an open mind. But in practice, a judge who wants to avoid reversal on appeal has a strong incentive to exclude jurors with relevant prior knowledge.

The upshot is that it may be appropriate to take a fresh look at jurors’ level of knowledge, with the full recognition that jurors bring all kinds of prior biases to hearing cases — not just factual information.

It’s one thing to keep jurors in a bubble once the trial has begun. It’s quite another to choose jurors who have chosen to live their lives in self-imposed bubbles. Those may not be the cross-section of the public whom we want to entrust with our most high-profile criminal cases, the ones where justice is on the line not only for victims and defendants, but for the country as a whole.

For reasons I explain in a 2014 article, jury ignorance is not as severe a problem as political ignorance among voters. But it is a significant problem, nonetheless, particular in cases requiring analysis of complex evidence and those touching on broader policy issues (the Chauvin case might be an example of both). Thus, there is good reason to reform the jury selection system so as to minimize  exclusion of people who supposedly have “too much” knowledge, and perhaps even to promote greater participation by such people.

I outlined some ways to do that in a 2015 post, where I advocated limiting the ability of lawyers and judges to remove potential jurors because of their background knowledge. I also suggested this problem strengthens the case for making jury service voluntary, a reform that should be combined with paying jurors much higher wages for their time, so as to incentivize participation by more knowledgeable members of the community:

The problem of juror ignorance also strengthens the case for making jury service voluntary. As in the case of voters, those who choose to serve voluntarily may well be more knowledgeable than those who do so only because they are forced to. States could incentivize more knowledgeable citizens to serve on juries by compensating those who serve for the full value of their time.

Juries play a vital role in the legal system. But that doesn’t mean participating must be coerced, any more than we have to draft lawyers, judges, court reporters, police officers, and others who participate in the administration of justice.

Concerns that a voluntary jury system would undermine representativeness can be addressed by using randomized lotteries and (where needed) specialized sampling techniques to alleviate this problem. Compensation levels can be adjusted to ensure adequate participation by various groups. For example, the state could offer higher jury pay to those who would forego more income by serving, or to parents of small children who would have to pay additional daycare costs. The resulting jury pool might actually be more demographically representative than the current mandatory version, which includes a variety of “hardship” and other exemptions.

Kristian builds on some of my ideas in ways that I hope policymakers will consider:

Current jury pay is absurdly low: Chauvin trial jurors will be compensated the Minnesota rate of $20 per day, or $2.50 an hour for an eight-hour day. Federal jurors usually make $50 a day, which works out to $6.25 an hour, a dollar below the federal minimum wage. Pay this low unfairly imposes the cost of jury trials on an unlucky few instead of the whole citizenry. It also creates a strong incentive to avoid jury duty or perform it without due care to speed the return to normal life.

Beyond a voluntary system with decent pay, I also wonder if capping the size of jury pools could be useful. A 2015 Associated Press report on a murder trial in Louisiana said an initial jury pool of 200 people was reduced to 80 by the usual exemptions. Those remaining were considered too few to assemble a jury. Lawyers have a right — a duty — to pick the best jury they can for their client, but that degree of selectivity beggars belief.

In a more recent case, the exemptions combined with the pandemic reduced a jury pool of 150 to 19, well below the far more reasonable minimum of 31 people the court wanted to pick 12 jurors and one alternate. For all but the most unusual trials, like Chauvin’s, a post-exemption jury pool of 30 or 40 seems like enough to get a good community cross-section. It might even force attorneys to keep a few more knowledgeable jurors around.

In sum, much can be done to reduce the dumbing down of juries, while simultaneously making jury service less unfair and coercive. Perhaps the Derek Chauvin case will lead to more serious consideration of potential reforms.

NOTE: A couple short passages in this post are adapted from a 2015 piece I wrote on making jury service voluntary.

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A New Frontier in the War on Meth: A 40 Percent Tax on Bongs You Can’t Use To Smoke Meth


Iowa-bong

Zerron Horton, co-owner of the Unkl Ruckus smoke shop in Des Moines, Iowa, has managed to steer his business through a flash flood in 2018, a major theft in 2019, and everything that 2020 threw at him. If Iowa legislators have their way, it might not survive 2021.

In February, the state senate unanimously passed a bill that would impose a 40 percent tax on pipes and glassware and would require retailers like Horton to pay expensive new licensing fees.

The goal of the legislation, according to bill author Sen. Dan Dawson (R–Council Bluffs), is to crack down on meth. “Metallic and glass devices that are commonly used in one of the biggest problems that Iowa has right now, which is smoking methamphetamines,” said Dawson to Radio Iowa in early March.

The legislation could spell death for businesses like Horton’s. He tells Reason the taxes “would be absolutely destroying.”

“I have 11 employees total, including me and the other owner, and I honestly can’t say with security that I would be able to keep everybody,” he says.

Dawson’s bill, S.F. 363, would apply that 40 percent tax on smoking devices, defined as “any equipment or product made in whole or in part of glass or metal, that is designed for use in inhaling through combustion tobacco, hemp, other plant materials, or a controlled substance.” Vaping devices are excluded, as are pipes made from clay, corncob, meerschaum, or briar.

The bill would also require retailers who sell those products to get a new device permit and pay a yearly $1,500 fee. Anyone shipping smoking devices directly to consumers in Iowa from out of state would also have to get a permits.

Unlike smokers of weed or tobacco, a meth smoker doesn’t apply flame directly to the drug; one heats up the outside of the paraphernalia. Traditional pipes, bongs, or bubblers wouldn’t get the job done. Only a narrow range of glassware, such as test-tube-looking devices or “bubble” pipes, are good for meth consumption.

Yet Dawson’s bill applies the same heavy tax to all smoking implements, regardless of whether they could be used to smoke meth. Meanwhile, meth users still have ways to smoke without buying devices subject to that 40 percent tax. The glass tubes that cigars come in can work in a pinch. So can aluminum foil and a plastic straw.

Dawson, who also works as an investigator with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, candidly acknowledges that home-made paraphernalia exists, but seemingly argues that pushing people toward using them would be a virtue.

Using aluminum foil to smoke meth would “create a residue on there, so that would be drug paraphernalia,” he told Radio Iowa. “But what people are doing now is they are buying these glass pipes because if they encounter law enforcement, they can throw it on the ground and smash it right away and destroy the evidence.”

That suggests Dawson’s real interest isn’t stopping people from using meth by making pipes prohibitively expensive so much as it’s making it easier for police and prosecutors to punish drug users. (Dawson did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.)

So far, S.F. 363 has been moving through the state legislature with little difficulty or debate. Indeed, most business owners who would be affected by the bill didn’t even know about it until about a week ago.

Kelly Stucker, the owner of The Konnexion in Iowa City, says she first heard about it from an old friend when they were catching up over the phone last Wednesday.

“It’s was randomly brought up,” she says. “I said, ‘Oh shit! I got to go, I need to get into action mode right now.'” She immediately started calling glass shops around the state, contacting around 30 by the end of the day.

In the past week, Stucker has also created an activist campaign from scratch, posting a change.org petition, sending form letters and talking points to store owners, and reaching out to state legislators. The effort is necessary, she says, to prevent a mortal threat to her industry.

“It’s basically a ban without being an outright ban. It’s a 40 percent tax on the retail price of a product. That’s insane,” she says. “There’s no way for me to compute that and figure out how the market is going to respond to that. It takes a $100 piece and turns it into a $140 piece. It takes a $200 piece and turns it into a $280 piece.”

So far, she saws, lawmakers from either party haven’t been responsive, which she finds incredibly disappointing.

“The left is denying Iowans the progressive policies they want. The right [is] crushing small businesses that they claim to hold so dear,” she says. “Us left-leaning libertarians in the middle are fucking homeless.”

Having passed the state senate, Dawson’s bill is currently working its way through the committee process in the Iowa House.

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A New Frontier in the War on Meth: A 40 Percent Tax on Bongs You Can’t Use To Smoke Meth


Iowa-bong

Zerron Horton, co-owner of the Unkl Ruckus smoke shop in Des Moines, Iowa, has managed to steer his business through a flash flood in 2018, a major theft in 2019, and everything that 2020 threw at him. If Iowa legislators have their way, it might not survive 2021.

In February, the state senate unanimously passed a bill that would impose a 40 percent tax on pipes and glassware and would require retailers like Horton to pay expensive new licensing fees.

The goal of the legislation, according to bill author Sen. Dan Dawson (R–Council Bluffs), is to crack down on meth. “Metallic and glass devices that are commonly used in one of the biggest problems that Iowa has right now, which is smoking methamphetamines,” said Dawson to Radio Iowa in early March.

The legislation could spell death for businesses like Horton’s. He tells Reason the taxes “would be absolutely destroying.”

“I have 11 employees total, including me and the other owner, and I honestly can’t say with security that I would be able to keep everybody,” he says.

Dawson’s bill, S.F. 363, would apply that 40 percent tax on smoking devices, defined as “any equipment or product made in whole or in part of glass or metal, that is designed for use in inhaling through combustion tobacco, hemp, other plant materials, or a controlled substance.” Vaping devices are excluded, as are pipes made from clay, corncob, meerschaum, or briar.

The bill would also require retailers who sell those products to get a new device permit and pay a yearly $1,500 fee. Anyone shipping smoking devices directly to consumers in Iowa from out of state would also have to get a permits.

Unlike smokers of weed or tobacco, a meth smoker doesn’t apply flame directly to the drug; one heats up the outside of the paraphernalia. Traditional pipes, bongs, or bubblers wouldn’t get the job done. Only a narrow range of glassware, such as test-tube-looking devices or “bubble” pipes, are good for meth consumption.

Yet Dawson’s bill applies the same heavy tax to all smoking implements, regardless of whether they could be used to smoke meth. Meanwhile, meth users still have ways to smoke without buying devices subject to that 40 percent tax. The glass tubes that cigars come in can work in a pinch. So can aluminum foil and a plastic straw.

Dawson, who also works as an investigator with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, candidly acknowledges that home-made paraphernalia exists, but seemingly argues that pushing people toward using them would be a virtue.

Using aluminum foil to smoke meth would “create a residue on there, so that would be drug paraphernalia,” he told Radio Iowa. “But what people are doing now is they are buying these glass pipes because if they encounter law enforcement, they can throw it on the ground and smash it right away and destroy the evidence.”

That suggests Dawson’s real interest isn’t stopping people from using meth by making pipes prohibitively expensive so much as it’s making it easier for police and prosecutors to punish drug users. (Dawson did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.)

So far, S.F. 363 has been moving through the state legislature with little difficulty or debate. Indeed, most business owners who would be affected by the bill didn’t even know about it until about a week ago.

Kelly Stucker, the owner of The Konnexion in Iowa City, says she first heard about it from an old friend when they were catching up over the phone last Wednesday.

“It’s was randomly brought up,” she says. “I said, ‘Oh shit! I got to go, I need to get into action mode right now.'” She immediately started calling glass shops around the state, contacting around 30 by the end of the day.

In the past week, Stucker has also created an activist campaign from scratch, posting a change.org petition, sending form letters and talking points to store owners, and reaching out to state legislators. The effort is necessary, she says, to prevent a mortal threat to her industry.

“It’s basically a ban without being an outright ban. It’s a 40 percent tax on the retail price of a product. That’s insane,” she says. “There’s no way for me to compute that and figure out how the market is going to respond to that. It takes a $100 piece and turns it into a $140 piece. It takes a $200 piece and turns it into a $280 piece.”

So far, she saws, lawmakers from either party haven’t been responsive, which she finds incredibly disappointing.

“The left is denying Iowans the progressive policies they want. The right [is] crushing small businesses that they claim to hold so dear,” she says. “Us left-leaning libertarians in the middle are fucking homeless.”

Having passed the state senate, Dawson’s bill is currently working its way through the committee process in the Iowa House.

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California Lawmakers Try Again To Create a System To Decertify Bad Cops


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After legislation was shut down by law enforcement unions last year, a California lawmaker is trying again to establish a legal process to decertify bad cops and get them off the force.

California is one of only four states (New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii being the other three) that does not have an official system to strip officers found guilty of misconduct of their badges, meaning that even when a cop gets fired for bad behavior, he or she can just go to another city and get rehired onto another force.

Massachusetts used to be in the same boat, but lawmakers passed a law that took effect this year to create a decertification process. In California, state Sen. Steven Bradford (D–Gardena) introduced similar legislation that died right at the finish line last September as resistance from police unions prevented it from passing.

According to Courthouse News Service, Bradford has made changes to his bill to address some due process concerns that law enforcement representatives had, and now it’s back as S.B. 2. Within California’s existing Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, it will create the Peace Officers Standards Accountability Division. The division will have the power to investigate police and decertify them if they’ve broken the law or engaged in serious misconduct like filing false reports, destroying or concealing evidence, tampering with their body cameras, abusing their police powers, and a host of other inappropriate behaviors.

Bradford’s new bill still keeps one of the sticking points from last year’s bill: This new commission will only have two people on it with police backgrounds. The remaining six members of the commission cannot be current or former officers. So while police representatives will have a voice on the commission, they’ll be outnumbered by civilians, including two who themselves were either victims of police abuse or relatives of a victim. Last year, representatives from police unions complained that this meant the board would be “inherently biased against officers,” but that part seems to be staying.

Also in S.B. 2 is a reform, but not a complete elimination, of the state’s civil qualified immunity regulations. Qualified immunity rules often shield law enforcement officers from being held financially responsible when they violate somebody’s rights. It’s a terrible policy, essentially giving permission to police to violate rights and get away with it. In the last two years of police reform activism, we’ve been seeing increasing efforts to eliminate it.

S.B. 2 unfortunately does not eliminate qualified immunity in the state, but it does make it easier for victims of police abuse to make a case against them. Currently, California’s regulations require that anybody attempting to sue a police officer for violating his or her rights prove that the officer had a “specific intent” to do so. That means reckless and irresponsible behavior by an officer could still be protected if the cop didn’t actually intend to cause harm to others. Conversely, S.B. 2 allows for “deliberate indifference or reckless disregard” to be sufficient to bring about a lawsuit.

Both reforms would significantly make it easier in California to hold law enforcement officers responsible for misconduct. Let’s see if lawmakers will be able to get it past the state’s powerful police unions this year.

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When It Comes to Policy, Biden and Trump Aren’t That Different


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Several of my friends have expressed relief now that Joe Biden is president and Donald Trump is gone. They no longer have to watch the news constantly, declaring that they know “the country is now in good hands.”

There’s no way to defend Trump’s poor behavior and insulting style. Yet, there is more to a president than his decorum. And on at least three signature Trump policies for which he’ll be remembered the most, often with dread, the similarities between Biden and Trump are unsettling.

Take immigration. President Biden campaigned against separating migrant kids from their families at the border. But, sadly, such separations are still happening. In fact, February 2021 recorded a 61 percent increase over January. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “The Washington Post reports that more than 8,500 migrant children are at facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services, while another 3,500—’the highest figure ever’—are stuck at [Customs and Border Patrol] stations waiting for a spot to open at the shelters.”

While the Biden administration promised an end to Trump’s immigration policies, the sheer number of kids effectively still locked up in deplorable conditions exposes the Biden administration’s delayed action—or possibly unwillingness—to reform the underlying policies that drive migrant children to show up unaccompanied at the border.

For starters, families who show up to ask for asylum are sent back, while unaccompanied children who cross the border will get into the country. That’s an incentive to send kids alone. Moreover, it’s still the policy to separate children from their more distant relatives when they show up at the border. These rules, combined with the large population that has built up over time under Trump, explains part of the increase in these border detentions.

What’s more, the Cato Institute’s immigration expert David Bier wrote recently that the Biden administration’s changes to the “remain in Mexico” policy make the situation even worse. Families that try to cross together are still sent back to Mexico; however, unlike under the Trump administration, they aren’t given a court date to make their case for asylum, or any sort of asylum process, for that matter. They are just sent back to wait in Mexico. Wait for what? It’s unclear.

Biden seems to have also embraced much of the same Trump trade agenda that many on the left used to criticize as protectionist, politically driven, and unnecessarily aggressive toward our trading partners. They were also rightfully critical of his abuse of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which authorizes the president to impose tariffs in the name of national security. Unfortunately, so far, Trumpian-style abuses continue under this new administration. The Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome and Inu Manak note that Biden’s first trade action was to reinstate “tariffs on aluminum from the United Arab Emirates under Section 232.”

While it’s still too early in the administration’s term to be sure what will happen next, there are reasons to worry that Biden will not do much to roll back Trump’s cronyist protectionism. The new administration has yet to remove Trump’s 25 percent national security tariffs on most imported steel. Other tariffs also remain in place at the expense of U.S. consumers. The administration says it’s reviewing the levies, though there’s no guarantee that it will remove them, as it has signaled that it may be as protectionist as the Trump administration. Powerful evidence on this from is Biden’s nonsensical “Buy American” policy.

Finally, there’s little daylight between the Trump and Biden administrations on industrial policy. While each may come at the issue from different angles, the support for industrial policy offered by Trump, Biden and their followers is very similar. They suffer from the same delusion that it’s an innovative idea, or that it will yield different outcomes from when it was tried in the past. It also exhibits pervasive errors in economic thinking and demonstrates an arrogant confidence that bureaucrats have sufficient knowledge to steer the economy in whatever direction they desire.

Biden shares other traits with Trump, such as his fiscal irresponsibility, a willingness to bomb foreign countries, and a soft spot for defense spending. So yeah, Trump is gone, but for those still paying attention and still watching the news, we realize that many of his policies are still firmly in place.

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