Category: reason

Understanding Ellison

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, Random House, 1,060 pages, $50

I first met the American novelist Ralph Ellison in the summer of 1963, when he gave a reading to a small audience at Columbia University. Beside me was the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who introduced me to the author. Since I then lived at the southern end of Harlem (as it bordered on Columbia) and Ellison lived in a northwest enclave on Riverside Drive, he invited me to his home.

Few writers visited that apartment—it was off their map, even though it was only a few miles north of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the favored cultural turf for Ellison’s literary generation. Overlooking the lordly Hudson, it was filled with art, the latest technologies, and musical instruments, some of which he played for me. On one visit I recall him fingering part of a Brandenburg Concerto on his recorder.

In 1965, when the BBC asked me to do film portraits of New York writers, Ellison was my first choice. A little later, when contracted to do a book of extended profiles of major American artists and intellectuals, it seemed appropriate to feature him alongside John Cage, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, and Herman Kahn.

I particularly admired Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), not only for its rich style but for its intellectual complexity. In lush prose reminiscent of William Faulkner, whose influence Ellison acknowledged, the novel tells of a nameless narrator’s life. Its events range from an unfortunate experience at a black college in the American South to the protagonist’s disappointments in New York City, where he suffers a terrifying experience in a paint factory and then meets semblances of Communists and black nationalists, all vividly portrayed, before retreating into the artificially illuminated underground cave from which he’s remembering his life. Some early readers thought the book autobiographical, which it wasn’t. Nor was it meant to “protest” maltreatment of African Americans—one theme in Ellison’s own commentary on the book is that the narrator, who doesn’t even know his own name, is responsible for his own invisibility. That Invisible Man can be persuasively read in such different ways is a measure of its richness.

I thought I knew Ellison as well as anyone else a generation younger than he, but The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, now appearing a quarter-century after his death, tells me much that I didn’t know. Within its thousand pages is—notwithstanding some repetition as Ellison retells the same stories—a richer portrait of the man than any previous scholar of his work had made.

The first theme of this book is that Ellison got better as a writer. Much better. Formally a music major at Tuskegee College—a degree he didn’t complete—he did miscellaneous work around New York City, met the established authors Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and got married and divorced and then remarried, all before joining the Merchant Marine during World War II. Only after returning home, when he was already in his 30s, did Ellison move to Vermont to concentrate on his writing. Unlike some “born novelists,” he was a late beginner; he never took a “writing workshop.” If he ever read any British literature, it doesn’t show.

Among Ellison’s Vermont neighbors were Hyman and his wife, the novelist Shirley Jackson. Here he drafted the scenes that became Invisible Man, and his personal letters got better as well. My own hunch, not shared by Ellison scholars, is that Hyman, not only as a supportive colleague but as a critic with a highly developed sense of structure, helped put the parts together. (Only parts of his second novel ever appeared. Brilliant though they often were, neither he nor anyone else could put them together in his lifetime.)

Ellison’s letters incidentally document how close he was in the early 1950s to the novelist Saul Bellow, nearly an exact contemporary, then likewise aspiring and ambitious, with whom he shared a wreck of a house in the Hudson River Valley. They also portray the importance of his early life in Oklahoma City, where he was born and lived until he was 20, never to return. Many of the richest and longest letters went to people from there, some of whom he hadn’t seen for decades. Other letters recall at length his early experiences with his younger brother, Herbert.

An additional theme is how minimal was Ellison’s contact with New York writers. His closest literary friend was Albert L. Murray, a few years behind him at Tuskegee, who likewise resided in Harlem.

Ellison in his letters gradually becomes more comfortable and adept at writing extended expository prose. Since he didn’t do much writing in college (and never went to graduate school), longer exposition was a form he was slow to master. These longer letters in turn reminded me that, while his second novel remained forever unfinished, Ellison wrote some remarkable essays, various in length (and often clumsily structured), usually about African-American culture. One profound theme that recurs in them is that, though white and black America have mostly lived separately and unequally, they have interacted and are entwined in a uniquely American experience.

My own favorite, “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station,” describes how Ellison had to go to New York City to discover the truth of his Tuskegee piano teacher’s advice that when anyone performs before an audience, he or she must reach everyone within the space. Working around 1935 as a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer in San Juan Hill (now the site of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center), Ellison hears four large black “coal heavers” in a basement arguing about the divas at the Metropolitan Opera. When he finally asks them how they know so much about sopranos, one explains that they worked a gig there, as the Egyptians in Verdi’s Aida.

Another recurring theme is Ellison’s individualism. Never would he allow himself or his work to be put into a box containing only African Americans. It wasn’t that he disliked his fellow blacks—they were his neighbors—but that he thought literary segregation confined him to a minor league. Especially in refuting the bullying critic Irving Howe and, later, black activists a generation younger, Ellison vehemently refused roles and purposes assigned to him. Indeed, he could be personally truculent.

Other invaluable letters have Ellison responding in detail about his intentions in particular scenes in his novel, which he remembered very well, though he confesses in passing that he didn’t reread it. Though he studied European music, he writes only about Americans here, just as he did in 2001’s Living with Music, a posthumous book collecting his music essays. I cannot think of another American writer whose culture was so thoroughly indigenous.

The most explanatory messages are directed to the man he chose as his unlikely literary executor, John F. Callahan, a white literature professor at a small Oregon college who’d never before been entrusted with such responsibility. In the years since Ellison’s death, Callahan has prepared and published different editions of Ellison’s long unfinished second novel, in addition to editing definitive collections of Ellison’s essays and shorter fictions. Along with a younger academic, Marc C. Conner of Washington and Lee University, Callahan edited and annotated The Selected Letters.

If you’ve not read Ellison before, please start with his classic novel, which you won’t forget, and then the single volume of collected essays mentioned earlier. (It includes “The Little Man.”) Then you can tackle this valuable brick of a book.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33o1lab
via IFTTT

Understanding Ellison

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, Random House, 1,060 pages, $50

I first met the American novelist Ralph Ellison in the summer of 1963, when he gave a reading to a small audience at Columbia University. Beside me was the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who introduced me to the author. Since I then lived at the southern end of Harlem (as it bordered on Columbia) and Ellison lived in a northwest enclave on Riverside Drive, he invited me to his home.

Few writers visited that apartment—it was off their map, even though it was only a few miles north of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the favored cultural turf for Ellison’s literary generation. Overlooking the lordly Hudson, it was filled with art, the latest technologies, and musical instruments, some of which he played for me. On one visit I recall him fingering part of a Brandenburg Concerto on his recorder.

In 1965, when the BBC asked me to do film portraits of New York writers, Ellison was my first choice. A little later, when contracted to do a book of extended profiles of major American artists and intellectuals, it seemed appropriate to feature him alongside John Cage, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Rauschenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, and Herman Kahn.

I particularly admired Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), not only for its rich style but for its intellectual complexity. In lush prose reminiscent of William Faulkner, whose influence Ellison acknowledged, the novel tells of a nameless narrator’s life. Its events range from an unfortunate experience at a black college in the American South to the protagonist’s disappointments in New York City, where he suffers a terrifying experience in a paint factory and then meets semblances of Communists and black nationalists, all vividly portrayed, before retreating into the artificially illuminated underground cave from which he’s remembering his life. Some early readers thought the book autobiographical, which it wasn’t. Nor was it meant to “protest” maltreatment of African Americans—one theme in Ellison’s own commentary on the book is that the narrator, who doesn’t even know his own name, is responsible for his own invisibility. That Invisible Man can be persuasively read in such different ways is a measure of its richness.

I thought I knew Ellison as well as anyone else a generation younger than he, but The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, now appearing a quarter-century after his death, tells me much that I didn’t know. Within its thousand pages is—notwithstanding some repetition as Ellison retells the same stories—a richer portrait of the man than any previous scholar of his work had made.

The first theme of this book is that Ellison got better as a writer. Much better. Formally a music major at Tuskegee College—a degree he didn’t complete—he did miscellaneous work around New York City, met the established authors Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and got married and divorced and then remarried, all before joining the Merchant Marine during World War II. Only after returning home, when he was already in his 30s, did Ellison move to Vermont to concentrate on his writing. Unlike some “born novelists,” he was a late beginner; he never took a “writing workshop.” If he ever read any British literature, it doesn’t show.

Among Ellison’s Vermont neighbors were Hyman and his wife, the novelist Shirley Jackson. Here he drafted the scenes that became Invisible Man, and his personal letters got better as well. My own hunch, not shared by Ellison scholars, is that Hyman, not only as a supportive colleague but as a critic with a highly developed sense of structure, helped put the parts together. (Only parts of his second novel ever appeared. Brilliant though they often were, neither he nor anyone else could put them together in his lifetime.)

Ellison’s letters incidentally document how close he was in the early 1950s to the novelist Saul Bellow, nearly an exact contemporary, then likewise aspiring and ambitious, with whom he shared a wreck of a house in the Hudson River Valley. They also portray the importance of his early life in Oklahoma City, where he was born and lived until he was 20, never to return. Many of the richest and longest letters went to people from there, some of whom he hadn’t seen for decades. Other letters recall at length his early experiences with his younger brother, Herbert.

An additional theme is how minimal was Ellison’s contact with New York writers. His closest literary friend was Albert L. Murray, a few years behind him at Tuskegee, who likewise resided in Harlem.

Ellison in his letters gradually becomes more comfortable and adept at writing extended expository prose. Since he didn’t do much writing in college (and never went to graduate school), longer exposition was a form he was slow to master. These longer letters in turn reminded me that, while his second novel remained forever unfinished, Ellison wrote some remarkable essays, various in length (and often clumsily structured), usually about African-American culture. One profound theme that recurs in them is that, though white and black America have mostly lived separately and unequally, they have interacted and are entwined in a uniquely American experience.

My own favorite, “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station,” describes how Ellison had to go to New York City to discover the truth of his Tuskegee piano teacher’s advice that when anyone performs before an audience, he or she must reach everyone within the space. Working around 1935 as a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer in San Juan Hill (now the site of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center), Ellison hears four large black “coal heavers” in a basement arguing about the divas at the Metropolitan Opera. When he finally asks them how they know so much about sopranos, one explains that they worked a gig there, as the Egyptians in Verdi’s Aida.

Another recurring theme is Ellison’s individualism. Never would he allow himself or his work to be put into a box containing only African Americans. It wasn’t that he disliked his fellow blacks—they were his neighbors—but that he thought literary segregation confined him to a minor league. Especially in refuting the bullying critic Irving Howe and, later, black activists a generation younger, Ellison vehemently refused roles and purposes assigned to him. Indeed, he could be personally truculent.

Other invaluable letters have Ellison responding in detail about his intentions in particular scenes in his novel, which he remembered very well, though he confesses in passing that he didn’t reread it. Though he studied European music, he writes only about Americans here, just as he did in 2001’s Living with Music, a posthumous book collecting his music essays. I cannot think of another American writer whose culture was so thoroughly indigenous.

The most explanatory messages are directed to the man he chose as his unlikely literary executor, John F. Callahan, a white literature professor at a small Oregon college who’d never before been entrusted with such responsibility. In the years since Ellison’s death, Callahan has prepared and published different editions of Ellison’s long unfinished second novel, in addition to editing definitive collections of Ellison’s essays and shorter fictions. Along with a younger academic, Marc C. Conner of Washington and Lee University, Callahan edited and annotated The Selected Letters.

If you’ve not read Ellison before, please start with his classic novel, which you won’t forget, and then the single volume of collected essays mentioned earlier. (It includes “The Little Man.”) Then you can tackle this valuable brick of a book.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33o1lab
via IFTTT

Seattle Courts: Jury Trials Suspended, Whether Civil or Criminal, Some Bench Trials Going Ahead

Seattle Times (Sara Jean Green) reports that King County (Wash.) Superior Court has postponed all jury trials until April 24:

“Social distancing during jury selection and jury trials is nearly impossible,” the order says.

The order acknowledges that criminal defendants have a right to a speedy trial but says that, as of Friday, the danger of the virus is too great.

“It constitutes an unavoidable circumstance beyond the control of the court and the parties,” Rogers’ order states.

Neighboring Pierce County and Snohomish County are implementing similar rules, though some bench trials are still progressing; I quote the Pierce County rules:

  • All jury trials will be suspended through April 24th, except those already in progress.
  • Civil jury trials, except those already in progress, will either be continued or heard as a bench trial by agreement of the parties.
  • All criminal jury trials, except those already in progress, will either be continued or heard as a bench trial by waiver of a jury trial….
  • Jurors summoned during those dates are excused from service….
  • The court is encouraging telephonic appearance.
  • Non-jury trials are not affected.  They will proceed as scheduled.

Thanks to Mark S. Leen for the pointers.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33s4hmp
via IFTTT

Seattle Courts: Jury Trials Suspended, Whether Civil or Criminal, Some Bench Trials Going Ahead

Seattle Times (Sara Jean Green) reports that King County (Wash.) Superior Court has postponed all jury trials until April 24:

“Social distancing during jury selection and jury trials is nearly impossible,” the order says.

The order acknowledges that criminal defendants have a right to a speedy trial but says that, as of Friday, the danger of the virus is too great.

“It constitutes an unavoidable circumstance beyond the control of the court and the parties,” Rogers’ order states.

Neighboring Pierce County and Snohomish County are implementing similar rules, though some bench trials are still progressing; I quote the Pierce County rules:

  • All jury trials will be suspended through April 24th, except those already in progress.
  • Civil jury trials, except those already in progress, will either be continued or heard as a bench trial by agreement of the parties.
  • All criminal jury trials, except those already in progress, will either be continued or heard as a bench trial by waiver of a jury trial….
  • Jurors summoned during those dates are excused from service….
  • The court is encouraging telephonic appearance.
  • Non-jury trials are not affected.  They will proceed as scheduled.

Thanks to Mark S. Leen for the pointers.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33s4hmp
via IFTTT

After a State-Authorized Medical Marijuana Patient Had an Epileptic Seizure and Crashed Her Car, Police Arrested Her for Driving With ‘Marjuana in Her System’

Beth Repp, a registered medical marijuana patient in Pennsylvania, crashed her car in Pittsburgh last September after suffering an epileptic seizure. Adding insult to injury, police arrested Repp and charged her with driving under the influence because “blood tests showed marijuana in her system.” Now Repp is challenging Pennsylvania’s unjust and unscientific definition of stoned driving, which effectively criminalizes driving by anyone who uses medical marijuana in compliance with state law.

Under Pennsylvania’s DUI law, a defendant is automatically guilty of driving under the influence—a misdemeanor punishable by a 12-month license suspension, a maximum fine of $5,000, and up to six months in jail—if he operates a motor vehicle with “any amount” of a Schedule I substance or a “metabolite” of that substance in his blood. That definition is irrational on its face, since THC can be detected in blood long after its psychoactive effects have worn off and metabolites have no impact on driving ability. The eminent forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who has joined Repp’s defense team, is expected to make those points when he testifies as an expert witness.

According to Repp’s lawyer, Patrick Nightingale, she consumed marijuana “many hours” before her accident. Her THC blood concentration was 8.1 nanograms per milliliter, which is not unusual for a medical marijuana user and does not necessarily indicate impairment. THC blood levels are not a reliable indicator of impairment in general, and that is especially true when “any amount” of THC or even its inactive metabolites is sufficient for a DUI conviction. THC can be detected in the blood of daily cannabis consumers for up to a month after last use.

Under Pennsylvania’s “zero tolerance” standard, any patient who regularly uses marijuana for symptom relief will always be breaking the law when he drives. “We have over 200,000 patients registered in Pennsylvania right now,” Nightingale told WPXI, the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, “and every single one of us is DUI 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year if we’re using medical cannabis under Pennsylvania law.”

By contrast, patients who use prescription opioids are allowed to drive in Pennsylvania unless they are “impaired.” In a motion he filed last month, Nightingale argues that the DUI charge against Repp should be dismissed because the disparate treatment of marijuana and opioids violates her constitutional right to equal protection of the law. Pennsylvania’s standard for marijuana DUIs, he says, “is not rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest as it criminalizes behavior that has nothing to do with impairment.” Nightingale notes that “THC’s non-psychoactive metabolite can be detected for days, weeks and in some cases months after cessation of cannabis use.” He adds that appeals courts in Arizona and Michigan “have rejected THC metabolites as sufficient to sustain a DUI conviction for medical cannabis patients in those states.”

Nightingale also argues that keeping marijuana in Schedule I of Pennsylvania’s Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category that is supposed to be reserved for dangerous drugs with a high abuse potential and “no currently accepted medical use,” is irrational because “marijuana clearly has medical efficacy.” Thirty-four states, including Pennsylvania, recognize marijuana as a medicine. “Pennsylvania patients and recreational consumers are denied equal protection of law,” Nightingale writes, when “one statute claims no medical efficacy and another creates a medical cannabis production and distribution program estimated to benefit over 261,000 Pennsylvanians.”

The Pennsylvania Superior Court, Nightingale notes in a supplementary motion he filed on March 3, last year held that “medical marijuana,” as opposed to “marihuana” in general, is not a substance listed in Schedule I. The court noted that Pennsylvania’s Medical Marijuana Act (MMA), which the legislature approved in 2016, “provides a very limited and controlled vehicle for the legal use of medical marijuana.” It added that “outside the MMA, marijuana remains a prohibited Schedule I controlled substance for the general citizenry who are unqualified under the MMA.”

The implication seems to be that the marijuana used by Repp was not “a prohibited Schedule I controlled substance” like the ones to which the DUI law refers. “If the court accepts that medical marijuana isn’t Schedule I,” Nightingale tells me, “then all Pennsylvania patients are potentially protected.”

In the 2019 case, the Superior Court rejected an equal protection claim by a defendant (also represented by Nightingale) who was charged with possessing marijuana for sale. “We hold that the CSA and the MMA can be read in harmony and given full effect,” the court said, since “the MMA was not intended to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I substances under the CSA” but rather to “provide a controlled program for lawful access to medical marijuana under specific circumstances and criteria for special medical needs.” A three-judge panel of the appeals court concluded that marijuana’s Schedule I status “does not violate equal protection on the grounds that it treats similarly situated citizens disparately.”

That case, unlike Repp’s, did not involve a DUI charge or a patient authorized by the state to use marijuana as a medicine. The decision therefore did not address an equal protection claim based on the disparate treatment of marijuana and other legal medications under Pennsylvania’s DUI law.

State Rep. Chris Rabb (D–Philadelphia), who is himself a registered medical marijuana user, has introduced a bill aimed at eliminating that disparity by creating a medical exception to the zero-tolerance rule. “Law enforcement can reasonably determine if someone is impaired through basic protocols,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It doesn’t matter what is impairing you. Sleeplessness can impair driving. Scores of pharmaceutical medicines can impair driving. I don’t care what a person is doing or ingesting; it’s the impairment that poses the danger. That’s what needs to be addressed.” If the aim is protecting the public from the danger posed by impaired drivers, of course, that approach makes sense for any psychoactive substance, regardless of its legal status or the motivation for using it.

Repp told WPXI that prosecutors urged her to take advantage of Pennsylvania’s “accelerated rehabilitative disposition” program, which allows certain nonviolent offenders to avoid a criminal record by complying with court-ordered requirements such as counseling, community service, paying court costs, and monitored abstinence from drugs and alcohol. “They are looking at me like I’m a drug addict or an alcoholic,” she said. “[They] keep saying to me, ‘Well, that’s not pleading guilty. It’s not an admission of guilt.’ Yes, it is an admission of guilt, when I have done nothing wrong.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2IHBr7V
via IFTTT

After a State-Authorized Medical Marijuana Patient Had an Epileptic Seizure and Crashed Her Car, Police Arrested Her for Driving With ‘Marjuana in Her System’

Beth Repp, a registered medical marijuana patient in Pennsylvania, crashed her car in Pittsburgh last September after suffering an epileptic seizure. Adding insult to injury, police arrested Repp and charged her with driving under the influence because “blood tests showed marijuana in her system.” Now Repp is challenging Pennsylvania’s unjust and unscientific definition of stoned driving, which effectively criminalizes driving by anyone who uses medical marijuana in compliance with state law.

Under Pennsylvania’s DUI law, a defendant is automatically guilty of driving under the influence—a misdemeanor punishable by a 12-month license suspension, a maximum fine of $5,000, and up to six months in jail—if he operates a motor vehicle with “any amount” of a Schedule I substance or a “metabolite” of that substance in his blood. That definition is irrational on its face, since THC can be detected in blood long after its psychoactive effects have worn off and metabolites have no impact on driving ability. The eminent forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who has joined Repp’s defense team, is expected to make those points when he testifies as an expert witness.

According to Repp’s lawyer, Patrick Nightingale, she consumed marijuana “many hours” before her accident. Her THC blood concentration was 8.1 nanograms per milliliter, which is not unusual for a medical marijuana user and does not necessarily indicate impairment. THC blood levels are not a reliable indicator of impairment in general, and that is especially true when “any amount” of THC or even its inactive metabolites is sufficient for a DUI conviction. THC can be detected in the blood of daily cannabis consumers for up to a month after last use.

Under Pennsylvania’s “zero tolerance” standard, any patient who regularly uses marijuana for symptom relief will always be breaking the law when he drives. “We have over 200,000 patients registered in Pennsylvania right now,” Nightingale told WPXI, the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh, “and every single one of us is DUI 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year if we’re using medical cannabis under Pennsylvania law.”

By contrast, patients who use prescription opioids are allowed to drive in Pennsylvania unless they are “impaired.” In a motion he filed last month, Nightingale argues that the DUI charge against Repp should be dismissed because the disparate treatment of marijuana and opioids violates her constitutional right to equal protection of the law. Pennsylvania’s standard for marijuana DUIs, he says, “is not rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest as it criminalizes behavior that has nothing to do with impairment.” Nightingale notes that “THC’s non-psychoactive metabolite can be detected for days, weeks and in some cases months after cessation of cannabis use.” He adds that appeals courts in Arizona and Michigan “have rejected THC metabolites as sufficient to sustain a DUI conviction for medical cannabis patients in those states.”

Nightingale also argues that keeping marijuana in Schedule I of Pennsylvania’s Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category that is supposed to be reserved for dangerous drugs with a high abuse potential and “no currently accepted medical use,” is irrational because “marijuana clearly has medical efficacy.” Thirty-four states, including Pennsylvania, recognize marijuana as a medicine. “Pennsylvania patients and recreational consumers are denied equal protection of law,” Nightingale writes, when “one statute claims no medical efficacy and another creates a medical cannabis production and distribution program estimated to benefit over 261,000 Pennsylvanians.”

The Pennsylvania Superior Court, Nightingale notes in a supplementary motion he filed on March 3, last year held that “medical marijuana,” as opposed to “marihuana” in general, is not a substance listed in Schedule I. The court noted that Pennsylvania’s Medical Marijuana Act (MMA), which the legislature approved in 2016, “provides a very limited and controlled vehicle for the legal use of medical marijuana.” It added that “outside the MMA, marijuana remains a prohibited Schedule I controlled substance for the general citizenry who are unqualified under the MMA.”

The implication seems to be that the marijuana used by Repp was not “a prohibited Schedule I controlled substance” like the ones to which the DUI law refers. “If the court accepts that medical marijuana isn’t Schedule I,” Nightingale tells me, “then all Pennsylvania patients are potentially protected.”

In the 2019 case, the Superior Court rejected an equal protection claim by a defendant (also represented by Nightingale) who was charged with possessing marijuana for sale. “We hold that the CSA and the MMA can be read in harmony and given full effect,” the court said, since “the MMA was not intended to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I substances under the CSA” but rather to “provide a controlled program for lawful access to medical marijuana under specific circumstances and criteria for special medical needs.” A three-judge panel of the appeals court concluded that marijuana’s Schedule I status “does not violate equal protection on the grounds that it treats similarly situated citizens disparately.”

That case, unlike Repp’s, did not involve a DUI charge or a patient authorized by the state to use marijuana as a medicine. The decision therefore did not address an equal protection claim based on the disparate treatment of marijuana and other legal medications under Pennsylvania’s DUI law.

State Rep. Chris Rabb (D–Philadelphia), who is himself a registered medical marijuana user, has introduced a bill aimed at eliminating that disparity by creating a medical exception to the zero-tolerance rule. “Law enforcement can reasonably determine if someone is impaired through basic protocols,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It doesn’t matter what is impairing you. Sleeplessness can impair driving. Scores of pharmaceutical medicines can impair driving. I don’t care what a person is doing or ingesting; it’s the impairment that poses the danger. That’s what needs to be addressed.” If the aim is protecting the public from the danger posed by impaired drivers, of course, that approach makes sense for any psychoactive substance, regardless of its legal status or the motivation for using it.

Repp told WPXI that prosecutors urged her to take advantage of Pennsylvania’s “accelerated rehabilitative disposition” program, which allows certain nonviolent offenders to avoid a criminal record by complying with court-ordered requirements such as counseling, community service, paying court costs, and monitored abstinence from drugs and alcohol. “They are looking at me like I’m a drug addict or an alcoholic,” she said. “[They] keep saying to me, ‘Well, that’s not pleading guilty. It’s not an admission of guilt.’ Yes, it is an admission of guilt, when I have done nothing wrong.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2IHBr7V
via IFTTT

Coronavirus Is Going To Be Expensive. Too Bad the Government Is Already in Massive Debt.

While delivering an address Friday afternoon to declare a national emergency and outline plans for billions of dollars in emergency spending to combat the COVID-19 virus, President Donald Trump paused for a rare moment of reflection.

In addition to responding to the current coronavirus crisis, Trump said, the federal government would have to make changes to be better prepared for a similar event in the future. You hope that doesn’t happen, he said, “but it will, I guess. Somewhere out there. [We’ve] had some bad ones over the years.”

It’s a shame he’s three years too late in realizing that.

During Trump’s first three years in office, he’s signed off on spending plans that added at least $4.7 trillion to the national debt. The debt totals more than $23 trillion, a record high. When measured against the size of the economy, it is approaching the all-time record set during World War II. Annual budget deficits are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the rest of the decade, at least. The Government Accountability Office has called the nation’s fiscal trajectory “unsustainable.”

Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he’d be able to pay off the national debt in eight years. That was always a pretty laughable idea, but once in office, Trump was the one laughing off worries about overspending. “I won’t be here” when the national debt becomes a crisis, Trump reportedly said during one Oval Office discussion about the issue.

But the “bad one” is here now. And Trump is still in office.

The bad ones aren’t always pandemics. Sometimes they are wars or massive terrorist incidents. Sometimes they are the result of government-inflated housing bubbles popping. Sometimes they’re just part of the business cycle. But they always come, and you can rarely predict them.

When they do happen, another thing you can count on is a governmental response that involves spending more money—to help people who lose jobs, to prop-up whole industries, or just to stimulate the stock market—at a time when tax revenues are almost certain to fall. Much of that spending will be counterproductive or, worse, wasteful cronyism. But it will happen regardless. This time, the Trump administration and House Democrats are currently negotiating a massive spending package (perhaps as much as $50 billion) that is likely to include paid sick leave for workers, expanded welfare programs, and a bailout for travel industries.

“The federal government will unleash every authority, resource, and tool at our disposal,” Trump said Friday.

Trump’s favored solution, a payroll tax cut that would extend through November, would reduce federal revenues by an estimated $840 billion.

The “bad ones,” in other words, are a recipe for growing deficits. That was true during World War II and after 9/11. It was true during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. We can debate the merits of aggressive, expensive government response to crisis all day, but the more important lesson provided by all those previous historical examples is to be prepared for them. That means keeping deficits in check—or, goodness, could we dream of eliminating them entirely?

The past decade was a good opportunity to do that. Great, even. Since the last recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth through the end of 2019. That’s the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America’s gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25 percent.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but that winning streak appears to be at an end. How did we handle that decade of good times? Mostly by pretending the “bad ones” would never come. Here’s what I wrote in January:

Hanging over this decade of good news is the gloom of a missed opportunity. After piling up trillions of dollars in deficit spending during the last recession, the federal government took some modest steps towards reducing that red ink during the middle years of the 2010s. But after Republicans took full control in 2017, spending skyrocketed and the deficit inflated again….

Compare all this with early 2001, at the end of the second-longest economic expansion in history. The federal government was running a surplus. The national debt was falling and amounted to only 31 percent of GDP. That’s what you’d expect to see now, since deficits typically fall when the economy is growing and grow when the economy is rotten.

Any huge spending or tax cut in response to the coronavirus will only accelerate the nation’s ongoing budget crisis. If the deficit jumps, it may have knock-on effects that slow growth or hike interest rates on America’s borrowing—thus making the debt an even heavier burden. Having failed to be fiscally responsible when it would have been relatively easier, our elected officials now face an impossible choice: oppose politically popular deficit spending in response to the coronavirus outbreak, or try to stimulate growth by backing policies that will harm the country’s long term economic stability. They will almost certainly (with a few exceptions) choose the former.

The final twist is that the stimulus spending may not help at all. As I’ve detailed before, the coronavirus outbreak is primarily a supply-side disruption to the economy—and that means demand-increasing stimulus policies likely won’t work.

In short: We will end up spending money we don’t have to solve a crisis that can’t be fixed by spending more money.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33felic
via IFTTT

Coronavirus Is Going To Be Expensive. Too Bad the Government Is Already in Massive Debt.

While delivering an address Friday afternoon to declare a national emergency and outline plans for billions of dollars in emergency spending to combat the COVID-19 virus, President Donald Trump paused for a rare moment of reflection.

In addition to responding to the current coronavirus crisis, Trump said, the federal government would have to make changes to be better prepared for a similar event in the future. You hope that doesn’t happen, he said, “but it will, I guess. Somewhere out there. [We’ve] had some bad ones over the years.”

It’s a shame he’s three years too late in realizing that.

During Trump’s first three years in office, he’s signed off on spending plans that added at least $4.7 trillion to the national debt. The debt totals more than $23 trillion, a record high. When measured against the size of the economy, it is approaching the all-time record set during World War II. Annual budget deficits are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the rest of the decade, at least. The Government Accountability Office has called the nation’s fiscal trajectory “unsustainable.”

Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he’d be able to pay off the national debt in eight years. That was always a pretty laughable idea, but once in office, Trump was the one laughing off worries about overspending. “I won’t be here” when the national debt becomes a crisis, Trump reportedly said during one Oval Office discussion about the issue.

But the “bad one” is here now. And Trump is still in office.

The bad ones aren’t always pandemics. Sometimes they are wars or massive terrorist incidents. Sometimes they are the result of government-inflated housing bubbles popping. Sometimes they’re just part of the business cycle. But they always come, and you can rarely predict them.

When they do happen, another thing you can count on is a governmental response that involves spending more money—to help people who lose jobs, to prop-up whole industries, or just to stimulate the stock market—at a time when tax revenues are almost certain to fall. Much of that spending will be counterproductive or, worse, wasteful cronyism. But it will happen regardless. This time, the Trump administration and House Democrats are currently negotiating a massive spending package (perhaps as much as $50 billion) that is likely to include paid sick leave for workers, expanded welfare programs, and a bailout for travel industries.

“The federal government will unleash every authority, resource, and tool at our disposal,” Trump said Friday.

Trump’s favored solution, a payroll tax cut that would extend through November, would reduce federal revenues by an estimated $840 billion.

The “bad ones,” in other words, are a recipe for growing deficits. That was true during World War II and after 9/11. It was true during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. We can debate the merits of aggressive, expensive government response to crisis all day, but the more important lesson provided by all those previous historical examples is to be prepared for them. That means keeping deficits in check—or, goodness, could we dream of eliminating them entirely?

The past decade was a good opportunity to do that. Great, even. Since the last recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth through the end of 2019. That’s the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America’s gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25 percent.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but that winning streak appears to be at an end. How did we handle that decade of good times? Mostly by pretending the “bad ones” would never come. Here’s what I wrote in January:

Hanging over this decade of good news is the gloom of a missed opportunity. After piling up trillions of dollars in deficit spending during the last recession, the federal government took some modest steps towards reducing that red ink during the middle years of the 2010s. But after Republicans took full control in 2017, spending skyrocketed and the deficit inflated again….

Compare all this with early 2001, at the end of the second-longest economic expansion in history. The federal government was running a surplus. The national debt was falling and amounted to only 31 percent of GDP. That’s what you’d expect to see now, since deficits typically fall when the economy is growing and grow when the economy is rotten.

Any huge spending or tax cut in response to the coronavirus will only accelerate the nation’s ongoing budget crisis. If the deficit jumps, it may have knock-on effects that slow growth or hike interest rates on America’s borrowing—thus making the debt an even heavier burden. Having failed to be fiscally responsible when it would have been relatively easier, our elected officials now face an impossible choice: oppose politically popular deficit spending in response to the coronavirus outbreak, or try to stimulate growth by backing policies that will harm the country’s long term economic stability. They will almost certainly (with a few exceptions) choose the former.

The final twist is that the stimulus spending may not help at all. As I’ve detailed before, the coronavirus outbreak is primarily a supply-side disruption to the economy—and that means demand-increasing stimulus policies likely won’t work.

In short: We will end up spending money we don’t have to solve a crisis that can’t be fixed by spending more money.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33felic
via IFTTT

Trump Declares National Emergency To ‘Unleash the Full Power of the Federal Government’

“To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency,” President Donald Trump announced on Friday afternoon. “Two very big words.”

The president assured listeners that the country “will overcome the threat of the virus” and will be “even stronger” for it. But his briefing comes amid criticisms from conservatives and liberals alike that he has not done enough to address COVID-19, particularly as the stock market continues to toss and turn. The president’s delayed response to coronavirus—which included passing over meetings on the subject, propagating false statistics, and downplaying its severity—may have contributed to its proliferation in the United States. 

Trump nonetheless struck a boastful note in his remarks. “When you compare what we’ve done with other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible,” he said Friday. “A lot of that had to do with the early designation and the closing of the borders. And, as you know, Europe was just designated as the hotspot right now, and we closed that border a while ago. Whether that was lucky or through talent or through luck, call it whatever you want.”

The national emergency declaration would allow the deployment of up to $35 billion in aid. (Or perhaps $50 billion, which was the figure the president quoted in his remarks.) Per the Stafford Act, the president can disburse Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) support to states and localities as they wrestle with containing the pandemic. In addition to suspending the entry of foreign nationals who have been to Europe over the last two weeks, the president also asked hospitals to activate their emergency preparation plans and is allowing the Secretary of Health of Human Services to waive several regulations around medical treatment and hospital stays.

Trump announced a public-private partnership to increase coronavirus testing in the United States. That’s a good idea, but until now Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations have hamstrung private labs’ ability to provide tests to those in need. That shortage could have been successfully ameliorated with the help of private sector players more than a month ago. 

The Roche test, for instance, is 10 times faster at screening for the virus, but it was not approved by the FDA until today. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former FDA chief, noted the success of the method on Twitter, calling it a “fairly routine technology” as far back as February 2.

Denunciations of Trump’s approach crescendoed after his national address on Wednesday evening, when the president overstated European travel restrictions, accidentally said that there would be a trade ban (there won’t be), and erroneously claimed that coronavirus treatment would be free. 

Indeed, Trump on multiple occasions has downgraded the coronavirus to nothing more than seasonal influenza—an assertion that contradicts the scientific consensus. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified that the fatality rate is likely to settle around 1 percent, which is 10 times that of the flu. 

Reminders to quell panic are well-taken, though insufficient in the face of a deadly disease that experts say requires significant social distancing to protect the most vulnerable. In that vein, Trump sought to strike a different tone as he delivered his final remarks, emphasizing the seriousness of the matter.

“All Americans have a role to play in defeating this virus,” he said. “Our most effective weapon right now is to limit the damage to our people and our country, and slow the spread of the virus itself. The choices we make, the precautions we put into place are critical to overcoming the virus.” 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2W9EqOk
via IFTTT

Trump Declares National Emergency To ‘Unleash the Full Power of the Federal Government’

“To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency,” President Donald Trump announced on Friday afternoon. “Two very big words.”

The president assured listeners that the country “will overcome the threat of the virus” and will be “even stronger” for it. But his briefing comes amid criticisms from conservatives and liberals alike that he has not done enough to address COVID-19, particularly as the stock market continues to toss and turn. The president’s delayed response to coronavirus—which included passing over meetings on the subject, propagating false statistics, and downplaying its severity—may have contributed to its proliferation in the United States. 

Trump nonetheless struck a boastful note in his remarks. “When you compare what we’ve done with other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible,” he said Friday. “A lot of that had to do with the early designation and the closing of the borders. And, as you know, Europe was just designated as the hotspot right now, and we closed that border a while ago. Whether that was lucky or through talent or through luck, call it whatever you want.”

The national emergency declaration would allow the deployment of up to $35 billion in aid. (Or perhaps $50 billion, which was the figure the president quoted in his remarks.) Per the Stafford Act, the president can disburse Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) support to states and localities as they wrestle with containing the pandemic. In addition to suspending the entry of foreign nationals who have been to Europe over the last two weeks, the president also asked hospitals to activate their emergency preparation plans and is allowing the Secretary of Health of Human Services to waive several regulations around medical treatment and hospital stays.

Trump announced a public-private partnership to increase coronavirus testing in the United States. That’s a good idea, but until now Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations have hamstrung private labs’ ability to provide tests to those in need. That shortage could have been successfully ameliorated with the help of private sector players more than a month ago. 

The Roche test, for instance, is 10 times faster at screening for the virus, but it was not approved by the FDA until today. Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former FDA chief, noted the success of the method on Twitter, calling it a “fairly routine technology” as far back as February 2.

Denunciations of Trump’s approach crescendoed after his national address on Wednesday evening, when the president overstated European travel restrictions, accidentally said that there would be a trade ban (there won’t be), and erroneously claimed that coronavirus treatment would be free. 

Indeed, Trump on multiple occasions has downgraded the coronavirus to nothing more than seasonal influenza—an assertion that contradicts the scientific consensus. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified that the fatality rate is likely to settle around 1 percent, which is 10 times that of the flu. 

Reminders to quell panic are well-taken, though insufficient in the face of a deadly disease that experts say requires significant social distancing to protect the most vulnerable. In that vein, Trump sought to strike a different tone as he delivered his final remarks, emphasizing the seriousness of the matter.

“All Americans have a role to play in defeating this virus,” he said. “Our most effective weapon right now is to limit the damage to our people and our country, and slow the spread of the virus itself. The choices we make, the precautions we put into place are critical to overcoming the virus.” 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2W9EqOk
via IFTTT