Category: reason

Matt Groening once described his moderately unhinged show The Simpsons as a cockeyed version of Leave It to Beaver and the other family sitcoms he grew up with. “Bart is like what would happen if Eddie Haskell got his own show,” Groening said. “He was a deviant.”

If that’s so, then Groening’s new animated series Disenchantment might fairly be described as what would have happened if Draco Malfoy wrote a Harry Potter movie. In Disenchantment, a renegade princess, a derelict elf and a rookie demon roam a decaying medieval fantasy kingdom, back-talking kings and wizards much the way Bart Simpson does parents and teachers. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a closer look.

View this article.

An Arizona police commander has been fired after choosing to use department resources for very personal reasons.

Footage from a body camera belonging to Anthony Doran of the Superior Police Department showed him carrying out a very personal tryst in the middle of his office, reports the Arizona Republic. In one video, Doran is seen angling his body camera toward himself and a woman in his office as they proceed to have sex. The unidentified woman in the video was not a department employee. The video dates to April, 2017, and was stored on Doran’s computer. The video file was discovered by a secretary conducting business on Doran’s computer.

The video is not all that was found. Channel 12 News reports that the video was found in a folder labelled “Fun Time.” The “Fun Time” folder contained an additional 36GB of pornographic videos and nude pictures of Doran taken by himself. The folder also contained pictures of Doran’s young daughter without clothes on. She is believed to be around the age of 5. According to the report, a sergeant who looked at the folder during an investigation into Doran wrote that both the images of the girl and their proximity to the other contents in the folder caused him to “physically react with shaking hands and upset stomach.”

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, which conducted the investigation into Doran’s behavior, will not pursue charges against Doran for the picture of his daughter. However, the report made note of “suspicion that some grooming behavior may be present.” Authorities also found that Doran was previously investigated and subsequently fired in 2013 from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for having inappropriate contact with a woman in his patrol car while on duty.

When confronted about the body camera footage, Doran allegedly told investigators, “I’ll admit to that (violation) and take my 40,” referring to a week-long suspension. Doran did not believe his termination was appropriate. He later griped that the town manager did not accept his resignation and chose to fire him instead. The Superior Police Department said he was fired in April.

An opinion piece in the Arizona Republic criticized the department for hiring “second-chance officers” like Doran. These are officers who, as explained, were “fired by previous departments, sanctioned by the state or placed on the Brady List, meaning their past behavior could compromise future court testimony.” Most of the officers in Superior’s nine-person police team are “second-chance officers.” It was explained that departments hire officers previously accused of unethical behavior to save money.

Bonus link: Reason‘s Anthony L. Fisher explores why it’s difficult to prevent bad cops from getting new jobs on the force.

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is hailing President Donald Trump’s decision to strip former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance. But the Kentucky Republican doesn’t think the president should stop with Brennan.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders accused Brennan, who led the CIA for most of former President Barack Obama’s second term, of “lying.” Brennan’s “recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary,” Sanders said, “is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation’s most closely held secrets.”

Sanders’ remarks echoed the sentiments of Paul, who has spent weeks calling for Brennan, a harsh critic of Trump, to lose his clearance. Late last month, Paul wrote on Twitter that “Brennan and other partisans” should be stripped of their security clearances. He suggested Brennan has leveraged his clearance into gigs as a cable news talking head.

So it came as no surprise that Paul lauded Trump for taking away Brennan’s security clearance. “I urged the President to do this. I filibustered Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA in 2013, and his behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information,” Paul said in a statement. “He participated in a shredding of constitutional rights, lied to Congress, and has been monetizing and making partisan political use of his clearance since his departure.”

In an interview yesterday with WKU Public Radio, Paul said he wants other ex-Obama administration intelligence officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to lose their clearances as well.

According to the Kentucky Republican, Clapper lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee when he was asked in March 2013 by Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) if U.S. intelligence was spying on American citizens. “When he was asked by Sen. Wyden if the NSA was collecting information on Americans, private information, he said no and that was a lie,” Paul said. “Later, Edward Snowden revealed that they were collecting all Americans’ phone information.”

Paul has previously come down hard on ex-Obama administration officials. Last month, he suggested that Brennan, Clapper, and Comey were “bad apples that need to be dismissed from the swamp of Washington.” And in April, Paul accused Rice of committing a crime by unmasking the identities of associates to Trump.

While Paul wants Trump to keep stripping security clearances, many former officials are making the opposite case. On Thursday, a dozen ex-intelligence officials blasted Trump’s “attempt to stifle free speech.” According to the officials: “Decisions on security clearances should be based on national security concerns and not political views.”

As Reason‘s Scott Shackford argued last month, revoking the clearances is a bad move by the president:

What does this threat mean for those in the FBI responsible for investigating the role Russia played in meddling with the 2016 election? What does this mean for whistleblowers or anybody connected to the government who may attempt to warn the public of misconduct? Because this is not an effort to “drain the swamp” in any real way, it’s really threatening that anybody who puts out information critical of the president could lose their security clearance and thereby lose job prospects.

Trump shouldn’t strip former officials of their security clearances just because he doesn’t agree with their political viewpoints. But in this case, it appears that that is Trump’s primary motivation.

Donald Trump wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to sue companies that make prescription pain medication because they “are really sending opioids at a level that it shouldn’t be happening.” Here is how the president summarized the issue at a Cabinet meeting yesterday:

It’s so highly addictive. People go into a hospital with a broken arm; they come out, they’re a drug addict. They get the arm fixed, but they’re now a drug addict.

The implication—that people with fractured bones should not receive prescription analgesics, lest they become addicted—is rather alarming. But it is consistent with Sessions’ view that patients suffering from severe pain should “take some aspirin” and “tough it out.” So here is an issue where the president and his attorney general, long at odds over the latter’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, see eye to eye. Trump and Sessions agree that opioids are “so highly addictive” that they should be avoided, even when they provide better pain relief than the alternatives.

Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Ballhaus seems sympathetic to this view. Reporting on Trump’s litigation plans, she says the president is trying to “combat the highly addictive painkillers linked to tens of thousands of U.S. deaths a year.” There are at least two problems with that statement: Pain pills are not “highly addictive,” and they are not “linked to tens of thousands of U.S. deaths a year.”

Let’s take the second claim first, since it is refuted by the same data Ballhaus cites to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem that the lawsuit contemplated by Trump supposedly would address. “U.S. overdose deaths from all drugs,” she says, “soared to more than 72,000 in 2017, a record, according to preliminary data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” How many of those deaths involved pain pills? About 15,000, according to the CDC. Is that “tens of thousands”? No, it is not. Furthermore, many of those deaths also involved other drugs, including illicit opioids such as heroin and fentanyl, so it’s misleading to blame them all on prescription analgesics.

Nor does the evidence support the assertion that pain pills are “highly addictive.” A BMJ study published in January looked at “diagnostic code[s] for opioid dependence, abuse, or overdose” in the records of 568 ,612 patients who received narcotics after surgery between 2008 and 2016. The researchers found such evidence of “opioid misuse” in 5,906 cases, or 1 percent of the total. A JAMA study published last week looked at 56,686 patients between the ages of 13 and 30 who filled opioid prescriptions after they had their wisdom teeth extracted. The researchers found that 737, or 1.3 percent, were still getting opioids from pharmacies after three days, by which time the pain from the oral surgery should have subsided. According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, about 2 percent of the people who used prescription opioids that year, whether legally or illegally, experienced a “substance use disorder.”

No doubt these studies missed some cases of addiction. Then again, their outcome measures—”opioid misuse,” “persistent opioid use,” and “substance use disorder,” respectively—are not synonymous with addiction. A lot of the people who fell into those categories would bear little resemblance to the addicts portrayed in the government’s anti-opioid ads, who are so desperate for more pain pills that they deliberately injure themselves. On the whole, the evidence indicates that addiction is a rare outcome among patients treated for acute pain, such as the guy with a broken arm in Trump’s scenario.

The risk of addiction is obviously relevant to the choices made by doctors and patients, and it figures prominently in the lawsuits that a bunch of states have filed against opioid manufacturers, which Trump wants the Justice Department to imitiate. As Ballhaus notes, “The suits generally claim the companies misrepresented the addictive risk of their medicines in marketing materials.”

That charge may be true on certain points, such as as the addictive potential of timed-release opioids that supposedly helped prevent nonmedical use but could easily be crushed for snorting or injection. But to the extent that pharmaceutical companies stated or implied that the risk of addiction among patients who take opioids for pain is low, they were telling the truth. It would not have been accurate for them to warn doctors that pain pills are “highly addictive.” On that point, it’s the government that is guilty of fraud.

Utah’s medical marijuana ballot initiative might be a First Amendment violation, claims a longtime marijuana opponent in a new lawsuit intended to remove the question from the state’s November ballot.

On Thursday, Salt Lake City-area lawyer Walter J. Plumb III filed a lawsuit against Utah’s Proposition 2, alleging that the measure—which would legalize medical marijuana for patients suffering from certain qualifying medical conditions as well as allow for the plant’s cultivation and sale—would violate First Amendment guarantees to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion.

The sticking point for Plumb is a provision in Prop. 2 that would forbid landlords from discriminating against potential tenants solely because of their status as medical marijuana patients. This would force Plumb—a practicing Mormon and owner of a number of residential properties that he leases out—to associate with people and practices that run counter to his deeply held beliefs, something his lawsuit says is a violation of his religious liberties. The suit also claims that being forced to rent to medical marijuana patients amounts to “compelled speech.”

“Members of all religions, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have constitutional rights to exercise their religious beliefs. This includes the right not to consort with, be around, or do business with people engaging in activities which their religion finds repugnant,” the suit reads. “Any practicing member of the LDS faith would find this mandate deeply offensive and incredibly repulsive to their religious beliefs and their way of life.”

Thursday’s lawsuit against Prop. 2 is the second one for Plumb, who has a long history of anti-marijuana activism.

In the late 1990’s, Plumb—a one-time law partner of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah)—mailed out an unsolicited, 60-page pamphlet to some 7,000 Salt Lake residents, warning of the dangers of cannabis consumption.

“I think it’s the best work on marijuana that’s ever been out. I think this is specific and gives parents help and direction,” Plumb told the Deseret News in 1998. He was speaking of his own pamphlet, which included a glossary of marijuana-related terms, as well as notes on which of these terms were used exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

Whatever the quality of that work, Plumb’s lawsuit is unlikely to go anywhere, says Connor Boyack of Utah’s Libertas Institute, a libertarian think tank and one of the organizations advocating for a ‘yes’ vote on Prop. 2.

In addition to the First Amendment claims in Thursday’s suit, which he describes as “a huge stretch,” Boyack says the lawsuit lacks “ripeness”—a requirement that litigation not be based on hypothetical future harms.

“Even if their claim were to have merit in the eyes of a judge, they can’t do anything until after the initiative passes into law,” Boyack says.

An opponent of anti-discrimination laws on property rights grounds, Boyack nevertheless says that the religious claims in Plumb’s lawsuit also miss the mark. “The contention in the lawsuit that our religion considers medical marijuana users to be repugnant is not only false, it’s abjectly stupid. It has no basis in truth,” says Boyack, himself a practicing Mormon, who notes that the church’s health code is silent on the use of marijuana as a medicine, although it does include prohibitions on “illegal drugs,” as well as perfectly legal substances like coffee and alcohol.

Boyack says Thursday’s lawsuit is the latest in a bag of dirty tricks used by marijuana opponents to keep the popular Prop. 2 measure away from voters.

Back in May, after Prop. 2 supporters had collected enough signatures to put their initiative up for a vote in November, a coalition of opponents—including the Utah Medical Association—paid canvassers $25 an hour trying to convince enough people to remove their names from the petition to get it booted off the ballot. That tactic failed, as did a previous lawsuit which was filed and then quickly retracted over the same ripeness issue.

Currently, Prop. 2 is polling at two-thirds support. Provided Plumb’s lawsuit fails to get the initiative kicked off the ballot, it will likely coast to victory in November, making conservative Utah the 31st state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes.

A New York couple planned to symbolically protest President Donald Trump’s immigration policies last month by visiting the Statue of Liberty while wearing “Abolish ICE” T-shirts. But they say security guards told them they couldn’t tour the monument unless they changed their shirts.

Tiffany Huang and her fiancé “felt we needed to acknowledge the symbolism of visiting the Statue of Liberty,” Huang tells Gothamist. They planned their visit for July 14, less than two weeks after protester Therese Okoumou was arrested for scaling the monument. Prior to her arrest, Okoumou and other demonstrators unfurled a banner from the statue’s pedestal calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished.

But Huang and her fiancé didn’t intend to take similar action. “We did not have any plans for any other sort of action—just exercising our right to free speech,” she tells Gothamist.

Still, citing “what happened on July 4th,” security guards gave them an ultimatum: Change their shirts, or leave. One guard told them “it was our ‘choice’ to either change or put on clothes over our T-shirts, or leave,” Huang says. “So we said we would rather leave, and another security person walked us back out through security.”

The couple contacted to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), who says they were the victim of “viewpoint discrimination.”

“Prohibiting would-be visitors to the Statue of Liberty from accessing the nation’s most prominent public symbol of welcoming immigrants simply because of the message on their shirts violates our most sacred values,” NYCLU staff attorney Jordan Wells tells INSIDER.

The NYCLU got in touch with the National Park Service (NPS), who admitted to the “misstep.” NPS spokesperson Jerry Willis tells Gothamist “this never should’ve happened” and said “it’s pretty clear from our standpoint that we don’t restrict free speech.”

Statue Cruises, the company that operates Statue of Liberty tours, refunded the couple for their unfinished tour, and the NPS invited them to return. Huang and her fiancé have taken the agency up on that invitation. They planned to come back today, again wearing their “Abolish ICE” shirts.

When Aretha Franklin arrived in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1967, she was one of the greatest singers in the world but hardly anybody knew it. She’d been showing up occasionally on the R&B charts, and she had grazed the lower rungs of the pop top 40 once, with—of all things—a version of the old Al Jolson hit “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” But she wasn’t a star yet, and she hadn’t yet found the sound that would make her one. She recorded some blues songs, some jazz standards, and a lot of material in what was seen as a “sophisticated” pop mode; she acquitted herself well, but she hadn’t shown what she was capable of doing. That changed at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, which spent the ’60s producing some of the earthiest, grittiest soul music around.

The first song Franklin recorded there, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Loved You),” encapsulated both the new direction her career was about to take and the FAME sound that was propelling her there. There’s the slinky electric keyboard that starts the song off, and the acoustic piano that chimes in later in a thundering gospel style; there’s a tight rhythm section, and the horns painting a shifting series of colors behind the singer. And then there’s Aretha’s voice, devoting every technique she learned from singing in church to a topic that’s far more worldly. (She was playing that piano too, by the way. Her voice was her greatest musical gift, but it wasn’t her only one.)

In popular consciousness, this music was much more “black” than the poppy products coming out of Motown at the time. But if you did a racial breakdown of the people working behind the scenes, Motown would be a Black Power success story while Muscle Shoals, in the unlikely location of 1960s Alabama, would be integration’s great hope. The cultural historian Charles Hughes once described the FAME sessions of the ’60s as “white rhythm sections combined with integrated horn sections to play on songs by primarily white songwriters sung by black artists, for sale primarily to black audiences (by white-owned record companies).” Musically speaking, the results were frequently brilliant; socially speaking, it was certainly preferable to what you’d find in Montgomery at the time.

But it wasn’t free of tensions, and the most notorious example of things going wrong at FAME came during the Franklin sessions, which fell apart after the musicians started recording a second song, the country-soul ballad “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” The fight that erupted wasn’t purely a matter of race. In particular, there was the problem that Aretha’s husband thought one of the trumpet players was hitting on his wife. But given that the clash culminated with husband and trumpter shouting racial slurs at each other at a local motel, it’s safe to say that Muscle Shoals, inspiring as its music could be, had not unlocked the secret to perfect ethnic harmony. Franklin scrammed back north, swearing she’d never return.

But she didn’t need FAME Studios anymore anyway. Muscle Shoals had shown everyone what she could do and be, and now she was going to sit at the top of the world doing and being it. She recorded countless fantastic records from 1967 until her death this week at age 76, and I’m not really sure which one is my favorite. But I know which one is the most essential:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

At a dinner with business leaders last Tuesday, President Donald Trump promised to do “something” to get drug prices “down really substantially,” reports Reuters.

But what, exactly? This isn’t the first time the president has threatened to shake up the complex world of prescription drug pricing. And even though policy details aren’t really his forte, Trump seems to favor the use of government coercion rather than market forces. Trump railed against Big Pharma, accusing them of “getting away with murder” during his 2016 campaign. More recently, he browbeat Pfizer into reversing some of their drug price increases and released a rather ambiguous “blueprint” to bring down drug prices.

Despite what the president would have you believe, the problem of high drug prices is not one with a simple solution. Subsidies and price controls, options that Trump seems to favor, could slow innovation and hamper progress in the industry. If Trump really wanted to bring down drug prices, that “something” must address the problems of government overreach, including the public funding of prescription drugs, drug patents, and the web of regulation engendered by the Food and Drug Administration—a combination of factors affecting both the supply and demand sides of the equation.

On the demand side, Medicare and Medicaid artificially increase demand for drugs by using tax dollars to subsidize consumption. That enables large pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices without suffering any meaningful decrease in their sales. Medicare Part D, for instance, was enacted in 2003 to help seniors afford prescription drugs, but it has actually trigged the opposite effect. A report from the American Association of Retired Persons, a senior citizens interest group, surveyed 528 medications many older adults take daily and found that “the average retail price was $12,951 in 2015, more than three times the average price for such drugs in 2006.”

“Medicare part D has opened the floodgates for higher prescription prices,” says Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and an expert on drug regulation. “The prices for cancer drugs are simply outrageous, but the government continues to pay despite no guarantee they will work.”

In addition, these programs aren’t cheap. In 2016, we spent $672.1 billion on Medicare and $565.5 billion on Medicaid, but healthcare and pharmaceutical costs remain stubbornly high, and are increasing.

The Trump administration’s blueprint endorses price “negotiation” through these federal programs, but this is nothing more than government price controls. These controls might lead to lower prices, but they would almost certainly cause pharmaceutical companies to scale back their research into drug development. As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey discussed back in January, “If price controls pressure the U.S. industry into a more conventional process industry model, like that of the chemical industry, pharmaceutical R&D budgets would be slashed.”

Another problem is the drug patent system, which was conceived to ensure the welfare of American consumers, but now seems to advantage large pharmaceutical companies. Because drug companies are given the opportunity to monopolize drug markets and charge exorbitantly high prices, they are able to freeze out competition that might drag prices down.

“If a manufacturer of acetaminophen, for example, wanted to charge a thousand dollars a tablet, they wouldn’t sell any tablets,” says Gilbert Berdine, associate professor of internal medicine at Texas Tech and a faculty affiliate with Texas Tech’s Free Market Institute. “It would be pointless for them to do that, because a competitor would capture the entire market by underpricing them.”

The White House, however, seems to recognize the issue of extended patents. “Lower-cost drugs are kept out of the market by drug companies gaming regulatory processes and the patent system in order to unfairly maintain monopolies,” reads the administration’s proposal. Serious patent reform would require congressional action, but Trump is right to urge the House and Senate to work on legislation to roll back the arcane patent laws that dominate the pharmaceutical industry.

Drug companies will argue that patents incentivize investment. That’s true. By disproportionately increasing the rewards for producing specific goods, the government essentially offers a subsidy of sorts to drug companies, which certainly boosts production. However, this subsidy, like all others, transfers investment from productive sectors of the economy to the pharmaceutical industry, who don’t have to fear the consequences of competition that control other industries.

“There have been pharmaceutical developments long before there were patents and there would continue to be pharmaceutical developments in the absence of patents,” Berdine says.

Atop this milieu of subsidies, the government restricts supply with a smorgasbord of regulations, mostly promulgated by the FDA, that restricts competition and stymies the discovery process of the market.

“The FDA hampers innovation by requiring extensive and expensive testing,” continues Thornton, “There are tons of drugs and devices that work and would be at low prices and would definitely save and improve lives, but they are unavailable because of the FDA.”

Trump’s FDA Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, has gained a reputation for his relatively speedy drug approvals, but that doesn’t address the underlying cause of having a massive, bureaucratic agency dedicated to limiting competition in the industry. According to the BrightFocus Foundation, a non-profit focused on supporting medical research, the costs for trials demanded by the FDA can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This serves as a formidable barrier of entry to startup drug companies looking to introduce potentially life-saving drugs to the marketplace. Massive pharmaceutical companies can afford these regulations, but smaller competitors cannot. This dynamic expands the monopolization of pharmaceutical giants, who can dragoon consumers and insurance companies into paying heavily amplified prices.

Skeptics of laissez-faire are quick to point out the possibility of dangerous drugs being released in the absence of an all-powerful regulatory agency. The FDA’s litany of rules might stop some bad drugs from reaching consumers, but the discipline of the market is a far more effective regulator than a gang of Washington bureaucrats.

“Dangerous drugs that hurt or killed people would lead to lawsuits, not to mention the loss of good will. Ineffective drugs might hang around via the placebo effect, but would probably be competed away in the long run,” argues Thornton.

Trump seems to have a strong penchant for economic deregulation, and if he were to apply this to the pharmaceutical industry, he just might be able to make real progress on an issue that’s stumped many an administration before his.

“The market is a beautiful thing,” says Berdine, “one layer of regulation after another is not going to fix the problems created by the previous layer of regulation.”

Satanists have taken their latest free speech battle to the Arkansas State Capitol.

The Associated Press reports that the Satanic Temple unveiled a statue of Baphomet, a demonic, goat-headed creature, and demanded that either their statue be placed in the capitol building or a recently installed Ten Commandments statue be removed. “If you’re going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don’t agree with that then let’s just not have any at all,” Satanic Arkansas cofounder Ivy Forrester argued at a Thursday rally.

Arkansas requires legislative sponsorship for all monuments in the state capitol. The Ten Commandments was sponsored by Republican state Sen. Jason Rapert in 2017 and quietly installed last year. In response, the Satanic Temple sent a letter to lawmakers later that year asking for their statue to also be installed. The Ten Commandments was later destroyed when a man rammed his car into the display, but was reinstalled about four months ago.

Worth noting: In 2017, the Satanic Temple sent Arkansas legislators a letter, asking them to sponsor a bill, that would allow for a statue of Baphomet to be placed on capitol grounds. Not one legislator responded Rep. Kim Hammer tells @KATVNews #arnews #arpx #arleg pic.twitter.com/x6tKm0euhl

— Marine Glisovic KATV (@KATVMarine) August 16, 2018

According to a petition circulated by the rally sponsors, Lucien Greaves, spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, said the demands for the statue were a matter of free speech. “This is a rally for all people who hold sacred the founding Constitutional principles of Religious Freedom and Free Expression that have fallen under assault by irresponsible politicians like Senator Rapert,” Greaves said.

“It will be a very cold day in hell before we are ever forced to put up a monument like the profane one they brought,” Rapert said after criticizing the Satanists as unserious. A sign underneath the Baphomet statue read, “Future home of the Baphomet monument…Presented in the spirit of religious pluralism by: The Satanic Temple with a special thanks to Senator Jason Rapert.”

When police officers raided the home and business of Paul and Maricel Fullerton and held the Woodland, California, couple at gunpoint in February 2016, they brought back a big haul.

A local multi-agency narcotics task force seized $55,000 from the Fullertons, along with 22 pounds of processed marijuana and several firearms. It had all the appearances of a major drug bust, except for the targets: a retired fire captain and a hospice nurse.

Now, after two years of protracted court proceedings that nearly ruined the Fullertons’ lives and careers, and briefly led to their separation from their child, Yolo County law enforcement will walk away with around $2,000, split between several agencies, and a misdemeanor marijuana conviction and to show for its efforts.

The Yolo County District Attorney finalized a settlement on Monday to return $53,000 that the Yolo Narcotics Enforcement Team (YONET) seized from the Fullertons. The Fullertons mostly prevailed, and all it cost them was around $100,000 in legal fees, fines, and other costs.

The Fullerton’s case was only one of more than 3,000 asset forfeiture cases initiated in California in 2016, according to an annual report by the state attorney general, but it’s a small example of both how the drug war is prosecuted and how it is changing: In the middle of the Fullerton’s case, California voters decided that the sort of offense that led heavily armed YONET agents to raid the Fullertons’ home and business should instead be treated as a minor nuisance or business license violation.

“After this long time period, yeah, I’m relieved, but I’m still angry inside most of all, because I know that there’s a system that’s basically broken,” says Fullerton, 46, of Woodland, California. “And if an honest, hardworking, disabled fire captain can get rolled up in these cogs of injustice, to me it isn’t really over.”

Fullerton was a firefighter for 25 years until an on-the-job spinal cord injury ended his career and left him with 12 screws and three metal plates in his neck. He found relief from prescription pain pills through medical marijuana. In 2012 he opened up his own hydroponics store, Lil’ Shop of Growers, in Woodland and joined a local medical marijuana collective.

But his new business didn’t sit well with local law enforcement, which began investigating the former fire captain after allegedly receiving a tip that he was selling large amounts of marijuana out of his store.

Local police claim Fullerton gave 1.7 grams of marijuana—about a joint-and-a-half—to an undercover officer and later agreed to sell the informant more marijuana for $300. Video evidence of the transactions in hand, YONET agents raided Fullerton’s store and home on Feb. 18, 2016.

Fullerton had worked for decades alongside local police and says he, his wife, and his business had a good reputation in town. In 2008, a “Heroes Award Luncheon” put on by the Yolo County Chapter of the American Red Cross recognized Fullerton and three other UC Davis firefighters for their role in saving a man’s life.

But in 2016 he ended up splayed on the ground, looking up the barrel of an assault rifle being leveled at him by a masked police officer.

Yolo County prosecutors hit both Paul and Maricel Fullerton with a host of felony charges including marijuana sales, possession of marijuana for sales, cultivation of marijuana, importation of a large-capacity rifle magazine, and child endangerment.

“Maricel was prosecuted despite having been told by officers that this wasn’t about her, because it gave them more leverage over Paul,” Ashley Bargenquast, the Fullertons’ lawyer in their civil forfeiture case, says. “It was really a fairly ugly prosecution that demonstrates some of the more political and more manipulative patterns of investigations.”

Worse, because of the child endangerment charge, the Fullertons’ daughter was temporarily placed in protective custody.

“They took my daughter away and she wasn’t allowed to come home for 10 days… I’ve totally lost my faith. It’s scary that they can just wrongfully charge people,” Maricel Fullerton told The Daily Democrat. “I’m in constant fear of what’s going to happen to us—to my daughter.”

The Fullertons dispute nearly every part of the law enforcement narrative. Fullerton says the police informant baited him with a sob story about a sick friend. He attempted to just give the marijuana to the informant, who insisted on shoving money into his hand. He also says he put that money in a fireman’s boot on the desk, which he uses to collect cash to donate to charity.

The Fullertons also say the gun safe in their house was unlocked—part of the justification for the child endangerment charge—because police opened it.

Prosecutors dropped the gun charges after it was shown they were legally owned, and while the case was dragging on, California voters approved a ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana. The ballot measure also transformed the Fullertons’ marijuana charges into misdemeanor offenses.

As part of a plea deal, Paul Fullerton pleaded no contest to misdemeanor possession of marijuana for sales and sale of marijuana. All remaining felony charges, including those against Maricel, were dropped. Fullerton maintains he did nothing wrong and only took the deal to make the rest of the charges go away.

It was far from the end of their troubles, though.

Fullerton had to wear an ankle bracelet for 90 days, but part of the sheriff’s department conditions included not using marijuana. Instead of returning to prescription pills, Fullerton went through a private company for his ankle bracelet, driving two hours each way to Oakland to get to his regular appointments and paying $4,800 for the pleasure.

Despite the charges against Maricel Fullerton being dropped, the case also impacted her career as a vocational nurse. Maricel was banned from working in any state-licensed facilities after a YONET officer appeared at her administrative hearing and testified against her.

And there was still the matter of the Fullertons’ money, which had been seized through civil asset forfeiture—a practice that allows police and prosecutors to seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner isn’t convicted or even charged with a crime.

“They seized every single asset that I had,” Fullerton says. “Every single cent. I had to borrow money from my mom to get medication for my spinal injury.”

To get their cash back, the Fullertons had to prove in court that the money was not connected to drug activity. They eventually were able to account for $53,000 out of the $55,000 seized. The remaining $2,000, they say, was partly vacation savings and partly from the private sale of some used car parts, but they agreed to settle with the D.A.

California passed an asset forfeiture reform bill in 2016 requiring law enforcement to obtain a criminal conviction in forfeiture cases under $40,000. It also requires more detailed annual reporting from the state attorney general’s office on forfeiture activities.

However, the numbers for Yolo County don’t appear in the attorney general’s latest report. Local district attorneys and police departments are not required to participate in the report, and the Yolo County D.A. was one of eight across California that chose not to.

Bargenquast, whose firm, Tully & Weiss, has handled numerous similar marijuana cases, says the attitude among California law enforcement about marijuana is changing, but more education and training is needed.

“We’re slowly coming into the paradigm where business shortcomings are treated as business shortcomings, not cartel activity, but baby steps,” she says.

“You just have way too many individuals who remember being called heroes and good ol’ boys for clearing cartels and irresponsible grows out of national forests, and now they are treating patients or licensees the same way instead of acknowledging they’re the citizens they’re sworn to protect and serve,” Bargenquast continued.

The Yolo County District Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. However, Yolo County prosecutor Amanda Zambor told the Davis Enterprise: “After a lengthy financial investigation we were only able to meet our burden of proof on a portion of the money being illegally obtained. In these cases it is often challenging to follow the money trail when there are numerous businesses with poor financial record keeping.”

The Fullertons are still seeking the return of their personal electronics, firearms, and 22 pounds of marijuana from the collective Fullerton belongs to, according to the Enterprise.

In the meantime, Fullerton says Lil’ Shop of Growers is still up and running, and in fact doing better than ever, although they are still digging themselves out of a hole two years later. But it permanently affected how the Fullertons thought about law enforcement.

“It ruined my whole trust with police officers,” Fullerton says. “My daughter is eight now, and she is scared of police officers now. I don’t want my daughter to be scared of police officers, you know? It’s just a very disheartening.”