Category: reason

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood is outraged by Donald Trump’s pardons, and she wants state legislators to do something about them before he strikes again. “First it was Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” she says in a press release. “Then it was Scooter Libby. Now it’s Dinesh D’Souza. We can’t afford to wait to see who will be next. Lawmakers must act now to close New York’s double jeopardy loophole and ensure that anyone who evades federal justice by virtue of a politically expedient pardon can be held accountable if they violate New York law.”

That “double jeopardy loophole” requires some explaining. But first note that Underwood, a Democrat who detests Donald Trump, does not like it when he pardons famous Republicans, because she thinks he is “undermining the rule of law” by using his clemency power for political purposes. Since no president has ever done that before, it is presumably yet another way in which Trump has trampled on the standards and conventions that constrained his predecessors. Underwood’s response to the president’s patently political pardons is a completely nonpartisan reform that she hopes will enable her to stick it to any cronies he might pardon in the future, especially if they know things that could hurt him.

Contrary to what you might think, the “double jeopardy loophole” to which Underwood refers is not the clause of New York’s constitution that says “no person shall be subject to be twice put in jeopardy for the same offense.” Nor is it the similar clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says no person may “be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

According to the New York Court of Appeals, the state constitution’s ban on double jeopardy is no broader than the federal version, and the U.S. Supreme Court has said the Fifth Amendment does not preclude prosecuting the same person for the same actions in both state and federal courts. Although the underlying conduct may be identical, the Court says, the offenses are distinct because they are defined by “two sovereignties.”

To their credit, New York legislators recognized that the dual sovereignty doctrine is a license for injustice, allowing a defendant to be punished twice for the same crime or tried again after an acquittal. They therefore enacted a law that says “a person may not be separately prosecuted for two offenses based upon the same act or criminal transaction.” There are 12 exceptions to that rule, but none of them covers objectionable pardons by Donald Trump. That is the “double jeopardy loophole” Underwood has in mind.

Underwood’s press release links to an April 18 letter in which her predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, a prominent Trump antagonist, lays out the case for closing this loophole:

The problem arises under Article 40 of the Criminal Procedure Law. Under that law, jeopardy attaches when a defendant pleads guilty, or, if the defendant proceeds to a jury trial, the moment the jury is sworn. If any of those steps occur in a federal prosecution, then a subsequent prosecution for state crimes “based upon the same act or criminal transaction” cannot proceed, unless an exception applies. New York’s law provides exceptions when a court nullifies a prior criminal proceeding (such as when an appeals court vacates a conviction), or even when a federal court overturns a federal conviction because the prosecution failed to establish an element of the crime that is not an element of the New York crime. But there is no parallel exception for when the President effectively nullifies a federal criminal prosecution via pardon.

Thus, if a federal defendant pleads guilty to a federal crime, or if a jury is sworn in a federal criminal trial against that defendant, and then the President pardons that individual, this New York statute could be invoked to argue that a subsequent state prosecution is barred. Simply put, a defendant pardoned by the President for a serious federal crime could be freed from all accountability under federal and state criminal law, even though the President has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to pardon state crimes.

When he wrote that letter, Schneiderman was “disturbed by reports that the president is considering pardons of individuals who may have committed serious federal financial, tax, and other crimes—acts that may also violate New York law.” According to the rumors, Trump had entertained the possibility of pardoning associates who might have damaging information about him. In view of that possibility, Schneiderman said, “We must ensure that if the president, or any president, issues such pardons, we can use the full force of New York’s laws to bring such individuals to justice.”

Allow me to elucidate Schneiderman’s point with an example. Suppose Eric Schneiderman is charged with federal hate crimes for assaulting several people “because of” their gender. If Schneiderman is convicted in federal court but Trump pardons him (bear with me: this is just a hypothetical!), current New York law would bar a state prosecution for assault. Hence Schneiderman would be “freed from all accountability under federal and state criminal law, even though the President has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to pardon state crimes.”

To prevent such outrages, Underwood is backing a bill that redefines prosecution under Article 40 to exclude cases where the defendant benefits from presidential clemency, unless the pardon or commutation occurs at least five years after conviction. That change is broader than necessary to address Underwood’s avowed concern, since it would allow state prosecution of someone who was already convicted and punished under federal law if the president subsequently pardoned him.

Dinesh D’Souza, for instance, paid a $30,000 fine and spent his nights for eight months in a “community confinement center” after he pleaded guilty in 2014 to violating the legal limit on individual contributions to federal camaigns. Even if you think the punishment was light, that was the judge’s decision, not the president’s. Yet if the exception Underwood wants had already been adopted, local or state prosecutors would have been free to pursue state charges against D’Souza in connection with his concealed campaign contributions, assuming they could fine a relevant New York statute.

It does seem like Underwood wants to punish D’Souza some more. “President Trump’s latest pardon makes crystal clear his willingness to use his pardon power to thwart the cause of justice, rather than advance it,” she says. “By pardoning Dinesh D’Souza, President Trump is undermining the rule of law by pardoning a political supporter who is an unapologetic convicted felon.”

I’m no fan of D’Souza’s, but it seems to me his offense, which involved funneling money to a college friend’s campaign, was not that big a deal. There was nothing inherently criminal about it, and there are serious First Amendment objections to laws that restrict people’s political advocacy by imposing abitrary caps on how much money they can give to candidates they like. Joe Arpaio, by contrast, defiantly abused the powers of his office and was never punished for it, since Trump pardoned him before he was sentenced. Since Arapaio was a sheriff in Arizona, of course, there is precious little that New York prosecutors could do about that.

In 1929, Movietone News interviewed some of the oldest people in America. The results would be interesting enough if they were simply a chance to hear the recollections of people born in the antebellum era. (The oldest subjects here entered the world in the 1820s.) But after a while, politics starts to creep in too.

A 103-year-old man informs an interviewer that while he’s a Republican now, in the old days he “voted the Whig ticket.” A 99-year-old man served as grand sachem of Tammany Hall, though sadly he doesn’t say much about what that entailed. And a 94-year-old lady turns out to be Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was both the first woman and the final slaveowner to belong to the U.S. Senate. (Felton, a Georgia suffragist whose pet causes included prohibition, vocational education, and lynching—she favored all three—was a senator for just a day and a slaveowner for much longer.) She remembers witnessing the Trail of Tears when she was three: “an indistinct recollection of seeing the red men as they went through the woods.”

Beyond that, there’s the engineer in White Plains who’d been working various railroad jobs since the 1870s, the octogenarian Civil War vets in Florida who dance slowly to a fiddler’s tune, and the Broadway theater manager who looks back on his youthful newspaper career, recalling what a sensation it was when “pictures of events of the day were printed at least two days after they happened.” Enjoy:

(Hat tip: Terry Teachout. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

It’s rare that a politician will say something that is praiseworthy and anger-inducing in the same breath. Nevertheless, Gov. Jerry Brown accomplished that unusual feat when he released his May revised budget, and told cities that the state government isn’t in a position to help them with their soaring pension costs. “They have to handle that themselves,” he explained during a briefing in the state Capitol.

His rationale for refusing to bail out hard-pressed local governments is compelling, concise and worthy of applause: “A lot of cities signed up for pensions they can’t afford.”

Why should taxpayers throughout the state pay more in taxes—or tolerate fewer services or more debt—to help those city governments that were fiscally irresponsible? They knew the risks, ignored the warnings and retroactively boosted pensions by as much as 50 percent over the past 15 years, yet now city officials are complaining about their tough fiscal position.

Cry me a river, writes Steven Greenhut.

Read the whole thing here.

When a police officer tackled a 20-year-old woman on a New Jersey beach over Memorial Day weekend and then punched her in the head, all over a bottle of Twisted Tea, bystander footage of the beatdown quickly went viral.

For those who missed it, here’s the initial video, which has been viewed more than a million times:

I was sleeping on the beach and I woke up to this.. i can’t believe it.. pic.twitter.com/UJE5Sy7E4G

— Lexy (@HewittLexy) May 26, 2018

It’s remarkable that in the crazy-fast, rapid-spin news cycle that now rules us, the story is still getting significant attention a week later. On Wednesday, the Wildwood, New Jersey, police released body camera footage of parts of their encounter with Emily Weinman, 20. If anything, the additional footage highlights how absurd and unnecessary the violence was.

None of the body camera footage shows the initial encounter that led to the confrontation. What we do know is that two Wildwood police officers came across Weinman on the beach. Her family spread included a cooler, and police spotted a bottle of alcohol. Weinman insisted this belong to her aunt, who she said would be coming back soon. (She never shows up during the videos.)

Weinman is not terribly hospitable toward the police, who make her take two breathalyzer tests. You can’t really tell what the outcome was, but when all is said and done, she has not been charged with being drunk in public. But she’s uncooperative, and she refuses to give police her last name. Eventually an officer has had enough and pulls out the cuffs to arrest her. She’s upset by this, so she attempts to walk away. That’s when the officer declares “You’re about to get dropped,” tackles her into the sand, punches her in the head, and arrests her.

The mayor of Wildwood, Ernie Troiano, was quick to come to the defense of the police officers with very little evidence other than his own experience as an ex-bouncer. (I hope to God all mayors in New Jersey are ex-bouncers.) He insisted that Weinman was “by far the aggressor here,” then turned to the “she’s no angel” tactic, pointing to the fact that Weinman was on probation for a previous crime. (She got into a fight in Philadelphia with a woman she believed was sleeping with her ex-boyfriend.)

The mayor then complained about underage drinking and people’s insistence on drinking on the beach. From Philly.com:

“I don’t understand why it seems to be that this is a God-given right that they can come here and drink underage,” he said, adding that no one is allowed to drink in public or on the beach in Wildwood unless they are attending an event that has received a permit to allow drinking.

So Troiano’s argument is that drinking isn’t a God-given right; it’s a right given by the government. Just because the taxpayers are forced to shell out money to maintain the beach doesn’t mean they can just come out there and drink on it, unless they have the government’s permission. So you see, they had no choice but to beat up a 20-year-old unarmed woman who was neither drunk nor violent.

It may ultimately turn out that Weinman is, indeed, no angel. It may turn out that she spit at an officer. (It kinds of look like she did as they brought her to the police vehicle.). It may turn out that she was consuming alcohol. But none of that justifies the police’s behavior. They decided they wanted to make a lesson out of Weinman, and now the public is repulsed by it. Note the reaction of the bystanders in the video. Several confront the officers about their behavior. At one point one even appears to try to pull the officer off the woman.

Weinman has been charged with two counts of aggravated assault on a police officer, aggravated assault by spitting at or on an officer, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, obstruction, and being a minor in possession of alcohol.

Across the country, overdoses and crimes attributed to drugs such as hydrocodone, oxycodone, codeine, and fentanyl are up. Heroin, once an exotic and expensive drug, is now widely available and reportedly as cheap as $5 a pop. Politicians, law enforcement, and the medical community are scrambling to respond. Media coverage abounds.

What is the reality of the opioid “epidemic,” what are its causes, and what are its effects on chronic pain patients, whose demand for prescription drugs is often (and incorrectly) blamed for causing the problem? In this Reason Podcast, I talk with Reason‘s Zach Weismueller, whose latest documentary follows a pain doctor who is retiring rather than put up with increasing government hassles and surveillance, and Jacob Sullum, a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his article “No Relief in Sight: Torture, despair, agony, and death are the symptoms of ‘opiophobia,’ a well-documented medical syndrome fed by fear, superstition, and the war on drugs. Doctors suffer the syndrome. Patients suffer the consequences.” That story was published way back in 1997, a striking indication of just how long—and how ineffective—the war on pain drugs has been.

“Contrary to the impression left by most press coverage of the issue, opioid-related deaths do not usually involve drug-naive patients who accidentally get hooked while being treated for pain. Instead, they usually involve people with histories of substance abuse and psychological problems who use multiple drugs, not just opioids,” Sullum writes in a cover story for the April 2018 Reason. “Treating pain medication as a disease vector, the government has restricted access to it by monitoring prescriptions, investigating doctors, and imposing new limits on how much can be prescribed, for how long, and under what circumstances. That approach hurts pain patients by depriving them of the analgesics they need to make their lives livable, and it hurts nonmedical users by driving them into a black market where the drugs are deadlier.”

Sullum appears in Weissmueller’s documentary about Dr. Forest Tennant, who is shutting down his five-decade-long practice in Southern California after being raided last fall by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Sullum and Weissmueller discuss misconceptions about opioid abuse, and they talk about how to help both abusers and patients in ways that won’t cause needless suffering and pain.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Photo Credit: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/Newscom

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On February 17, 2014, 29-year-old Kristen Coutu injected herself for the last time.

Coutu was found dead in her car in Cranston, Rhode Island, around 11 p.m. What she apparently had thought was heroin turned out to be pure fentanyl, a much more powerful opioid. The man who sold her the drugs, Aaron Andrade, was charged with second-degree murder, pleaded guilty, and is now serving a 40-year sentence.

He could have had it even worse. Under a bill just passed by the Rhode Island state Senate, drug dealers could be sentenced to life in prison if drugs they sell are used in a fatal overdose. (A version of the bill is now being considered in the Rhode Island House.) “Kristen’s Law” has been backed by prosecutors and relatives of overdose victims, such as Coutu’s mother. The bill is supposed to deter drug dealers, but critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say it will do little to stem the flow of drugs and will likely end up hurting the drug users it is supposed to help.

“The criminalization of drug use over the last hundred plus years has not only failed to stem the tide of substance use and associated disorders, it’s led to mass incarceration disproportionately affecting communities of color and low income communities,” substance abuse expert Lisa Peterson told lawmakers during a hearing on the bill. The Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the legislation, points out that it can be difficult to differentiate between drug users and drug dealers, who are often struggling to fund their own habit.

From Rhode Island’s Democrat-controlled state Senate to the White House—where President Donald Trump has floated the idea of giving drug dealers the death penalty—members of both major parties have tried to tackle the opioid problem with yet more enforcement and punishment. They should learn instead from the drug war’s failures. Cracking down on dealers does little to inhibit drug crime; it does much more to put a fiscal strain on taxpayers. Furthermore, while it’s difficult to measure precisely how many low-level drug dealers are also addicts, but as Kathryn Casteel points out it’s safe to assume a reasonable degree of overlap between these two groups. Legislation like Kristen’s Law will needlessly subject destitute addicts (who are often unaware of what they are selling) to expensive and harsh punishment instead of letting them get treatment they need.

Above all, officials need to realize that overdoses and murders are two completely different things. Treating them as the same doesn’t do anything to help anyone. Twenty states already have similar laws on the books and many others prosecute such cases through their standard homicide statutes, yet the opioid crisis rages on.

“She didn’t ask to die,” Kristen’s mother testified to the Rhode Island House. “She didn’t ask for a lethal dose of fentanyl that would have killed someone much bigger than her.”

She’s right. Kristen didn’t ask to die. And as long as drug users have no reliable way to tell what they’re putting into their bodies, more people are going to die this way. All the more reason to roll back the senseless rules preventing a fully above-ground market in legal, accurately labeled opioids.

It is deeply ironic that just when Ireland, a Catholic nation, is handing women more control over their bodies, the United States is taking it away. States all around the country are imposing new restrictions on abortion. And now on the pretext of preventing taxpayer dollars from going to fund abortions, President Trump is going after Planned Parenthood’s Title X dollars.

But notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia that if Trump wanted to defund Planned Parenthood it would be one thing. But he is using Title X funding to try and control how the outfit spends its private funds.

How should Planned Parenthood fight back?

View this article.

Politicians and journalists often tell a story about greedy pharmaceutical companies that turned doctors into dealers and patients into addicts. And now, we’re told, tens of thousands of Americans are dying of overdoses every year because of government inaction.

If this is truly an epidemic, the diagnosis is wrong in a few major ways. And the cure prescribed by the government is making the disease worse.

Pain and Suffering

Dr. Forest Tennant is one of the last doctors in America willing to treat pain patients using high doses of opioid painkillers. He operates out of a strip mall in West Covina, California. And he’s contacted by patients from all over the country on a daily basis, pleading with him to treat them because nobody else will.

But in a matter of months, thanks in part to increased pressure in the government’s war on opioids, he may be closing his clinic’s doors, which have been open since 1975.

When Reason did a story on Tennant’s clinic in 2017, his patients spoke of how government restrictions on opioid use were causing legitimate pain patients to suffer needlessly. Four months after we ran that story, the DEA raided Tennant’s clinic and home. The search warrant accused him of overprescribing medication and accepting payoffs from the pharmaceutical company INSYS. Tennant has earned speaking fees from the company as recently as 2015, which he says is standard practice. And his nonprofit clinic regularly operates at a loss, according to financial statements submitted to the Department of Justice.

“I think the government is trying to kill me and every one of [Tennant’s] patients,” said Gary Snuk, a resident of Montana, when asked about the raid on Tennant’s clinic. Snuk, who suffers from chronic pain resulting from back surgery complications, turned to Tennant when he couldn’t find adequate pain treatment from a local physician.

“We have no place to run,” says Snuk.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control recommended new opioid prescription guidelines, with a maximum dosage of 90 morphine-milligram equivalents (MME) a day. Although the guidelines were supposed to be voluntary, Tennant says most physicians have begun to treat them as mandatory. Several states have adopted legislation that mirrors the federal recommendations.

“I do not know of physicians who will be willing to prescribe high-dose opioids anymore,” says Tennant.

This situation has put a target on the back of doctors who don’t follow the guidelines, and Tennant says the pressure that the guidelines have put on him are a major reason that he’s decided to wind down his practice and focus on tapering his patients down below 90 MME so that they can find other doctors to treat them once he retires.

But he maintains that some patients exhibit genetic variations that require them to take unusually high doses of opioids to achieve pain relief.

“I don’t know how those people are going to get down to 90,” says Tennant. “There has been propaganda—and it’s pure propaganda—that you can just stop opioids. No need to taper them. Just stop. And we’re going to have some patients commit suicide.”

Prohibition, Then and Now

Government officials like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who heads the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, have repeatedly blamed the problem on doctors overprescribing opioids to their patients and turning them into addicts.

“It’s not starting on our street corners. It’s starting in our doctors’ offices and hospitals,” Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper in July 2017.

But the story isn’t quite so straightforward. Several studies, including a recent one out of Harvard, pegs opioid abuse among postsurgical patients at less than one percent. Estimates about abuse among chronic pain patients vary, with the high end being a little less than eight percent.

“Most policy makers have bought into this idea that we doctors prescribe opioids to our patients, who then rapidly become drug addicts,” says Jeffrey Singer, a Phoenix-based general surgeon and policy analyst (and a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website). “All of the evidence suggests that this is not the case.”

Singer says it’s a myth that most nonmedical users start on pills prescribed to them by a doctor. Instead, they more often borrow, buy, or take them from a friend or family member with leftover pills. The DEA calls it “diversion.” A 2014 analysis of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) confirms that most nonmedical pain pill users obtain their pills via diversion, not directly from a physician.

In many ways, the story of the opioid overdose crisis begins with the introduction of OxyContin to the US market in 1995. It promptly became the pill of choice for nonmedical street users of opioids.

Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, was aware of its popularity as a street drug, which it allegedly worked to conceal. Yet the company also created abuse-resistant formulations (ADFs), which are uncrushable and can’t be liquefied. By doing so, the company was able to extend the drug’s patent. With encouragement from the Food and Drug Administration, Purdue soon made all OxyContin pills uncrushable. Singer says policies of this sort have profound unintended consequences.

“The only thing [ADFs] have done is to make nonmedical users switch over to something other than [pain pills], and most of the time it’s been heroin,” says Singer.

Singer compares ADFs to attempts by the federal government to control alcohol consumption during Prohibition. The government ordered the “denaturing” of industrial alcohol through the addition of unpalatable chemicals. But it’s hard to stop determined consumers from getting what they want, and people kept drinking the denatured alcohol. So the government went a step further by adding poison to the alcohol, a move that likely resulted in thousands of deaths.

Seymour Lowman, the assistant U.S. treasury secretary partially responsible for overseeing alcohol prohibition, even said that if drunks were “dying off fast from poison ‘hooch'” then “a good job will have been done” if it meant a more sober America. Singer doesn’t think that modern government officials have the same attitude but argues that the effects are quite similar.

“If [policy makers] step back and think about what they’re doing by promoting abuse-deterrent formulations of opioids, they’re in effect doing to same thing that alcohol prohibition people did. They’re driving people to much more deadly, dangerous substances,” says Singer.

A June 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that “there appears to have been one-for-one substitution of heroin deaths for opioid deaths. Thus it appears that the intent behind the abuse-deterrent reformulation of OxyContin was completely undone by changes in consumer behavior.”

The Nature of Addiction

“The focus on prescription pain killers is especially misguided now that the vast majority of opioid-related deaths actually involve illegally produced drugs,” says Reason‘s Jacob Sullum.

Sullum been writing about the suffering caused by restricting access to pain medication for 21 years. His April cover feature for Reason magazine examines the myths underlying the government’s response to the opioid overdose problem. He says the misguided focus on the supply of opioids is a proven failure but that politicians continue to do it because it’s much simpler than dealing with the complicated nature of addiction.

Jillian Monda is an Ohio-based bartender and photographer who struggled with and overcame an addiction to heroin several years ago. She says her boyfriend introduced her to heroin and that she took to it because it allowed her to turn off her mind and forget about a recent sexual assault she experienced and keep her obsessive-compulsive disorder under control.

“Heroin is really good at making you not feel anything at all,” says Monda. “The big unifying factor [among users I knew] was that everyone had some kind of mental problem or thing they were trying to avoid…and rather than getting proper psychiatric care for that, they were doing heroin.”

Victims of trauma like Monda, or people with mental illnesses who are self-medicating, are far more likely to develop an opioid addiction than are pain patients. To deal with these complex psychological and social problems, Sullum says a more nuanced approach than supply-side prohibition is needed.

Harm Reduction

Cities like San Francisco and Oakland, California are at the forefront of what’s called the “harm reduction” movement in America.

“Harm reduction is, at its core, a pragmatic way of looking at all risk-taking behavior,” says Eliza Wheeler of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which funds and oversees several needle exchange programs in the Bay Area. These exchanges allow heroin users to turn in dirty needles and obtain clean ones to prevent the spread of diseases. They also offer medications like naloxone, which can save lives by reversing the effects of an opioid overdose.

And now San Francisco’s Department of Public Health is preparing to convert some needle exchanges into “safe consumption sites,” where drug users can shoot up, snort, or smoke their drugs under supervision.

San Francisco would be the first American city to allow safe consumption sites, but Vancouver has already allowed the practice for years and the U.S. Surgeon General recently announced support for the idea in the United States.

“The problem with implementation [of harm reduction measures] is not lack of evidence that it works,” says Wheeler. “What we’re battling is a moral discomfort.”

There’s an even more radical approach than harm reduction. In response to its own overdose crisis, Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. The country saw rates of overdose deaths, disease transmission, and overall use fall. Portugal’s drug overdose rates are now approximately six deaths per million people. In the U.S., it’s 312 per million.

Meanwhile, the DEA investigation of Dr. Tennant is still ongoing. He hopes to find another doctor to take over his clinic. If not, he’ll close its doors by the end of June, and his patients—already turned away by their hometown doctors—will need to find someone else to care for them.

“When people get hopeless is when they think about suicide,” says Tennant. “And so we need to give people some hope. If nothing else, let them know that somebody cares.”

Sullum says that if the government doesn’t change its approach to opioids soon, we can expect more of the same results.

“The strategy the government seems to be pursuing is one of harm maximization,” says Sullum. “If it continues to do that, at the expense of harm reduction policies, you’re not going to see a decrease in opioid-related deaths—and in fact, they may continue to go up.”

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Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Alex Manning, Jim Epstein, Lexy Garcia, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Brett Raney. Additional color correction by Todd Krainin.

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Hurricane season starts today. If any dangerous storms roll into the United States this summer, President Trump’s tariffs on steel, aluminum, and Canadian timber will make them more costly.

Last year’s hurricane season was the costliest in American history, with three major storms—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—making landfall in the United States. Each of those storms caused more than $50 billion in damage, a threshold that had previously been surpassed by only two storms (2005’s Katrina and 2012’s Sandy).

Even if we avoid a repeat of last year’s weather, the tariffs are creating problems for anyone who wants to be prepared. Hurricane shutters, used to protect windows from being shattered by storms, are often made out of steel or aluminum. Shutter manufacturers are charging higher prices this year to make up for the higher costs and uncertainty created by the tariffs.

Sam Zaz, owner of Just Shutter It in Port St. Lucie, Florida, tells WPTV that supplies that cost $11 or $12 per square foot a year ago now cost him $14 or more. If prices keep going up, he’ll have little choice but to pass it on to his customers.

And if a major storm does hit, driving up demand for home building materials, there are already worries that shortages could occur as tariffs disrupt international suppliers. Developers are careful to downplay the potential costs of products they are trying to sell, but some tell The Real Deal, a South Florida real estate trade publication, that tariffs could increase the price of housing by “only” 1 to 2 percent.

That may not sound like much, until you realize that it means paying around $3,000 more for a home in Miami-Dade County (median home value: $288,000)—or, worse, paying that much more to rebuild your home after it’s been blown away and all your worldly possessions have been lost. Every family has an extra $3,000 stashed away in their survival kit, right?

Protectionism has already proven costly in the wake of major storms. As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi noted last year, Trump’s tariffs on Canadian lumber (approved in early 2017 with far less fanfare than the current round of steel and aluminum tariffs) had a direct impact on the rebuilding process around Houston after Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding in August.

“It was a significant hike at the time. It was a 20 percent increase,” Patrick Mayhan, vice president of purchasing for the Houston-area company Westin Homes, told Britschgi. “We had no choice but to pass that along to our retail pricing for the home. And that’s a significant amount, because lumber is a big part of the cost of building a home.”

Framing lumber accounts for about 18 percent of a house’s final cost, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that Trump’s lumber tariff has increased the price of single-family dwellings by an average of $1,300 as “builders have started to raise their prices to keep profit margins stable.”

In April 2017, the month Trump issued his tariff on Canadian timber, prices for framing lumber shot up to 20 percent higher then they had been in January of the same year. This wasn’t just a temporary shock to the system or a result of speculators reacting to the tariff announcement. By March of this year, the price of framing lumber had jumped by another 16 percent, according to a price index published by the trade publication Random Lengths.

Most homes along the Gulf Coast and in other hurricane-prone regions are built with concrete and rebar in order to withstand storms. That still requires steel, but it demands far less lumber than the average American home. But last year’s hurricane season demonstrates that powerful tropical storms don’t always stay where they are supposed to.

Meanwhile, nearly half of America’s steel imports are used for construction, and an ongoing jump in steel prices started in early March, when the Trump administration first announced its plans to lay tariffs. That spike occured despite the fact that several of America’s top sources for steel were exempt from the tariff until June 1, so another leap could be coming in the near future—just in time for hurricane season.

Sometimes the people hallucinating are not the ones taking the mushrooms, but the ones seeing them on Facebook.

After a couple in Maryland posted photos of the yummy morel mushrooms they had discovered, they got a call from the cops.

OutdoorHub reports that:

John Garrison posted a series of photos with his girlfriend, Hope Deery, on Facebook showing off the couple’s morel mushroom find while out hunting for the sought after fungi one afternoon.

“Mountain Morels!!! About to sautee them with brown sugar and cinnamon and see how that turns out,” his Facebook post reads.

While that does indeed sound like something you would only eat while high as a mountain goat, a revolting recipe is not what got them in trouble.

Garrison claims a few hours after eating the mushrooms, a police officer showed up at their door and questioned the couple about posting pictures of psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms.

But the police officer had made a mistake.

“We let them in and as soon as the police officer walked in he asked us why we were eating mushrooms and posting about it online.”

That would be pretty dumb. But the cop was dumber. As Garrison wrote on Facebook: “He thought he was on the biggest bust of his career thinking we were having a magic mushroom party before I explained to him that Morels are a native choice edible mushroom similar to truffles.”

The non-stoned truffle-maker had to rummage through the trash to find evidence of his non-crime. But the cop was still skeptical, which surprised Garrison because psychedelic mushrooms look nothing like morels. “I figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like,” thought Garrison, wrongly.

It wasn’t until a more gourmet cop showed up and identified morels as tasty, not trippy, that the couple was released. But first the cops proceeded to “process their IDs.”

Why? Because even non-events are events once the cops are involved. That is the (ahem) morel of the story.