Category: reason

Huge ratings weren’t enough to save the rebooted Roseanne, which was formally cancelled by ABC on Tuesday after star Roseanne Barr described former Obama administration aide Valerie Jarrett as if “the Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby” on Twitter.

It was a vile thing to say, though no one has any right to be surprised that Barr said it. The notoriously pro-Trump comedian—who is otherwise something of an ardent leftist—has a long history of offensive, nonsensical utterances. She once said Wall Street bankers should be executed via guillotine, has flirted with 9/11 trutherism, and claimed the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag operation. She doxed George Zimmerman’s parents, and suggested people should go to their homes unless Zimmerman was arrested for killing Trayvon Martin. In March 2018, she falsely accused Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg of making a Nazi salute; it was Roseanne herself, of course, who posed as Adolph Hitler for a satirical magazine in 2009, holding a tray of overbaked gingerbread men labelled “burnt Jew cookies.”

Roseanne is crazy, and her disgusting remark about Jarrett is perfectly in character. No one is allowed to pretend that Roseanne finally went too far, or some such nonsense: the Jarrett comment—for which she swiftly apologized, to no avail—is hardly more offensive than any number of things she has said over the years. If people who say very bad things do not deserve to work in television, then Roseanne should never have been rebooted in the first place.

The only thing that’s different this time is this: social media turns up the volume on offensive statements, and provides a perfect platform to pillory the perpetrator into submission. The network executives at ABC had to watch the Twitter villagers reaching for their pitchforks in real time, and feel the pressure to respond.

There’s nothing technically wrong with this: ABC can end any of its shows, prematurely or not, for any reason. Roseanne doesn’t have a First Amendment right to a platform on television, and if outraged liberals can persuade her bosses to jettison her, more power to them.

And yet I think we ought to be a little worried about what will come of this. Roseanne was by some accounts an interesting show that offered insights into the kind of Trump-voting working class American family that doesn’t often grace our TV screens. “Like most of us, they live, and live through, their differences, an accomplishment the show’s more ideological critics don’t seem to give people much credit for,” wrote Reason‘s Scott Shackford in a review of the show for the July issue of Reason.

Can a person find Roseanne interesting without endorsing Roseanne the person? If so, why was that possible yesterday, but not today—given that nothing about Roseanne’s nature has fundamentally changed?

Many conservatives are already criticizing what they will undoubtedly view as ABC’s capitulation to political-correctness-run-amok, and it’s easy to see how this could play directly into the right’s narrative that the left is determined to silence everybody who says the wrong thing. In response to left-of-center pundit Toure calling on ABC to address the fact that “millions are hurt, offended, and traumatized by Roseanne’s racist comments,” conservative commentator Jesse Kelly tweeted the following:

REMINDER:
Liberals will come for your career for wrong-think. People on the Right have had about enough of it and will start returning the favor. https://t.co/TkqoxtTrXO

— Jesse Kelly® (@JesseKellyDC) May 29, 2018

But conservatives are already coming for people’s livelihoods. Not even a week has passed since the NFL caved to pressure from conservative viewers—as well as the president himself—and banned players from kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police violence.

And that’s the problem. Conservatives won’t watch football unless all the players comport themselves perfectly, rigidly adhering to the right’s version of patriotic correctness. How dare you disrespect the flag, they say. Liberals don’t think a television show should continue to exist if somebody central to its production does or says something super bad. How dare you traumatize our marginalized communities, they say.

This race to find more things to be offended about and more reasons to start lynch mobs doesn’t seem particularly healthy for the fabric of American society, especially if right and left are determined to one-up each other on the outrage front. Many media companies will attempt to appease viewers on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and their output will be that much less interesting. I won’t particularly miss Roseanne, but I do miss being able to appreciate a television show, book, or work of art, even if I thought the artist was a lunatic.

Little more than a week after backing away from the threat of a trade war with China, the Trump administration on Tuesday reversed course and announced plans to impose tariffs on some 1,300 Chinese-made goods.

“The United States will impose a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology,” the White House announced Tuesday. A final list of covered imports will be announced on June 15—the preliminary list released in April included everything from biscuit ovens to airplane parts, and from flamethrowers to cash registers—and the tariffs will actually be imposed “shortly thereafter,” the White House said.

This amounts to a $50 billion tax increase on American consumers and businesses.

But don’t take my word for it. Instead, take John Hoff’s. Hoff, the president of Global Point Technology, an upstate New York company that designs and sources manufacturing components, was one of more than 100 people to testify before the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative against the proposed tariffs. His business already pays more than $40,000 in import taxes, but would have to pay more than $1.3 million if Trump’s proposed tariffs went into affect, he told the office’s special tariff committee.

“Imposing these tariffs would not be punishing a Chinese company,” Hoff said. “It would be punishing a U.S. company.”

He was hardly the only one to deliver that message. Over and over again, the committee heard from American business owners who said tariffs would wreck their bottom lines, force price increases to be passed along to consumers, and not do much of anything to punish China.

A few days after the hearing—and after two days of negotiations between Trump administration officials and their Chinese counterparts—an armistice was declared. China made some vague promises about buying more American products with the aim of reducing the trade deficit between the two countries, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin went on Fox News to declare that the administration was “putting the trade war on hold.”

The peace apparently didn’t last.

What changed? Maybe this is another case of Trump simply doing whatever the last person to speak to him says. Behind the trade war, there is a more camouflaged conflict between Trump’s top economic advisers, with free-traders like Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow pitted against economic nationalists like Peter Navarro. Over the long weekend, maybe the protectionists cornered the president and changed his mind.

Or maybe Trump has “thrown caution to the wind” and is following his gut on tariffs as one unnamed White House source told Axios‘ Jonathan Swan over the weekend.

Regardless of the reasons, this is no way to conduct foreign policy and serves only to rattle the domestic economy. Trump’s quick about-face on the Chinese tariffs surprised Beijing. “This is obviously contrary to the consensus reached between the two sides in Washington not long ago,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday in a statement.

Whatever it is that Trump hopes to accomplish by threatening a trade war—here’s your reminder that the goals are far from clearly outlined, nor is there much evidence that tariffs are a useful tool in fighting China’s admittedly bad trade practices—it’s hard to see how pulling the rug out from under your negotiating partner is a step on the path towards resolution.

Worse, this tune-in-next-week-to-find-out approach to trade negotiations creates huge levels of uncertainty for American businesses.

“How are U.S. businesses to innovate and create more value for consumers when policymakers bring so much uncertainty to trade?” asks Nathan Nascimento, vice president of Freedom Partners, a pro-trade group. “While some have speculated that this routine of announcing future tariffs is a mere negotiating ploy, the reality is that they have immediate and lasting, negative impacts on millions of Americans.”

What do Kim Kardashian, Joy Reid, and The Federalist have in common?

They’re all aghast at the case of Matthew Charles, a Tennessee man who was recently sent back to federal prison after two years of freedom when an appeals court ruled he had been released in error. Now criminal justice reformers and thousands of others are calling on President Donald Trump to commute Charles’ sentence.

Charles was released early from federal prison in 2016, having served 21 years of a 35-year sentence for selling crack to a police informant. Federal prosecutors then appealed, arguing that, because Charles had been originally been classified as a “career offender,” he was ineligible for the retroactive sentencing reductions put into place during the Obama presidency.

Despite a request from a federal judge asking prosecutors to drop their appeal, citing Charles’ “undisputed rehabilitation,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office pressed on. A federal appeals court ruled that, by the letter of the law, Charles should never have been released from prison.

A widely-read story published Friday by Nashville Public Radio reported in stomach-wrenching detail Charles’ last days of freedom, as family and friends said goodbye and Charles boxed up the small life he had managed to build on the outside. Earlier this month, he turned himself in to the U.S. Marshals and was sent back to a cage for another decade.

Charles was not a model citizen when he first arrived at prison. By his own account, he was right where he deserved to be. He had a serious criminal record including attempted murder and kidnapping. His crack cocaine sentence included an enhancement for illegally purchasing guns.

But as the article details, Charles found religion in prison, became a law clerk and GED instructor, helped illiterate inmates decipher court documents, and served 21 years of hard time without a single disciplinary infraction. After his release, he held down a steady job, volunteered every Saturday at a food pantry, reconnected with his family, and found a serious girlfriend.

Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries and a prominent criminal justice reform advocate, says Charles’ case demonstrates the problem with mandatory minimum sentences.

“These one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work in society, generally, and don’t work in the criminal justice system, either,” Holden says. “This case in so many ways sheds a light on it. You talk about a guy who did everything he was supposed to do while in prison, he turned his life around. Then he gets out, and he’s been leading a great life and just doing all the things you want to see someone do, but now he’s heading back to prison. It doesn’t make any sense. By the letter of the law, they got it right, but it’s completely unjust.”

Charles’ return to prison is so outrageously cruel and stupid that it has spurred condemnation across the political spectrum, from MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid to the conservative website The Federalist. Even Kim Kardashian tweeted about it.

Criminal justice reformers have been pushing the story to the White House in hopes of catching the attention of Jared Kushner, the adviser and Trump son-in-law who has made prison reform one of his top priorities.

A Change.org petition started by Families Against Mandatory Minimums is calling on Trump to commute Charles’ sentence; it now has more than 10,000 signatures.

As it happens, Trump is holding a rally in Nashville tonight, and local supporters of Charles’ are trying to catch Trump’s attention.

“As President Trump visits Nashville this evening, I hope he will review the case of Nashville resident Matthew Charles who, after serving over 20 years in prison, was released,” Republican state Sen. Steve Dickerson said in a statement today. “After living in Nashville as a model citizen, Mr. Charles is now being sent back to prison through no fault of his own. In no way is this justice, and I urge President Trump to commute Mr. Charles’ sentence so he may continue to move forward with rebuilding his life.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Charles is hardly the only prisoner who has been rehabilitated and is a good candidate for commutation. In fact, federal prosecutors argued that Charles’ case wasn’t unjust or unique enough to warrant relief, because there were roughly 5,000 other federal inmates whose status as “career offenders” had led to them being denied early release.

“Indeed, the only thing that appears to distinguish Mr. Charles from others who were found to be Career Offenders years ago and who now show evidence of rehabilitation is that the vast majority of these individuals are still incarcerated while Mr. Charles was released from prison and, thus, had the opportunity to interact with society outside of prison,” U.S. Attorney Donald Cochran wrote.

He may not have been making the point he intended to.

This morning Roseanne star Roseanne Barr crudely tweeted that Valerie Jarrett, a former aide to President Barack Obama, is like the “Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby.” She deleted the tweet, but it represented a line of bonkers behavior that ABC would no longer accept. By the afternoon, the president of ABC Entertainment, Channing Dungey, put out a statement that the show would not be coming back for a new season.

The Roseanne reboot’s first season of ended just a week ago as a ratings hit for the network. Dungey said in the release, “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

Roseanne has a lengthy history of outrageous statements, behavior, tweets, and conspiracy-mongering, but a statement that cannot be dismissed as anything but a racist slur no matter how hard you squint is something the network would be hard-pressed to ignore.

It’s also unfortunate that her inability to show any sort of personal restraint doomed the show. I watched most (but not all) of the first season of the Roseanne reboot, and it’s important to note that both Roseanne the character and Roseanne the show did not operate with the same attitude as Roseanne the real-life woman.

While both Roseannes are big supporters of President Donald Trump, the show was very thoughtful in its portrayal of a wide variety of ideological perspectives and how these family members navigated them, mostly through amusing bickering matches. Because of the show’s rich history and years of character work, these political divides didn’t feel like fronts; they felt lived-in and real. The conflicts played out as though they involved real people, not social-media constructs trying to score points off their eternal enemies. The show was not about which side was right and which side was wrong but how families deal with real-world problems as move forward through their lives.

In a short review of the reboot for the July issue of Reason magazine, I wrote: “Like most of us, they live, and live through, their differences, an accomplishment the show’s more ideological critics don’t seem to give people much credit for.” It’s a shame the real-world Roseanne justified the outrage of her ideological critics. The show deserved much more thoughtful critique.

President Donald Trump can barely open his mouth about immigration without getting something heinously wrong. Attorney General Jeff Sessions can barely open his mouth about immigration without getting something heinously wrong. And too many of the people opposing this administration’s immigration policies have a hard time doing so without themselves getting a bunch of stuff heinously wrong. Is this any way to tackle the admittedly difficult and always emotional policy issue of what to do about foreign nationals who seek to visit, work in, and/or move to this country?

On today’s editor-roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly talk about how bad faith makes bad immigration policy, and also about the NFL/national anthem kerfuffle, Europe’s awful General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and—by request!—our special summer-reading recommendations (which you can find below the podcast):

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

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘XXV’ by Broke For Free is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

Relevant links from the show:

“What It Means That ICE ‘Lost’ 1,500 Refugee Children,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Government Has ‘Lost’ 1,475 Unaccompanied Minors It Apprehended at the U.S. Border,” by Nick Gillespie

“Lies About Chain Migration Are Donald Trump’s ‘Welfare Queen,’ a Tall Tale To Comfort the Base,” by Nick Gillespie

“Jeff Sessions’ Immigration Lies,” by Matt Welch

“NFL’s National Anthem Policy Exposes Free Speech Hypocrisy of Right, Left, and Trump,” by Robby Soave

“NFL Players WILL Respect the Flag’s Authoritah, Says Commissioner,” by Matt Welch

“The End of Free Speech,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules Will Make Facebook and Google More Powerful,” by Andrea O’Sullivan

“Chicago Is Trying to Pay Down Its Debt by Impounding Innocent People’s Cars,” by C.J. Ciaramella

“Philip Roth, RIP” by Nick Gillespie

Special summer reading recommendations:

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway

The Witch Elm: A Novel, by Tana French

Broken Harbor, by Tana French

Session Cocktails: Low-Alcohol Drinks for Any Occasion, by Drew Lazor and the editors of Punch

Blandings Castle Series, by P.G. Wodehouse

Bad Citizen Corporation: A Greg Salem Mystery, by S.W. Lauden

HHhH: A Novel, by Laurent Binet

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Brussels has moved on straws. On Monday the European Commission—the bureaucratic and executive arm of the European Union—proposed banning single-use straws, plates, cutlery, and cotton swabs.

The new rules would also require new labels for sanitary wipes and balloons, explaining proper disposal techniques. Makers of plastic food containers and cups would have to pay impact fees to help clean up their products. So will the makers of fishing gear (which makes up 27 percent of Europe’s beach litter).

Everything not specifically banned—including bags, balloons, and cigarette filters—will be subjected to “awareness raising measures.”

“This Commission promised to be big on the big issues and leave the rest to Member States,” Frans Timmerman, the commission’s vice president for sustainable development, said in a press release. “Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem, because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.”

The straw ban will now be considered by the European Parliament and its Council of Ministers.

Most straw bans lean heavily on environmental justifications, and the E.U.’s is no exception, arguing that its new raft of anti-plastic measures will reduce marine litter to half of current levels while preventing 2.6 million tons of CO2 from being emitted by 2030.

The commission also claims that bans, restrictions, and taxes on certain plastic items will be great for the economy and for everyday consumers.

“Tackling marine litter creates economic opportunities,” a commission white paper confidently declares. Banning some plastic products, it argues, will require producers to make new, better products that will in turn “create jobs as well as strengthen technical and scientific skills and industry competitiveness.” Consumers will save €3.5 billion, claims the commission.

Needless to say, companies make and consumers use the existing crop of plastic products because they satisfy a need at the right price. Cheap and available plastic straws allow Europeans to drink beverages on the go, while plastic cotton swabs help them get gunk out of their ears in their free time. Neither benefit is life-changing, but they’re benefits nonetheless. If these items are banned, consumers will have to splurge on more expensive versions of the products or else go without them completely. That’s hardly a benefit for consumers.

The environmental benefits are questionable too. Plastic pollution is a global problem—and when you consider it on a global scale, the case for European restrictions becomes pretty thin.

A 2015 study on plastic marine waste found that most of it comes from populous coastal Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, which have become rich enough to start consuming a lot of plastic but not rich enough give their waste collection systems the upgrade they need.

China alone accounts for 28 percent of annual marine plastic waste. Indonesia is another 10 percent.

Rich countries, despite being heavy plastic users, contribute relatively little plastic waste to our oceans mostly because we do a good job of disposing of the plastic that they do us. The U.S. and the coastal countries of the E.U. combined are responsible for less than 3 percent of all plastic waste.

Some experts on plastic pollution have thus acknowledged that bans on consumable plastics in rich countries won’t make much of a difference.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State, tells National Geographic. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans.”

Such arguments have proven impotent in stopping the rapid spread of plastic straw bans. Just a year ago, only a few coastal California cities had either banned straws outright or restricted them with straw-on-request laws (which require the customer to ask for a straw before receiving one). Now, thanks in part to innumerable activist campaigns, some celebrity endorsements, and a viral video featuring a turtle, banning straws is a hip cause. Seattle implemented a straw ban in September 2017. Its northern neighbor Vancouver followed earlier this month. Both New York City and San Francisco are considering straw bans, as is the United Kingdom.

The U.K.’s environment minister, Michael Gove, even argued for Brexit on the grounds that a strengthened national government would be able to ban straws more quickly. Conversely, the E.U. is arguing that the plastic straw menace is the kind of problem that continent-wide government was built to handle.

“Given the propensity of litter to be carried by wind, currents and tide,” reads the E.U. Commission report, “the problem of plastic pollution and marine litter is transboundary in nature and therefore cannot be tackled in isolation by Member States.”

Whether the officials behind it are local, national, or supranational, a straw ban may soon be coming to a jurisdiction near you.

In Arizona, the #RedForEd teachers strike has drawn to a close along with the school year itself. Ultimately, public school teachers got their raises, politicians got to posture, and parents and students got a bitter taste of what it’s like to be held hostage in a battle between government employees and their paymasters. For Arizona residents, it should serve as an important lesson about the dangers of leaving themselves at the mercy of government institutions, argues J.D. Tuccille.

“Even before the walkouts…Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) had pledged to give teachers a 20 percent raise by 2020,” The Washington Post noted as the strike began. And after a week without classes—during which parents scrambled for something to do with their kids while they were at work—that’s exactly what the state legislature approved and the governor signed: the proposal lawmakers had already been debating.

Luckily, looking for alternatives to dysfunctional government schools isn’t an empty threat in Arizona, which has a healthy range of education options. Families can choose from charter schools, virtual schools, homeschooling, tax credits for donations to private school scholarship funds, and Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (vouchers) for private school tuition, notes Tuccille. Roughly 17 percent of the state’s public school students attend privately managed charters, which offer a range of education philosophies for different needs and tastes.

View this article.

A bill passed by the California Assembly would put an end to a practice in which several cities have been contracting with private prosecutors to handle nuisance abatement cases, then billing the impacted citizens thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees.

A $5,600 prosecution fee for keeping chickens illegally on a property and a $31,000 prosecution fee for home improvements built without a permit are just two examples of the eye-popping enforcement techniques that have been happening in California desert cities like Indio and Coachella.

Here’s how it worked: The cities set up code enforcement and nuisance abatement laws that called for criminal prosecutions, then contracted out those prosecutions to a law firm named Silver & Wright (this firm actually developed the original concept and pitched it to the cities). The law firm then prosecuted the cases and got defendants to plead guilty, pay a small fine, and agree to fix the problem. A few months later, Silver & Wright billed them for their own prosecutions. The firm’s demands for money included threats of liens on their properties if they did not pay. If they attempted to appeal, they were billed even more to cover the firm’s costs of fighting the appeal.

These money-mongering tactics were investigated and exposed by journalists at the Desert Sun and subsequently prompted a class action lawsuit filed by the lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm. Those lawyers hope to stop this practice and get the money returned to the property owners.

It looks like the days are numbered for this tactic. A bipartisan duo of lawmakers introduced the bill to formally forbid California cities and counties from engaging in this practice. The remarkably short AB2495 adds a single sentence to the state’s code that reads, “A city, county, or city and county, including an attorney acting on behalf of a city, county, or city and county, shall not charge a defendant for the costs of investigation, prosecution, or appeal in a criminal case, including, but not limited to, a criminal violation of a local ordinance.”

One of the Assembly members sponsoring the law, Republican Chad Mayes of Yucca Valley, said he had been hearing complaints but credited the Desert Sun‘s reporting for pushing him to introduce the legislation.

The bill unanimously passed the state Assembly and now heads to the Senate. According to a report by the Assembly Committee on Public Safety, the bill has no registered opposition.

The cities involved initially defended the practice. But last week, the city manager of Indio reversed position and told the Desert Sun he supported the reform bill.

Fourth Amendment advocates scored a victory today when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against a warrantless police search that involved an officer entering private property for the purpose of examining a motorcycle stored under a tarp in the driveway near a home. “In physically intruding on the curtilage of [Ryan Austin] Collins’ home to search the motorcycle,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority in Collins v. Virginia, the officer “not only invaded Collins’ Fourth Amendment interest in the item searched, i.e., the motorcycle, but also invaded Collins’ Fourth Amendment interest in the curtilage of his home.”

The central question before the Supreme Court in Collins v. Virginia was whether the so-called automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment, which allows the police certain latitude to search vehicles on public streets without a warrant, also allows the police to walk up a driveway without a warrant and search a vehicle parked in the area near a house. The Court ruled 8-1 that the automobile exception should not apply in this scenario.

“To allow an officer to rely on the automobile exception to gain entry to a house or its curtilage for the purpose of conducting a vehicle search would unmoor the exception from its justifications, render hollow the Fourth Amendment protection the Constitution extends to the house and its curtilage, and transform what was meant to be an exception into a tool with far broader application,” wrote Justice Sotomayor. “Indeed, its name alone should make all this clear enough: It is, after all, an exception for automobiles.”

The sole dissent in the case was filed by Justice Samuel Alito, who insisted that the police had every right to engage in this sort of warrantless activity. “The Fourth Amendment prohibits ‘unreasonable’ searches,” Justice Alito maintained. “What the police did in this case was entirely reasonable. The Court’s decision is not.”

This clash over the meaning of the Fourth Amendment should come as little surprise. Since joining the Supreme Court in 2009, Justice Sotomayor has distinguished herself as both a leading critic of police misconduct and an outspoken advocate of Fourth Amendment rights. Justice Alito, by contrast, has emerged as perhaps the Court’s most dependable voice in support of law enforcement in such cases.

Today’s decision will not be the last time that Sotomayor and Alito stand on opposite sides of a Fourth Amendment dispute.

C.J. Harris helped his Georgia high school football team reach the state championship game last year and had been offered a spot on the roster at Auburn University as a walk-on—that is, a non-scholarship player—to play defensive back for the Tigers, one of the top college football programs in the country.

But Harris suffers periodically from epileptic seizures and uses cannabidiol (CBD) oil, derived from marijuana, to manage his symptoms. That makes him ineligible to play college football, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ruled last week in a decision that has been widely panned.

After reviewing Harris’ medical records, Auburn’s coaches told Harris’ family that C.J. would not be able to compete in NCAA sports while taking CBD oil, WGXA reported last week. “When I read the text that one of the coaches sent me, I just, I broke down,” Harris told the Macon, Georgia, TV station. “Because this is my dream, and I saw everything lining up perfectly for me.”

The NCAA has a strict zero tolerance drug policy for athletes, and players caught with even trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis, are banned. Even though CBD oil is made from the stalks of the cannabis plant—as opposed to coming from the flowers, or “buds,” of the plant, like marijuana—and does not create the same effect of feeling “high” that comes from smoking or eating cannabis products with higher concentrations of THC, it can still contain trace amounts of THC, enough to violate the NCAA’s hardline anti-drug policy.

“We urge the NCAA to review their existing guidelines on THC and explore possible exceptions to allow players under medical treatment, like C.J., the ability to fulfill their dreams of playing college football,” said Phil Gattone, president and CEO of the Epilepsy Foundation, in a statement. “We hope the NCAA would reconsider their decision and assess C.J. on his character and talent as a football player.”

Even some college football coaches are speaking out against the NCAA’s rules. “A kid should not be punished for his seizures being brought under control,” Jerry Kill, the former University of Minnesota football coach who was named Big 10 Coach of the Year in 2014 and had to retire from coaching because of epileptic seizures, told a CNN reporter. “It’s not fair to the kid.”

More than 3 million Americans suffer from epilepsy, and about one-third of them have a form of the disease that does not respond well to pharmaceutical treatments. For many of them, including Harris, CBD oil has offered a potential solution. Since 2013, 17 states have legalized low-THC cannabis oil for limited medical purposes. Republican governors have signed 14 of those bills, including governors of deep red states like Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah. While special interests continue to fight CBD legalization in some places, the momentum is clearly on the side of legalization and ending the drug war.

Harris started suffering seizures in the 8th grade, but says he has not had a seizure in more than a year since starting to use CBD oil as a treatment. CBD is legal in both Georgia, where he lives, and in Alabama, where Auburn University is located.

As CBD oil, medical marijuana, and recreational marijuana become more widely accepted and legalized, it’s not only police and other government agencies that have to deescalate the drug war. The NCAA is a private institution and can make it’s own rules, of course, but those rules should reflect the changing attitudes and policies surrounding the use of marijuana, particularly when student-athletes’ health is part of the equation.

At the professional level, the National Football League is researching how CBD oil and other forms of medical marijuana might be able to help football players deal with the long-term consequences of playing the violent, dangerous sport—with current and former players advocating for the league to change its policy.

But the NCAA remains rooted to an outdated anti-drug mentality that leaves players with fewer treatment options and might end Harris’ college football career before it starts.