Category: reason

States with legal medical marijuana have more people over age 50 in the workforce—and they’re working longer hours.

The correlation is noted in a study published last month by researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Temple University, who analyzed 20 years of data from the national Health and Retirement Study, an annual survey of Americans over 50.

“The enactment of medical marijuana laws was associated with a 9.4 percent increase in the probability of employment and a 4.6 to 4.9 percent increase in the hours worked per week,” write researchers Lauren Hersch Nicholas and Johanna Catherina Maclean.

As of 2016, 25 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to legalize medical marijuana, though the laws differ in terms of which medical conditions are eligible to be treated with marijuana as well as how the drug can be accessed. Studies have shown marijuana to be an effective treatment for pain, anxiety, depression, nausea and sleep disorders, Nicholas and Maclean say. Those kinds of conditions are often chronic and worsen as a person ages, so better treatment options can help older workers say on the job.

That, in turn, puts less stress on welfare and disability programs.

“These effects should be considered as policymakers determine how best to regulate access to medical marijuana,” Nicholas and Maclean conclude.

For this study, researchers reviewed workforce data from 1992 through 2012, comparing participation rates before and after those states decided to legalize medical marijuana.

“This study contributes to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that regulating cannabis access is associated with a variety of unanticipated yet positive health and societal outcomes, such as decreased rates of opioid addiction and mortality, fewer workplace absences and reduced Medicare costs,” said Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, a national pro-legalization marijuana policy organization, in an email to Reason.

There are nine states with marijuana initiatives on the ballot next month. Of those, there are three—Arkansas, Florida and North Dakota—asking voters to decide whether marijuana should be legalized for the treatment of medical conditions.

• At least 269 people in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and St. Vincent have been killed by Hurricane Matthew, which reached U.S. waters Friday morning.
• Gary Johnson is scheduled to talk about foreign policy at the University of Chicago today.
• Students of all races prefer black and Latino teachers to white ones, according to a new paper.
• You think your parents were embarrassing? A Massachusetts dad has been arrested for dressing up like a clown and tailing his son’s school bus.
• Here’s the complaint against Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer, who was arrested in Texas yesterday. Evidence he’s complicit in “child sex trafficking” includes the fact that more people responded to an undercover officer’s escort ad than to an ad selling an old sofa and the fact that a woman detained in a Justice Department sting on Backpage admitted to posting ads there.

• A judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to stop doing business in Philadelphia.
• “In much of the developing world… [Hitler] is perceived less as a mass murderer and ideologue of global conquest than as a stern disciplinarian who addressed social ills in a briskly efficient manner,” according to Foreign Policy.
• Polish lawmakers voted down a proposed ban on abortion 352 to 58.
• The world’s oldest cat is a millennial.

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The crime that sent Ricky Minor to federal prison for life involved a little more than a gram of methamphetamine, plus supplies for making more: pseudoephedrine pills, acetone, matches, and lighter fluid. There was no evidence that he made meth for anyone but himself and his wife, and under Florida law he probably would have received a sentence of two or three years. But a series of nonviolent drug offenses, none of which resulted in prison time, made him a “career offender” under federal law, triggering a mandatory life sentence for attempting to manufacture methamphetamine. “I was sitting in the courtroom when it happened,” Minor’s mother recalled in an interview with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “and it was all I could do to stay seated in my chair. I was so shocked. I just couldn’t believe they could do that to him.” The judge who sentenced Minor acknowledged that a life term “far exceeds whatever punishment would be appropriate” while noting that he had no choice but to impose it.

Minor, who has spent 15 years behind bars, expected to die there. But thanks to President Obama, he will go free early in the next decade. Yesterday Obama commuted Minor’s sentence from life to 262 months. Assuming Minor gets full “good time” credit, he should be released in less than five years. “Thanks to President Obama,” Minor said in an ACLU press release, “I now have the chance to make my family proud of me, earn pride in myself, and be a person in society who is helpful and useful. I have felt my life wasting away inside of this place, and I know I’m capable of more. I haven’t been able to hug my daughter as a free man since she was 7 years old. She’s an adult now, and I am overcome with happiness that I won’t miss any more of her life.”

Minor is one 102 federal prisoners whose sentences Obama shortened yesterday, including 33 serving life sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. The latest batch raises Obama’s commutation total to 774, “more than the previous 11 presidents combined,” as the White House notes. That accomplishment is especially remarkable given Obama’s slow start. He shortened just one sentence in his first term and just 20 more in the first two years of his second term. Of the commutations granted so far, 97 percent were issued in the second half of Obama’s second term, with 76 percent granted since the beginning of this year. “While he will continue to review cases on an individualized basis throughout the remainder of his term,” says White House Counsel Neil Eggleston, “these statistics make clear that the president and his administration have succeeded in efforts to reinvigorate the clemency process.”

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), which helped publicize Ricky Minor’s case, praised Obama for picking up his commutation pace while noting that the possibility of clemency does not absolve Congress of its responsibility to reform federal sentences, a bipartisan effort that fizzled this year thanks to Republican worries about looking soft on crime close to elections. “The president is doing the right thing,” FAMM Vice President Kevin Ring said yesterday. “A hundred families—fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, and children—tonight will celebrate the news that a loved one will soon rejoin their family. President Obama has the power fix past mistakes, but only Congress can prevent future ones. It’s time for Congress to reform the mandatory sentencing laws that produced—and continue to produce—unjust and counterproductive sentences.”

One of the weirdest half-hours of nominally normal 1960s television is “Top Secret,” a 1963 episode of My Three Sons. This almost invasively wholesome series starred Fred MacMurray as Steve Douglas, an aeronautical engineer raising three boys after his wife’s death. In this installment, he has to work at home on a classified project; to keep everything secure, the house is put under surveillance.

“We’ll handle this job as though the Douglas family was out to blow up New York City,” one agent explains to his colleagues. “Every word, every move, every meaningful silence—that’s our assignment, from Top Level Pentagon.” An apparatus built to combat external and internal threats will be used instead on an ordinary American family, for what we are assured is everyone’s good.

For the rest of the episode the government invades everyone’s privacy, but the biggest victims appear to be the feds themselves, who are bored to tears by what they find. They file dreary reports on a young boy’s movements; they tap the family’s phone, yielding nothing but the halting progress of a teenager’s love life. At the end, Fred MacMurray’s character breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly:

You know, this security thing was a little tough on my family for a while, but, well, you can see that it was necessary. Of course, now that the project is completed I can tell you what it was all about. You see, what I was really working on was a type of missile—

And then the words top secret appear over MacMurray’s face and his next several sentences are scrambled. The security system that hovered over the Douglases turns out to be in our homes too, intercepting information before it can be heard on our televisions. It is difficult to describe this scene without it sounding deeply creepy, but the show presents it as perfectly benign. There’s even a laugh track:

In my book The United States of Paranoia, I contrasted that episode with a bicentennial-year edition of another sitcom, Good Times. (The summary above is adapted from my write-up in the book.) By 1976, the country had seen all sorts of official crimes exposed, from Watergate to COINTELPRO. Between that and the larger cultural revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, audiences were more willing to accept stories about the national security state abusing its power, even in a genre like the situation comedy. So when Good Times did a story about an ordinary American family falling under federal surveillance, it took a rather different approach to the subject. Here the FBI is shown callously disregarding its targets’ liberty, privacy, and interests, with disastrous results.

This is how much pop culture can change in 13 years:

Part two of three:

Part three of three:

As you may have noted, “The Investigation” ends with John Amos looking directly at the camera, like Fred MacMurray at the end of “Top Secret.” This time there’s no laugh track.

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

Can there be too many movies about black slavery in America? Not as long as there are new generations to be instructed in its abominable particulars, most likely, and not as long as its corrosive legacy continues to fester. The Birth of a Nation, the new movie by actor, writer and first-time director Nate Parker, takes up the subject once again, with mixed results. In recounting the story of Nat Turner, leader of a celebrated slave rebellion in 1831 Virginia, Parker gives us most of the familiar horrors: the whippings, the lynchings, the casual rapes. But he also devises fresh images: the sight of two plantation children at play, with a little white girl happily leading a little black girl around by a noose fastened to her neck, says as much about the soul-crushing inhumanity of black bondage as the movie’s more gruesome scenes.

Unfortunately, in his determination to avoid turning the film into an exercise in pure rage, Parker has extended his story into areas of melodrama that recall the sentimental historical epics of Hollywood’s golden age. We see the young Nat, tutored by a kindly white woman, engrossed in reading a Bible by the hearth light in his family’s rough cabin. (Other books, his mentor tells him, “are full of things your folk wouldn’t understand.”) And while Parker’s depiction of the love between Turner (played by Parker himself) and a battered slave girl called Cherry (a luminous Aja Naomi King) has a sweet delicacy, it also flirts with cliché, and it slows the movie’s momentum, writes Kurt Loder.

Americans remain deeply divided along partisan lines on the issue of climate change, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. Seven in 10 liberal Democrats trust climate scientists to give full and accurate information on the causes of climate change, whereas only 15 percent of conservative Republicans do. Why this partisan difference over what is essentially an empirical question? Recent social science research suggests that this type of polarization tends to occur when accepting or rejecting a scientific thesis becomes a signal to your fellow partisans that you’re on their side. Now new research finds that actively open-minded thinking by partisans actually increases polarization. So when it comes to politically polarized scientific disputes, does this mean that all sophisticated reasoning tends toward confirmation bias? Not for folks who are “science curious.”

View this article.

Veronica Welsh teaches at Smithtown High School West in Long Island and says the school has quite a few racists. According to a Facebook post she made, you can spot them by the Donald Trump gear they wear.

The Libertarian Party, as I detailed back in May, was involved in two distinct lawsuits that could have resulted in presidential candidate Gary Johnson getting into the presidential debates.

One of them, Johnson v. Commission on Presidential Debates, against the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) itself, was tossed in August by U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer for the D.C. Circuit.

That case is now, according to lawyer Bruce Fein in an email today, “on appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. No briefing schedule has yet been issued and thus no oral argument date.”

A second lawsuit, targeted specifically at the Federal Elections Commission for its alleged failures to properly curb the Commission on Presidential Debates, had been awaiting a decision on motions for summary judgment from both parties for months. Its official name is Level the Playing Field v. FEC.

Level the Playing Field is a “nonpartisan, nonprofit corporation not affiliated with any candidate or candidate committee…[whose] purpose is to promote reforms that allow for greater competition and choice in elections for federal office, particularly for the Presidency and Vice Presidency.” The Libertarian Party and Green Party are also plaintiffs in that suit.

This week, a date was announced for oral arguments on the motions for summary judgment. The catch: they are set for January 7, 2017, too late to effect the debates before the 2016 election.

From my past reporting, a quick summation of the arguments in that case, also in U.S. District Court for D.C.

The latest motion for summary judgment argues that the CPD has always been a deliberated duopoly for the two major parties and has “been violating FECA and FEC regulations limiting debate-sponsoring organizations’ ability to use corporate funds to finance their activities” since its efforts are not truly “nonpartisan.” The suit accuses the FEC “refus[ing] to enforce the law and ignored virtually all of this evidence in conclusorily dismissing the complaints even though there is plainly reason to believe that the CPD is violating FECA….

The suit accuses the CPD’s 15 percent polling requirement to be admitted to the debate as being effectively “impossible for an independent candidate who is not a self-funded billionaire to achieve.”

The suit further claims the FEC is derelict in its duties:

to protect the CPD and the major parties. The FEC relied on an interpretation of its debate staging regulation that is at odds with the text of the regulation and inconsistent with FECA. The FEC ignored virtually all of Plaintiffs’ allegations that the CPD is biased in favor of the two major parties. Its cursory analysis of Plaintiffs’ detailed evidence that the polling criterion disproportionately disadvantages independent candidates was conclusory and illogical, and failed to actually consider Plaintiffs’ allegations. This was arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law…..

The motion for summary judgment finally requests that:

The Court should grant summary judgment for Plaintiffs, and direct the FEC to do its job, which is to enforce the law and put an end to the CPD’s biased, anti-democratic, and fundamentally corrupt and exclusionary polling rule.

Those arguments will now be made in court in front of Judge Tanya Chutkan, alas too late to matter for 2016 no matter the outcome.

In other L.P./debate access news, I reported last week how, by at least one seemingly legitimate interpretation of the stated rules, the L.P.’s Florida Senate candidate Paul Stanton might qualify to be invited to a public debate on October 26 with incumbent Republican Marco Rubio and Democratic challenger Paul Murphy.

Now, the group running the debates has officially said no go to Stanton’s campaign.

Their reasons, in a letter I’ve obtained, sent from Dean Ridings of the Florida Press Association which co-hosts the debates?

First, that the Public Policy Polling poll in which Stanton earned 9 percent (which, along with what sounded like a 3.5 percent margin of error the hosts would give candidates, places him exactly at the 12.5 percent that should have earned entrance) does not qualify as a “credible and reputable independent poll.”

That’s because the poll was commissioned by a group called VoteVets.org Action Fund, one known to have supported Democrat Patrick Murphy financially. Thus, Ridings says they conclude “that the PPP Poll was performed on behalf of a supporter of a candidate in the United States Senate Race and is not an independent poll.”

Ridings also points out that they consider the poll illegitimate because it only listed three candidates by name, Rubio, Murphy, and Libertarian Stanton. In fact, though, “the ballot will list seven candidates by name. A poll question that contains a false or misleading premise and that only mentions some of the candidates who will appear on the ballot cannot, in our opinion, be considered a credible or fair assessment of likely voter intent.”

Further, Ridings applies the ambiguity I wrote about last week against Stanton. While part of their requirements said that they would apply a uniform 3.5 percent margin of error in a candidates favor, here Ridings falls on the poll’s own margin of error, a mere 3.4 percentage points.

The Stanton campaign’s only comment today was, via email: “With Hurricane Matthew about to make landfall on the East Coast of Florida, Paul is concerned only for the safety of Floridians and has no further campaign statement today.”

Carl Ferrer, the chief executive officer of Amsterdam-based classified-ad site Backpage, was arrested in Texas Thursday afternoon at the Houston airport. Ferrer, who is the subject of a current Congressional-subcommittee investigation into the site’s alleged role in sex trafficking, also had a warrant out in California for his arrest.

The charges against him include pimping, conspiracy, pimping of a minor, and attempted pimping of a minor. None stem from things Ferrer is alleged to have done personally. Rather, it’s asserted that because he own a classified-ad website—the second largest in the world, after Craigslist—where these activities may have happened, Ferrer himself is guilty of the charges.

Upon arriving on a flight from Amsterdam to Texas Thursday, “nearly three dozen members of the Texas Attorney General’s Law Enforcement Unit participated in Ferrer’s arrest and the execution of a search warrant on the Dallas headquarters of Backpage,” according to the Texas Attorney General’s Office. “Making money off the backs of innocent human beings by allowing them to be exploited for modern-day slavery is not acceptable in Texas,” Attorney General Paxton said in a statement. “I intend to use every resource my office has to make sure those who profit from the exploitation and trafficking of persons are held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

Outside the realm of politician hyperbole Backpage.com is a site much like Craigslist, its more well-known online classifieds counterpart. Like Craigslist, Backpage provides a space for people to post ads offering secondhand-lawnmower sales, independent housecleaning services, and all sorts of things—including, in the adult entertainment section of the site, things like strippers, dominatrixes, and sex.

And like Craigslist—and Facebook, and Twitter, and every newspaper with a comment section—Backpage is protected by Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. It says that user-generated content sites cannot be held strictly liable for things members or users post. Without Section 230, Twitter could be taken down over terrorism threats from anonymous ISIS members, Facebook could be destroyed because some users have been found to solicit sex from underage individuals in its messaging section, Reason could be liable for anything its commenters post, and Craigslist could be killed over someone selling a stolen TV there.

But but but… the children! The children are actually being harmed by actions like Ferrer’s arrest. I’ve written extensively about Backpage over the past few years, as well as about U.S. sex-trafficking investigations. While Backpage doesn’t screen all its ads, it does employ people to monitor the adult section. And any ads suspected of containing anyone under 18 are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Countless investigations into child sex-trafficking in the U.S. have been solved with Backpage’s help.

Political opponents of the site like to imagine that without it, sex trafficking and the sexual exploitation of minors would simply cease. But the closure of sites like Backpage—where ads for adult sex workers and adults selling totally non-sex related things far outnumber any ads for illegal activity—send both independent sex workers and sex-traffickers to more underground venues or back out onto the streets—places where no one is screening anything or reporting anything suspicious to the government.