Tag: hit&run

Wisconsin College Spent $100K Investigating Instructor for Allegedly Saying Police Department Was ‘Full of Racists’

A vocational college in La Crosse, Wisconsin, spent more than $100,000 investigating one of its instructors for allegedly saying the local police department was “full of racists.”

The school is Western Technical College (WTC). The instructor is Nicole Miller, who teaches at the college’s law enforcement academy; she is also a former La Crosse County sheriff’s deputy and former correctional officer. Miller purportedly made the comment while warning a potential recruit against taking a job at the La Crosse department.

When then–Police Chief Ronald Tischer heard about this, he demanded an investigation. The ensuing probe, in which Tischer also enlisted the Wisconsin Department of Justice, lasted more than a year and ended with Miller being cleared of any wrongdoing. But it has cost the public college $103,445 so far in bills to a consulting firm and law firm that it hired to handle the matter, according to figures provided by WTC.

The case shows how powerful local officials, like a police chief, can leverage their influence to punish critics. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy group, says that investigating an instructor for giving her professional opinion to a student has a chilling effect on free speech.

“Students rely on the ability of instructors to share honest views about the opportunities available to them,” says Adam Steinbaugh, the director of FIRE’s individual rights defense program. “That’s true whether it’s a student asking about an opportunity at an academic program, a private company, or a government agency. Investigations into protected speech—such as opining on a police department’s culture or actions—will chill speech, to the detriment of students.”

The imbroglio started on August 13, 2018, when Tischer emailed the WTC president complaining that he had heard that Miller had been telling students that the La Crosse Police Department was “full of racists” and “you shouldn’t work there.”

“As you can imagine, I am outraged at this comment,” Tischer wrote. “The La Crosse Police Department does more than any other police department in the state to attract and hire a diverse workforce.”

A week later Tischer sent an email to officials at the Wisconsin Department of Justice about a “significant problem” that had been uncovered at WTC. “We would like to meet to discuss our options and ensure this instructor or any other instructors are never allowed to unjustly defame our department,” Tischer wrote.

In October 2018, WTC officials met with Tischer and representatives from the Department of Justice. The college laid out its initial investigation, which found there wasn’t evidence to support Tischer’s claims that Miller had said the department was “full of racists.”

Tischer then complained that the investigation hadn’t interviewed enough people about Miller’s alleged bias against the La Crosse Police Department, and he accused her of making several other disparaging remarks about the department and individual officers. In a follow-up email, Tischer suggested that the college could also be sued for her comments.

“Western Technical College is culpable for Ms. Miller’s words and bears the burden for her actions,” Tischer wrote on November 5, 2018, email. “The term Vicarious Liability comes to mind” (emphasis in original).

Tischer demanded that the college remove his name from its criminal justice advisory council and said he would be asking the state for a permanent waiver for the La Crosse Police Department to avoid sending any future officers to the WTC’s law enforcement academy.

The college, at the request of Tischer and the Wisconsin Department of Justice, hired a law firm and consulting firm to conduct an outside investigation.

While the investigation was taking place, several other La Crosse Police Department officers reported that Miller had made disparaging remarks about the department, each of which added additional time and costs to the investigation.

In November of this year, after conducting 24 interviews with supposed witnesses, the firms released their final report, finding that there was not sufficient evidence to substantiate any of the allegations.

“Any discussions regarding race were private conversations and the alleged statements ‘full of racists’ and ‘you shouldn’t work there’ could not be substantiated,” the report stated. “In addition, the main witness related to these allegations stated that Ms. Miller had no malicious intent and that she was looking out for him.”

As for the other alleged disparaging remarks, the report concluded that “rumormongering was a factor in this matter and may have worsened this situation.”

One thing the report didn’t delve into was whether the La Crosse Police Department was in fact full of racists.

In 2016 the city paid $50,000 to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit by a former La Crosse police officer against the department.

Anthony Clark, one of only two black officers at the La Crosse Police Department at the time, alleged that he was subjected to persistent racial harassment by officers and supervisors. Clark’s suit claimed black officers were referred to as “jigaboo,” that he was called a “house dog,” and that bananas were put in his locker.

After Clark’s complaint went public, he claimed the La Crosse Police Department retaliated by papering him with disciplinary investigations and reprimands.

“It became clear that following the public notice of my charges, the city has fly-specked my records, video and audio, searching for infractions and criticized actions which are routine for other white officers in the department,” Clark wrote in a follow-up discrimination complaint.

The city did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the terms of its settlement with Clark, but it agreed to purge his disciplinary record. 

The only black La Crosse officer who worked with Clark, Nathan Poke, filed a another discrimination lawsuit this January, alleging that he was retaliated against and ultimately fired for trying to report misconduct by a white officer. In a sworn deposition, he repeated many of Clark’s claims about the department. He said another officer referred to him and his music, or anything related to black culture generally, as “jigabooish.”

A spokesperson for Western Technical College said that, as of now, the La Crosse Police Department has not sent any recruits back to the school. Tischer is now the police chief of Payson, Arizona.

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Want the Government To ‘Defend Families’ From Porn? Child Protective Services Should Be a Cautionary Tale

In their zeal to break with libertarians and limited-government conservatives, various thinkers on the new right have been making a lot of noise about the allegedly urgent need to ban pornography.

Such a crackdown is being touted as pro-family and pro-child—part of a revitalized conservative agenda that thinks the government has an important role to play in promoting and defending families and children.

These conservatives should consider the track record of the government agencies most directly involved with ostensibly safeguarding the welfare of children: the states’ various child protective services departments. I submit that think-of-the-children conservatives who grapple seriously with CPS’s long history of tearing apart families for no good reason should shudder at the idea of giving more power to the state.

Let’s consider the most recent article from Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire writer who has helped to revive and revisit this debate. Walsh is among a group of social conservatives—Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz are two others—firmly in the camp that says conservatism should shed its libertarian side and fully embrace the government’s power to promote social welfare. In an interview with Vox‘s Jane Coaston, Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward described this view as “the idea that we should prohibit people from making bad choices,” or more simply “make the bad thing illegal.” In his various debates with conservative writer David French (who leans more toward the libertarian side, though he supports some efforts to curb pornography), Ahmari has repeatedly reminded audiences and readers that he is “willing to ban things.”

Walsh defines his position thusly: “Every Child Exposed to Internet Pornography Is an Abuse Victim. There Should Be Laws Protecting Them.” For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the first part of that contains at least some truth, and that porn is indeed harmful for kids. (The harms of porn are generally overstated, but we’ll ignore that for the moment.)

There is a government agency tasked with protecting children from abuse. This agency goes by a different name in every state; in California, for example, it’s Child Protective Services, or CPS. It is empowered to remove children from homes where abuse is suspected.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that some children are in indeed vulnerable situations. But CPS is a hammer, and every family that comes under suspicion of having done something wrong is a nail. Here at Reason, Lenore Skenazy and I have chronicled many horror stories about these agencies’ wrongful interventions. Diane Redleaf, an attorney, families advocate, and author of They Took the Kids Last Night: How Child Protective Services Puts Families At Risk, told Skenazy that “children are routinely taken from their parents, even when there’s no evidence of abuse.” They are taken because of a false accusation from a nosy neighbor or teacher, because perfectly capable children were left alone by themselves for short periods of time, because of injuries that the authorities wrongly attributed to abuse, because doctors’ instructions weren’t followed to a T, and for a host of other reasons that did not actually necessitate tearing families apart.

The Houston Chronicle recently conducted a massive survey of CPS victims. Some 300 parents told the paper that medical misunderstandings had resulted in them losing custody of their children. For more on this subject, read my report about the Lowther family, torn apart for half a year because of a false accusation of child sexual abuse.

I’m sure many pro-family conservatives react with horror when the government overrides parental rights in these cases. (Indeed, I recall that Walsh covered the Lowther case, for which I am grateful.) Do kids belong to themselves and their parents, or are they the property of the state? Should we default toward trusting parents to know what’s best for their kids, or should they have to prove that they are better stewards of their own children’s well-being than a vast government bureaucracy? I think it’s obvious where social conservatives should stand on this.

Declaring that thousands of perfectly healthy young people are actually victims of sexual abuse because they consumed some pornography is a recipe for disaster. It’s an invitation for the state to punish parents for having failed to prevent this abuse.

I understand that the aim of anti-pornography conservatives is not to punish parents but to help them, by going after porn creators and distributors. But other wars on vice—drugs, prostitution, alcohol, cigarettes—have virtually always been waged against the consumers of such vices as well as the producers and providers. Why would porn be any different?

When the state’s responsibility for children increases—when every undesirable thing is considered a form of abuse necessitating governmental intervention—parents lose rights. Giving the government more opportunities to hassle families should have no place in a pro-family agenda.

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After Contentious Debate, House Judiciary Votes To Advance Articles of Impeachment Against Trump

Members of the House Judiciary Committee voted Friday morning to advance articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The move came after hours of debate on Wednesday and Thursday as the committee sparred over the merits of the articles, with Republicans introducing a series of amendments, all of which were denied along party lines. Trump is hurtling toward impeachment amid allegations that he withheld a White House meeting and $391 million in congressionally authorized military aid from Ukraine in exchange for President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announcing public probes into his political rivals. Specifically, Trump wanted Zelenskiy to investigate Burisma Holdings, the energy company where former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board, and look into a highly criticized theory that Ukraine executed a major 2016 election interference scheme to help Democrats.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) sought to strike the first article entirely. “Article one in this resolution ignores the truth, ignores the facts, ignores what happened and what has been laid out for the American people over the last three weeks,” he said. There was no quid pro quo, Jordan maintained, although Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified that there was a well-understood exchange in place with respect to the desired White House meeting. Jordan also continued to drive home that the investigations in question never took place, a point that the minority party repeatedly made during the initial hearings. 

“I think the tougher challenge is the question of what explains why the money eventually got delivered,” Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton, told me last month. “We may not want to give them a lot of credit for eventually coming to their senses and trying to release the funds, especially if we think that why they’re doing it was because they got caught.”

Jordan also moved to strike language from the articles that says Trump should be removed from office, which Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–New York) said was a “silly” suggestion.

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R–Penn.) fought to have the second article removed, asserting that Trump has not obstructed congressional investigators from conducting their inquiry. Democrats cite the president’s refusal to release certain documents and let witnesses testify, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and former national security adviser John Bolton.

Reps. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) and Andy Biggs (R–Ariz.) each introduced an amendment as well. The former requested that “Burisma and Hunter Biden” supplant the mention of Joe Biden, which he called “the true topic” of the desired probe. (A White House rough transcript of the July 25 between Trump and Zelenskiy call shows the president mentioning both men.) 

Gaetz invoked the younger Biden’s history of substance abuse as he sought to characterize his business relationship with Burisma as rife with corruption. “I don’t want to make light of anybody’s substance abuse issues, I know the president is working real hard to solve those throughout the country,” he said, “but it’s a little hard to believe that Burisma hired Hunter Biden to resolve their international disputes when he could not resolve his own dispute with Hertz rental car over leaving cocaine and a crack pipe in the car.” In response, Rep. Hank Johnson (D–Ga.) reminded Gaetz of his 2008 arrest on drunk driving charges.

Biggs asked that language be inserted to add that the aid block was “consistent with administration policy to ensure foreign aid is not used for corrupt purposes,” although Ukraine had already met all of the necessary anti-corruption benchmarks to receive foreign aid before it was withheld. The articles of impeachment currently say that Trump released the security assistance package when “faced with the public revelation of his actions,” referring to the whistleblower report and the press attention that followed.

The articles will soon head to the House floor for a full vote, likely to take place next week.

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U.K. Election: Brexit Wins, Jeremy Corbyn Crashes

The U.K. election has delivered a huge victory to conservatives—and to Tory leader Boris Johnson—and astounding losses to the Labour Party. The results mean much more than the Conservative Party continuing to control the U.K.’s governing bodies.

With at least 364 seats won, the Conservative Party has well surpassed the number required for a majority in Parliament. Prime Minster Boris Johnson “will now enjoy a comfortable majority to ‘get Brexit done’—in other words, to pass the withdrawal agreement that he negotiated with European Union leaders in October,” notes The Economist.

“In truth, the election-night story was not so much that of a Tory surge but of a Labour slump,” the magazine adds.

The Jeremy Corbyn–led Labour Party will see its parliamentary vote share drop eight points. It was the party’s worst showing since 1935.

Labour’s steepest drops came in areas where the Nigel Farage–led Brexit Party did well. (But as The Spectator notes, Farage’s party did not “even come close to winning a single parliamentary seat.”) 

In any event, it looks like Brexit is on.

And with the chances of Scottish secession rising again, some say this could kick off the destruction of the United Kingdom itself.

The election also speaks to the rising power of combining left-leaning economic policy with conservative social views and immigration policies (so, you know, the worst of all words for free minds/markets/migration types).

Britain’s third largest party, the Liberal Democrats, also “had a dreadful night,” points out The Economist. And yet

the Tories’ mighty new coalition is sure to come under strain. With its mix of blue collars and red trousers, the new party is ideologically incoherent. The northern votes are merely on loan. To keep them Mr Johnson will have to give people what they want—which means infrastructure, spending on health and welfare, and a tight immigration policy. By contrast, the Tories’ old supporters in the south believe that leaving the EU will unshackle Britain and usher in an era of freewheeling globalism. Mr Johnson will doubtless try to paper over the differences. However, whereas Mr Trump’s new coalition in America has been helped along by a roaring economy, post-Brexit Britain is likely to stall.

Some say the results highlight how it’s easier for right-leaning politicians and parties to embrace left-leaning policies than vice-versa, though this idea has its skeptics:

“The British election results, like any election result, is the result of unique circumstances and multiple factors,” suggests Jonathan Chait at Intelligencer. “It is also, however, a test of a widely articulated political theory that has important implications for American politics. That theory holds that Corbyn’s populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn’s crushing defeat is a decisive refutation.”

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“Vaping policy” consumes White House.

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A good piece from Jane Coaston on the new porn wars, with cameos by Katherine Mangu-Ward and myself:

For several decades now, movement conservatism has adhered to Andrew Breitbart’s maxim that “politics is downstream of culture,” arguing that rather than engage the forces of government to create change, conservatives should focus on changing popular culture instead. But some social conservatives are now arguing the very opposite….

Arguments in favor of the use of laws to change or improve human behavior hasn’t been a characteristic of the post-2010 conservative movement that still bears the influence of the Tea Party and libertarian-leaning Republicans. In fact, Mangu-Ward told me that such arguments were, in her view, generally made by left-leaning politicians and thinkers. Referencing former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to ban large sodas, she said such rationales stem from “the idea that we should prohibit people from making bad choices,” or in short, “make the bad thing illegal.”

Catholic theocrat and New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari told Coaston that pornography is “degrading” and “Andrea Dworkin was right.”

QUICK HITS

  • Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) is introducing a milk freedom bill:

  • Uh-oh:

  • 3D printers are building houses for poor families in Mexico.
  • “Space entrepreneurs tend to share a fondness for libertarian principles,” says Wired.
  • A West Hollywood councilman wants to launch a task force to look at the “lived experience of sex workers in West Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area” and prepare a report for local and county authorities.
  • American Samoans are U.S. citizens by birth, says a federal judge. “American Samoans living in Utah brought the suit in 2018, arguing that being ‘non-citizen nationals’ instead of US citizens closed the door to some employment opportunities and didn’t allow them to vote, among other rights afforded to US citizens,” reports CNN.
  • California’s gig-worker “protection” bill continues to harm gig workers and freelancers.
  • The new U.K. Parliament will have a record number of women:

  • Lol:

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Richard Jewell Shows What a Conservative Hollywood Would Look Like 

I am not entirely sure whether Richard Jewell is a great movie—probably it is—but I am certain that it is a fascinating cultural document. For in addition to telling a startling true story, it acts as a feature-length thought experiment into the question: What would Hollywood look like if it were stridently, self-righteously conservative instead of comparably liberal? 

Directed by Clint Eastwood from a screenplay by Billy Ray, Richard Jewell tells the true story of the title character, a socially awkward security guard whose swift and decisive actions amidst a bombing at the 1996 Olympics probably saved dozens or even hundreds of lives. Yet instead of being hailed as a hero, Jewell was subjected to a brutal, manipulative FBI investigation and an onslaught of callous media coverage, simply because he fit a demographic profile.  

Judged strictly on its cinematic merits, Jewell is a masterclass in understated craftsmanship. Eastwood coaxes top-notch, empathetic performances from his leads, especially Paul Walter Hauser in the title role. And the screenplay by Ray, who has previously chronicled both media and law enforcement failures in Shattered Glass and Breach, acts as a guided tour of the journalistic and law enforcement failures that led to Jewell becoming a federal target and publicly humiliated as a person of interest. It is tense, terse, startling, and, for the most part, incredibly effective. 

But Eastwood, one of Hollywood’s most prominent non-liberal filmmakers, has more in mind than simply telling Jewell’s personal story. Instead, he uses him as an example, a case study in the failure of a broad cross-section of elite institutions that resulted in the unwarranted and counterproductive harassment of someone who had performed an immense public service. 

The first of those institutions is academia. Jewell was once fired from a security job at a local college for misbehavior, and the FBI’s investigation kicks off when an administrator reports him as suspicious. The second is the media, which rushed to report that Jewell was a person of interest, and which, in some cases, exaggerated the strength of law enforcement’s case against Jewell (NBC’s Tom Brokaw is shown confidently saying: “The speculation is that the FBI is close to making the case. They probably have enough to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well.”) 

The final culprit is law enforcement itself, which the movie shows inappropriately sharing Jewell’s name with a reporter for the local Atlanta paper (the paper has contested the movie’s version of this particular event), and engaging in a series of deceptive tactics in hopes of playing on Jewell’s earnest naivete and essential trust in authority. 

Even more than the sections dealing with the media, the sequences involving law enforcement are among the movie’s most damning, as they show the FBI subjecting Jewell to an intense and humiliating investigation, often under misleading pretenses, based on no substantive evidence against him—and then concocting ever-more-implausible theories to explain his guilt when the facts don’t prove their suspicions. 

Some of the focus on Jewell comes from a genuinely checkered past: He was fired from a job as a sheriff’s deputy, and we see him abusing his power with a couple of drunken college students. But some of it comes from the way in which he fit a cultural and demographic profile, as an uncultured, unsophisticated, overweight white man who collected guns, adored police, and lived with his mother. Jewell, the movie suggests, was a victim of elite snobbery, which misjudged him not only as a rube, but as a grave danger. 

You can see where this is going. In the opening stretch of the movie, we hear Jewell say “you can’t have a country” without law and order and see his down-and-out lawyer, Watson Bryant (a feisty, deceptively brilliant Sam Rockwell), sitting in front of a bumper sticker that says “I fear government more than I fear terrorism.” There’s even a brief discussion of the phrase “quid pro quo.” By the end of the movie, Jewell and Bryant are having extended discussions in front of a prominently framed Georgia flag, which at the time incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag into its design. The contemporary political parallels aren’t exactly subtle. 

Donald Trump’s name is never uttered in Richard Jewell, but his presence looms over the movie, and at times it plays as much as an implicit defense of him—another uncouth outsider mocked, dismissed, and vilified by the elite trio of media, academia, and federal law enforcement—as a true story about a wrongly suspected security guard. 

As a movie about Trump and today’s political climate, I’m not sure it entirely succeeds, if only because the facts about Jewell are so clear cut and the debates about Trump are not. But as a movie about Richard Jewell, the individual, and the ways that he was treated with systematic unfairness by America’s elite cultural and legal institutions, it’s a marvel of empathy, clarity, and righteous indignation. That the movie seems to want viewers to transfer these feelings onto today’s political landscape is somehow both beside the point and impossible to ignore. 

Which is to say that Richard Jewell presents an unusual version of Hollywood politics in negative, one in which the filmmaking and storytelling are undeniably excellent even as the filmmaker’s political views are embedded in ways that both distract from the underlying film and provide its reason for being. The movie’s politics are so thoroughly integrated into its narrative and its assumptions about the world that they are in some sense inseparable from the quality of the filmmaking itself. This is not just a movie that tells an essentially conservative story; it’s a movie that tells its story from an essentially (if idiosyncratically) right of center perspective—and that probably wouldn’t exist without it. 

So to watch Richard Jewell as a liberal, I imagine, is something like what watching movies as a non-liberal is like so much of the time—bringing a similar blend of pleasure and frustration, irritation and engagement, enlightenment and outrage. If nothing else, then, Eastwood has done what only the best filmmakers manage to do, and made a movie that truly helps viewers see through another person’s eyes. 

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Seating in the Courts of Appeals

Last month, I wrote a thee–part series about my negative experience waiting on bar line at the Supreme Court. This post will recount my positive experience attending oral arguments at the D.C. and Fourth Circuit Courts fo Appeals.

On Monday, December 9, I attended oral arguments at the D.C. Circuit for Blumenthal v. Trump. Here, members of Congress alleged that President Trump violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Oral argument were slated to begin at 9:30. I arrived at the court around 8:15. At that point, a handful of people were waiting in the hallway outside the courtroom. A member of the court staff did an informal count, and told everyone what number he or she had. I was number 4. Around 9:00, we all lined up in number order. There was no confusion. A few minutes afterwards, we were escorted into the courtroom. By my count, there were about 20 reserved seats for the public. The rest of the seats were reserved for the press, guests of counsel, guests of the court, as well as law clerks. (There were far more than a dozen law clerks; I suspect clerks from other chambers also attended). This process was quite organized and efficient.

On Thursday, December 12, I attended oral arguments at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals for Maryland and D.C. v. Trump. Here, the state and the district alleged that President Trump violated the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clause. This proceeding was en banc, and there were fifteen judges present. (Judge Shedd, who took senior status in 2018, sat on the panel, but did not sit on the en banc court; I’m not sure why.) The hearing was to begin at 9:00. I arrived shortly after 8:00. The en banc courtroom was already open, and was divided into sections. Sections 1 and 2 were for guests of the parties. Section 3 was for the press. Section 4 was for the law clerks. (This section was, by far, the biggest, as each of the fifteen judges brought 3 or 4 law clerks to Richmond.) I was in Section 5, a section for the public. (I counted about 20 seats in this section). Court staff handed me a ticket that said section 5. This ticket allowed me to leave the courtroom to use the restroom or get a drink of water. Again, the process was extremely simple and straightforward.

Kudos to the D.C. Circuit and the Fourth Circuit. SCOTUS, you can do better.

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This Was the Decade When Politicians Stopped Panicking About Marijuana and Started Panicking About Nicotine

During the same week last month when a congressional committee passed a groundbreaking bill aimed at repealing the federal ban on marijuana, another congressional committee approved a new federal ban on flavored e-cigarettes. The House Judiciary Committee’s vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act showed how far politicians have moved in their thinking about drugs during the last decade. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s vote on the Reversing the Youth Tobacco Epidemic Act showed how far they have to go.

The shift from demonizing cannabis to demonizing nicotine is not a good sign for anyone who hoped that recognizing the folly of marijuana prohibition would lead to a broader understanding of the costs inflicted by attempts to forcibly prevent people from consuming psychoactive substances. By and large, neither legislators nor the voters they represent think about this subject in a principled way. If they did, the repeal of National Alcohol Prohibition in 1933 would not have been followed four years later by the Marihuana Tax Act, a federal ban disguised as a revenue measure. When it comes to ending the war on drugs, the same arguments have to be deployed anew for every intoxicant.

Still, there’s no denying the dramatic progress we’ve seen since 2010, when no state allowed recreational use of marijuana (with the partial exception of Alaska, where the state constitution had been interpreted as protecting private possession of small amounts). Today recreational use is legal in 11 states, 10 of which also allow commercial production and distribution, while medical use is legal in 33 states, up from 13 at the beginning of the decade. During the same period, according to Gallup, public support for general legalization has risen from 44 percent to 66 percent.

Marijuana remains illegal for any purpose under the Controlled Substances Act, which creates all sorts of problems for the cannabis industry. But in recent years (and under two administrations), the feds generally have not targeted state-licensed marijuana suppliers for prosecution or forfeiture. Nearly every Democratic presidential contender supports legalization (with the notable exceptions of Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg), and even Donald Trump has repeatedly said states should be free to abandon pot prohibition.

One other sign of the times: Former House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican who not long ago described himself as “unalterably opposed” to marijuana legalization, is now a cannabis industry lobbyist. Boehner saw the light sooner than several prominent Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.).

The movement away from total prohibition has not been limited to marijuana. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which last year approved the first cannabis-derived medicine to be recognized by the federal government (an oral cannabidiol solution used to treat epilepsy), in 2017 recognized MDMA as a “breakthrough therapy” for post-traumatic stress disorder. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which sponsored the research that the FDA found compelling, says MDMA could be available by prescription as soon as 2021, more than three decades after the Drug Enforcement Administration banned it.

Psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” may join MDMA as a prescription drug. Last year, based on preliminary research, the FDA identified psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for depression. A 2017 YouGov survey found that 53 percent of Americans support clinical trials involving “illegal psychedelic substances” such as “mushrooms, ketamine, [and] MDMA,” while 63 percent would try a psychedelic as a treatment for “a medical condition” if it were “proven to be safe and effective.”

Local activists in various states want to go further by decriminalizing nonmedical use of psilocybin. This year Denver voters approved a ballot initiative that instructed police to stop arresting adults 21 or older for possessing psilocybin. While the practical consequences of that initiative will be modest, it is symbolically and politically important as the first successful measure of its kind. Activists in Oregon and California hope to pass ballot initiatives that would decriminalize psilocybin statewide.

When it comes to opioids, by contrast, the pendulum has been swinging toward more government control. Responding to a surge in opioid-related deaths that began in the early 2000s, the government imposed new restrictions on the use of narcotic analgesics. Since 2010, those policies have succeeded in driving down pain pill prescriptions, which had increased dramatically since the late 1990s. Yet the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated as nonmedical users switched to heroin and illicitly produced fentanyl, which are much more dangerous because their potency is unpredictable. Today those black-market drugs account for the vast majority of fatalities involving opioids. Meanwhile, the indiscriminate campaign against prescription analgesics has deprived many bona fide patients of the medication they need to control their pain.

Like the crackdown on pain pills, the government’s reaction to the recent surge in adolescent vaping promises to increase drug-related harm. The popularity of e-cigarettes, which first hit the U.S. market in 2006, took off during the last decade. Millions of Americans have switched from smoking to vaping, a much less hazardous source of nicotine—a development that Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), hailed as “a tremendous public health opportunity.” But legal responses to rising e-cigarette use by teenagers, including state bans on flavored e-liquids and similar restrictions proposed by the FDA, undermine the harm-reducing potential of these products by eliminating the varieties that former smokers overwhelmingly favor. The result is likely to be more tobacco-related disease and death as former smokers return to their old habits and current smokers are deterred from switching.

Thanks to unfounded warnings that e-cigarettes are hooking “a whole generation of young people,” members of Congress who want to eliminate the federal ban on marijuana, which was originally imposed in the name of protecting America’s youth, think that same goal justifies a new federal ban that would make it impossible for adults to legally obtain the nicotine products they demonstrably prefer. The paradox is all the more puzzling because those legislators recognize that the recent outbreak of vaping-related lung injuries, which are associated mainly with illegal cannabis extracts, is not a sound argument for pot prohibition. Since the real hazard seems to be dangerous additives or contaminants in black-market products of unknown provenance and composition, prohibition only increases the risks to consumers.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf therefore argues that the lung disease outbreak reinforces the case for marijuana legalization. “The real problem with vaping is the illicit substances that are being introduced into the vaping,” he told a reporter in September. “Bring it out in the open. Let’s deal with it.”

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania legislators are considering a ban on flavored e-cigarettes, and the congressman who introduced the proposed federal ban nonsensically cites lung injuries involving black-market THC vapes as a reason to ban legal e-cigarettes that deliver nicotine. Drug panics, it seems, never fade away; they just shift to new targets.

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Forgotten Workers

Tucked in a back corner of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., is a tiny case for curators to showcase “new perspectives” on topics that had previously gone overlooked. Through spring 2020, that space features a smattering of photographs and artifacts titled “Forgotten Workers: Chinese Migrants and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad.”

The display recognizes the throngs who left their country and helped enable America’s westward expansion. While everyone worked under grueling conditions, placards note that Chinese laborers were paid less than their Irish and Mormon counterparts. White workers also got dormitory-style housing while the Chinese were relegated to tents.

And yet they came anyway, as many as 15,000 of them, to risk their lives laying tracks across the mountains of a foreign land. The exhibit reminds us how much human beings are willing to endure for a chance at greater economic opportunity.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2RLTBef
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Right To Be Forgotten

Have you ever done something cringeworthily stupid? How do you feel about the prospect that a potential employer or date can find out about it simply by Googling?

These questions are at the heart of Sharyn Rothstein’s sharp new play, Right To Be Forgotten, which premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in October. It opens with two endearingly nerdy graduate students, Derril Lark (John Austin) and Sarita Imari (Shubhangi Kuchibhotla), at the end of what has evidently been a pretty good first date. Imari hints that she’d like to see him again. Lark awkwardly responds that she’ll probably change her mind if she looks him up online.

Owing to an inept teenage infatuation, #DerrilLark has become a widespread meme for creepy stalking. As this tightly produced drama unfolds, crusading public interest lawyer Marta Lee (Melody Butiu) defends Lark against former law school classmate Eve Selinsky (Guadalupe Campos), now a lobbyist for Big Search. It’s a smart and timely look at how to balance free speech and privacy in a wired age.

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