Tag: hit&run

The Justice Department Rules That the FDA Cannot Regulate Lethal Injection Drugs

The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently decided that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no authority to regulate “articles intended for use in capital punishment,” including the drugs used in lethal injections.

The opinion was published earlier in May and signed by Trump-appointed Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel:

Electric chairs and gas chambers are “articles” that were created for the sole purpose of capital punishment. Because of this, it is clear that the FDA does not have authority over them. Other articles, such as the drugs used in lethal injections or the guns used in firing squads, were created for functions beyond execution. While the FDA has technically never claimed jurisdiction over the former, its authority over the drugs used for lethal injections is questionable.

For example, the FDA has jurisdiction over hot tubs, saunas, and treadmills, ONLY when they are “intended for medical purposes.” The FDA has no authority when they are used for recreational purposes as that is beyond its jurisdiction.

In a similar way, the FDA regulates drugs based on whether or not they “are safe and effective for their intended uses.” An article approved for one use is currently not allowed to be imported for a separate use. Sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs used in the standard lethal injection cocktail since the 1970s, is one of the articles in question. Sodium thiopental is an anaesthetic used in surgical procedures. Corrections facilities multiply the normal 300-milligram dosage anywhere from six to 17 times for the purpose of execution.

The DOJ acknowledges that the FDA has jurisdiction over drugs used in animal euthanasia because it is a standard practice accepted in veterinary care. Capital punishment, on the other hand, is not accepted as medical care.

The DOJ also observes that lethal injection drugs would be unable to meet FDA compliance since the agency requires labels to include warnings about “unsafe dosages.” It is understood that warning against fatal use would be irrelevant for any drug used for the purpose of death.

Because of these observations, the DOJ concludes that the FDA cannot regulate any article of capital punishment because the intended use, capital punishment, is not medical and therefore falls beyond the FDA’s scope. The FDA is only free to regulate the same drugs when used in medical care.

The opinion stems from a years-long fight between the FDA and the state of Texas over an injunction blocking the importation of sodium thiopental. The injunction remains in place for now.

Though states are eager to possess sodium thiopental for executions, U.S. manufacturer Hospira ceased production of the drug altogether in 2011. After the company moved production to Italy, the Italian government demanded that the company ensure that the drugs would not be used to administer the death penalty. Hospira determined that while they did not condone the use of their drug for capital punishment, they did not have the ability to ensure that it would remain out of the hands of U.S. corrections facilities. In a statement following the decision to shut down entirely, the company said it regretted that hospitals “who use the drug for its well-established medical benefits” will no longer have access to the product.

A sodium thiopental shortage caused states to look for other manufacturers and drugs. Oklahoma, for example, began to use pentobarbital, a drug intended to euthanize animals. Opponents renewed their criticism of the drug following two botched executions in Oklahoma in 2014. When the Danish manufacturer announced that it would no longer supply the drug for lethal injections, states turned to synthetic versions.

The FDA has largely lost its claim as any sort of moral gatekeeper. Stories like the one portrayed in the 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club show how the FDA’s heavy-handed regulations punish those seeking life-saving medicine. Rather, the DOJ opinion, as well as Texas’ and other states’ aggressive fight to access drugs for lethal injection show just how far the government is willing to go to kill.

Public opinion currently supports the death penalty. Pew Research Center found that the decades-long decline in support for the death penalty was thwarted by a rise in 2018. Pew also found in 2015 that the majority of people recognize that there is a risk of putting an innocent person to death and that the death penalty is unlikely to deter serious crime.

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Reason Nominated for 19 Southern California Journalism Awards

With more than 1,700 entries, the Greater Los Angeles Press Club’s annual Southern California Journalism Awards broke its own record for submissions this year. While we did not break our own record, Reason did alright. We received a very healthy 19 nominations for work published across our print, web, and TV platforms in the 2018 calendar year.

Here are the pieces that tickled, enraged, and impressed the judges.

Best Humor/Satire Writing: Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton, “Groundhog Day: 2018”

Best Obituary/In Appreciation: Todd Krainin, “Travel Shows Were Boring as F*ck. Then Came Anthony Bourdain”

Best Medical/Health Reporting: Zach Weissmueller and Mark McDaniel, “Government-Approved Workouts? The Fight Against Fitness Licensing”

Best National Political/Government Reporting: Eric Boehm, “Trade Hearing Highlights Staggering Number of Losers From Trump’s Tariff Plan”

Best Educational Reporting: Jim Epstein, “Rich Disabled Kids Get the City to Send Them to Private School. Poor Disabled Kids Get Screwed.”

Best Minority/Immigration Reporting: Shikha Dalmia, “Sanctuary Churches Take in Immigrants and Take on Trump“

Best Editorial: Katherine Mangu-Ward, “When Fixing the Problem Makes It Worse”

Best Investigative Reporting (any platform): Jacob Sullum, “America’s War on Pain Pills Is Killing Addicts and Leaving Patients in Agony“

Best Columnist: J.D. Tuccille, “Embrace the Dirt Nap“

Best Personality Profile, Politics/Business/Arts: Matt Welch, “Jordan Peterson Is Not the Second Coming“

Best Investigative Reporting (TV): Jim Epstein, “The $15 Minimum Wage Is Turning Hard Workers Into Black Market Lawbreakers”

Best News Feature (over 5 minutes): Zach Weissmueller, “Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build a Foxconn Plant”

Best Entertainment Personality Profile/Interview (TV): Nick Gillespie, Austin Bragg, and Ian Keyser, “CNN’s Jake Tapper on The Hellfire Club, Donald Trump’s Big Lies, and D.C.’s ‘Bullshit Waterfall'”  

Best Non-Entertainment Personality Profile/Interview (TV): Nick Gillespie, Justin Monticello, and Todd Krainin, “Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Cult of Silicon Valley”

Best Investigative Reporting (print): C.J. Ciaramella, “Chicago Is Trying to Pay Down Its Debt by Impounding Innocent People’s Cars“

Best Hard News Feature: Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “The Senate Accused Them of Selling Kids for Sex. The FBI Raided Their Homes. Backpage.com’s Founders Speak for the First Time.”

Best Soft News Feature: C.J. Ciaramella, “The Radical Freedom of Dungeons & Dragons“

Best Political Commentary, National: Robby Soave, “A Bunch of Senators Just Showed They Have No Idea How Facebook Works. They Want to Regulate It Anyway.”

Best Sports Commentary: Eric Boehm, “Curling Is the Closest the Olympics Ever Get to Anarchy“

Folks, you can’t ask for a better snapshot of what we do well.

We are grateful to the Los Angeles Press Club for allowing us to mingle with the rest of Southern California’s notable media publications, to our story subjects for their willingness to talk about the ways in which our incessantly cruel and dumb ruling class have affected their lives, and to our readers for their continuing support of free minds and free markets. We can’t do what we do without you.

We’ll let you know the final score after the awards ceremony on June 30 in Los Angeles.

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Las Vegas, Which Just Authorized Cannabis Lounges, Aspires to be the ‘New Amsterdam’

More than two years after Nevada legalized marijuana for recreational use, Las Vegas will soon become one of the few jurisdictions in the country to license cannabis consumption lounges. The lack of locations where visitors can legally consume the marijuana they can legally buy has been especially glaring in Las Vegas, which attracts 43 million tourists a year and is home to the world’s largest cannabis emporium.

This month the Las Vegas City Council approved an ordinance authorizing licenses for “social-use venues,” which must be physically separated from pot stores and may not sell alcohol. For the first year the licenses will be limited to businesses that are already authorized to sell marijuana. Councilman Bob Coffin, who sponsored the ordinance, said he expects those businesses to open lounges adjacent to their retail locations.

The ordinance does not apply to the Las Vegas Strip, which is under the jurisdiction of Clark County. But the city has dozens of marijuana dispensaries that can now apply for permission to create venues where their customers can consume their products. The licenses cost $5,000 a year, and the lounges must be at least 1,000 feet from schools and casinos. Entry will be limited to adults 21 or older (Nevada’s marijuana purchase age), and patrons will not be allowed to use cannabis products outdoors or in view of the general public.

“We’re the new Amsterdam,” exulted Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, a former state legislator who introduced a 2017 bill that would have explicitly legalized locally licensed cannabis consumption spaces. While that bill did not pass, Nevada’s Legislative Counsel Bureau concluded that state law already allows such businesses.

Question 2, the legalization initiative that Nevada voters approved in 2016, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $600 fine, to consume marijuana in a store that sells it or in any “public place,” defined as “an area to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted regardless of age.” The Las Vegas ordinance is designed to meet those requirements.

The Reno Gazette Journal reports that Acres Cannabis, which operates a 19,000-square-foot store at 2320 Western Avenue, plans to open a consumption space that “will include a concert hall and full-service kitchen launched with the Morton family,” founders of the Morton’s steakhouse chain. Acres CEO John Mueller brags that “you’re going to see an elevated experience over something you’ve seen in Amsterdam or these little boutique places” in cities such as San Francisco.

The casino and resort industry remains leery of marijuana, which is still federally illegal. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has warned that pot-friendly casinos could lose their licenses. Now the prospect of a better-than-Amsterdam experience for visitors who want to use marijuana threatens to draw business away from resorts and nightclubs that are not allowed to welcome cannabis consumers.

“What they’re really trying to target are the tourists coming into Las Vegas,” Councilman Stavros Anthony, a gaming industry ally who cast the sole vote against allowing cannabis lounges, told the Gazette Journal. “That’s really where the money is. That’s always where it’s been. These consumption lounges are really the first attempt to gather in the tourists that want to smoke marijuana here in Nevada.”

Segerblom thinks the casinos are right to be worried. “They’re concerned about [cannabis lounges] making money outside the hotels,” he told the paper. “They’re worried [that] the longer this goes outside hotels, the more established they’ll get. As a business person, I would be concerned too.”

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Tweet From Country’s Largest Labor Org Encourages Workers to ‘Seize the Means of Production’

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has taken a radical turn in a few of its recent social media postings, winking at the idea of airline workers executing their bosses and encouraging the proletariat to literally seize the means of production.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO tweeted out an explainer video from self-described “anti-capitalist, worker-owned” streaming platform Means TV featuring Dan Whelan, identified as a “Marxist, roofer”, explaining that the middle class is actually an illusion spread by the owners of society to divide the working class.

“All workers under capitalism are subject to the same conditions of constantly producing more for as little wage compensation as possible,” says Whelan.

Differences in income, type of work, or lifestyle that we use to draw distinctions between working- and middle-class wage earners are all a fiction, he goes on to say, created by “the rich and the media” to divide and distract workers from the inherent class conflicts in our society.

The country’s largest labor organization apparently found these textbook Marxist talking points convincing enough to tweet out the video, along with the caption “we all need to seize the means of the production.”

That tweet, taken on face value, seems to endorse some form of workers’ revolution aimed at taking ownership of capital currently held in private hands. This understandably raised a few eyebrows.

This is not the first time the AFL-CIO has courted controversy in the past few days with some of its social media content.

Last week, in response to a widely circulated picture of a Delta Airlines poster suggesting its workers would have more money for video game consoles if they didn’t pay union dues, the AFL-CIO tweeted out a meme suggesting that deprived of a union, workers would be spending that money on a guillotine instead.

The post was eventually taken down, and an AFL-CIO spokesperson issued a statement to CNN saying “we strive to keep our Twitter account actively engaging and real to advocate for working people,” she said. “We came across and shared this Internet meme. We realize it was in poor taste, that [it] doesn’t reflect the values of the AFL-CIO and it has been taken down.”

Whether this latest invocation to seize the means of production is representative of the AFL-CIO’s views as a whole is unclear. In recent years the organization has stuck to more incrementalist goals like raising wages for its members, not abolishing wage labor altogether.

Reason‘s request for clarification on this latest tweet was not returned by the time of publication.

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San Francisco Bans Police Use of Facial Recognition

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8 to 1 to ban local law enforcement from using facial recognition technology. Not everyone is pleased.

“It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University to The New York Times. “It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology.”

Well, yes. And the public safety value of putting electronic ankle bracelets on everybody and keeping their location information in a giant database so that police can later find out if an individual was near the site where a crime happened is similarly undeniable. But that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.

The San Francisco ban was passed, as the Times reports, in response to civil libertarian concerns about the technology’s potential abuse by the government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.

Police, on the other hand, argue that facial recognition would now just be a handy investigative tool simply used to identify suspects committing crimes while caught on closed-circuit city and private security cameras. Sounds reasonable, yes?

Consider the recent Florida case in which officers used facial recognition technology to identify someone as an allegedly low-level drug dealer by comparing cell phone camera snaps with a mugshot database. The alleged dealer claims that the police got the wrong guy. As part of his defense, the accused man’s attorney challenged the accuracy of the technology and asked to see what other booking photos were returned as probable matches by the facial recognition algorithm. The police refused to turn them over. “Their refusal violated the Constitution, which requires prosecutors to disclose information favorable to a defendant,” asserts the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Sadly, such police and prosecutorial misfeasance is not all that rare.

As bad as this misconduct is, that is not the main concern with widespread government deployment of facial recognition technology. Civil libertarians worry that the technology could morph into pervasive automated authoritarianism in which individuals can be tracked everywhere, in real time, similar to the version being developed by the Chinese government. The Chinese government reportedly aims, as part of its Skynet surveillance system, to add an additional 400 million video cameras to its existing 170 million over the next three years. The cameras employ real time facial recognition technology.

As Matt Cagle, a lawyer with the ACLU of Northern California tells the Times, the technology “provides government with unprecedented power to track people going about their daily lives. That’s incompatible with a healthy democracy.”

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Police Raid on Journalist’s Home Has Grave First Amendment Implications

When San Francisco police arrived at journalist Bryan Carmody’s apartment last week, they smashed the building’s gate with a sledgehammer, placed him in handcuffs, and raided his home with guns drawn.

They left with his notebooks, computers, phones, and various other electronic devices, as well as a police report on the death of Jeff Adachi, the city’s public defender.

“I knew what they wanted,” said Carmody in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “They wanted the name.”

That is, they wanted the name of the person who leaked the police report to Carmody, who then sold it to three local news outlets. His company, North Bay News, tracks stories overnight and sells the resulting footage and information to television stations for their round-the-clock coverage.

Agents had attempted to identify his source several weeks prior; Carmody says he “politely” declined to provide it. The department then sought warrants for the raid, raising serious First Amendment concerns around Carmody’s protections as a journalist.

The police report about the death of Adachi—whose reputation was defined by his penchant for criticizing the police—provided gossipy fodder for San Francisco’s local news in late February. Laden with a string of scandal-ridden details about his final moments, it said he had been with a woman who wasn’t his wife in an apartment that had “cannabis gummies,” “empty bottles of alcohol,” as well as an “unmade bed”—the latter of which was widely publicized with photographs. The salacious and often irrelevant specifics, later leaked to several journalists, sparked speculation that the police department was looking for the last laugh against the city’s top public defender, who wasn’t exactly known for making their jobs any easier.

“There were leaks happening all over the place,” Carmody told the L.A. Times.

But the particulars of the police-Adachi feud are no longer of import to Carmody. What does matter to him are the circumstances surrounding his confiscated equipment, without which he cannot run his company.

The raid may have broken California state law, which shields journalists from being held in contempt for declining to name a source. It also excludes protected items from being subject to search warrants.

But those warrants—one for his home and the other for the office of North Bay News—were issued in spite of Carmody’s professional background. “It’s possible that the courts decided that because Carmody is a freelancer, he is not subject to the shield law,” Aaron Field, an attorney with the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, said in an interview with the San Francisco Examiner. “That is not correct.”

Police Commissioner John Hamasaki tells the Examiner that the information was not obtained “in the context of his duties as a reporter,” but as a salesman. That’s a dubious assumption at best: Although Carmody lacks a specific platform, his work is clearly journalistic in nature. A disregard for his First Amendment protections is not justifiable—it’s merely convenient.

That’s not lost on NoCal’s Society of Professional Journalists, which conceded in a statement that “news organizations should disclose when content has been provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.” Carmody’s business model gives them ethical pause—perhaps for good reason. But that doesn’t justify the police department’s recourse.

“While there may be legitimate questions on the circumstances surrounding the reporting of Adachi’s death, the seizure of any journalist’s notes or other reporting materials sets a dangerous precedent,” the statement continued. “An attack on the rights of one journalist is an attack on the rights of all journalists.”

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How To Crush ‘the Tyranny of Metrics’

When you woke up today, did you weigh yourself? At work, did you check any performance measures for yourself or your colleagues? When you got home, did you check your kids’ grades on ProgressBook or some other form of online tracking service? Did you get your 10,000 steps in today, or are you waving your arms on the couch right now, trying to goose your daily total before turning in for the night?

We live in an intensely and increasingly measured world. Virtually everything we do yields data, numbers, and information that we think will improve our performance, help us hit target goals, or figure out if we’re doing things right. Even just a few decades ago, this would have struck most of us as nuts, but now we take it for granted—at home, at work, at play.

In The Tyranny of Metrics, just out in paperback from Princeton University Press, historian Jerry Z. Muller explains how we got to a place where we’re constantly measuring everything we do—and why much of the time we’re not just wasting our time but making things objectively worse. While acknowledging that “the attempt to measure performance is…intrinsically desirable,” he nonetheless contends that most metrics we use exemplify what Friedrich Hayek disdained as “scientism” or a “pretense to knowledge” that is false and misguided. 

In chapters examining the use of numbers in education, policing, banking and finance, war, and other areas, Muller demonstrates how what he calls “metric fixation” often goads us into bad, counterproductive behavior. For instance, when surgeons were forced to participate in mandatory public “scorecards” that charted their patients’ outcomes, Muller writes, doctors responded by refusing to treat the highest-risk people. “Anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed. We will see many variations on this theme.”

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

 

 

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Abortion Ban in Alabama Designed ‘To Directly Challenge Roe v. Wade’

“It is important that we pass this statewide abortion ban legislation and begin a long overdue effort to directly challenge Roe v. Wade,” Alabama Lieutenant Gov. Will Ainsworth said last week. A vote on the measure had been temporarily tabled after the state Senate broke out in “chaos” debating an amendment to make exceptions in cases of rape and incest.

That bill passed the Alabama Senate 25-6 yesterday, without the rape/incest exceptions (which failed 21-11).

It not only bans abortion at any point in pregnancy but also makes it a felony for doctors to perform them, with exceptions only when the mother’s life is in danger. It’s now headed to a sympathetic state leader, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey (though Ivey said yesterday that she would “withhold comment until she has had a chance to thoroughly review the final version of the bill that passed”).

Bill sponsor Sen. Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, specified that the law would not prohibit the destruction of fertilized eggs used for in-vitro fertilization, only those conceived within a woman’s body. “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant,” Chambliss said, in floor debate with Democratic Sen. Rodger Smitherman.

“Alabama paid nearly $4 million to ACLU since 2013, after losing or settling lawsuits on gay marriage, immigration and yes, abortion,” noted Alabama Media Group reporter Anna Claire Vollers yesterday, calling the latest legislation “another costly test case.”

But that’s the point, as Alabama’s lieutenant governor directly said in the quote up top.

And it’s the point in other states—Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Mississippi—where legislatures have also passed near-total bans on abortion. “While these 6-week abortion bans may not ever take effect, anti-abortion advocates believe they can use them to ban abortion nationwide,” writes Ema O’Connor at Buzzfeed. “The anti-abortion movement sees this current court as the most friendly in decades, and they hope getting these laws in front of it will result in them overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Yesterday, Reason Editor-in-Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, Managing Editor Stephanie Slade, and I talked about the abortion ban that recently passed in Georgia and libertarian debate around abortion more generally. You can listen here.

FREE MINDS

The Twitter team pushes back against would-be censorship from Devin Nunes. Twitter and political consultant Liz Mair filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.) filed against them in federal court in March. Their objection is on procedural grounds, not the (rather ridiculous) content of Nunes’ lawsuit. The May 9 motion “takes issue with where the lawsuit was filed,” reports The Sacramento Bee. “Twitter contends Nunes does not have standing to file the lawsuit in Virginia. Twitter is based in California, Nunes is from California and the work his complaint says was impacted occurred in Washington, D.C., the motion argues.” More here.

Related—Jane Coaston corrects a common misunderstanding about Section 230:

FREE MARKETS

“In theory, Medicare for All is more popular than ever,” writes Reason Features Editor Peter Suderman, in a post about Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) eluding specifics when asked about her support for the idea. “Medicare for All,” the brainchild of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), refers to a single-payer system of delivering health care with the government footing the bill. “Polls show that a majority of the country favors” it and “some surveys have even found that a surprisingly large percentage of Republicans are open to the idea,” notes Suderman. But:

Those same surveys consistently reveal that support for Medicare for All falls apart as soon people hear that it would raise taxes, result in delays for care, and eliminate private insurance—all of which are likely outcomes of a transition to single-payer. The public, in other words, favors the non-specific, cost-free idea of Medicare for All, but not the practical reality and the many trade-offs that it would necessarily entail.

More here.

QUICK HITS

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Brickbat: Supply and Demand

The British Labour Party is looking at forcing the the London Stock Exchange to delist companies that don’t do enough to fight global warming if it comes back to power. “We’ve got to signal now that we’re being serious about tackling climate change. And we’re going to use every lever of government we possibly can to enable that to happen,” said John McDonnell, the party’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer. McDonnell said he would also like to see the criteria for listing a company on the stock exchange include its record on human rights and trade union rights.

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The Sex Trafficking Panic

When police charged New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft with soliciting prostitution, the press said the police rescued sex slaves.

“They were women who were from China, who were forced into sex slavery,” said Trevor Noah on The Daily Show.

We’re told this happens all the time.

“Human trafficking is the fastest growing illegal business in the United States,” says fashion model Kathy Ireland.

It’s bunk, says Reason Associate Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

In the Robert Kraft case, she points out, “They had all these big announcements at first saying they had busted up an international sex trafficking ring, implying these women weren’t allowed to leave.”

But now prosecutors acknowledge that there was no trafficking. The women were willing sex workers.

The police and the media got it wrong. That’s typical. “Ninety-nine percent of the headlines are not true,” says Brown in my latest video. “Sex trafficking and prostitution are sort of used interchangeably.”

What about the headlines that say police are “rescuing victims”?

“By rescue they (mean) put them in jail and give them a criminal record,” says Brown. “The victims are the sex workers…getting harassed and locked up in cages by the cops.”

Politicians tell us that thousands of children are forced into the sex trade.

“Three-hundred thousand American children are at risk!” said Rep. Ann Wagner on the floor of Congress.

That 300,000 number comes from just one study, and that study’s lead author, Richard Estes, has disavowed it.

“The National Crimes Against Children Center says, ‘Do not cite this study’!” says Brown. It’s “total bull.”

Widely quoted bull.

On TV, former prosecutor Wendy Murphy shouts, “Three-hundred thousand kids a year are raped, sex trafficked and pimped in this country!”

“If that was the case, cops would be able to find this all the time,” responds Brown. “Cops wouldn’t have to go through these elaborate stings.”

Florida police spent months taking down the spa Robert Kraft visited.

“They had Homeland Security involved,” recounts Brown. “They were following these women around in the grocery stores, watching them buy condoms.”

I’d think cops would have better things to do with their time.

“If this was really a situation where these women were being forced and sexually assaulted multiple times a day, the cops just let it happen for months on end?” asks Brown.

She covered a case in Seattle where the local sheriff, at a news conference, said he’d rescued sex slaves.

But when Brown spoke to the sheriff later, “he ended up saying, ‘Well, you know, maybe they weren’t being forced by whatever, but we’re all trafficked by something and there was money involved.’ Then by the end of the investigation they were like, ‘Well, I mean, they were pressured because they didn’t know a lot of people and they wanted to make money’.”

One former sex worker says the moral panic over prostitution is a “combination of the conservative fetish for going after people for doing ‘sex stuff’ and the liberal instinct to help a group of people that they can’t be bothered to understand.”

That includes the celebrities who perpetuate the myth that sex slavery is rampant.

“You can go online and buy a child for sex. It’s as easy as ordering a pizza,” says Amy Schumer.

“Thousands of children are raped every day!” says comedian Seth Meyers.

Actor Ashton Kutcher even promotes an app that he claims rescues victims. He told Congress, “We have identified over 6,000 trafficking victims this year.”

Really? Where are they? Kutcher’s representatives did not respond to our repeated emails.

“If Ashton Kutcher is finding all those victims, he’s not turning them over to police,” said Brown.

Sex slavery is evil. Authorities should do everything they can to stop it. But there is a big difference between slavery and sex work done by consenting adults.

“When we have these exaggerated numbers,” says Brown, “it forces people into this crazy emergency moral panic mode that ends up not helping the actual problem that we have.”

Periodic crackdowns on prostitution don’t help either.

“They want this imaginary world where you take away a safer option for these women,” says Brown, and then “the oldest profession, as they call it, will magically stop. But that’s not going to happen.”

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