If you want to find a federal court case—say, to look up the latest juicy filing in the prosecution of one of Donald Trump’s indicted cronies—odds are you’ll hold your nose and log on to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) website, a system run by the federal judiciary.
It’s an old and clunky platform, running on the best interface the mid-1990s had to offer. Which might be excusable if it were free, but it’s not.
PACER charges 10 cents a page for court records and searches. There’s a $3 cap on large documents, and users pay nothing if their bill is under $15 per quarter. This keeps most casual users from needing to pony up—but for news organizations, researchers, and legal professionals, costs can pile up quickly.
According to the E-Government Act of 2002, PACER is only supposed to charge enough to cover its operating costs. Instead, it’s a slush fund for the U.S. court system. PACER has raked in about $145 million annually over the last few years while incurring about $3 million per year in costs. Even the Justice Department has to pay to use PACER—124 million taxpayer dollars between 2010 and 2017.
“PACER is the only major government system that charges by the click, and access to federal court dockets is one of the most important government databases we have,” says Carl Malamud, a prominent public domain advocate. “Distribution of documents on the internet at costs that resemble 1970s copyshop fees is ridiculous in today’s day and age.”
Several class-action lawsuits, backed by media outlets and pro-transparency groups, have been filed in recent years and are currently winding their way through the system.
In the meantime, some vigilante coders have come up with workarounds to the PACER paywall. A project called RECAP created a browser extension that, when installed, uploads any court docket or document that a PACER user views to a free website and lists which filings are already available. USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath created Big Cases Bot, an automated program that monitors notable cases, uploads filings to DocumentCloud (another free repository of public information), and tweets out newly added records almost as soon as they’re available.
But none of this fixes the fundamental problem, which is that PACER is operating beyond its charter to the detriment of public access to the law.
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The California Assembly’s Natural Resources committee has approved a bill that would bar hotels from providing guests with tiny bottles of shampoo, body wash, lotion and other personal care items. Supporters say the law would reduce the amount of plastic that is thrown away.
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours is the latest book by the libertarian economist David Friedman, with a single chapter each contributed by Peter Leeson (on the law of pirates) and David Skarbek (on the law of prison inmates). It describes 13 different legal or quasi-legal systems from a variety of places and times. No modern nation-state is found among these systems, and some readers may decline to count some of the systems as genuine legal systems at all.
This would be particularly true of the “embedded” legal systems—those adopted by a sub-group within a larger society that has its own, government-made law. Pirates, prisoners, gypsies, and the Amish are all subject to traditional governmental law, whether or not they respect it, yet each group also has or had its own code of conduct and methods for enforcing it, which sometimes conflict with the state-made law of the wider society.
All of the systems in the book are nevertheless recognizably law-like. That is, all are systems of socially enforced rules of conduct designed to mitigate and manage human conflict. The book’s other examples include imperial Chinese law, Jewish law, Islamic law, saga-period Icelandic law, Somali law, early Irish law, the law of the Plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne), 18th century English law, and ancient Athenian law.
Readers familiar with Friedman’s political views may be expecting a defense of an anarcho-capitalist legal system, yet, for better or worse, he holds back on that score
In general, Friedman handles normative questions with a very light hand. At the outset, he lets readers know that all the systems to be considered deserve to be taken seriously, as all are the work of adults no less intelligent than those who designed the modern American legal system. I confess that at certain points, I found it difficult to take some of these “very different” systems seriously as systems of justice. Under imperial Chinese law, for example, “If beating a child resulted in his death and there was no excuse for the beating, the punishment was one year of penal servitude. … There was no punishment for a reasonable beating of a disobedient son that resulted in death.” (Emphasis mine.) Reading that, I am inclined to doubt not the intelligence but the moral decency of the people who designed such law. But Friedman describes such seeming outrages dispassionately, without the moralism some of us might be tempted to indulge.
Friedman makes no effort to identify the best system, expressing doubt more than once that any such thing exists. He aims only to understand them, identifying some of the important advantages and disadvantages of each before making a few suggestions for reforming our own legal system. There is a faint libertarian theme which might go unnoticed by those unfamiliar with Friedman’s earlier work. Perhaps Friedman was trying to illustrate the feasibility of reducing the legal system’s reliance on the state in favor of private mechanisms; nevertheless, the book covers each legal system in general, rather than focusing solely on the aspects that teach libertarian-friendly lessons.
I believe imperial China was chosen chiefly to illustrate the potential for designing contracts that minimize people’s need to use the court system to resolve disputes. (This was done by relieving each party of duties whose breach would be difficult to prove.) Several systems were seemingly chosen to illustrate the feasibility of private enforcement of court decisions, in contrast with our own system’s entirely government-based enforcement. In saga-period Iceland, for example, courts’ decisions were enforced by private violence. If one party to a dispute disobeyed the court’s decision, that party could be declared an “outlaw” by the court, with the consequence that it would become legal for other members of the society to kill that individual. This eliminates the need for a centralized, governmental police force, albeit in a brutal manner.
In the case of present-day American prison inmates, individuals join gangs chiefly for protection, and these gangs enforce laws against their own members. If a gang member disrespects a member of a rival gang in a manner deemed unacceptable by prison culture, the offender’s own gang may authorize, or themselves carry out, a beating of the offender, with the aim of keeping the peace between gangs. A less violent and more sympathetic example is Amish laws, which are generally enforced by social ostracism.
This book stops short of calling for private enforcement of all laws. Friedman does not hold back, however, when he describes the possibility, under medieval Icelandic law, of a tort victim giving or selling his legal claim to another party. Friedman thinks this a great advantage of the Icelandic system over the modern American system. If, for instance, you have vandalized my house, but I am for some reason unable or unwilling to directly pursue a lawsuit against you, I should be able to give or sell my claim for damages to someone who is more willing and able to pursue the case. Perhaps there would be a company that would pay me for the right to pursue a lawsuit on my behalf; if the lawsuit wins, the company then receives the damages that would have been due to me.
Another improvement Friedman puts forward is inspired by the system of ancient Athens. There, private individuals could prosecute one another for crimes. They would then be tried by a large jury. If the prosecution was successful, the prosecutor would receive a portion of the fine imposed on the defendant. If the prosecutor failed to convince at least 20 percent of the jury of the merits of his case, the prosecutor himself would be fined. This deters meritless accusations.
Along similar lines, Friedman proposes that tort plaintiffs who lose should be required to pay compensation (over and above court costs) to the victorious defendant, with the amount of compensation proportional to the amount that the plaintiff sought to recover from the defendant. In addition, he suggests, government prosecutors who repeatedly file charges for which they cannot convince at least four jurors to vote for conviction should be removed from their jobs. These rules would eliminate incentives to file frivolous lawsuits or unjustified criminal charges.
Taking a page from 18th century English law, Friedman suggests that private citizens should be permitted to initiate criminal prosecutions, but perhaps only against government officials. This would address the problem of the government’s unwillingness to prosecute its own members.
On each of these points, I find Friedman’s recommendations well-taken. Friedman generally considers costs and benefits in utilitarian terms, asking not “Is this rule intrinsically just?” but “What desirable or undesirable behaviors would this rule bring about?”, using the economist’s assumption of generally rational and self-interested agents to answer the latter.
As in his earlier work, Friedman occasionally draws striking connections. My favorite example: Courts in the Middle Ages faced a problem with collecting enough evidence for convictions. Their solution was to extract confessions from suspects by means of torture. Similarly, modern-day American prosecutors face difficulties satisfying the demanding standards of trials. They, too, solve this problem via coerced confessions: They threaten to pile up more charges—or more serious charges—against the defendant unless the defendant pleads guilty. Like the medieval approach, this technique works against the guilty and innocent alike. Suppose I have just a 10 percent chance of being convicted at trial, of an offense that comes with an expected 20-year prison sentence. The prosecutor need only offer to reduce the charges against me to something with a less than 2-year sentence, and it becomes rational for me to accept a deal. Of course, my “confession” under such circumstances hardly constitutes strong evidence that I am guilty of anything.
This is just one of many insights sprinkled throughout the text. Friedman’s fans will appreciate the book’s characteristic clarity, candor, and rationality.
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The dusty streets and patchwork buildings of Ifo, one of the camps that make up Dadaab Refugee Complex in eastern Kenya, don’t seem like much of a home. But for Abdullahi Ahmed, now 62, Ifo has long been a home worth fighting for.
Ahmed arrived in Ifo back in 1991, when he fled the civil war in Somalia. His journey to the refugee camp was unspeakable: At one point, he had to leave his dying son under a tree and just keep walking. It’s the kind of calculus from which a father never recovers, but Ahmed had to make it: His wife and other children were counting on him to lead them to safety, and Ahmed, himself emaciated and weak, couldn’t carry the dying boy anymore.
In Ifo, he started building a new life. A loan from a fellow refugee turned into a vegetable stall, and that vegetable stall turned into a restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
Today, Ahmed watches over Ifo like a friendly patriarch: His restaurant has become a community center of sorts, where fellow refugees inhale plates of rice and meat between colorful painted walls. Ifo feels settled, fixed in the landscape. But it wasn’t always that way.
In 2006, representatives from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) called Ahmed and other community leaders to a meeting. For years, seasonal rains had caused flash floods, terrorizing Ifo’s residents. The floods washed away homes, dismantled toilets, and ruined much-needed food and other supplies. On the advice of an engineer from Nairobi, the agency had decided to dismantle the entire settlement and relocate its residents.
Ahmed was aghast. Over the previous decade and a half, Ifo’s residents had turned a desperate refugee camp into a city. Children had been born and raised there; small businesses had flourished; temporary huts made of sticks and repurposed tin cans had been refurbished into long-term homes. A second displacement would devastate this already-traumatized community.
Ahmed had lost one home due to war. He wasn’t about to leave another one just because some bureaucrats told him he had to.
“I thought, ‘This engineer from Nairobi is bogus,'” recalls Ahmed, who smiles broadly from behind a wiry scrub-brush beard. So he spoke up. Ahmed told the agency that the engineer they had hired was wrong. There was a better and cheaper alternative to relocation: a levee to redirect the floodwaters away from Ifo’s families. In the months that followed, the UNHCR took Ahmed’s advice and built the levee. The camp stayed put; the floods stopped. Ahmed was never paid a consultation fee, but he was right.
In 2017, the World Food Programme had to cut food rations to Kenya’s refugee camps by 30 percent due to insufficient funding. In the good old days, the refugees at least got rice. Today, they don’t even get that.
Of course he was right. Before the war, he had been one of Somalia’s most respected civil engineers.
We are in the midst of the world’s worst refugee crisis since World War II. According to the UNHCR, the earth currently contains 68.5 million forcibly displaced people. To put that in context, the population of the United Kingdom is 66 million. There are more refugees in the world right now than Brits.
More than 870,000 Somali refugees are in the Horn of Africa and Yemen alone, while another 2.1 million Somalis are internally displaced. Dadaab, the world’s third-largest refugee complex, hosts the highest percentage of refugees from Somalia.
First established in 1991, Dadaab has grown over the decades to become a city of 209,000 people. The majority are Somali, but refugees from Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Congo can be found there as well. Life in the camps is grim: Hundreds of thousands of traumatized people, half-starving on too-small rations, live in conditions that Oxfam calls “barely fit for humans.” (Dadaab is eerily well-named: The word means “a rocky hard place.”)
Taking care of all these people comes with a hefty price tag that no one wants to pay. According to a report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nongovernmental organization (NGO), proper care in 2018 would have cost an estimated $191.1 million; as late as November, only 19 percent of that was funded. In 2017, the World Food Programme had to cut food rations to Kenya’s refugee camps by 30 percent due to insufficient money. In the good old days, the refugees at least got rice. Today, they don’t even get that.
“The food they give us is not even fit for dogs to eat,” says Bishar Ahmed, 35, who came to Dadaab from Kismayu, Somalia, in 1998. “We want to work so we can buy food that is fit for human consumption.”
A refugee entrepreneur in Hagadera camp negotiates with a client. Jillian Keenan
But Kenya has imposed harsh limits on the refugees’ ability to work. As we’ll see, this doesn’t just make life harder for the people in the camps. By hobbling their self-reliance, it forces large numbers of them to depend on the authorities for survival, inflating those enormous costs. According to the World Bank, more than 90 percent of Somali refugees in Kenya are entirely dependent on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs.
Third-country resettlement options for Somali refugees are grim and getting worse. Historically, America has been a positive force in global refugee resettlement, taking in tens of thousands each year. In 2016, 90 percent of African refugees who settled somewhere other than their home country or the country to which they initially fled ended up in the United States, according to the IRC. But in January 2017, President Donald Trump slashed the refugee resettlement cap more than in half and issued an executive order severely restricting entry for citizens of half a dozen countries, including Somalia. Now U.S. refugee resettlement is at its lowest point since 1977. Somali refugee resettlement has seen a 97.4 percent decrease from the first three months of 2016, according to State Department data. And as anti-refugee sentiment flares, Europe hasn’t done much better: In 2017, E.U. member states took in only 9,451 refugees out of a total of 1,190,000 with resettlement needs, according to IRC.
As Dadaab lingered in a state of limbo for decades with no exit strategy in sight, Kenya began to show signs of asylum fatigue. In 2012, then–President Mwai Kibaki called for refugees in the camps to be “resettled” inside Somalia, saying “Kenya can no longer continue carrying the burden.”
Then security concerns made the situation worse. Following brutal attacks at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2013 and Garissa University in 2015, Kenyan officials found a quarter of a million scapegoats in Dadaab. Claiming that the Somali terror group Al-Shabab had infiltrated the camps, making them a “nursery” for violent extremism, Deputy President William Ruto threatened to close the complex down. Human rights groups condemned the proposal and Ruto backpedaled. But a year later, in May 2016, the controversy was reignited when the Kenyan government announced that it had disbanded its Department for Refugee Affairs as a first step to shuttering Dadaab.
The timing of the announcement was significant: Just two months earlier, the E.U. had brokered a deal with Turkey to send back every Syrian refugee who crossed its borders. The double standard did not go unnoticed in Nairobi.
“In Europe, rich, prosperous, and democratic countries are turning away refugees from Syria, one of the worst war zones since World War II,” Kenyan Interior Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said at the time. “There comes a time when we must think primarily about the security of our people. Ladies and gentlemen, that time is now.”
Following a petition from human rights organizations, Kenyan High Court Judge John Mativo ruled that the government’s plans to close Dadaab and repatriate its refugees were an unconstitutional “act of…persecution.” The disbanded Department for Refugee Affairs was replaced with a new Refugee Affairs Secretariat.
Since then, life in limbo has continued. More than 79,000 people have voluntarily repatriated to Somalia, but many in the camps say they’ll never go back. Closing Dadaab would be a logistical and political nightmare—a quarter of a million people won’t just disappear. Where would they go? Who would pay for the relocation operation? What if the now three generations of Dadaab refugees simply refused to leave the only home many of them have ever known?
As former Human Rights Watch researcher Ben Rawlence put it in City of Thorns (Picador), his 2016 book: “No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent.”
Refugees are often seen as a drain on national resources. But that doesn’t have to be true. When Abdullahi Ahmed shared his engineering expertise with UNHCR, for example, he saved the global community from paying for an exceedingly expensive relocation. (The agency could not provide an estimate of how much it would have cost to move Ifo, but according to The Nation, a proposal to relocate Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi was projected to run roughly $9 million.) Failing to capitalize on the economic value of refugees isn’t just a humanitarian mistake. It’s an economic one.
Thirty years ago, Dadaab was a remote outpost where camel and goat herders had to walk 66 miles to the nearest town just to sell their meat and milk. Today, according to a 2010 study commissioned by the Kenyan, Danish, and Norwegian governments, the direct and indirect benefits of Dadaab’s camps amount to as much as $14 million a year in a region that sorely needs it. That study also found that Dadaab’s informal refugee-run markets turn over around $25 million per year—a quarter of all economic activity in northeastern Kenya.
Dadaab’s informal refugee-run markets turn over around $25 million per year—a quarter of all economic activity in northeastern Kenya.
“We would rather have the refugees stay around; they are our brothers,” says Mahat Moge, 37, a Kenyan who owns a conference venue and restaurant just outside the camps. “And,” he adds with a grin, “we can do business with them.” Moge buys sugar, milk, and other staples from refugee vendors, since their informal markets operate outside the Kenyan legal framework and therefore don’t incur a tax.
In April 2018, the International Finance Corporation released a consumer and market study of Kakuma, a smaller refugee camp on the other side of Kenya. Rather than focus on the camp’s humanitarian needs, the study looked at Kakuma “through the lens of a private firm looking to enter a new market.” It found a vibrant informal economy, including 14 wholesalers—an economic vitality the camp shares with its host community.
“Kakuma camp and town are a single market in more than just name,” the report concludes. “Over the past decades, the two have become socioeconomically interdependent with refugees hiring, trading, and working with town residents and vice versa.”
The economic value of refugees isn’t unique to that country or even to the continent of Africa. One study, which looked at the economic impact of refugees in Ohio, found that the Refugee Services Collaborative of Cleveland spent an estimated total of $4.8 million on refugee services in 2012—but refugee activity boosted the local economy by an estimated $48 million, created 650 jobs, and generated $2.7 million in state and local tax revenue. In the words of a 2016 report from the Open Political Economy Network, “Investing one euro—or dollar—in welcoming refugees can yield nearly two in economic benefits within five years.” The 2017 book Refugee Economies (Oxford University Press) concludes that “far from being an inevitable burden, refugees have the capacity to help themselves and contribute to their host societies—if we let them.”
But if the influx of economic value that refugees bring is so clear to researchers, why isn’t it more clear to the countries that host them, such as Kenya? If refugees build such vibrant and thriving informal markets, what has stopped them from translating that potential into formal employment and self-reliance?
Although the UNHCR gives Kenya’s refugees the essentials of survival—free shelter, free food, free water, free medical care, free education, even free firewood—entrepreneurship is everywhere. Parts of Hagadera, one of Dadaab’s camps, are comparable to any other central business district in small-town East Africa, if you ignore the fact that the buildings are made of sticks and sheet metal rather than concrete. (Government policies prohibit the refugees from building permanent structures.) Refugees have opened stores, restaurants, photography studios, internet cafés, and much more. In the words of 28-year-old Ahmed Ali, who tries to work as a mechanic even though roadblocks around the region mean that sometimes months pass without a car to repair, “It is better to work for yourself than sit and wait for aid.”
Yet despite all the “free” things the camps’ residents receive, the refugees themselves are not free. Two policies—the UNHCR’s incentive worker policy and the Kenyan government’s encampment policy—waste the vast human potential at places like Dadaab, with negative consequences for refugees and native Kenyans alike.
Abdiaziz Ali, who was born in Mogadishu in the late ’80s or early ’90s (like many refugees, he isn’t certain about his age), was always one of the smart kids. He arrived at Dadaab as a toddler and quickly began to excel academically. When he finished secondary school in 2004, he was accepted to the University of Nairobi. After working for seven years, he finally saved enough to move to the capital city and begin studying for his B.A. in sociology and conflict resolution. At that point, Abdiaziz felt like he was living the dream: With hard work and an education, he would build a future that was brighter than the nightmare his parents had fled.
Refugee-run market. Jillian Keenan
Then the terrorist attacks in Nairobi and Garissa changed his life. In 2014, the Security Laws Amendment Act placed all refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya under so-called “encampment.” Leaving Dadaab and other refugee settlements without a movement pass became nearly impossible. The government raided homes, businesses, and schools to round up refugees who were working or studying outside the camps.
“Kenyan police and security forces are using abusive and discriminatory tactics in the name of national security, targeting entire communities,” Daniel Bekele of Human Rights Watch said at the time. Thousands of people were detained in police stations without charge. Just before what would have been his graduation ceremony, Abdiaziz was sent back to the camp where he grew up.
At Dadaab, Abdiaziz had no good options. With his degree in sociology and conflict resolution, he could have been a valuable asset to one of the NGOs that works in the camp complex. But refugees employed by UNHCR and its partners are allowed only to be “incentive workers.” Regardless of their experience or qualifications, incentive workers earn as little as $50 a month, even as Kenyans are paid far more for doing the same jobs. “I will spend weeks writing a report,” says one such worker, who makes the equivalent of about $80 a month working full-time for the International Rescue Committee, “and then the Kenyan who emails it out for me gets paid 10 times as much.” (The incentive worker asked not to be identified. His job sucks, but in the absence of better options, he doesn’t want to lose it.)
“NGOs will only pay Kenyans, because that is the law of the country,” Abdiaziz says. “But private companies want to pay whoever is best. The problem is, private companies are not in the camps.”
For a while, Abdiaziz considered going back to Somalia, where he’d be free of the Kenyan government’s employment limitations. One of his childhood friends, Abbas Siraji, had left Dadaab in 2011 and returned to Mogadishu with dreams of rebuilding their homeland. At first, it went well: He was able to work for fair compensation in Somalia, and he was eventually appointed minister of public works and reconstruction. Then in May 2017, Abdiaziz learned that Siraji had been shot to death in Mogadishu. Abdiaziz had a wife and children. No job was worth that risk.
“Abbas used to tell us to come back home,” says Abdiaziz. “But the moment he was killed, I knew I would never go back.”
Today, Abdiaziz is placing his bets on the only free space he can access: the internet. He’s using the secondhand laptop he bought as a student in Nairobi to get an online degree in computer programming and web design. Someday, he hopes, he can find overseas clients online.
Kenya’s parliament is aware of these problems. In 2017, it passed the so-called Refugees Bill, which would have recognized employment and land ownership rights for roughly 500,000 refugees. “It does not make sense to continue as we have been,” says former Kenyan Member of Parliament Agostinho Neto, who introduced the legislation. “We have refugees with professional backgrounds who could help support our economy and sustain themselves. Instead, they’re incarcerated in the camps.” Neto’s bill was widely praised as a positive attempt to enable refugee self-reliance, but President Uhuru Kenyatta rejected it, citing a lack of constitutionally required “public participation” in the proposal.
The policies that have held back Abdiaziz hurt native Kenyans too. One refugee—you’ll understand why he’s anonymous in a moment—needs to buy a new generator for his successful business in Hagadera camp. He has applied for a movement pass to travel to Nairobi to make the purchase, but he knows he won’t get it. After he’s denied, he’ll have one remaining option: pay to have a generator smuggled in from Somalia. The refugee entrepreneur will have to overpay for the machine, and some businessman in Nairobi will lose a sale. The only winners will be the Somali smugglers.
Amid all this uncertainty, there is a reason for hope: Kenya needs workers.
Thanks to recent discoveries of oil, gold, and other natural resources, Kenya’s extractive sectors are booming. The industries could explode to as much as 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product by 2030, surpassing even traditional exports such as coffee. But Kenya doesn’t have enough skilled labor to meet the booming demand. Already, the shortage has forced the Kenya Pipeline Company to import workers from China and Nigeria.
To address the problem, Tullow Oil Kenya launched a $1 million training program to equip new graduates with the knowledge they need to work in the oil and gas sector. In addition to geologists and engineers, there’s a demand for people with skills in information technology, equipment repair, and welding.
“I feel like we are in an open prison,” one 20-year-old welder in Ifo tells me. “Our skills are needed, but we can’t use them.” He has no clients, but he grabs his tools anyway, eager to show off the trade he learned from his cousin. Like the engineer who saved Ifo from the floodwaters, like millions of refugees around the world, the welder could contribute to his adopted country’s growing economy. But instead he waits, stuck in a rocky hard place, for clients who never appear.
“My name is Issaq Ahmed,” he says, ripe with potential. “And I am a welder.” At least he could be—if he were free to work.
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Mehros Nassersharifi is being charged with making “a telecommunication” “with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse a person at the premises to which the telecommunication was made” (Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.21(A)(1)), by
creat[ing] a Twitter account named “Perrysburg Girls Ranked” and post[ing] numerous girls names which contained descriptions of their physical attributes in a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory post about a female of Jewish ethnicity.
The Twitter account apparently had at least 15 posts, which
contained female student’s names, with a number beside them, and a description of them.
Many of the posts contained derogatory, harassing and abusive descriptions of their physical attributes. One of the posts contained a derogatory description of a female of Jewish ethnicity. The post read, “The Jew. Other than the fact that she should have been perished along with the 6 million back In the 1940’s, she’s annoying as hell, she has a weird chunky body. NO ass, no tits, and an ugly fucked up face. Jumps from guy to guy, and no real positives to dating her. I came daddy brings her to a 61.”
Now this is obviously nasty behavior. While I think that even it is constitutionally protected (there’s no established First Amendment exception that covers it), I have to agree that little would be lost to public debate if people couldn’t publicly insult high school students’ appearance, and say that they ought to have been killed.
But nothing in the statute that the prosecutor is using is limited to such speech. Instead, the statute applies to a vast range of speech—at least if one accepts the prosecutor’s theory that a Twitter message is “made … to” “the premises” of everyone who might read it:
(A) No person shall knowingly make or cause to be made a telecommunication, or knowingly permit a telecommunication to be made from a telecommunications device under the person’s control, to another, if the caller does any of the following:
(1) Makes the telecommunication with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse any person at the premises to which the telecommunication is made, whether or not actual communication takes place between the caller and a recipient; …
Tweeting about government officials is a crime, if a prosecutor and jury decide they were sent “with purpose to … abuse” the officials (or “to harass” them, whatever that means). Same for messages (or Facebook posts or blog posts) about activists, businesspeople, and others.
Same for messages that “abuse” by condemning people’s actions or ideologies, and not just their looks. Nor is the law limited to anti-Semitic or otherwise bigoted speech; indeed, R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) makes clear that it would be unconstitutional for the law to be so limited.
Online newspaper articles would be covered, too, if the prosecutor and jury decide they were posted “with purpose to … abuse” the people being written about. Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.21(F) does provide an exception for employees or contractors of various media outlets, but that exception applies only to certain other provisions of the law, not to (A)(1), which is the provision being used here.
To be sure, most prosecutors will likely use the law sparingly, and might perhaps try to limit it, for instance, just to nonpolitical personal insults of private citizens (and perhaps especially of teenagers). But that is precisely the same argument the Supreme Court expressly rejected in U.S. v. Stevens (2010) (the animal cruelty video case):
Not to worry, the Government says: The Executive Branch construes § 48 to reach only “extreme” cruelty, and it “neither has brought nor will bring a prosecution for anything less.” The Government hits this theme hard, invoking its prosecutorial discretion several times. But the First Amendment protects against the Government; it does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige. We would not uphold an unconstitutional statute merely because the Government promised to use it responsibly.
Last year, I lost a Sixth Circuit case (Plunderbund Media, LLC v. DeWine) in which my clients and I challenged a related provision of the same statute, § 2917.21(B)(2); that provision expressly applied to “post[ing] a text or audio statement or an image on [the web] … for the purpose of abusing, threatening, or harassing another person,” which is how the prosecutor in Nassersharifi is interpreting (A)(1) as well. We lost that case on the grounds that the court didn’t think that our clients (political organizations) faced a sufficient threat of prosecution for their usual speech; the court therefore concluded that we lacked standing to bring our challenge.
But Nassersharifi, if he chooses to fight this, would have standing to challenge the law on its face, and to argue that—even if his own speech might be restrictable on some theory—the law is substantially overbroad, because it covers a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech. That challenge should, I think, prevail.
(It’s possible that Nassersharifi could be disciplined by the school, or even expelled, for his speech; that’s a separate and complicated matter that I’ll leave aside for this post.)
A good line from Louis Henkin, writing in 1971. His “something more” is “a workable accommodation of competing values properly achieved and reasonably justified”; others might say “an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution, both those parts that secure freedoms and those that secure government power”; others might say “a focus on the traditions of the American people, and on the precedents that embody those tradition.” But in any event, he is surely right that not all restraints on liberty, even all foolish or immoral ones, are unconstitutional, and that the Constitution is aimed at securing not only liberty from governmental excesses but also other “competing values” as well.
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As more states legalize recreational marijuana use, another part of the cannabis plant has found a market niche. CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a molecule that can be derived from hemp or cannabis. It doesn’t contain THC, so it won’t get you high.
The compound has become a common ingredient in trendy wellness products because of its purported therapeutic benefits.
“I became really like obsessed with CBD,” says Jonathan Eppers, founder of Vybes beverages. “I always tell people it’s like liquid yoga.”
Eppers, whose company makes CBD drinks that are sold in nearly 250 U.S. grocery stores, coffee shops, and hotels, says that he launched the beverage startup in 2017 after using CBD oils to treat his own anxiety. But the products that he sells are illegal—even in states like California where recreational marijuana is now widely available.
“I didn’t really didn’t think too much about the regulations around CBD because CBD oil was being sold in grocery stores here in LA,” Eppers says. “But once I got into it we sort of realized we were in a gray area with CBD.”
In January 2019, Eppers said officials from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) showed up to one of his Los Angeles warehouses and confiscated $140,000 worth of Vybes beverages. Eppers says state officials put an embargo on his product and went after a company that helps package his products in Northern California.
“Basically for two months, we haven’t been able to sell Vybes which is costing us hundreds of thousands of dollars,” states Eppers.
California is just one of many states where CBD sales are legally murky. The law clearly allows for the sale of cannabis-derived CBD products, but items that contain the hemp version of the molecule are prohibited.
“The Department of Public Health here is of the view that CBD can’t be put in foods, beverages, animal foods you name it,” says Griffen Thorne, a cannabis lawyer with Harris Bricken. “It is kind of interesting that you have marijuana, which is still federally illegal and there’s a path towards sales for companies that want to actually make and sell marijuana products. Whereas CBD is derived from a plant that’s no longer federally illegal and there are a ton of roadblocks and there’s zero clarity on how to do it for many products.”
Just months after Eppers launch his company, the CDPH released an FAQ document that echoed the Food and Drug Administration’s stance on CBD, stating that products containing the compound could not be sold by unlicensed retailers. But the document contained no guidance for enforcement, and many retailers—unaware of the state’s stance on CBD—have continued selling the product to consumers.
“I was confused because CBD had been sold in California for several years and it’s only getting bigger,” Eppers says. “And all of a sudden they were coming out and saying we couldn’t put this in food and beverages. So it was like what changed?”
While continuing to sell his product, Eppers asked the state for legal clarification. He was hopeful that passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, removing hemp from the Controlled Substances list, would establish that his products are fully legal. But he soon discovered that wasn’t the case.
“It wasn’t until after the Farm Bill passed that California became a lot more aggressive and actually [started] going after companies here in California that were producing CBD products,” says Eppers.
Kenny Morrison, a cannabis industry veteran who runs VCC Brands and serves as president of the California Cannabis Manufacturers Association, sees parallels between today’s CBD market and the early days of recreational marijuana.
“It’s all just layovers from prohibition,” Morrison states. “The retail model of cannabis being sold at a storefront, in order for that to become accepted and commonplace people had to sort of break the law or interpret the law in a new way. And we’re seeing that with CBD as well. So it’s kind of ironic that now cannabis is super regulated and CBD isn’t. Yet cannabis paved the way for CBD.”
With consumer sales of CBD products projected to top $2 billion by 2020, lawmakers in several states, including California, are pushing for bipartisan legislation that would legalize the use of CBD in food, beverage, and cosmetic products.
California’s CBD bill, AB 228, is currently making its way through the statehouse, a move Eppers and others hope will clean up the regulatory mess left over from prohibition.
“What’s happened with the state kind of clamping down on this is it’s really brought the industry together,” Eppers says. “The state will fix this legislatively.”
Produced and shot by Alexis Garcia. Additional camera by Zach Weissmueller, Paul Detrick, and Justin Monticello.
Photo credits: Hollandse-Hoogte/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Jens Kalaene/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom, Michal Fludra/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS/Newscom, Jevon Moore/SplashNews/Newscom, and Vybes. Additional footage provided by the Drug Policy Alliance.
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Ghost Dance by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (http://bit.ly/1bFo3O7)
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Everyone loves to hate algorithms. Companies mine your data to sell you more dumb tchotchkes. Governments use them to develop secretive and dystopian-sounding “predictive policing” tools.
But in one corner of the country, algorithms are being used to erase the impacts of the war on marijuana and free thousands of people from the stigma of a criminal record.
Around 20 million people have been arrested for marijuana over the past three decades, and as more states legalize or decriminalize pot, a pressing public policy issue has emerged: What should we do with all the people who have criminal records for something an ever-growing portion of the country thinks should be legal? Over the past four years, at least 10 states have passed laws addressing expungement of certain marijuana convictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The problem is the mechanism for getting one’s marijuana record expunged varies from state to state, and in most places it ranges from burdensome to nearly impossible. Even where the process is supposed to be expedited, it often is reliant on the old government standbys: paper, people, and time.
That’s where Code for America, a nonprofit good-government group, came in. It asked a simple question: Why should people have to apply at all when the government already has all the data to determine if they’re eligible?
So the organization built an algorithm to automatically identify San Francisco residents eligible for expungements and file for them. The results were stunning. San Francisco officials announced in February that the program resulted in 9,000 expungements for marijuana offenses, and it did it all in minutes.
“On average it takes 15 minutes for an attorney to review just one record,” says Evonne Silva, senior program director for Code for America. “The fact that we can review thousands of records in minutes really unlocks the potential for this to apply to other marijuana legalization efforts in other states.”
Farther south in the Golden State, Los Angeles County and San Joaquin County recently announced they will launch similar projects with Code for America. Public officials estimate it will result in 54,000 expungements.
“What we’ve actually seen is that there are public servants who wants to find a different way, because in their day-to-day they see that the process isn’t serving constituents,” Silva says.
If programs like Code for America’s spread, they could have a huge impact on reducing the damage of the drug war on communities and individuals.
A criminal record can have lifelong negative effects, including lost job opportunities—either from state licensing restrictions or skittish employers—loss of the right to vote or own a gun, ineligibility for student loans, and a host of other collateral consequences.
Code for America estimates there are 4,800 legal obstacles that exist for someone with a criminal record in California alone.
“There is no limit to how much you can discriminate against a person with a criminal record,” Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, told Reason‘s Jacob Sullum earlier this year. (If you’re looking for a state-by-state breakdown of the expungement process for marijuana convictions, by the way, look no further.)
To see just how revolutionary automated expungements would be, it’s instructive to look at the states that are doing a poor job of handling past marijuana convictions.
Alaska, for instance, simply doesn’t allow any valid conviction to be sealed or expunged. Anyone in Alaska convicted of a marijuana offense is also barred from participating in the state’s legal marijuana industry, locking out the very people harmed by prohibition.
In Colorado and Maine, only misdemeanor marijuana offenses can be expunged leaving those with felony convictions in the lurch. In Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington, D.C., getting a past marijuana offense sealed can take months and cost thousands of dollars if one hires a lawyer to expedite the process.
The deterrent effect of these barriers is considerable. Silva says that in California, only 3 percent of people eligible to have marijuana convictions expunged had petitioned to do so more than two years after the process first went into place.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced in January that, six years after the state legalized recreational marijuana, his office would create an expedited process to pardon thousands of marijuana offenders without them having to go to court. But while pardons are a powerful tool, they are also dependent on the whims of the current executive.
The experiments in automated expungements currently going on in San Francisco and Los Angeles should become the standard for the rest of the states where marijuana has been legalized. The government branded millions of people as criminals for marijuana, but the tools developed by Code for America show it can quickly and efficiently reverse that decision, if it wants to.
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“Marijuana legalization,” declared a Voxheadline last month, “is winning the 2020 Democratic primaries.” A quick scan of the field indeed shows how far we’ve come since even 2011, when “Choom gang” alum Barack Obama was still cracking down on state-legal medical marijuana outfits and laughing off suggestions that prohibiting a popular, non-lethal plant was perhaps not the wisest public policy.
In fact, the top 11 highest-polling declared Democratic presidential candidates (plus a bunch in the lower tiers, notably Rep. Tulsi Gabbard [D–Hawaii]) have all backed some form of ending the federal prohibition of marijuana, fewer than four years after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the first major-party candidate in history to do so. Several in fact have become legislative leaders on this issue, especially Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), plus former congressman Beto O’Rourke.
As popular opinion and state law speeds toward legalizing recreational weed, and a tough-on-crime Republican president frees prisoners and advances criminal justice reform, former drug warriors are scrambling to catch up with the times. The last holdout here may be still-undeclared candidate Joe Biden, who invented the office of the drug czar, spearheaded some of the very worst criminal justice laws of the past four decades, and said while vice president that legalization is a “mistake” because marijuana is a “gateway drug.”
Still, as senior editor and longtime drug policy journalist Jacob Sullum told Nick Gillespie on Wednesday’s Reason Podcast, virtually all major-party presidential candidates this year are pretty damned good on pot legalization. This not only is unprecedented, it was also unthinkable very recently.
So with a big assist from our friends at Marijuana Moment, and taking advantage of Reason‘s new-and-improved search engine, here’s a survey of post positions among the highest-polling Democrats to declare:
Legalize it!: Sanders in October 2015 became the first major-party presidential candidate to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. Since then he introduced the Senate’s first bill to repeal federal prohibition and has made ending the war on drugs one of his central issues.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored (as did many 2020 competitors) Cory Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act, which would expunge possession arrests from people’s records, allow current pot prisoners to be resentenced, and withhold federal funding from states that crack down too vigorously on weed. Thinks “small business people in the African American [community] deserve to be part of” the corporate marijuana market.
Prohibition disconnect: Has questioned why non-marijuana cigarettes should be legal.
Inhaling status: “Didn’t do a whole lot for me. My recollection is I nearly coughed my brains out, so it’s not my cup of tea.”
Legalize it!: O’Rourke was earlier than 99 percent of elected Democrats to the legalization issue, pushing the El Paso City Council in 2009 to at least study it, co-writing a 2011 book advocating legal weed, and successfully primarying an eight-term prohibitionist in 2012. He not only wants to remove federal prohibition, he’d also like the federal government to declare the plant legal across all 50 states, and then lead the international fight to “end the global war on drugs.”
Other bills/concepts backed: As congressman, introduced a bill to end the federal government’s policy of withholding highway funds to states unless they suspend the driver’s licenses of drug convicts. Also co-sponsored various bills to seal criminal drug records, protect legal-weed states, allow doctors to prescribe pot to veterans, and remove possession convictions as a barrier to federal student aid.
Inhaling status: “Pot, yeah, there was definitely, you know….There was, uh, I don’t know how to put this, but yeah. People smoked pot, but not habitually.”
Legalize it!: Now, sure. But before gearing up to run for president? Ugh.
Other bills/concepts backed: The Marijuana Justice Act. Beyond that, “Harris has only co-sponsored one other cannabis-related bill: the SAFE Banking Act, which would protect banks that work with marijuana businesses from federal punishment.”
Prohibition disconnect:
Inhaling status: “I inhaled….It gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.”
Legalize it!: “I think even in Indiana, criminal justice reform, including marijuana [legalization], we’re probably there….I really think a state-wide campaign in Indiana would do well, especially on the criminal justice stuff. To find common cause between the younger, libertarian right that’s not so sure about the Republican Party as an institution, and a more traditional, progressive coalition—I think you can get there on drugs.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Well, the South Bend mayor is only 37 years old. Has talked favorably about commuting sentences and rehabilitating ex-cons once drug laws are changed.
Prohibition disconnect: Approved “an ordinance in 2017 that prohibited businesses in the city from selling synthetic cannabinoids.”
Inhaling status: “I was standing outside my dorm. I was on my way home from a party or something….I ran into a friend and he had an acquaintance with him, and we were chatting, and at some point I noticed that she was smoking a joint. And just out of curiosity — there was like a little bit left — I was like ‘Oh, is that…’ And she handed it to me.”
Legalize it!: Since 2017, yes, though as recently as 2016 she declined to endorse a Massachusetts recreational initiative (which she then later lied about); and in 2013 she was out-and-out tarring her Republican opponent as being soft on pot.
Other bills/concepts backed: Was the main Democratic sponsor of a bipartisan 2018 bill to removal federal prohibitions in states where marijuana is legal. Co-sponsored the Marijuana Justice Act, plus bills to deschedule weed, legalize pot-related banking, and conduct research aimed at getting veterans medicinal access.
Prohibition disconnect: Warren would like to create a huge new federal Office of Drug Manufacturing, which wouldn’t necessarily start as the nationalized pot pusher-man, but….
Legalize it!: Cory Booker is the most far-reaching pro-legalization Democrat in the United States Senate, frequently joining with the libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) on all manner of criminal justice reform. Has made his Marijuana Justice Act a centerpiece of his presidential run, and busted johnny-come-latelies like Kamala Harris for making jokes about the herb while people still rot in prison. Like O’Rourke, he was railing against the drug war in local politics more than a decade ago.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored the landmark CARERS Act, which would protect state-legal marijuana operations from federal law enforcement. Would “absolutely” back mass marijuana-related pardons as president.
Prohibition disconnect: Has repeatedly expanded a law enforcement approach to the opioid crisis.
Inhaling status: “I have never smoked marijuana, I have never smoked a cigarette, I have never eaten marijuana, I have never tried another drug, I have never drank alcohol. I think the most alcohol I have had may be a sip of beer to get my friends off my back, or maybe the church wine.”
Legalize it!: “I support the legalization of marijuana and believe that states should have the right to determine the best approach to marijuana within their borders,” she said in 2019. Twenty years ago it was a much different story.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored the Booker/Warren Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States (STATES) Act. Has backed measures to expand cannabis research and remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act.
Prohibition disconnect: As Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Attorney from 1999-2006, Klobuchar doubled the number of drug convictions. “We must keep a focus on drug dealers,” she said in 2004. As senator, she has been one of the leading proponents of civil-liberties-restricting “sex trafficking” legislation.
Legalize it!: “Colorado and other states have shown we can sensibly legalize marijuana with reasonable controls.”
Other bills/concepts backed: In favor of expunging drug-possession arrests from criminal records.
Prohibition disconnect: “Under his leadership, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a 2014 memo clarifying that owners of federally assisted housing facilities are required to deny entry to people who use marijuana, even for medical purposes in accordance with state law.”
Inhaling status: “It’s unknown if Castro has ever consumed cannabis, though he did write in his book that he hung out in college with a ‘Jeff Spicoli’ type.”
Legalize it!: In one of the better campaign stunts in recent memory, the tech entrepreneur and robot-pessimist announced earlier this month that, “I would legalize marijuana and I would pardon everyone who’s in jail for a non-violent, drug-related offense….I would pardon them all on April 20, 2021, and I would high five them on their way out of jail.” Later, he clarified that this pertained only to marijuana-related convictions, but still—4/20 clemency day!
Other bills/concepts backed: Decriminalizing opioid use and possession.
Prohibition disconnect: Yang has some of the weirdest policy sets out there, including providing “guardrails to keep technology from corroding our mental and emotional well-being, particularly for young people,” because smartphones are having a “devastating” impact on children.
Inhaling status: “No, no, I’m not really” a weed smoker, he said in a radio interview this month. “You know, I was a pretty geeky Asian dude.”
Legalize it!: “The senator, who has an A grade from NORML, has become one of the most vocal advocates for federal marijuana reform in Congress, co-sponsoring multiple pieces of legislation and frequently talking about the issue in speeches and on social media. However, she did not start off her political career supporting cannabis reform.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Marijuana Justice Act, CARERS Act, the Booker/Warren Respect States Act, expanding research, expunging records, giving access to veterans.
Prohibition disconnect: Hoo boy. Gillibrand last month proposed a seven-day limit to pain prescriptions, which is one of the worst policy ideas in recent memory.
Legalize it!: The former Colorado governor “may be best known nationally as the guy who opposed marijuana legalization in his state but ultimately decided it was not the disaster he feared it would be.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Supports the STATES Act, and further says that the laboratories of democracy should be able to decriminalize cocaine and heroin (and sex work!), which is unusually bold. Favors expunging non-violent convictions.
Prohibition disconnect: Even after his big policy turn, Hickenlooper signed a ban on pot gummy bears and animal-shaped edibles, and a reduction on the number of pot plants people can have in their homes. He vetoed a bill allowing for marijuana tasting rooms.
Inhaling status: “He wrote in his book about how his mother caught him attempting to grow marijuana during high school, how cannabis ‘slowed me down and made me kind of silly’ and how he ‘got a little high’ and took a nude selfie as part of a project for an advanced photography class in college.”
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In Canada, a new Ontario provincial budget released last week proposes to loosen alcohol consumption rules in the province, including allowing licensed establishments to start serving alcohol at 9 a.m., legalizing tailgating, letting local governments set rules that would allow people to consume alcohol in public parks, and letting breweries, wineries, and distilleries serve more than mere samples. Other proposed changes include plans to allow convenience stores to sell beer and wine, legalizing happy hour advertisements, and postponing a new wine tax that was set to take effect this month.
The proposals come after the provincial government recently sought public comment on its plans to “moderniz[e] the rules for the sale and consumption of alcohol in Ontario.”
“The cornerstone of putting people first is consumer choice and convenience,” Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said of the plans. “This is why our government is taking steps to modernize the way we sell, distribute and consume alcohol in Ontario.”
Three things appear to be true of Ontario’s alcohol laws. First, they’re in great need of reform. Second, people such as Fedeli are talking openly about the need for changes. Third, the first and second points above are true largely due to decades of inadequate half-measures masquerading as real reform.
A 1997 article by the Mackenzie Institute, a Canadian think tank, lists a host of inane provincial booze laws throughout recent history, including that, “until about 1970, Ontario’s bars were required to have a separate Ladies entrance and a room where escorted gentlewomen might enjoy a beverage with a respectable male companion.” More recently, in 2011, it was a pretty big deal when Ontario alcohol deregulation measures allowed licensed establishments to give you a free drink on your birthday. Yay.
The elephant in the room is Ontario’s liquor control board, known as the LCBO, which has long been reviled both as the heart of the province’s booze-law problem and a powerful obstacle to reform.
Much of the hatred toward the LCBO comes from the “quasi-monopoly” it enjoys over alcohol sales. Another facet of the LCBO that Ontarians detest is the strong LCBO union that uses its power to head off competition from private sellers.
“Our prohibition-era alcohol system is not about protecting drinkers or maximizing revenues for the government,” wrote Candice Malcolm, of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, in a 2014 piece in the Toronto Sun. “It is about power and control, particularly for government-sector unions.”
Ontario’s awful alcohol rules have consequences. Toronto is the province’s—and Canada’s—largest and most international city. But Toronto is also derided as boring. And when someone paints Toronto as un-fun, bad booze laws usually get the blame.
“To be fair, much of Toronto’s lameness comes from the fact the city happens to be located in Ontario,” wroteBenjamin Boles at blogTO in a great 2014 post that details the city’s and province’s rich history of terrible alcohol laws, including temperance laws that stayed on the books in Toronto into at least the late 1990s. “The province’s liquor laws are legendarily strict and often bizarre.“
But Ontario’s bad alcohol laws don’t exist in a vacuum. To be clear, Canada has some pretty rotten alcohol laws in force around the country.
Those that restrict the movement of alcohol across provincial borders are some of the worst. Unfortunately, the country’s Supreme Court chose to uphold those laws last year.
The national government has also seen fit to adopt new and highly intrusive and draconian steps to combat drunk driving.
One such measure, which took effect nationwide in December, gives police the terrifying “power to demand a breath sample at the roadside, without reasonable grounds.” Critics have assailed the measure as a frontal assault on civil liberties.
“The country has been tending towards a police state for some time,” columnist Arthur Weinreb wrotelast year. “Nowhere are the losses of individual rights accepted by so many people as when these rights are taken away in order to combat drinking and driving.” Weinreb reveals that a police officer used the law to pull over a 70-year-old man who’d dropped off a variety of empty beer cans and the like at a recycling center.
Yet a police spokesman said officers would use to law to target “cars leaving licensed establishments or leaving the downtown,” the Guelph Mercury Tribunereports.
“The officer told him the three cases of empties were a lot, he was obviously a drinker and he was then asked when he last had a drink,” Weinreb writes. “[The man] said he last drank around midnight the day before.” The police officer then demanded the elderly man take a breathalyzer test.
While the national government has made the country’s booze laws fodder for columnists, the prospects for disentangling the Ontario government from alcohol sales appear largely to be a welcome development among the same crowd.
“I strongly dislike [center-right Ontario Premier Doug] Ford and pretty much everything he’s done, both in and out of office, but I’m simply not hyperpartisan enough to argue that his booze proposals are inherently bad ideas,” writes columnist Emma Teitel. “They’re not. Ford is a crappy leader—the kind who values populist gobbledygook over research and whose education minister believes neglect promotes resilience—but even crappy leaders have decent ideas sometimes.”
Consider me a fan, then, of good ideas from crappy leaders.
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