When politicians and pundits take aim at cashless businesses, they often argue that such places violate the choices of consumers who lack bank accounts. But on closer examination, these places’ commitment to choice is remarkably limited.
When New York City Councilmember Ritchie Torres (D–Bronx) introduced a bill to ban card-only establishments, for example, he said that while he uses debit cards for almost all of his transactions, “that should be a choice that I make freely as a consumer not a requirement imposed on me by a business.” The ATM company Cardtronics offers a stirring, if self-interested, defense of “consumer payment choice” in written testimony supporting Torres’ legislation. And Andy Callado, a financial coach for the working poor, tells Vox Media’s Facebook show Consider It that while he wishes everyone had a bank account, “we can’t force people to do that. We have to empower people to make their own decisions and do what’s best for them.”
So far, such arguments have proven persuasive enough for cashless bans to pass in Philadelphia and New Jersey. New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are all considering prohibitions on cashless establishments.
Yet for their rhetoric about protecting choice, pro-cash politicians are happy to override businesses’ decisions. While dismissing the idea that we can’t force consumers to have bank accounts, both Collado and Torres are more than happy to force businesses into accepting cash that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Accepting cash, as Reason‘s Billy Binion has pointed out, comes with a number of costs, including the time it takes to count up bills and coins and the need to hire armored cars to transport this currency off-site. Cash-accepting businesses also face a heightened risk of theft. Surely businesses should also have the choice to avoid or minimize these costs if they want.
Consumers who avoid banks do so because banks come with trade-offs. (“You go in expecting one thing, and then once you look at your statement, you have this $35 fee, this $15 fee,” one woman tells Considering It.) Businesses that avoid cash are doing the same thing. Forcing businesses to take cash is less about protecting consumers’ choices and more about shifting the costs of these consumers’ decisions onto the businesses.
For the small minority of enterprises that have decided to go cashless, the costs of cash outweigh the sales they might lose from going card-only. For other businesses—including, I suspect, most businesses in neighborhoods where banks are scarce—the calculation points the other way. Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all standard on everyone, wouldn’t it be better to let everyone sort out all these trade-offs in the marketplace?
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UkbZbV
via IFTTT
Detroit’s bail system unconstitutionally punishes poor people accused of crimes, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a new federal class action lawsuit.
On Sunday, the ACLU of Michigan filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division on behalf of eight plaintiffs who had been caught in the bail system of the 36th District Court in Detroit.
According to the lawsuit, ACLU representatives have witnessed hundreds of Detroit court proceedings where magistrates simply rushed through arraignments and assigned bail amounts based on the nature of the charges without inquiring about defendants’ ability to pay. Defendants are not permitted to ask questions or explain their situation, and in 95 percent of these cases were not yet represented by attorneys.
Cash bail was ordered in 85 percent of the cases the ACLU observed. The magistrates do not determine whether the defendants are dangerous or flight risks, so the primary factor determining whether people are detained in cells while awaiting their day in court is simply whether they’ve got money. Jails in Wayne County (where Detroit is located) house about 1,600 people every night, 62 percent of whom are being detained pretrial.
A third of the people in Detroit live below the poverty line. According to the ACLU, when defendants cannot immediately make bail, they have to wait at least a week for their next hearing (when they’ll have counsel) to try to request bail to be reduced. One of the plaintiffs in the suit couldn’t afford $200 after getting arrested over an unpaid five-year-old misdemeanor ticket for staying in a park after dark. He was told he would have to stay in jail for two weeks before his next hearing. Other plaintiffs were arrested for more serious charges, in some cases violent felonies. In all cases, though, the initial arraignments remained the same. They were brought before a magistrate in a remote teleconference. The magistrate rushed through the proceedings to the point that the defendants said they didn’t even understand what was happening, setting bail amounts without asking the defendants anything or even explaining why the bail amounts were set at those levels.
Indeed, according to the lawsuit, people who appear before the magistrates are often threatened or intimidated if they try to ask questions or say anything outside the court’s script:
Once the Magistrate Defendants have announced the bail conditions, they instruct the arrestee to step away from the camera. If the arrestee seeks to ask a question, the Magistrate Defendants typically interrupt the arrestee with a warning that anything she says can and will be used against her in a court of law. In issuing such a warning, the Magistrate Defendants typically do not first inquire whether the individual’s question pertains to the underlying criminal allegations or to the court’s bail determination. In one instance on March 18, 2019, Magistrate [Millicent] Sherman told an arrestee who attempted to raise a question that “now is not the time to ask questions.” Sometimes, DDC guards can be heard over the video audibly “shushing” an arrestee or otherwise instructing them not to speak further with the Magistrate, even when the arrestee attempts to ask questions about their particular bail situation. Predictably, many individuals who are bold enough to interpose questions in the first place do not proceed with their questions after such an admonition.
This suit is similar to one the ACLU recently filed against judges in Philadelphia for engaging in similar behavior.
Bail is supposed to be applied as a way to make sure that defendants don’t skip out on court dates or commit additional criminal acts while free. Instead, many courts have simply used them as default demands, with risk assessment playing no role in determining who goes free. It’s all about whether they can scrounge up the money.
As a result, people who are poor end up being punished just for being arrested, whether or not they’re convicted. Because they cannot get out of jail, they lose income (and potentially their jobs), face evictions, and could even lose custody of children.
The lawsuit charges the Detroit magistrates with violating the detainees’ due process and equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment and their 6th Amendment right to counsel. The lawsuit is asking for a permanent injunction stopping the current bail system and substituting one that pays attention to defendants’ ability to pay and that considesr the actual risk factors of flight or danger to the community.
For more about the current legal push for bail reform, go here.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2v5mmpN
via IFTTT
A special federal law enforcement task force dedicated to stopping the flow of opioids into the United States was deployed in southern Arizona for eight days in March. The joint effort of local, state, and federal cops managed to stop more than 400 cars and conduct 129 vehicle searches.
How many opioids did all that effort yield? Less than a quarter gram of heroin.
Rather than targeting opioids, the Interior Department’s Opioid Reduction Task Force seems to have been used primarily to enforce immigration laws. According to a press release issued last week by the department, the operation conducted between March 20 and March 28 resulted in 50 arrests—with 42 of those arrests for “illegal entry.” Though the press release trumpeted the fact that the task force seized $2.3 million in illegal drugs, nearly all of that total was marijuana, not opioids. (The feds also reported seizing 31 grams of meth.)
That shouldn’t be a surprise when you considering where the task force was deployed: on the Tohono O’odham Reservation, along the United States’ southern border, and not at a port of entry. Most heroin and other opioids—and, indeed, most foreign drugs of all varieties—come into the United States through border checkpoints. The majority of heroin coming from Mexico is transported via privately owned vehicles “entering the United States at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods,” the federal Drug Enforcement Administration concluded in a 2018 report.
That’s one of many reasons why building a massive wall along the length of the southern border is unlikely to staunch the flow of heroin into the country.
It should also raise questions about why a federal opioid task force was deployed for eight days in a part of the country that does not include a port of entry. After all, if you’re trying to stop opioids from coming into the country, it would make more sense to go where you’re most likely to find opioids. The Interior Department did not respond to questions from Reason seeking further explanation about why the task force was deployed to the Tohono O’odham Reservation—and the department did not clarify whether it viewed the eight-day operation as a success, despite the apparent lack of opioid interdiction.
What we do know is that the feds managed to harass lots of apparently innocent Americans—many of them likely Native Americans—in the effort. In addition to stopping 422 vehicles and searching 129 of them, the Opioid Reduction Task Force deployed its K-9 units 89 times and responded to 40 “K-9 alerts.” The task force also handed out 14 traffic tickets.
In all, the Arizona deployment makes a pretty good argument against using federal law enforcement to combat the opioid trade. Americans who are addicted to heroin and other opioids need safe ways to ween themselves off dangerous drugs (and better access to non-lethal drugs in the first place), a strategy that has already paid off in places like Ohio. Giving federal immigration cops—yes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was included in the Opioid Reduction Task Force—another opportunity to demand to see proof of citizenship is not helping reduce opioid addictions or deaths. If anything, government enforcement efforts are only making opioids more dangerous by creating market conditions that benefit more potent, and potentially more deadly, alternatives like fentanyl, which can be 10 times as profitable per kilogram than heroin.
The Department of the Interior says its special opioid cops have seized “millions of dollars worth of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs during the task force’s first year of existence. But its pretty clear that the most recent operation was a dud.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IlFJUm
via IFTTT
A clip of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) describing the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an incident in which “some people did something” went viral on social media last week.
What followed was a vicious cycle of thunderous conservative indignation, complete with President Donald Trump tweeting a video mashing up Omar’s remarks with footage the planes hitting the Twin Towers, followed by an overreaching liberal backlash against the backlash, in which Democratic presidential contenders Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), all accused Trump of inciting violence against Omar.
The plain truth is this: Omar’s comments may sound flippant when taken out of context, but they were nowhere near as offensive as the right made them out to be—and Trump’s tweet, though thoughtless and unfair, did not represent any kind of violent threat. Everybody who got worked up about Omar was stoking unfounded outrage. And they were doing it hypocritically, since this is the kind of thing each side tends to hate when the other side does it.
Here is the full context of Omar’s remarks, delivered at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) event last month:
Here’s the truth. For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen. Frankly, I’m tired of it. And every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.
“Some people did something” is not the most sensitive way to describe 9/11, but the right—and the Trump tweet, specifically—made it sound like that was all she had said. She wasn’t minimizing the tragedy; she was suggesting that what some Muslims did threatened all Muslim Americans’ civil liberties. Omar was arguably incautious with her choice of words (and CAIR was actually founded in the 1990s), but those who dragged her for this were engaged in”patriotic correctness,” a right-wing variety of political correctness.
Omar’s remarks did not merit this level of denunciation. But as a sitting congresswoman, she’s in the political fray; she should not be immune from criticism, wrongheaded though it sometimes may be. Some of that criticism crossed a clear line: Omar has claimed that she received death threats in the wake of Trump’s tweet. No one should be threatened for expressing their opinions, and the government should take whatever action is necessary to make sure Omar is safe. But even if Trump calling attention to Omar’s comment had the effect of causing her to receive death threats, Trump himself did not threaten or incite violence, in either a strictly legal or a metaphorical sense. It would be no more appropriate to accuse Trump of inciting violence against Omar than it would be to hold the far left at fault for the 2017 congressional baseball shooting, which was perpetrated by a Sanders supporter who had appropriated some views of the Republicans-are-the-real-Taliban variety.
In general, don’t criticize a politician because some people might take it too far and threaten her would be a bad rule, one that would make it more difficult to hold politicians accountable when they really have earned a good lambasting.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IkiGZX
via IFTTT
The practice of arresting drivers for minor traffic violations in Texas first received wide national attention as a result of the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Atwater v. Lago Vista, which upheld the handcuffing, booking, and jailing of a woman who violated a state law requiring drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seat belts. In 2016 such rough treatment of motorists became even more controversial when a 28-year-old woman named Sandra Bland, who was arrested after a state trooper stopped her for failing to signal a lane change, died of an apparent suicide in the Waller County jail. A new report from the Texas group Just Liberty, based on data reported under a 2017 state law passed in response to the Bland incident, estimates that “more than 45,000 Texas drivers were arrested at traffic stops for Class C misdemeanors last year” and were therefore unnecessarily exposed to the risk of injury as well as the trauma of being hauled off to jail in handcuffs.
Class C misdemeanors are traffic and city ordinance violations that are typically handled with citations. Based on Just Liberty’s analysis of 2018 data from cities with populations of more than 50,000, that is what happens more than 99 percent of the time. But because there are so many traffic stops—3 million in the data set used for this report—the absolute number of arrests is large.
Among traffic stops by local police departments, arrests for Class C misdemeanors were most common in Waco, at 451 per 10,000 stops (4.5 percent), nearly seven times the average of 67 (0.7 percent). Injuries associated with police use of force during such arrests were most common in Houston, where they were reported in 53 per 10,000 stops, three times the average rate of 17 per 10,000. The injury rate for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which was responsible for Bland’s arrest, was more than double that average. Just Liberty notes that cases where injuries were reported are “likely a small subset of all force incidents at traffic stops.”
Breaion King’s arrest
In 2015, for instance, an Austin police officer stopped a 26-year-old elementary school teacher named Breaion King for speeding and ended up yanking her from her car, pulling her across the parking lot, and throwing her to the ground. The incident, which was the focus of the Oscar-nominated HBO documentary Traffic Stop, was highly traumatic for King. But because she “wasn’t seriously injured,” Just Liberty says, “her arrest, while disturbing, would not have been included in this data.”
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2UmEOUY
via IFTTT
On Friday, the Justice Department announced that it will not appeal a federal trial court decision ruling that the federal law banning female genital mutilation (FGM) is unconstitutional. This is likely to be an unpopular move. But it is right thing to do nonetheless. The federal FGM ban exceeds the scope of Congress’ power under the Constitution. I summarized the reasons why in this post on the trial court decision:
Article I of the Constitution does not give Congress any general power to suppress crime or child abuse. Therefore, the federal government tried to shoehorn the FGM ban into the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. On first principles, it is pretty obvious that, at least in most cases, FGM is not a form of interstate commerce. It is generally performed within one state and often isn’t even a commercial transaction. However, misguided Supreme Court decisions have interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly that they now allow Congress to regulate virtually any form of “economic activity,” even if it is only performed within a single state, and even some forms of “noneconomic” activity, so long as banning it is part of a broader “regulatory scheme” aimed at an interstate market. But… the FGM ban does not fit even these broad criteria, and is also at odds with previous Supreme Court decisions, including United States v. Morrison (2000), which make it clear that the Commerce Clause does not give Congress the power to ban local violent crime…
If Congress does not have a general power to forbid violence against women or other violent crime – such as rape and murder – it also does not have the power to ban FGM. Like other crime, FGM, of course, has some effect on interstate commerce. But if the Commerce Clause gave Congress the power to forbid any activity that affects interstate commerce in some way, it would have the power to ban virtually anything, as almost any type of human behavior has some effect on what people buy, sell, or transport in interstate trade.
FGM cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be classified as an economic or commercial activity. There is no suggestion that the procedure is done for money…. Nor is there any suggestion that this “service” is offered within anything approaching an established interstate market, as exists for illegal drugs and pornography. Committing FGM is comparable to possessing a gun at school, i.e., a criminal act that “has nothing to do with commerce or any sort of economic enterprise.” [United States v.] Lopez, 514 U.S. at 561.
The federal government also claimed that the law is authorized by a combination of the treaty power and the Necessary and Proper Clause, as an exercise of Congress’ authority to enforce US obligations under Article 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which requires states to “to ensure the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all civil and political rights set forth in the present Covenant,” and Article 24, which states that “[e]very child shall have, without any discrimination as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, national or social origin, property or birth, the right to such measures of protection as are required by his status as a minor, on the part of his family, society and the State.” These are stronger arguments than the Commerce Clause theory. But they still fall short for reasons explained in Judge Friedman’s opinion and in my earlier post on the case.
Female genital mutilation is a terrible crime. But that does not mean it has to be dealt with by the federal government. As Judge Friedman explains, FGM is already illegal in every state. It is either banned by targeted anti-FGM laws, or by general laws against child abuse and assault. Just as there is no need for a federal law against murder or assault, so there is no need for a federal anti-FGM law.
Some experts who agree that the anti-FGM law is unconstitutional nonetheless condemn the Justice Department’s decision not to appeal, because they believe DOJ has a duty to defend the constitutionality of any federal law for which a plausible defense can be offered. I disagree for reasons outlined here and here. The Justice Department’s highest legal duty is to defend the Constitution, not federal laws that violate it.
For what it is worth, I have maintained that view under both the Obama administration (with respect to its decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act) and the Trump administration (respecting its refusal to defend Obamacare). My objection to elements of the latter policy was due to the fact that DOJ’s position was wrong on the merits, not the idea that the Department has a duty to defend the constitutionality of all federal laws that have a plausible legal rationale.
It is, therefore, a mistake to conclude that the Trump DOJ is a consistent champion of federalism. Very far from it. That said, Friday’s decision may be the result of the influence of the Attorney General William Barr, who appears to be more supportive of federalism than his predecessor, Jeff Sessions. Being better than Sessions in this respect is, of course, a pretty low bar for Barr to exceed. But a small measure of progress is much better than nothing.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2v7XfTc
via IFTTT
Beto O’Rourke’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy don’t get as much attention as those of his fellow Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. But in a recent interview with The Nation, the former Texas congressman makes a point of listing several U.S. interventions that didn’t go well. “Look at [the 1953 CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammad] Mosaddegh in Iran,” O’Rourke says. “Coming on 19 years in Afghanistan. Twenty-seven years in Iraq, [five] successive presidential administrations. Tell me that any of those wars or covert actions or interventions have made those countries, the world, or our foreign-policy prospects any better. They haven’t.”
Twenty-seven years isn’t the right year count for America’s presence in Iraq—more on that here—but the underlying point is valid. O’Rourke’s criticism of the Afghan intervention is especially welcome. The U.S. has lost 2,400 American lives and $900 billion in that war, yet Afghanistan faces worsening violence and instability.
The key to avoiding these types of conflicts “is to lead with diplomacy, holding the card of military involvement as the last resort,” argues O’Rourke. “We need to bring these wars to a close. We need to follow the lead of [Democratic Reps.] Mark Pocan (Wis.) and Ro Khanna (Calif.), who are trying to prevent us from going into new wars or continuing the wars that we are effectively in, in places like Yemen,” he tells The Nation.
Pocan and Khanna have been vocal opponents of U.S. involvement in the Yemen war. They were among the members of Congress to cosponsor legislation, which has now passed both houses of Congress, that tries to ensure that the president only commits U.S. military forces to conflicts abroad if he has congressional approval.
“This country has completely forgotten its constitutional responsibility to lawfully declare and end these wars, as prescribed in the first article of the U.S. Constitution,” O’Rourke tells The Nation. “I don’t think there’s been a meaningful vote on the wars since 9/11, since the ones we had in 2001 and 2002, and I think that’s desperately needed right now.”
O’Rourke is referring to a pair of congressional resolutions that easily passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives the president power to take military action against any nation or person he believes to have been involved in the 9/11 attacks. It’s been used to justify military intervention not only in Afghanistan but in Syria, Somalia, the Philippines, and Niger. The 2002 Authorization of for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, meanwhile, allowed the U.S. to invade Iraq.
Some in Congress have tried to address this issue. Last month, for instance, Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Tom Udall (D–N.M.) introduced legislation that would withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and repeal the AUMF. The AFGHAN Service Act has yet to gain much traction the Senate.
In decrying unauthorized U.S. intervention abroad, O’Rourke echoed Paul, who warned Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week that wars must be approved by Congress. “You do not have the permission of Congress to go to war in Iran. If you want a war in Iran, you have to come to us. It’s the way the Constitution was written, and it needs to be very clear,” the senator told Pompeo, who was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Paul was specifically addressing a possible U.S. intervention in Iran, but the concept applies to other potential conflicts too: If the president wants to go to war, he needs congressional approval.
This sort of anti-interventionist sentiment is not unusual for O’Rourke, who has criticized Washington’s intervention in Iraq and Syria and has rightly called the AUMF “a blank check for endless war.” O’Rourke has come under fire from some on the left for not being progressive enough, but when it comes to foreign policy, he’s at least as much of an anti-war candidate as Sanders.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2VNz887
via IFTTT
Pete Buttigieg is officially running for president. He announced his decision to enter the crowded Democratic primary at a Sunday rally:
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Mayor <a href=”https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@PeteButtigieg</a>: "My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete. I'm a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for President of the United States." <a href=”http://bit.ly/2KDMIK5> <a href=”https://t.co/CaCkpvtgqP”>pic.twitter.com/CaCkpvtgqP</a></p>— The Hill (@thehill) <a href=”https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1117680453757145088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>April 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>
The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, first made waves in January when he organized an exploratory committee. Since that time, he has unexpectedly become one of the better-known names in the race. As of the beginning of April, he had attracted $7 million in donations.
Buttigieg’s combination of identities—Midwestern mayor, Afghanistan veteran, openly gay and married—has helped him stand out from his fellow contenders. But they’ve also placed him at odds with some on the cultural left, as when Christina Cauterucci complained that he was not overtly gay enough. Such criticisms drew a sharp retort from The Washington Post‘s Drew Goins, who pointed out that an openly gay man’s “rising popularity in a presidential primary contest is a once-unimaginable accomplishment.”
Buttigieg shares many ideas with his fellow progressives in the race, even endorsing the notion of battling the conservative SCOTUS majority through court-packing. But he breaks with the pack on some issues—he opposes free college, for example, because he finds it difficult to support subsidizing the minority of Americans who earn more because of their college degree. He has also used his military service to promote a relatively non-interventionist foreign policy and to criticize “endless war.”
Bonus Link: Ira Stoll calls Buttigieg “the most interesting Democrat running for president.”
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2V087B8
via IFTTT
During a hearing on the 1937 law that effectively banned cannabis throughout the United States, a congressman asked Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger “whether the marihuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium, or cocaine user.” Anslinger, who at that point was blaming marijuana for inspiring outbursts of vicious and irrational violence, said he had seen no evidence that its users progress to other drugs. “I have not heard of a case of that kind,” he said. “I think it is an entirely different class. The marihuana addict does not go in that direction.”
By the early 1950s, Anslinger had changed his mind. “Over 50 percent of those young [heroin] addicts started on marijuana smoking,” he told a congressional committee in 1951. “They started there and graduated to heroin; they took the needle when the thrill of marijuana was gone.”
Anslinger reiterated that point four years later, when he testified in favor of stricter penalties for marijuana offenses. “While we are discussing marijuana,” a senator said, “the real danger there is that the use of marijuana leads many people eventually to the use of heroin.” Anslinger agreed: “That is the great problem and our great concern about the use of marijuana, that eventually if used over a long period, it does lead to heroin addiction.”
1951 story
The idea that marijuana use “leads to” heroin use, eventually known as the “stepping-stone” or “gateway” theory, became a durable theme of anti-pot propaganda, echoes of which can still be heard today. As vice president, Joe Biden, currently the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said “I think legalization is a mistake” because “I still believe it’s a gateway drug.” A couple of years ago, before coming around on legalization, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likewise worried that “marijuana leads to other drugs, and there is a lot of proof that is true.”
Was Cuomo right about that? Was Anslinger onto something when he warned that today’s pot smoker is tomorrow’s heroin addict?
Anslinger was right that people who use marijuana are more likely than people who don’t to eventually try heroin. But the nature of the relationship between cannabis consumption and the use of “harder” drugs remains controversial: Does marijuana use cause opioid use and, if so, in what sense? Can the association be explained by factors that independently predispose people to use both kinds of drugs?
These questions take on added significance given the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition across the United States, a development that has coincided with a surge in opioid-related deaths. But despite the superficial appeal of linking those two trends, the evidence suggests that legalizing marijuana does not cause an increase in opioid-related harm and may in fact mitigate it.
Clear Correlations, Contested Causes
It clearly is not true that marijuana use inexorably leads to heroin use, as Anslinger sometimes implied. Recent data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicate that 123 million Americans have tried marijuana, while 5.3 million have tried heroin. In other words, marijuana use is more than 20 times as common as heroin use, and less than 5 percent of cannabis consumers have tried heroin.
Marijuana vs. heroin use
It is true, however, that people who use “hard drugs” such as heroin generally have used marijuana first. In a group of about 1,200 New Yorkers followed from high school into their mid-30s, for example, around 95 percent of the subjects who had used illegal drugs other than marijuana had started with cannabis.
It is also true that people who use marijuana are more likely than people who don’t to subsequently use other illegal drugs. In the study of New Yorkers, men who had used marijuana by their mid-20s, but had not used it in the previous year, were almost five times as likely as men who had never used marijuana to report using other illegal drugs. The corresponding risk ratio for men who had used marijuana daily in the previous year was 12 to 1. The association between cannabis consumption and other illicit drug use is especially strong among heavy marijuana users and people who begin using marijuana at an early age.
A 2013 analysis of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that young men and women who had used marijuana were two-and-a-half times as likely to report illegal use of prescription opioids. A 2017 analysis of data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions found a similar risk ratio after adjusting for several potential confounders.
While these correlations are clear, their meaning is not. One possible explanation is that the experience of using marijuana makes people more likely to try other illegal drugs. Another possible explanation is that people who use marijuana are different from people who don’t in ways that also affect their likelihood of using other drugs. Pre-existing differences in genetics, personality, and environment could explain both tendencies.
The psychologist Andrew Morral and his colleagues at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center have shown that an underlying propensity to use drugs, combined with the relative availability of different intoxicants, could entirely account for the three phenomena emphasized by advocates of the gateway theory: 1) that people tend to use marijuana before other illegal drugs, 2) that people who use marijuana are more likely to use other illegal drugs, and 3) that the likelihood of progression increases with the frequency of marijuana use. Their mathematical model did not disprove the gateway theory, but it did prove that the gateway theory is not necessary to explain these observations. Morral et al. concluded that “available evidence does not favor the marijuana gateway effect over the alternative hypothesis that marijuana and hard drug initiation are correlated because both are influenced by individuals’ heterogenous liabilities to try drugs.”
Twins and Rats
Several studies have sought to test the gateway theory by taking into account other variables that may be independently associated with drug use. A longitudinal study of teenagers and young adults in New Zealand, for example, found a strong association between frequency of cannabis consumption and use of other illegal drugs after adjustment for nearly three dozen potential confounding variables. But as Morral et al. pointed out, even such extensive efforts to control for confounders are unlikely to do so perfectly. They calculated that when adjustment for confounding “fails to capture just 2% of the variance in drug use propensity,” marijuana users “appear to have odds of initiating hard drugs that are twice as great as non-users of marijuana.” Hence “it is hardly surprising that controlling for these covariates does not eliminate the association between marijuana and hard drug use.”
Another approach examines this association in twins, who share the same home environment and have similar or, in the case of monozygotic pairs, identical genes. An Australian study found that in cases where one twin had used marijuana before turning 17 and the other had not, the first twin was more than twice as likely to use opioids, regardless of whether the twins were identical or fraternal and even after adjusting for several potential confounders. A similar study based on the Vietnam Era Twin Registry found that subjects who had used marijuana before turning 18 were nearly three times as likely to use opiates as co-twins who had not. In a study of Dutch twins, the risk ratios were higher: The subjects who had used marijuana at 17 or younger were more than 16 times as likely as their co-twins to report “hard drug” use, for instance.
Even these seemingly compelling results do not rule out the possibility that pre-existing differences can account for the associations. Whatever situational factors explain why one twin uses marijuana as a minor and the other does not may also explain why one uses opioids and the other does not. “The observation that familial factors do not entirely explain the association between early cannabis use and subsequent [drug] use, while suggesting a potential causal role for cannabis use in the development of other illicit drug use, does not prove such an association,” the authors of the Dutch study noted. “There may be other factors, especially aspects of the non-shared environment (e.g., peer affiliations) preceding the onset of cannabis use that might account for the observed associations.”
Another kind of research used to bolster the gateway theory involves exposing laboratory animals to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and observing their subsequent use of other drugs. One study found that “pretreating” adolescent rats with THC made them more inclined to self-administer heroin as adults, indicating what the researchers described as “heightened opiate sensitivity.” But other studies have found that treating rats with nicotine has a similar effect on opioid consumption and that morphine heightens sensitivity to THC as well as the reverse—results that cast doubt on marijuana’s special role as a gateway drug.
Aside from the usual problems associated with extrapolating from animal behavior in the laboratory to human behavior in the real world, the relevance of the rat research is unclear. Even if early exposure to marijuana made people more likely to enjoy heroin, that would not explain their willingness to try it in the first place. To the extent that the gateway theory focuses on the transition from using cannabis to experimenting with other drugs, sensitization seems like a red herring.
What’s the Matter With Japan?
Variations in drug use patterns across generations and across cultures suggest that marijuana’s role as a gateway drug is a function of social norms and black-market conditions rather than the drug’s inherent properties.
A 2001 analysis of data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that the likelihood of progressing to “hard” drugs such as cocaine and heroin after using marijuana rose from 9 percent among respondents born in 1940 to 39 percent among those born in the early 1960s, then fell to 24 percent among respondents born in the early 1970s and 6 percent among those born in the late 1970s. The authors concluded that “the gateway phenomenon reflects norms prevailing among youths at a specific place and time,” meaning that “the linkages between stages are far from causal.” It follows, they added, that “simply restricting youth’s access to gateway drugs will not necessarily reduce subsequent hard drug abuse.”
A 2010 study looked at data on drug use progression in 17 countries from the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Surveys. Subjects in most countries followed the pattern typically observed in the United States, starting with alcohol or tobacco and later progressing to marijuana and other illegal drugs. But the likelihood of progression from marijuana to other illegal drugs varied across countries. It was lower in the Netherlands, for example, than it was in Belgium, Spain, and the United States. Furthermore, there were striking exceptions to the usual sequence. In Japan and Nigeria, for instance, illegal drug consumers rarely tried cannabis first.
“These results suggest the ‘gateway’ pattern at least partially reflects unmeasured common causes rather than causal effects of specific drugs on subsequent use of others,” the authors concluded. “This implies that successful efforts to prevent use of specific ‘gateway’ drugs may not in themselves lead to major reductions in the use of later drugs.”
Marijuana prohibition might not be an effective way of reducing opioid use even if cannabis consumption is causally related to use of other illegal drugs, depending on the mechanism involved. Cannabis consumption might lead to use of other drugs, for example, by bringing people into contact with a black market where other intoxicants are also available. Violating the law to use marijuana, especially if it goes undetected by the authorities and does not result in any punishment, might reduce psychological barriers to using other illegal drugs. People who discover through personal experience that the government’s warnings about the hazards of marijuana use are overblown may be more skeptical of the government’s warnings about other drugs.
Since all three of these mechanisms are contingent on government policy regarding marijuana, we might expect that loosening legal restrictions on marijuana would weaken the link between cannabis consumption and use of other drugs. That may have happened in the Netherlands, which since the 1970s has tolerated the retail sale of marijuana by so-called coffeeshops, a policy justified in part by the belief that separating marijuana from other illegal drugs would make progression less likely. A 2011 study found that “cocaine and amphetamine use are below what one would predict for the Netherlands,” which suggests that “separating the soft and hard drug markets possibly reduced the gateway.”
Does Legalizing Marijuana Increase Opioid Use?
If there is a causal relationship between cannabis consumption and use of other drugs that is not simply an artifact of prohibition, loosening legal restrictions on marijuana should cause an increase in opioid use. Legalization can be expected to increase marijuana use by eliminating the risk of arrest, reducing the stigma associated with the drug, and making access easier (and ultimately cheaper). As cannabis consumption becomes more common, so should use of other drugs, including opioids. Yet there is not much evidence that is happening in the states that have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use. If anything, legalizing marijuana seems to reduce opioid use.
Studies have found that medical marijuana laws are associated with reductions in high-risk opioid use, in opioid-related hospitalizations, in admissions for treatment of opioid use disorder, in the percentage of fatally injured drivers who test positive for opioids, and in opioid prescriptions for Medicare and Medicaid patients. Consistent with those results, other studies have found that patients who use medical marijuana tend to reduce their use of prescription pain relievers.
Between 1999 and 2010, a study published in 2014 found, medical marijuana laws were associated with a 25 percent reduction in opioid-related deaths. A subsequent analysis, by contrast, found that the opioid-related death rate rose faster in 20 jurisdictions that legalized medical or recreational use between 2010 and 2016 than in states that did not. But as critics pointed out, the latter analysis misclassified several states as jurisdictions where marijuana was legally available, including Oklahoma, which did not legalize medical marijuana until 2018; Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where medical marijuana programs were not operating until after 2016; and Georgia, where medical use of cannabidiol extracts (but no other cannabis product) was only notionally allowed, since there was no legal supply.
A 2018 study found that merely having a medical marijuana law was associated with lower rates of opioid-related death until 2010. After that there was no apparent benefit from medical marijuana laws per se, but states with “legally protected and operational dispensaries” continued to see reductions, suggesting that “broader access to medical marijuana facilitates substitution of marijuana for powerful and addictive opioids.”A 2019 study likewise found that “states with active legal dispensaries see a drop in opioid death rates over time.”
A 2017 study found that legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado was associated with a reduction in opioid-related deaths. A study published the following year found a similar association in Washington.
These findings are not conclusive, but they do suggest that marijuana legalization so far has not contributed to the rise in opioid-related deaths. Nor is there a clear association between rising marijuana use and rising opioid use in national data. Between 2002 and 2017, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the share of Americans who reported using marijuana in the previous month rose by more than 50 percent. Nonmedical use of prescription opioids, meanwhile, was more or less flat from 2002 through 2014, and so was the prevalence of substance use disorder involving those drugs. (Subsequent numbers are not comparable because of questionnaire changes implemented in 2015.) The prevalence of past-month heroin use doubled in 2014, but it was flat from 2002 through 2013.
Persistent Skepticism
“The stepping-stone theory holds that the adolescent begins the use of illicit drugs with marihuana, and later proceeds to heroin in the search for greater thrills,” the Nixon-appointed National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse noted in 1972. “The opposing viewpoint holds that the large majority of marihuana users never become heroin addicts and denies the validity of a causal relationship.” The commission was inclined toward the latter view, concluding that “marihuana use per se does not dictate whether other drugs will be used.”
Twenty-seven years later, a report on marijuana’s medical potential from the organization that later became the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) was likewise skeptical of the gateway theory. While “most users of other illicit drugs used marijuana first,” the authors said, “there is no evidence that marijuana serves as a stepping stone on the basis of its particular physiological effect.” Rather, “the legal status of marijuana makes it a gateway drug.”
NASEM’s 2017 report on cannabis was a bit more tentative but still did not endorse the gateway theory. “While some research has shown an association between cannabis use and the subsequent use of other illicit drugs, the predictors of progression from cannabis use to other illicit drugs remain largely unknown,” it said. “The data do not provide compelling evidence that cannabis is [causally] associated with the initiation of other drugs of abuse, although this is one possibility. Other possibilities that could explain these findings include easier access to cannabis than to other illicit substances and common risk factors for both cannabis use and the use of other substances.”
Harry Anslinger clearly was wrong when he claimed that marijuana, “if used over a long period,” inevitably “lead[s] to heroin addiction.” Seven decades later, we recognize that marijuana users generally do not become heroin addicts. Among Americans born in 1979, for instance, the survey data indicate that 96 percent of cannabis consumers do not move on to “hard” drugs.
It remains possible that something about the experience of using marijuana makes people more inclined to try heroin or other opioids. But that theory is by no means necessary to explain patterns of drug use in the United States or other countries. And even if there is some truth to it, the implications for marijuana policy are not obvious. If “the legal status of marijuana makes it a gateway drug,” as NASEM surmised in 1999, legalizing cannabis could reduce opioid use rather than increasing it. There is some evidence that is happening in the states that have decided to allow medical or recreational use.
Regardless of whether that is true, the moral case against treating marijuana use as a crime remains strong. Even if marijuana use does make subsequent abuse of opioids more likely, that would merely count as one kind of self-harm that prohibition aims to prevent. Like other forms of paternalism, marijuana prohibition interferes with the individual’s sovereignty over his own body and mind. This interference is especially objectionable because the people who supposedly benefit from it—the ones who otherwise would have used cannabis, and possibly progressed to opioids—are not the people who bear the burdens of enforcement. The fear that some people whom prohibition deters from using cannabis might otherwise become heroin addicts cannot justify using force against a much larger group of people who are violating no one’s rights.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2In4xuW
via IFTTT
The political class and certain media circles have been celebrating over of the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. To watch their respective reactions is to recognize that, too often, the two groups see themselves as one and the same. Their interests and opinions coincide, and they don’t like having their authority challenged by loose-cannon journalists who reveal inconvenient secrets and expose the powers-that-be to unwelcome scrutiny.
On April 11, British police dragged Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy that had shielded him for years from Swedish sexual assault charges (later dropped) and, mostly, from the wrath of the U.S. government over WikiLeaks’ work with now-imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Together, Assange and Manning exposed state secrets including a U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians, close ties between the government of Pakistan and the Taliban, and diplomatic cables revealing the U.S. government’s private positions to be very different from those presented to the public.
Assange was “arrested on behalf of the United States authorities,” police announced last Thursday. A new Ecuadorian administration, interested in closer relations with the U.S. and leery of transparency because of reports that have implicated the current president in corruption, seems to have been the precipitating factor.
Unsurprisingly, U.S. officials generally gloated over the arrest. “I’m glad to see the wheels of justice are finally turning,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“He’s our property. We can get the facts and truth from him,” added Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
The president was a little more hands-off, though just as telling with his non-reaction. “I know nothing about Wikileaks,” Trump insisted after Assange’s arrest, even though he was a big fan of the transparency organization back when it was making life difficult for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
More troubling is the cheerleading for the arrest among people who supposedly make their living by doing exactly what Manning and Assange did with WikiLeaks—reporting information that government officials would prefer to remain unknown. And this cheerleading extends well beyond the intelligence and law-enforcement community castoffs who now infest media outlets.
“The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime,” The New York Timeseditorialized, amidst some regret that it was the Trump administration behind the arrest and indictment of the WikiLeaks founder. “The case of Mr. Assange,” the editorial board sniffed, “could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime.”
“Mr. Assange is not a free-press hero,” agreedThe Washington Post‘s editorial board. “Yes, WikiLeaks acquired and published secret government documents, many of them newsworthy, as shown by their subsequent use in newspaper articles (including in The Post). Contrary to the norms of journalism, however, Mr. Assange sometimes obtained such records unethically.”
Unethically? Assange is charged with a conspiracy “to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defense of the United States so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website,” according to the federal indictment.
“The Assange indictment is weaker than you might expect,” comments former federal prosecutor Ken White. “Basically, the story it tells is (1) Manning gave Wikileaks stuff after she downloaded it, which isn’t a crime by Wikileaks, and (2) Assange encouraged her to go after more files and offered to help by cracking a password to give her broader access, but it didn’t work.”
It’s worth emphasizing that the newspapers objecting to Julian Assange’s conduct and journalistic credentials still boast of their publication of the Pentagon Papers, which contained troubling revelations about the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst, secretly photocopied documents and passed them to the press, which battled the government to publish them.
Both the Post and the Times also published revelations about privacy-threatening global and domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency based on information illegally copied by Edward Snowden while he worked as a contractor for the CIA.
The fact that Assange and WikiLeaks act much as do other journalistic operations is precisely why the Obama administration didn’t press charges, despite rage over inconvenient revelations equal to that of the current administration.
“Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem,’” the Postnoted in 2013. “If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material.”
Then again, The Washington Post has been consistently awful on this point in recent years. “The first U.S. priority should be to prevent Mr. Snowden from leaking information that harms efforts to fight terrorism and conduct legitimate intelligence operation,” the newspaper’s editorial board demanded in 2013, even after its own news pages ran some of that information. The Post‘s current chin-strokers seem to view publication of facts embarrassing to the powerful as an unseemly leftover from the bad old days.
Maybe the familiar—if out-of-vogue—nature of Assange’s and WikiLeaks’s conduct is why so much of the commentary targeted at him focuses on his objectivity, his worn appearance, and his allegedly unpleasant personality and hygiene. But anybody spending much time around journalists should be careful about pretending any of that is unusual for the profession.
Did Assange show bias in his choice of targets? Maybe so—but bias is so common throughout journalism as to be unremarkable. Charges that he worked on behalf of the Russian government would be extremely unfortunate, if proven. But such collaboration would not be unprecedented for a profession that has a history of enabling officials foreign and domestic.
“American reporters spied for the CIA. They spied for the Soviets. And they spied for the British—boy, did they spy for the British,” Glenn Garvin wrote in the March issue of Reason.
In addition, a few years locked in an apartment with resentful hosts, waiting to be snatched by security operatives, might make anybody a little unpresentable. Three doctors who examined Assange last year wrote, “it is our professional opinion that his continued confinement is dangerous physically and mentally to him.” Of the worst tales about his conduct in the embassy, one of the examining physicians, Sean Love, added, “This is a complete smear. This is meant to degrade his humanity.”
Whatever Assange’s qualities as a human being when he entered his refuge in London, it should be no surprise that he came out worse for wear—or that many people believe he’s been mistreated.
“The Working Group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation,” a U.N. human rights panel ruled in 2016.
Instead, Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy, with his arrest cheered by other journalists who now regret that their profession once expected them to behave as he does.
“Criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history, and unconstitutional,” warns Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Further, while there is no First Amendment right to crack a government password, this indictment characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy the routine and protected activities journalists often engage in as part of their daily jobs, such as encouraging a source to provide more information.”
That’s all true. But journalism is at risk not just from government assaults on freedom of the press, but from media types who see their role not in scrutinizing the powers-that-be, but in protecting those powers from the public—and in backing the punishment of people who still do real journalism.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IjAPHn
via IFTTT
Another kind of research used to bolster the gateway theory involves exposing laboratory animals to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and observing their subsequent use of other drugs. 
NASEM’s