Tag: hit&run

Wishing all of you a good and #blessed Sunday (now wish each other a good Sunday!), and having dispensed with that, please note that I’m waving a basket under your nose because we are still smack dab in our 2018 webathon, in which we invite readers and viewers and listeners to help make this seemingly spontaneous order possible through your tax-deductible donations. For those 600+ who have donated so far, thank you! And for those of you still biding your time, checking out this website on the Lord’s day, I’ve got button for you to click:

Today I want to talk about what a pleasure it is to go on TV in front of 1.6 million viewers and talk about the importance of libertarianism and the awfulness of warrantless surveillance while pointing an accusatory nose at a former CIA and NSA director. Because it’s fun!

A key part of our mission here is to go where people are talking about news and public policy, and inject some sorely needed libertarianism into the mix. For instance, Elizabeth Nolan Brown going on Fox New Channel to try and explain to Laura Ingraham why the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) is terrible even for the victims it aims to protect. Or Shikha Dalmia talking to actual Australians about how she’s still not a gun-grabber even after her family was caught up in a school shooting:

Or C.J. Ciaramella going on C-SPAN to talk about legalizing marijuana—on 4/20, no less!

There’s a common misconception about making these kinds of TV appearances, and what your donations may have to do with them. Goes a little something like this:

Reason pays for the slot on MSNBC?

— Adam Adamou (@Grazen) November 29, 2018

No, Reason doesn’t pay for MSNBC slots. More to the point, MSNBC (as well as Fox, CNN, and the other cable nets) don’t pay for us to go on. That’s in no small part because we like to be able to cross 6th Avenue—to appear wherever we’re asked, without any contractual restrictions. Next time you watch a cable news segment (preferably our great pal Kennedy on Fox Business Network, for instance this coming Thursday!), notice how often a panelist is referred to as a “contributor.” That’s TVese for “they’re getting paid, and you won’t see them on another network.” Your donations, therefore, help us remain free agents, able to spread these libertarian viewpoints across the widest possible distribution.

So you know what to do:

The weird thing about George H.W. Bush’s term in the White House, looking back a quarter-century later, is that back then I thought he was the worst president of my lifetime. Bear in mind that I was born when Richard Nixon occupied the Oval Office, so worst president of my lifetime was a pretty high bar to clear. But I was in college in the Bush years, old enough to pay attention to what was happening in the world and young enough to lack perspective on just how bad things could get. There’s a certain sort of apocalypticism that comes easily to you when you’re 20 and you want to stop a war.

The conflict in question was the first Gulf War. I’m just as opposed to it now as I was then—more so, given what was set in motion by stationing U.S. troops on Saudi soil—and I stand by most of my other reasons for cursing H.W.’s time in power. I think he was wrong on issues ranging from drugs to taxes to the S&Ls, from the Iran-contra pardons to the invasion of Panama. But it soon became clear that he was far from the worst president I’d live to see. He wasn’t even the worst one named Bush.

So here’s to the times he moved in the right direction. Here’s to keeping his head as the Communist bloc collapsed, and here’s to overseeing an actual reduction in military spending after the Cold War ended. Here’s to a relatively even-handed approach to the Palestinian conflict. Here’s to easing up the saber-rattling in Nicaragua and letting a Central American–led peace process play out. None of those policies were perfect, but I can imagine how another leader in a similar situation could have done worse. In some cases, I don’t have to imagine it.

And here’s to demonstrating that you can win a war and still lose the next election. Though I don’t think the lesson took.

Former President George H.W. Bush, who served one term in office from 1989 through 1993, is dead at the age of 94. By all accounts, he was an exceptionally kind, decent, and thoughtful individual and his service as a Navy pilot in World War II—he was awarded the Distinguished Navy Cross and shot down over the Pacific—reminds us of a time when seemingly casual, superhuman heroism by young twentysomethings was the order of the day.

Yet from a specifically libertarian view, there is little to celebrate and much to criticize regarding his presidency. With at least one notable exception, he did nothing to reduce the size, scope, and spending of government or to expand the ability of people to live however they wanted. If he was not as harshly ideological and dogmatic (especially on culture war issues) as contemporary conservatives, neither did he espouse any philosophical commitment to anything approaching “Free Minds and Free Markets.” There’s a reason he did not elicit strong negative responses or inspire enthusiasm: He lacked what he called “the vision thing.” He had no overarching theory of the future, no organizing principle to guide his policymaking. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in a president—we don’t need a maximum leader, after all—but it also means he squandered an opportunity to set the coordinates for a post-Cold War world in the direction of maximum freedom.

In his post-presidency years, Bush emerged as a genial, even comforting, distant presence on a political landscape that continues to drive toward absolute demonization and polarization of even the most trivial differences. That’s a role he was perfectly suited to play: As a one-term president who was the father of a very controversial president, he was a non-threatening loser to Democrats and Republicans alike, a Napoleon in exile who had no chance of coming back and taking power. At the same time, he lacked the moralizing overbearing of Jimmy Carter and the doltish qualities of Gerald Ford (who also bore a whiff of illegitimacy since he’d never been elected either president or vice president).

But George H.W. Bush’s primary legacy is as a president, despite a resume that is arguably the most impressive ever held by a chief executive. Before he took up residence in the White House, he’d been a two-term vice president, headed up the Central Intelligence Agency, was liaison to China in the early ’70s and was ambassador to the United Nations, ran the Republican National Committee, and served in Congress from Texas for two terms.

He helped to manage the end of the Cold War in Europe with restraint and diplomatic aplomb, and almost immediately oversaw the paying out of what was called “the peace dividend,” or reductions in year-over-year spending on defense. But as vice president, he was a big supporter of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs, and his unbridled and misguided enthusiasm for prohibition carried over into his own White House Years. Flipped out by high-profile deaths of movie stars such as John Belushi and athletes such as Len Bias, and fretting over the rise of crack cocaine, Bush appointed former Education Secretary William Bennett as America’s first head of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) or, as the position was called by its supporters, “drug czar.” Bennett publicly announced “there’s no moral problem” with beheading drug dealers because, you know, they’re bad people doing bad things. Bush moved quickly to internationalize America’s drug war, sending military supports and troops to far-flung countries willing to produce the drugs Americans demanded, further destabilizing places that were already shaky to begin with. Less than a year in to his presidency, he ordered “Operation Just Cause,” an ilegitimate invasion of Panama that burned “down entire neighborhoods of the capital and kill[ed] hundreds of people, to collar a single two-bit narcotrafficker,” our former ally Manuel Noriega.

Then there’s the defining foreign-policy act of his presidency: the Gulf War, or “Operation Desert Shield.” Pitched as an effort to restore internationally recognized boundaries after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, the Gulf War ultimately solved no problems and instead set the table for the quagmire in which the United States is still mired. In summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein met with U.S. Amb. April Glaspie about the tensions between Iraq and Kuwait. Glaspie said, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” While there remains an argument over whether Glaspie was following Bush administration orders or injecting her own interpretation of U.S. interests, Stephen M. Walt writes, “It is clear from the cable that the United States did unwittingly give a green light to Saddam, and certainly no more than a barely flickering yellow light” to invade. Which Saddam did a week later.

To his credit, President Bush assembled a truly international coalition that included Israel and all Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East, worked in conjunction with (though not subservient to) the United Nations, and limited the scope of the invasion to pushing Iraq out of Kuwait and subsequently containing Saddam Hussein. As Jonathan Rauch noted here, shortly after the 9/11 attacks:

The goal of the Gulf War, for Bush and the Arab allies alike, was not to impose a new order on the region but to restabilize the old one. Strategically speaking, that meant caging the overweening Saddam, not toppling him. Moreover, until 1990 Saddam had been a savage bully, but one America had done business with. It was reasonable to expect that after the fighting he might settle down, play by the rules, and pocket billions in diverted development aid like any self-respecting kleptocrat.

Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way. The United States did nothing to aid the immediate post-war popular uprisings that Bush himself cheered on, earning the distrust of the local populace. Saddam did not become someone we could do “business” with in any meaningful way, and the region was hardly stabilized by that first U.S.-led Gulf War.

Indeed, the only way in which the first Gulf War looks good is in comparison to the second one that took place at the direction of George W. Bush. But that doesn’t mean the first Gulf War was a legitimate act of American defense policy, which should be aimed at protecting U.S. lives and property, not policing all the borders of all the countries in the world. There’s a strong case to be made that the relative ease of the immediate and overwhelming military victory by U.S.-led troops over Iraq in 1991 emboldened President Bill Clinton to become more promiscuous about overseas interventions, a tendency that Bush II also betrayed. Kicking “Vietnam Syndrome,” or a sense that the United States was relatively impotent when it came to shaping world events via military intervention, continues to extract a high cost for Americans and foreigners alike. Even as H.W. Bush vaguely invoked a post-Cold War “new world order,” he effectively invented the role of the United States as the world’s policeman, a role that presidents, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, continue to glory in.

On the domestic side, Bush is best remembered for breaking his campaign promise of “No new taxes,” which he did to broker a 1990 budget deal with the Democrats. The legacy of the 1990 budget deal, which promised spending cuts of two dollars for every dollar in tax increases, is hotly disputed, both in its budgetary and political effects. The main provision increased the top marginal income tax rate from 28 percent to 31 percent and even critics of the plan agree it generated a total of about $137 billion in new revenue; champions of the plan credit it with setting the stage for the budget surpluses of the late 1990s.

This much is certain, and should resound today, when our budget situation is much more dire in terms of spending, revenue, and deficits. On the spending side, the plan constrained the rate of spending growth but didn’t actually propose year-over-year cuts. As Reason‘s Charles Oliver noted in 1990, the need for a budget deal occurred because the government was overshooting mandated deficit-reduction targets set in the mid-1980s by about $60 billion out of a budget than totaled $1.2 billion. What happened if the government spent too much, asked Oliver?

All that happens is that federal spending will automatically be cut across the board by that amount. Since the federal budget is over $1.2 trillion, it will only have to be cut by about 5 percent. Does anyone really think that there isn’t 5 percent of fat in the federal budget?

Of course, Congress can avoid automatic cuts by making reductions of its own. There are plenty of targets for the budget ax. The Bush administration already plans a 2 percent to 5 percent reduction in defense spending. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell has said that Pentagon spending could be cut by 25 percent without hurting America’s defenses. Some outside experts put the figure closer to 50 percent. Still, taking Powell’s estimate but speeding up his timetable slightly, we could cut defense spending by about $75 billion next year; that’s $62 billion more than is currently planned.

We could scale back domestic spending, too. Congress could cut farm subsidies, slow cost-of-living rises in social programs, and even eliminate controversial agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts….

It all depends upon Congress and the president agreeing to use the peace dividend to reduce the deficit, not spending that money on new social programs.

We know how that turned out, of course. It remains unclear whether Bush’s breaking of his tax pledge was the reason he ended up losing to Bill Clinton in 1992. For some of 1991, Bush basked in post-Gulf War approval ratings above 90 percent (!), but a recession caused in part by tight money, fallout from the Savings & Loan scandal, fear of new taxes, and a tight money supply. As did the emergence of Ross Perot, who carried a Texas-sized grudge against Bush and clearly drained support directly from him in the general election.

Bush will be remembered as a decent man but the reverberations of his domestic and foreign policy failures leave little for libertarians to cheer.

The first time I saw a sitting American president give a speech was on Nov. 17, 1990, in Prague’s historic Wenceslas Square, on the one-year anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s storybook Velvet Revolution. The speaker was George Bush (we did not know his middle initials back then), and I was appalled.

Oh, he was decent and affable enough—always was, just like the Dana Carvey impersonation that did so much to define Bush’s public persona. But, my arrogant and impertinent 22-year-old self pointed out with factual accuracy if not quite moral wisdom, the supposed Leader of the Free World exhibited a stunning ignorance of and/or disregard for local and regional facts on the ground.

The warm-up music on that frigid day was a bunch of hymns and marching songs from the American Civil War—this in a country that was already careening toward a nerve-wracking fracture that would happen 26 months later. The speech and pomp were filled with references to God, amongst a people who routinely lead the world in atheism.

More substantively, the U.S. president just didn’t seem to have a realistic handle on regional events, which were changing at a velocity almost impossible to convey in 2018. Besides urging in vain for Czechoslovakia to stay together—not an unreasonable ask, given that majorities in both the Czech and Slovak republics favored unification all the way up to the split (it’s a long story)—Bush also seemed to think Yugoslavia was a union worthy and possible of saving. I had spent much of the previous month in the tail end of that country, and hostile dissolution seemed inevitable. The first shots would be fired seven months later.

The passage of time has changed my uncharitable interpretation of Bush’s flailings. The inability of Washington to properly understand, let alone control, the mostly beneficial convulsions of the 1989-1991 world is a testament to the awesome-if-usually-dormant power of people to cast off their own shackles, at their own chosen speed. The reunification of Germany, to cite one critical geopolitical development, happened with an acceleration that alarmed leaders of East and West alike, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Margaret Thatcher. But Germans willed it to be so.

The further removed we are from historical events, whether through time or geography, the more they seem inevitable. They are anything but. Two months after Bush’s Prague speech, Gorbachev sent tanks into Lithuania, killing 14. (The Nation contributor deserves massive credit for rolling back Soviet imperialism from the Warsaw Pact, but he fought bitterly for a unified and still-communist U.S.S.R. until the whoosh of events, too, carried Gorby off stage in late 1991.) Soviet troops only started exiting unwilling countries in the summer of 1991; Kremlin leadership could have gone any which way, and it doesn’t take much imagination to create an alternative timeline in which the awful-enough ex-Yugoslav wars became a great-power conflagration.

Instead, the world saw the end of superpower proxy wars throughout Africa and Latin America, the collapse of the state-ownership model not just in the East but in Western Europe as well, and the most rapid transformation from unfree to free, socialist to capitalist, in human history.

Bush, like other world leaders of the time, deserves credit not for making all that happen, but mostly for allowing it to happen, in the form of not overly getting in the way. The powerful don’t have a particularly good track record when faced suddenly with their own leaking relevance, and with the major and important exception of the Gulf War (which we will be writing more about in this space), Bush handled America’s comparative unclenching with admirable calmness.

Former president Barack Obama had it about right earlier this week, at a Rice University event with former secretary of state James Baker: “When it comes to foreign policy, the work that President George H.W. Bush did with Jim at his side was as important and as deft and as effective a set of foreign policy initiatives as we saw in recent years, and deserve enormous credit for navigating the end of the Cold War in a way that could have gone sideways, all kinds of ways.”

Things of course did go sideways—they always do at least a little, and some of the blame even for the 2018 geopolitical realities he probably loathed lies at the foot of 41. Bush’s dream of creating an international taboo against aggressive violations against other countries’ sovereignty, for example, led directly to that laudable principle being serially violated by his own country. By his own son. And by the two presidents since.

That is part of George H.W. Bush’s legacy that should, but probably won’t, be assessed unflinchingly during the coming tributes. But so should his otherwise non-hysterical statecraft at a time of great tumult. Let one the lessons of his passing be that sometimes American presidents don’t have to know it all, and don’t have to control it all, either.

One year after Maine’s groundbreaking food sovereignty law took effect, the capital city of Augusta has become the latest municipality to set food freedom in stone.

Maine’s first-in-the-nation food sovereignty law, An Act To Recognize Local Control Regarding Food Systems, allows local governments in the state to pass ordinances that exempt many direct-to-consumer food sales within city limits from burdensome state licensing and inspection requirements.

Two years ago, at least 15 municipalities in Maine adopted a food sovereignty ordinance (FSO). At the time, these local ordinances were merely aspirational in nature. When an FSO conflicted with state law, the local ordinance was unenforceable. But Maine’s statewide food sovereignty law has changed the game, writes Baylen Linnekin. No longer are Maine cities and towns that adopted FSOs fighting state law. They’re embracing it.

View this article.

We’re smack in the middle Reason‘s webathon. We’ve already met one of our matching grants. (Thanks so much!)

But we have another matching grant that’s specifically for new donors or people who increase their donations from the previous year. So if you’ve never donated before, this is the time to break your streak and double your money. And if you have already donated, consider giving a little bit more this year since those dollars will make a bigger difference.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “What are these guys doing with my money?”

I just approved expense reports containing (a) a silver monocle, (b) a trip to the strip club, and (c) a book about Locke.

Being the editor of @reason is exactly like you imagine.

— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) September 6, 2018

But everything we do is in the service of entertaining, informing, or helping you with life’s difficult tasks. Like choosing a school system, hiring an escort, or doing your Christmas shopping.

In November, we gave you the skinny on states where public schools are doing the best work with your tax dollars:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

And in July, we published the Burn After Reading issue, which was full of handy tips and tricks for living a life that’s more free, more fair, and more fun. We gave you step-by-step Glock-building instructions and some slightly sloppy dabbling in gene editing at home in Ron Bailey’s kitchen. Maggie McNeill tells you how to hire an escort. At Reason HQ, we were wondering how to make prison hooch or really good pot brownies, and we thought our readers might be too. Grow your own mushrooms, subscribe to a magazine about cockfighting, infuse bourbon with THC, or make a pipe out of an apple! We also gave tips and tricks for using powerful encryption tools and deploying bitcoin anonymization.

Those stories don’t just happen. Time, effort, and money go into everything we publish:

That point has come and gone, friend.

— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) September 6, 2018

And check in on Monday when the Reason staff makes suggestions for your Christmas shopping, just as we do every year.

Your donation to Reason funds important research and reporting into news you can use. Please give today.

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George H.W. Bush, who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993, has died at the age of 94.

His death was announced late Friday evening by Jim McGrath, the former president’s current spokesman. He also provided a statement from George W. Bush, Bush’s son and the 43rd president:

Statement by the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on the passing of his father this evening at the age 94. pic.twitter.com/oTiDq1cE7h

— Jim McGrath (@jgm41) December 1, 2018

The Washington Post lays out some highlights of Bush’s one term:

Over the course of a single term that began on Jan. 20, 1989, Mr. Bush found himself at the helm of the world’s only remaining superpower. The Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union ceased to exist; the communist bloc in Eastern Europe broke up; the Cold War ended. …

Mr. Bush’s presidency was not all plowshares. He ordered an attack on Panama in 1989 to overthrow strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega. After Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Mr. Bush put together a 30-nation coalition — backed by a U.N. mandate and including the Soviet Union and several Arab countries — that routed the Iraqi forces with unexpected ease in a ground war that lasted only 100 hours.

However, Mr. Bush decided to leave Hussein in power, setting up the worst and most fateful decision of his son’s presidency a dozen years later.

Read more here. There will no doubt be additional weighing in about the elder Bush’s presidential career, both the ups and the downs.

Previous Reason coverage of the elder Bush here. Bush’s official site here will be updated with funeral information as it’s available.

Meek Mill and Chance the Rapper both released music this week that sees the iconic hip-hop artists taking on criminal justice reform, economics, and Trump/Kanye. It’s good stuff and you can listen to it below.

Championships by Meek Mill

Oh, say can you see, I don’t feel like I’m free/Locked down in my cell, shackled from ankle to feet/Judge bangin’ that gavel, turned me to slave from a king/Another day in the bing, I gotta hang from a string/Just for poppin’ a wheelie, my people march through the city/From a cell to a chopper, view from the top of the city
—”What’s Free”

Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill dropped Championships on Friday. His first studio album since being released from prison in April, Mill’s decision to collaborate with Drake on “Going Bad” signifies the end of a long feud between the two, while “What’s Free” shows Mill riffing deeply on the wheelie that cost him his liberty.

First convicted in 2008 at the age of 19 for possessing a gun in a grocery store, Mill has spent the lat 10 years in and out of prison and on probation. His most recent stint hinged on a farcical and petty abuse of state power: a social media video showed him popping a wheelie on a motorbike. The subsequent reckless endangerment and reckless driving charges violated the terms of his probation and saw him sentenced to two to four years in prison.

Since his release, Mill has used his story to show how easy it is to become swept up in the criminal justice system. He has has vowed to lobby for criminal justice reforms, especially for those facing long probation times.

Jay-Z also addresses his own friendship struggles with Kanye West on the song. Calling out his old collaborator by name, HOV makes it clear that he won’t be donning a red MAGA hat anytime soon. As for his friendship with West, who has spent the better part of 2018 declaring his love for the president, Jay-Z’s general attitude in the song indicates that those Watch the Throne days are very much over.

New Tracks from Chance the Rapper

Don’t gifts get re-wrapped?/That shit could get sticky like tree sap/I gave you free raps, that shit sound like free facts/Which is ’bout as common as free Blacks
—”The Man Who Has Everything”

Though Chance the Rapper hasn’t released an album since 2016, he’s kept fans fed with the occasional single. We got a double delight on Friday, when Chance uploaded “The Man Who Has Everything” and “My Own Thing (feat. Joey Purp)” to SoundCloud. The songs are personal, focusing on topics like his relationship with his fiancée. In between those reflections, however, is some commentary on his decision to release music for free.

As Sean McBride wrote at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2016, the free-music strategy is a capitalist one. By advertising his product that way, Chance’s raps become accessible to all kinds of crowds. When people begin to yearn for more, he can make up the cost, in part, with sold-out tours and merchandise sales.

While Chance himself has not used the c-word to describe what he does, he did tell the Chicago Tribune, “I put my music out there for free because I wanted people to see and notice it as a beacon for what I’m doing…” But make no mistake. Chance added that he’s never been “against” selling his product, which he believes has value.

A new report from Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute claims that “for every dollar gained in tax revenue, Coloradans spent approximately $4.50 to mitigate the effects of [marijuana] legalization.” That factoid is already showing up in arguments against legalization, even though it is plainly fallacious.

Centennial Institute Director Jeff Hunt, who is also the university’s vice president of public policy, takes the approach favored by anti-pot polemicists, conflating correlation with causation and counting every purported cost to which a number can be attached, no matter how implausibly, while ignoring every benefit except for tax revenue and the increased value of Colorado homes since legalization (which suggests the state has not turned into the drug-addled dystopia predicted by prohibitionists).

Most glaringly, as Paul Danish notes in the Boulder Weekly, Hunt et al. make no attempt to isolate the impact of legalization, which is supposed to be the subject of the report. Instead they tote up supposedly marijuana-related costs without regard to whether they were caused by the change in policy the report claims to be analyzing.

“The figures, even if accurate, represent the economic and social costs of marijuana use,” Danish observes. “But the study’s supposed purpose is to identify the economic and social costs attributable to marijuana legalization, which are different [from] the overall costs (real, imaginary or theoretical) of marijuana use generally.”

In other words, if you assume (as Hunt et al. do) that marijuana makes people fat and lazy, resulting in $54,833,218 in extra health care costs related to “physical inactivity” each year, you need to estimate what share of those fat and lazy potheads would not be consuming cannabis but for legalization. The fact that Hunt does not even make a gesture in that direction says a lot about his analytical rigor and intellectual honesty.

Does marijuana make people fat and lazy? “People who use marijuana more frequently,” Hunt et al. say, “tend to be less physically active.” He assumes the difference is entirely attributable to their marijuana use, as opposed to other ways in which people who consume cannabis might be different, on average, from people who don’t. That is like observing that fans of professional wrestling are fatter than people who have never heard of Kenny Omega (I have no idea whether that is true) and concluding that watching WWE matches makes people fat.

Hunt et al. likewise assume that a correlation between marijuana use and dropping out of high school means that marijuana makes people drop out of high school, even though he notes that “these figures do not demonstrate causation.” Lost productivity related to dropping out of school, which the report puts at $423,362,337.22 (multiplying “marijuana-related drop-outs” in 2016-17 by $334,716.12, “the cost of not completing high school”) is the biggest component of the $1.1 billion annual cost that the Centennial Institute attributes to legalization. It is quite a stretch to count a high school dropout’s future loss of income as money “spent” by Coloradans in 2017, but that is what Hunt et al. do. And as with “physical inactivity,” they do not try to estimate how many of those students would have dropped out even if marijuana had never been legalized, even though the whole point of this exercise is to show what a disaster legalization has been.

The second biggest component of the Centennial Institute’s legalization bill is marijuana-related hospitalizations and emergency room visits, which the report says cost $381,915,043 in 2015. The number of these cases did rise following legalization, but it is hard to tell how much of that change represents a real increase in problems caused by cannabis consumption. Now that marijuana is legal, people are probably more willing to admit that they use it (as Hunt et al. concede) and to seek help when they run into trouble. Medical staff may also be more likely to note marijuana use in hospital records. But none of that really matters in the Centennial Institute’s analysis, because once again the report looks at the total cost, as opposed to the portion that might plausibly be attributed to legalization.

The same goes for traffic accidents, where Hunt et al. not only assume that marijuana was the cause whenever a driver tested positive for THC, regardless of whether he was actually impaired by it at the time of the crash, but also act as if there were no stoned drivers prior to legalization. Even when spending has declined since legalization, as with marijuana arrests and “treatment for marijuana use disorder,” Hunt et al. count the current cost as part of the tab for letting Coloradans use cannabis without a doctor’s note.

Hunt claims the report is “fair” and takes “a conservative approach to calculating the costs and fees associated with increased marijuana use.” In reality, it does not even attempt to calculate the costs associated with increased marijuana use. At best, it calculates the cost associated with marijuana use, period, and the manner in which it does that will not seem “fair” to anyone who does not already agree with Hunt that legalization is a huge mistake.

A Texas man is accusing several police officers in Northern California of stealing three pounds of legal marijuana from him during a traffic stop, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed earlier this month. And he’s not the only one who says he was essentially robbed by a group of rogue police officers.

Zeke Flatten alleges that three police officers from the town of Rohnert Park and Hopland Band of Pomo Indians pulled him over last December while he was driving through Mendocino County. The officers were not wearing name tags or badges, and they identified themselves as federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, rather than local police officers, the lawsuit says.

Flatten told the officers about the marijuana and offered to show them his paperwork for it, but they seized it and left without issuing him a ticket or running his name to check for outstanding warrants.

Flatten is not the only alleged victim. The lawsuit, citing recent local news investigations, says police from the town and tribe have a pattern of using a lucrative civil asset forfeiture program to shake down motorists for marijuana and cash during traffic stops.

Rogue Rohnert Park police “conspired to expand the legitimate interdiction mission to one of personal financial gain, and over the years seized thousands of pounds of cannabis and hundreds of thousands of dollars of currency without issuing receipts for the seizures, without making arrests for any crimes, and without any official report of the forfeitures being made,” the lawsuit says.

And when arrests were made, “cash and cannabis seized was significantly underreported in furtherance of the conspiracy allowing the officers to skim off the top of even otherwise legal interdictions,” the suit continues.

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize cash, cars, and even houses suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is not charged with a crime. Law enforcement groups argue that civil forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime, but civil liberties groups say there are far too few due process protections for property owners and far too many perverse profit incentives for police.

“It’s the government agencies typically that have been enriched as a result of those seizures,” Flatten’s attorney Izaak Schwaiger says. “What’s different in Mr. Flatten’s case is that it’s individuals who are getting enriched—individual officers who under the color of law are abusing their authority to conduct traffic stops without the requisite legal cause and then robbing people of their cash, or in this case their cannabis.”

An independent blogger first began scrutinizing Flatten’s case in February after he contacted local police and media to complain. Although local and state police often partner with federal authorities for asset forfeiture cases, the ATF said it wasn’t involved.

Rohner Park Sgt. Jacy Tatum issued a press release and an incident report to try and justify the stop, but the report appeared to confuse Flatten’s case with another large marijuana seizure, getting several key details, such as the car make and model, wrong. “As a result his press release defended the wrong illegal seizure, and instead of diffusing the scrutiny plaintiff’s allegations had brought, it brought the allegations more clearly into focus,” the lawsuit says.

KQED, working with several other newspapers, then published an investigation this June that uncovered similar complaints by nine other motorists who say they were essentially robbed by Rohner Park police. For example, Huedell Freeman says Tatum and Rohnert Park police officer Joseph Huffaker, also named in Flatten’s lawsuit, seized 47 pounds of marijuana from him, despite Freeman’s having a permit to grow.

Tatum and another Rohner Park officer were sued for seizing $120,000 from a man in 2016 who said he was on his way to a high-stakes poker game in Las Vegas.

The stories also detailed complaints by area defense attorneys who said Tatum had earned a spot on the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office “Brady list,” an ignominious list of officers whose history of false testimony must be disclosed if they are called as witnesses.

A month after KQED published its story, Tatum left the police department, as did the police chief of Rohnert Park. The town has hired an independent investigator to audit its asset forfeiture program, and the department ceased most of its marijuana interdiction efforts in 2017.

Northern California has for decades been the marijuana-growing capital of the U.S., and traditionally such seizures have been a lucrative and reliable revenue source for local police departments, and a more or less accepted cost of doing business for black market growers.

Tatum, Whitaker, and several other officers were part of a drug task force that seized hundreds of pounds of marijuana and a small mountain of cash. “Between 2016 and 2017, the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety kept $1.2 million in seized funds for its own,” Flatten’s lawsuit says.

To hone their skills, the department paid to send Tatum and the other task force members to attend training sessions hosted by Black Snow, a private company that teaches police how to target and perform roadside asset seizures. It also operates Black Asphalt, a private surveillance network police can use to identify potential motorists to target.

In a 2014 investigation into how police use highway traffic stops to seize hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists without charging them with crimes, The Washington Post reported on Desert Snow:

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

But now marijuana is legal in California, and Schwaiger says growers who used to be cowed by the threat of felony charges are now finally able to speak up about police misconduct.

“What we’ve seen is people are proud of the fact that their industry has come out of the shadows and they feel like they should be able to operate without fear of persecution from the government,” Schwaiger says. “Years ago, when you could get a felony for growing marijuana in California, everyone just considered getting ripped off by the cops the price of doing business. Now people feel entitled to engage in legitimate commerce, and they’re willing to complain if something goes bad.”