Tag: hit&run

Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) today blasted the “weak” and “pathetic” $853 billion spending bill passed by the House yesterday. Amash reminded President Donald Trump of a promise he made in March, when he reluctantly signed another massive appropriations package into law while vowing not to go along with similar legislation in the future.

The Senate voted 93-7 last week to approve the most recent measure, and the House passed it by a vote of 361 to 61 yesterday. The bill is now headed to Trump’s desk, and if he doesn’t sign it by October 1, much of the federal government will shut down.

On Twitter last week, Trump expressed his displeasure with the spending package, although not because it’s wasteful. Rather, he slammed the “ridiculous” bill because it doesn’t include enough funds for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump indicated he will likely sign the bill anyway, telling reporters yesterday, “We’re going to keep the government open.”

Trump may have promised to avoid a government shutdown, but he sang a different tune in March, when he signed a 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. He wasn’t happy about it, pledging to “never sign another bill like this again.”

Amash wants Trump to keep his word. In a tweet today, the libertarian-leaning Republican criticized the bill, which he voted against, and quoted Trump’s promise from March. “He’ll now be put to the test,” Amash said of Trump.

This gigantic, wasteful, pathetic spending bill passed the House and Senate. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump said, “I will never sign another bill like this again,” about the last bill like this, the omnibus. He’ll now be put to the test. https://t.co/x3FpgmRemD

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) September 27, 2018

The bill in question provides money for the Departments of Defense, Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services, keeping them funded through December 7. The majority of the funds—more than $600 billion—are for the Pentagon. As Reason‘s Zuri Davis noted last week, it’s believed to be the largest military budget since the height of the Iraq war.

Amash didn’t just call out Trump. Yesterday, he pointed out on Twitter that “the same Republicans who used to blast” former President George W. Bush’s “spendthrift GOP have become far worse than the politicians they once derided.”

Amash is absolutely right. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the nation is on track to run a $1 trillion deficit in the next fiscal year. But neither party in Congress seems to care. Whether it’s the $1.3 trillion omnibus bill Trump signed in March, the $150 billion spending bill that passed earlier this month, or the $853 billion appropriations package Trump is likely to sign in the coming days, wild spending is something Republicans and Democrats can agree on.

Last April, Philadelphia Police Officers Matthew Walsh, 30, and Marvin Jones, 48, stopped a man, handcuffed him, and searched him and his vehicle. Walsh and Jones detained him for 15 minutes before driving him one block away and releasing him. On Wednesday, the officers were arrested and charged with a felony count of tampering with records and misdemeanor counts of criminal conspiracy, false imprisonment, obstructing administration of law, and official oppression.

According to a statement given to Reason by the Philadelphia Police Department, Walsh and Jones reported that they stopped the man for “apparently using narcotics.” They said they searched him because he kept his hands in his pockets. The man, whom the department did not name, was not charged following the interaction and later filed a complaint against the officers.

An investigation was subsequently conducted by the Internal Affairs Bureau. After combing through surveillance footage and police records, investigators concluded there was no way that Jones and Walsh could have witnessed the suspected drug use. They also found that the man was compliant during the stop and search, which turned up nothing but prescription medication. The officers allegedly falsified their report following the stop and failed to disclose the search.

Walsh and Jones, who have worked for the department for four and 10 years, respectively, were arrested on Wednesday. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross suspended the officers for 30 days. They will be dismissed at the end of their suspension.

If anything is more clear after today’s Senate testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, it’s that Republicans are using this to lay the groundwork for future attacks against Democratic leaders, and not against Ford.

All of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee ceded their questioning time to Phoenix-area prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. And Mitchell’s most thorough lines of questioning centered not on Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged attack on Ford in high school nor the events immediately surrounding it but on how involved liberal leaders and lawyers were in the process of her coming forward.

It’s not a bad strategy. To go tough on a woman recounting an assault on national television would play badly with audiences far beyond the #BelieveAllWomen crowd. And while that may be cynical way to look at it, the outcome was nonetheless a positive one: Mitchell refrained from repeating some of the worst sins of previous political forays of this sort. We didn’t get another Anita Hill hearing. Let’s consider that a small silver lining.

But what did we get? The way the questioning was set up—five minutes from the conservative side, five minutes from the liberal side, repeat—turned into a series of grandstanding speeches from Democrats like Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris interspersed with meticulous and detailed questions from Mitchell about just how Ford has decided to come forward, when, and what happened since.

Who suggested she take a polygraph? (Her lawyers.) Who paid for it? (Her lawyers.) Who was paying for her lawyers? (They’re working for free.) Did she tell Sen. Diane Feinstein or any other Senate Democrats to make her name public? (No.) Does she know who leaked her letter? (No.) Why didn’t she choose to have the committee come to her in California? (She didn’t know that was a possibility.) Why didn’t her lawyers tell her it was? (She couldn’t say.)

Though Mitchell made no explicit arguments, her whole process today seemed designed to elicit support for an argument that Democrats and their pet lawyers had manipulated the Supreme Court confirmation process for their own political gain. After the hearing, Republican lawmakers made it explicit. “All I can say is that we are 40 something days away from the elections and their goal, not Mrs. Ford’s goal, is to delay this past the midterms so they can win the Senate and never allow Trump to fill this seat,” Sen. Lindsay Graham told reporters.

Mitchell’s questions also helped prop up the right-story/wrong-guy theory (as previously, and clumsily, advanced last week by Republican strategist Ed Whelan and fleshed out today with two men coming forward to say it was them, not Kavanaugh, who had assaulted Ford).

That’s also politically smart: Republicans can now at least nominally claim belief in Ford as a victim—and explain why so many people are finding and describing her as credible—without conceding that Kavanaugh did it.

Democrats attempted to head this off at the hearing. “How are you so sure that it was [Kavanaugh]?” Feinstein asked Ford at one point. Ford: “The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now, basic memory functions,” she replied. “So what you are telling us is this could not be a case of mistaken identity?” asked Feinstein. Ford replied, “Absolutely not.”

But that didn’t stop Republicans like Sen. Lindsay Graham with perpetuating the mistaken identity theory afterward. “Something happened, I don’t know what,” Graham told reporters. And then again: “I don’t doubt that something happened to her.” Then he suggested it might be a good idea if Ford go “talk to someone” about her issues.

It’s maddeningly disingenuous, of course—oh, sure we take you seriously, we just don’t believe you’re capable of getting the most crucial and basic part of your own story right! But Senate Democrats taking this opportunity to prostate themselves on the belief alter was its own form of disingenuous and patronizing too.

The hearing itself ended on Mitchell doing her own patronizing grandstanding, about the proper and “trauma-informed” way to interview victims. Seeming sympathetic to Ford’s plight, she waxed on about how the process today had been far from ideal (“Would you believe me if I told you that there’s no study that says this setting, in 5 minute increments, is the best way to do [trauma-informed interviews]?”) and that a closed session in Ford’s home state of California would have been more appropriate. Ford seemed grateful for the olive branch. She laughed. She agreed.

Mitchell continued: “Did you know that the best way to do it is to have a trained interviewer talk to you one on one in a private setting and let you do the talking?” Ford said it made “a lot of sense.”

Then Mitchell had a follow up: “Did anybody ever advise you, from Senator Feinstein’s office, or Representative Eshoo’s office, to go get a forensic interview?” Ford said no. “Instead,” asked Mitchell, “you were advised to get an attorney, and take ap polygraph?” Ford said many people advised her to get an attorney, and the attorney recommended the polygraph. Mitchell finished up:

And instead of submitting to an interview in California, we’re having a hearing today in five minute increments, is that right?

Whether this was meant as a knock on Ford and/or her lawyers, the implication was clearly that Senate Republicans weren’t to blame for the day’s frustrations.

In a recent letter to the Chicago Sun-Times, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) takes issue with my argument that new FDA restrictions on e-cigarettes could deter smokers from switching to vaping, resulting in more tobacco-related deaths than would otherwise occur. “Mr. Sullum needs to check his facts,” Durbin says, claiming that e-cigarettes, on balance, lead to more rather than less smoking. That conclusion is based on some highly implausible assumptions.

“[Sullum] claims that vaping helps people quit smoking traditional cigarettes,” Durbin writes. “A recent study from Dartmouth found the exact opposite: e-cigarette use leads to 81 times more new smokers than quitters.” The study to which Durbin refers, which was published in the online journal PLOS One last March, grossly underestimates the number of smokers who use e-cigarettes to quit while overestimating the number of people who would never have started smoking if e-cigarettes were not available.

To calculate the impact of e-cigarettes on smoking cessation, the researchers relied on a single 2013 study, reported in The Lancet, that compared quit rates among smokers randomly assigned to groups that received nicotine patches or e-cigarettes with or without nicotine. The six-month quit rate for e-cigarette users was 7.3 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for patch users and 4.1 percent for subjects who used nicotine-free e-cigarettes. In other words, e-cigarettes were 26 percent more effective than patches.

By contrast, a 2014 study based on British survey data, reported in the journal Addiction, found that smokers who used e-cigarettes to quit were twice as likely to be successful as smokers who used nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) such as patches. That suggests e-cigarettes are something like 100 percent more effective than NRT. Although randomized studies are usually considered to be stronger evidence of causality than surveys (which don’t control for confounding variables), they may underestimate the effectiveness of e-cigarettes if vaping is more appealing to some subgroups of smokers than others. Another issue with the earlier study is that improved e-cigarette design in recent years has resulted in more satisfying nicotine delivery, which probably has increased the effectiveness of e-cigarettes as an aid to quitting.

The PLOS One study assumed that the availability of e-cigarettes increases successful quit attempts by just 2,070 per year in the United States. But as Brad Rodu points out, data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that 2.6 million former smokers were vapers as of 2016, which would amount to 260,000 successful quit attempts per year, on average, in the decade since e-cigarettes were commercially introduced in the United States. It is not safe to attribute all of those successes to e-cigarettes, since some vapers might have quit smoking through other means. But the 125-fold difference between the NHIS results and the estimate used in the PLOS One analysis suggests the latter number is unrealistically low, to put it mildly.

On the other side of the ledger, the PLOS One study put the number of additional smokers attributable to e-cigarettes at 168,000 a year, or 81 times the number of quitters (hence the number cited by Durbin). The researchers arrived at that figure by comparing smoking initiation rates among people who try vaping and people who don’t. But that risk ratio, although “adjusted for demographic, psychosocial, and behavioral risk factors,” cannot possibly account for all the pre-existing differences between people who are attracted to vaping and people who aren’t. It stands to reason that some of the same factors that predispose people to vaping also predispose them to smoking. The relevant question is how many people who start smoking after vaping would not have used tobacco if e-cigarettes had never been introduced. The answer is unclear, but the number is certainly lower than 168,000 per year.

The predicted net increase in smoking does not seem to be happening in the real world. To the contrary, smoking rates among adolescents and adults continue to fall, and a 2017 BMJ study found that “the substantial increase in e-cigarette use among US adult smokers was associated with a statistically significant increase in the smoking cessation rate at the population level.” A 2018 analysis in the journal Tobacco Control projected that switching from smoking to vaping could result in as many as “6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost” over a decade.

Durbin also dismisses the point that adult vapers happen to like supposedly kid-friendly e-liquid flavors. “Mr. Sullum also claims that these candy-like flavors are aimed at adults, not kids,” he writes. “Flavors like blue razz candy, gummy bear, whipped cream, and chocolate cupcake? Come on.” That is the full extent of Durbin’s argument. Yet it’s undeniable that such sweet e-liquid flavors are highly popular among adult e-cigarette users, many of whom report that flavor variety was an important factor in switching from smoking to vaping.

If you think e-cigarettes are a public health disaster, as Durbin insists, such details may not matter to you. But if you acknowledge the harm-reducing potential of e-cigarettes, as the FDA does, you have to recognize the potentially lethal impact of attempts to reduce underage vaping by making these products less appealing.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is reclassifying an epilepsy drug containing cannabidiol (CBD), making it the first marijuana-derived medication to be legalized for sale under federal law.

Epidiolex, which is produced by GW Pharmaceuticals, can be used to treat patients with one of two rare but severe forms of childhood epilepsy: Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS). But it’s made from marijuana, which is classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

That classification supposedly means a drug has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” But that’s not an accurate description of Epidiolex, which does not get users high, since it does not contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, and clinical studies have shown the drug works. As Kayla Stetzel noted in an April piece for Reason:

Over two weeks, total seizures among Lennox-Gastaut patients who took Epidolex fell, on average, by 38 percent in one study and 44 percent in the other, while placebo patients experienced a drop of 18.5 percent and 23.5 percent, respectively. About 40 percent of patients in the cannabidiol (CBD) treatment groups saw a 50 percent or greater reduction in “drop seizures”—violent seizures that cause the upper body or full body to go limp, resulting in falls or injuries.

In June, the Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex as a medical treatment, giving the DEA 90 days to reclassify the drug. Today the DEA finally acted, making Epidiolex a Schedule V drug, which is the least restrictive category for controlled substances.

“We are pleased that the DEA has placed EPIDIOLEX in the lowest restriction Schedule,” GW CEO Justin Gover said in a statement, because it will help ensure that patients with LGS and Dravet syndrome, two of the most debilitating forms of epilepsy, can access this important new treatment option through their physicians.” He added that GW will try to make the drug “available within the next six weeks.”

While the DEA’s action is a step in the right direction, the decision does not “legalize or change the status of other CBD oil products,” DEA spokesperson Rusty Payne told WTHR, the NBC affiliate in Indianapolis. Those products are increasingly popular, thanks to their many health benefits.

Bonus link: Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has pointed out that 17 states specifically allow for the treatment of epilepsy with cannabis oil. But in states like Georgia, obtaining it is another question. That’s why two parents let their 15-year-old epileptic son smoke cannabis, only to be charged with reckless conduct.

For a quarter of a century, Gene Epstein was the economics editor and a columnist at the business magazine Barron’s. Before that, he served as an economist for the New York Stock Exchange. Now, he runs The Soho Forum, a monthly Oxford-style debate series held in New York that covers topics of special interests to libertarians. (As a co-sponsor, Reason records and releases audio and video versions of each debate. Go here for a full archive).

Epstein has just published a major essay in City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, about the long and error-prone career of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, whom he calls “continually mistaken” but “chronically admired.” Stiglitz, writes Epstein, is the apotheosis of “elite myopia” when it comes to trusting government over free markets to improve the lives of the poor. Read the article here.

In the latest Reason Podcast, I talk with Epstein about the continuing influence of Stiglitz, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and chief economist at the World Bank who is a favorite of progressive Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). We also talk about Epstein’s upcoming October 15 debate in New York with Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor and publisher of the left-wing Jacobin magazine, about whether socialism or capitalism is the better system for making people more free and prosperous. To buy tickets, which must be purchased in advance, go here now.

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Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party 35 years ago, answered questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning.

The absurd format of the hearing, the obvious biases of all relevant adjudicators, and the failure to summon additional witnesses for questioning all but guaranteed that these proceedings would be farcical from a due process perspective—and they were.

The Republican senators—all men—delegated Special Counsel Rachel Mitchell to ask their questions for them because they thought it would look better if Ford’s cross-examination was conducted by a woman. But because of the structure of the hearing—five minutes of Republican questioning, followed by five minutes of Democratic questioning—Mitchell had to keep pausing to allow those on the other side their turn. This made her line of questioning very difficult to follow. Her flow was constantly interrupted. And many of her questions were minor clarifications of things Ford had said. If Mitchell’s ultimate goal was to undermine Ford’s credibility, she failed.

“I am here today not because I want to be,” said Ford in her testimony. “I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”

Indeed, Ford spoke eloquently about what she remembered and what she did not. Her background as a professor of psychology no doubt helped her tremendously—she was able to speak with authority about memory and trauma.

“Occasionally, I would discuss the assault in individual therapy, but talking about it caused me to relive the trauma, so I tried not to think about it or discuss it,” said Ford. “But over the years, I went through periods where I thought about Brett’s attack. I confided in some close friends that I had an experience with sexual assault. Occasionally, I stated that my assailant was a prominent lawyer or judge but I did not use his name.”

Whenever it seemed like Mitchell was getting to the point of her questions, her allotted time came to an end, and then the Democrats spoke. Cross-examination, halted every five minutes, and punctuated by statements of support from partisan Democrats who are obviously biased against Kavanaugh, is pointless. Several senators, including Sen. Kisten Gillibrand (D–NY) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) made blanket I-believe-you statements. Their minds are already made up, and Kavanaugh hasn’t even testified about the alleged assault yet.

The Republicans aren’t really interested in the truth, either. If they were, they should have summoned Mark Judge—a friend of Kavanaugh and alleged witness to the incident—to testify, at the very least. They did not.

As I wrote previously, due process requires impartial judges and juries. But the people who will vote to confirm Kavanaugh have largely already made up their minds on the matter of his alleged sexual assault. As the attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote in a recent column, “the Kavanaugh case is not about justice; it’s about power… The scenario playing out on Capitol Hill and in the press, the bottom line is simple: whoever has the most votes, whichever political party holds (for the time being) the most power, will determine what the ‘truth’ is. There will be no civics book ending. No analogy to a real judicial proceeding will be possible.”

A full investigation of this matter, and a fair adjudication of Kavanaugh, would require a significantly revised process. This isn’t due process—this isn’t even an honest attempt to determine what actually happened.

Privacy International, based out of London, is an advocacy group that “envisions a world in which the right to privacy is protected, respected, and fulfilled.” It has been engaged in activism and legal challenges opposing mass surveillance and the collection of citizens’ data in the United Kingdom and countries across the world.

In an Orwellian twist, the group discovered this week that the British government has been secretly collecting and looking at their private data.

Privacy International was one of the activist groups that legally challenged the bulk surveillance conducted by the U.K. government, and which had been revealed by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden. A couple of weeks ago, the European Court of Human Rights, of which the U.K. is a member, validated Snowden’s warnings by ruling that the U.K.’s mass collection of citizens’ online metadata was a violation of their privacy rights.

On Tuesday, Privacy International was informed during a hearing over this legal challenge that MI5, England’s domestic intelligence and security agency, had unlawfully collected and held their data. MI5 also acknowledged that communications data they’d gathered had been accessed and viewed by MI5 personnel.

All this matters because the government previously said it had not kept the data it had collected. Then, defenders of this mass data collection conceded that, sure, they were collecting and storing all this info for a while, but they weren’t accessing or looking at it without good reason or without following proper safeguards. None of this turned out to be true. The Register, a U.K.-based site that reports on information technology, notes:

MI5’s admission was the focus of today’s proceedings because it had initially said it held no such data on the charity pre-avowal—but last year amended its position.

Moreover, the discovery of that data has exposed a previously unknown cache of information that officers have amassed while working on cases—and one that MI5 admitted lacked the safeguards that exist for other regimes.

In court, Privacy International’s counsel, Thomas De la Mare, equated the situation to an “MI5 sofa”.

The agency initially “had a look under the cushions” and found nothing, he said, but when it later poked down the back it dug up “a whole bunch of data” about his clients.

The explanation of how this all happened gets a little technical and complicated—there is a stage of intelligence gathering that lacked processes for review, retention, and deletion. And so it’s apparently not even clear to the government what data they had in their possession or how they handled it. Privacy International is now demanding to know how and why, exactly, MI5 could claim it did not possess or access data that it did, in fact, possess and access.

Ultimately, the big takeaway here is that the lack of transparency surrounding data collection and mass surveillance allows for both sinister abuses and actual mistakes to occur, and then go unnoticed for years.

It’s also your regular reminder that secret surveillance tools have historically been used to keep tabs on people who are critical of government behavior, not just folks believed to have criminal aspirations or terrorist connections.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been thoroughly criticized for its poor preparation, wastefulness, and ineffective responses to natural disasters. Now, it faces a management scandal involving FEMA Administrator Brock Long. An internal investigation from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that Long used over $150,000 in government money for personal expenses.

The heavily redacted report tracked Long’s actions between December 2017 and April 2018 and was obtained by the Washington Post. According to the paper’s findings, Long commissioned staff and government vehicles for personal trips. The unapproved trips included being driven from Washington, D.C., to his home in Hickory, North Carolina, on the weekends. The aides would then stay in hotels so they could drive Long either back to Washington, D.C., or to Charlotte Douglas International Airport. On at least one occasion, an aide picked up Long’s children from their school.

Government-funded personal trips also extended beyond chauffered rides from D.C. back to his home. Long also took a trip to Hawaii with his family during his children’s spring break. Following business-related activities, an aide drove Long and his family to visit a pineapple plantation and a volcano.

A policy states that Long is only permitted to travel in government vehicles during national emergencies with approval from DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Nielsen was reportedly made aware of the situation because of Long’s absences from his office, due, in part, to his frequent travel home. She confronted Long to inform him that agency resources were not for personal use.

Long spent about $151,000 on unauthorized travel, according to an estimate in The Wall Street Journal. Two officials have since been suspended in connection with the travel. Long remains in his position, but was ordered by Nielsen to pay the government back.

Legalization of recreational marijuana in California means there’s very little action airport police can take against travelers caught with small amounts of weed. Leave it to federal law—and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)—to complicate things.

At Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), anyone 21 and over can “possess up to 28.5 grams of marijuana and 8 grams of concentrated marijuana for personal consumption,” according to a “marijuana policy” posted on the airport’s website. As Marijuana Moment‘s Tom Angell pointed out on Twitter, the policy has been up on the website since at least April. Los Angeles Airport Police spokesperson Alicia Hernandez told McClatchy the policy has been in effect since January, when recreational weed officially became legal in the state.

Other California airports don’t have stated policies regarding marijuana, but police have essentially said there’s nothing they can do if travelers aren’t violating California law. “We’re really not in a place to do anything,” Sgt. Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which has jurisdiction over Oakland International Airport, told CNBC in December. Lieutenant Mark Gonzales of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department told USA Today in February the same goes for Orange County’s John Wayne Airport.

According to Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), LAX’s marijuana policy is a sign that marijuana use in California isn’t a big deal to local authorities. “It exemplifies the widespread cultural shift and acceptance of marijuana that is ongoing in the state of California,” Armentano told Leafly.

But while local cops don’t seem to care, marijuana is still illegal under federal law. That means TSA agents have to flag fliers in possession of weed, even if that won’t accomplish anything. “TSA’s response to the discovery of marijuana is the same in every state and at every airport—regardless of whether marijuana has been or is going to be legalized,” TSA spokesperson Lorie Dankers tells Reason via email. “Airport law enforcement will be notified if marijuana is discovered by a TSA officer during the security screening process of carry-on and checked baggage.” Law enforcement will then decide “whether or not the passenger is allowed to travel with marijuana.”

Particularly at LAX, though, airport police have made it clear they’re not going to do anything. So what’s the point of the TSA making a fuss? In the end, travelers with weed will still be allowed to fly. Whether or not they’ll be able to catch their flights is another question, depending on how long they’re held by the TSA and local police.

Even though it’s easy to blame the TSA here, the oft-maligned agency doesn’t even deserve most of the blame. The TSA’s job is to enforce federal laws, even the bad ones. And in this case, the federal law is very, very misguided.

Back in 2010, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie offered three reasons why weed should be legalized. One, because the government could collect billions of dollars in tax revenue and save billions more in law enforcement costs. Two, because Americans increasingly support weed legalization, and three, because pot prohibition infringes on bodily autonomy. Those arguments are just as true today as they were eight years ago.

Since 2010, nine states (plus Washington, D.C.) have legalized weed for recreational use. But the federal ban continues to complicate matters, especially for travelers. There’s a simple fix, of course: Remove marijuana from Schedule I, and allow the states to set their own pot policies.

Bonus link: Is the TSA actually chiller about weed than the city of San Francisco? It’s possible, wrote Reason‘s Christian Britschgi in November.