Tag: hit&run

A California bill would ban restaurants from giving straws to customers unless they specifically ask for one. The bill’s sponsor explained, “We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans.”

Lukasz Niec was brought to the U.S. as a three-year-old, a refugee from Poland’s oppressive then-communist government. Now 43, Niec’s a permanent resident with a green card and an American wife, daughter, and stepdaughter. He works as a doctor specializing in internal medicine for Bronson HeathCare in Michigan.

But the Immigration and Control Enforcement (ICE) agency in the Department of Homeland Security arrested him last week and he may be deported to a country whose language he doesn’t even know.

Why? Because of two old criminal convictions, USA Today reports, with Niec’s being taken into custody the result of “two misdemeanors from 26 years ago — malicious destruction of property under $100 in January 1992, and a few months later receiving and concealing stolen property over $100. Niec was 17 at the time, and the youthful offender proceeding allowed young first offenders to avoid a criminal record if they stayed out of trouble. But ICE is a federal agency, and family members complained that Niec did not know that the agency was not bound to honor the agreement, the family says.”

More recently Niec’s had trouble with the law in 2008 over a drunk driving conviction for which he served probation and had the conviction set aside, and a 2013 domestic violence trial in which he was found not guilty.

But mostly he’s been a medical professional and nothing in his record indicates a threat to American civic order such that ICE should be eating up public resources bothering with him and harming his family and the people he serves as a doctor. It’s one more example of the pointless cruelty of immigration law enforcement. As Washington Post notes, “under previous administrations, immigration authorities have often let low-level offenders off the hook, prioritizing the deportations of violent criminals…But the Trump administration has issued sweeping new guidelines expanding the range of immigrants that count as high priority for deportation, including low-level offenders, and those with no criminal record — regardless of how long they have lived in the country.”

Niec has made himself an integral part of his home state’s medical profession. As MLive reports:

“He’s an excellent citizen, an excellent physician. He’s well respected and well liked,” colleague Penny Rathburn said. “He’s not a threat to our society.”

Several colleagues wrote letters addressed to an immigration judge in support of Niec. They were being printed on Bronson letterhead Friday to be sent out, Rathburn said.

“The consensus about his character is overwhelming with no single complaint I have ever heard from anyone over 10 years,” Kwsai Al-Rahhal, M.D. wrote.

“He is loving, caring and respectful. I have seen how he treats my own family and my kids love ‘uncle Lucas.’….

Another colleague, Jose Angelo L. De Leon, M.D., called Niec an inspiration and a mentor. Niec stepped up to work extra hours during shortages, he wrote.

“I cannot say enough about his work ethic and his service to our community,” he wrote.

For more on citizen reaction to the Trump-era deportation wave, see Shikha Dalmia’s informative and infuriating February Reason cover story.

Shannon Daves has been held in solitary confinement at the Dallas County, Texas, jail for nearly a week because she can’t afford a $500 bail.

Daves, 47, an unemployed, homeless transgender woman accused of theft, is one of hundreds of criminal defendants in Dallas County languishing behind bars every day simply because of their inability to make bail, according to three civil rights groups.

Those groups—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Civil Rights Corps, and Texas Fair Defense Project—filed a federal class-action lawsuit late Sunday night on behalf of Daves and five other named plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of Dallas County’s bail policies. In all six of the plaintiffs’ cases, their arraignments lasted less than a minute, and the judges never asked about their income or ability to pay before setting bail.

Dallas County, which includes the city of Dallas, is the latest to be hit in a wave of lawsuits around the country challenging the constitutionality cash bail policies. Similar challenges have been filed in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee. Last April, a federal judge issued a stunning ruling that found the bail practices in Harris County, Texas, were unconstitutional and ordered almost all misdemeanor defendants to be released within 24 hours.

Civil liberties groups say cash bail practices like Dallas County’s keep defendants, who are presumed innocent, behind bars because of their inability to pay—essentially a debtor’s prison. Sunday’s lawsuit claims about 70 percent of the jail population are there because they can’t afford bail. The cost to county taxpayers, the civil rights groups estimate, amounts to $225,321 per day.

Brandon Buskey, an ACLU senior staff attorney, argues that system violates the core constitutional principles of equal protection and due process.

“The current situation is that the county operates a wealth-based system of detention,” he says. “Every day people are held in jail simply because they can’t afford very small amounts of money. On the other hand, if you’re wealthier you go free, often within a few hours.”

The civil rights groups argue that even short stays in jail can have devastating consequences for defendants, especially poor ones. “Pretrial detention of presumptively innocent human beings causes people to lose their jobs and shelter, interrupts vital medication cycles, and separates parents and children,” the lawsuit states. “It coerces guilty pleas and results in longer sentences.”

Around one-third of inmates at the Dallas County Jail have some form of mental illness, according to the lawsuit.

Dallas County officials began working to reform their bail policies last year, after the Dallas Morning News reported on the case of a grandmother who spent two months in jail after shoplifting two school uniforms worth $105. Her bond was set at $150,000, of which $15,000 was nonrefundable.

Opposing such reform efforts is the professional bail bond industry. Industry represenativies have filed lawsuits in New Jersey and New Mexico arguing that denial of cash bail is actually a violation of defendants’ constitutional rights.

“What that does, in a nutshell, is it takes something that is constitutionally protected as a liberty-preserving option and turns it into an option of last resort,” former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, now working for the American Bail Coalition, argued before a New Jersey judge last year.

Civil liberties groups, however, say that the bail bond industry’s opposition is little more than an attempt to preserve its bottom line.

“Most people who go through the system in Dallas county or elsewhere in the country can be released without any worry and without any condition on their liberty,” Buskey says. “For those who present some risk, money is not the answer. The bail bond industry’s efforts to save itself by asserting that, somehow, cash bail is needed to keep people safe is just that—a self-interested and desperate attempt to keep their livelihood going.”

Psychedelic researchers have known since the 1960s that bad vibes can lead to bad trips. Now researchers from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London have published a paper providing new evidence that when it comes to psychedelic-assisted therapy, a positive “[mind]set and setting” may be crucial to long-term improvements in a patient’s mental health.

Researchers David J. Nutt, Robin L. Carhart-Harris, and Leor Roseman wanted to test the hypothesis that “the quality of the acute [psychedelic] experience mediates long-term improvements in mental health.” In other words, that feeling either good or bad while psychedelic drugs are active in the body determines whether patients experience improvement in symptoms weeks and months after undergoing drug-assisted therapy.

The Imperial team tested the question by administering psilocybin to 20 patients with treatment-resistant depression in a setting designed to produce a positive experience. They then administered the altered states of consciousness (ACS) questionnaire, which measures patient experience across several dimensions: 1. “oceanic boundlessness,” Freudian shorthand for feelings of blissfulness, positivity toward other human beings, and oneness with the universe; 2. “dread of ego dissolution,” which probes “negative, aversive experiences in which anxiety is a central aspect”; 3. changes in vision; 4. changes in hearing; and 5. receptiveness, or a lowering of the patient’s guard.

Various forms of the ACS questionnaire have been used for years to get a sense of what, exactly, people experience when we use psychedelic drugs. The Imperial team decide to pair the ACS form with standard depression questionnaires. In this way they hoped to answer two major questions about the neurobiological mechanisms of psychedelic-assisted therapy: the extent to which visual and auditory changes impact clinical outcomes, and the correlation of negative and positive acute experiences with long-term mental states.

Five weeks after the study, nine of the 20 patients reported a greater than 50 percent reduction of depression symptoms. The team had replicated work done at Johns Hopkins University.

That’s heartening, considering that depression is a miserable experience. But the really awesome finding here is the evidence that a positive acute therapeutic experience correlates with long-term improvement, while a negative acute experience does not:

This relationship appears to be somewhat specific, in that [a feeling of oceanic boundlessness] was significantly more predictive of positive clinical outcomes than altered visual and auditory perception—endorsing the moniker “psychedelic” (“mind-revealing”) over “hallucinogen” when referring to this class of drug—at least in the context of psychedelic therapy. It also suggests that the therapeutic effects of psilocybin are not a simple product of isolated pharmacological action but rather are experience dependent. We also found that greater [anxiety and impaired cognition] experienced during the drug session was predictive of less positive clinical outcomes.

When I interviewed Roseman last year, he offered me this explanation for why a positive psychedelic experience could work as a form of medical therapy:

Ask a medical doctor, “What is PTSD?” and the answer they’ll give is that it’s a strong change in a person due to an experience. What you’re trying to do with a psychedelic is reverse that change. You use the psychedelic to promote a certain experience, and that experience—not just the drug, the experience—is what causes the change. If you believe that a person can be altered by one bad experience, you should also be willing to believe that a person can change from one beautiful, cathartic, emotionally unitive experience.

The new study acknowledges that unaccounted-for components may influence outcomes more than, or as much as, the criteria in the ACS questionnaire. Music choice, priming, insights gained, and the relationship with the therapist may play a more important role than whether the patient felt a positive sense of connection and openness versus cognitive impairment, loss of control, and/or anxiety. While I suspect all of those things matter, my own experiences and the trip reports other psilocybin users have shared lead me to think that the team’s findings will be replicated. Those other components, after all, are not mutually exclusive from the overall quality of a therapeutic experience. Feeling connected to, and safe with, a psychedelic therapist likely matters quite a bit in creating a positive acute experience. I would say the same of priming (i.e., mentally preparing the patient to have a good experience) and probably even music choice.

Another insight from this study is that psychedelic-assisted therapy is revolutionary for reasons other than pharmacology. In the U.S., primary care and family medicine doctors are playing an increasingly large role in recognizing and treating common mood disorders. In most cases, that amounts to administering a short questionaire and prescribing an SSRI (perhaps in combination with bupropion) in the same 15-minute window those physicians would address any other common ailment. While it’s probably better to have only a little attention rather than none at all, we are essentially moving away from an experiential therapeutic model in favor of assembly-line mental health care. Psychedelic-assisted therapy does not, and perhaps cannot, work that way.

A video appearing to show agents of the U.S. Border Patrol boarding an interstate bus in Fort Lauderdale, Florida went viral on Twitter over the weekend. The agents move down the bus’ aisle, asking each passenger to provide some form of documentation proving that they are in the country legally.

Watch below:

.@CustomsBorder got on a Greyhound bus yesterday at 4:30pm in Fort Lauderdale and asked every passenger for their papers and to prove citizenship. Proof of citizenship is NOT required to ride a bus! For more information about your rights, call our hotline: 1-888-600-5762 pic.twitter.com/rWJn61o8VP

— FLImmigrantCoalition (@FLImmigrant) January 20, 2018

Not surprisingly, the video has drawn largely critical reactions. Officers demanding that passengers “show their papers” during a suspicionless sweep of a bus not crossing any international boundary? It may seem more like a relic from history or a scene from dystopian fiction than something most Americans expect to encounter in their daily travels.

But not if you’ve been paying attention. Sadly, such suspicionless immigration sweeps are more common than many people think. Far from being a rare action by rogue agents, these “roving patrols” are a routine part of Border Patrol operations, and their frequency has been slowly increasing since 9/11.

Blame the Supreme Court for the practice’s persistence. In a series of decisions going back to the 1970s, the Court has conferred immigration and customs authorities with ever-increasing power to detain, question, and search people “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States.” The feds have interpreted this to mean that immigration agents may conduct enforcement operations at any location within 100 miles of a land or sea border. That area encompasses most of America’s major cities, and it is home to roughly two thirds of the country’s residents.

Immigration authorities’ power within this zone, the Supreme Court said, includes the power to detain travelers long enough to elicit “response to a brief question or two and possibly the production of a document evidencing a right to be in the United States,” even without any articulable suspicion.

• The Senate has broken the lawmaking logjam in funding the government with another short-term spending bill. While the Democrats wanted to tie government funding to protections for immigrants, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Eric Boehm analyzes here.
• The Supreme Court ruled that D.C. police had probable cause to arrest folks at a late night party in a vacant house, even if the party members didn’t actually know they were trespassing, and determined the officers had immunity to lawsuits. Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote about the case previously here.
• According to a letter from a senator, the FBI did not preserve months of texts between two officials, one of whom was removed from the probe of President Donald Trump, who were romantically involved and apparently were not big fans of the incoming president.
• The National Security Agency (NSA) has accidentally deleted evidence it promised it would preserve for an ongoing lawsuit connected to domestic surveillance. They say they’re very sorry about it, though!
• A relative says the California couple accused of chaining up and neglecting their 13 kids were wannabe swingers. That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with abusing children, but OMG it’s salacious!!!
• Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has struck down the state’s congressional map as unconstitutional gerrymandering and ordered the lawmakers to make up a new one.

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Today Vermont Gov. Phil Scott signed a bill making his state the ninth to legalize marijuana for recreational use and the first to do so through the legislature rather than a ballot initiative. The new law, which takes effect on July 1, allows adults 21 or older to possess up to an ounce of marijuana in public, to grow up to six plants (two of them mature at any one time) per household, and to keep whatever they produce.

“After more than 15 years of hard work by [the Marijuana Policy Project] and our allies in the state, adults in Vermont no longer need to fear being fined or criminalized for low-level marijuana possession and cultivation,” says Matt Simon, MPP’s New England political director. “Responsible adults will soon have the freedom to enjoy a safer option legally, and law enforcement will be free to concentrate on serious crimes with actual victims.”

Unlike the initiatives that legalized recreational marijuana in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, the Vermont law does not permit commercial production or distribution. But it creates a Marijuana Regulatory Commission (with the same membership as the advisory commission that Scott appointed last September) that is charged with studying “regulation and taxation of a commercial adult-use marijuana market that is economically sustainable, reduces the illegal marijuana market, [and] results in net revenues to the State after appropriate costs for education, public health and public safety have been deducted.” The commission is required to produce a final report by the end of the year.

Scott, a Republican who vetoed a previous legalization bill last May, is not keen on commercialization. In a message to the General Assembly, he expressed “mixed emotions” about signing the bill. “I personally believe that what adults do behind closed doors and on private property is their choice, so long as it does not negatively impact the health and safety of others, especially children,” he said. But he added that he still has “reservations about a commercial system which depends on profit motive and market driven demand for its growth.”

Still, Scott indicated that he might be open to going further in the future. “I look forward to the Marijuana Advisory Commission addressing the need to develop comprehensive education, prevention and highway safety strategies,” he said. “There must be comprehensive and convincing plans completed in these areas before I will begin to consider the wisdom of implementing a commercial ‘tax and regulate’ system for an adult marijuana market. It is important for the General Assembly to know that—until we have a workable plan to address each of these concerns—I will veto any additional effort along these lines which manages to reach my desk.”

Does the fraught conversation around #MeToo and sexual mores need more Peter Suderman explaining that, well actually, we really should be viewing things more through the lens of long-tail economics? The question answers itself.

Today’s Reason Podcast, which also features Katherine Mangu-Ward, Robby Soave, and yours truly, veers headlong into such touchy subjects, including the generational divide over consent and agency, the gap between federal directives and on-the-ground adjudications of campus sexual assault, the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has to do with National School Choice Week. Kick the whole shebang is a round of derision and glee about the abortive government shutdown.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

“Reminder: The Parts of the Federal Government Authorized to Shoot You Are Still Functioning,” by Scott Shackford

“The Government Shutdown Is an Artifact of a Broken Budget Process,” by Peter Suderman

“Vanessa Grigoriadis on the ‘Blurred Lines’ of Consensual Sex and Assault on Campus,” by Nick Gillespie and Justin Monticello

“The Fragile Generation,” by Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt

“Betsy DeVos Withdraws ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter That Weaponized Title IX Against Due Process,” by Robby Soave

“The Case for School Choice Is Overwhelming From Every POV Except One,” by Nick Gillespie

“To Reduce Campus Rape, Legalize Pot and Alcohol,” by Robby Soave

“Crowding Out Private Coverage: The Cost of Expanding Children’s Health Insurance,” by Peter Suderman

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CNN asked me to contribute to a roundup of comments on “how to date in 2018.” The prompt was last week’s news about actor Aziz Ansari, who was accused of mistreating a woman—ignoring her nonverbal protestations—during an intimate encounter at his apartment. As I wrote in the CNN piece:

What allegedly happened to “Grace” in Aziz Ansari’s apartment was unpleasant, but almost nobody believes it was sexual assault. Most of the pundits who weighed in called it bad sex or worse, but not anything violent or criminal. Grace herself disagreed; she told Babe.net that “after a really long time,” she came to view the experience as assault rather than mere awkwardness. Ansari released a statement that said he thought the encounter was “completely consensual.”

It’s not just the pundits. I was on Michael Smerconish’s Sirius XM radio program last week when he revealed the results of a poll of his listeners, 95 percent of whom did not believe Ansari’s behavior constituted sexual assault.

Differences of opinion seem especially pronounced between older and younger feminists. Matt Welch highlighted those differences—vis a vis a feud between HLN’s Ashleigh Banfield and babe.net reporter Katie Way—in a recent Reason blog post.

I don’t know the ages of the other participants in the CNN roundup, and I probably shouldn’t try to guess from looking at their pictures. But opinions here seemed more mixed.

Jaclyn Friedman, an activist, wrote that she hopes the #MeToo movement will “scare men into finally paying attention to women as people, whether that means realizing that they probably don’t want to be hit on at work, or finally paying attention to what their female partners are experiencing during sex….No more excuses about not being a mind reader or women who aren’t forthright enough.”

Katie Anthony, a feminist blogger, pushed the envelope even further:

You need to know that when you take her back to your apartment, there is a part of her that wonders if she’s going to die there. Not every time, not every woman. But enough of us, and often.

The threat of harm is a flip of the coin with deadly stakes. A 2017 CDC report found that half of murdered women died at the hands of a current or former partner (or their family or friends). With this knowledge, we know we must say no; we also know that resistance could cost us our lives. Say no; go along. Be strong; be easy.

According to Anthony, women can’t really just say no—the threat of violence is always around the corner. She even deployed a “coin flip” metaphor, wrongly implying there’s a 50-50 chance that a date ends violently.

Roxanne Jackson, a founding editor of ESPN Magazine, took a much different position:

The biggest takeaway of the Aziz Ansari story is that women and girls have to learn to talk, out loud, about our sexuality. It’s time to shed the Victorian-era notions still clinging to women—even those who call themselves feminists—that make it shameful to tell a man exactly what we want sexually, and how we want it.

It’s dangerous to rely on non-verbal cues or mind reading to tell a guy you’re OK with oral sex (giving and receiving) and making out on the couch but you do not want to go all the way, as did the woman who called herself “Grace” in the Babe.net story about her date with Ansari.

Speaking up is difficult but there is no better time than this #MeToo moment for women to find their voices, not just to expose real predators who sexually harass and assault women, but overly zealous men, as the Babe article portrays Ansari to be, who may think “yes” to a date at his place automatically means “yes” to sex….

I wrote a column in 2013 advising my college-age son to get a text message from women to indicate they had consensual sex. Just in case, as in the Ansari story, the woman goes home feeling violated because he failed to read her non-verbal cues. I got a lot of criticism for that piece but I still stand by it.

When it comes to dating in 2018, let’s talk about sex. And if your partner doesn’t think that’s sexy, say goodbye.

Jackson’s suggestion that maybe college-aged males should require their partners to fill out some kind of consent form doesn’t seem crazy to me. As I said in my own take for CNN:

Such caution is desperately needed on university campuses, where modern dating culture is defined by casual, alcohol-fueled hookups. Some of these incidents cross the line into rape, and should be dealt with harshly. But many others are messier, and guys are sometimes punished severely for conduct no worse than Ansari’s. As an education reporter, I’ve covered case after case in which administrators wrongly expelled students—often young men of color—after a sexual partner complained about an imperfect encounter.

The University of Findlay, for instance, kicked out two athletes because a female student claimed they raped her—even though a number of witnesses, according to the lawsuit filed by the two athletes against the university over their expulsion, said they not only heard her give consent, but also recalled her bragging about the encounter afterward.

A spokesperson for the university told the Washington Examiner that they would “vigorously defend the process and our decision.” The case is still pending.

Nowhere are the dangers of requiring affirmative consent as a legal standard—as opposed to just, say, teaching affirmative consent as a generally good thing to which people should aspire—more apparent than on college campuses, where poorly-trained bureaucrats routinely conflate messy sexual encounters with assaults. Women certainly shouldn’t live in fear of men, but nor should men live in fear of women.

Amazon has narrowed the list of places where it might put its second headquarters down to 20. Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, is so excited that Montgomery County made the shortlist that he’s offering Amazon a new $5 billion package of incentives.

“Amazon sent a clear signal that Maryland truly is open for business by selecting Montgomery County as one of an elite group of contenders for this transformative project,” Hogan said today as he unveiled the sycophantically named Promoting ext-Raordinary Innovation in Maryland’s Economy (PRIME) Act.

The PRIME Act offers a lot of sweeteners. It includes 10 years of tax credits against any state and local property taxes, plus a 10-year exemption on any sales taxes owed by Amazon on purchases of construction equipment and warehouse equipment. Maryland would also give Amazon a 10-year tax credit to cover state income taxes paid by any employee Amazon hires within 17 years of setting up shop in the state, as long as that employee earns between $60,000 and $500,000.

And it’s not just tax abatements. The proposal offers the online retailer $150 million in direct grants. Add the legislation’s road, transit, and infrastructure upgrades, and the whole package comes to $5 billion—the same amount Amazon plans to spend on the new headquarters.

Luring businesses with corporate handouts is a long-lived American tradition. For instance, Washington state—home of Amazon’s current headquarters—has given the aviation giant Boeing $11.9 billion to stay in town. Likewise, Amazon’s competitor in the retail market, Walmart, is notorious for scooping up development grants, tax abatements, and any other form of pork it can from the jurisdictions where it sets up shop. The group Good Jobs First calculated in 2011 that Walmart was pulling down $70 million of these incentives annually.

The inevitable justification for these giveaways is that they will more than make up for the costs by bringing new jobs, new spending, and new investment to an area. Hogan, for example, says Amazon is offering “the single greatest economic development opportunity in a generation, and we’re committing all of the resources we have to bring it home to Maryland.”

Hogan is indeed bringing all the resources he can to bear with the PRIME Act, which at this point is the second most generous incentive package to be offered in the Amazon bidding war. (New Jersey had offered the company $7 billion, but the state failed to make the final cut.) Yet every dollar the governor is offering will have to be paid by someone. If the PRIME Act passes and Amazon comes to Maryland, residents and businesses without the political clout of a multi-billion-dollar multinational will suffer a higher tax burden.

Maryland Senate President Mike Miller (D-Calvert) has already criticized Hogan along those lines, telling the Washington Post that he’d like to see the state give more aid to Baltimore and higher hospital funding in Prince George County before it offers billions to one of the world’s wealthiest corporations.

Hogan won the governorship in deep-blue Maryland in part on his promise of creating a more business-friendly, fiscally responsible state government. His PRIME Act betrays those promises. And it encourages the other places on Amazon’s shortlist to stoop even lower to cinch the deal. Reason TV highlighted highlighted the dangers of that in a recent, all too realistic, video: