Tag: news

A teen in Oklahoma City reportedly died in August of an overdose of Benadryl pills, and this tragedy is fueling yet another social media “challenge” panic. Are teens really trying to convince other teens to take tons of allergy pills to get high?

As with all of these social media panics that start bouncing around the web and local news networks, this story has kernels of truth to it while suggesting a trend that is probably exaggerated. Remember the “Tide Pod challenge?” Some teens did genuinely post videos of themselves eating Tide Pods, and there was a temporary increase in calls to poison control for laundry detergent ingestion. But the kind of national panic that led to involvement by fearmongering lawmakers was just completely over-the-top relative to the actual risks.

Similarly, the “Benadryl Challenge” starts with something real. Three teens in Texas in May sought medical treatment after overdosing on Benadryl. The hospital, Cook Children’s Hospital at Fort Worth, posted on their blog that the teens got the idea from a TikTok video that told them they could get high and hallucinate if they took several Benadryl pills. One girl took 14 of them and needed medical treatment.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and McClatchy News reached out to TikTok and were told that, yes, the company had removed content from the platform that was violating their community guidelines by encouraging people to take excessive amounts of Benadryl. So TikTok acknowledged the videos existed and has removed them.

Fast forward to the end of August. On August 28, Oklahoma City news outlet KFOR reported that a 15-year-old girl actually died from overdosing on Benadryl, ostensibly because she “fell victim to what’s been called the Benadryl Challenge on Tik Tok,” according to KFOR’s report. The story has bounced around several media sites now, including Newsweek and the U.K. Daily Mail.

The attribution for the cause of death comes from a Facebook post that has been subsequently deleted. The U.S. Sun and the New York Post identify the girl as Chloe Phillips, a sophomore at Blanchard High School, who died on August 21. The Facebook post apparently comes from her Great-Aunt Janette Sissy Leasure who blamed the “Benadryl Challenge”

“This needs to stop taking our kids or putting them in the hospital,” she wrote.

KFOR’s reporting, however, leaves out any attribution and does not provide any actual comments from her family about the girl’s death. KFOR interviewed Scott Schaeffer, director of the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information, who explained to reporter Cassandra Sweetman how consuming large amounts of Benadryl can cause heart problems and seizures along with those hallucinations.

One might read Sweetman’s story and assume, then, that Schaeffer knew about what happened with Phillips and was doing his job informing the public. That assumption, however, would be incorrect. Schaeffer subsequently told Reason that he actually had no direct knowledge about the incident KFOR reported.

Furthermore, in an email, Schaeffer said, “[U]pon review of our records, [we] have found no cases that appear to have been inspired by the ‘Benadryl Challenge.'”

Sweetman has not responded to an email from Reason seeking attribution for the girl’s death and the circumstances behind it.

That there’s very little evidential attribution that a teen girl in Oklahoma actually died as a result of a TikTok video hasn’t stopped the story from going viral. And each story’s sole example of this “trend” points to the same overdoses of the teens in Fort Worth and videos that TikTok has already removed. (A company representative told Forbes they’re keeping an eye out for any new videos that might get posted.)

This is not a “trend.” It is, however, an easy way for media outlets to sow another round of panic and paranoia over social media and to convince stressed out parents that social media platforms and new technologies pose a danger to their kids.

While it’s true that there have been a small number of videos on TikTok encouraging Benadryl abuse, and that three teens in Texas decided to try it, there is actually very little evidence that a “Benadryl Challenge” is something young people are doing (note the lack of actual links to TikTok videos in all this coverage) and so far, it’s unclear whether a teen in Oklahoma City actually died as a result of it.

What is true is that many, many media outlets have decided to use a deleted Facebook post as factual evidence of a widespread pandemic of teens deliberately attempting to overdose on allergy medication.

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In 2018, Florida schools saw a hiring surge for police officers. As a result, a new study says, the number of school arrests—which had been declining for years—suddenly started to rise. There was also a sharp increase in the use of physical restraint against students.

“The presence of law enforcement in schools was related to increases in the number of behavioral incidents reported to the state, the number of such incidents reported to law enforcement, and student arrests,” the report says. “The results suggest a need to reconsider whether law enforcement should be present in schools, and, if they are, how they can be implemented in a way that minimizes unnecessary exposure of students to law enforcement and arrests.”

The study was conducted by F. Chris Curran, director of the Education Policy Research Center at the University of Florida. It comes as school districts across the country, reponding to demands for policing reforms, are reconsidering the use of school resource officers (SROs).

Florida in particular has rapidly increased the number of police patrolling its school hallways in the last two years. After the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, the state legislature passed a law requiring every K–12 school in the state to have a police officer or armed guardian. The law more than doubled the number of SROs in Florida schools. The majority of those new hires were assigned to elementary schools.

Florida has also been the site of several recent viral videos of small children being arrested. Last month, body camera footage emerged showing officers in Key West, Florida, trying and failing to handcuff an eight-year-old boy, whose wrists were too small for the cuffs. An Orlando SRO made headlines last September when he arrested a six-year-old girl. 

As Reason reported in June, civil liberties groups and disability advocates have been warning that the hiring surge has led to a disturbing number of arrests of children. The new study bears out at least some of their concerns. It found that the presence of SROs “predicted greater numbers of behavioral incidents being reported to law enforcement, particularly for less severe infractions and among middle schoolers.” While overall youth arrests in the state declined by 12 percent, the number of youth arrests at school increased 8 percent.

The study reported that police arrested elementary-aged children 345 times during the 2018–2019 school year. It also found four times as many incidents of physical restraint in 2018–2019 as there were in the previous year.

Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have long contended that SROs contribute to the “school-to-prison pipeline” and lead to more arrests and harsher discipline, especially against minority students and students with disabilities. The study found that the increase in arrests was mostly attributable to increases in arrests of white students, while arrests of black students continued to decrease, though blacks are still disproportionately represented among student arrests.

The study’s conclusions broadly track with recent findings by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat, who studied several dozen middle and high schools in California and found that that increasing the number of SROs led to both immediate and persistent increases in the number of drug and weapon offenses and the number of suspensions and expulsions of students.

The SPLC and ACLU are calling on the state to repeal the 2018 law mandating SROs in every school.

“Florida is failing to meet the needs of its students,” Michelle Morton of the Florida ACLU said in a press release. “The security measures implemented by our state due to the fear of mass shootings have created school environments that are not conducive to learning.”

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“YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” is a cry you hear incessantly at protests in Portland, Oregon, always shouted at close range to your face by after-dark demonstrators. You can assert that, yes, you can film; you can point out that they themselves are filming incessantly; you can push their hands away from covering your phone; you can have your phone record them stealing your phone—all of these things have happened to me—and none will have any impact on their contention that “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM” and its occasional variation, “PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!”

I cannot say who came up with these anti-camera battle cries. But it’s easy to understand why protesters use them: to shape the narrative the country sees about the protests. And that narrative, in my estimation after many weeks covering street clashes in a city where I lived for 15 years, is 90 percent bullshit.

I wondered, the first time I attended the protests at the federal building back in July, who all these young people with PRESS emblazoned on their jackets or helmets were. I asked one such guy who he worked for.

“Independent Press Corps,” he told me. As it turned out, dozens of other young PRESS people happened to work for the same outfit, which I at first assumed was a fancy way of saying “I want to report stuff and stream it on my Instagram.”

This turned out to be naive. The IPC is an organized group in league with the activists, and it is usually their footage you see streamed online and recycled on the news: mostly innocent protestors being harassed and beaten by police.

The police indeed have tear-gassed and beaten people; there has been brutality. It is equally true, but featured less prominently in the news coverage, that activists spend hours every night menacing and setting fires to police stations and other institutions: City Hall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters, and last week Mayor Ted Wheeler’s apartment building (until he agreed to move out). With the PRESS crew recording part of the story and the “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” crew harassing other journalists, the result can be a misleading view of the protests. It’s a revolution via the cellphone video they allow you to see.

The IPC and other documentarians who are deemed sympathetic to the activists’ cause agree on certain principles. You do not show activists’ faces. You only show activists in a defensive position: responding to, rather than inciting, violence. You enhance what can appear to be police brutality, e.g., activists defending themselves with homemade shields, often bearing the anarchist circle-A, against police. The shields are largely ineffective for personal defense, but extremely effective for optics, and that’s precisely the point. If a member of the IPC is arrested, he or she will be protected.

Reporters seen as not sufficiently sympathetic to the cause—which is defined by the Ten Demands for Justice, and includes most notably the abolition of the police—will be followed, be harassed, have their notes photographed and their phones blocked or stolen. (All these things have happened to me in the last month. A photographer friend has been repeatedly doxxed and placed on a list of “enemies.”)

If you forget any of these rules, you can just refer to the handy Google spreadsheet of approved journalists and suggested behavior. The spreadsheet contains names, Twitter handles, and ways to financially support the journos who make the cut.

Note who the people on this activist-approved list are writing for. Sergio Olmos, who made IPC’s list of approved journalists, is a man on the ground for The New York Times. Freelancer Robert Evans, whose early tick-tock of events on the ground I have admired, tweeted on July 19 that the burning of the Portland Police Association was “the single biggest win so far.” When questioned why, he replied that protesters have been “tear-gassed and beaten” for weeks. Unmentioned in our conversation or his tweets: Protesters have been setting fire to the building for hours on many nights throughout the summer before a police response materializes. These protester-approved journalists are producing much of the news you see about the protests, with an assist from the national press. Kate Shepherd isn’t on the list, but she was previously a sympathetic reporter for local Portland media, and she is now filing such stories for The Washington Post, with headlines like “Portland police arrest a hate crime survivor and Wall of Moms organizer in crackdown.”

Meanwhile, Portland has become a political football, with Donald Trump essentially running his presidential campaign against Democratic mayors like Wheeler, tweeting that “Portland will never recover with a fool for a Mayor. He tried mixing with the Agitators and Anarchists and they mocked him. He would like to blame me and the Federal Government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. Courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.” Both sides are getting their information through purposely bottlenecked media reports, and the results are predictably distorted and dangerous.

It will not be quiet in Portland this weekend. Last night self-professed antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl was shot to death as the authorities tried to arrest him for killing Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson. (Reinoehl claimed in an interview with Vice that it was self-defense.) It’s going to be 100 degrees in the city. As we move into what is shaping to be the hottest weekend thus far in Portland, it’s important to understand how the coverage you are getting is being shaped, and by whom.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

In 2018, the town of Gibraltar, Wisc., banned food trucks after a family started vending on their own property outside their store. After IJ challenged that ban, the town replaced it with a new ordinance prohibiting food trucks from areas where brick-and-mortar restaurants operate. Unconstitutional economic protectionism? This week we got our answer: “I can reach no other conclusion than these ordinances look, swim, and quack like efforts to unfairly discriminate against mobile food establishments in favor of brick-and-mortar restaurants in downtown Fish Creek in the Town of Gibraltar.” Click here to learn more.

• Congress has the inherent power to issue subpoenas, but, says two-thirds of this D.C. Circuit panel, it has failed to pass a law giving it the power to have courts enforce those subpoenas, meaning the House of Representatives cannot sue to enforce its subpoena of former White House Counsel Don McGahn.
• The District Attorney of Middlesex County, Mass., may have lost her challenge to the federal government’s practice of arresting noncitizens in state courthouses. But she has joined the surprisingly lengthy roster of litigants whom First Circuit Judge Selya has compared to or contrasted with Rumpelstiltskin. So there’s that. 
• Members of New York’s 10th Street Gang, seeking revenge on rival 7th Street Gang, gather guns and go looking for trouble. Shooting breaks out and two innocent bystanders are killed. A member of the gang—convicted of aiding and abetting the murders by lending a .44 caliber handgun to another member—challenges the sufficiency of the evidence against him. Second Circuit: And he wins. It’s undisputed that the .44 malfunctioned and didn’t fire. No actus reus, no crime.
• Syrian man is involuntarily conscripted into the militia, where he undergoes basic training, performs guard duty, and does errands for superior officers. He flees to the United States, where he seeks asylum on the ground that he will be tortured if returned to Syria. Feds: We consider the government militia you were forced to join to be a terrorist organization, and we don’t grant asylum to terrorists. Third Circuit: That’s right. (Fortunately, he received a more restrictive “deferral of removal” under the Convention Against Torture.) 
• Does New Jersey’s ban on large capacity magazines violate the Second Amendment? Third Circuit: We already decided that it does not when we denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, so we’re bound by the law of the case and cannot reconsider. Dissent: Prudential doctrines shouldn’t trump constitutional rights.
• Third Circuit: Pennsylvania man, who is African American, provides a ride home to a woman who states she is afraid of her drunk, abusive boyfriend. And with good reason. Upon arrival, the boyfriend hurls racial epithets, brandishes a knife, threatens to “chop up” the girlfriend, and jumps on the hood of the moving car. The terrified driver calls 911, who instruct him to convey his interior/exterior passengers to a police checkpoint. Naturally, the driver is arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, despite passing a breathalyzer test, and is charged with multiple…y’know what, just grab a stiff drink and read the case.
• Does keeping a death-row inmate in solitary confinement for 33 years violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment? Third Circuit: Going forward? Yes. But qualified immunity in this case.
• Third Circuit: Porno Producers Partially Prevail in Push to Prevent Paperwork Penalties 
• Here’s one for the procedure nerds: Partnership sues several pharmaceutical companies as a qui tam relator under the False Claims Act. When one of the partners leaves, that change amounts to the creation of a new partnership. Is the lawsuit now barred by the Act’s first-to-file bar, which prevents a new person from intervening or bringing a related action? Third Circuit: Clever, but no.
• Salvadoran man seeks asylum, alleging that if he is sent back to El Salvador, he will be killed by MS-13 because his sister refused to date a local gang leader. Fourth Circuit: “Like offensive linemen on a football team, standards of review are not glamorous or exciting. But that does not mean they are unimportant.” And under the “substantial evidence” standard, this guy is hosed. Dissent: With their “nonsensical” and “cursory” analysis below, “the agencies left their blind side wide open.”
• The City of Austin allows digitized billboards for “on-premises signs,” i.e., signs that advertise stuff at the locale of the sign, but prohibits digitization of “off-premises signs.” Is this a content-based distinction that violates the First Amendment? Fifth Circuit: It is, notwithstanding Justice Alito’s suggestion in Reed v. Town of Gilbert that such distinctions are content neutral. 
• Fifth Circuit: “The United States prosecuted and convicted Thaddeus Beaulieu for felony criminal contempt. The Government concedes that it committed prosecutorial misconduct but asks us to affirm Beaulieu’s conviction anyway. We refuse and instead vacate the judgment.”
• Maximum Security finished first at the 145th running of the Kentucky Derby, but his owners came home without the $1.5 million prize. Racing stewards disqualified the horse for interference. Sixth Circuit: Although the racing stewards are appointed by a government agency, we need not decide whether the procedures they applied comported with due process. The owners had no protected property interest in a prize they had not yet won.
• When an interaction between Black Hebrew Israelites, a Native American activist, and a group of high school students became the story of the hour, Representative Debra Haaland and Senator Elizabeth Warren Fired off some tweets. Almost two years later, the Sixth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the students’ defamation claims. Because the Congresswomen tweeted their tweets in the course of their government employment, they are protected by sovereign immunity.
• There is no dispute that the defendant—a Catholic school—would be protected from suit by the First Amendment if it had simply fired the plaintiff because of his sexual orientation. But does the First Amendment bar the plaintiff’s claim that the school subjected him to a hostile working environment? No, holds the Seventh Circuit, reasoning that religious employers can control their employees through hiring and firing decisions and need not subject them to abuse. 
• Tennessee man, unhappy to discover the Red Cloud Indian School is Catholic, posts a video to YouTube (and sends it to a school administrator) showing him taking a large, machete-like knife to the throat of a stuffed frog and saying he was coming to clean house. He then packs his truck with a machete, handgun, and a 5-foot-long samurai sword and drives the 1,000 miles to the South Dakota school. He’s arrested in the parking lot, convicted of a weapons offense. Sentencing guidelines say 18–24 months; he’s sentenced to 60 months. Eighth Circuit: Which is fine. 
• Pro tip from the Eighth Circuit: If you wish to appeal a two-year injunction enforcing a non-compete clause, be sure to try to stay the order so your case doesn’t become moot while your appeal is pending.
• Allegation: TSA screener at Minneapolis–St. Paul airport manhandles man on crutches, causing him to fall and get injured. Can the man sue for battery and negligence? Eighth Circuit (over a dissent): Yes. TSA screening personnel qualify as “investigative or law enforcement officers” under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which means no sovereign immunity and the man’s suit can go forward. (Circuit split watch: The en banc Third Circuit agrees, the Eleventh Circuit disagrees.)
• Four men are convicted of sending $10k to a Somali terrorist group. The feds had tapped one of the men’s phones pursuant to a warrant that relied on info from an NSA program collecting phone metadata in bulk (a program Edward Snowden made public and the NSA no longer has authority to use). Ninth Circuit: There are significant Fourth Amendment concerns here, and the bulk metadata collection violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But we won’t suppress the evidence, and we will affirm the convictions.
• Apple retail-store employees must undergo exit searches at the end of their shifts, which usually take 5–20 minutes to wait for and undergo. Which is time they must be paid for, according to the Ninth Circuit. 
• Parents of Hindu children in the California public schools claim that the 6th and 7th grade curricula discriminate against Hinduism. For example, they refer to a sacred text as an important piece of literature in Ancient India and describe Hinduism as a “culture that emerged as a belief system.” Ninth Circuit: The materials “reflect careful crafting … to achieve a balanced portrayal of different world religions.” No constitutional violations here.
• Do speakers have a right to speak from traffic medians? Tenth Circuit: Yes! Concurrence: But maybe not if the median is really narrow.
• University officials: Sure, the plaintiff alleges that we falsely ginned up charges that got him indicted for racketeering, but those charges were dismissed as time barred. He can only sue for malicious prosecution if he beat the charges on the merits! Eleventh Circuit: No, we’re pretty sure he can sue for malicious prosecution anyway.
• Two-thirds of this Eleventh Circuit panel agrees that the Eighth Amendment allows prison officials to take into account the fact that a new Hepatitis C treatment is “really expensive” when deciding whether all prisoners with Hep C will get it immediately. 
• Can the son of the former Prime Minister of Albania show a book’s author and publisher had actual malice in depicting him as connected to the “Albanian mafia” as part of a wild story of gun-running later made into a Jonah Hill movie? No way (or, as the Albanians say, jo aspak), says the Eleventh Circuit, in part because of “the many prior published reports” making similar allegations. 
• An Alabama man’s attempt to bring a stray dog to a shelter without showing anyone his ID turns into a melee with police officers, multiple tasings, and a final, surprise gunshot. A “gothic story,” says the Eleventh Circuit, in which qualified immunity is unwarranted.
• And in cutting-edge mandamus news, the D.C. Circuit finds that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (though not her aide Cheryl Mills) is entitled to a writ of mandamus to prevent her deposition in connection with a FOIA case and (sitting en banc) that former National Security Advisor is not entitled to a writ preventing the district court from holding a hearing about the government’s motion to dismiss his prosecution.
• And in en banc news, the Tenth Circuit has voted to rehear its earlier ruling upholding a federal rule defining bump stocks as illegal “machine guns.” The Ninth Circuit, however, will not reconsider its decision requiring a warrant for most forensic searches of a phone at the border. Six judges dissent, warning that this “makes our borders far more porous and far less safe.”

Friends, earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court granted IJ a victory in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, holding that states cannot disqualify private schools from a state subsidy program solely because they are religious. This week, IJ filed a new case on behalf of Dennis and Cathy Griffin against the state of New Hampshire, which prohibits so-called “tuitioning towns”—towns that are too small to operate their own schools and instead pay student tuition at nearby private or public schools—from providing assistance to families that wish to send their kids to religious schools. Learn more here.

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