Tag: news

Chris Howard, 23, was booked into the Gwinnett County Jail in February 2017 after testing positive for marijuana while on probation for a drunk driving arrest. According to a local news report, he had shared a marijuana cookie with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.

On February 15, Howard had a seizure and went into convulsions while in a holding cell. Surveillance video shows several jail deputies forcefully holding Howard down. The deputies subsequently claimed that Howard was being “aggressive,” something I couldn’t see in any of the surveillance footage that has been released, all of which shows Howard on the ground.

Eventually, Howard was removed from the holding tank but rather than being brought someplace to receive medical treatment, he’s put in a separate jail cell and left there for at least 30 minutes. Surveillance footage from the cell shows Howard, not raging or acting aggressive, writhing around on the floor in apparent pain and occasionally managing to get to his knees and beat on the door in an attempt to get somebody to help him.

In the video, Howard is finally removed from the cell, but according to the lawsuit, deputies still didn’t get Howard medical care because jail policy required him to be in a jail uniform before he could see a facility care provider. Howard hadn’t yet been processed, so there was another delay where they had to change Howard’s clothes. He was so weak at this point that two deputies needed to assist him.

By the time deputies got Howard to the medical facility within the jail, his condition had deteriorated to the point that medical staff told them Howard needed to go to the hospital. “Y’all brought a dead man,” one member of the medical team told the deputies, the lawsuit claims.

Howard was taken to Gwinnett Medical Center, where doctors determined he had gone into cardiac arrest. He never regained consciousness, and died in the hospital.

All of this over a marijuana cookie.

Howard’s treatment at the jail is not an anomaly, say many people who have spent time there. In December, a class-action lawsuit was filed representing 75 people who have been detained at Gwinnett County Jail, accusing the jail’s “Rapid Response Team” (the same team who responded to Howard’s seizure) of excessive force and violating the rights of detainees.

The jail has been subject to other lawsuits and investigations because of the Rapid Response Team. A federal grand jury has requested records about the use of force there. A deputy resigned last year and was charged with battery after punching a mentally ill inmate several times in the head.

This is not a maximum security facility housing the hardest of the hardcore. It’s a regular county jail, and many of its occupants have not been convicted. The Netflix documentary First and Last, which I reviewed here in October, tracked the lives of several people who were either being processed into the jail or leaving the jail after serving short sentences. Like Howard, many people in the jail are there for minor drug-related probation violations. There were several people in the documentary who were serving sentences in jail entirely for marijuana use. As I wrote in my review, First and Last does a terrible job of addressing jail abuses, and in six episodes, does not once reference the troubled Rapid Response Team.

The surveillance videos are difficult to watch, even without any sound. That this was the end for Chris Howard is a tragedy, and the result of our foolishly ruthless drug war.

You can read the lawsuit here.

Philadelphia’s innovative program to provide medication-assisted therapy (MAT) to prisoners with opioid use disorder has hit a snag, and an official at the Philadelphia Department of Prisons says federal limits on how many patients any one doctor can help are partially to blame.

Under federal law, doctors can concurrently treat only a limited number of patients using the drug buprenorphine, a partial opioid agonist that scratches the itch (so to speak) brought on by opioid cravings. The drug’s effects are much milder than those of prescription painkillers and heroin, which allows patients to manage their addiction or dependence without being incapacitated.

The Philadelphia County Jail is currently struggling to provide buprenorphine to all the patients who need it because physician John Lepley, who has a federal waiver that allows him to treat 250 patients concurrently, recently left the facility for another job. None of the jail’s remaining buprenorphine providers can prescribe as much as Lepley. According to Nina Feldman at WHYY,

The prison employs nine doctors with 30-patient limits, and one with 100. But because of the way the doctors’ schedules are organized and how they are distributed throughout the facility, [Chief of Medical Operations Bruce Herdman] said he doesn’t have enough doctors to meet the demand of his patients.

To treat just 30 concurrent patients, qualified providers must complete eight hours of training and receive an additional Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) prescribing number. Even after completing that training, providers must wait a full year to apply for federal permission to treat 100 patients concurrently. According to Herdman, most of his team won’t be eligible to treat 100 patients concurrently until June 2020.

In recent years, harm reduction advocates have suggested that the training requirement and patient caps endanger patients by discouraging provider participation. Herdman agrees, telling Feldman, “That limitation on prescribing is really weird. A regular physician can prescribe all sorts of other narcotics without additional training. But for buprenorphine, they want additional training.”

I am skeptical that the time commitment alone can explain the massive gap between the number of providers who could get the waiver and the much smaller number of those who do. Eight hours worth of webinars and modules certainly do not explain why some number of waivered physicians—more than 50 percent, according to one survey—do not treat the maximum number of patients allowable by law.

In 2018, researchers pointed to a host of reasons why doctors do not obtain, or make maximum use of, the buprenorphine waiver: a small number of doctors don’t think medication-assisted therapy is effective, while others don’t find treating heroin addicts to be lucrative enough (doctors who do make it lucrative run the risk of going to prison). But the biggest issue is that the relative paucity of waivered doctors means every doctor with a waiver is being asked to serve far too many patients.

Among waivered doctors who are not treating as many buprenorphine patients as the law allows, 36 percent told researchers they lacked capacity; 10 percent were worried about diversion (and likely the DEA’s response to said diversion); and 8.8 percent did not want to be inundated with buprenorphine requests. The DEA and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration do not control reimbursement rates for MAT treatment, but they do jointly oversee the waiver program and are responsible for the distorted incentives that have created a massive gap between need and capacity.

We must also consider the fact that applying for permission to prescribe buprenorphine puts physicians under intense DEA scrutiny, and that the DEA is known to raid the homes and offices of doctors who prescribe the drug, sometimes for reasons that don’t hold up in court. While there are doctors who do hand out Suboxone in a way one might charitably describe as uncareful, the drug is significantly safer than methadone, which is itself significantly safer than illicit fentanyl and heroin. Put another way: if it were as easy for Philadelphians to obtain pharmaceutical buprenorphine as it is for them to obtain illicit fentanyl, there would likely be fewer Philadelphians in the county jail and fewer still in the ground.

If you haven’t already, please read Jacob Sullum’s recent Reason feature on the deadly consequences of the feds micromanaging prescribers, and my interview with Christopher Moraff on Philadelphia’s fentanyl problem.

Wisconsin promised more than $3 billion in subsidies to Foxconn, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of smart phone parts, to lure the tech giant to suburban Milwaukee. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker promised that “working families would reap the benefits” of the giveaway, and President Donald Trump flew to Wisconsin last June to participate in a ceremonial groundbreaking for the plant. The project was an example of “reclaiming our country’s proud manufacturing legacy,” Trump said.

Now? There may not be a Foxconn factory built in Wisconsin at all.

“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory,” Louis Woo, a high ranking assistant to Terry Gou, Foxconn’s chairman, tells Reuters. Instead of a manufacturing facility that was supposed to create 13,000 blue collar jobs, Foxconn is reconsidering its plans and is likely to turn the Wisconsin facility into a “technology hub” that would include research facilities and the production of specialized tech products. The jobs created are likely to be “knowledge” positions—in other words, not blue collar jobs—Woo tells Reuters. That’s something Foxconn had already acknowledged was likely in November when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was planning to import workers from Taiwan and China to meet its hiring goals in Wisconsin.

Foxconn is already lagging well behind its job-creation promises. While the company originally promised to create 5,200 jobs by the end of 2020, Foxconn said earlier this month that the actual number would be about 1,000.

Woo says that Foxconn is shifting its strategy because the company can’t make television screens in the U.S. and remain competitive in the global marketplace. But if that’s true now, then it was certainly true a few years ago when the company was making promises to Walker’s government—and when Walker was promising that “LCD displays will be made in America for the very first time, right here in the state of Wisconsin.”

As TechCrunch explains, the problems with the Foxconn factory were not difficult to see. Building television screens with relatively expensive American labor was always a major question mark, and it was never clear how Foxconn planned to operate a huge manufacturing center “in what was essentially the middle of nowhere, without the sort of dense ecosystem of suppliers and sub-suppliers required for making a major factory hum.”

There were plenty of warning signs that Foxconn would have trouble following through with those promises. Foxconn previously walked away from a plan to invest $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs in India, and similar deals in Vietnam and Brazil. Even in America, there was evidence that Foxconn should not be trusted to make good. A planned manufacturing facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was supposed to employ 500 people and come with a $30 million investment, but it never materialized.

Even if everything had worked out, the Foxconn giveaway was a bad idea. Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a number-crunching agency similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office, calculated that it would take the state until 2043 to recoup the $3 billion handout, which was the largest such subsidy in Wisconsin history. Even if all 13,000 promised jobs went to Wisconsinites, the tab would be more than $230,000 per job created.

Another lousy part of the deal is the fact that eminent domain will be used to remove residents of Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, where the new facility is to be built. As Reason has previously reported, Foxconn will receive more than 1,000 acres of land for free, the logic being that the subsequent increase in land value will pay for itself eventually in the form of higher property taxes.

It was always pretty unlikely that the Foxconn deal with live up to the promises made by the company, Walker, and Trump. That it is failing so spectacularly, and so early, should serve as a stern warning to the next politician who considers a similar scheme.

Myths about sex trafficking at the Super Bowl are rearing their heads once again.

Earlier in the week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D—N.Y.) tweeted her desire to “scrap” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after comedian Mohanad Elshieky, who is in the U.S. legally, was detained by border patrol agents while traveling between gigs. Washington Examiner contributor and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) supervisor Jason Piccolo responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet by declaring that the congresswoman wanted to abolish “the agency fighting the illegal sex trade at the Super Bowl.”

“ICE will be at the forefront of investigating the illicit sex trade at Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta this week. Yes, the same ICE synonymous with immigration enforcement will deploy teams of special agents to combat the sex trade in Georgia,” Piccolo writes. His argument relies on a tired narrative to justify unnecessary surveillance.

As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported last Super Bowl, fact-checks have found little support for the assertion that the Super Bowl doubles as a major sex trafficking event. In fact, sources from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women to The New York Times and Sports Illustrated have found little evidence supporting the supposed link between major events and an increase in sex trafficking.

Still, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies continue to ignore the facts in favor of their own narratives. Last year, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unveiled a web campaign and a hashtag to show its commitment to fighting the mythical problem.

Brown also noted the importance of nuance, as consensual sex work by adults is ofte mischaracterized as sex trafficking. Prior to the 2018 Super Bowl, Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Sgt. Grant Snyder observed that an increase in visitors to the city could lead to “a sizable increase in demand” in paid sexual encounters. However, the demand was primarily for consenting sex workers. Snyder also noted that neither research nor past law enforcement experience supported beliefs of a supposed influx of sex-traffickers in Minneapolis.

Even if ICE was truly on the front lines of such an issue, it does not take away from Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that the agency is “totally broken.” Audits of the various immigration agencies within DHS found mismanagement, misconduct, and poor oversight predating this administration and the one before it.

Enjoy the Super Bowl!

On Monday evening in Houston, a dozen armed men broke into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, a middle-aged couple who had lived in the house at 7800 Harding Street for at least two decades. The first man through the door, who was armed with a shotgun, used it to kill one of the couple’s dogs. Tuttle responded to the home invasion by grabbing a revolver and shooting the man with the shotgun, who collapsed on a sofa in the living room. As Nicholas tried to disarm the intruder, his accomplices shot her. Tuttle returned fire, and by the end of the shootout he and his wife were both dead. Four of the assailants were hit by gunfire, while a fifth injured his knee.

Many people will be reassured to learn that the men who stormed into the house on Harding Street were police officers serving a drug warrant. I am not one of those people. Let me explain why, starting with some fishy aspects of the official police account and ending with the immorality of responding to peaceful, voluntary transactions with violence.

At a press conference on Monday night, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo initially said the address of the raid, which began around 5 p.m., was 7800 Hardy Street, which is about 12 miles from the actual location. Acevedo said “Hardy Street” three times, and he seemed to be reading the address from a stack of papers. By the end of the press conference, he was saying “Harding Street.” Which address was on the search warrant? I am waiting to hear back from the Houston Police Department on that point.

Acevedo said the the plainclothes narcotics cops serving the warrant “announced themselves as Houston police officers while simultaneously breaching the front door.” Meanwhile, uniformed officers waiting in or near a “marked police unit” outside the house “hit the siren and hit the lights so they knew that police officers were there.” Maybe that’s true, but it is also possible that Tuttle did not hear the siren or did not connect it to the men bursting into his house. It is also plausible that the officers’ announcement, which by Acevedo’s account happened at the same moment that they were knocking down the door, did not register amid the noise, confusion, and shotgun blasts.

“Immediately upon breaching the door,” Acevedo said on Monday, “the officers came under fire from one or two suspects inside the house.” But as he revealed during a press conference the next day, it was actually the police who fired first, killing what he described as “a very large pit bull that charged at that officer.”

When a reporter asked whether Tuttle and Nicholas knew they were being raided by police, Acevedo said “a lot of drug houses have surveillance systems that are better than what businesses use,” because “they want to know when the cops are coming.” Contrary to the implication, KHOU, the CBS affiliate in Houston, reports that the house had no security cameras, although “a house next door to the Tuttles’ home does have surveillance video,” and “police took that footage for evidence.” Acevedo said the officers involved in the raid were not wearing body cameras.

According to Acevedo, the investigation that led to the raid “began because a neighbor had the courage to say, ‘We’re not going to put up [with this]. We think that they’re dealing dope out of this house.'” That tip was passed on to the narcotics division, which “was able to actually determine” that “street-level narcotics dealing” of “black-tar heroin” was happening at the house. Acevedo said police “actually bought black-tar heroin at that location,” although “we didn’t find any” on Monday. Instead the search discovered an unspecified amount of marijuana, along with a white powder that police thought might be cocaine, or maybe fentanyl.

“The neighborhood thanked our officers because it was a drug house,” Acevedo said. “They described it as a problem location.” But according to the Houston Chronicle, Tuttle and Nicholas, who had been married 21 years, “kept to themselves” and “didn’t seem like troublemakers.” Tuttle’s sister, Elizabeth Ferrari, told the paper she talked to her brother, a disabled 59-year-old Navy veteran, last week, and he seemed fine. She had never seen any indication that he and his wife were involved with drugs. “I don’t buy it all,” Ferrari said. “Not one hot minute.” Other relatives and friends “offered similar disbelief.”

KHOU reports that “Tuttle apparently had no criminal record,” while the only mark against Nicholas was a misdemeanor “theft by check” charge involving $145. After she paid restitution, the charge was dismissed. One neighbor told KHOU “they never had company,” while another said, “There was never traffic at that house. Never.” Neighbors interviewed by the station said “they never noticed suspicious activity.”

Maybe other neighbors had different impressions. Maybe Tuttle and Nicholas really were selling heroin out of their house. But if so, they were not doing anything that justified the government’s violence. Since exchanging intoxicants for money violates no one’s rights, the police were clearly the aggressors in this situation.

Acevedo tried to disguise that reality by arguing that the illegal drug trade drives violence in Houston. “While people think drugs is a harmless crime,” he said on Monday, “the industry is not harmless, and a lot of the shootings we see in our city are drug rips or people fighting over gang territory.” But crimes like those are not inherent to the drug business; they are a consequence of prohibition, which creates a black market in which participants cannot rely on legal protection and tend to resolve disputes with violence.

Acevedo used the deadly drug raid as a pretext to push gun control, saying politicians should enact policies to curtail “the proliferation of firearms in the hands of people that have no business having guns.” The only specific example he mentioned was requiring background checks for anyone who buys a firearm at a gun show, whether or not the seller is a federally licensed dealer. But if the local press reports are correct, neither Tuttle nor Nicholas had a criminal record that would have disqualified them from owning guns.

In addition to the .357 Magnum revolver that Tuttle reportedly fired, police found two 12-gauge shotguns, a 20-gauge shotgun, a .22 rifle, and a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle. That’s not a lot of guns for Texas, and there is nothing about this collection that suggests criminally violent intent. The fact that Tuttle used his revolver in self-defense during a home invasion hardly proves he was a public menace.

Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, seized on the occasion to condemn people who criticize cops. “We are sick and tired of having targets on our back,” he said on Monday night. “We are sick and tired of having dirtbags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and protect our families. Enough is enough. And if you’re the ones that are out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, well, just know we’ve all got your number now, and we’re going to be keeping track of all y’all, and we’re going to be making sure we’re going to be holding you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.”

Tuttle did not go looking for cops to shoot. He was responding to a violent attack by men he may not even have recognized as police officers, men who knocked his door in, repeatedly fired a shotgun, killed his dog, and fatally shot his wife. If police officers don’t want to be portrayed as the enemy, they should stop acting like the enemy.