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The Society. Available now on Netflix.

When the high school kids in the upscale New England town of West Ham head off on a field trip to a national park, it gets canceled halfway to the destination. When they arrive back home in the middle of the night, the town is empty. And, deprived of adult supervision for a full 10 minutes, the lot of them go all Lord of the Flies: Grocery store potato-chip aisle looting! Peeing on walls! Water drunk right from the faucet! “Fuck” used as past perfect progressive! Teenagers quoting Christopher Durang plays! Poor Gen Z teens. They can’t even go feral worth a damn.

I’m as happy as the next Baby Boomer to see an entire generation younger than mine witheringly dismissed as fools with the flick of an executive producer’s cigarette holder. But can you really build an entire television show around a cri de coeur that today’s teenagers, left to their own devices, would mix Spam with jalapenos?

It is the apparent conviction of The Society‘s creator-writer Christopher Keyser, whose eclectic resume includes L.A. Law, Party of Five and Tyrant, that you can, and he’s doing his level best to prove it.

The Society contains not a single interesting character or plot line. Its young cast is so unmemorable that it’s impossible to recall which one is which. Is that girl the dancer with self-esteem issues or the one with the drunk mom? Is that the nice deaf boy or his crazy brother? And does it matter?

Spoiler alert: No. The kids spend their time either setting up elaborate motorized games of tag or embarking on truly impossible projects. (One goes to the now-abandoned town hospital’s library to teach himself how to perform heart surgery on the hot student body president, who needs a bypass. Or maybe it was the girl who’s the school’s social queen bee?)

Either way, they show a remarkable indifference to their situation, or even the possible clues about what led to it. That weird stench that hung over the town on the day they left, for instance. “There’s no reason to suspect that this stink poses any health hazard,” the mayor had said at a city council meeting, his eyes pinwheeling so madly that you knew it was going to be the rotting viscera of disemboweled zombies marching toward West Ham.

Then there was the Hebrew inscription that turned up on the school gym just before they left on the field trip: Mene mene tekel upharsin, “you’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Its most famous previous use as graffiti is in the Biblical book of Daniel, when it appears on the wall of the palace of the unrepentant tyrant Belshazzar shortly before he meets one of those inauspicious Old Testament fates. Are the kids caught up in some theological allegory?

Maybe so. “There’s nothing around here to do but fucking think,” complains one of them. OMG, they’re in teen Hell.

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What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to use more drugs in more settings?

No one is better situated to start that conversation than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a show that explores what sorts of drugs are available, how they work, and how we might best use them to fulfill our hopes and dreams. 

In one early episode, Morris confounds the conventional wisdom by telling “a positive story about PCP,” a drug that even legalizers typically have nothing good to say about. He visits with Timothy Wyllie, an artist and visionary who uses the drug as part of his creative process. In another, he travels to the Brazilian Amazon, where locals get high on a drug taken from frogs. In a third, he gains access to an abandoned laboratory in a volcano that was once central to the production of MDMA.

Morris also does laboratory work at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he and his collaborators create new drugs for testing and research trials. He sat down with Reason to talk how the drug war has warped the discussion about legal and illegal drugs and what the post-prohibition landscape will look like.

To watch a video version of this interview, go here.

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Yesterday federal prosecutors in California announced that they are charging John T. Earnest, the alleged perpetrator of last month’s shooting at a synagogue near San Diego, with 108 hate crimes in connection with that attack, which killed one person and injured three others. The 19-year-old Rancho Peñasquitos resident already faced murder and attempted murder charges under state law, but the Justice Department wants to make sure he also gets punished for his anti-Semitism.

The 108 charges include “obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs using a dangerous weapon” and “hate crimes in relation to the shooting in violation of the Mathew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California is alleging one count of each for each of the 54 people who were in the synagogue at the time of the attack. The FBI says Earnest also admitted setting fire to an Escondido mosque in March, which led to a 109th charge, for “damage to religious property by use of fire.”

The federal charges, which can be punished by life in prison or the death penalty, make it more likely that Earnest will be executed for his crimes. He might be eligible for the death penalty under California law as well, but Gov. Gavin Newsom recently imposed a moratorium on executions in that state.

As with Charleston mass murderer Dylann Roof, Charlottesville killer James Fields, and Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers, the evidence against Earnest will include the opinions he expressed before the attack. “After the shooting,” the DOJ press release says, “law enforcement investigators found a manifesto online bearing Earnest’s name. A copy of the manifesto was later found on Earnest’s laptop during the execution of a search warrant. In the manifesto, Earnest made many anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements. Specifically, Earnest referred to ‘Jews’ as a race, and he stated his only regret was that he did not kill more people.”

If Earnest had not written his anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim manifesto, it would be harder for prosecutors to prove that he targeted his victims because of their religion. Without that element, the federal hate crime charges would not apply, meaning he would be punished only under state law, probably by life in prison rather than the death penalty. It is therefore not far-fetched to say the manifesto could be the difference between life and death for Earnest, in which case he would effectively be punished for his abhorrent beliefs as well as his appalling actions.

“No one in this country should be subjected to unlawful violence, injury, or death for who they are or for their religious beliefs,” said Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Our actions today are inspired by our desire to achieve justice for all of the victims and their families.”

I’d go a bit further than Dreiband, since I believe no one in this country should be subjected to unlawful violence, injury, or death for any reason. When they are, state courts are fully capable of seeking “justice for all of the victims and their families.”

There is no constitutional justification for the federal government to get involved, and when it does the prospect of serial trials or multiple punishments for the same crime should trouble anyone who thinks the Framers were onto something when they wrote the Fifth Amendment’s ban on double jeopardy. Worse, the justification for all this duplicative effort is precisely to punish people for their bigoted beliefs, which are supposed to be protected by the First Amendment.

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The Oregon Supreme Court scored a victory for privacy rights yesterday, ruling that cops can’t paw through your garbage without first getting a warrant.

The decision came in response to the case of a Lebanon, Oregon, couple, Tracy Lien and Travis Wilverding. Convicted of unlawful delivery of meth and heroin—both felonies—they appealed on the grounds that crucial evidence had come from an illegal, warrantless search of their garbage.

Back in 2014, Lebanon law enforcement officers asked the local waste management company to collect the couple’s trash separately so police could search it. The company assented, and the cops found evidence in the garbage of illegal drug use, which was then used to obtain a search warrant for Lien and Wilderding’s home.

Both at trial and after their convictions, the couple argued that this warrantless search of their garbage violated the Oregon Constitution’s guarantee of privacy. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court agreed.

In its 6–1 decision, the Court rules that “privacy—freedom from government scrutiny—is a fundamental principle and value” protected by the state’s constitution. Furthermore, this privacy “is grounded in particular social contexts.” In other words, whether you’re safe from warrantless snooping comes down to how great an expectation of privacy you have. When it comes to your trash, the Oregon Supreme Court says, the expectation of privacy is pretty high.

“Most Oregonians would consider their garbage to be private and deem it highly improper for others—curious neighbors, ex-spouses, employers, opponents in a lawsuit, journalists, and government officials, to name a few—to take away their garbage bin and scrutinize its contents,” Justice Lynn Nakamoto writes for the majority.

Nakamoto’s opinion alludes to a classic 2002 article from the alternative Portland paper Willamette Week. In that story, reporters from the Willamette Week rummaged through the garbage of Portland’s mayor, police chief, and district attorney, all three of whom had defended dumpster diving as a valid form of evidence collection. The reporters turned up a number of incredibly private things, including a romantic note from the police chief to his wife.

When these reporters asked the officials about the things they’d found, most were less than pleased with what they saw as a violation of their privacy. That story, Nakamoto writes, reinforced just how private the contents of one’s garbage could be.

In 2007, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that once a sanitation company takes the garbage from the curb, it’s fair for police to paw through it. Thursday’s decision establishes a new standard: Police cannot ask the sanitation company to specifically set aside a specific household’s garbage to be searched later, after pickup, unless the cops first obtain a warrant.

Residents of the Beaver State can thus be a bit more confident that the contents of their bins will not come back to haunt them in criminal proceedings. So maybe it’s time to finally recycle that broken bong.

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What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to use more drugs in more settings?

No one is better situated to start that conversation than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a show that explores what sorts of drugs are available, how they work, and how we might best use them to fulfill our hopes and dreams. 

In one early episode, Morris confounds the conventional wisdom by telling “a positive story about PCP,” a drug that even legalizers typically have nothing good to say about. He visits with Timothy Wyllie, an artist and visionary who uses the drug as part of his creative process. In another, he travels to the Brazilian Amazon, where locals get high on a drug taken from frogs. In a third, he gains access to an abandoned laboratory in a volcano that was once central to the production of MDMA.

Morris also does laboratory work at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he and his collaborators create new drugs for testing and research trials. He sat down with Reason to talk how the drug war has warped the discussion about legal and illegal drugs and what the post-prohibition landscape will look like.

To listen to an audio podcast version of this interview, go here.

Edited by Mark McDaniel and Alexis Garcia. Cameras by Jim Epstein.

Photo credit: Everett Collection/Newscom

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