Tag: posts

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved a depression treatment derived from ketamine. A surgical anaesthetic-turned-party drug, ketamine has been enjoying a comeback this decade as an off-label treatment for clinically depressed patients who don’t respond to other therapies.

Esketamine, a product recently approved by the FDA, is the first antidepressant “in decades to work in a completely new way in the brain,” reports the Washington Post. “Older antidepressants target the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine or dopamine. Esketamine affects the receptor for a different brain chemical called glutamate.” More:

The spray acts within hours, rather than weeks or months as is typical for current antidepressants, and could offer a lifeline to about 5 million people in the United States with major depressive disorder who haven’t been helped by current treatments. That accounts for about one in three people with depression. […] Esketamine must be administered under medical supervision and can only be used in a certified doctor’s office or clinic, according to the conditions of the FDA approval. It is to be taken with an oral antidepressant.

Studies of ketamine-derived antidepressant treatments have been going on now for more than two decades, with the first study published in 2000. “Several studies now provide evidence of ketamine hydrochloride’s ability to produce rapid and robust antidepressant effects in patients with mood and anxiety disorders that were previously resistant to treatment,” noted an array of scientists in JAMA Psychiatry back in 2017.

An FDA advisory committee voted in February to recommend approval of Esketamine, with only two members of the committee voting no despite having more mixed evidence than with many previous antidepressants.

QUICK HITS

The NSA is getting a little blatant, no?

Trump again supports some troops in Syria. President Donald Trump may agree with Congress that the U.S. should keep “a small peacekeeping group of about 200” troops in Syria, despite the president’s previous promises of total withdrawal. “The White House announcement of a residual force apparently misstated the total — military officials have described plans for a force of about 400 — and did not specify its mission or duration,” reports the Washington Post.

Protecting and serving. The feds will look into last year’s killing of Stephon Clark by Sacramento police officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet, “who fired on Stephon Clark 20 times after mistaking his cellphone for a gun. Clark was struck at least seven times and died at the scene, later determined to be his grandmother’s backyard,” notes the Los Angeles Times. The local district attorney’s office announced on Saturday that it would not file charges.

Arpaio 2.0 falls out of conservative favor. The enduringly awful former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has been banned from Fox News and dumped by the super-PAC he previously served as the face of, according to The Daily Beast. Find Reason coverage of Clarke’s history here.

A free-market economist gloats. “In 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate exceeded Europe’s for the first time in decades. Apologists for European labor market regulation rejoiced, so I publicly bet that European unemployment would exceed U.S. unemployment over the next decade,” writes Bryan Caplan at The Library of Economics and Liberty. “Ten years later, the bet’s results are now in. The average U.S. unemployment rate during this decade was 6.8%. The EU-19 (the original EU-15 plus the Baltics and Slovakia) was 10.3%. … What does this all mean? To me, this bet is just a small extra piece of evidence in favor of the orthodox and blindingly obvious theory that Europe has higher unemployment than the U.S. because it has stricter labor market regulation. Flexible labor markets respond more sharply to shocks, but yield lower unemployment rates overall.”

Jonah Goldberg on CPAC as “pseudo-event.” The president’s two-hour speech capped off the infomercial-meets-mega-church-meets-comic-con vibe. It “was a virtuoso performance,” writes Goldberg. “But the overriding theme to the pudding was that there is only Trump. … In Trump’s sprawling address, which he began by literally hugging the American flag, he denounced and castigated any competing source of conservative authority, including several people who served in his own administration.”

Tune in to spark joy:

Delighted to have @kmanguward on the show today to talk about how @MarieKondo offers a worldview alternative to the likes of Tucker Carlson and Bernie Sanders! https://t.co/ESavz2yCrs

— Andrew Heaton (@MightyHeaton) March 4, 2019

The district attorney in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania used asset forfeiture revenues intended for drug enforcement to lease a 2016 Toyota Highlander, local newspaper LNP reports:

Since January 2016, the [Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman] has spent more than $21,000 in drug forfeiture proceeds, the largest source of revenue for the county’s taxpayer-supported Drug Task Force, to lease and maintain the sport-utility vehicle, records show.

Stedman has driven the SUV to Harrisburg at least 16 times since the spring of 2017, parking records show. His expense reports show he used the vehicle for district attorney business — attending legislative hearings, meeting with the governor’s staff and taking part in law conferences and training — that was not directly related to drug-law enforcement.

The report is yet another instance of local prosecutors, drug task forces, and law enforcement using asset forfeiture revenue as a slush fund. Under civil forfeiture laws, police can seize cash and property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is never convicted or charged with a crime.

In Macomb County, Michigan, county officials have launched an audit of the local prosecutor’s office after a successful public records lawsuit revealed more than $100,000 in questionable expenditures from the asset forfeiture fund, including using the funds for office furniture, birthdays, and retirement parties.

In Illinois, former La Salle County state’s attorney Brian Towne is facing criminal charges for misconduct and misappropriating public funds after he allegedly spent asset forfeiture funds on an SUV, WiFi for his home, and local youth sports programs. Town created his own highway interdiction unit and asset forfeiture fund for his office, an unusual move that the Illinois Supreme Court later ruled was illegal.

A 2016 Department of Justice Inspector General audit found that an Illinois police department spent more than $20,000 in equitable sharing funds on accessories for two lightly used motorcycles, including after-market exhaust pipes, decorative chrome, and heated handgrips.

And who could forget the Georgia sheriff who purchased a $90,000 Dodge Viper with forfeiture funds for the department’s DARE program? Or the other Georgia sheriff who bought a $70,000 Dodge Charger Hellcat (707 horsepower and tinted windows) with forfeiture funds?

Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime. However, civil liberties groups say there are far too few due process protections for property owners and far too many pervers profit incentives for police.

Many states also have lax reporting requirements for asset forfeiture, making it hard, if not impossible, to keep tabs on what police are seizing, from whom, and what they are spending the proceeds on.

Former Reason contributor Aaron Malin has been suing the pants off local Missouri drug task forces and prosecutors to get their asset forfeiture expenditures.

In 2017, Philadelphia Weekly, in collaboration with City & State PA, reported that the local D.A.’s office had spent $7 million in asset forfeiture funds over the last five years, including “at least one contract that appears to have violated city ethics guidelines—construction work awarded to a company linked to one of the DA’s own staff detectives.”

You will surely be surprised to read that, back in Lancaster, Stedman’s office is battling to hide more of its asset forfeiture expenditures. LNP continues:

The district attorney is fighting LNP’s request to review records of hundreds of thousands of dollars in seized drug-related property here every year. The state Office of Open Records has ordered Stedman to release those records, but the district attorney has appealed to the county Court of Common Pleas and argues the law shields expenditure records from disclosure.

Cory Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act, which he reintroduced last week, would rehabilitate the much-maligned plant by removing it from the federal government’s list of proscribed substances. The New Jersey senator’s bill also aims to rehabilitate the victims of that arbitrary ban, and in that respect it differs from most of the legalization measures that have been passed by states or proposed by members of Congress.

By and large, the lingering impact of laws that criminalized peaceful activities involving cannabis has been addressed as an afterthought, if at all. Booker’s bill, which he has made a conspicuous part of his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, therefore does a real service by raising the issue of what the government owes to people who were convicted of doing things that are no longer crimes, Jacob Sullum says.

View this article.

If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”

The stupidity of these journals, writes John Stossel, says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.

View this article.

The Broward County, Florida, sheriff’s office says it is investigating bodycam video showing a deputy using excessive force on a black man after calling him “boy.” The videos shows Deputy James Cady approaching Allen Floyd, who is sitting on the curb of a parking lot holding his 9-month-old son. Cady asks Floyd for his ID. When Floyd asked why, Cady raises his voice and again demands the ID. He then grabs Floyd, with his baby still in his arms, and places him against a car. The incident happened in 2017, but the sheriff’s office says it wasn’t aware of the video until alerted by the public defender’s office recently.

Markets are superb at turning what participants believe to be facts into prices. An intriguing new National Bureau of Economic Research study on market expectations about climate change looks at the price trends of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) weather futures contracts.

“The evidence shows that financial markets fully incorporate climate model projections,” conclude Columbia University’s agricultural and resource economist Wolfram Schlenker and sustainable development researcher Charles Taylor. “We find that the market has been accurately pricing in climate change, largely in line with global climate models, and that this began occurring at least since the early 2000s when the weather futures markets were formed.”

In 2001, the CME created a weather futures market enabling traders to hedge against losses stemming from fluctuations in the weather. As the researchers explain, the predominant contracts are based on heating and cooling degree days, which are indexed to 65 degrees Fahrenheit and encompass eight cities scattered across the United States. Cooling degree days (CDD) measure by how much and for how long temperatures exceed 65 degrees and thus require cooling. Conversely, heating degree days (HDD) measure by how much and for how long temperature fall below 65 degrees and thus require heating. The CDDs are traded for the months of May, June, July, August, and September, and the HDDs are traded for the months of November, December, January, February, and March. The payoff of these contracts is based on the cumulative difference between the daily temperature and 65 degrees Fahrenheit during a certain period of time, usually one month.

The notional value of weather futures and options traded on the CME in the last year adds up to more than $360 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Over the counter trading values are much larger.

To get a handle on what the weather futures market is saying about climate change trends and the accuracy of the climate model projections, Schlenker and Taylor compared the price trends, actual temperature trends at the eight cities to which HDD and CDD contracts are linked, and the projections made in 2006 by climate models aggregated at Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) archive. They also try to take into account the effects on prices of weather fluctuations that correlate with various ocean oscillation indices such as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation.

“We find that market expectations as measured by futures prices when weather outcomes are unknown have been trending at the same rate as temperature forecasts in the CMIP5 archive,” they write. “All find significant warming, i.e., an increase in cooling degree days in summer and a decrease in heating degree days in winter. Predictions of climate models have materialized, at least on average, validating model forecasts, and financial speculators with money on the line have fully internalized these forecasts.”

Basically, futures prices are reflecting the model predictions that there will be fewer cold days and more hot days as a result of man-made climate change.

In addition, the researchers report that “market expectations have been trending up smoothly in line with climate model predictions and do not seem to respond to year-to-year fluctuation in weather outcomes. In other words, market participants do not myopically update based on weather outcomes in the previous year, but proactively anticipate a warming climate.”

One interesting wrinkle is that contrary to model projections made back in 2006, recent February contracts for eastern U.S. cities indicate that traders believe that that month will see an increase in HDDs. This tracks new studies that suggest that a warming Arctic region will destablize the jet stream and result in more frigid polar vortex outbreaks during that month.

Of course, this is only one study, but economic liberals should consider seriously their conclusion with respect to what the weather market is saying about the reality of man-made climate change.

“There are also policy implications of our findings, especially since some politicians still question the existence and extent of climate change,” they observe. “Anyone doubting the observed warming trend can make a significant profit by betting against it in weather markets. However, the observed annual trend in futures prices shows that the supposedly-efficient financial markets agree that the climate is warming. At least so far, climate models have been very accurate in predicting the average warming trend that’s been observed across the US. When money is on the line, it is hard to find parties willing to bet against the scientific consensus.”

Scott Gottlieb, an internal medicine doctor and veteran of the federal health care bureaucracy, will leave the FDA next month, according to multiple reports.

Gottlieb’s tenure began with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) implying he was a shill for big pharma and asking him during his spring 2017 confirmation hearing if he thought the FDA “puts too high a priority on championing safety and unborn babies.” Two years later, his track record resembles that of his Democratic predecessors. As a regulator, he has employed both incentives and punishments, particularly with branded drug companies seeking to shut out generic competitors, opioid makers, nutritional supplement companies, and nicotine product manufacturers. When and wherever public health conflicted with personal freedom, Gottlieb advocated for the former.

If you’ve read Reason’s profile of him, you already know Gottlieb was never a free market radical, but a good-government reformer and bureaucratic streamliner who’s long believed that government has a role to play in both medical innovation as well as policing a massive universe of everyday products.

In April 2017, Gottlieb was confirmed 57 to 42, making him the first FDA commissioner in at least 20 years to be confirmed on a party line vote. But after taking it on the chin from Senate Democrats, Gottlieb’s most vocal critics since taking over at FDA have been libertarians and conservatives. When I watched him speak to a group of people at a December 2017 event hosted by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, with which Gottlieb has been affiliated since the early 2000s, the toughest questions came from people who’d once considered him one of their own. This particular exchange is seared in my memory:

When the floor opens for questions, one is about his plan to require cigarette manufacturers to lower the nicotine in their products to a “minimally or non-addictive level.”

“You want to take the nicotine out of cigarettes,” the audience member says, incredulous. “Do you also want to take the alcohol out of booze?”

“The FDA does not regulate alcohol products,” Gottlieb responds.

“Well, thank God for that,” the questioner says, before plopping into his seat.

Gottlieb aggressively sought to restrict access to nicotine products, in particularly vaping devices. He also renewed the federal government’s attempts to ban the herbal supplement kratom and pushed drugmakers to repackage the over-the-counter antidiarrheal drug loperamide, based on reports that opioid users took large doses of the drug in hopes of staving off the horrors of withdrawal. Again, the man never fashioned himself a libertarian.

Occasionally, however, he did things libertarians liked. In an era of ever more opaque government, Gottlieb was a chatterbox who personally explained many of the agency’s decisions both on Twitter and in blog posts on the FDA website. He called for more access to medication-assisted therapy (MAT) for people addicted to opioids, and he was a frequent critic of drug patent holders who engaged in anticompetitive practices. That the Department of Health and Human Services continues to over-regulate MAT drugs and drug companies continue to sabotage their competitors speaks more to the limited powers of any one bureaucrat than it does to Gottlieb’s commitment to changing those policies.

The Washington Post and Axios report that he’s leaving due to the strain of commuting from Connecticut, where his wife and children reside. While his announcement apparently came as a surprise to some of his colleagues and officials in the Trump White House, I’m not sure it would shock those who have worked with him in the past.

“He knows that you basically have two years to accomplish anything,” AEI’s Joseph Antos told me back in 2017. The two were colleagues during one of Gottlieb’s stints at the American Enterprise Institute. “Maybe in Scott’s case it will be longer than that, but whatever the length of time is, it’s very brief. You do all you can and then it’s somebody else’s turn.”

Hopefully the next person up has Gottlieb’s integrity, and not Trump’s.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who yesterday announced that he is seeking the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, may be best known nationally as the guy who opposed marijuana legalization in his state but ultimately decided it was not the disaster he feared it would be. If that does not seem like much to be excited about, neither does anything else in his background, accomplishments, or list of positions.

“I don’t think John has at all defined why he is running,” a Colorado political strategist told The New York Times. “There are very few people I know who wake up and want to go caucus to support a raging moderate.” That is the opinion of a “longtime friend,” so you can imagine how Democrats who do not have such warm feelings toward Hickenlooper are reacting.

Hickenlooper does have more executive experience than the other Democratic contenders—as a two-term governor, mayor of Denver for eight years, and cofounder of that city’s Wynkoop Brewing Company. “I’m running for president because I believe that not only can I beat Donald Trump, but that I am the person that can bring people together on the other side and actually get stuff done,” he said on ABC’s Good Morning America yesterday. “The division is keeping us from addressing big issues like climate change and the soaring costs of health care.”

In case you thought Hickenlooper was winging it, that is actually his campaign slogan: “It’s time for our nation to come together & get things done.” Hickenlooper’s vague appeal to consensus and technocratic competence is reminiscent of Ross Perot, but without the compelling quirkiness—although he does contend in a campaign video that he is well-prepared to take on Donald Trump because of his experience standing up to bullies who picked on him because he was “a skinny kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a funny last name.” Hickenlooper says “standing tall when it really matters is one of the things that really drives me.”

In addition to climate change and health care, Hickenlooper plans to stand tall on gun control. “We beat the NRA by enacting universal background checks and banning high-capacity magazines,” he brags. Those “universal background checks” are far from universal and cannot reasonably be expected to have much of an impact on mass shooters, who typically do not have criminal or psychiatric records that would disqualify them from buying guns, or on ordinary criminals, who can easily avoid background checks. And given how quickly magazines can be switched, Colorado’s 15-round limit on magazines is not likely to have a measurable impact on mass shootings, let alone more common forms of gun violence.

Those positions, in any case, do not distinguish Hickenlooper from his Democratic rivals. He sounds a bit more centrist than some of them do on health care (he has declined to endorse “Medicare for All”); on the environment (he is a former oil industry geologist who supported fracking in Colorado); and on trade (he supported the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership while opposing Trump’s tariffs).

Hickenlooper’s main selling point, I guess, is that he is more pragmatic than the other Democrats. “I’m running for president because we need dreamers in Washington, but we also need to get things done,” he says in the campaign video. “I’ve proved again and again that I can bring people together to produce the progressive change Washington has failed to deliver.”

Hickenlooper: He’ll get things done. Progressive things. Mostly. As long as Republicans agree. Come together.

Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump during 2018 cost the U.S. economy $6.9 billion last year—above and beyond the $12.3 billion paid by American consumers and importers to the federal government.

That’s the conclusion of a new economic analysis of the Trump trade war published this week by Centre for Economic Policy Research, a London-based think tank, by a trio of economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University, and Columbia University. The paper draws an important but sometimes ignored distinction between the cost of the tariffs as a form of taxation and the broader economic effects of raising barriers to trade. Americans are paying both those “seen” costs in the form of higher taxes, as well as the “unseen” spillover costs—known as “deadweight loss” in economist lingo—created by the tariffs.

By the end of last year, after ramping up tariffs over the course of several months, the deadweight loss of Trump’s tariffs totaled $1.4 billion each month, according to Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David Weinstein, the three researchers.

“We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers,” they concluded.

Evidence of broader, negative economic consequences of the tariffs blows a major hole in the Trump administration’s big three economic arguments for its protectionist trade policies.

First, Trump has argued that the tariffs benefit the U.S. government because they are generating revenue that could be used to close the budget deficit. This is technically correct because tariff revenue does flow into the U.S. Treasury, but the billions generated by the trade war has not slowed the growth of the federal budget defict. In any case, if the tariffs are draining $1.4 billion out of the economy every month beyond the cost of the taxes paid by U.S. importers, it becomes even more of a stretch for Trump to claim that the tariffs are benefiting the country, its economy, or the federal government.

“Our results imply that the tariff revenue the U.S. is now collecting is insufficient to compensate the losses being born by the consumers of imports,” the researchers conclude.

The second argument Trump has made for the tariffs is that they are needed to create leverage on other nations in order to negotiate better trade deals. Trump has explicitly credited the tariffs with helping negotiate the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a more protectionist replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and has made it obvious that he believes tariffs on Chinese goods will pave the way to a new trade deal with China.

But Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found “little evidence of such an improvement in the terms of trade.” One of the main points of contention in the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a trade deal with China has been the supposed theft of U.S. intellectual property by Chinese firms, but even if a future trade deal resulted in the Chinese paying an additional 25 percent in royalties for U.S. intellectual property, it would take three years of payments to make up for the damage inflicted on U.S. companies by the first 11 months of Trump’s trade war.

Finally, Trump has claimed that tariffs will help resurrect American manufacturing jobs and prevent further offshoring of blue collar work to cheaper labor markets in Mexico, China, and elsewhere.

But even if the trade war could bring back 35,400 manufacturing jobs—equal to the number of American steel- and aluminum-producing jobs lost in the past decade—the deadweight loss to the economy would be about $195,000 per job, “which is almost four times more than the annual wage of a steel worker,” the trio concludes.

An economic white paper is unlikely to sway Trump’s opinion about tariffs—he’s the Tariff Man, after all—but this analysis is the most comprehensive summary yet of the ongoing costs of the White House’s misguided protectionism. More than a year after Trump assured Americans that his trade war would be “good, and easy to win,” the data strongly suggest otherwise.

Another cake stand-off in Colorado—this time about a transgender celebration cake—appears to be coming to an end, with both sides agreeing to walk away.

Masterpiece Bakeshop of Lakewood, Colo., became a household name when owner Jack Phillips scrapped with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission after he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple due to religious objections to same-sex marriage.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices dodged the larger issue of whether the act of making a cake is a form or free expression protected by the First Amendment. Instead, the justices ruled in a 7-2 decision that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not been a neutral arbiter examining the rights of all parties involved, and had, in fact, expressed hostility toward Phillips’ religious rights in its decision.

While that case was making its way up the courts, a transgender attorney contacted Phillips claiming she wanted to have a custom cake made to celebrate her identity, saying she wanted one with a blue exterior and pink exterior.

Phillips also has religious objections to recognizing transgender identities, and so he declined to make the cake. The lawyer, Autumn Scardina, filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, who went after Phillips again. Phillips responded with a lawsuit of his own, arguing that the state was targeting him because of his religious beliefs.

Today, both the State of Colorado and Phillips have agreed to drop litigation in the case after the Commission said it would dismiss the complaint if Phillips dropped his lawsuit. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser seemed to realize this wasn’t a test case that was going to lead to a different outcome:

“After careful consideration of the facts, both sides agreed it was not in anyone’s best interest to move forward with these cases. The larger constitutional issues might well be decided down the road, but these cases will not be the vehicle for resolving them. Equal justice for all will continue to be a core value that we will uphold as we enforce our state’s and nation’s civil rights laws.”

This was most certainly the right call by Colorado. As I noted when this case began winding through the courts, it seemed pretty clear that this was an attempt to require Phillips to create a cake that expressed a particular belief. Central to the wedding cake fight was whether a wedding cake inherently sent a message and whether the baker was being forced to express support for same-sex marriage if he was required to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Is a wedding cake truly a message of support for same-sex marriage, or is it just a shape?

In this case, the color of the cake requested by the lawyer was clearly intended to serve as a message. There are a number of Supreme Court precedents establishing that businesses typically cannot be forced by the government to transmit or include messages with which they disagree. Bakers cannot be forced to make cakes that support transgender identities. This is a necessary component of free speech, one that also protects bakers who do not wish to make cakes that celebrate white nationalism, or transmit other kinds of messages they find offensive. It should come as no surprise that the law protects the rights of vendors. If white nationalists—or literally anyone else—wants to message with marzipan, they are free to make their own cakes.