Month: September 2014

Given the link between alcohol consumption during
pregnancy and birth defects, should expectant mothers who drink be
arrested for assault? If not, it is hard to see why Mallory Loyola
was.

Loyola, who was arrested in July after giving birth to a baby
girl who tested positive for amphetamine, is the first person to be
charged under a new Tennessee law that criminalizes drug
consumption by pregnant women. The law, ostensibly aimed at
protecting children, is really about punishing what a chief sponsor
described as “the worst of the worst”: women who not only consume
arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants but do so at a time when they
are supposed to be thinking only of their babies.

But as Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains, there is no
clear link between the drug Loyola consumed and birth defects in
humans. The nonsensical rhetoric about addicted babies is aimed at
concealing the fact that the law, like drug prohibition generally,
seeks to punish people for actions that violate no one’s
rights.

View this article.

If like most of the country, you skipped last night’s Miss
America pageant, you missed the routine above, which is widely
credited with giving Miss New York, Kira Kazantsev, the crown.

She plays with a red cup and sings Pharrel’s “Happy.”

More here.

Reason on past
Miss America contests (really).

The Weekly Standard
makes the case—implicitly, at least—that Sen. Rand Paul might
not be ready for a presidential campaign in which his every word,
choice, and past statement will be picked apart.

TWK’s John McCormack asked Paul at an event in New Hampshire to
square his previous resistance to attacking ISIS—he didn’t want to
help Iran fight its battles, he said at the time—with his recent
support for aspects of President Obama’s plan. According to
McCormack, Paul responded by ending the Q and A session:

This was the second press conference that Paul had abruptly
ended on Friday. …

So when did the senator decide that he supported bombing
ISIS? “I don’t know if there is an exact time,” Paul told me
Friday.

I asked Paul twice if he was no longer concerned, as he wrote in
June, that bombing ISIS may simply turn the United States into
“Iran’s air force.” He didn’t respond to the
questions and indicated he wasn’t happy with this reporter as well
as a local reporter who repeatedly suggested Paul is an
isolationist.

“All right, thanks guys. Work on that objectivity,” Paul said,
as he walked away.

Agree or disagree that these sorts of questions are fair, Paul
is certainly going to get more of them as his presumed quest for
the Republican presidential nomination continues. Most journalists
he deals with certainly won’t be working on their objectivity
anytime soon.

Additionally, I’m a bit surprised that Paul—who prides himself
on ideological consistency—has been caught so off guard by this
line of questioning. Of course people want to know the specifics of
why and when Paul’s principled opposition to ISIS intervention
morphed into outright support for airstrikes. And of course hostile
reporters want to jump on the
Rand-is-a-thin-skinned-flip-flopping-sell-out narrative. It
certainly looks like Paul is merely hedging earlier
stances (absent any mitigating or clarifying information), and
that’s
why the
media is
writing so many stories about it.

Perhaps most people—and
even some libertarians—will find nothing objectionable about
Paul’s latest opinions. But from a political-imaging standpoint, he
clearly needs to explain his thinking more clearly when
contradictions arise, if only to safeguard against the
proliferation of stories like McCormack’s.

Americans trust their
government less and less, according to
new polling from Gallup.

Overall, “trust in the three branches of the federal government
is collectively lower than at any point in the last two decades,”
with those who place a fair amount or great deal of trust in
Congress down to 28 percent. At 43 percent, trust in the
executive branch has dropped to its lowest point since Watergate.
Only the court system fares relatively well, with 61 percent saying
they trust the legislative branch.

Overall, trust has been dropping for years. Yes, there have been
a handful of spikes—around September 11^th, the war in
Iraq, and the election of Barack Obama. But each of those hopeful
moments was followed by a rapid slide. Here’s Gallup’s
graph: 

What, exactly, trust represents in a survey like this is
somewhat hard to pin down. To some extent it’s just a measure of
approval or disapproval, which is why you see a clear partisan
split on trust in the executive branch, with 83 percent of
Democrats saying they trust the executive, compared to 37 percent
of independents and 13 percent of Republicans.

But it’s also a measure of expectation. Will this institution
and its members deliver on promises made? Will they act in
accordance with the values they claim to hold? Will they make good
judgments, and will they act in ways that allow for transparency
and accountability?

Which is another way of saying it’s a measure of faith. And on
the evidence, Americans have lost a lot of faith in their
government—the elected branches in particular.

It’s easy to imagine politicians trying to address this by
promising to do everything better, to finally make it all work as
promised. That’s sort of what Barack Obama promised back in 2008,
when his big idea wasn’t any program or policy so much as a promise
to change the way Washington works. Another way of putting this is
that he was going to restore trust in the government.

But of course, despite initial hopes, that didn’t really work
out, and, in the end, that notion, and its failure, probably
contributed overall to the decline in trust: Obama promised big,
sweeping cultural changes that were never likely to pay off, and
then when they didn’t, trust fell even further. No one likes having
their hopes dashed, their expectations shattered.

Which suggests an opening for any politician who is both bold
and humble enough to try—acknowledging that there are real limits
to what government can accomplish, and promising to do fewer
things, but to do them well. 

Alberta high school student
Keenan Shaw was suspended for two days after he got caught selling
an illicit substance from his locker at Winston Churchill his
school. Weed? Nope. Booze? Nope. Acid? Nope. 

Shaw
says all those treats (and more) are on offer in the school’s
corridors:

“I’m not going to name any names, but I know a couple of
people selling marijuana, there’s kids selling smokes, there was a
kid last year selling meth, as well as a kid selling acid,”
said Shaw. 

But his drug of choice is full-sugar Pepsi. Commerce in the
sweet, sweet drink is banned at his school, which allows only diet
sodas to be sold on premises. 

This case of capitalism gone awry
started small in Grade 9:

The Grade 12 student, who realized only diet pop was being sold
in the cafeteria, made the short trek to a local grocery store to
pick up a case of Pepsi.

“I decided if I wanted a pop, maybe others do, too,” he
said.

Shaw brought it back to Churchill, and within 20 minutes, sold
every can of pop.

“From an entrepreneurial perspective, he said, ‘Wait a second, I
just paid $5 for a case of pop and got $12 back,’” said his mother,
Alyssa Shaw-Letourneau, whose son sold the pop for $1 a can. “From
a business perspective, it’s smart.”

Shaw says he’ll abandon his soda sales rather than risk
expulsion.

Many people, including the president of the
United States, smoked pot in high school but nevertheless managed
to graduate, earn college degrees, and lead reasonably happy and
successful lives. If you are one of those people, or if you know
some of them, you may be skeptical of a new study linking even
occasional adolescent marijuana consumption to academic failure,
addiction, and attempted suicide. Maybe you and your friends were
just lucky, or maybe these results are misleading. More the latter,
it turns out.

The study,
reported last week in The Lancet Psychiatry, found
that people who smoke pot as teenagers are more likely than people
who don’t to drop out of high school, become dependent on cannabis,
use other illegal drugs, and attempt suicide. The associations were
strongest for those who smoked pot the most.

The researchers, led by Edmund Silins of the National Drug and
Alcohol Research Centre in Sydney, Australia, found that subjects
who smoked pot daily before age 17 (a pattern of use that
is far from
common) were 63 percent less likely to finish high school than
subjects who abstained, 62 percent less likely to earn a college
degree, 18 times as likely to be dependent on cannabis as adults,
eight times as likely to use other drugs, and seven times as likely
to attempt suicide. By comparison, subjects who smoked pot less
often than monthly before 17 were 22 percent less likely than
nontokers to finish high school, 22 percent less likely to earn a
college degree, twice as likely to be dependent on cannabis as
adults, 67 percent more likely to use other drugs, and 62 percent
more likely to attempt suicide.

Silins et al. call these outcomes “psychosocial sequelae of
adolescent cannabis use,” and some press
coverage of the study likewise has portrayed them as
consequences of marijuana consumption. But the causal role of
cannabis is not nearly as clear as these accounts imply.

It surely is plausible that teenagers who get stoned every day,
like teenagers who get drunk every day, would have trouble doing
well in school because they are intoxicated when they are supposed
to be learning. But that observation leaves unanswered the question
of why some teenagers, but not others, choose to get stoned every
day. The propensity to engage in that sort of behavior may be a
marker for characteristics that independently undermine academic
performance.

The researchers tried to account for that possibility by
adjusting their results for various confounding variables—factors
other than marijuana use that may contribute to the observed
associations. They say they adjusted for 53 confounding variables,
which sounds impressively thorough. But their data—based on samples
ranging from 2,537 to 3,765 subjects, depending on the outcome
reported—are drawn from three different studies in Australia and
New Zealand, each of which measured a subset of those 53 variables.
The number of variables reported
in those studies actually ranged from 14 to 21.

More important, it is unlikely that these measures, which
include childhood behavior problems, grades in elementary school,
attention difficulties noted by parents, and self-reports of
depression and anti-social behavior, adequately account for the
combination of apathy, alienation, boredom, frustration, and
rebelliousness that might lead a teenager to get high instead of
paying attention in school and doing his homework. While
intoxication itself may be a barrier to learning, the psychological
factors that encourage intoxication probably play a role as well.
Likewise, the emotional issues that motivate frequent intoxication,
issues that may have gone undetected by the measures used in this
study, could make people more prone to suicide.

Such hard-to-measure variables may be especially important in
understanding the associations between relatively light cannabis
consumption and bad outcomes. While it’s quite plausible that a kid
who routinely comes to school stoned would have trouble learning
the skills and absorbing the information he needs to graduate, it
is hard to believe that smoking pot a few times a year would in
itself reduce a teenager’s odds of graduating by 22 percent, let
alone that it would make him 62 percent more likely to attempt
suicide as an adult.

Washington Post blogger Christopher
Ingraham notes some
other complications related to marijuana’s legal status and the way
pot smokers are treated:

If a teacher knows or even suspects that a certain kid is
using drugs, that may predispose the teacher against that student.
“Teachers are very likely to stigmatize drug users,” says Joseph
Palamar, co-author of another recent study comparing teen
marijuana and alcohol use. “That stereotype gives kids problems,
and that kid’s not gonna want to go to class.”

Palamar also says that because marijuana “is an illegal
drug, you have to buy it in an illegal manner, and then you’re
exposed to the black market. Marijuana use is affiliating you with
other kids, some of whom might be problematic—people more likely to
question authority. You become affiliated with things that might
have a negative impact on your education.”

Moreover, Palamar’s research shows that because of marijuana’s
legal status, teen cannabis users are much more likely to get
into trouble with the police than teen alcohol users. And in many
cases, if you have a drug conviction on your record, you become
ineligible for college aid. “If you get caught with drugs, you’re
not able to go to college,” he told me.

In short, while it is hard to dispute that early and frequent
marijuana use can cause problems, such behavior is part of a
complicated psychosocial web that is difficult to untangle with the
methods used in this study. And while prohibitionists are bound to
cite this study as an argument against legalization, the question
of whether teenagers should smoke pot is clearly distinct from the
question of whether adults who do so (or the people who help them)
should be arrested and punished.

As NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano told HealthDay,
“There is little debate among experts that the use of cannabis by
young people, in particular daily use of cannabis, ought to be
discouraged, just as young people’s use of other potentially
problematic intoxicants, such as alcohol and tobacco, ought to
similarly be discouraged.” But that does not mean prohibition is a
good way to accomplish that goal. “The presumption that
criminalizing cannabis adequately prevents or limits young people
from gaining access to cannabis is demonstrably false,” Armentano
said. “Criminalizing cannabis for adults has little if any impact
on reducing teens’ access [to] or consumption of the plant.”

I am not completely convinced of that last point. Some
consequences of legalization—retailers who card, for instance—work
against underage consumption. But others, such as lower prices and
readier availability for adults who may be willing to share their
purchases with minors, could increase underage access. Whatever the
net effect, the special vulnerabilities of adolescents do not
justify treating adults like children.

[This post originally appeared at
Forbes.com.]