Category: reason

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged doctors to cut back on opioid prescriptions in 2016, Charles LeBaron thought the advice made sense. LeBaron, a physician who was a CDC medical epidemiologist for nearly three decades, believed doctors had been too loose with pain medication, contributing to a dramatic increase in opioid-related deaths. In this context, he thought, it was perfectly reasonable to recommend greater restraint.

As LeBaron relates in his book Greed to Do Good, he had a change of heart a couple of years later, when he suffered agonizing pain as a result of staphylococcal meningitis. The pain was so bad that he contemplated suicide when it seemed he might not be able to obtain the oxycodone he needed to relieve his torment.

Now LeBaron intimately understood how patients desperate for pain relief could start to look like addicts desperate for a fix, driven to switch doctors, hoard pills, and move from one pharmacy to another. He also understood the downside of discouraging doctors from prescribing opioids. While curtailing prescriptions might prevent some nonmedical use, it also hurt bona fide patients.

The CDC’s notionally optional advice resulted in widespread restrictions imposed by legislators, regulators, insurers, pharmacies, and medical providers. The human costs included abrupt medication “tapering,” appalling undertreatment, patient abandonment, suicide, and a surge in drug deaths as nonmedical users replaced reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black market products.

The CDC’s main error, LeBaron argues, was treating the opioid “epidemic” the way it had long treated communicable diseases: by trying to stop transmission of the “pathogen” at “the most accessible point.” That mentality, he says, obscured the point that the “pathogen” in this case was a boon to patients like him, who needed it to make their suffering bearable.

The post Review: A Doctor Changes His Mind About Opioid Prescriptions appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/t6SqfNL
via IFTTT

Renaldo Norman said he was shocked to find that the Atlanta Department of City Planning had mistakenly started demolishing a house he was building on Highview Road, knocking down one wall. Norman, who had invested over $200,000 in building the house, said the workers thought his building permit had expired. In fact, he had already applied for and been granted a six-month extension. Norman is now considering whether he will have to rebuild from scratch due to the damage.

The post Brickbat: Hole in the Wall appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/Wa95h0k
via IFTTT

The post Friday Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/lBxvb8D
via IFTTT

Yesterday, in a lawsuit brought by twenty state courts, federal District Court Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. ruled the Trump Administration violated the Constitution when it tried to deny federal transportation grants to states that refuse to help ICE deport supposed illegal migrants. The court ruled the Department of Transportation acted illegally because Congress had not authorized it to impose any such conditions on transportation grants, and because immigration enforcement has no meaningful connection to the purpose of the grants:

Defendants’ conduct violates the [Administrative Procedure Act] because they acted outside of their statutory authority when they issued the Duffy Directive and imposed the IEC categorically across all U.S. DOT grants when Congress appropriated those funds for transportation purposes, not immigration enforcement purposes….. Congress did not authorize or grant authority to the Secretary of Transportation to impose immigration enforcement conditions on federal dollars specifically appropriated for transportation purposes….

These conditions violate the Spending Clause as well; the IEC is not at all reasonably related to the transportation funding program grants whose statutorily articulated purposes are for the maintenance and safety of roads, highways, bridges, and development of other transportation projects. The Government does not cite to any plausible connection between cooperating with ICE enforcement and the
congressionally approved purposes of the Department of Transportation. Under the
Defendants’ position, the Executive would be allowed to place any conditions it chose
on congressionally appropriated funds, even when it would be entirely unrelated to
the Department’s purpose. Such is not how the three equal branches of government
are allowed to operate under our Constitution.

This ruling follows a similar April decision by another federal district court, barring the Trump Administration from denying federal grants to “sanctuary” jurisdictions, which refuse to assist some types of federal immigration enforcement policies.

The two rulings are obviously right, and completely predictable – and, in fact, predicted by me. During Trump’s first term, federal courts repeatedly struck down administration efforts to pressure immigration “sanctuary” jurisdictions by  attaching conditions to federal grants that were never authorized by Congress. Last November, I predicted we would see a repetition of this pattern under Trump 2.0. It wasn’t a hard prediction, and I don’t deserve any great credit for it.

In the November post, I noted longstanding Supreme Court precedent holds that conditions on federal grants must,1) be enacted and clearly indicated by Congress (the executive cannot make up its own grant conditions), 2) be related to the purposes of the grant in question (here, transportation grants cannot be conditioned on immigration enforcement), and 3) not be “coercive.” Trump repeatedly ran afoul of these requirements in his first-term efforts to coerce sanctuary cities. And it would seem he hasn’t learned from his errors.

For more detail, see my Texas Law Review article assessing litigation arising from Trump’s first-term actions targeting sanctuary jurisdictions. In that article and elsewhere, I also explain why immigration sanctuaries (and conservative gun sanctuaries) are beneficial, and why judicially enforced limits on conditional grants provide valuable protection for federalism and the separation of powers.

Judge McConnell’s decision is just a ruling on a preliminary injunction. There is no final decision in this case, and the Trump Administration will probably appeal. But barring a radical break with precedent, that appeal and others like it are extremely likely to fail – and for good reason.

The post Federal Court Rules Against Trump Plan to Condition Federal Transportation Grants to States on Cooperation with ICE Deportation Efforts appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/NApRMLQ
via IFTTT

From Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon):

When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.

The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”

“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.

But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”

There’s a lot more there; worth reading the whole thing. If there’s a response from the Harvard Law Review or otherwise, I’ll of course be glad to link to that as well. Seems to me valuable to know more about how an institution that has historically aimed to be seen as a leading scholarly journal, rather than just as an ideological advocacy organization, actually operates.

Note that there are also separate questions (1) whether a law review’s race-based selection decisions (if such have been made) violate antidiscrimination law (see, e.g., Michael Dorf’s posts exploring that), and (2) whether a law review might have a First Amendment defense to any such charges. But at this point I’m just particularly interested in what such journals are actually doing.

The post More Allegations of Race/Gender/Etc. Focus in <i>Harvard Law Review</i> Screening Process appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/5KZTPEC
via IFTTT