Everyone loves to hate algorithms. Companies mine your data to sell you more dumb tchotchkes. Governments use them to develop secretive and dystopian-sounding “predictive policing” tools.
But in one corner of the country, algorithms are being used to erase the impacts of the war on marijuana and free thousands of people from the stigma of a criminal record.
Around 20 million people have been arrested for marijuana over the past three decades, and as more states legalize or decriminalize pot, a pressing public policy issue has emerged: What should we do with all the people who have criminal records for something an ever-growing portion of the country thinks should be legal? Over the past four years, at least 10 states have passed laws addressing expungement of certain marijuana convictions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The problem is the mechanism for getting one’s marijuana record expunged varies from state to state, and in most places it ranges from burdensome to nearly impossible. Even where the process is supposed to be expedited, it often is reliant on the old government standbys: paper, people, and time.
That’s where Code for America, a nonprofit good-government group, came in. It asked a simple question: Why should people have to apply at all when the government already has all the data to determine if they’re eligible?
So the organization built an algorithm to automatically identify San Francisco residents eligible for expungements and file for them. The results were stunning. San Francisco officials announced in February that the program resulted in 9,000 expungements for marijuana offenses, and it did it all in minutes.
“On average it takes 15 minutes for an attorney to review just one record,” says Evonne Silva, senior program director for Code for America. “The fact that we can review thousands of records in minutes really unlocks the potential for this to apply to other marijuana legalization efforts in other states.”
Farther south in the Golden State, Los Angeles County and San Joaquin County recently announced they will launch similar projects with Code for America. Public officials estimate it will result in 54,000 expungements.
“What we’ve actually seen is that there are public servants who wants to find a different way, because in their day-to-day they see that the process isn’t serving constituents,” Silva says.
If programs like Code for America’s spread, they could have a huge impact on reducing the damage of the drug war on communities and individuals.
A criminal record can have lifelong negative effects, including lost job opportunities—either from state licensing restrictions or skittish employers—loss of the right to vote or own a gun, ineligibility for student loans, and a host of other collateral consequences.
Code for America estimates there are 4,800 legal obstacles that exist for someone with a criminal record in California alone.
“There is no limit to how much you can discriminate against a person with a criminal record,” Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, told Reason‘s Jacob Sullum earlier this year. (If you’re looking for a state-by-state breakdown of the expungement process for marijuana convictions, by the way, look no further.)
To see just how revolutionary automated expungements would be, it’s instructive to look at the states that are doing a poor job of handling past marijuana convictions.
Alaska, for instance, simply doesn’t allow any valid conviction to be sealed or expunged. Anyone in Alaska convicted of a marijuana offense is also barred from participating in the state’s legal marijuana industry, locking out the very people harmed by prohibition.
In Colorado and Maine, only misdemeanor marijuana offenses can be expunged leaving those with felony convictions in the lurch. In Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington, D.C., getting a past marijuana offense sealed can take months and cost thousands of dollars if one hires a lawyer to expedite the process.
The deterrent effect of these barriers is considerable. Silva says that in California, only 3 percent of people eligible to have marijuana convictions expunged had petitioned to do so more than two years after the process first went into place.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced in January that, six years after the state legalized recreational marijuana, his office would create an expedited process to pardon thousands of marijuana offenders without them having to go to court. But while pardons are a powerful tool, they are also dependent on the whims of the current executive.
The experiments in automated expungements currently going on in San Francisco and Los Angeles should become the standard for the rest of the states where marijuana has been legalized. The government branded millions of people as criminals for marijuana, but the tools developed by Code for America show it can quickly and efficiently reverse that decision, if it wants to.
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“Marijuana legalization,” declared a Voxheadline last month, “is winning the 2020 Democratic primaries.” A quick scan of the field indeed shows how far we’ve come since even 2011, when “Choom gang” alum Barack Obama was still cracking down on state-legal medical marijuana outfits and laughing off suggestions that prohibiting a popular, non-lethal plant was perhaps not the wisest public policy.
In fact, the top 11 highest-polling declared Democratic presidential candidates (plus a bunch in the lower tiers, notably Rep. Tulsi Gabbard [D–Hawaii]) have all backed some form of ending the federal prohibition of marijuana, fewer than four years after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the first major-party candidate in history to do so. Several in fact have become legislative leaders on this issue, especially Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), plus former congressman Beto O’Rourke.
As popular opinion and state law speeds toward legalizing recreational weed, and a tough-on-crime Republican president frees prisoners and advances criminal justice reform, former drug warriors are scrambling to catch up with the times. The last holdout here may be still-undeclared candidate Joe Biden, who invented the office of the drug czar, spearheaded some of the very worst criminal justice laws of the past four decades, and said while vice president that legalization is a “mistake” because marijuana is a “gateway drug.”
Still, as senior editor and longtime drug policy journalist Jacob Sullum told Nick Gillespie on Wednesday’s Reason Podcast, virtually all major-party presidential candidates this year are pretty damned good on pot legalization. This not only is unprecedented, it was also unthinkable very recently.
So with a big assist from our friends at Marijuana Moment, and taking advantage of Reason‘s new-and-improved search engine, here’s a survey of post positions among the highest-polling Democrats to declare:
Legalize it!: Sanders in October 2015 became the first major-party presidential candidate to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. Since then he introduced the Senate’s first bill to repeal federal prohibition and has made ending the war on drugs one of his central issues.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored (as did many 2020 competitors) Cory Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act, which would expunge possession arrests from people’s records, allow current pot prisoners to be resentenced, and withhold federal funding from states that crack down too vigorously on weed. Thinks “small business people in the African American [community] deserve to be part of” the corporate marijuana market.
Prohibition disconnect: Has questioned why non-marijuana cigarettes should be legal.
Inhaling status: “Didn’t do a whole lot for me. My recollection is I nearly coughed my brains out, so it’s not my cup of tea.”
Legalize it!: O’Rourke was earlier than 99 percent of elected Democrats to the legalization issue, pushing the El Paso City Council in 2009 to at least study it, co-writing a 2011 book advocating legal weed, and successfully primarying an eight-term prohibitionist in 2012. He not only wants to remove federal prohibition, he’d also like the federal government to declare the plant legal across all 50 states, and then lead the international fight to “end the global war on drugs.”
Other bills/concepts backed: As congressman, introduced a bill to end the federal government’s policy of withholding highway funds to states unless they suspend the driver’s licenses of drug convicts. Also co-sponsored various bills to seal criminal drug records, protect legal-weed states, allow doctors to prescribe pot to veterans, and remove possession convictions as a barrier to federal student aid.
Inhaling status: “Pot, yeah, there was definitely, you know….There was, uh, I don’t know how to put this, but yeah. People smoked pot, but not habitually.”
Legalize it!: Now, sure. But before gearing up to run for president? Ugh.
Other bills/concepts backed: The Marijuana Justice Act. Beyond that, “Harris has only co-sponsored one other cannabis-related bill: the SAFE Banking Act, which would protect banks that work with marijuana businesses from federal punishment.”
Prohibition disconnect:
Inhaling status: “I inhaled….It gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.”
Legalize it!: “I think even in Indiana, criminal justice reform, including marijuana [legalization], we’re probably there….I really think a state-wide campaign in Indiana would do well, especially on the criminal justice stuff. To find common cause between the younger, libertarian right that’s not so sure about the Republican Party as an institution, and a more traditional, progressive coalition—I think you can get there on drugs.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Well, the South Bend mayor is only 37 years old. Has talked favorably about commuting sentences and rehabilitating ex-cons once drug laws are changed.
Prohibition disconnect: Approved “an ordinance in 2017 that prohibited businesses in the city from selling synthetic cannabinoids.”
Inhaling status: “I was standing outside my dorm. I was on my way home from a party or something….I ran into a friend and he had an acquaintance with him, and we were chatting, and at some point I noticed that she was smoking a joint. And just out of curiosity — there was like a little bit left — I was like ‘Oh, is that…’ And she handed it to me.”
Legalize it!: Since 2017, yes, though as recently as 2016 she declined to endorse a Massachusetts recreational initiative (which she then later lied about); and in 2013 she was out-and-out tarring her Republican opponent as being soft on pot.
Other bills/concepts backed: Was the main Democratic sponsor of a bipartisan 2018 bill to removal federal prohibitions in states where marijuana is legal. Co-sponsored the Marijuana Justice Act, plus bills to deschedule weed, legalize pot-related banking, and conduct research aimed at getting veterans medicinal access.
Prohibition disconnect: Warren would like to create a huge new federal Office of Drug Manufacturing, which wouldn’t necessarily start as the nationalized pot pusher-man, but….
Legalize it!: Cory Booker is the most far-reaching pro-legalization Democrat in the United States Senate, frequently joining with the libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) on all manner of criminal justice reform. Has made his Marijuana Justice Act a centerpiece of his presidential run, and busted johnny-come-latelies like Kamala Harris for making jokes about the herb while people still rot in prison. Like O’Rourke, he was railing against the drug war in local politics more than a decade ago.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored the landmark CARERS Act, which would protect state-legal marijuana operations from federal law enforcement. Would “absolutely” back mass marijuana-related pardons as president.
Prohibition disconnect: Has repeatedly expanded a law enforcement approach to the opioid crisis.
Inhaling status: “I have never smoked marijuana, I have never smoked a cigarette, I have never eaten marijuana, I have never tried another drug, I have never drank alcohol. I think the most alcohol I have had may be a sip of beer to get my friends off my back, or maybe the church wine.”
Legalize it!: “I support the legalization of marijuana and believe that states should have the right to determine the best approach to marijuana within their borders,” she said in 2019. Twenty years ago it was a much different story.
Other bills/concepts backed: Co-sponsored the Booker/Warren Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States (STATES) Act. Has backed measures to expand cannabis research and remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act.
Prohibition disconnect: As Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Attorney from 1999-2006, Klobuchar doubled the number of drug convictions. “We must keep a focus on drug dealers,” she said in 2004. As senator, she has been one of the leading proponents of civil-liberties-restricting “sex trafficking” legislation.
Legalize it!: “Colorado and other states have shown we can sensibly legalize marijuana with reasonable controls.”
Other bills/concepts backed: In favor of expunging drug-possession arrests from criminal records.
Prohibition disconnect: “Under his leadership, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a 2014 memo clarifying that owners of federally assisted housing facilities are required to deny entry to people who use marijuana, even for medical purposes in accordance with state law.”
Inhaling status: “It’s unknown if Castro has ever consumed cannabis, though he did write in his book that he hung out in college with a ‘Jeff Spicoli’ type.”
Legalize it!: In one of the better campaign stunts in recent memory, the tech entrepreneur and robot-pessimist announced earlier this month that, “I would legalize marijuana and I would pardon everyone who’s in jail for a non-violent, drug-related offense….I would pardon them all on April 20, 2021, and I would high five them on their way out of jail.” Later, he clarified that this pertained only to marijuana-related convictions, but still—4/20 clemency day!
Other bills/concepts backed: Decriminalizing opioid use and possession.
Prohibition disconnect: Yang has some of the weirdest policy sets out there, including providing “guardrails to keep technology from corroding our mental and emotional well-being, particularly for young people,” because smartphones are having a “devastating” impact on children.
Inhaling status: “No, no, I’m not really” a weed smoker, he said in a radio interview this month. “You know, I was a pretty geeky Asian dude.”
Legalize it!: “The senator, who has an A grade from NORML, has become one of the most vocal advocates for federal marijuana reform in Congress, co-sponsoring multiple pieces of legislation and frequently talking about the issue in speeches and on social media. However, she did not start off her political career supporting cannabis reform.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Marijuana Justice Act, CARERS Act, the Booker/Warren Respect States Act, expanding research, expunging records, giving access to veterans.
Prohibition disconnect: Hoo boy. Gillibrand last month proposed a seven-day limit to pain prescriptions, which is one of the worst policy ideas in recent memory.
Legalize it!: The former Colorado governor “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.”
Other bills/concepts backed: Supports the STATES Act, and further says that the laboratories of democracy should be able to decriminalize cocaine and heroin (and sex work!), which is unusually bold. Favors expunging non-violent convictions.
Prohibition disconnect: Even after his big policy turn, Hickenlooper signed a ban on pot gummy bears and animal-shaped edibles, and a reduction on the number of pot plants people can have in their homes. He vetoed a bill allowing for marijuana tasting rooms.
Inhaling status: “He wrote in his book about how his mother caught him attempting to grow marijuana during high school, how cannabis ‘slowed me down and made me kind of silly’ and how he ‘got a little high’ and took a nude selfie as part of a project for an advanced photography class in college.”
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In Canada, a new Ontario provincial budget released last week proposes to loosen alcohol consumption rules in the province, including allowing licensed establishments to start serving alcohol at 9 a.m., legalizing tailgating, letting local governments set rules that would allow people to consume alcohol in public parks, and letting breweries, wineries, and distilleries serve more than mere samples. Other proposed changes include plans to allow convenience stores to sell beer and wine, legalizing happy hour advertisements, and postponing a new wine tax that was set to take effect this month.
The proposals come after the provincial government recently sought public comment on its plans to “moderniz[e] the rules for the sale and consumption of alcohol in Ontario.”
“The cornerstone of putting people first is consumer choice and convenience,” Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said of the plans. “This is why our government is taking steps to modernize the way we sell, distribute and consume alcohol in Ontario.”
Three things appear to be true of Ontario’s alcohol laws. First, they’re in great need of reform. Second, people such as Fedeli are talking openly about the need for changes. Third, the first and second points above are true largely due to decades of inadequate half-measures masquerading as real reform.
A 1997 article by the Mackenzie Institute, a Canadian think tank, lists a host of inane provincial booze laws throughout recent history, including that, “until about 1970, Ontario’s bars were required to have a separate Ladies entrance and a room where escorted gentlewomen might enjoy a beverage with a respectable male companion.” More recently, in 2011, it was a pretty big deal when Ontario alcohol deregulation measures allowed licensed establishments to give you a free drink on your birthday. Yay.
The elephant in the room is Ontario’s liquor control board, known as the LCBO, which has long been reviled both as the heart of the province’s booze-law problem and a powerful obstacle to reform.
Much of the hatred toward the LCBO comes from the “quasi-monopoly” it enjoys over alcohol sales. Another facet of the LCBO that Ontarians detest is the strong LCBO union that uses its power to head off competition from private sellers.
“Our prohibition-era alcohol system is not about protecting drinkers or maximizing revenues for the government,” wrote Candice Malcolm, of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, in a 2014 piece in the Toronto Sun. “It is about power and control, particularly for government-sector unions.”
Ontario’s awful alcohol rules have consequences. Toronto is the province’s—and Canada’s—largest and most international city. But Toronto is also derided as boring. And when someone paints Toronto as un-fun, bad booze laws usually get the blame.
“To be fair, much of Toronto’s lameness comes from the fact the city happens to be located in Ontario,” wroteBenjamin Boles at blogTO in a great 2014 post that details the city’s and province’s rich history of terrible alcohol laws, including temperance laws that stayed on the books in Toronto into at least the late 1990s. “The province’s liquor laws are legendarily strict and often bizarre.“
But Ontario’s bad alcohol laws don’t exist in a vacuum. To be clear, Canada has some pretty rotten alcohol laws in force around the country.
Those that restrict the movement of alcohol across provincial borders are some of the worst. Unfortunately, the country’s Supreme Court chose to uphold those laws last year.
The national government has also seen fit to adopt new and highly intrusive and draconian steps to combat drunk driving.
One such measure, which took effect nationwide in December, gives police the terrifying “power to demand a breath sample at the roadside, without reasonable grounds.” Critics have assailed the measure as a frontal assault on civil liberties.
“The country has been tending towards a police state for some time,” columnist Arthur Weinreb wrotelast year. “Nowhere are the losses of individual rights accepted by so many people as when these rights are taken away in order to combat drinking and driving.” Weinreb reveals that a police officer used the law to pull over a 70-year-old man who’d dropped off a variety of empty beer cans and the like at a recycling center.
Yet a police spokesman said officers would use to law to target “cars leaving licensed establishments or leaving the downtown,” the Guelph Mercury Tribunereports.
“The officer told him the three cases of empties were a lot, he was obviously a drinker and he was then asked when he last had a drink,” Weinreb writes. “[The man] said he last drank around midnight the day before.” The police officer then demanded the elderly man take a breathalyzer test.
While the national government has made the country’s booze laws fodder for columnists, the prospects for disentangling the Ontario government from alcohol sales appear largely to be a welcome development among the same crowd.
“I strongly dislike [center-right Ontario Premier Doug] Ford and pretty much everything he’s done, both in and out of office, but I’m simply not hyperpartisan enough to argue that his booze proposals are inherently bad ideas,” writes columnist Emma Teitel. “They’re not. Ford is a crappy leader—the kind who values populist gobbledygook over research and whose education minister believes neglect promotes resilience—but even crappy leaders have decent ideas sometimes.”
Consider me a fan, then, of good ideas from crappy leaders.
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Many people warned that the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) would endanger the lives of adults who consensually exchange sex for money. Ten months after its passage, CBS San Francisco reported that the city saw a whopping 170 percent “spike in human trafficking” last year. But there are reasons to be wary of the CBS story and the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) data it relied on.
While ample signs point to negative effects from FOSTA, which made it a federal crime for websites and other online platforms to facilitate prostitution, this probably isn’t one of them. What it does illustrate is that increased police attention to the “problem” doesn’t equate to more people helped or justice served.
According to a year-end report, SFPD opened 40 sex-trafficking investigations in 2017 and around 108 in 2018—there’s the 170 percent spike. But pull back, and it’s unclear whether FOSTA, which became law on April 11 last year, is really to blame. In 2014, for instance, SFPD opened 80 sex-trafficking investigations—double the number from 2017. In 2015, the department either worked on 67 or 169 investigations, depending on which of its sources you consult.
That brings us to another important distinction: An investigation means simply that police looked into something and filed a report. It doesn’t mean that they found forced or underage prostitution, that arrests were made, or that charges were filed. In 2017, just nine investigations were taken to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office for prosecution, and just one of those cases led to an indictment. In 2016, 10 cases were presented to prosecutors and six led to charges.
Last year, city police and prosecutors ramped up efforts to target human trafficking. Additionally, an increase in street-based prostitution in certain neighborhoods—the inevitable result of FOSTA’s targeting of online advertising platforms—meant increased sex-worker visibility. In other words, the level of sex trafficking reported “doesn’t necessarily map to prevalence,” as Notre Dame law instructor Alex Frell Levy pointed out on Twitter. Indeed, an SFPD spokesperson attributes the spike to an “an increase in awareness and reporting,” not an increase in underlying rates.
Nonetheless, a wealth of anecdotal evidence from sex workers, police, health care providers, and others—in the Bay Area and beyond—suggests bad outcomes from government efforts to close online sex-work markets.
At an October 2018 meeting of the city’s Task Force on Human Trafficking, “some members shared their perspective on the impact of FOSTA,” according to the minutes. “An increase in street-based sex work in the Mission District has been observed. Members from the Police Department shared that they have seen a ripple effect after the [April 6] closure of Backpage and that more sites have popped up on the internet. They said that the demand for sex work has not changed with the law.”
In August, SFPD formed a Sex Worker Abatement Unit. Although police have couched recent stings as attempts to stop “pimps” and “traffickers,” much of their efforts end up targeting sex workers or their clients. “Arrests have increased dramatically and noticeably, and as a result sex workers who are victims of violence are intimidated and running from police,” Rachel West of the U.S. PROStitutes Collective told reporters last December.
The city passed a law in 2017 clarifying that officers shouldn’t arrest sex workers reporting crimes, and a bill stating the same has been introduced at the state level. But with police intent on “abating” sex work altogether, these measures likely won’t cut it.
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In the wake of the Mueller report’s release, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has called for starting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
In a Friday afternoon Twitter thread, the senator and 2020 presidential contender laid out her case for impeaching Trump, saying that his efforts to obstruct an investigation into Russian election interference necessitate his removal from office.
“To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country,” writes Warren. “The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”
The Mueller report lays out facts showing that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election to help Donald Trump and Donald Trump welcomed that help. Once elected, Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into that attack.
The odds that Warren will get her wish seem slim. Demanding Trump’s head is nonetheless a good publicity stunt for the senator’s flagging presidential campaign.
The latest New Hampshire polls show support for Warren at 8.7 percent. That puts her behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and “No Opinion.” A Monmouth University Poll from last week put Warren at 7 percent among Iowa Democratic voters.
The senator is likely hoping that demanding Trump be removed from office via impeachment might make her attempt to unseat him in a presidential election a little easier.
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According to a vast array of evidence, movie producer Harvey Weinstein is not a good man. After all, dozens of women have accused him of abuses ranging from pressuring women into sexual activity in exchange for movie roles to forcible sexual assault. But Weinstein also isn’t a sextrafficker, under popular or legal conceptions of the term. And treating him as such is both an insult to actual victims of forced prostitution and a dangerous precedent to set.
Nonetheless, a federal judge has ruled that a class action lawsuit accusing Weinstein of sex trafficking may proceed. The civil suit, first filed in 2017, involves 10 named defendants seeking damages for events that allegedly occurred from 2004-2013.
On Thursday, U.S. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein dismissed all but one of the claims in the 18-count lawsuit, including all claims against defendants other than Weinstein (The Weinstein Company, Miramax Films, The Walt Disney Company, and others had also been named). However, Hellerstein denied Weinstein’s motion to dismiss the claim brought against him for alleged violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.
The TVPA created a new federal criminal category for trafficking in persons, an umbrella offense that includes forced labor (a.k.a. labor trafficking); forced or coerced prostitution (a.k.a. sex trafficking); and any prostitution involving anyone under 18 years old (a.k.a. child sex trafficking). Over the past two decades, well-intentioned fervor for fighting these horrific happenings has ballooned into a massive mandate to stop all prostitution, even when it’s between consenting adults. (Just look at the Florida massage parlor stings that ensnared Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft for one recent example.)
And lately, we’re seeing a new distortion: “sex trafficking” being used as a catch-all criminal charge against anyone accused of any sort of bad sexual behavior or alleged sexual crimes.
Actress Allison Mack and other members of the NXIVM “empowerment group”/cult were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges last year, even though no one in the group alleges any sort of prostitution happening. In both the NXIVM case and this one, proposing sexual activity that may be beneficial beyond the sex itself is enough groundwork for a sex trafficking claim.
In the NXIVM case, the feds claimed that Mack was guilty of sex trafficking because she tried to persuade some female members to sleep with the group’s leader, Keith Raniere, and may have moved up the NXIVM ranks or received other in-group benefits if they did.
In the suit against Weinstein, defendants say that he promised them film opportunities or career advancement if they engaged in sexual acts with him; that he assaulted or attempted to assault them when they refused; and that because Weinstein’s handlers and employees sometimes coordinated meetings between him and defendants, they were all part of a sex-trafficking enterprise together. Weinstein is apparently the “john” in this scenario, the women both the victims of trafficking and the recipient of its rewards (so, both victim and trafficker); and those who helped with Weinstein’s scheduling are accomplices.
It makes no sense.
Sexual assault and rape are bad enough on their own, of course. So why the need to force these cases into a framework that doesn’t fit?
Because the sex trafficking framework allows for a lot more prosecutorial possibilities. Anyone who is even remotely aware of potential trafficking can be wrapped into racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy counts, which isn’t the case with sexual assault or rape charges. A rape case against Weinstein couldn’t have snared Disney, too. Nor could Allison Mack and others be indicted if Raniere was simply accused of assault.
“Sex traffickers” can be sued in federal court, while cases against rapists must go to state court. Sex trafficking convictions bring an array of mandatory fees and fines for both the government and victims; sexual assault charges do not. And proving that someone powerful offered commercial benefits for sex may prove easier than proving assault took place, especially if many years have passed.
Plus, sex trafficking is such a buzzword that cases employing it are guaranteed to get more attention.
But it’s one hell of a slippery slope. If cases like these succeed, we can expect to see a whole lot more trumped-up trafficking cases, which could not only lead to unjust outcomes for those accused but also take resources away from prosecuting cases of labor exploitation and sexual abuse. Nobody will be helped by us further blurring the definitions and boundaries around things like sex trafficking, sexual assault, rape, prostitution, coercion, and consent.
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Andrew Yang wants you to know: he’s not a socialist.
The businessman is among the crowded field of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders and is campaigning almost solely on a universal basic income (UBI) proposal. Nicknamed his “Freedom Dividend,” it promises to give $1,000 a month to every adult between the ages of 18 and 64.
It’s a plan that reeks of pie-in-the-sky idealism. But, perhaps ironically, Yang’s campaign is colored by his affinity for capitalism, particularly as the founder of a nonprofit—Venture for America—that trains young entrepreneurs. And he touts his pragmatism in what is almost certainly an attempt to sway skeptics.
“I’ve looked at the numbers…” Yang said repeatedly at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Monday evening, eliciting loud cheers from supporters who fervently waved signs that said “MATH.”
The presidential hopeful told Reason that his Freedom Dividend would put “more people in position where they can actually participate in a free market,” making for a “much more dynamic” economy.
UBI has a bevy of full-throated critics on both sides of the aisle. In 2016, Oren Cass wrote in National Review that it is “a logical successor to the worst public policies and social movements of the past 50 years.” Eduardo Porter of The New York Timessaid it provides a “non-negligible disincentive to work” and that government aid would become “less generous over time.”
But it’s also had an unlikely array of supporters over the years, like Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.—not to mention famed libertarian economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray.
“The good news is that a well-designed UBI can do much more than help us to cope with disaster,” Murray wrote in TheWall Street Journal in 2016. “It also could provide an invaluable benefit: injecting new resources and new energy into an American civic culture that has historically been one of our greatest assets but that has deteriorated alarmingly in recent decades.”
Murray and Yang approach the UBI discussion from a similar vantage point: Automation is picking up speed, and it’s coming for your job. “We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were,” says Murray. Similarly, Yang calls his Freedom Dividend a “tech check”—an homage to the retail workers, call center employees, and truck drivers who may increasingly find themselves without work in the coming years.
But Murray and Yang diverge considerably when it comes to how they would pay for a UBI—as well as how it would interact with the welfare system. Murray champions the burn-it-all-down approach, financing the stipend by eradicating all social safety net programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, as well as housing and agricultural subsidies.
Yang sees it differently. He proposes centralizing health care costs and taxing tech giants like Amazon, who he says are automating jobs into oblivion and driving some stores across the country into the ground. Emboldened by the Freedom Dividend, recipients will spend their money in their local communities, facilitating a “trickle up economy.”
And while he pictures welfare dependence waning, Yang maintains that it has its rightful place in society. “You don’t want to take away benefits that hundreds of thousands of Americans are literally relying upon for their very survival,” he told Reason. “The goal is to create more positive incentives.” Over time, he says that welfare enrollment would decline with a rise in empowered consumers, “because many people in the Dividend would never find themselves in those programs.”
The jury is certainly still out on UBI, and objections to Yang’s Freedom Dividend are not without merit. Some research lends credence to the idea that a guaranteed check will discourage employment and overall productivity. Others counter that those fears are unfounded, citing Alaska’s Permanent Fund: The state sends a yearly stipend to residents and has not experienced significant dips in aggregate employment. The latter claim is a bit harder to stomach, as Alaska paid residents $1,600 in 2018—hardly enough to quit your day job. Yang proposes $1,000 per month, although some argue it will help people pursue their professional goals by lowering barriers to entry.
Yang is also backing Medicare for All, the decriminalization of opioids (including heroin and fentanyl), as well as the regulation of social media companies to encourage healthier habits.
“We have the smartest engineers in the country trying to turn supercomputers into dopamine delivery systems for teenagers,” he told Reason. To address this, he suggests that social media developers be required to encourage moderation; according to Yang, an alert system that tells users to “find a human” or “go outside” would be a start. “Financial incentives of their companies will never suggest that they do this, and so they need a hand,” he said—although the long-term benefit of such initiatives would likely be dubious.
Although Yang’s candidacy is a long shot by most standards, he considers himself the perfect foil to President Trump.
“Donald Trump is our president today because he got a lot of the fundamental problems right,” he said at his Monday night rally. “When he was going around saying, ‘Hey things are not great,’ and then the counter was ‘Things actually are great,’—that was not the right response.”
But Yang says that, while Trump may have diagnosed the problem, he’s prescribing the wrong medicine. “His solutions are that we have to turn the clock back,” he said. “Time only moves in one direction. I want to accelerate our economy and society. I want to prepare us for the true challenges of the 21st century.”
“And I’m the right man for the job, because the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math!”
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Today the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency, which processes citizenship applications and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, released a policy alert saying that consuming state-legal marijuana could still be grounds for denying someone’s citizenship application.
“Since 1996, a number of states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to decriminalize … both medical and non-medical (recreational) marijuana in their respective jurisdictions,” reads USCIS’s alert. “However, federal law classifies marijuana as a ‘Schedule I’ controlled substance” meaning its sale or possession is a still a violation of federal law.
Therefore, says the agency, admissions of past marijuana use—even if said use occurred in a state or country where it was legal—could be a bar to establishing an applicant’s “good moral character,” a requirement immigrants need to meet in order to become citizens.
With the policy alert, smoking pot explicitly joins the many other vices that could be used to deny aspiring Americans full citizenship. Current federal policy also considers polygamists, adulterers, prostitutes, and “habitual drunkards” to be unworthy of naturalization.
As the Cato Institute’s David Bier points out, the new policy goes further than just barring immigrants who’ve been convicted of marijuana offenses or otherwise admitted to consuming it.
Reads the USCIS policy alert, “even if an applicant does not have a conviction or make a valid admission to a marijuana-related offense, he or she may be unable to meet the burden of proof to show that he or she has not committed such an offense.”
“In other words, even if an immigrant attempting to become an American has never been convicted of using marijuana and won’t admit doing so, they could still be denied U.S. citizenship,” writes Bier.
Deeming stoners to be “immoral” is obviously a pretty antiquated view, particularly given the fact that a full 65 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal. And while a lot of progress has been made on that front on the state and local level, USCIS’s policy alert is a helpful reminder that federal prohibitions are still doing a lot of damage.
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The Limits to Growth in 1972 featured calculations of “exponential reserve index” for important nonrenewable resources that assumed exponential growth rates in consumption while multiplying known reserves of each resource fivefold. After crunching the numbers, the authors reported, “The effect of exponential growth is to reduce the probable period of availability of aluminum, for example, from 100 years to 31 years (55 years with a fivefold increase in reserves). Copper, with a 36-year lifetime at current usage rates, would actually last only 21 years at the present rate of growth, and 48 years if present reserves are multiplied by five.”
Let’s consider copper. The World Bank reported that world reserves of copper stood at 154 million tons in 1960, rising to 451 million tons in 1976. At constant levels of consumption, the World Bank calculated that 1960 reserves would have lasted only 37 years and the 1976 reserves would be exhausted in 59 years. At a 2 percent annual growth rate, reserves would be depleted 28 and 40 years respectively.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports, 47 years after the publication of The Limits to Growth, that world known reserves of copper stand at 830 million tons as of 2018. Furthermore the USGS notes that identified resources contain about 2.1 billion tons of copper, and undiscovered resources contain an estimated 3.5 billion tons. Evidently, the book’s calculation that humanity should have been about to run out of copper in the next year or so turned out to be completely wrong.
Economist Julian Simon from the University of Maryland understood that the authors of The Limits to Growth were vastly underestimating human ingenuity operating under the rule of law in free markets to solve problems such as impending resource exhaustion. Simon challenged the gloomy prognostications made by the authors of The Limits to Growth in his brilliant books The Ultimate Resource in 1981 and the magisterial The Resourceful Earth, co-authored with Herman Kahn, in 1984.
This led to Simon’s famous bet with population doomster Paul Ehrlich. In October 1980, Ehrlich and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities that could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) 10 years later at 1980 prices. If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. There was no note in the letter. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.
Inspired by Simon’s pioneering analyses, Marian Tupy,* editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University-Hawaii have devised the Simon Abundance Index. Tupy and Pooley use data on 50 different commodities to track their price trajectories over the past 37 years from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The index measures the timeprice of commodities and change in global population to estimate overall resource abundance. They find that the planet’s resources became 379.6 percent more abundant between 1980 and 2017.
At 11:00 a.m on Monday, April 22, to mark the 49th anniversary of Earth Day, the Cato Institute is holding a public event to unveil the Simon Abundance Index. Besides Tupy and Pooley, the event will feature as speakers Julian Simon’s son David M. Simon and techno-utopian George Gilder, author of Life after Google. Folks in the Washington, D.C. area can go here to register to attend the event or sign up to see it online.
Happy Earth Day!
*Disclosure: Marian Tupy and I are working together on book that tracks and explains nearly 100 global population, income, commodity, and environmental trends.
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To ignore the countless slaves who were victims of rape would be a travesty. To say that Ancestry is doing that very thing with their latest slavery-era ad is reaching.
Ancestry is a popular genealogy website based out of Utah. For years, people of all backgrounds have used the information to learn more about lost family histories. Recently, Ancestry thought to advertise its services with a commercial depicting an interracial couple escaping from the South.
A white man is seen trying to convince a black woman named Abigail, presumably a slave, to run away to the North with him, presumably so they can be married and live the rest of their lives together. Abigail begins to question the idea before he tells her that there’s a place “across the border” where they can be together. After asking her to leave with him, the screen cuts to pictures of the couple and a marriage certificate.
The website was quickly accused of whitewashing history and romanticizing sexual exploitation. The outrage over the commercial was so severe that the ad was removed altogether.
“Ancestry is committed to telling important stories from history. This ad was intended to represent one of those stories. We very much appreciate the feedback we have received and apologize for any offense that the ad may have caused. We are in the process of pulling the ad,” the company tweeted.
Let me start by saying that I share the same sentiments about cutesy depictions of slavery. Far too often, the uncomfortable parts are glossed over in favor of a good Hollywood story. Just watch the slave scenes in The Patriot or Brad Pitt, whose studio produced 12 Years a Slave, grace the screen.
However, the mere existence of past atrocities and bad storytelling does not mean that the Ancestry ad deserved the outrage that it received.
For one thing, there’s no possible way a viewer would assume that the commercial is showing exploitative sexual abuse. At least one user questioned if Abigail belonged to the man trying to get her to run away with him. It’s a safe assumption that the characters are forbidden lovers and nothing further.
Others criticized the commercial for having the white love interest suggest that they run north, either to another state or to Canada, to be together. While it’s true that northern states enjoy a sort of ahistorical absolution for their imposition of segregation on free blacks, it’s also not completely far off to have this couple look for hope in the North. After all, we praise the bravery of Harriet Tubman and other conductors of the Underground Railroad, which was designed to help slaves in the South escape to the North to access better and freer lives.
Most importantly, there is no universe in which a single romance discounts the very real suffering of rape victims. Had the commercial insinuated that many historical rapes were actually just romances, then this point would be legitimate. But it’s also likely that consensual interracial relationships existed in this climate. These are no less worthy of a story. In fact, The New York Times did a profile on the descendant of this very kind of union in 2018.
Social media brigades like this one have led to some pretty big blunders.
Only two years ago, the world was doubled-over in laughter when a young girl waltzed right into her dad’s live interview. The dad giving the live interview was a white professor named Robert E. Kelly. Once the internet was given enough time to whip up some hot takes, social media users criticized Kelly as a father and employer after assuming that the Korean woman who frantically rushed into the room after the young girl was his terrified nanny. As it turns out, the “terrified nanny” was actually Kelly’s mortified wife and mother of the young girl. Critics were soon called out for relying on poor stereotypes to deny even the slightest possibility that this was a legitimate family unit.
When critics went after black British filmmaker Amma Asante’s Where Hands Touch, a fictional love story between a biracial German girl and a member of the Hitler Youth, Asante maintained that the accusations of Nazi romanticization were unfounded. Not only is their violence and bigoted rhetoric quite present in her film, but Asante has also made it known that she is on a professional mission to highlight untold black stories in her work, like the existence of biracial Germans during the Holocaust.
“When stories are hidden, and they haven’t been told, I think that when we hear about them, we have an expectation that they should sit more firmly with experiences that we know and we recognize,” she toldIndieWire amid the controversy. “I interviewed people who have experiences, and those experiences weren’t necessarily comfortable ones, but it’s their truth, and it’s not our right to challenge that.”
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If programs like Code for America’s spread, they could have a huge impact on reducing the damage of the drug war on communities and individuals. 
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