Tag: in-the-news

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Last month, federal auditors revealed the DEA had secretly spied on Americans who bought money counters. With a reach so expansive it alarmed even the FBI, this sweeping surveillance program helped the DEA seize over $50 million in cash and real estate. Yet auditors found “the vast majority” of those under surveillance “were never shown to be connected to illicit drug-related activities.” Over at Forbes.com, IJ’s Nick Sibilla has more.

• While presiding over the Department of Justice’s military prosecution of the alleged mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing, this Air Force Colonel was simultaneously gunning for a job as an immigration judge with . . . the Department of Justice. An improper appearance of bias? D.C. Circuit: Indubitably. All 460 of his written orders in the case are vacated. Be more careful next time.
• Eight voting citizens of Greensboro, N.C. successfully challenged a 2015 law that redrew their City Council district and got an injunction prohibiting the County Board from enforcing the law. Can they recover their attorney’s fees from the Board? District Court: The Board didn’t write the law, it declined to defend the law, and it stipulated to a bunch of facts to streamline the litigation; special circumstances justify denial of fees. Fourth Circuit (over a dissent): Fee awards are about compensating the attorneys, not punishing bad actors. Pay up.
• Hattiesburg, Miss. doctor might be overprescribing opioids. So the medical board gets an administrative warrant and allegedly sends nine agents to his office to search through medical records. They allegedly detain him for hours, often at gunpoint. One delivers the charming line “[i]f you don’t sit down I will put you down.” Fifth Circuit: That’s unreasonable for an administrative search. And now that we’ve settled that—qualified immunity!
• Abilene, Tex. prison guards seek to extract from his cell a prisoner who prefers to stay. Guards contend they used the minimum force necessary, which involved spraying a chemical into the cell and restraining the prisoner’s arms and legs. The prisoner contends it was much worse—after guards handcuffed him on the floor, they punched him, squeezed and twisted his genitals, and stuck a finger in his anus. Video fails to allay confusion. Fifth Circuit: Could be excessive force. Need a trial to figure that out.
• El Paso, Tex. police respond to 911 call at dusk, discover unarmed man in the process of hanging himself from basketball hoop. Police demand he show his hands. When he fails to comply, they tase him, and he immediately goes limp. They remove him from the hoop and begin CPR, but he dies at the hospital. District court: No qualified immunity. Fifth Circuit: If the officer wanted us to address the question of whether he had qualified immunity, he should have briefed it. He didn’t (he addressed other issues in his brief instead), so the case can go on.
• Hunt County, Tex. sheriff’s dept.: Welcome to our Facebook page; please say only nice things about us or we will ban you. Fifth Circuit: Well, that’s called viewpoint discrimination, and it’s generally frowned upon.
• In June 2016, Omar Mateen pledged his allegiance to ISIS, entered the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Fla. and opened fire, killing 49 people and injuring another 53. Can the victims and their family members bring suit under the Anti-Terrorism Act against Twitter, Facebook, and Google for providing the platforms through which Mateen became self-radicalized? Sixth Circuit: “We sympathize with Plaintiffs—they suffered through one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history. ‘But not everything is redressable in a court.'”
• It’s nearly impossible for out-of-staters to get a concealed-carry permit in Illinois. Only residents of Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia can do it because those are the only states that do the kind of criminal and mental health reporting that Illinois is comfortable with. Is that constitutional? Seventh Circuit (2016, over a dissent): Yup. Gun rights are limited. Seventh Circuit (just now, in the same case, over the same dissent): Still true.
• Immigrant from Iraq is detained for a year and a half while an immigration judge decides whether to send him back to the Middle East. The man sues to get out of custody. District judge: He’s locked up under a statute that operates only for the time reasonably necessary to get a decision. A year and a half is too long. Let him out. Eighth Circuit: Those words are not in the statute. But the district court should address the man’s constitutional claims. [Ed. note: If there’s time. Because—well—there’s a preliminary order to send him back to Iraq.]
• A trio of California laws meant to protect immigrants from the feds go into effect, says the Ninth Circuit. No preliminary injunction to stop law that requires employers to notify employees before federal immigration inspections. No preliminary injunction (for the most part) for state-imposed inspection requirements on facilities that house certain federal detainees. And no preliminary injunction for law that limits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with the feds, even though it “may well frustrate the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.”
• Jury rules for defendants. Judge 1 throws out verdict, grants judgment as a matter of law for the plaintiff. Defendants move to change the verdict back. Judge 1 says no. Defendants move to change the verdict back again. Judge 1 retires, and Judge 2 goes back to ruling for the defendants. Tenth Circuit: We’re going with Judge 1 on this. Plaintiff wins.
• Opa-Locka, Fla. 911 caller reports man trying to get through window of a neighbor’s house. Officers respond, see man matching the caller’s description, point guns at him, handcuff him, pat him down, reach into his pocket, and find a single bullet. Eleventh Circuit (2018): The police were allowed to pat the man down to find a weapon, but they crossed the constitutional line when they reached into his pocket to get the bullet. Eleventh Circuit (en banc, by a 7–5 vote): No, no. His conviction for being a felon in possession of ammunition (and pistols discovered nearby) is affirmed. Judge Jordan, dissenting: The majority fails to adequately grapple with the man’s originalist arguments. (More on that from Josh Blackman.)

Friends, this week IJ’s Center for Judicial Engagement released Episode 5 of the Bound By Oath podcast, which dives tolerably deeply into the history and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. This episode: the Equal Protection Clause, featuring African-style hair braiders, Georgetown law prof and IJ alum Evan Bernick, and also space aliens in invisible and undetectable craft. Available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, and other fine podcasting apps.

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Frontline: The Abortion Divide. PBS. Tuesday, April 23, 10 p.m.

In 1983, in its first season, Frontline aired The Abortion Clinic, documentarian Mark Obenhaus’ matter-of-fact chronicle of daily life (or, depending on your view, the daily taking of life) at a clinic in Darby, Pennsylvania.

Though the show created a stir by showing (albeit in a non-grisly fashion) two abortion procedures, mostly it was notable for demonstrating the flat disconnect between abortion supporters and opponents.

Thirty-six years later, Obenhaus is back in Darby (this time with co-producer Elizabeth Leiter) to take another look at the clinic and the pro-life demonstrators who cluster outside every day. His conclusion: When it comes to abortion, Darby is “even more bitterly divided than it was 36 years ago.”

The “bitter” part is not so apparent—The Abortion Divide is mostly free of the muzzle-velocity rhetoric that dominates this issue—but the division is plain. The two sides, essentially, don’t hear one another at all.

The pro-choice folks, in measured tones, suggest their opponents represent the eternal white male imperative to be the boss of everything and everybody. The pro-life people, on the other hand, think the places they’re picketing are post-modernist Treblinkas and Auschwitzes.

“It’s barbaric to chop a baby up, put it in a little canister, take it out and count the pieces,” says one of the pro-life chiefs. “What kind of world have we entered into, where we do this to our children?”

There is no compromise between these two positions, and perhaps there shouldn’t be. If you believe a fetus (or “pregnancy tissue,” as some of the clinic personnel call it) is just an undifferentiated appendage like a tonsil or an appendix, then why should anybody else have any say about what you do with or to it?

And if you think it’s a tiny person with a small heart but a full-sized soul—the Darby pro-lifers are virtually all devout Catholics—how could you ever countenance what happens to it inside an abortion clinic?

The Abortion Divide, scrupulously even-handed, makes no attempt to sort out the moral questions here, merely recounting their continued existence. And if the show were nothing more than a heat check on the debate—oh, man, they’re still all mad—there would be little point to it. But Obenhaus and Leiter persuaded some of the women, both at the abortion clinic and a nearby facility for unwed mothers run by the pro-lifers, to talk about their feelings as they work through the question of what to do. Their thoughts are startling, sometimes maddening and nearly always touching.

A homeless woman at the unwed-mother refuge is something of a poster child for unlearned lessons; a recovered-for-the-moment drug addict, she has five children in foster homes, two living with her sisters, and a burbling new one in a crib by her side. “Now we’re trying again,” she says. “He’s pretty special—ain’t nobody taking this one.” It’s hard not to want to shake her and shout, “Grow up!” And harder still, watching mother and baby beam at one another, to not believe, just a little bit, in Carl Sandburg’s axiom that “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”

Yet bad decisions do not respect socioeconomic boundary lines. Down the street at the abortion clinic, another woman, 30-ish and seemingly well-educated and well-heeled, has just learned she’s carrying twins. With a palpable air of embarrassment, she admits the pregnancy is the result of a single act of unprotected sex and an unexpectedly hard-ass universe: “Surely, one time, I’d get some kind of a grace period on that.”

She’s hoping for better luck with the babies themselves—”a sense of peace … with these two beings I’ve chosen not to bring into the world.” She imagines a chat with them before the abortion in which she tells them, “Thank you, and I’m honored to be given this gift of life. Unfortunately, I can’t do it right now.” The twins, alas, were not available to recount their their side of the conversation.

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I haven’t read the Mueller report and I don’t plan to any time soon. I don’t feel like I would gain much by sifting through what’s already been widely acknowledged to be 400-plus pages of Rorschach test. The main point of the “Russia probe” was to figure out whether there was any sort of hanky-panky going on between the former (future?) Soviets and the Trump campaign, and we now know that there was not.

But of course now the story shifts from dark worries about “collusion” to unrestrained outrage over the president’s ham-fisted attempts to “obstruct justice” by unduly influencing the investigation by lying in public and private, firing key players, leaning on witnesses, or otherwise gumming up the works. I trust my Reason colleagues (Scott Shackford, Peter Suderman, Jacob Sullum, and Eric Boehm), each of whom argues to varying degrees that if President Donald Trump isn’t technically guilty of obstruction, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s mostly because his subordinates either refused to follow his orders or screwed things up while trying to do his bidding.

But you know what? I don’t care that much that Trump was trying to obstruct justice in this instance. Certainly, if there is no underlying crime, you shouldn’t get in trouble for lying to the feds, even though it’s technically illegal. Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code makes it a crime to

“knowingly and willfully … make[] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” in the course of “any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch” of the federal government.

But should it be? We’ll come back to the White House in a moment, but the way this sort of usually plays out for the little people is that, as Jim Talent observed last year in National Review,

The FBI gathers information about a person, finds facts that the person might want to conceal — not because the facts prove a crime but because they are embarrassing for some other reason — then asks about those facts in an interview, on the expectation that the person will lie and thereby incriminate himself.

As Popehat blogger (and Reason contributor) Ken White has detailed extensively, FBI agents are trained to get you to lie, thereby being able to arrest you or squeeze you however they want. As White wrote for Reason a year ago,

In the old westerns, rather than take the trouble of hauling mustachioed miscreants to desultory trials, lawmen would often provoke them into drawing first, thus justifying shooting them down where they stood. A modern federal interview of a subject or target is like that. One purpose, arguably the primary purpose, is to provoke the foolish interviewee into lying, thus committing a new, fresh federal crime that is easily prosecuted, rendering the original investigation irrelevant. Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001, which makes it a felony to lie to the feds, is their shiny quick-draw sidearm. This result not an exception; it is the rule. It happens again and again.

Consider George Papadopoulos. The special counsel secured his guilty plea not for improper contact with the Russians but for lying about that contact to the FBI. Consider Michael Flynn. He too pled guilty not to unlawful contact with Russians but to lying to the FBI about that contact. Consider Scooter Libby, or Martha Stewart, or Dennis Hastert, or James Cartwright, all taken down by the feds not for their alleged original misconduct but for lying about it. Even when catching someone in a lie isn’t enough to force them to plead guilty, it can add charges to a case. Consider Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, charged not just with substantive crimes but with lying to the FBI about them.

There is arguably no person on the planet less sympathetic than Donald Trump. He is a reflexive liar, a blowhard, a bully, and the goddamned president of the United States. He should be a better person on all fronts and there’s no doubt that he should set a better example than he does. But when it comes to obstructing justice, at least when there was no underlying crime, he shouldn’t be in any trouble whatsoever.

Far more important, the rest of us shouldn’t be when we get set up to lie by the FBI or other law enforcement folks who have a tremendous amount of power. At The New York Times, David Brooks suggests that one of the great messages of the Mueller investigation is that it reveals

Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government.

There’s much truth to that formulation, which has been echoed by many of the president’s critics. But there’s a bigger takeaway worth underscoring, one that is vastly more important than Donald Trump who, truth be told, is acting how most presidents have acted in the past and will act in the future.

The bigger takeaway is that the federal government exercises vast and nearly unchecked power over virtually every aspect of our lives. As civil libertarian and Three Felonies a Day author Harvey Silverglate has told Reason, there are literally hundreds of thousands of federal regulations under “each of the federal criminal statutes … [and] you’re just assumed to know [them] and you can be picked up and you can be charged and these are real criminal violations.” And if that doesn’t work, the feds can snag you simply by talking to you. Contempt for Donald Trump shouldn’t obscure that brutal reality, which will outlive the Mueller report and probably most of us, too.

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California can keep all its sanctuary cities and limit local both law enforcement cooperation and private employer cooperation with immigration officials, ruled a panel of federal circuit judges.

The Department of Justice has been challenging three immigration-focused laws passed by California in 2017. One (SB 54) essentially turned the entire state into an immigration “sanctuary,” significantly restricting the ability of law enforcement officers within the state from assisting the Department of Homeland Security in tracking down or detaining illegal immigrants unless they have been convicted of certain crimes. The second (AB 450) prohibits private businesses from voluntarily allowing federal immigration officials to enter non-public areas of their companies, as well as preventing them from accessing their records unless the feds have warrants. The third (AB 103) imposes inspection requirements on federal immigration detention facilities within California.

The Department of Justice argued that all of these laws are pre-empted by federal government immigration law and inappropriately attempted to impose burdens on the feds. Not so for two of those laws, said three judges with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. It’s federalism!

The judges’ reasoning for rejecting the feds should be familiar to anybody who paid attention to the conflicts as states started legalizing marijuana for medical use. It’s true that the federal government has the authority to round up people in the country illegally or anybody who has committed crimes that allow for deportation. But the federal government lacks the authority to demand state-level assistance in enforcing federal immigration guidelines, much like the federal government cannot force state or local police to arrest people for violating federal drug laws.

“SB 54 may well frustrate the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts,” the panel ruled. “However, whatever the wisdom of the underlying policy adopted by California, that frustration is permissible, because California has the right, pursuant to the anti-commandeering rule, to refrain from assisting with federal efforts.”

For AB 450, the Justice Department argued that the bill intruded on the relationship between the feds and employers and attempted to impose requirements on federal inspections that weren’t authorized by Congress. Here the judges said that, actually, the imposition is on the relationship between employers and employees. It controls what employers must and must not do, not what the feds can do. The feds can certainly ask an employer to let them inspect a facility without a warrant. But it’s the employer that will get punished if he or she cooperates.

That may sound like a weird dodge, but it does raise the question of what would happen if a business owner challenged the law. By what authority does the state of California tell private citizens when they can cooperate with immigration officials? That’s significantly different from telling government employees when they can work with the feds.

The judges did determine that AB 103 does, unlike AB 450, burden the federal government with demands that are out of the scope of California’s authority in part and that a lower court erred when it concluded this burden was not significant.

So in the end, the court rejected the Department of Justice’s attempts to stop the first two laws from being implemented and sent the third one back down to a lower court for a second look. It’s another loss for the Trump administration, whose legal efforts against sanctuary city practices have been largely unsuccessful.

Read the ruling here.

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It’s hard to be pessimistic about marijuana legalization these days. Recreational cannabis is legal in 10 states and decriminalized in another 14. Virtually all presidential candidates, including Trump, favor letting states decide the legal status of marijuana. Polls show a majority of Republicans even support legalization. And six proposals to move marijuana laws in a more or less libertarian direction are now making their way through Congress. 

What do these policy proposals look like? How are states navigating the conflicts between state and federal law? And are there any obstacles left on the path to nationwide legalization? 

Reason’s Todd Krainin sat down with Erik Altieri, the executive director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, to talk about the building momentum toward nationwide legal pot.

Music—”Reggae Life” by Goymamba.

Produced, hosted, and edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

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Broward County sheriff’s deputies were called to a popular teen meet-up area, a McDonald’s parking lot, Thursday afternoon. The police were there ostensibly to breakup a fight, not start one.

But according to video footage of the encounter, sheriff’s deputies pepper-sprayed at least one black teenager, tackled him, punched him in the head repeatedly, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and slammed his face into the pavement. The Sun Sentinel reported that the victim was a 14-year-old student at J.P. Taravella High School.

Okay c’mon #BlackTwitter , this needs to be seen period! These are MINORS, they going to school to get literally beat up by the police? Oh nah ????????‍♀️ #BlackTwitter Tag the right people so this could be seen cause this is truly SICK. I am disgusted. pic.twitter.com/dwVORGg74m

— Lea ????????‍♀️. (@LeProsperity) April 18, 2019

The victim left the scene in an ambulance, blood covering his face.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office is “investigating the incident to determine exactly what happened, how it started, how it escalated and they’re looking at the outcome of it,” a police spokesperson told The Miami New Times. But bashing a person’s head against hard concrete is never appropriate, regardless of which party escalated the encounter. The officers involved could have killed this young man, and they should face serious consequences.

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Just in time for 4/20, a CBS News poll shows that Americans increasingly support legalizing marijuana.

The April 9-14 poll of 1,010 adults, 65 percent of whom said they support legalization, is roughly in line with the results of similar surveys. It’s yet another sign that more and more Americans are tired of pot prohibition.

When CBS commissioned a similar poll in 1979, just 27 percent of respondents wanted legalization. That number rose to 45 percent in 2013, 59 percent in April 2018, and 65 percent, a record high, in the most recent polling.

Again, this latest number isn’t terribly surprising. An October 2018 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Americans supported legalization, up an astounding 44 percentage points from 12 percent in 1969. Moreover, 62 percent of respondents told the Pew Research Center they supported legalization in a survey released in October. The results of the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, released last month, differed slightly, but not by much. A record-high 61 percent of Americans supported legalizing weed in that poll, up from just 16 percent in 1990. And Quinnipiac University’s national survey, the results of which were also published last month, showed 60 percent of Americans support legalization.

So which demographics favor legalization in CBS’s latest survey? Well, 72 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 think weed should be legal, as well as 49 percent of adults ages 65 and over. This phenomenon was also seen in the Quinnipiac survey, where 85 percent of the former age group supported legalization, but just 44 percent of the latter demographic.

“The baby boomers say no to the drug that helped define an era, while the millennials say bring it on,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said at the time. “In between are enough voters to rubber stamp legalizing marijuana for recreation as well as medical reasons.” Sixty-three percent of voters between the ages of 35 and 49 supported legalization in the Quinnipiac survey, as well as 59 percent of respondents between the ages of 50 and 64. CBS News did not provide information on those demographics.

Legalization is relatively popular no matter your partisan persuasion, the CBS poll shows. Fifty-six percent of Republican respondents support legalization, as do 66 percent of independent voters and 72 percent of Democrats.

Overall, just 42 percent of respondents said a presidential candidate’s potential support for legalized marijuana would affect whether or not they vote for him or her. Twenty one percent—including 10 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats—said they’d be more likely to vote for that candidate. Another 21 percent—including 34 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of Democrats—said they’d be less likely to cast their ballot for that candidate.

(It’s worth noting, as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum and Nick Gillespie did on a recent podcast, that most of the 2020 presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, think legalization should be left up to individual states.)

Nearly two-thirds of Americans—66 percent—agree that marijuana is less dangerous than most other drugs. Twenty-seven percent believe it’s equally dangerous, and 5 percent think it’s more dangerous. For whatever it’s worth, it’s virtually impossible to die from a pot overdose: You’d need to consume 1,500 pounds of the stuff within 15 minutes to overdose, according to David Schmader, author of Weed: The User’s Guide, as I’ve previously explained.

Americans’ increasing acceptance of weed is reflected in changing laws around the country. Thirty-two states, as well as the District of Colombia, have legalized weed consumption in at least some cases. In 10 of those states, plus D.C., it’s legal for recreational use. States like New York and New Jersey are dragging their feet on legalization for recreational use, but they’re likely to get there sooner rather than later.

The next step, as Reason‘s Zuri Davis has pointed out, is for states that have legalized weed to address past marijuana convictions and bring the criminal justice system fully up to speed.

Bonus links: Saturday, coincidentally, happens to be 4/20, and Reason has got you covered with a wide array of Weed Week stories. (You should particularly check out my personal favorite, in which Liz Wolfe got high and did her taxes.)

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An independent analysis of President Donald Trump’s ballyhooed rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) projects that the new three-way trade deal would provide a boost to the U.S. economy but would result in the outsourcing of more automaking jobs.

Overall, though, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is a modest, mild set of reforms—Trump has called NAFTA “one of the worst deals ever” but his proposed replacement is basically NAFTA 2.0, according to the estimates provided by the International Trade Commission (ITC) in a report released Thursday. The new report is unlikely to ease the USMCA’s passage through Congress, where factions on both sides of the aisle remain skeptical about the merits of replacing the 26-year-old NAFTA.

The ITC report projects the USMCA would hike U.S. gross domestic product by $68.2 billion (0.35 percent) and U.S. employment by 176,000 jobs (0.12 percent). The U.S. would see gains in both imports and exports if the deal is ratified, the ITC estimates.

“Since NAFTA removed almost all tariff barriers, the gains from USMCA are modest and largely come from reductions in the remaining non-tariff barriers,” writes Inu Manak a trade policy scholar for the libertarian Cato Institute.

Perhaps the most politically important part of the report focuses on how the new trade deal would affect automakers. The Trump administration pushed for the inclusion of stricter rules that make it more difficult for cars and car parts to cross national borders duty-free—something the administration believes would reverse the trend of automaking jobs moving to Mexico under NAFTA. Under the proposed new rules, 75 percent of the component parts of vehicles would have to be produced in North America, and 40 percent would have to be built by workers earning at least $16 an hour—effectively putting a minimum wage on Mexican manufacturing plants.

Instead of complying with the new regulations to trade duty-free, it’s likely that carmakers would simply pay the higher tariffs and pass those costs along to consumers. As a result, the ITC report says, consumer prices on cars in the U.S. would increase, resulting in an estimated 140,000 fewer vehicles sold. Auto manufacturing jobs would decline by about 1,500.

Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, a trade group, called the ITC analysis “flawed” in a statement issued Thursday.

“The report underestimates the longer-term investments and increased U.S. auto parts sourcing that will be made in our sector as a result of the certainty and predictability the USMCA will deliver,” he said.

Previously, interest groups representing automakers and dealers had been skeptical about the NAFTA rewrite. Throwing support behind Trump’s USMCA may be a political calculation—essentially, a bet that getting the USMCA through Congress is the best way to get the president to back away from his threats to tear-up NAFTA without a replacement, an outcome that would be disastrous for automakers and the rest of the U.S. economy.

There’s something to be said for that promise of trade stability. Canada and Mexico are the two largest export markets for the United States, not to mention the second- and third-largest import markets.

It will now be up to Congress to weigh the modest gains and losses promised by the USMCA against the danger of not giving the president the win he seeks on trade. It’s now clear that the NAFTA replacement won’t dramatically alter the economic future of any of the three nations involved, but that doesn’t mean Congress will shrug its shoulders and simply pass it.

“Donald Trump’s NAFTA represents at best a minor update to NAFTA, which will offer only limited benefits to U.S. workers,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which handles trade issues, in a statement. “The administration shouldn’t squander the opportunity to lock in real, enforceable labor standards in Mexico.” Democrats appear poised to oppose the USMCA on the grounds that it does not do enough to prevent moving jobs to Mexico—Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) has said she will not hold a vote on the new trade deal until Mexico makes changes to its own labor policies.

But the deal is already too protectionist for other members of Congress, including a faction of Senate Republicans who oppose the new rules of origin for cars. In a statement released Thursday, Senate Finance Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) was noncommittal about the USMCA. “I’m glad to see the report recognized USMCA’s new economic benefits,” Grassley said, promising a “thorough and thoughtful review” of the trade deal and ITC analysis.

The report, says Manak, “is unlikely to sway anyone in Congress from changing their already strongly held opinions on the agreement.”

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With the rise of legal recreational marijuana across the country and an unwinding of the drug war on the horizon, more and more people are thinking about how best to shape America’s post-prohibition drug culture. What sorts of institutions, attitudes, and practices will help us figure out which chemicals we want to ingest to make ourselves happier, more productive, and more fulfilled? How do we best educate ourselves about the risks and rewards of better living through chemistry when everything from acid to Zoloft is legally in our home medicine cabinets?

Today’s guest is working to stage that conversation. Sarah Rose Siskind, who was the head writer on the Reason TV series Mostly Weekly, hosts a monthly show called Drug Test at New York’s Caveat theater. Each episode features a different drug—magic mushrooms, most recently—and scientists, researchers, and counselors discussing a particular substance’s chemistry, history, and associated rituals. There’s also footage of a “VIP” or “very intoxicated person” who performs a variety of mental and physical tests before and after ingesting the drug in question. The result is a frank, smart, and fun discussion of how we might all navigate the world after the drug war.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Links related to today’s podcast:

Drug Test with Sarah Rose Siskind on Facebook

Caveat NYC

MAPS: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, by Tao Lin

Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, on Viceland

 

 

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Hello, reader. If you or someone you know is currently too high, Maureen Dowd-style, then you’ve come to the right article. 

First, the good news: You’re probably fine. At some point in the very near future, your heart rate will return to normal, your anxiety will subside, the spins will stop, the lethargy will lift, your nausea will dissipate, and your mind will clear. It may take several hours—perhaps a whole day or night if you’ve consumed edibles—but all will once again be how it was.

Now, let’s talk about what you can do to make this experience less awful, and how you can avoid having it again.

If your heart is beating out of your chest and you feel kind of crazy, know that it’s more likely to be anxiety than a heart attack.

“Every E.R. chart I saw sounded the same,” says Larry Bedard, a retired emergency medicine physician at Marin General Hospital in California and the former president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. “Dad had finally agreed to share a joint with his son. Fifteen minutes later he’d say, ‘My chest feels tight, I feel lightheaded, maybe I’m having a heart attack, call 911.'”

If that sounds like you or a person you’re worried about, Bedard says this is most likely an anxiety response. 

Why does it feel like a heart problem? Because while marijuana may slow motor function and a person’s sense of time, the drug also increases heart rate. Not by a dangerous amount in an otherwise heart-healthy person, but it is noticeable and can be scary.

Taking your complaint to an E.R. is an expensive way to learn that there’s not much you can do but wait it out. Of all the cannabis intoxication patients Bedard can remember seeing in his time at Marin, “not a single patient needed to be hospitalized.”

If you do show up at an emergency room and report that you consumed too much marijuana, there’s not much doctors can do. “Reassurance and observation,” Bedard says. “Someone with vomiting may need an IV due to fluid loss, but not more than that.” Maybe they’ll give you some benzodiazepines to help you relax, but they can’t magically (or medically!) un-high you.  

Peter Grinspoon, a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, says going to the emergency room can actually worsen cannabis-induced anxiety.

“The ER is busy and stressful. It’s not a great place for dealing with anxiety effects of marijuana,” Grinspoon says. “If you’re having anxiety, the best thing to do is remind yourself that it’s not going to kill you, then find a quiet place, hold the hand of a close friend, and listen to some calming music.”

(Grinspoon was quick to point out that “if someone takes a huge dose of an edible and they’re a cardiac patient, then yes, they might need medical care.”)

If you want to save several thousand dollars and an inquiry into your cannabis use, put on Buena Vista Social Club’s 1997 self-titled album. Enya and Frank Ocean are good, too. Then, find a position that lessens your discomfort and remind yourself that the THC will eventually leave your system. (I like to lie down in a dark room and put my forearm over my eyes, or walk around in fresh air. I also find regular ‘ole tap water, sipped slowly, can help settle my stomach.)

If you’re nauseated or vomiting, try a hot (not scalding) bath.

Over time, chronic cannabis users can develop something called “cannabis hyperemesis syndrome,” the symptoms of which are abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting (that’s what “emesis” means). 

Research suggests you can curb your nausea at home by taking a hot bath. More recent studies have found that applying capsaicin cream to a person’s abdomen—capsaicin being the compound that makes peppers spicy—can also relieve the symptoms of hyperemesis. These topical creams are marketed as arthritis treatments, and you can find them at your local drugstore.

Medical researchers don’t know what causes hyperemesis in regular cannabis users, or why capsaicin and hot water seem to work as well as they do. Bedard warns against running the bath water too hot, as being high may impair your ability to gauge scalding water.

The only real “cure” for this syndrome is to take a break from cannabis altogether.

How does one avoid a scary cannabis experience? Know what you’re taking, start low, go slow, and consider vaping or smoking if it’s your first time.

1.) Know what you’re taking. While it’s tough to predict how you’ll respond to various cannabis strains, you want to make sure that you are, in fact, taking cannabis or something made from cannabis, and that you’re not taking K2 or Spice, or any other synthetic cannabis formulation. These “fake weed” products, commonly marketed as things other than fake weed, can cause both psychosis and kidney damage. While they often don’t show up on drug tests and are thus popular with people in the military or on supervised release, the health risks are simply not worth the buzz.

If you live in a state where recreational cannabis is legal, buy from a dispensary or other state-legal retailer. If you live in a state where weed remains illegal, get a referral from a friend. If you know someone who grows weed, that’s probably legit stuff as well.

Your weed doesn’t need to be top-shelf for you to have a good time, but it does need to be real weed. As with milk products, when in doubt, throw it out.

2.) Start with a low dose. “If you’re going to make a mistake on the dose, make the mistake of not taking enough and being bored, versus the mistake of taking too much and being terrified for 10 hours,” Grinspoon says. “A type 1 error is not a big deal. A type 2 error makes you anxious and miserable.”

For new users, that means taking a single, small pull from a hand pipe or joint, and then waiting to take another hit until you know how that first dose will affect you. If you’re going to vape, ask whoever provided the device to put it on the lowest heat setting, which will provide the mildest dose. 

It won’t take long to figure out if you want more. “The quickest way to get a drug into your system, other than intravenously, is by inhalation,” Bedard says. “The effect comes on in 15 minutes or so.” Sometimes it’s faster than that, sometimes a tad bit longer. The point is that a relatively short amount of time elapses between when you smoke or vape and when you know how the drug is going to affect you. Grinspoon notes that you can take more once you’ve assessed how you feel, but you can’t dial the high down if you take too much. 

If your first encounter with cannabis looks like it’s going to be through a bong, ask whoever’s hosting you to fill the chamber for you. Bongs can essentially be “loaded” with smoke and then shared. Once the bong has been loaded, take a very small pull and make sure you leave most of the smoke (which you’ll be able to see) in the chamber.

This might feel a little embarrassing, but it’s better than accidentally ripping off a huge hit, which can cause even a seasoned smoker to hate life. 

3.) If it’s your first time trying cannabis—ever in your life, or in many years—be very, very careful with edibles. This might seem counterintuitive. Smoke is bad, vapor could be bad, eating things is generally OK. Doesn’t that mean edibles are the healthier choice? Not really. Smoking a little cannabis will not majorly hurt your lungs, while it is very difficult to consume just the right amount of an edible.

“I caution my patients who use medical marijuana to be careful with edibles,” Grinspoon says. “With a vaporizer, you have a sense of your dose’s impact after 15 minutes. If you need more, you can take more. But if you take too many edibles, you won’t know for more than an hour, and then you can be in a really unpleasant place for as long as 10 hours.”

Even well-labeled products for sale at dispensaries in states where marijuana is legal can cause problems. “Edibles work faster on an empty stomach, often much slower on a full stomach,” Grinspoon says. “Absorption is different with different people, based on metabolism and body weight. Edible packaging is not reliable because it’s not an exact science.” And because THC is fat soluble, you’ll get a different level of effect at a different time depending on the fat content of the edible product and the food you eat before or after.

If edibles are your only option, and you’re feeling brave, there are some guidelines you can use to maximize your chance of having a nice experience. If you are a large person, take no more than half of the serving listed on the label, and then wait at least two hours to see how you feel. If you are a smaller person, consider taking a third or even a fourth of a serving. Heck, even a large person will feel something after a third of a serving. While homemade edibles are trickier, the half-or-less serving rule will generally keep you from going overboard.

With all edibles, it’s important to wait a couple of hours before taking a second dose. THC consumed in food not only takes a while to kick in, it often lasts longer, too. If you eat half a serving at noon, become impatient and take another half at 1 p.m., and then become convinced that you are impervious to THC and take another full serving at 1:30 p.m., you will spend several hours—at least!—feeling the effects of two full servings. It will not be fun.

If you’re a seasoned smoker, don’t kid yourself into thinking you have the tolerance for edibles. “If someone is used to getting high pretty quickly from smoking, and then eats a large serving of an edible, they’ve likely got more THC in their system than they’ve ever had before,” Bedard says.

Most importantly, remember this: “Start low, go slow, and don’t overdo it,” Grinspoon says. “I just tell people to trust me on this. I’m a doctor, and I’m not anti-cannabis.”

And if you’re unpleasantly high right now, please know that we feel for you.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2ZpckxU
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