Tag: news

After Colorado legalized marijuana, Denver became the center of the newly legal industry, accounting for more than a third of the state’s recreational retail licenses. Yet local politicians in the state capital still have not seen fit to allow cannabis consumption in any setting other than private residences. Meanwhile, Colorado Springs, a considerably more conservative city that has banned the sale of recreational marijuana, boasts about 15 cannabis clubs. That surprising situation now has an expiration date: Thanks to a ban that the Colorado Springs City Council approved by a vote of 6 to 3 on Tuesday, the clubs must close by March 22, 2024.

The Colorado Springs Gazette says the ban’s supporters complained that “many clubs charged ‘membership dues’ or collected ‘donations’ in trade for marijuana,” thereby violating the city’s ban on recreational sales. Such arrangements might also violate state law, depending on how clear the quid pro quo is. Under Amendment 64, Colorado’s legalization initiative, adults 21 or older are allowed to give up to an ounce of marijuana at a time to other adults “without remuneration.” But sales are limited to licensed stores, where on-site consumption is prohibited.

The legal status of bring-your-own-cannabis clubs is a matter of dispute. State law prohibits “consumption that is conducted openly and publicly,” which does not seem to cover a private, members-only club. But Denver officials maintain that any business to which you can gain entry by paying a fee qualifies as open and public. A local ballot initiative proposed by two of Amendment 64’s main backers would have changed that policy, allowing cannabis consumption in businesses that exclude people younger than 21. They withdrew that initiative last September in the hope of negotiating a compromise with the city council.

Since the Colorado Springs ban does not take effect for eight years, it may yet be reversed by the city council or by a local ballot initiative. Jayman Johnson, owner of the Speakeasy Vape Lounge and Cannabis Club on East Bijou Street, threatened to run against Councilman Keith King, a ban supporter who represents Johnson’s district. According to the Gazette, King, who said he supported the ban mainly because residents currently have no say over whether clubs open in their neighborhoods, “urged cannabis club supporters to organize and get an initiative on the ballot to try to save their social communities.”

Reason TV covers Colorado’s cannabis consumption conundrum:

Last August I explained how the issue is addressed in the five jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana so far.

Last night’s presidential debate illustrated once again the vast differences between Donald Trump’s immigrant-bashing Republican Party and the kinder, gentler Democrats. Instead of fighting over who would deport more people—or speak less Spanish—Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders vowed to intervene (even personally!) to help poor, undocumented immigrants.

But are immigration politics really as simple as good guys vs. bad guys?

(Click below for full text and downloadable versions.)

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Researchers famously tried to replicate 100 prominent psyhology studies and reported last year in Science that only about 40 percent could be. This scandalous result has recently provoked a defensive backlash from other practitioners who asserted that the Science replicability study itself was flawed and that the reported results of psychological research are, in fact, stronger than its critics have claimed. Even as the controversy has been playing out, a new study finds that one of the more robust results of psychological research may be bunkum. Specifically, the new study to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science challenges the finding that an individual’s willpower declines as he or she resists various immediate temptations.

During the past two decades, the ego depletion effect has been confirmed by scores of psychological studies using all manner of experimental techniques. However, according to Slate, a new study using 2,000 subjects in experiments across the world that tried to replicate ego depletion has found absolutely no such effect. This is a huge bombshell. As Slate explains:

No sign that the human will works as it’s been described, or that these hundreds of studies amount to very much at all. …

For scientists and science journalists, this back and forth [over replicability] is worrying. We’d like to think that a published study has more than even odds of being true. The new study of ego depletion has much higher stakes: Instead of warning us that any single piece of research might be unreliable, the new paper casts a shadow on a fully-formed research literature. Or, to put it another way: It takes aim not at the single paper but at the Big Idea.

[Roy] Baumeister’s theory of willpower, and his clever means of testing it, have been borne out again and again in empirical studies. The effect has been recreated in hundreds of different ways, and the underlying concept has been verified via meta-analysis. It’s not some crazy new idea, wobbling on a pile of flimsy data; it’s a sturdy edifice of knowledge, built over many years from solid bricks.

And yet, it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus, that its foundation might be made of rotted-out materials. That means an entire field of study—and significant portions of certain scientists’ careers—could be resting on a false premise. If something this well-established could fall apart, then what’s next? That’s not just worrying. It’s terrifying.

The whole Slate article is well worth your attention.

In his seminal 2005 article, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” Stanford University statistician John Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”

Might I suggest that psychology and, in fact, the rest of science would benefit from some really focused research on the problem of confirmation bias?

For more background, see my Reason feature “Broken Science.“

Multiple video clips have emerged showing an anti-Donald Trump protester, part of a group being ejected from last night’s Trump rally in Fayetteville, NC, being sucker-punched by a Trump supporter.

Though the incident took place mere feet away from the same law enforcement officials escorting protester Rakeem Jones out of the venue, the officers in question ignored the perpetrator and instead immediately grabbed a stunned Jones, threw him to the ground, and placed him in handcuffs. 

Jones told the Washington Post that he and three companions, “a white woman, a Muslim, and a gay man” went to the rally as a “social experiment.” One of the people in the group, Ronnie C. Rouse, said that as soon as Trump’s speech began, someone in the crowd “singled them out” and moments later a group of eight officers wearing “Sheriff’s Office” uniforms arrived to remove them from the premises. 

With officers both in front and behind him, Jones walked up the stairs, pausing briefly to throw his hands up in mocking defiance of the booing crowd. The video clips show a man wearing a ponytail under a cowboy hat walking toward the aisle, waiting until Jones is within arm’s reach, then decking him with a right cross. Seconds later, the officers yanked Jones up the stairs and forcibly detained him. 

“The police jumped on me like I was the one swinging,” Jones said to the Post. He added, “It’s like this dude really hit me and they let him get away with it. I was basically in police custody and got hit.”

The identity of the man who threw the punch is unknown at this time, but one video shows several officers walking right past him, not even looking in his direction, after he threw the punch. 

In a strange twist, the area’s local law enforcement agencies are all refusing to take responsibility for what happened. The Post reports:

Fayetteville is in Cumberland County, N.C., but an official from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, reached by The Washington Post early Wednesday, said officers from that jurisdiction were not the ones who detained the man. The Fayetteville Police Department also told The Post they did not detain anyone at the rally, held at the city’s Crown Coliseum.

As previously noted here at Reason, violence and threats of violence have become an increasingly common feature of Trump rallies, and disrupting a Trump event can technically be prosecuted as a federal crime. 

The Republican frontrunner has also mused publicly that he’d like to punch a protester in the face, insinuated that people who disrupt his events might deserve to get “roughed-up,” and encouraged his supporters to forcibly remove anti-Trump demonstrators, telling one crowd he’d “defend you in court.”