What's the Matter With Chicago?

and Seattle and New York and Boston...?

July 9, 2008

(Page 2 of 15)

Movement: 26 Drugs: 19 Gambling: 24 Food/Other: 28

34) SEATTLE

Seattle has always had an identity conflict. Gay bathhouses are allowed, street protests are legendary, and marijuana is, by voter initiative, the police department’s lowest enforcement priority. Each summer a two-day event called Hempfest draws some 150,000 people who openly smoke weed in a city park with the blessings of the cops and the local government, which regards the festival as protected speech.

Yet Seattle has long had an unhealthy strain of nannyism as well. Washington was one of the first states to prohibit alcohol in the last century, and the city’s restrictions on strip clubs and card rooms are legendary. In the last five years, the nanny impulse has gone into hyperdrive.

In 2003 Seattle banned sales of high-alcohol beers and fortified wines in a part of town popular with the homeless and street drunks. Three years later, a city report found that the ban hadn’t reduced petty crime and street drinking. Yet Mayor Greg Nickels and the Seattle City Council slammed through another ordinance expanding the so-called “alcohol impact area” to several other neighborhoods. It’s a measure of just how contradictory paternalism gets in Seattle that you can still walk into a bar in these neighborhoods and buy locally crafted microbrews with even higher alcohol content, albeit at a much steeper price than a 40-ouncer.

In 2005 a state ballot initiative banned smoking in all public places. Unlike similar prohibitions in other cities, there are no exemptions for tobacco stores, cigar bars, or private clubs. As if that weren’t enough, the Washington State Clean Indoor Air Act bans smoking within 25 feet of the doors, windows (closed or open), and ventilation systems of any public building. In parts of Seattle, smokers literally have to stand in the middle of the street to comply with the law.

Ironically, many Seattleites who smoke pot voted for the smoking ban. Perhaps they didn’t look too closely at the language of the law, which prohibits “smoking,” not tobacco.

The city’s deep embrace of environmentalism and “sustainability” rhetoric also has a nanny odor to it. This year, for example, Mayor Nickels pushed the state legislature to enact an excise tax on cars based on their fuel efficiency. (For a change, the idea met with a significant public backlash and died.) But one enviro law did expand local freedom a bit. City Council Member Richard Conlin last year proposed that the city license pygmy goats as pets, partly so that residents can process their yard waste in a more eco-friendly manner. The proposal became law by a unanimous vote.

—Philip Dawdy

Sex: 9 Tobacco: 35 Alcohol: 35 Guns: 21

Movement: 30 Drugs: 4 Gambling: 20 Food/Other: 32

33) NEW YORK

New York competes with Chicago as a trailblazer for bad new ideas, whether it’s the 2003 ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, the 2006 decision to create and maintain an active, involuntary database of the blood sugar levels on every resident diabetic, the 2007 ban on trans fats in restaurant cooking oil, or the 2008 rule that fast food chains must show calorie content on their menus. New Yorkers pay higher cigarette taxes than anyone else in the country, $4.64 per pack in combined city, state, and federal excise taxes as of June. The city has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, requiring official permission for possession of any firearm and reserving handgun carry permits for the well-connected.

Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani alike have empowered the enormous local police force to issue arrest citations and fines to citizens guilty of trivial offenses such as sitting improperly on a milk crate. Worst of all may be the city’s decades-long crackdown on marijuana, at a time when other municipalities from coast to coast are decriminalizing or de-emphasizing enforcement of laws against pot possession. “From 1997 to 2006,” sociologist Harry Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small note in an April New York Civil Liberties Union report, “the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 353,000 people simply for possessing small amounts of marijuana. This was eleven times more marijuana arrests than in the previous decade.”

—Matt Welch

Comments

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Sally O'Boyle|9.10.10 @ 12:41AM|#

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