Prohibition's 14-year span in the early 20th century caused a boozy brain drain as droves of American bartenders shuttered their watering holes and moved abroad. With them went America's Golden Age of Cocktails. Reason's Peter Suderman in 2017 brilliantly laid out the backstory behind how the federal government almost killed the cocktail. But the government's anti-alcohol tantrum also nearly killed off another product further up the alcohol supply chain—the humble apple.
Today, the produce section of your average American grocery store is dominated by a small handful of commercial apples. A mere 5–10 varietals—such as the ubiquitous Red and Golden Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp—rule the country's apple market. In my humble opinion, other than the flavorful Honeycrisp (developed via cross-breeding at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s), these varietals are largely bland, flavorless, and uninspiring.
It wasn't always this way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, America was home to well over 10,000 apple varieties, more than any other nation on earth. The names were as wide-ranging and extraordinary as the species diversity, with monikers like Yarlington Mill, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, and Winter Banana.
America's apple exceptionalism came long before the Department of Agriculture doled out millions of dollars in annual grants to farmers, and even before land grant colleges were established to advance the nation's agricultural knowledge. Instead, it was almost entirely a bottom-up, grassroots groundswell that solidified the country's apple hegemony, with nearly every farm in early America containing an apple orchard—and nearly every American (nine out of 10) living on a farm.
To understand the story of the apple, one must first understand the story of cider. Nowadays called "hard cider," cider's American bona fides ironically far outstrip that of apple pie—with alcoholic cider's roots tracing back to the very birth of our nation. Heralded by some as the "fuel of the revolution," cider was not only allegedly passed out to both colonial and British troops during lulls in the action at the Battle of Concord, but it helped propel George Washington's first election to the Virginia House of Burgesses by ensuring his voters were well-lubricated. John Adams drank a gill of cider for breakfast before his daily five-mile walks, Thomas Jefferson made cider at his Monticello orchards, and Ben Franklin famously quipped: "He that drinks his cyder alone, let him catch his horse alone."
Given its role as cider's irreplaceable ingredient, the apple rose hand in hand with cider as a sine qua non of early American life. Needless to say, cider is only as good as the apples that go into it, which is why the nearly endless variety of apples found in 18th and 19th century America produced some of the most unique and flavorful ciders the world has ever known. In the words of cicerone Michael Agnew, these early apples were "cultivated for their tannins and acidity, [and] produced complex quaffs with flavors that rivaled fine wine, quite unlike the sweetened, alco-pop or non-alcoholic juice-in-a-jug that passes for cider today."
Early Americans consumed an average of 35 gallons of cider per year, in part because it was much safer to imbibe than water. "Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider," as author Michael Pollan noted. "In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water."
Proverbs 27 intones: "If you care for your orchard, you'll enjoy its fruit." But America didn't care for its orchards. At the very moment cider, and the apple, were becoming hard-wired pieces of Americana, everything began to change. First, the European revolutions of 1848 spurred a wave of German immigration to the United States. Unsurprisingly, more Germans meant more beer, which provided a ready challenger to contest cider's heavyweight title as America's alcoholic beverage of choice. Around the same time, the Industrial Revolution led to America's first great urbanization push—and German immigrants themselves were part of this trend, choosing to settle in Upper Midwest cities like Milwaukee.
This provided a natural competitive advantage for beer over cider, as grains like barley and wheat were cheaper to grow, easier to haul into urban environs, and less perishable than the apple. "Beer was made in breweries, which are like factories—they're modern," as William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History, pointed out. "Beer seemed cleaner and a more efficient, modern drink."
As cider declined in prominence, the bucolic rural apple orchard became less important to the American lifestyle. But while the apple was already declining across the nation's cultural landscape, it was the U.S. government that delivered the coup de grâce to this noble fruit.
With Prohibition's advent in 1920, not only alcohol but also the ingredients that made alcohol became public enemy No. 1. As Smithsonian Magazine recounts, FBI agents took to chopping down acres and acres of backwoods apple orchards, "effectively erasing cider…from American life."
Even if they escaped the G-men's axes, orchard owners had little incentive to maintain their orchards in the absence of cider. "[Prohibition] caused orchards to stop growing cider apples altogether, dealing our cider tradition—and the apples themselves—a death blow," writes Jonathan Frochtzwajg of Modern Farmer.
Whether at the foot of an ax, or via the headwinds of the temperance-induced gutting of the apple's highest and best economic use as a progenitor of cider, the American apple would never be the same. "Among the causes that contributed to the demise of cider in the United States, without question the Temperance Movement belongs near the top of the list," according to David R. Williams of George Mason University.
By the time Prohibition ended nearly 14 years later, America's cider and apple culture had been decimated. Part of this is attributable to the fact that mechanized urban breweries were better positioned to weather Prohibition, given that the factory setting allowed for a more ready transition to other product lines like soft drinks or selling ice during the country's dry spell.
An additional factor is inherent to the apple itself. Barley and wheat grow as annual crops, which allows their production to be curtailed or ramped up on relatively short notice, thereby allowing breweries to spring back into action quickly once Prohibition ended. In contrast, planting a new orchard means committing to a 25-year investment—one which, quite literally, takes at least three to six years to bear fruit. "When prohibition ended in the 1930s, there was neither the desire nor the means to resuscitate the cider industry," notes Williams.
To the extent the apple maintains its titular banner today as America's most popular fruit, it is only in the form of those aforementioned, depressingly bland grocery store varietals. These homogeneously boring modern apples are a poor substitute for their pre-Prohibition ancestors. By the 1990s, commercial orchards were growing fewer than 100 types of apples, with a mere 11 varietals constituting 90 percent of grocery sales. Over 10,000 apple varieties are believed to have gone extinct since Prohibition.
Were the story to end there, we would likely be forever condemned to a never-ending conveyor belt of Galas and Granny Smiths in the produce aisle. But just as the apple's fall came at the very moment it reached its apex, its resurrection began only once it hit its nadir. For while the government nearly killed the apple, the free market is saving it.
As America's modern craft cider boom took hold in recent decades, cidermakers began scouring the countryside for those unique, flavorful, spectacularly named apple varietals of yesteryear. Often called "spitter apples" since they are less sweet than the standard grocery store offerings, thousands of heirloom apple varietals thought to be lost are being rediscovered, and saved, by American cidermakers.
Stories abound of Appalachian apple enthusiasts who have saved thousands of "lost" apple varieties and now work closely with craft cidermakers. Famed cidermaker Diane Flynt of Foggy Ridge Cider, whom many consider the founder of today's craft cider movement, has credited cider's modern rise as being built "on the backs of these old fashioned apples…. If I didn't have these apples, my cider wouldn't taste very good."
Flynt, who won a James Beard Award in 2018, recently took things even further by shuttering Foggy Ridge to concentrate solely on apple growing. Other Virginia cideries, like Blue Bee Cider and Albemarle Ciderworks have helped save the Hewes Crab apple—a favorite of both Washington and Jefferson. The Hewes Crab was presumed to be extinct before a solitary tree was discovered near Williamsburg in the 1990s. Other heirlooms are similarly enjoying a renaissance, such as the Arkansas Black, another beloved cider-making apple.
Slowly but surely, the epic names are reentering the American lexicon: Bitter Buckingham, White Winter Jon, Royal Lemon, Candy Stripe, and Black Winesap. For that, we can thank Adam Smith's invisible hand—which, a hundred years later, has finally stayed the hand of the government's apple ax.
American '76 Recipe
A patriotic spin on the French 75, this libation celebrates cider's irreplaceable role in the American story.
3 ounces of craft cider
2 ounces of bourbon
½ an ounce of lemon juice
½ an ounce of maple syrup
Heirloom apple slice
Shake bourbon, lemon juice, and maple syrup in a shaker filled with ice. Double-strain into a rocks glass containing fresh ice; top with cider and give a quick stir. Garnish with a slice of your favorite heirloom apple varietal—and save the Red Delicious for the fruit salad.
Recipe adapted from Give Me Liberty and Give Me a Drink! by Jarrett Dieterle.
The post How the Government Almost Killed the Apple appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last month, New Zealand scrapped a law that would have gradually prohibited tobacco products by banning sales to anyone born after 2008. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, will implement a similar scheme now that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (SJC) has cleared the way.
Brookline's bylaw, which bans sales of "tobacco or e-cigarette products" to anyone born after 1999, is unlikely to have much practical impact, since the town is surrounded by municipalities where such sales remain legal. But it reflects a broader transition from regulation to prohibition among progressives who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the war on drugs.
The local merchants who challenged Brookline's ban argued that it was preempted by a state law that sets 21 as the minimum purchase age for tobacco products. They also claimed the bylaw violates the Massachusetts Constitution's guarantee of equal protection by arbitrarily discriminating against adults based on their birthdates.
The SJC rejected both arguments in a decision published on Friday. The court concluded that state legislators had left local officials free to impose additional sales restrictions. And since birthdate-based distinctions do not involve "a suspect classification," it said, Brookline's bylaw is constitutional because it is "rationally related to the town's legitimate interest in mitigating tobacco use overall and in particular by minors."
The striking aspect of Brookline's law, of course, is that it applies to adults as well as minors. It currently covers residents in their 20s and eventually will apply to middle-aged and elderly consumers as well.
Since anyone 21 or older who wants to buy tobacco or vaping products can still legally do so across the border in Boston, Cambridge, or Newton, Brookline's ban looks more like an exercise in virtue signaling than a serious attempt to reduce consumption. The same could be said of the outright bans on tobacco sales that two other wealthy and supposedly enlightened enclaves, Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach, enacted in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
The Beverly Hills ban makes exceptions for hotels and cigar lounges, and both cities border jurisdictions where tobacco sales are still allowed. But even as moral statements, these edicts are flagrantly illiberal, standing for the proposition that adults cannot be trusted to decide for themselves which psychoactive substances they want to consume.
Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach also prohibit marijuana sales, which are allowed under a California law that authorizes local bans. But they continue to tolerate liquor sales, and so does Brookline, where you also can legally buy marijuana.
The details may vary, but the busybody impulse is consistent. And the consequences of that impulse can be seen in Massachusetts, which has prohibited sales of flavored tobacco or vaping products since 2019, stimulating sales in neighboring states, black-market activity, and criminal prosecutions.
Cigarette smuggling spurred by high state taxes is a longstanding phenomenon, and the flavor restrictions that some jurisdictions have imposed compound that problem. Worse, the Food and Drug Administration plans to ban menthol cigarettes and limit nicotine content, and it seems determined to erase nearly all of the vaping industry by refusing to approve products in the flavors that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer.
Such policies hurt consumers by depriving them of products they want and driving them toward shady suppliers whose offerings may pose unanticipated risks. Prohibition also invites criminalization, which is why the American Civil Liberties Union opposes the menthol ban.
"Policies that amount to prohibition for adults will have serious racial justice implications," the organization warned in a 2021 letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. "Such a ban will trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction. A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with local law enforcement."
Progressives commonly recognize such problems in the context of the war on drugs. Expanding that war to include tobacco is bound to magnify them.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Expanding the Drug War To Include Tobacco Would Be a Big Mistake appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Earlier this week, lawmakers on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees put forward six spending bills that would fund the government through the end of the year. In a press release, Republicans on the House committee bragged that the bills would "save taxpayers more than $200 billion over the next ten years"—a period of time over which the Congressional Budget Office predicts the national debt will expand by $20 trillion and eclipse the nation's gross domestic product.
Some of those savings come from cuts to federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Unfortunately, even those cuts are much more modest than they appear.
In their press release, House Republicans boasted that the appropriations package "utilizes the power of the purse to address the weaponization of the growing bureaucracy within the FBI and ATF." Specifically, they do this by "reversing [ATF's] anti-Second Amendment overreach…by significantly reducing its overall funding by $122 million, a 7% decrease" from 2023, as well as holding the FBI "accountable for targeting everyday Americans by reducing its overall operating budget by $654 million and cutting its construction account by 95%."
But these already-meager cuts don't involve very much actual cutting.
The FBI's salaries and expenses totaled over $10 billion in 2023, and it requested over $11 billion for 2024; the appropriations bill would grant $10.6 billion—a bit less than the FBI wanted but only about one-half percent less than last year's budget and certainly nothing approaching the 6 percent cut Republicans bragged about.
Republicans get around this with some tricky math: In a 2022 omnibus spending bill, the Bureau received $652 million toward the construction of a campus in Huntsville, Alabama. Republicans include the $652 million when touting a 6 percent cut, even though the money apportioned for salaries and expenses barely budged.
In fact, when Republicans bragged about "cut[ting] the FBI's construction account by $621.9 million"—for a whopping 95 percent decrease—that precipitous drop uses the one-time Huntsville cash as its starting point. Besides, the FBI only asked for a $61.9 million construction budget, which would have constituted a 90 percent decrease on its own.
Meanwhile, the ATF received $1.672 billion for salaries and expenses in 2023, while the appropriations bill would apportion $1.625 billion—a decrease of just 2.8 percent, not the 7 percent drop House Republicans claimed. That supposed 7 percent cut of $122 million comes from adding the $47 million cut in salaries and another $75 million cut from construction costs. The ATF did not request any construction money in its 2024 budget, so boasting that this a cut is laughable. Just like with the FBI, judging salaries and expenses in an apples-to-apples comparison yields a much more modest cut.
Any sort of fiscal discipline should be welcomed, of course. But it's not like Republicans are dedicated to pruning federal law enforcement agencies across the board.
"The Drug Enforcement Administration was an outlier in the bill, as it would receive a modest funding bump," writes Eric Katz at Government Executive. The bill would fund the DEA with $2.57 billion; when accounting for revenue from diversion control programs, Republicans say the department would receive "$42.4 million more" than it did in 2023.
The bill also directs not only the DEA but also the FBI to prioritize the policing of fentanyl. The FBI is directed "to allocate the maximum amount of resources" to target the "trafficking" of fentanyl and other opioids. There's no sign of any recognition that prohibition is exactly why fentanyl has proliferated in the first place and that harm reduction measures would be much safer and more effective than a law enforcement solution.
In fact, Republicans openly state in their press release that the cuts are not intended to save taxpayers money, noting that the bill "right-siz[es] agencies and programs and redirects that funding to combat fentanyl and counter the People's Republic of China."
Clearly, when the federal government consistently spends much more than it takes in, there is room to cut and an imperative to do so. It's unfortunate, then, that Republican lawmakers are bragging about plans to cut $200 billion over 10 years—1 percent of the anticipated federal debt accrued in that time—and it's even more disturbing to know that they're fudging the numbers to even get that much.
The post Republicans Use Fuzzy Math To Claim Large FBI, ATF Cuts in Budget Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Seventeen years ago, the federal government raided Charlie Lynch's medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay, California, and charged him with five drug felonies. Lynch, whose business complied with state and local regulations, has been fighting to stay out of prison ever since, and last month he finally won that battle.
The Department of Justice (DOJ), which had been insisting since the first iPhone was released that Lynch should be incarcerated for at least five years, suddenly agreed to a deal that will spare him that punishment and erase his criminal record. The case, which proceeded on autopilot even as marijuana prohibition collapsed in one state after another, is a vivid reminder that the unjust, massively unpopular policy persists at the federal level thanks to presidential and congressional inertia.
Lynch, a software developer who lived in San Luis Obispo County, started mulling a new line of work after he obtained a doctor's recommendation for marijuana to treat his cluster headaches and found there were no nearby dispensaries that could supply his medicine. He conferred with a lawyer, local officials, and even the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) before opening Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers in downtown Morro Bay in April 2006.
California had legalized medical marijuana a decade earlier, and Lynch's business was licensed, aboveboard, and legitimate as far as the city and state were concerned. The mayor, the city attorney, and city council members attended the grand opening ceremony, where the mayor posed for a photo shaking Lynch's hand.
None of that mattered to the DEA, which raided the dispensary in March 2007, at which point it had been openly serving patients for a year. During Lynch's 2008 trial in Los Angeles, he was not allowed to discuss the nature of his business, which was irrelevant under federal law.
"We all felt Mr. Lynch intended well," the jury forewoman told the Los Angeles Times. "But under the parameters we were given for the federal law, we didn't have a choice."
At sentencing, U.S. District Judge George Wu considered details the jury was not allowed to hear, including the purpose of Lynch's business, his extensive efforts to comply with state regulations, and the "scrupulous record-keeping" that enabled him to do that even as it facilitated his federal prosecution. Noting that Lynch had no prior criminal convictions and deeming him neither a typical drug dealer nor a serious threat to public safety, Wu sentenced him to a year and a day in federal prison.
Lynch appealed his convictions, and the DOJ appealed the sentence, arguing that Wu had improperly allowed Lynch to avoid the five-year mandatory minimum that ordinarily would apply based on the amount of marijuana his dispensary had stocked. In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld Lynch's convictions and agreed that he should have received the mandatory minimum but sent the case back to Wu to resolve lingering questions about Lynch's compliance with state law.
Why did that suddenly matter? The year after Lynch's trial, a DOJ memo discouraged prosecution of state-legal medical marijuana suppliers. Beginning in 2014, Congress made that policy mandatory through a spending rider that has been renewed every year since.
Meanwhile, the number of states that allow medical use of marijuana has risen to 38, including two dozen, accounting for most of the U.S. population, that also allow recreational use. Some 15,000 businesses across the country are doing what Lynch did, unmolested by the DEA or the DOJ.
Lynch's case nevertheless dragged on, bankrupting him, blocking his employment, and leaving him in legal limbo. Federal prosecutors belatedly relented in January, and last month Wu approved a diversion agreement that will clear Lynch's record as of this April.
"I think a lot of people forgot about Charlie Lynch," his former public defender remarked. But the federal government's pointless vendetta against Lynch is worth remembering, since it reflects a prohibition policy we are still stuck with 17 years later.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
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]]>Following public ridicule and the defection of co-sponsors, a Tennessee legislator has withdrawn a bill that would have banned convenience stores and supermarkets from selling refrigerated beer. State Rep. Ron Gant (R–Rossville) said he did not want "to infringe on law-abiding citizens or be unfair to businesses." Gant originally proposed the measure as a way to reduce drunk driving.
The post Brickbat: Pop the Top appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oregon legislators last week overwhelmingly approved recriminalization of low-level drug possession, reversing a landmark reform that voters endorsed when they passed Measure 110 in 2020. Gov. Tina Kotek has indicated that she is inclined to sign the bill, ratifying a regression driven by unrealistic expectations and unproven assertions.
"With this bill," Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber (D–Portland) claims, "we are doubling down on our commitment to make sure Oregonians have access to the treatment and care that they need." But Oregon is not merely making sure that people "have access" to treatment; it is foisting "help" on people who do not want it by threatening them with incarceration.
H.B. 4002 makes drug possession a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. A defendant can avoid that outcome by enrolling in a treatment program.
Under Measure 110, by contrast, drug possession became a Class E violation punishable by a $100 fine. Drug users could avoid the fine by completing a "health assessment" at an "addiction recovery center." The initiative said the assessment should "prioritize the self-identified needs of the client" and refer him to appropriate services. But Measure 110 did not make agreement to those services mandatory.
The initiative's supporters argued that coercive treatment is both less effective and more ethically problematic than voluntary treatment. "Research suggests that, except in certain circumstances where drug users are uniquely self‐motivated (such as doctors and commercial airline pilots who fear losing their licenses), coercive treatment is futile at best and may increase the likelihood of overdose in people who relapse after release from treatment," Jeffrey Singer notes in a Cato Institute blog post.
The policy embodied by H.B. 4002 is notably different from the legal approach to alcohol abusers, who generally cannot be forced into treatment unless they commit crimes such as driving while intoxicated. Measure 110's supporters argued that abuse of those substances likewise should be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal matter.
Over 58 percent of voters agreed. But a continuing increase in opioid-related deaths, coupled with nuisances related to public drug use, soured Oregonians on Measure 110. By last August, at which point the initiative had been in effect for only a year and a half, an Emerson College poll found that 64 percent of Oregon voters favored reinstating criminal penalties for possession.
It is not surprising that opioid-related deaths continued to climb after Measure 110 took effect in February 2021, because the initiative did nothing to address the iffy quality and unpredictable potency of black-market drugs. That problem is created by drug prohibition and aggravated by attempts to enforce it. The government's crackdown on pain pills replaced legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with illegal drugs of unknown provenance and composition. The deadly impact of that shift was magnified by the emergence of fentanyl as a heroin booster and replacement—a phenomenon that also was driven by prohibition, which favors highly potent drugs that are easier to conceal and smuggle.
"Oregon voters were mistaken if they believed that decriminalization alone would reduce overdose deaths," Singer writes. "Decriminalizing is not the same as legalizing. If people who use drugs need to get them on the black market, they can never be sure of the dose or purity of what they are buying or if it is the drug they think they are buying."
While Measure 110 demonstrably did not reverse the upward trend in drug-related deaths, there is little reason to think it accelerated that trend. The numbers from Oregon are instead consistent with a fentanyl-fueled rise in fatal overdoses that has played out in different parts of the country at different times.
"Overdose mortality rates started climbing in [the] Northeast, South, and Midwest in 2014 as the percent of deaths related to fentanyl increased," RTI International epidemiologist Alex Kral noted at a January 22 conference in Salem, Oregon. "Overdose mortality rates in Western states did not start rising until 2020, during COVID and a year after the introduction of fentanyl."
That lag explains why Oregon has seen a sharper rise in opioid-related deaths than most of the country since 2020. But so have California, Nevada, and Washington, neighboring states where drug possession remained a crime.
A 2023 Journal of Health Economics study estimated that decriminalization in Oregon was associated with a 23 percent increase in "unintentional drug overdose deaths" that year. But "after adjusting for the rapid escalation of fentanyl," Brown University public health researcher Brandon del Pozo reported at the Salem conference, "analysis found no association between [Measure 110] and fatal drug overdose rates."
Kral concurred, saying "there is no evidence that increases in overdose mortality in Oregon are due to" decriminalization. That is consistent with the results of a 2023 JAMA Psychiatry study, which found "no evidence" that Measure 110 was "associated with changes in fatal drug overdose rates" during the first year.
Critics of Measure 110 argued that it encouraged drug use. Yet an RTI International study of 468 drug users in eight Oregon counties found that just 1.5 percent of them had begun using drugs since Measure 110 took effect. And contrary to the claim that decriminalization had attracted hordes of drug users to the state, the subjects' median length of residence in Oregon was 24 years.
The Associated Press says H.B. 4002 "enables police to confiscate the drugs and crack down on their use on sidewalks and in parks." Yet as with alcohol, public consumption that alarms or discommodes people is distinct from mere possession. Just as it is possible to address public drunkenness and disorderly behavior without making consumption of alcohol a crime, it is possible to address nuisances related to other kinds of drug use without threatening to jail people for consuming politically disfavored intoxicants, no matter the circumstances.
Public disenchantment with Measure 110 seems to be based at least partly on unrealistic expectations that may have been encouraged by its supporters' rhetoric. "The idea behind this groundbreaking effort is simple," Theshia Naidoo, managing director of criminal justice law and policy at Drug Policy Action, said in 2020. "People suffering from addiction need help, not criminal punishments. Instead of arresting and jailing people for using drugs, the measure would fund a range of services to help people get their lives back on track."
Those services were slow to materialize, however. Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, complains that Oregon politicians "blamed an innovative policy in its infancy for decades of their own ineffectiveness." While "drug decriminalization worked to reduce the harms of criminalization," she says, "chronic underfunding of affordable housing, effective addiction services and accessible health care are to blame for the heartbreaking public suffering seen in Oregon's streets."
Frederique adds that "there is not a shred of evidence supporting claims that Measure 110 increased homelessness, overdose or crime rates." Recriminalization, she says, is "a false promise of change to distract from politicians' incompetence as they approach reelection." State Sen. Lew Frederick (D–Portland) likewise warns that H.B. 4002 "reinforce[s] the punishment narrative that has failed for 50 years."
Oregon legislators "didn't give decriminalization combined with harm reduction a chance to work," Singer says. "They are delusional if they think going back to the formula that caused countless avoidable overdose deaths and filled our prisons is going to work now when it has never worked before."
At bottom, Measure 110 stood for the proposition that drug use, which violates no one's rights, should not be treated as a crime. Its opponents have yet to offer a persuasive moral justification for rejecting that proposition.
The post Oregon Legislators Overwhelmingly Vote To Recriminalize Low-Level Drug Possession appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Oregon is considering legislation that would recriminalize low-level drug possession, reversing a landmark reform that voters approved in 2020. Although critics of that ballot initiative, Measure 110, cite escalating drug-related deaths, decriminalization is not responsible for that trend.
Opioid overdose fatalities have been rising nationwide for more than two decades. That trend was accelerated by the emergence of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute, a development that hit Western states after it was apparent in other parts of the country.
"Overdose mortality rates started climbing in [the] Northeast, South, and Midwest in 2014 as the percent of deaths related to fentanyl increased," RTI International epidemiologist Alex H. Kral and his colleagues noted at a conference in Salem, Oregon, last month. "Overdose mortality rates in Western states did not start rising until 2020, during COVID and a year after the introduction of fentanyl."
That lag explains why Oregon has seen a sharper rise in opioid-related deaths than most of the country since 2020. But so have California, Nevada, and Washington, neighboring states where drug possession remains a crime.
Decriminalization under Measure 110 took effect in February 2021, and a 2023 Journal of Health Economics study estimated that it was associated with a 23 percent increase in "unintentional drug overdose deaths" that year. But "after adjusting for the rapid escalation of fentanyl," Brown University public health researcher Brandon del Pozo reported at the Salem conference, "analysis found no association between [Measure 110] and fatal drug overdose rates."
Kral and his collaborators concurred, saying "there is no evidence that increases in overdose mortality in Oregon are due to" decriminalization. That is consistent with the results of a 2023 JAMA Psychiatry study, which found "no evidence" that Measure 110 was "associated with changes in fatal drug overdose rates" during the first year.
The expectation that decriminalization would boost overdose deaths hinges on the assumption that it encourages drug use. Yet an RTI International study of 468 drug users in eight Oregon counties found that just 1.5 percent of them had begun using drugs since Measure 110 took effect.
Because Measure 110 did nothing to address the iffy quality and unpredictable potency of illegal drugs, it is not surprising that overdoses continued to rise, consistent with trends in other Western states. Those problems are created by drug prohibition and exacerbated by efforts to enforce it.
When drug consumers do not know what they are getting, as is typical in a black market, the risk of a fatal mistake is much greater. That hazard was magnified by the crackdown on pain pills, which pushed nonmedical users toward more dangerous substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with products of uncertain provenance and composition.
Worse, the crackdown coincided with the rise of illicit fentanyl, which is much more potent than heroin and therefore made dosing even trickier. That development also was driven by prohibition, which favors highly potent drugs that are easier to conceal and smuggle.
The perverse consequences of these policies soon became apparent. The opioid-related death rate, which doubled between 2001 and 2010, nearly tripled between 2011 and 2020, even as opioid prescriptions fell by 44 percent. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted more than 80,000 opioid-related deaths, nearly four times the number in 2010.
Although it is hard to make much progress in reversing these depressing trends without addressing the underlying legal regime, harm reduction tools such as fentanyl test strips, naloxone, and supervised consumption facilities can make a dent in the death toll by preventing or reversing overdoses. Treating drug users as criminals, by contrast, compounds the harm caused by prohibition, unjustly punishing people for conduct that violates no one's rights.
"It is no longer 2020," Albany, Oregon, Mayor Alex Johnson told state legislators last week, urging recriminalization. "The world has changed. Fentanyl has become a death grip." Before legislators take Johnson's advice, they should reflect on how that happened.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
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]]>Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD.
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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love?
Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself.
The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer.
Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is?
Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."
Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby?
Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K.
Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in.
Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night.
Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you?
Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing.
Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society?
Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s.
I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation.
Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing.
Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that."
Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from?
Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street–bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns.
So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there.
Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes.
Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that?
Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this.
A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it".
So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof: MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together.
Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics.
Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito.
Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that?
Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results.
Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context?
Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through.
Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected.
Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way.
So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before.
Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that.
Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so.
So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government.
Gillespie: Right. So then what happened?
Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time.
Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug.
Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre.
So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned?
Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters.
After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years
Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy?
Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government.
So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now.
Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there?
Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news.
Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death.
Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it.
Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act.
Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s.
Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away?
Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before.
Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine?
Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly.
Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff. What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy?
Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard.
Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival.
Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling.
Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics?
Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made.
Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice.
Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with.
Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this.
Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on.
I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems."
Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do.
Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people.
Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this?
Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system.
Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in.
Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances?
Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
The post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When it comes to identifying America's most ridiculous and nonsensical alcohol law, there are many ignominious candidates to choose from. But Virginia's infamous food-beverage ratio certainly deserves a spot on any list of the dumbest drink laws in the country. A plucky coterie of Virginia policy makers has sought to reform the commonwealth's beverage ratio for years, only to run into a buzzsaw of special interest cronyism. But suddenly there is hope for boozy freedom.
Virginia's food-beverage ratio mandates that restaurants earn $45 in food sales for every $55 they take in selling liquor-based drinks. This may sound innocuous at first, but it has the effect of making establishments like elite cocktail lounges or high-end whiskey bars—which often offer scotch pours costing upwards of a thousand dollars—nearly impossible to operate in the commonwealth. After all, it takes a lot of food sales to offset a single $2,000 shot of Macallan M under the ratio. The rule also creates burdensome record-keeping requirements for restaurants, who are forced to prove they have not violated the ratio each year.
The provenance of Virginia's ratio (at least spiritually) traces back to the Prohibition era, when it was, of course, illegal for any restaurant to sell alcohol. In 1968, the state Legislature passed the Mixed Beverage Act, which stipulated that restaurants could not make more money from booze than food. The law underwent several iterations in the 1980s and '90s before reaching its current 45–55 ratio. Bizarrely, in the 1990s, beer and wine were arbitrarily exempted from counting toward the ratio, meaning it has only applied to liquor sales since that time.
The upshot is that a craft brewery in Virginia can sell as much beer as it wants—even booze-bomb Imperial IPAs—without so much as a trace of food on the premise, while a cocktail lounge that specializes in, say, gourmet hot dogs and sophisticated drinks might have trouble even opening in the first place. This makes little sense given that defenders of the law argue that the point of the ratio is to reduce the potential level of intoxication among patrons of drinking establishments.
Some of the lawmakers defending the ratio even went so far as to invoke the language of Prohibition, such as then-Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw (D–Fairfax County) growling in 2015: "If you can't meet that ratio, you ain't running a restaurant, you are running a bar. If you want saloons in Virginia, say so." Opponents painted a doomsday picture of "bars on every corner" of the commonwealth—all while conveniently overlooking neighboring Washington, D.C., which does not have a ratio or a saloon epidemic.
If anything, the ratio is actually more likely to incentivize lower-end "saloons" or "gin mills" at the expense of the aforementioned high-end cocktail lounges and whiskey bars. Once again, that's because it is a lot easier to meet the ratio by selling $4 rail drinks with rotgut spirits than by selling $350 pours of Pappy Van Winkle. During state budget shortfalls in the past, lawmakers have further compounded the problem by increasing the costs of liquor at state-run Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) stores to raise more revenue, which in turn forces restaurants to increase food prices to account for this increase in liquor prices. In this way, the ratio even impacts nondrinkers by acting as a form of stealth taxation on food in the commonwealth.
Unsurprisingly, the real reason the ratio persists is that an influential group of Richmond restaurateurs has heavily lobbied the state Legislature for years to keep it in place. Rather than being motivated by altruistic concerns over protecting the public from the purported terrors of saloons, these business owners are actually worried about upstart competitors like speak-easies and cocktail bars—which are becoming increasingly popular amid the ongoing craft spirit boom—from undercutting their bottom line.
This protectionist influence has acted as an iron curtain repelling repeated efforts to change or modify the ratio. But just when it appeared all hope was lost for fixing the ratio, a recent reform bill suddenly started flying through legislative committees and has now improbably passed the state Senate unanimously. The unexpected success of this reform effort seems to be attributable to turnover in the Legislature and the retirement of old-guard senators like Saslaw.
Should the legislation also clear the House of Delegates and make it to Gov. Glenn Youngkin's desk, it would reduce the food-beverage ratio from 45–55 to 35–65 for restaurants with monthly food sales below $10,000, and it would outright eliminate the ratio for restaurants exceeding that threshold. Ideally, the ratio would be axed for all establishments, regardless of their monthly food sales—especially given that beer and wine sales are already unlimited in Virginia.
Outright elimination of the ratio may have to wait for a future time, but Virginia is on the precipice of at least severely kneecapping one of the worst laws in its code book. If it does, it will serve as an all-too-rare example of free market champions finally outlasting the protectionists.
The post Virginia May Finally Fix a Dumb Drink Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Repealing "blue laws" and allowing Sunday alcohol sales has much less of a negative effect than doomsayers predicted.
That's according to a new research paper by Cristina Connolly and Alyssa McDonnell of the University of Connecticut, Marcello Graziano of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Sandro Steinbach of North Dakota State University. The study, published in the Journal of Wine Economics by Cambridge University Press, "examine[d] the impact of repealing Sunday blue laws on alcohol sales and retail competition, focusing on Connecticut's 2012 policy change allowing Sunday beer sales in grocery stores."
Connecticut repealed its long-standing prohibition on Sunday alcohol sales in 2012—more than a century after the law was introduced and three decades after the Connecticut Supreme Court deemed most of the state's other Sunday sales prohibitions unconstitutional. Liquor stores would also be allowed to open on Sundays, in addition to letting grocery stores sell beer on that day.
The repeal of blue laws is not without its critics. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT Tech Talk newspaper, a 2008 study found that "repealing America's blue laws not only decreased church attendance, donations and spending, but it also led to a rise in alcohol and drug use among people who had been religious."
Connecticut's repeal was opposed at the time by liquor store owners themselves, who expressed concern about everything from the "social costs" of more alcohol sales to the extra expense incurred from being open an extra day.
"Proprietors of liquor stores in Connecticut and store association lobbyists claimed that allowing Sunday sales would negatively impact their livelihoods," write the authors of the new study. "Not only would they need to pay operating costs for an extra day of the week, but there was also a concern that consumers would shift to purchasing beer at grocery stores as Sunday is one of the most popular grocery shopping days. Specifically, Connecticut's liquor store association claimed that, as a direct result of this policy, liquor stores would lose sales and reduce employment, or close."
The authors examined Connecticut's sales figures for grocery and liquor stores both before and after the repeal, using other states without Sunday alcohol laws as a control group. They found "no evidence of negative impacts on beer sales in liquor stores."
"Despite repeated claims by liquor store associations," the report concludes, "repealing these laws did not harm liquor stores, suggesting that it is possible to repeal Sunday blue laws without negatively impacting smaller businesses." Incidentally, the study also contradicted claims by grocery store lobbyists, who said Sunday alcohol sales would "have large, positive economic impacts."
The same data also provides comfort for those who worry that being able to buy alcohol one additional day per week would lead to an explosion in alcoholism and addiction. "Our estimates indicate that repealing these laws significantly increased beer sales at grocery and liquor stores directly after the policy shift, but these effects disappeared afterward."
"There is an initial bump in sales, possibly due to the novelty of the policy," they found. "This impact levels off after the initial month, with no discernible effect on sales after the seventh week."
As it turns out, the repeal benefited both consumers and vendors while proving the doomsayers wrong. But it was also a net positive for economic liberty as another piece of Prohibition falls by the wayside.
The post Study: If You Let People Buy Beer at Grocery Stores, the Liquor Stores Still Survive appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America's Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured, by Jordan S. Rubin, University of California Press, 278 pages, $27.95
For the average American, the phrase "Florida drug kingpin" is more likely to evoke cocaine-slinging Cubans or meth-cooking bikers than a middle-aged science-fiction nerd who invited the police to inspect his facilities. Yet in the eyes of federal prosecutors, Charles Burton Ritchie was no less a kingpin—just smarter and less violent than the folks they were used to dealing with.
The story of Ritchie's rise and fall, as told by Jordan S. Rubin in Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America's Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured, is every bit as compelling as a more Scarfacian tale. Rubin, a former narcotics prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, has written a period-defining study of federal drug prosecutions at the beginning of the synthetics boom.
Our Dantes are Ritchie and his business partner Ben Galecki, who met as teenagers in the early 1990s while attending the same Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Pensacola, Florida, both under court order. Ritchie was a few years older and went on to found the Psychedelic Shack, a beach-adjacent shop that sold bongs, rolling papers, and alternative clothing. Galecki would later work at the Shack as a piercer.
Initially, the Shack made most of its money from cannabis paraphernalia. In keeping with head-shop practice, Ritchie forbade his employees from acknowledging what things like bongs were designed for and would not sell to customers who mentioned illegal drugs. Eventually, he got hip to a trendy head-shop product called spice, conveniently marketed by wholesalers as potpourri or incense, packaged by the gram, and featuring a label warning that it was "not for human consumption." Once on the Shack's shelves, it quickly became popular among the customers who bought "tobacco water pipes."
Spice, as many Americans now know, is not potpourri or incense. It's also not just "a" drug but an ever-changing number of synthetic cannabinoids sprayed onto generic plant matter to mimic the effect of cannabis.
The very first spice formulation to hit the American gray market was created by Clemson University chemist John W. Huffman in the 1980s using a federal grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Huffman would later say that actual cannabis was far safer than smoking the compounds Chinese chemists created based on his published research, which he likened to "playing Russian Roulette."
But Ritchie didn't tell his customers to smoke it. He told them it was incense and potpourri. "I'm a libertarian," he said during cross-examination at a 2017 criminal trial. "What people do with a legal product is their business."
This brings us to the recurring theme in Rubin's investigation: Ritchie's belief that he had sold a legal product. How does one ascertain that one's business is square with the law? You could consult the law—in this case, the Controlled Substances Act, which is periodically amended to include new compounds that the government wants to prohibit. You could contact an attorney. You could consult the local sheriff's department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). You could have a lab test your product for banned compounds. Ritchie did all those things when he founded a spice manufacturing company called Zencense, and everyone—including the law—told him that the compounds he was buying from China, cutting with acetone, and spraying onto plant matter did not contain controlled substances.
But complying with the 1986 Federal Analogue Act is not quite that simple. The statute gives federal law enforcement license to go after people who deal in substances "substantially similar" in structure, effect, or advertised effect to prohibited ones.
In 1992, the first major case in which the law was applied went down in flames after two DEA chemists disagreed over whether an orphaned antidepressant compound called AET, which the defendants marketed as MDMA, was, in fact, substantially similar to any drug that was actually illegal. When the DEA analysts reached different conclusions in their respective testimonies, Judge Lewis Babcock, a Reagan appointee, concluded that the Analogue Act failed to inform citizens of what was actually illegal. If the DEA's chemists couldn't agree with each other about substantial similarity, what hope would a normal person have?
What does the phrase even mean? Alexander Shulgin, a Dow chemist turned psychedelic pioneer who reintroduced MDMA to the world after decades of inattention, succinctly summed up the problem with the Analogue Act in a 1987 lecture cited by Rubin: Is a Pontiac taillight "substantially similar" to a Chevy taillight? "In some ways yes and some ways no," Shulgin answered himself.
Rubin's history of the Justice Department's lobbying efforts over the Analogue Act suggests the agency was less concerned with epistemology than whether the concept would hold up in court. Eventually it would. All it took for the government to start winning was some messaging discipline within the DEA and enough trials to build a reservoir of favorable precedents.
As in 1992, that discipline was initially hard to come by when the DEA sought to prosecute spice manufacturers in the 2000s. Central to Rubin's book is a forensic chemist at the DEA who believed that Ritchie and Galecki, the latter a 20 percent owner of Zencense until the pair sold the company in 2012, were not manufacturing or selling a drug that was "substantially similar" to compounds that had been banned by a 2011 amendment to the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA fought fiercely to keep that chemist from testifying and found a friendly federal judge to agree in the first major trial against Ritchie and Galecki. During the second of what would be three trials, the DEA chemist was allowed to testify, but he had, by that point, resigned from the agency under a cloud related both to his work habits and to his unwise response to a Craigslist personal ad seemingly posted by a juvenile. In other words, he'd lost his punch as a witness.
Rubin's play-by-play of the legal battle that followed Ritchie and Galecki's indictment is meticulously annotated and chilling. One federal prosecutor said in open court that the government keeps a secret list of prohibited analogs that it will not share with the public because that would let the "bad guys" stay one step ahead of the law. A federal judge refused to let Ritchie tell a jury what steps he took to comply with federal drug laws.
Ritchie and Galecki are not perfectly sympathetic. They called their products potpourri and incense but gave them names like Bizarro and Orgazmo. They knew people were smoking and inhaling a chemical bouquet they mixed themselves in what can charitably be called rustic conditions.
But the feds come across here as more dangerous, mercurial, and unethical than their targets. Instead of presenting jurors with evidence of a crime and then proving the defendants committed that crime, the Analogue Act both allows and requires prosecutors to present legally vague behavior and then have jurors determine, based largely on competing testimonies on molecular chemistry, whether any crime was committed at all. In short, what Zencense did was not illegal until jurors said so, which they definitively did in September 2020.
The pair's ordeal is also vivid proof that bad laws have unintended consequences. It was the prohibition of cannabis, after all, that led to Huffman's research and the spice market. In a saner world, Ritchie and Galecki could've sold legal cannabis at the Psychedelic Shack. In this one, they saw a loophole the government created and took their shot. The government, unwilling to concede that it didn't have a pot to piss in, closed that loophole around their necks.
Ritchie, now 53, and Galecki, 49, are scheduled for release from federal prison in 2032. The Analogue Act is still the law of the land, even if nobody quite understands what that means.
The post How a Law No One Understands Brought Down Florida Drug 'Kingpins' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How do you mark the anniversary of Prohibition's repeal? At Reason we celebrate the hard-won victory of (relative) sanity that led to the passage of the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th Amendment and clearing the way for Americans to again (legally) consume alcoholic beverages. We also point to lessons that can be learned from failed efforts to use the force of law to prevent people from making their own choices.
But if you're an international nanny-stater, you use the day to call for restrictions on popular beverages.
"WHO calls on countries to increase taxes on alcohol and sugary sweetened beverages," the World Health Organization headlined a December 5 press release, precisely 90 years after the ratification of the 21st Amendment. "The World Health Organization (WHO) is releasing today new data that show a low global rate of taxes being applied to unhealthy products such as alcohol and sugary sweetened beverages (SSBs). The findings highlight that the majority of countries are not using taxes to incentivize healthier behaviours."
Admittedly, WHO is a meddlesome world organization, so one can't expect it to always be aware of important political dates in any one country. Still, the irony is rich enough to make you reach for something sweet and buzz-inducing. Why not double down on control-freakery on a day when Americans with a modicum of historical awareness reflect on the defeat of such efforts?
That said, WHO didn't call for outright bans on sweet and boozy drinks. The idea is to hike prices through the tax system so that people—presumably those with less money—can't afford them and therefore become slimmer and more sober.
"Taxes that increase alcohol prices by 50% would help avert over 21 million deaths over 50 years and generate nearly US$17 trillion in additional revenues," insists WHO.
WHO also points to polling data showing that majorities in multiple countries support sin taxes on alcohol, sugary drinks, and tobacco. Presumably, those surveyed could purchase fewer such products of their own accord but want pressure applied from above on those who might choose differently.
But what people support in the abstract isn't the same thing as what they actually do when living under real-life policies. Laws and unintended consequences have a funny way of colliding again and again.
"Substitution to untaxed beverages with no added sugars (e.g., water) is an intended goal of SSB [sugary sweetened beverage] taxes," noted a 2021 brief from the University of Illinois Chicago's Policy, Practice and Prevention Research Center. "However, substitution to unhealthful products is a possible unintended consequence. For example, a tax on SSBs may induce substitution to sweets or salty snacks, if an individual is looking to obtain alternative high-sugar or high-calorie foods."
In fact, research on the results of Seattle's soda tax found that increased prices drove people to buy more sweet snacks and beer. That means calories consumption just shifted around in terms of their sources, not necessarily reducing what was ultimately consumed.
"There is no evidence from anywhere around the world which shows that these policies lead to a reduction in weight, obesity or even overall calorie intake," comments Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs in the U.K., which has had a sugar tax for five years.
People can also evade taxes by crossing borders to cheaper jurisdictions, as Norwegians did to purchase lower-taxed sweets in Sweden when their country adopted a sugar tax. Americans have been jumping city and state lines for decades to escape punitive sin taxes on alcohol, as well as shipping and distribution restrictions that limit choices.
"High taxes and limited enforcement have New York City awash in illegal booze and cigarettes," Crain's New York Business trumpeted a few years ago.
Cigarettes are a perfect case study because taxes on them are so high: $4.35 in New York state, plus $1.50 in New York City. That creates an incentive to find ways around the sin tax, legal or otherwise.
"Excessive tax rates on cigarettes induce substantial black and gray market movement of tobacco products into high-tax states from low-tax states or foreign sources," warns the Tax Foundation. "New York has the highest inbound smuggling activity, with an estimated 54.5 percent of cigarettes consumed in the state deriving from smuggled sources in 2021."
Regulators of the newly legal (in some states) marijuana industry seem dedicated to replicating all of the errors of tobacco and alcohol regulation. They're hobbling legal operators and keeping the already thriving underground market awash in cash.
"Steep taxes and heavy regulation are making it hard for licensed pot sellers to operate in some states, driving more producers and buyers to illegal outlets," Zusha Elinson and Jimmy Vielkind wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.
The lessons of Prohibition may be fading into the mists of history, but that article was published eight months ago. There's no reason to believe that alcohol taxes already being evaded where they're too high won't continue to be evaded if hiked even further. And the evidence already suggests that taxes and restrictions on sugary drinks—or any other "sin" enjoyed by the public—will have the same outcome.
Of course, all of this treats high taxes and other efforts "to incentivize healthier behaviours," as WHO puts it, as just a set of policy choices among many, to be adopted if they work or discarded otherwise. But there's also the reason that people so vigorously undermine restrictive policies: They want to be free to make their own choices.
Prohibition failed because it was actively resisted by drinkers who resented being deprived of their freedom of choice. Taxes on sugar, alcohol, and other sins are similarly fought by people who believe they have the right to make their own decisions, even if public-health nannies disapprove. Freedom has a value of its own, separate from the obesity and mortality figures bureaucrats obsessively peruse.
"Taxing unhealthy products creates healthier populations. It has a positive ripple effect across society—less disease and debilitation and revenue for governments to provide public services," huffed Dr. Rűdiger Krech, Director of Health Promotion for WHO.
Some of us might say that freedom is what gives life value, and that slimming us down and extending our span on this Earth at the expense of our liberty is a lousy tradeoff.
The post WHO Calls for Punitive Booze and Soda Taxes on the Anniversary of Prohibition Repeal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On this date in 1933, Americans ratified the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, officially repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had ushered in Prohibition of alcohol just 14 years prior. Many of us will toast the occasion the same way Americans did in 1933: with a good drink. If you're so inclined, you may also want to light up a smoke while you still can. Ninety years after the end of one era of Prohibition, we are gradually creeping into a new one forbidding the sale of tobacco and/or nicotine. And just as in that previous era, these laws are encouraging illicit markets, forcing consumers to buy more dangerous products, and leading to the arrest and prosecution of sellers.
Like the temperance movement of the previous century, the movement to eradicate tobacco and nicotine is global in scope. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is pushing to implement the world's first nationwide "smoke-free generation" law, which would make it illegal for Brits currently aged 14 and under to ever purchase combustible tobacco for their entire lives. A similar law was passed and nearly enacted in New Zealand but will be reversed by the election of a new government.
Starting in 2024, Australia's already strict laws against vaping will be tightened even further, banning the personal importation of all kinds of vape devices. Nicotine e-cigarettes will be legally available only by prescription and penalties for mere possession of illicit e-cigs or nicotine liquid range from fines of more than $20,000 to imprisonment.
Despite recent assurances from federal health minister Mark Butler that law enforcement will focus on importers and sellers, one 49-year-old man caught by police in Western Australia with vaping liquid in his car has reportedly been charged with possessing a Schedule Four poison, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison. (Conventional cigarettes, which unlike vapes actually do kill millions of people every year, are not classified as poison under Australian law.)
In total, more than 40 countries have implemented bans on the sale of e-cigarettes, from oppressive states such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela to more liberal democracies such as Argentina, India, and Japan. Thailand threatens some of the harshest punishments, with threats of imprisonment and high-profile cases of police extorting foreign vapers for bribes.
By comparison, the United States remains a relatively free country when it comes to smoking and vaping, but prohibitionist policies are advancing. Five states and nearly 400 localities have passed some form of flavor ban. Massachusetts, the first state to comprehensively ban both flavored tobacco and flavored nicotine liquids, has seen a surging black market as a result; authorities are seizing so many illicit cigarettes and vapes that they are running out of room to store them.
As predicted by civil liberties advocates, flavor bans are also leading to arrests and prosecutions. Though bans do not typically impose criminal penalties directly, sellers participating in illicit markets can be charged with felony tax evasion. One pending case in Massachusetts may send two men to prison for up to five years on charges stemming from the sale of flavored cigarettes and e-cigs.
At the federal level, the Food and Drug Administration is preparing a national ban on menthol cigarettes. An even more ambitious proposal would mandate extremely low levels of nicotine in cigarettes, amounting to prohibition in all but name. The optimistic scenario envisioned by anti-smoking advocates is that these policies will effectively cut off the supply of forbidden products, nudging smokers to quit or switch to safer alternatives with little complication. The more realistic outcome is that the extremely lucrative business of supplying cigarettes to the nearly 30 million Americans who smoke will prove extremely attractive to criminal suppliers.
We have, of course, seen this all before with the prohibition of alcohol. Anti-smoking activists attempt to distance their policy proposals from the word "prohibition," but the comparison is apt. The promise to target sellers rather than consumers is identical. The indifference to the lives of drinkers who were poisoned by tainted alcohol rather than allowed a safe and legal source of liquor is echoed in today's policies that keep people smoking lethal cigarettes by banning safer alternatives. And while the United States has not yet created the conditions to completely turn the market for cigarettes over to illicit sellers, we can get a preview of what that may be like in the current rash of arson attacks on Australian tobacconists fueled by turf wars between competing gangs.
There is a deeper parallel in the ways that these prohibitions are publicly advocated. The temperance movement is caricatured in modern memory as a bunch of no-fun moralizing Protestants taking away Americans' freedom to drink. Historian Mark Schrad's excellent 2021 book Smashing the Liquor Machine is a reminder that the truth was far more nuanced; Prohibition was also a deeply progressive cause championed by reformers who sought to protect vulnerable populations from a predatory and destructive liquor traffic. The problems they identified were real, even if their solution proved to be fatally flawed.
Today's advocates for nicotine and tobacco prohibitions are in the same vein of progressive reform; they portray their policies not as restrictions on personal freedom but rather as protections against the deadly and dishonest tobacco industry. This is evident in the responses to the reversal of New Zealand's "world-leading" ban on tobacco, its change in policy described as "retrograde," an "act of idiocy," even as "systemic genocide" against the indigenous Maori. Suggestions that tobacco prohibition would infringe on liberties or have genuine downsides are barely given consideration among the press or public health experts.
Before shaking up the cocktails on this Repeal Day, today's tobacco and nicotine prohibitionists may do well to take a few moments to contemplate what lessons they might take from their anti-alcohol predecessors. Both sets of reformers justifiably railed against the sale of dangerous substances; if anything, the case against tobacco is even stronger than that against booze. But there is an essential difference too: while all sources of alcohol are roughly equivalent from a health perspective, the harms of smoking can be greatly reduced by switching to innovative, lower-risk sources of nicotine.
That difference highlights an opportunity that was never available to the Anti-Saloon League: to defeat the enemy not by prohibition but by competition. Making safer products available and using less restrictive measures to nudge consumers to use them can save lives without risking the inherent dangers and unintended consequences of prohibition. While that outcome may be less satisfying to progressive reformers than bringing the hammer down on Big Tobacco, they might consider one more lesson from the Prohibition era. If a policy was so unworkable that people are still celebrating its repeal nearly a century later, it's probably worth trying a different course of action today.
The post Repeal Day Lessons for Tobacco Prohibitionists appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today is Repeal Day—the day we celebrate the end of Prohibition.
Prohibition was dubbed the "noble experiment," but there was nothing noble about it.
The federal ban on buying, selling, and producing most alcoholic beverages turned a peaceful, artisan booze trade into a black market run by outlaws and gangs with guns.
The only good news to this story is that in the end, after more than a decade of disaster and dysfunction, the feds finally gave up, wiping the ban from the books with a new constitutional amendment.
That's the way it is with public policy: Often the best way to reform government is just to end bad laws.
Here at Reason, that's what we make the case for every single day.
At Reason, we argue for getting rid of entire federal agencies. We push for eliminating stupid, maddening, and counterproductive zoning laws. We show how top-down bans and mandates make everything worse for everyone.
The FDA? The FCC? The TSA? Zoning? The Jones Act? The chicken tax? Yep. Even the chicken tax.
We don't need any of that nonsense! Let's have a Repeal Day for all of it.
We make these arguments with data, dispassion, and reasoned argument. But sometimes we do have to yell a little bit.
Give us your money right now so we can keep on yelling about bad laws.
Even better: Your donation will be matched, thanks to a generous donor. In drink terms, you can think of it as ordering a single pour—but getting a double on the house.
We also make the case against new bad laws—especially those that, like Prohibition, try to stop you from doing, consuming, and enjoying stuff that's already legal and fun.
When politicians try to outlaw PornHub, TikTok, Four Loko, or strawberry-flavored vapes, we're on your side too.
Prohibition has been over for nearly a hundred years. But the Prohibitionists aren't letting up. Neither are we.
Donate to Reason to help us stop the new Prohibitionists!
With your support, we end bad laws—and stop terrible new ones from going into effect.
The post Give to <i>Reason</i>, Because We Have to Repeal Bad Laws appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you remember headlines about angel dust and crack, you know that drug panics are nothing new. From time to time an intoxicating drug is rediscovered or newly synthesized, or old ones are consumed in new ways, leading to public fascination and forecasts of doom. We've seen that recently with widespread attention paid to fentanyl and tranq, and a recent article in The New York Times about "super meth" and "polysubstance use."
The November 13 Times piece headlined "'A Monster': Super Meth and Other Drugs Push Crisis Beyond Opioids" consists of a high panic to substance ratio. As Reason's Jacob Sullum pointed out, "super meth" is not new, but represents a return to making methamphetamine from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) the way the Hell's Angels did in the past before illicit manufacturers started deriving it from pseudoephedrine. Now that allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine are strictly controlled, underground labs have returned to old techniques.
Well, of course. Black market operators always innovate to work around laws and law enforcers.
The rest of the of the article, on the simultaneous consumption of several drugs, is equally unremarkable, though outcomes remain as unfortunate as ever.
"The United States is in a new and perilous period in its battle against illicit drugs," writes the Times's Jan Hoffman. "The scourge is not only opioids, such as fentanyl, but a rapidly growing practice that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels 'polysubstance use.'"
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Intentional polysubstance use occurs when a person takes a drug to increase or decrease the effects of a different drug or wants to experience the effects of the combination." If you're wondering if this is really a new thing that never occurred to anybody before, the answer is a big, fat "no".
John Belushi "died March 5, 1982, of an accidental overdose of heroin and cocaine — known as a 'speedball,'" the Chicago Sun-Times observed in 2020 after the death of Cathy Smith, who injected the comedian with that asking-for-trouble cocktail.
Mixing fentanyl and meth, or downers and uppers of all sorts, or any type of mutually reinforcing intoxicants is an old practice for aficionados of the perfect high. Done with moderation, you might end up with caffè corretto—Italy's "corrected coffee" with booze added to espresso. Done to excess, you could get a junky face down in an alley—or a famous comedian DOA in an expensive hotel room. The problem is that prohibition encourages stronger drugs which can be more easily smuggled in small packages, and illicit manufacturing produces products of unreliable purity and potency.
People who disapprove of drugs want to end their use, but consumers have never demonstrated a willingness to comply. Sellers always arise to meet their demand. Drug innovation to evade prohibitionists, and making cocktails of those drugs, is inherently more dangerous than legal markets.
"Hoffman's report brings to mind a 2018 University of Pittsburgh study I frequently cite, showing the overdose death rate has been on a steady exponential growth trend since at least 1979, with different drugs in fashion and predominating among overdose deaths at different times," comments Jeffrey Singer, an Arizona-based surgeon and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, in response to the Times piece.
Singer attributes endless innovation in ever-stronger drugs and the rise in resulting overdoses to the competition between prohibitionists and illicit suppliers to outwit one another.
"The iron law of prohibition — 'the harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug'—means we can expect more potent and dangerous forms of drugs to continue to arise," he adds.
If you blend "more potent and dangerous forms of drugs" in "polysubstance use" (or just speedball it) you're going to add risks on top of risks. The results can be tragic, but they're less the result of drugs than they are of restrictions and prohibitions that inevitably drive consumers to seek intoxicants from illegal suppliers. For a good illustration, let's revisit the "super meth" piece in the Times.
"Like opioids, which originally came from the poppy, meth started out as a plant-based product, derived from the herb ephedra. Now, both drugs can be produced in bulk synthetically and cheaply. They each pack a potentially lethal, addictive wallop far stronger than their precursors," Hoffman wrote.
Why grow a crop in a field, which can be targeted for destruction by prohibitionists, when you can synthesize the active ingredients in a hidden laboratory that's difficult to find and can be moved if necessary? And if you're going to synthesize it, why not find ways to make it more concentrated so that large numbers of doses can be moved in compact shipments? You can always cut it at the distribution end and sell it in lower-concentration doses.
Unfortunately, illicit laboratories aren't always as reliable as aboveboard ones and underground chemists aren't necessarily as competent or diligent. When somebody screws up or just doesn't care, it's much harder to hold a criminal network to account than it is to go after a corporation that has a mailing address and a reputation to maintain. The end result, for the drug trade, is illness and death from intoxicants of unknown purity and potency, if the formulation was even safe to begin with.
"Until policymakers come to terms with the fact that the polydrug overdose crisis and the 'second meth epidemic' are the latest manifestations of drug prohibition, the cycle of harder enforcement yielding harder drugs and new drug 'epidemics' will continue," adds Singer.
Unfortunately, this is a mistake that policymakers have been making seemingly forever, through the rise of illegal markets, the adoption of veterinary medications for recreational use, the diversion of anesthetics and tranquilizers, and the innovations of chemists in underground laboratories. From heroin to crack to meth to fentanyl to tranq and everything in between, battles between prohibitionists and those wanting to limit the scope of people's choices are never won by the control freaks. The 18th Amendment and U.S. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages stand as monuments to their failures.
People have always wanted to alter their consciousness in ways great and small. They will continue to want to get high no matter how much disapproval their activities draw from sober scolds. The only question is whether those getting high will acquire their intoxicants of choice from legal, responsible suppliers who have to maintain their brands and explain themselves in court, or from illegal suppliers who meet demand by any means necessary.
So long as prohibitionists keep up their efforts, there will always be another "super meth" cocktail around the corner.
The post The 'Monster' Isn't the Drug, It's the Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last Saturday, October 28, the actor Matthew Perry died in his hot tub. Best known for playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom Friends, since the show ended he'd become almost as famous as a celebrity addict who very publicly struggled with substance abuse, recovery, and relapse. His untimely death offers an opportunity to think about both drug use and drug prohibition, as he took both legal and illegal substances throughout his life.
Does his life support continuing the federal drug war—a broad-based, overlapping series of policies that has given rise to high levels of incarceration over the past half-century, a $3.2 billion annual budget for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and record levels of overdose deaths?
Perry's best-selling 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, is a searing account of his long and difficult relationship with currently banned substances the government calls "illicit drugs," legal pharmaceuticals, and alcohol. In it, he discussed his near-death experience when his colon burst due to taking too many opioids, which have a constipating effect. (At one point, he says he was downing up to 55 Vicodins a day.) He was put into a medically induced coma, given just a 2 percent chance of survival, and spent months using a colostomy bag. He says he had his first drink at 14 and started drinking every day at age 18. He was clean and sober for only one season of Friends, which ran for a decade between 1994 and 2004. By his count, he made 15 trips to rehab, had 14 stomach surgeries, and told The New York Times that he'd "probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober."
The cause of death for the 54-year-old is not known and an inquest and full toxicology report could take months to complete. Reportedly, the only drugs found in his house were prescription medicines for anxiety, depression, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, (an artifact of his heavy smoking). But whether Perry's death was directly caused by drugs, there is no question his long history of substance abuse hastened it. Bodies just can't take the sort of punishment he gave his. Perry intuited this and noted in an interview promoting his book that he wanted to be remembered more for helping people get straight than for playing the sarcastic Chandler Bing. "When I die," he said, "as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people."
Given his personal history, it's not surprising that he was no fan of legalizing drugs. Rather, he supported drug courts and forcible treatment, as he made clear in a famous-at-the-time dust-up with British conservative Peter Hitchens. After Hitchens challenged whether addiction is a disease in the way that cancer or diabetes is, Perry responded by saying that denying the disease model of addiction was "as ludicrous as saying that Peter Pan was real." He continued: "I'm a drug addict. My life is, 'If I have a drink, I can't stop.' And so it would be following your ideology that I'm choosing to do that."
Yet while Perry's definition of an addict who has no volition is one we commonly associate with substance abuse, it should be remembered that his experience is atypical, and not simply because he had the means to pay for a level of care far beyond that of an average person, or because of the intensity and duration of his substance use.
A 2018 study of people prescribed opioids, reported Reason's Jacob Sullum, "found that just 1 percent of people who took prescription pain medication following surgery showed signs of 'opioid misuse,' a broader category than addiction." Other research shows that even people classified as "excessive drinkers"—eight drinks a week for women, 15 for men—are not "alcohol dependent." That is, they show no signs of withdrawal and report no increased tolerance for beer, wine, or spirits. Harvard psychiatrist John F. Kelly tells CNN that somewhere between 60 percent and 75 percent of people diagnosed with substance-use disorder "reach remission." One need not agree with figures such as Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart, who has written about his "responsible" heroin use, or Sullum, whose 2003 book Saying Yes is a "defense of drug use," to understand that most people manage their legal and illegal (or illicit) substances pretty well.
In the wake of a tragic death like Perry's, it's easy to overlook how drug prohibition makes it harder for people to seek treatment by compounding shame and denial with legal issues. As a wealthy celebrity in a creative industry that is uncommonly accepting of drug problems, Perry was able to more openly deal with his issues (though as his memoir makes clear, it was still no easy task). The drug war "others" users and makes them seem less than human, which explains why it's more common that, as the Cato Institute's Trevor Burrus puts it, "heroin addicts get cages and alcoholics get treatment."
Drug prohibition also means casual users face monumentally greater risks from adulterated drugs whose potency and purity are unclear. Last year, "a record high of 109,000 Americans" died from drug overdoses, "with roughly three-quarters involving opioids and 90 percent involving illicit fentanyl."
Yet most opiate/opioid users are not trying to kill themselves. What percentage of fentanyl-related deaths involve users who don't even know they are taking fentanyl, which has been showing up in all sorts of other drugs as a cutting agent? Or who have no clear sense of how much of a substance they are taking? During alcohol prohibition, tainted liquor killed people because there were no controls on its production. That ended the minute the stuff became legal and its makers and distributors had an incentive not to poison their customers.
Legalizing drugs and regulating them similar to beer, wine, and alcohol won't end abuse or accidental deaths, but it will make those outcomes less likely. Evidence from Oregon, which decriminalized low-level drug possession in 2021, shows that reducing legal penalties had no impact on overdose deaths a year after implementation. In 2022, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) told the Senate that marijuana legalization "has not been associated with an increase in adolescents' marijuana use." That's almost certainly because legal businesses have more reason than outside-the-law dealers to follow rules.
It's better to stop spending billions of dollars a year propping up a drug war that fails most basic cost-benefit analyses (such as this one coauthored by Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker) and spend more time helping people with problems and creating new cultural norms that encourage responsible living, with or without the use of intoxicants. (Drinking, for instance, has declined globally over the past 20 years.)
That may not be exactly the way that Matthew Perry thought about helping other people, but it would be a fine legacy nonetheless.
The post Matthew Perry, Drug Abuse, and Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman sprint through a buffet of topics including government shutdowns, Mexican fentanyl, the second GOP presidential debate, and the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.).
1:04: The government didn't shut down.
10:03: Fentanyl and the border with Mexico
25:05: Reactions to the second GOP debate
38:18: Weekly Listener Question
42:52: Death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Congressional Clown Show," by Liz Wolfe
"The Government Won't Shut Down," by Eric Boehm
"The GOP Can Always Get Worse—And It Will (Midterm Election Copout Edition)," by Nick Gillespie
"Josh Barro: A Republican Presidential Debate Detached From Reality," by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
"Despite Debunking, Rainbow Fentanyl Myths Continue," by Emma Camp
"The Truth About Ron DeSantis' Fentanyl Horror Story," by Joe Lancaster
"Ban Teenagers From Social Media, Vivek Ramaswamy Says, Because Fentanyl," by Jacob Sullum
Ronald Reagan vs. 2024 Republicans on immigration, by Bess Byers
"The 5 Best Arguments Against Immigration—and Why They're WRONG" by Nick Gillespie and Todd Krainin
"Vivek Ramaswamy Is Wrong About the National Debt," by Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism,'" by Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy Proposes a (Probably) Illegal Plan To End Birthright Citizenship," by Fiona Harrigan
"Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie Call Out Trump for Adding to Federal Debt," by Eric Boehm
"DeSantis Says He Would Use Justice Department To Bring Civil Rights Cases Against 'Soros-Funded Prosecutors,'" by C.J. Ciaramella
"On Guns, Drugs, and National Security, Dianne Feinstein Was Consistently Authoritarian," by Jacob Sullum
"Social Security, Snoopy Snoopy Poop Pants, & Alan Simpson: Ultimate Enema Man Remix," by Austin Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"The Noid," Domino's pizza 1986 ad
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The 'Whack Jobs' Were Right appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 confirmation hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) asked him to "reconcile" his conclusion that "assault weapon" bans are unconstitutional with "the hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons that have taken place in recent history." It was a classic Feinstein moment, combining her steadfast support for arbitrary gun laws with blatant misinformation and a logical non sequitur.
Feinstein, who died Thursday night at age 90, wrote the 1994 federal "assault weapon" ban, which prohibited the importation, manufacture, distribution, and possession of semi-automatic guns that she falsely claimed were uniquely suitable for mass murder. Although the distinctions drawn by that law never made much sense, Feinstein was determined to reinstate the ban after it expired in 2004, proposing a series of new, supposedly improved versions. Her dedication to a logically, practically, and constitutionally dubious gun control policy was of a piece with her diehard support for the war on drugs, her embrace of mass surveillance in the name of national security, and her willingness to restrict speech protected by the First Amendment, all of which reflected her consistently authoritarian instincts.
Feinstein's exchange with Kavanaugh was a window into the way she thought about public policy. Feinstein demanded an explanation for Kavanaugh's dissent from a 2011 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the District of Columbia's "assault weapon" ban. As he noted in that opinion, the D.C. law (like Feinstein's bills) covered a "haphazard" set of arbitrarily selected guns "with no particular explanation or rationale for why some made the list and some did not." Kavanaugh concluded that the ban was inconsistent with District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case in which the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense.
As Kavanaugh explained to Feinstein, Heller says the Second Amendment protects the right to keep handguns for self-defense, while allowing that bans on "dangerous and unusual" weapons—firearms that are not "in common use" for "lawful purposes"—would be constitutional. "Most handguns are semi-automatic," Kavanaugh observed. "The question was can you distinguish, as a matter of precedent," between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. He noted that "semi-automatic rifles are widely possessed in the United States; there are millions and millions." To Kavanaugh, that meant the guns that Feinstein wanted to ban were "in common use" for "lawful purposes" such as self-defense and hunting, so possession of them was protected by the Second Amendment.
But Feinstein was not actually interested in Kavanaugh's legal reasoning. "How do you reconcile what you've just said with the hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons that have taken place in recent history?" she asked. In addition to wildly inflating the actual number of mass shootings at schools (with or without "assault weapons"), the question was nonsensical. Although handguns are by far the most common kind of weapon used in firearm homicides (including mass shootings), the Supreme Court in Heller nevertheless had upheld the constitutional right to own them for self-defense. There is obviously a difference between the empirical question of how often a particular category of firearms is used to commit crimes and the legal question of whether that category is covered by the Second Amendment.
Feinstein either did not understand or was determined to obscure that distinction, preferring an emotional appeal to anything resembling a constitutional argument. She showed the same impatience with legal niceties in a 2013 exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), who had the temerity to join Kavanaugh in questioning the constitutionality of her pet legislation. "I'm not a sixth-grader," she said, objecting to Cruz's "lecture." Although "I'm not a lawyer," she added, "I've been up close and personal to the Constitution." But aside from her suggestion that "assault weapon" bans fell under "exceptions" recognized in Heller, Feinstein's purported intimacy with the Constitution did not yield any relevant insights.
Feinstein instead appealed to her personal experience with gun violence, starting with the day in 1978 when Dan White used a revolver to kill San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. "Senator, I've been on [the Senate Judiciary Committee] for 20 years," she said. "I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in. I saw people shot. I've looked at bodies that had been shot with these weapons. I've seen the bullets that implode [sic]. In Sandy Hook, youngsters were dismembered." In short: If you think Americans have a right to own guns that can be used to kill innocent people, you hate children and want them to die.
When it came to drug policy, Feinstein was equally undaunted by facts and logic. She not only pushed the pseudoephedrine restrictions that have incommoded cold and allergy sufferers across the country without having any impact on methamphetamine use; she joined Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) in proposing legislation aimed at the mythical threat of candy-flavored meth. She not only opposed legalization of recreational marijuana in California; she worried that the Justice Department was not responding aggressively enough to legalization in Colorado and Washington.
Even on medical use of marijuana, which 38 states currently allow, Feinstein did not yield an inch. In 2015, she was the only Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee who voted against a spending rider that bars the Justice Department from interfering with such laws.
Feinstein argued that the violence fostered by prohibition was a good reason for the government to redouble its efforts to discourage drug use. She was ever eager to expand the war on drugs, whether the target was imitation marijuana or Four Loko.
In addition to gun violence and drug abuse, Feinstein worried a lot about national security, an area where she likewise displayed little concern for civil liberties. She dismissed revelations about the National Security Agency's mass, warrantless collection of information about Americans' telephone calls, saying it was "just metadata." She thought WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be prosecuted for publishing classified information of clear public interest, even though that is something journalists who cover national security routinely do. Caught up in the hysteria about Russian trolls, she warned social media companies they had better "do something" about "disinformation," or else "we will." Combining two of her interests, she said anyone "appropriately suspected" of involvement in terrorism should lose his Second Amendment rights based on "a reasonable belief" that he "may" use a gun "in connection with terrorism."
Based on her votes, the Institute for Legislative Analysis reports that Feinstein adhered to a "limited government" position 5 percent of the time. The best that can be said about her long career as a politician is that she pursued policies she honestly thought would work in the name of causes she genuinely cared about. But her good intentions produced positions that almost always seemed to err in favor of more government power and less individual freedom.
The post On Guns, Drugs, and National Security, Dianne Feinstein Was Consistently Authoritarian appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The second Republican debate of the 2024 presidential campaign cycle took place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday, and at various points throughout the night the topic turned to drug policy.
The candidates argued over the proliferation of fentanyl—the synthetic opioid significantly more potent than morphine or heroin that is often found mixed with other narcotics purchased on the black market. Specifically, the candidates squabbled over who would most aggressively weaponize the military and federal power in an attempt to prevent illicit fentanyl from reaching American shores.
Some of the candidates deployed anecdotes gleaned from the campaign trail of people whose loved ones died of fentanyl overdoses in order to justify increasingly oppressive drug policy. But Gov. Ron DeSantis's example is much more complicated than he let on.
"In Florida, we had an infant, 18 months [old]," DeSantis said. "Parents rented an Airbnb, and apparently the people that had rented it before were using drugs. The infant was crawling, the toddler was crawling on the carpet and ingested fentanyl residue and died. Are we just going to sit here and let this happen, this carnage happen in our country? I am not going to do that." As he has in the past, DeSantis used the story to illustrate the need for tougher drug and immigration policy, up to and including shooting people as they cross the border with Mexico.
A campaign official confirmed to Reason that DeSantis was referring to Enora Lavenir,* the 19-month-old daughter of a French couple vacationing in Wellington, a small Florida town near West Palm Beach. The Lavenirs rented a four-bedroom house through Airbnb, where on August 7, 2021, Enora's mother Lydie Lavenir found her unconscious and foaming at the mouth. Paramedics rushed the girl to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
Last year, the Lavenirs filed a wrongful death suit against Airbnb, the property's owners, and the most recent previous renter. The lawsuit has since been amended to add additional defendants including HomeAway, the parent company of Vrbo, another home-rental service through which the prior tenant rented the house. According to the lawsuit, "the medical examiner detected a lethal level of Fentanyl in Enora's blood and determined that her cause of death was acute Fentanyl toxicity. Toxicology readings indicated a quick death, ruling out the possibility that Enora came into contact with Fentanyl anywhere else but in the Airbnb rental."
Contrary to DeSantis's statement at the debate, the lawsuit does not claim that Enora was "crawling on the carpet and ingested fentanyl residue." In fact, the suit does not speculate exactly how Enora came into contact with the drug; it merely alleges that Airbnb and Vrbo have "known for years that drug use is prevalent in [their] properties" and "that drugs, paraphernalia, and residue are frequently left behind in rentals, that there is a substantial risk of them being left behind, and that when they are left behind they pose a fatal risk to future guests, including children and infants."
As to the owners, the suit alleges that the property "had a history of being used as a party house" and that days before the Lavenirs checked in, the previous tenant and/or his guests brought "illicit drugs to the subject premises," which the Lavenirs believe "included, but were not limited to, powder cocaine, powder cocaine laced with Fentanyl, Fentanyl, and/or marijuana."
But according to police reports from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, "it was unknown how the decedent ingested the fentanyl and the source of the fentanyl" as "there were no signs of any illegal narcotics at the crime scene," either on the premises or in the Lavenirs' toxicology. When interviewed, the previous tenant admitted throwing a party that included the use of marijuana and powder cocaine, but according to the investigator's report, he "does not recall seeing any signs of any material which he would consider to be fentanyl" and had "no explanation as to how fentanyl would have got into the residence."
The medical examiner concluded that Enora ingested the substance that killed her; contrary to sometimes-hysterical press coverage, it is not possible to absorb fentanyl through the skin. And since investigators could find no source for the drugs, it's not accurate for DeSantis to state definitively that she "ingested fentanyl residue" from the carpet.
More to the point, it's entirely inappropriate for DeSantis to use Enora Lavenir's death as a justification for a more aggressive drug policy. After all, prohibition is the reason that fentanyl gets mixed into illicit drugs in the first place. Drug users are not asking for an extremely potent opioid to be mixed into the narcotics they buy; drug traffickers, in the face of severe penalties, shifted to a cheaper alternative of higher potency to cut into the drugs that people do want.
The way to stop the next Enora Lavenir from dying of accidental fentanyl exposure is not by doubling down on prohibition, but by admitting that it's been a failure.
*UPDATE: A campaign official emailed after press time to confirm that DeSantis was referring to the Lavenirs.
The post The Truth About Ron DeSantis' Fentanyl Horror Story appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy described a meeting with the parents of Sebastian Kidd, an Iowa teenager who died in July 2021 after consuming fentanyl disguised as Percocet that he "bought…on Snapchat." As is often the case with Ramaswamy's comments, his take on Sebastian's death was a mixture of sense and nonsense.
The sense was Ramaswamy's recognition that substance abuse cannot be explained in purely pharmacological terms. The nonsense was his reflexive endorsement of the war on drugs, which is responsible for the circumstances that led to Sebastian's death.
"It is our job to make sure that never happens," Ramaswamy said. "But it's also our job to make sure that 17-year-olds don't turn to Percocet via Snapchat. We have to bring back mental health care in this country, not with pumping pharmaceuticals, but [with] faith-based approaches that restore purpose and meaning in the next generation of Americans."
Although Sebastian was "great on the outside," his father, Deric Kidd, told the CBS affiliate in Des Moines, he "went through a lot throughout his life, a lot of loss [and] a lot of pain….You saw the smiles and the laughter, and it was a joy to be around him. But I think he was trying to internalize a lot of things that he went through."
When it comes to troubled teenagers (or adults), Ramaswamy is right to emphasize the importance of "purpose and meaning," the absence of which contributes to unhealthy relationships with drugs. Contrary to his implication, religion is just one source of purpose and meaning, which also can be found through secular pursuits and interpersonal connections. But even a well-adjusted teenager who wanted to try Percocet simply out of curiosity could have met the same fate as Sebastian.
Instead of Percocet, a combination of acetaminophen and oxycodone in doses ranging from 2.5 to 10 milligrams, Sebastian got an unknown amount of fentanyl, a much more potent opioid. Before going to bed one night, according to his parents, he swallowed half a tablet, which proved to be a lethal dose.
The hazard that killed Sebastian is a familiar feature of the black market created by drug prohibition: Consumers do not know what they are getting. Unlike prescription analgesics or a bottle of liquor, illegal drugs are highly variable and unpredictable. In recent years, that danger has been compounded by the proliferation of illicit fentanyl, which nowadays shows up not only in powder sold as heroin but also in stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine. It is also pressed into tablets that resemble pain pills.
This development was driven by the economic incentives that prohibition creates. As a synthetic drug that does not require cultivation of opium poppies, fentanyl can be produced much more cheaply and discreetly than heroin. And because it is much more potent, it is easier to smuggle, allowing traffickers to pack many doses in small packages that are hard to detect.
Thanks to the spread of fentanyl, which made potency even harder to predict, illegal drugs are a bigger crap shoot than ever before, as reflected in record numbers of drug-related deaths. The government made that situation worse by restricting the supply of prescription opioids, which left bona fide pain patients to suffer needlessly while driving nonmedical users toward much more dangerous substitutes.
Unsurprisingly, Ramaswamy did not mention any of this, because it would implicate policies he supports in tragedies like Sebastian Kidd's death. When Univision's Ilia Calderon, one of the debate moderators, asked how he would "stop fentanyl brought into the country, mostly by U.S. citizens through ports of entry," Ramaswamy said the answer was to double down on a strategy that has failed for a century.
"We do have to seal that southern border," he said. "Building the wall is not enough. They're building cartel-financed tunnels underneath that wall. Semitrucks can drive through them. We have to use our own military to seal the Swiss cheese of a southern border."
The adaptiveness that Ramaswamy describes has always doomed efforts to "stop the flow" of illegal drugs, and it always will. Prohibition sows the seeds of its own failure by enabling traffickers to earn a hefty "risk premium," a powerful incentive that drives them to find ways around any roadblocks (literal or figurative) that drug warriors manage to create. Since the government cannot even keep drugs out of prisons, "seal[ing] that southern border"—a 2,000-mile stretch that can be crossed in myriad ways—may be a bit harder than Ramaswamy suggests.
As Calderon noted, "90 percent of fentanyl is seized at official border crossings, and 57 percent of the smugglers are U.S. citizens." Even if the government could create an impregnable barrier elsewhere, it could not monitor traffic through ports of entry intensively enough to make a serious dent in the fentanyl supply without imposing huge economic costs by disrupting trade and travel. And even if it accomplished that impossible feat, traffickers have alternatives, including water routes, the 5,500-mile border with Canada, and the mail, through which commercially viable quantities of fentanyl can be shipped in small packages, only a tiny fraction of which can be intercepted.
"US government agencies have made considerable efforts to interdict fentanyl and its precursors from entering the US market, but the combination of its small size and high value makes this difficult," Roger Bate notes in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. "Mexican gangs and Chinese criminal enterprises find it easy to hide the products through a variety of transit methods."
Even if the U.S. government "managed to stop 100 percent of direct sales to the US, enterprising dealers will simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US," Bate writes. "Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible." Furthermore, "whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail, drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US."
Ramaswamy did not address any of these daunting challenges. But in addition to embracing the ever-appealing fantasy of stopping drug use through border control, he proposed a retail-level intervention. "If you're 16 years old or under," he said, "you should not be using an addictive social media product" like Snapchat.
Never mind that the age restriction Ramaswamy imagines would not have affected Sebastian Kidd, whose death he cited to justify the policy. And never mind that highly motivated teenagers would find ways to evade social-media age limits. Since any technology that facilitates communication can be used to arrange drug purchases, Ramaswamy's proposal is a pitifully inadequate solution to the problem he is describing.
"Why did [Sebastian] die?" Ramaswamy asked. "Because [the pill] was laced with fentanyl. That is closer to bio-terrorism, not a drug overdose. That is poisoning."
Ramaswamy wants us to know he is outraged by the dishonest practices of illegal drug dealers. But like nearly every politician of both major parties, he gives no thought to the policies that invite such potentially lethal fraud, because he is too busy promoting them.
The post Ban Teenagers From Social Media, Vivek Ramaswamy Says, Because Fentanyl appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Three years ago, 58 percent of Oregon voters approved Measure 110, a groundbreaking ballot initiative that eliminated criminal penalties for low-level possession of illegal drugs. Last week, a group called the Coalition to Fix and Improve Ballot Measure 110 proposed two versions of an initiative aimed at reversing that reform, and recent polling suggests most Oregonians are open to the idea.
There are two main reasons for that reversal of public opinion, neither of which goes to the heart of the moral and practical case for decriminalization. Oregonians are understandably troubled by the nuisances associated with public drug use, and they are dismayed that, despite Measure 110's promise of more funding for treatment, opioid-related deaths have continued to increase.
The main idea behind Measure 110 was that consuming politically disfavored intoxicants should not be treated as a crime. Since drug use itself violates no one's rights, it is hard to argue with that premise.
Eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession, however, does not require tolerating conduct that offends, incommodes, or alarms people who have an equal right to use sidewalks, parks, and other taxpayer-funded facilities. That problem—which many major cities face, regardless of whether they routinely arrest people for drug possession—is distinct from drug use per se, just as disorderly alcohol-related conduct is distinct from drinking per se.
The alcohol comparison is instructive in another way. Even during Prohibition, which banned the production and distribution of "intoxicating liquors," drinking was not a crime. The situation created by Measure 110 is analogous, with all the dangers that criminalizing the drug supply entails.
Just as alcohol prohibition exposed drinkers to the potentially deadly hazards of bootleg booze, drug prohibition forces users to rely on black-market products of uncertain provenance and composition. Measure 110 did nothing to address that problem, which has led to record numbers of drug-related deaths across the country.
That trend was fostered by the proliferation of illicit fentanyl, a result of the economic incentives that prohibition creates, and by the government's crackdown on pain medication, which drove nonmedical users toward substitutes that are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable. It is therefore not surprising that opioid-related deaths kept rising after decriminalization in Oregon, which saw increases similar to those recorded in California and Washington, neighboring states where low-level possession remains a crime.
Advocates of recriminalization argue that the threat of jail encourages drug users to enter treatment. But there are reasons to doubt that forcing "help" on people who do not want it is an effective way of resolving the social and psychological issues underlying life-disrupting drug habits.
According to a 2016 systematic review, "evidence does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms." The authors conclude that "given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms."
One danger of jailing noncompliant drug users is that incarceration raises the risk of a fatal overdose because forced abstinence reduces tolerance. According to a 2023 study, that risk is "markedly elevated" among people recently freed from prison, especially during the first two weeks after release.
Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton, who supports the recriminalization of drug use in Oregon, says he favors "mandatory diversion just like we have for drunk driving." But drunk drivers have committed a crime that endangers other people, while Barton thinks drug users should be forced into treatment even when they have done nothing other than consume psychoactive substances that legislators have decided to ban.
Heavy drinkers are free to ruin their health and their lives as long as they do not injure or endanger others, and that was true even during Prohibition. But under the policy that Barton favors, all illegal drug users are equally subject to criminal penalties. Measure 110 rightly repudiated that morally indefensible distinction.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Oregon's Drug Problems Were Not Caused by Decriminalization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This week's featured article is "After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs," by C.J. Ciaramella.
Audio generated using AI.
The post <i>The Best of Reason</i>: The DEA at 50 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's a fine art to refusing to learn lessons that are right in front of your eyes. A recent newspaper column demonstrated mastery of that art, managing to simultaneously acknowledge the failures of America's drug policy while calling for more of the same. The author acknowledged that mandatory minimums do no good and then suggested that the right course of action is to prosecute drug dealers harder. But harder drug law enforcement gets you harder drug problems.
"News coverage of a Mesa police officer losing consciousness in his patrol car from an overdose certainly highlights, if sensationally, the crisis that is opioids, in particular fentanyl," wrote Abe Kwok, editorial page planner for the Arizona Republic. "As critics such as the libertarian think tank Cato Institute note, harsh mandatory sentencing laws do nothing to blunt narcotic drugs' effects."
He added that "the institute pointed to a 1,500% spike in methamphetamine deaths in the United States between 2006 and 2021, following voter-approved Proposition 301 in Arizona that imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possessing, transferring, selling, distributing or manufacturing meth."
Kwok also acknowledged that other restrictive policies, especially limitations on opioid prescriptions "did little to slow deaths from overdoses but created their own set of problems, such as blocking access to relief for chronic pain sufferers." This is an important point championed by the late Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network over a decade ago and still a matter of serious concern for many Americans. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally acknowledged that opioid guidelines are being interpreted inflexibly. The CDC emphasized that "some policies purportedly drawn from the 2016 CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline have been notably inconsistent with it and have gone well beyond its clinical recommendations" resulting in "untreated and undertreated pain."
So far, so good for Kwok. Except, he refuses to take these arguments to their logical conclusion.
"Most people know, especially those who peddle the drug, that just a tiny amount of fentanyl can be lethal," Kwok writes. He calls for "law enforcement agencies to commit to aggressively investigate the direct source of the drug(s) in an overdose fatality and for prosecutors' offices to vigorously pursue charges when there's sufficient evidence."
Umm… No. If Kwok had read further in the Cato Institute piece by Jeffrey Singer to which he'd linked, he would understand why this makes no sense.
"The harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug," Singer, an Arizona surgeon and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote while praising a veto of mandatory minimums legislation by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. "Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes and subdivide into more units to sell."
What Singer calls the "Iron Law of Prohibition" is why bootleggers specialized in distilled liquor instead of beer. The law is why powdered cocaine was concentrated into crack. And the iron law is why headlines about drugs now feature fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid many times stronger than heroin. If prohibitionist policies continue, expect illegal products of the future to be marketed in a concentrated form to evade detection. Because these drugs are so potent they allow little room for leeway, making it relatively easy to overdose.
The fact that these drugs have been driven underground where they are often adulterated and of uncertain dosage makes them that much more dangerous.
Which is to say, the illegal fentanyl market that Abe Kwok worries about now is a direct result of the aggressive law enforcement efforts and vigorous prosecutions that he champions. More aggressive arrests and vigorous prosecutions will get you more results along the lines of illegal trafficking in big-bang-for-your-buck drugs like fentanyl. "Tranq"—the street name of the animal tranquilizer xylazine—is already here to fill the role of the next nasty high to gain users and news coverage.
Oddly, Kwok admits that his preference for harder law enforcement won't accomplish anything but doesn't budge from the idea.
"Pursuing criminal charges in those roughly 1,300 cases may not make a dent in drug supply or demand," the Arizona Republic writer notes of a flurry of drug-related deaths in Maricopa County. "But they would represent a closer step toward justice."
Justice? Of what kind?
Instead of doubling down on failure, what if Kwok had been willing to read Singer's March testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, which is linked from the Cato piece he cited? Or, more likely, what would he have passed along if he'd been more inclined to take the testimony to heart and to suggest remedies he fears his audience doesn't want to hear?
"If policymakers double down on the same prohibitionist policies they have employed for over 50 years, deaths from illicit drug overdoses will continue to rise. Doing the same thing repeatedly, with even more vigor this time, will not yield a different result," Singer told lawmakers. "Prohibition makes the black market dangerous because people who buy drugs on the black market can never be sure of the drug's purity, dosage, or even if it is the drug they think they are buying."
Singer recommends ending drug prohibition to allow for a legal market that deals in products of known dosage and purity. A legal market won't stop people from getting high, but it will end the escalation between punitive law enforcement on the one hand and drug innovation and potency on the other.
Short of legalization, the Arizona surgeon suggests lawmakers focus on eliminating laws that stand in the way of harm reduction, such as those that criminalize drug paraphernalia (driving users to share needles and diseases) and bar the distribution of drug test strips (rendering it difficult to identify drugs). Making naloxone available over-the-counter was a good step towards reducing deaths since it reverses the effects of opioid overdoses. That's an approach that gets law enforcement out of the way rather than doubling down on failure.
Stepping back from prohibitionist policies that Kwok concedes do harm and accomplish little if any good might not accord with his sense of "justice." But recognizing reality by abandoning counterproductive authoritarianism might just make the world a somewhat better place and save lives.
The post Some Drug Warriors Just Won't Concede Defeat appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Cigar smokers have reason to celebrate as a federal judge has vacated the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) authority to regulate premium cigars. The ruling concludes years of litigation tracing back to the FDA's decision in 2016 to extend its authority under the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, imposing potentially burdensome regulations on the industry. Wednesday's ruling from Judge Amit P. Mehta in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia strikes down the FDA's 2016 deeming regulation, handing a decisive victory to cigar makers.
The central issue of the case was whether the FDA adequately considered whether there is empirical justification for regulating premium cigars as stringently as other tobacco products, such as cigarettes and oral tobacco. Plaintiffs contended that the FDA ignored information on the differential usage patterns and health effects of premium cigars that had been submitted to the agency and misrepresented data on the prevalence of youth cigar smoking. Mehta agreed, holding in July 2022 that the FDA's deeming rule was arbitrary and capricious.
The ruling only vacates the FDA's authority over premium cigars, leaving regulations on machine-made cigars, little cigars, and flavored cigars intact. Products classified as premium cigars must meet a list of requirements:
"(1) are wrapped in whole tobacco leaf; (2) contain a 100 percent leaf tobacco binder; (3) contain at least 50 percent (of the filler by weight) long filler tobacco; (4) are handmade or hand rolled; (5) have no filter, nontobacco tip, or nontobacco mouthpiece; (6) do not have a characterizing flavor other than tobacco; (7) contain only tobacco, water, and vegetable gum with no other ingredients or additives; and (8) weigh more than 6 pounds per 1,000 units."
In short, this means that most of the cigars one would find at a specialty tobacconist will qualify as premium, while the cheaper cigars sold in convenience stores will not.
Cigar makers are delighted by the news. "Finally, this cottage industry is saved from illegal, ambiguous and overreaching regulations," Rocky Patel told Cigar Aficionado. "Now we can focus on making great quality cigars and you will have the freedom to enjoy them for many years to come."
Health groups such as the American Lung Association are predictably less enthused. In a joint amicus brief urging the court to reject an exemption for premium cigars, they contended that "such an exemption will create the misimpression that premium cigars are safer tobacco products because they are unregulated."
Of course, no one seriously denies that smoking cigars poses some health risks. Inhaling smoke from combusted tobacco is inherently riskier than abstaining. Yet there is also substantial evidence that the risk profile of premium cigars is very different from that of cigarettes. The more alkaline smoke of cigar tobacco is less likely to be deeply inhaled. Surveys show that smokers of premium cigars are more likely to be occasional rather than daily users. As a 1998 monograph from the National Cancer Institute notes, "Most cigarette smokers smoke every day. In contrast, as many as three-quarters of cigar smokers smoke only occasionally, and some only smoke a few cigars per year. This difference in frequency of exposure translates into lower disease risks."
Despite this information having been submitted during the public comment period, the FDA failed to consider whether it warranted a different regulatory approach than the one applied to cigarettes. Given that premium cigars by definition consist entirely of cured tobacco leaves rolled into tubes of various sizes, it's difficult to imagine compelling health benefits to applying strict regulatory scrutiny to individual products. Indeed, the FDA itself has acknowledged that premium cigars are its "lowest enforcement priority" relative to other nicotine and tobacco products that are used more frequently by youth.
Cigar makers argued that even if their products are a low enforcement priority for the agency, regulatory uncertainty and potentially high costs of compliance could deter companies from investing in bringing new cigars to market. This week's ruling removes that uncertainty, helping to preserve a dynamic market for premium cigars.
In the long run, regulatory threats to premium cigars remain. It's possible that the FDA could appeal the ruling or issue a new deeming regulation addressing the deficiencies in its first attempt. If the agency follows through on a controversial proposal to mandate very low levels of nicotine in cigarettes and small cigars, it might also seek to apply the same standard to premium cigars to prevent existing cigarette smokers from switching.
It's worth noting the irony that the present court ruling makes it far easier to introduce a new combustible premium cigar than it is to introduce a new electronic cigarette, despite the latter containing no actual tobacco and demonstrating tremendous potential to save lives as a substitute for cigarettes. To date, only 23 components of vapor products have received authorization from the FDA out of millions of applications, suppressing the legal market for e-cigarettes and encouraging a flood of illicit products. This is an additional source of ongoing litigation for the agency, whose marketing denial orders have been challenged in court by dozens of companies.
There are sound legal, economic, and epidemiological reasons for exempting premium cigars from FDA regulation, but this ruling is yet another example of how cigar smokers are treated better under the law than users of other nicotine and tobacco products. Smoking bans often make exemptions for cigar lounges while forbidding vapes, cigarettes, and hookahs, and comprehensive prohibitions on the sale of tobacco products (like the one implemented in Beverly Hills) carve out exceptions for cigars. There's more than a whiff of classism to American tobacco law, as consumers of high-end cigars are granted the freedom to smoke what they like while vapers and cigarette smokers are kicked to the curb or denied the right to purchase their preferred products.
In the May 2022 issue of Reason, I reported on the various policies that are bringing the U.S. into an era of nicotine prohibition in which entire classes of tobacco products are forbidden from sale, leading to illicit markets, criminalization, and other harmful unintended consequences. This week's ruling overturning the FDA's authority averts that future for premium cigars for at least a little while. Although the threat of eventual prohibition remains, this win for freedom is reason enough for many to light up a cigar in celebration.
The post Premium Cigars Escape FDA Regulation for Now appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The emergence of the animal tranquilizer xylazine as a fentanyl adulterant has prompted law enforcement officials to agitate for new legal restrictions and criminal penalties. That response is fundamentally misguided, because the threat it aims to address is a familiar consequence of prohibition, which creates a black market in which drug composition is highly variable and unpredictable.
Xylazine, a.k.a. "tranq," was first identified as a drug adulterant in 2006, and today it is especially common in Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, Maryland, and Connecticut. The combination of fentanyl and xylazine poses special hazards.
Like opioids, xylazine depresses respiration, so mixing it with fentanyl can increase the risk of a fatal reaction. Unlike a fentanyl overdose, a xylazine overdose cannot be reversed by the opioid antagonist naloxone.
Xylazine also seems to increase the risk of serious and persistent skin infections and ulcers, which have always been a hazard of unsanitary injection practices. According to a 2022 article in Dermatology World Insights and Inquiries, "the presumed mechanism" is "the direct vasoconstricting effect on local blood vessels and resultant decreased skin perfusion," which impairs healing.
In 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports, xylazine was detected in 23 percent of fentanyl powder and 7 percent of fentanyl pills analyzed by its laboratories. But before the DEA was warning us about xylazine in fentanyl, it was warning us about fentanyl in heroin, and both hazards are the result of laws that the DEA is dedicated to enforcing.
From the perspective of drug traffickers, fentanyl has several advantages over heroin. It is much more potent, which makes it easier to smuggle, and it can be produced much more cheaply and inconspicuously, since it does not require opium poppies. Xylazine has similar advantages: It is an inexpensive synthetic drug that can be produced without crops. And unlike fentanyl, it is not classified as a controlled substance, which makes it easier to obtain.
American drug users are not clamoring for xylazine in their fentanyl, any more than they were demanding fentanyl instead of heroin. The use of such adulterants is driven by the economics of prohibition. And as usual with illegal drugs, consumers do not know what they are getting. Whether it is vitamin E acetate in black market THC vapes, MDMA mixed with butylone, levamisole in cocaine, or fentanyl pressed into ersatz pain pills, prohibition reliably makes drug use more dangerous.
Much to the dismay of veterinarians, drug warriors alarmed by tranq have proposed treating xylazine as a controlled substance. As usual, they think the solution to a problem created by prohibition is more prohibition.
The post Prohibition Gave Us Tranq-Laced Fentanyl appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Three years ago, Oregon voters approved a groundbreaking ballot initiative that eliminated criminal penalties for low-level drug possession. The result of that "reckless experiment," New York Times columnist Bret Stephens claims, has been a "catastrophe" featuring increases in "opioid overdose deaths," "shooting incidents," and public nuisances such as discarded needles, "human feces," and "oral sex."
Stephens' assessment, which draws heavily on a story by Times reporter Jan Hoffman that was published on Monday, combines legitimate concerns about drug addiction and public order with misleading implications based on out-of-context statistics. And because Stephens ignores the main argument for decriminalization—that it is unjust to treat drug use as a crime—he never grapples with the morality of the policy it replaced.
It is important to keep in mind that Oregon's Measure 110 did nothing to address the supply of illegal drugs, which remain just as iffy and potentially deadly as they were before the initiative was approved. Decriminalization was limited to drug users, and it was based on the premise that people should not be arrested merely for consuming forbidden intoxicants. This distinction between drug users and drug suppliers is similar to the policy enacted during Prohibition, when bootleggers were treated as criminals but drinkers were not.
Measure 110 changed low-level drug possession from a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a maximum fine of $6,250, to a Class E violation, punishable by a $100 fine. Drug users who receive citations can avoid the fine by agreeing to undergo a "health assessment" that is supposed to "prioritize the self-identified needs of the client." That assessment might result in a treatment referral, but participation is voluntary.
Despite the limited nature of Oregon's reform, which was not designed to reduce the hazards posed by the highly variable and unpredictable composition of black-market drugs, Stephens thinks the fact that drug-related deaths continued to rise in Oregon shows that decriminalization has failed. "In 2019 there were 280 unintentional opioid overdose deaths in Oregon," he writes. "In 2021 there were 745."
Stephens neglects to mention that drug-related deaths rose nationwide during that period, from about 71,000 in 2019 to more than 107,000 in 2021. The number of deaths involving opioids rose from about 50,000 to about 81,000—a 62 percent increase.
To be sure, the increase in Oregon that Stephens notes was much larger. But how does it compare to trends in other jurisdictions that did not decriminalize drug use?
Between 2019 and 2021, Oregon's age-adjusted opioid overdose death rate rose from 7.6 to 18.1 per 100,000 residents. California saw a similar increase: from 7.9 to 17.8. In Washington, the rate likewise nearly doubled, from 10.5 to 20.5. And even in 2021, Oregon's rate was lower than the national rate (24.7) and much lower than the rates in states such as Connecticut (38.3), Delaware (48.1), Kentucky (44.8), Maine (42.4), Maryland (38.5), Tennessee (45.5), Vermont (37.4), and West Virginia (77.2). On its face, this does not look like evidence that decriminalization is responsible for Oregon's continuing rise in opioid-related deaths.*
While Measure 110 does not seem to have caused an increase in drug-related deaths, it manifestly did not prevent that increase. Was it supposed to?
As Stephens notes, the initiative's supporters argued that the resulting health assessments, combined with new funding for treatment from marijuana taxes, would help people with drug problems turn their lives around. He acknowledges that defenders of Measure 110 complain of "funding shortfalls" and point out that "funds for harm reduction, housing and other services have been slow to arrive." But he notes that the new system so far does not seem to have channeled many people toward treatment. "Of the 4,000 drug use citations issued in Oregon during the first two years of Measure 110," he says, citing an article in The Economist, "only 40 people called the hotline [for health assessments] and were interested in treatment."
Those numbers seem to validate the warnings of Measure 110 critics that, without the threat of jail, few drug users would be interested in treatment. But while forcing drug users to choose between jail and treatment surely boosts the number of people enrolled in such programs, there is reason to question the long-term effectiveness of that policy, which makes a difference only for people who are not yet ready to seek help on their own.
According to a systematic review of the evidence that the International Journal of Drug Policy published in 2016, research "does not, on the whole, suggest improved outcomes related to compulsory treatment approaches, with some studies suggesting potential harms." The authors conclude that "given the potential for human rights abuses within compulsory treatment settings, non-compulsory treatment modalities should be prioritized by policymakers seeking to reduce drug-related harms."
Notably, people with drinking problems generally are not subjected to compulsory treatment unless they commit crimes such as driving while intoxicated. Since alcohol is legal, heavy drinkers are free to ruin their health and their lives as long as they do not injure or endanger others.
Drug prohibition also blurs another distinction that is commonly applied to alcohol: the difference between use and abuse. Anyone caught with illegal drugs, whether or not he is experiencing life-disrupting problems, might be required to enroll in treatment if he wants to avoid criminal penalties. That approach is akin to requiring treatment for all drinkers, including occasional and moderate consumers.
Stephens does not pause to consider whether these differences make moral or practical sense, and he seems confused about how to classify the conduct of people with drug problems. "Addicts are not merely sick people trying to get well, like cancer sufferers in need of chemotherapy," he says. "They are people who often will do just about anything to get high, however irrational, self-destructive or, in some cases, criminal their behavior becomes. Addiction may be a disease, but it's also a lifestyle—one that decriminalization does a lot to facilitate. It's easier to get high wherever and however you want when the cops are powerless to stop you."
Viewing addiction as a disease that overrides free will is convenient for drug warriors, because it justifies forcible intervention. If addicts cannot reasonably be expected to control themselves, the argument goes, the government must step in to help them, whether or not they want that help. Their choices and preferences need not be respected, because they are illusory, a product of pharmacological slavery. At the same time, however, it seems patently unjust to punish people for behavior they purportedly cannot control.
Stephens tries to square that circle by selectively applying the disease model. Addicts are sick, he says, but they are also bad, because they have chosen a destructive and antisocial "lifestyle." Although they are incapable of controlling their drug use, which makes compulsory treatment appropriate, they nevertheless respond to incentives, such that removing the threat of arrest changes their behavior. Their "disease" means they should not be treated as autonomous moral agents, except when it comes to holding them criminally liable for their actions.
That paradox can be avoided if we view addiction as a bad habit that is hard but not impossible to change, a pattern of behavior that cannot be explained by chemistry without also considering the psychological and environmental factors that drive self-destructive attachments to psychoactive substances. According to that view, addicts make choices all the time, albeit choices that are strongly influenced by their personal and social circumstances. There is nothing inherently illogical or unfair about holding them responsible for those choices when they impinge on other people's rights.
That means a heavy drug user who steals to support his habit is not immune from criminal penalties. It also means the government can justifiably regulate what drug users do in public, where their actions might offend, incommode, or alarm people who have an equal right to use sidewalks, parks, and other taxpayer-funded facilities. Although Stephens implies otherwise, eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession does not require tolerating public drug use, defecation, or blowjobs.
In practice, of course, a jurisdiction that decriminalizes drug use when every other jurisdiction continues to treat it as a crime may attract people inclined to behave in the ways that Hoffman and Stephens describe. But those nuisances—which many major cities face, regardless of whether they routinely arrest people for drug possession—are a problem distinct from drug use per se.
Stephens also blames decriminalization for an increase in violent crime. "In 2019 there were 413 shooting incidents in Portland," he writes. "In 2022 there were 1,309." As he notes, that number now seems to be falling: There were 540 shooting incidents in the first half of this year, down from 674 in the first half of last year.
Although Stephens does not spell out the causal connection he has in mind, the reasoning presumably is that decriminalization encouraged drug use and attracted more drug users to the city, boosting demand and therefore black-market activity. But the violence that attends such activity, which is notably absent from legal markets in drugs such as alcohol, is entirely a product of prohibition. Just as Measure 110 did not improve the quality and consistency of illegal drugs, it did not solve the problem of black-market violence, which would require a more fundamental reform.
Decriminalizing drug possession, in short, is a halfway measure that reduces but by no means eliminates the harm caused by prohibition. Stephens, who assigns little or no weight to the benefits of eschewing criminal penalties for conduct that violates no one's rights, is loath to acknowledge even that limited accomplishment.
"Some readers," Stephens says, may argue that "we don't want to return to the cost, violence and apparent fruitlessness of the old war on drugs. But that depends on whether the price of endless war exceeds or falls short of the price of permanent surrender."
Prohibition, Stephens concedes, is ineffective and expensive, and it fosters violence, which is hardly an exhaustive list of its problems. In this context, "permanent surrender" counts as a victory.
*Correction: The original version of this post erroneously cited data from the Oregon Health Authority as evidence that opioid-related deaths in Oregon fell last year. But those data covered only part of 2022; the preliminary estimate for the full year indicates a small increase in fatal overdoses involving opioids.
The post Did Drug Decriminalization Cause a 'Catastrophe' in Oregon? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the celebrated Iranian artist Khosrow Hassanzadeh died of methanol poisoning this month, everyone but his country's most ardent theocrats recognized that prohibition was the problem. Yet when the Biden administration unveiled its plan to address the "emerging threat" of fentanyl mixed with the animal tranquilizer xylazine last week, it claimed prohibition was the solution.
In reality, these two hazards are manifestations of the same familiar phenomenon. When governments try to stop people from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants, they make consumption of those substances more dangerous by creating a black market in which purity and potency are highly variable and unpredictable.
The danger to which Hassanzadeh succumbed is caused by bootleggers' sloppy distilling practices and reliance on industrial alcohol that is unsafe for human consumption. Hassanzadeh thought he was drinking aragh, a traditional Iranian spirit distilled from raisins, which he obtained from a supplier he mistakenly trusted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Iran saw a sharp increase in methanol-related deaths and injuries, including permanent blindness, thanks to a combination of folk beliefs about the preventive properties of alcohol and an ethanol shortage caused by the sudden demand for hand sanitizer. In recent months, Iranian authorities have noted another surge in such casualties.
While the proximate cause of the more recent trend is unclear, the root cause is obvious: Iran's ban on alcohol consumption by Muslims forces drinkers to rely on illicit sources that sell iffy and possibly poisonous liquor. In a legal market, people who buy distilled spirits do not have to worry about methanol contamination.
"Khosrow was taken from us because of the lack of social freedoms," Nasser Teymourpour, a fellow artist, observed on Twitter after his friend's death. "You took Khosrow from us."
Although drug warriors are keen to overlook the fact, the same analysis applies to Americans who die after consuming black-market drugs of unknown provenance and composition. The alarm about xylazine in fentanyl, which compounds the danger of fatal respiratory depression and may increase the risk of serious and persistent skin infections, is just the latest illustration of this predictable peril.
Before the federal government was warning us about xylazine in fentanyl, it was warning us about fentanyl in heroin. Both dangers are caused by laws that make drug use a potentially deadly crapshoot.
Fentanyl is much more potent than heroin, so it is easier to smuggle, and can be produced much more cheaply and inconspicuously since it does not require opium poppies. Xylazine has similar advantages: It is an inexpensive synthetic drug that can be produced without crops. And unlike fentanyl, it is not classified as a controlled substance, so it is easier to obtain.
The emergence of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute made potency even harder to predict. The consequences can be seen in record numbers of drug-related deaths.
The government aggravated that situation by restricting the supply of legally produced, reliably dosed opioids, which drove nonmedical users toward more dangerous substitutes and left bona fide patients to suffer from unrelieved pain. Despite this recent experience with the perverse effects of prohibition, the Biden administration is confident that it can lick the xylazine menace by stepping up efforts to "reduce and disrupt the illicit supply chain and go after traffickers."
Whether it is vitamin E acetate in black-market THC vapes, MDMA mixed with butylone, levamisole in cocaine, or fentanyl pressed into ersatz pain pills, prohibition reliably makes drug use more hazardous. Sometimes that effect is intentional.
During Prohibition, the federal government required that industrial alcohol be mixed with methanol to discourage diversion. While critics called the resulting deaths "legalized murder," Anti-Saloon League leader Wayne Wheeler argued that "the person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide," even while conceding that it would cost "many lives" to "root out a bad habit."
Iran's rulers seem to have a similar attitude. Joe Biden, a longtime drug warrior who now claims to embrace "harm reduction," should reject that lethal logic.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Methanol-Tainted Liquor and Xylazine-Tainted Fentanyl Illustrate the Same Prohibitionist Peril appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Alcohol always gets a bad rap. Perhaps more than any other substance in history, we love to blame alcohol for all our problems. During Prohibition, temperance advocates associated alcohol with everything from laziness and broken homes to poverty and insanity. While we have for the most part moved on, alcohol still receives its share of condemnation.
In modern times, one of the chief worries about alcohol is the possibility of underage children getting their hands on it. Those pushing these concerns grew louder as a wave of states across the country changed their laws during the pandemic to allow more types of alcohol to be delivered to consumers' doorsteps. Though youth drinking has long been a target of handwringing, the reality is that fewer and fewer young people are drinking. Rather than overlook this untold story, policy makers should use it to inform their posture toward alcohol reform in the years ahead.
After Prohibition's repeal, many states passed restrictions on youth drinking. Initially most states set the age limit at 21, but the drinking age took a winding road to its modern level. In the 1970s, a majority of states reduced the legal age for drinking from 21 to as low as 18, in keeping with the passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. By the '80s, however, as concerns about drunk driving increased, the legal age crept back up to 21, culminating in Congress passing the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which tied highway funding for states to a 21-year-old drinking age, in 1984.
Today, the age limit is an established part of American culture, setting our country apart from many of its international neighbors. What is often lost in the discussion is that teen drinking reached its apex in the 1980s and has precipitously declined ever since.
In 1991, over 50 percent of high school students reported drinking alcohol, but by 2019, this had plummeted to under 30 percent. At the same time, the percentage of respondents reporting that they had at least one drink of alcohol before the age of 13 fell from around one-third to 15 percent. Youth binge drinking has also declined by nearly half in recent decades.
These statistics come amid an unprecedented craft alcohol boom that has swept America. But what about the expansion of to-go and alcohol delivery options during the pandemic?
Despite the overall underage drinking trends, opponents of these delivery reforms came out of the woodwork to once again sound the alarm about the children. The Washington Post ran high-profile exposés on undercover sting data showing that COVID-era alcohol delivery was fueling more alcohol purchases by minors. The implication was that teenagers were secretly ordering booze through Mom and Dad's online delivery apps and drinking more than ever.
The data do not back up these claims. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes its biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey, which, among other questions, asks high schoolers about their drinking habits. Using this data, the R Street Institute found no perceptible correlation between alcohol delivery and increased rates of youth drinking during the pandemic.
In fact, from 2019 to 2021, youth drinking fell in 48 out of 50 states. Further, in states allowing alcohol delivery from establishments like restaurants and bars, underage drinking actually fell more than it did in states that forbid such delivery. To clarify, this does not suggest that delivery somehow reduces underage drinking, but it does demonstrate the lack of a connection between the two.
As has so often been the case throughout American history, alcohol is being blamed for something that is not its fault—and, in this case, not even a real phenomenon. Youth drinking is falling, not rising, and alcohol delivery appears to be wholly irrelevant to the conversation. Going forward, policy makers should adjust their attitudes accordingly and find a new target for their ire.
The post Youth Drinking Is Falling, Not Rising appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"COCAINE UNIQUELY FITS THE FAST-PACED AMERICAN LIFESTYLE," reads a caption for an exhibit at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Museum in Arlington, Virginia. "The Federal Bureau of Narcotics considered cocaine a nearly defeated drug," it continues. "However, cocaine use rebounded, reaching its highest use level ever at the end of the 20th century." It's an oddly candid observation to find in a place you'd expect to celebrate the federal agency whose mission is to "enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States."
The DEA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, marking half a century of abject mission failure. During five decades as a bottomless money pit that has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions, the agency's annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion. The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries. It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property. Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs. Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high. The DEA's own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s. The DEA's 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment notes that methamphetamine "purity and potency remain high while prices remain relatively low," and cocaine availability remains steady.
While there are some reasons to believe Americans may finally have tired of the DEA's oversized role in their lives, the agency remains a powerful force. To understand what went wrong—and why it will keep going wrong—you have to go back to the agency's origins.
On April 4, 1972, President Richard Nixon's drug war landed in Humboldt County, California. The DEA, which was established the following year, was still only a glimmer in Nixon's eye at this point. But its playbook was being written here, outside the backwoods cabin of 24-year-old Dirk Dickenson.
As a Huey helicopter touched down near the cabin, plainclothes law enforcement officers brandishing pistols and long guns leaped out. The chopper was accompanied by five police cars. There were 19 law enforcement agents in total, including the county dogcatcher. Two television cameramen and a newspaper photographer were in tow as well, lured by a deputy sheriff's promise of the biggest drug bust in county history. They were expecting to find a huge PCP lab guarded by gun-toting, long-haired freaks.
The officers were the tip of the spear in a new campaign. A year earlier, Nixon had declared drug abuse "America's public enemy number one" and vowed to "wage a new, all-out offensive" against it.
Dickenson and his girlfriend both initially wandered outside to gawk and wave at the helicopter landing on their property. Dickenson, like many other California hippies, had drifted into rugged Humboldt County to escape the bummers of city life. When they caught sight of the guns, Dickenson and his girlfriend realized this wasn't a friendly house call and rushed back inside.
Several things then happened very quickly, all under the deafening sound of the helicopter's rotors. The officers started breaking down the front door of the cabin. Dickenson ran out the back and bolted for the treeline. Several officers gave chase, but one of them stumbled and fell. Lloyd Clifton, a former Berkeley police officer and an agent of the federal government's 4-year-old Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), assumed his bumbling comrade had been shot. Clifton stopped, leveled his .38 revolver at the fleeing, unarmed hippie, and shot Dickenson in the back while TV cameras rolled.
Dickenson died from massive internal bleeding while waiting to be evacuated to the hospital. Police found personal-use amounts of marijuana, hashish, peyote buttons, and LSD in Dickenson's cabin, but no giant drug lab. A judge later dismissed charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter against Clifton, the first federal drug agent to be charged with homicide.
The BNDD was the precursor to the DEA, created as part of a plan to consolidate federal drug enforcement—then split among several agencies and departments—under one umbrella agency and massively increase its funding. At its founding in 1968, the BNDD had 615 agents and a $14 million budget. Its early efforts were focused on three sources of drugs consumed by Americans: marijuana pouring in from Mexico, heroin smuggled from France, and domestically manufactured LSD. The lead agent in the Dickenson raid had previously arrested Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead's soundman and one of the biggest acid cooks in the country.
In 1973, the DEA was formally created by a reorganizational plan that Congress approved, absorbing the BNDD and several other federal agencies. Its beginnings were not auspicious. The agency's leadership was hamstrung by backbiting and accusations of corruption, and its on-the-ground operations were dogged by incompetence.
A 1973 New York Times investigation found a string of botched drug raids by BNDD task forces, soon to be the backbone of the DEA, across the country. "Such incidents have resulted in at least four deaths, including one policeman slain when a terror stricken innocent woman shot through her bedroom door as it burst open," the Times reported. "In California one innocent father was shot through the head as he sat in a living room cradling his infant son."
A Rolling Stone editor, Joe Eszterhas, spent two years investigating federal drug enforcement, including the Dickenson raid, and concluded these narcotics agents weren't police officers, whom he had some respect for. They were "deputized gangsters," he wrote in his book Nark!
That was the public perception as well. The DEA's first director, John R. Bartels Jr., complained the American people did not know what the agency really did and regarded its agents "as corrupt Nazis who don't know how to open the door except with the heel of their right foot." (Dirk Dickenson was unavailable for comment.)
But instead of being shelved as an unpopular mistake, those early joint task forces became the blueprint for how domestic drug enforcement is still carried out today. Congress passed new laws, and courts hacked away at the Fourth Amendment to accommodate the drug war and shield officers from liability, allowing the raids to continue unimpeded and largely out of public view.
The DEA Museum does not mention any of the botched raids that figured prominently in the agency's early history, although it does display a .38 revolver like the one that killed Dickenson. The gun looks old-timey and quaint next to the displays of submachine guns and shotguns that DEA agents would soon be armed with.
Federal marijuana enforcement in the 1970s was a failure by every objective measure. It did not put a dent in the U.S. marijuana supply, despite several busts of massive grow operations. In 1979, for example, a DEA/FBI task force busted Miami's "Black Tuna Gang," which smuggled more than 500 tons of pot into the country over a 16-month period. Yet "by the 1980s," an official DEA history notes without further reflection, "more than 60 percent of American teenagers had experimented with marijuana and 40 percent became regular users. Supply also continued to increase."
The Reagan administration's solution was to double down. In April 1981, presidential adviser (and future attorney general) Edwin Meese announcedto a room of 250 prosecutors that the administration would mount "a more massive and extensive" campaign against drug trafficking than ever before attempted.
In 1985, another helicopter landed in Humboldt County, this time outside the home of Judy Rolicheck and her family. The air power was part of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a task force of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that used helicopters—and even U-2 spy planes—to surveil Northern California for outdoor marijuana grows. After the helicopter landed, around 25 task force members held the Rolichecks at gunpoint for two and a half hours and shot their dog. There was a marijuana grow about 600 yards away, out of sight of the house, but the Rolichecks had nothing to do with it. The agents left, and the family was never charged with a crime.
A lawsuit filed that year by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) on behalf of numerous Humboldt County residents, including Rolicheck, alleged they were being harassed by the low-flying helicopters and that the agents were ransacking their houses and seizing property without warrants. The U.S. Supreme Court would later rule, in a 1989 case involving marijuana, that police could use aircraft to perform warrantless searches of backyards.
This was the beefed-up war on drugs. The DEA was in an arms race against sophisticated cartels and smuggling operations inundating the country with cocaine and marijuana, and the reality on the streets was far messier than the pastel-draped heroics of Miami Vice.
Legendary Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan described an incident in which a DEA informant who made money on the side by robbing drug dealers ripped off two undercover DEA agents by mistake. The agents responded by initiating a running gun battle down a South Miami street. The informant escaped but turned himself in the next day after reading a newspaper article that explained who his robbery victims were. Since he was a good informant, the feds accepted a heartfelt apology and the return of the stolen cash in lieu of prosecuting him.
During the 1980s, the DEA's powers continued to expand while oversight of its widespread domestic and foreign operations was minimal. In a 1986 cover story for Reason, Dale Gieringer investigated the slimy underworld of the DEA and its confidential informant program, warning that "the DEA has become a law unto itself, an agency out of control." Gieringer described illegal extraditions, abusive searches and seizures, and suspects who were beaten by foreign law enforcement officers at the order of DEA agents.
"Under the aegis of President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese, the DEA has pursued increasingly aggressive and unscrupulous tactics of entrapment, seizure, surveillance, and paramilitary violence," Gieringer wrote. "Thanks to public antidrug hysteria, a compliant Congress, an uncritical press, and a court system increasingly dominated by Reaganite judges, the DEA has enjoyed virtual carte blanche to trample on individuals' rights."
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 strengthened the DEA's influence by expanding civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize property allegedly related to criminal activity. The law allowed the federal government to share up to 80 percent of forfeiture revenue with state and local police, creating a strong financial incentive for departments to work with federal task forces and redirect resources to drug enforcement.
In places like Humboldt County, entrepreneurial innovation once again triumphed. The DEA's official history brags that the marijuana eradication campaigns of the 1980s and early '90s "put so much pressure on growers that many abandoned their outdoor cultivation on public and private land for the safety of indoor cultivation." But it adds that "indoor cultivated marijuana created new concerns for law enforcement; it was of such high quality and potency that American marijuana became the most sought-after cannabis in the world."
In a televised 1989 speech, President George H.W. Bush announced yet another escalation of the war on drugs while waving a plastic baggie of crack purchased from a dealer whom DEA agents had lured to "a park just across the street from the White House." The dealer got almost a decade in prison, and Bush got his prop. Describing illegal drug use as "the gravest domestic threat facing our nation," he said "we won't have safe neighborhoods unless we are tough on drug criminals—much tougher than we are now."
Tapped to deliver the Democratic Party's response, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) complained that Bush was not tough enough. "The president said he wants to wage a war on drugs," Biden said. "But if that's true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam; not another limited war fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy."
Democrats and Republicans ensured the drug war was not cheap, but the human tragedies continued. During the next two decades, tough-on-crime bills pushed by Biden and like-minded legislators bore their rotten fruit. The total incarcerated population in the United States skyrocketed from roughly 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.3 million at its peak in 2008.
Drug crimes were not the primary driver of mass incarceration; violent offenses were. But in the federal prison system, about half of all inmates were serving sentences for drug offenses, and they still account for roughly the same share.
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws led to draconian penalties, especially for crack cocaine offenses. Thousands of crack cocaine offenders received federal prison sentences substantially longer than what they would have received for an equivalent cocaine powder violation.
In 1998, for example, Jason Hernandez, then 21, was sentenced to life in federal prison plus 320 years for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2013. "The person who supplied me [with cocaine] ended up getting 12 years," Hernandez told me in 2016. "I got life because I converted it to crack cocaine. I deserved to go to jail. I deserved to go to jail for a long time, but I didn't deserve to die in there."
The war on drugs also consistently produced racially disparate results. In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reports, 77 percent of federal defendants sentenced for crack trafficking were black, while 16 percent were Hispanic and 6 percent were white. In 2019, The Washington Post reported that none of the 179 defendants arrested in DEA "reverse-sting" cases during the previous decade in the Southern District of New York were white.
Meanwhile, the DEA's response to the "opioid crisis" offered a stunning example of drug enforcement's perverse effects. The DEA, working with local and state police, started monitoring doctors and cracking down on those suspected of running "pill mills." The threat of prosecution, combined with restrictions imposed or encouraged by regulators, legislators, and the CDC, drove opioid prescriptions down. But those efforts had the opposite effect on opioid-related deaths, which not only continued to rise but rose at an accelerated rate.
When local pain clinics were shut down or scared away and anxious doctors began eschewing opioid prescriptions, not only addicts but people with legitimate chronic pain issues were left to suffer—or turn to black market alternatives that were much more dangerous because their composition was highly variable and unpredictable. The DEA Museum obliquely acknowledges the unintended but predictable consequences: "Following a crackdown on overprescribing, users turned to heroin. Overdose deaths increased rapidly."
The hazards of black market drugs were magnified by the rise of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute, which made potency even harder to predict. Heroin-related deaths quintupled between 2010 and 2016. That number has fallen since then. But for the category of opioids that includes fentanyl and its analogs, deaths rose more than twentyfold between 2013 and 2021. As Reason's Jacob Sullum argued, the DEA's enforcement efforts were not only futile; they were "remarkably effective at making drug use deadlier."
An exhibit just outside the DEA Museum is called "Faces of Fentanyl." Displayed on the walls are thousands of pictures of people who died from fentanyl poisoning, all contributed by family members. The oldest person on the wall is 70. The youngest is 17 months old. The display is sobering but also infuriating given the policy failures that led to its creation.
In addition to making drug use deadlier, the DEA makes air travel perilous by robbing passengers who dare to carry large amounts of cash. Stacy Jones became one of those victims when a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener stopped her at the Wilmington, Delaware, airport in May 2020.
Jones was not very worried at first. She and her husband were returning to their home in Tampa after a casino trip. They had $43,000 in cash in a carry-on bag, which the TSA screener found alarming.
Even after the screener called over a sheriff's deputy, who started to ask about the source of the cash, Jones remained confident that everything would be sorted out. She knew the law, or she thought she did. She knew it was perfectly legal to fly domestically with large amounts of cash. "We're gamblers," Jones says. "We've hit jackpots, and we've traveled with money. So we've never, ever thought that this could happen. Never."
They had a solid explanation: They said they had flown to North Carolina for a casino reopening. They had dinner with friends, who were interested in buying a Maserati that Jones' husband owned. The friends paid for the car in cash. Because of a sudden death in the family, Jones and her husband never made it to the casino. They booked a last-minute flight home. Jones put the money from the car sale, along with cash she had for gambling, in the carry-on bag and headed for the airport.
It was when the deputy called in two DEA agents that Jones got concerned. "When the DEA walked in, it felt serious at that point," she says.
In the interrogation room with the two DEA agents, the pressure on Jones ratcheted up. They made Jones and her husband go over the story again—casino, car purchase, vacation cut short. They brought in drug-sniffing dogs. A DEA agent followed Jones into the bathroom and stood outside the stall. She felt like a criminal, even though she knew she wasn't."
I was shaking, crying, panicking, worried about my job, worried about the money, worried if they were going to take us to jail," Jones says. "The humiliation of that—it's a helpless feeling."
The DEA agents decided the couple's story did not add up. They announced that they were seizing the cash based on suspicion it was drug money. After taking all of the cash the couple had, except for $500 in a bank envelope, they released Jones and her husband to catch their flight home without a receipt or any other paperwork.
Thanks to the laws passed in the 1980s, DEA agents did not need to charge Jones with a crime to seize her money. They simply needed probable cause to believe the money was connected to illegal activity, a judgment that in practice may amount to nothing more than a hunch.
"They just tell you your story doesn't add up," Jones says. "And then they take your money and make you fight for it."
After the couple got home, Jones started researching what had happened to them. She had never heard of civil asset forfeiture before. She quickly discovered she was not alone.
A 2016 USA Today investigation found the DEA, working with local police departments, had seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers at 15 major airports during the previous decade. The newspaper reported the DEA regularly snoops on travel records and maintains a network of confidential informants in the travel industry.
That was just a partial survey. According to a 2017 report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, the DEA had seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity during the previous decade. More than three-quarters of that sum—$3.2 billion—was seized from people who, like Jones and her husband, were never charged with a crime.
Although Jones was not prosecuted, she was suspended from her job at Delta Air Lines during the ordeal. After a few months, she was forced to resign until she could clear her name.
When an owner tries to recover property seized by the DEA, the government is supposed to prove a criminal nexus by "a preponderance of the evidence," meaning it is more likely than not that the property is connected to illegal activity. Federal law allows an "innocent owner" defense, which requires a claimant to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that he either did not know about any illegal activity or did all he reasonably could to stop it.
Since this is a civil process, however, property owners are not entitled to an attorney. They bear the cost of challenging a forfeiture action and proving their innocence. When Jones called a local attorney the day after the seizure in Delaware, he told her it would cost too much and advised her to just let the money go.
Fortunately for Jones, her research showed that many victims of the DEA's airport seizures were fighting back with help from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm that combats forfeiture abuse. In July 2020, Jones joined a class action lawsuit the Institute for Justice had filed against the TSA and the DEA. The lawsuit contends the DEA has a policy or practice of presumptively seizing cash in amounts of $5,000 or more from travelers at airports, "regardless of whether there is probable cause for the seizure." That practice, the complaint says, violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
On November 13, 2020, the U.S. government agreed to return the money the DEA had taken from Jones and her husband. Although Jones was rehired by Delta, the couple never received an apology from the DEA. But why would they? The DEA is only doing what presidential administrations have ordered it to do, and what courts have emboldened it to do for 50 years: fight a pointless, wasteful war that sacrifices the rights of innocent Americans.
While all of this has been going on domestically, the DEA's foreign operations have drawn more scrutiny, for understandable reasons. The history of those efforts is littered with headline-grabbing scandals.
In 1985, drug traffickers abducted and murdered DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico. It was a pivotal moment in DEA history, impelling the agency to focus on transnational cartels. Since then, the DEA's foreign operations have generated some of its greatest successes: the killing of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993 with the assistance of DEA technology and manpower, the dismantling of the Cali Cartel, and the interdiction of vast quantities of cocaine and other drugs.
But the massive amount of money flowing through the drug trade makes these foreign posts prone to bribery and corruption. During the last decade, DEA offices in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti have all been plagued by accusations of serious misconduct.
A 2015 report from the Justice Department's inspector general revealed that at least 10 DEA agents stationed in Colombia had sex parties with prostitutes hired by cartels. Two years later, another inspector general report concluded the DEA had lied to the public, Congress, and the Justice Department about a 2012 incident in which DEA advisers ordered a Honduran law enforcement helicopter to open fire on a water taxi full of civilians, killing four people, including two women and a 14-year-old boy. Although the DEA insisted someone on the boat had fired on them first, video evidence strongly suggested otherwise.
More recently, a veteran DEA agent, José Irizarry, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for conspiring to launder a Colombian cartel's money. But before he went to prison in 2022, Irizarry decided to take everyone else down with him. In a series of interviews with the Associated Press (A.P.), he accused dozens of his colleagues of skimming millions of dollars to fund extravagant lifestyles and debauchery across three continents.
"We had free access to do whatever we wanted," Irizarry told the A.P. "We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there, it was about drinking and girls."
Irizarry repeated the harshest criticisms of the international war on drugs, but this time from the perspective of someone on the inside. "You can't win an unwinnable war," he said. "DEA knows this, and the agents know this….There's so much dope leaving Colombia. And there's so much money. We know we're not making a difference."
In March, the DEA released a review of its foreign operations, initiated in the wake of the Irizarry scandal. While the report makes several recommendations for improving oversight of the agency's foreign posts, the fundamental problem with the DEA's mission to disrupt international drug trafficking can't be fixed: Everyone knows what the score is.
"The drug war is a game," Irizarry observed. "It was a very fun game that we were playing."
The DEA Museum takes up a couple of large rooms on the first floor of the agency's headquarters. It's a muted, occasionally amusing collection. Among the exhibits are several issues of High Times, a Homer Simpson bong, a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, a "life mask" of Pablo Escobar donated by the Colombian National Police, and the Versace-branded, diamond-studded guns of the notorious cartel boss Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
To its credit, the DEA Museum is professional and, if not critical, at least somewhat realistic about the game of whack-a-mole the agency has been playing for the last 50 years. The museum does not ignore marijuana legalization, and it alludes to the disastrous impact of the DEA's crackdown on prescription opioids. But there's always the weight of hanging questions and things left unsaid. Visiting the museum is an exercise in ironic distance; it's a place that public opinion is leaving behind.
In May, Minnesota became the 23rd state to legalize recreational marijuana. A 2022 Pew Survey found that 88 percent of U.S. adults say marijuana should be legal for either medical or recreational use. According to Gallup, two-thirds of Americans favor the latter policy.
In 2020, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize simple possession of all drugs. Another Oregon ballot initiative approved that year authorized the use of psilocybin at state-licensed "service centers." Last year Colorado voters went further by eliminating criminal penalties for noncommercial production, possession, and distribution of five naturally occurring psychedelics. Several cities have taken more modest steps in the same direction.
The DEA continues to dump sand in the gears of legalization where it can. But as the gulf between public opinion and federal drug policy widens, the agency's duties seem increasingly farcical. Five decades should be long enough to admit we've made a terrible mistake and relegate the DEA to a museum.
The post After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Many people say that illegal migrants should instead "get in line" and "wait their turn" to enter legally. In a new Cato Institute study, immigration policy expert David Bier explains why, for the vast majority, that simply isn't possible. For most there simply is no "line" that they can join. Even for many of those who are potentially eligible, the "line" is so long that it might take decades for them to get permission to enter—if it ever happens at all. In most cases, demanding that would-be immigrants wait in line is much like demanding that people who wanted to get a drink during Prohibition do so legally:
America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve‐outs for a select few.
Many Americans have the false impression that these carve‐outs are realistic options for potential immigrants to join American society, but the government's restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases. Even when someone qualifies, annual immigration caps greatly delay and, more frequently, eliminate the immigrant's chance to come to the United States. Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: it happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.
This study provides a uniquely comprehensive, jargon‐free explanation of U.S. rules for legal permanent immigration. Some steps are simple and reasonable, but most steps serve only as unjustified obstacles to immigrating legally. For some immigrants, this restrictive system sends them into the black market of illegal immigration. For others, it sends them to other countries, where they contribute to the quality of life in their new homes. And for still others, it requires them to remain in their homeland, often underemployed and sometimes in danger. Whatever the outcome, the system punishes both the prospective immigrants and Americans who would associate, contract, and trade with them.
Bier methodically goes through every currently existing option for legal immigration and explains their scope and limitations. For example, as he points out, the refugee admissions system is constrained by a narrow legal definition of who qualifies as a refugee, a tight annual cap (currently 125,000) that the US nonetheless fails to reach because of bureaucratic obstacles, and other constraints. Along the way, Bier also dismantles some other common myths about immigration policy, such as that the US takes the majority of the world's migrants (it in fact only takes about 7.5%), and that it is more open to immigration than any other country (far from it).
Bier proposes a variety of useful reforms, such as abolishing discriminatory country-based caps for employment visas, eliminating long waits for visas of many kinds, and much else.
Much of what Bier covers is well-known to immigration policy experts. But the paper is a valuable overview for both specialists and interested laypeople.
Over the last two years, the combination of the end of the Covid pandemic and policy changes by the Biden administration has enabled the US to regain pre-pandemic and Pre-Trump levels of legal migration. But while Biden's changes have had a significant liberalizing impact, Bier's paper shows they still exclude the vast majority of would-be migrants.
Bier's paper cannot and does not resolve all debates over immigration policy. A committed restrictionist could potentially read it, agree with all or most of its points, and conclude that the status quo is much better than he previously thought!
But it does have a number of policy implications, nonetheless. Bier catalogues many ways in which the current system is self-contradictory, undermining its own stated objectives, such as preventing family separation and attracting workers to industries with labor shortages.
The extraordinary difficulty of legal migration also undercuts arguments that migrants have a moral duty to "get in line" rather than try to enter illegally. The near-impossibility of legal entry for most strengthens the case that they are morally entitled to disobey immigration laws, especially in situations where the alternative they face is a lifetime of poverty, violence or oppression.
The paper also has implications for the ongoing public debate over disorder at the border. Most of that disorder is in fact caused by restrictions on legal migration, which incentivize people fleeing horrific conditions to try illegal routes instead (the only ones available to them). Just as Prohibition predictably led millions of people to purchase alcoholic beverages from organized crime, so severe immigration restrictions predictably lead migrants to cross illegally or seek out the services of smugglers.
The best way to reduce illegal alcohol sales and the involvement of organized crime in that industry was to end Prohibition. Similarly, the best way to reduce illegal border crossings and associated problems is to make legal migration easier, as the Biden Administration has begun to do with its CNVH parole program, a policy that has significantly reduced illegal border crossings by migrants from the four nations it covers.
I do have a few quibbles with Bier's analysis. Most notably, I think the estimate that 158 million people (based on surveys) would migrate to the US if legal barriers were dropped is probably an overstatement. It doesn't take account of various moving costs associated with migration, which respondents may not consider when answering survey questions (e.g.—the cost of learning a new language, finding a job, etc.). It also does not consider constraints imposed by employment and housing markets. In a section of Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move, I discuss the limitations of such estimates in more detail.
It may be that the current system bars "only," say, 80 or 90 percent of would-be migrants to the US, as opposed to Bier's estimate of 99%. But even the lower figure is enough to show the severely restrictive nature of the status quo—and the ways in which it consigns many millions of people to lives of poverty and oppression largely because of morally arbitrary circumstances of ancestry and place of birth. As Bier notes, the system also severely constrains the liberty and economic opportunities of native-born Americans.
The post Why Legal Immigration is Almost Impossible for the Vast Majority of those Who Want it appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Drug prohibition sows the seeds of its own defeat by creating a highly lucrative and resilient black market that is always adjusting to enforcement efforts. When police arrest a drug dealer, someone else takes his place. Even dismantling an entire trafficking operation does not have a substantial and lasting impact on retail prices or consumption because it creates opportunities that other organizations are happy to seize.
This enforcement problem is compounded when drug transactions are hard to detect because they take place on the dark web. Yet the authors of a recent study suggest that busting dark-web dealers is a cost-effective way of reducing access to illegal drugs. The study, which was published in the journal Information Systems Research, not only does not support that claim; it underlines the futility and perverse consequences of trying to get between people and the drugs they want.
University of Minnesota researcher Jason Chan and his collaborators looked at what happened after Jeremy Donagal, a.k.a. the "Xanax King," was arrested along with five other drug suspects in May 2014. Donagal was charged with producing various drugs, including steroids, alprazolam (Xanax), and gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), and selling them on darknet sites, including Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0 (SR2). After Donagal and his associates were arrested, the feds used his account to set up "controlled deliveries," resulting in the arrests of about 60 buyers. The operation was publicized that June.
Chan et al. found that news of the arrests was associated with a 39 percent drop in the average number of sales by SR2 vendors. The number of SR2 vendors fell by 56 percent. The latter result, Chan says in an emailed press release, "suggests that the policing effort induced a negative shock to the dark web ecosystem in which a significant proportion of drug sellers decided to exit altogether."
Chan et al. say the study provides "initial evidence in support of the effectiveness of selectively targeting large-scale drug vendors to dampen darknet activities." That strategy, they suggest, is more "cost-efficient" than more ambitious operations that aim to shut down entire dark-web platforms. "Compared with site shutdowns," they write, "selective targeting is less costly and time-consuming yet still able to reduce drug-dealing activities on the darknet market."
But did the Xanax King arrests actually "reduce drug-dealing activities on the darknet market"? The study's analysis is based on a comparison of activity on SR2 to activity on two "nonpoliced sites," Agora and Evolution, where drug selling evidently continued unabated. Even on SR2, "news of the arrest did not affect the average drug prices." Chan et al. found that "small-scale vendors," who were disproportionately affected, "attempted to clear out their remaining inventory by reducing drug prices after the policing event before exiting the site."
Meanwhile, the number of sales by "the larger vendors" rose, and "the site became more consolidated after the policing event." That is consistent with the observation that arresting or deterring some drug dealers encourages others to pick up the slack. The arrests, Chan et al. say, had a "limited impact on deterring the larger vendors in the market, which are likely drug syndicates that have the resources and means to evade legal arrests and punishment."
It seems clear that the busts put a scare into SR2 sellers and buyers, including those located outside the United States. Focusing on that subset, the study found that "the arrest event had a negative and significant impact on transaction volumes, vendors with active transactions, and remaining vendor count." The authors say that suggests "the deterrence effect of the policing shock can extend beyond the immediate prosecutorial jurisdiction of the enforcement agency."
Unsurprisingly, the study does not purport to show that the "policing shock" had a significant and lasting effect on the darknet supply of illegal drugs, the total supply, consumption of those substances, or drug-related harm. Chan et al. say their findings indicate that "the supply side of the market" was "more affected by the enforcement event than the demand side"—and again, even the supply-side effect was limited to SR2. They add that "drug sellers on the darknet market" did not "have the means to alter price levels even after a supply shock to SR2 as buyers are aware of outside options of purchasing drugs elsewhere (e.g., other darknet sites) and purchase elsewhere should drug prices on one site increase."
Those "outside options" always exist, which is why enforcement efforts like this have a limited and fleeting impact. "It is unclear if the results generalize to other darknet sites," the researchers concede. "It is possible that newer darknet sites may have stronger security and anonymization innovations based on learnings of the failures met by predecessor sites. Should such technological innovations improve substantially over time, enforcement effects observed in this work might not apply to future sites." That observation underlines the adaptive abilities of the black market, which has always found ways around the barriers that drug warriors erect.
Chan et al. also concede that "we are unable to make claims on vendor migration that might have occurred because of the enforcement effort." In other words, the vendors who left SR2 may have set up shop elsewhere, just as buyers may have taken advantage of "outside options."
Even if we ignore those caveats and assume that arrests and prosecutions can put a significant dent in the darknet supply of drugs, the wisdom of trying to do that is dubious. "As an underground economy that is not governed by a regulatory
system, darknet markets allow for the transactions of impure and specialized designer drugs that can cause dangerous and unpredictable side effects," Chan et al. warn. "For instance, some drug dealers mix fentanyl, a cheap but powerful synthetic opioid, with other drugs to increase their profits. Without knowing that their purchased drug contains fentanyl, users may overdose, suffering brain damage and even death as fentanyl is 50 times more potent than morphine."
The researchers do not acknowledge that websites like SR2 reduce such risks by making drug dealers more accountable to consumers. Since negative reviews hurt their bottom line, vendors have an incentive to protect their reputations by delivering what they promise. The dark web, which facilitates repeat business for vendors with good reputations, is more conducive to such market discipline than in-person transactions with acquaintances of acquaintances who provide no assurance of quality or potency.
Discussing the original Silk Road, which the FBI shut down in 2013, Reason's Brian Doherty noted that its pages, "like those at Amazon or Yelp, were dense with seller ratings and reviews, guiding buyers to vendors with good records and high-quality products. Boisterous online forums were a click away, jammed with customer-generated information about drugs, dealers, safety, and whatever else the anonymous technorati wanted to chat about."
Although Chan et al. do not explicitly mention these benefits, they do note that "the number of reviews received is highly correlated to the transaction volume of darknet vendors"—so much so that they use this measure as a proxy for sales. And they allude to other ways in which darknet drug bazaars reduce risks for consumers.
"Compared with the traditional sale of drugs on the streets, the risks of encountering violence (e.g., disputes with street gang members, robberies by desperate buyers) when transacting on darknet sites are much lower," the researchers note. "At the same time, drug transactions performed on darknet markets are generally believed to involve lower risks of arrests." But the authors view these consumer advantages with alarm.
"For these reasons, digital platforms that facilitate illicit activities have experienced high participation levels and stable growth over time," Chan et al. write. "The unabated expansion of darknet drug markets is concerning from a public health perspective." From a "public health perspective," they evidently think, it makes sense to push drug users toward transactions with street dealers, which pose a much higher risk of violence, life-derailing encounters with cops, and injury or death caused by powders and pills of unknown provenance and composition.
One can make an argument for such harm maximization: Although limiting online access to drugs is apt to increase the dangers that any given user faces, prohibitionists might reason, the deterrent effect of those hazards could, on balance, result in less drug consumption and less drug-related harm. But that collectivist calculus is not just empirically questionable; it is morally abhorrent, sacrificing the welfare of undeterred drug users in the name of saving more-timid consumers from the potential consequences of their personal decisions.
This is just one example of the drug war's broader logic. Prohibition reliably makes drug use more dangerous, which counts as a benefit if the main priority is discouraging people from using psychoactive substances that politicians have deemed intolerable. As the ever-escalating number of drug-related deaths shows, that strategy does not work very well. But drug warriors never learn from their mistakes. They are always sure that the latest enforcement tweak—in this case, "selectively targeting large-scale drug vendors to dampen darknet activities"—will succeed where all previous efforts have failed.
The post The Economics of Prohibition Doom Plans To Reduce Drug Use by Busting Online Dealers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New York Times columnist Ross Douthat thinks "legalizing marijuana is a big mistake." His argument, which draws heavily on a longer Substack essay by the Manhattan Institute's Charles Fain Lehman, is unabashedly consequentialist, purporting to weigh the collective benefits of repealing prohibition against the costs. It therefore will not persuade anyone who believes, as a matter of principle, that people should be free to decide for themselves what goes into their bodies.
Douthat recognizes that his case against legalization "will not convince readers who come in with stringently libertarian presuppositions." Lehman, a self-described "teenage libertarian" who has thought better of that position now that he is in his 20s, likewise makes no attempt to argue that the government is morally justified in arresting and punishing people for peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights. They nevertheless make some valid points about the challenges of legalization while demonstrating the pitfalls of a utilitarian analysis that ignores the value of individual freedom and the injustice of restricting it to protect people from themselves.
Douthat and Lehman are right that legalization advocates, who at this point include roughly two-thirds of American adults, sometimes exaggerate its impact on criminal justice. All drug offenders combined "account for just 16.7 percent" of people in state and federal prisons, Lehman notes, and perhaps one-tenth of those drug war prisoners (based on an estimate by Fordham law professor John Pfaff) were convicted of marijuana offenses. People arrested for violating pot prohibition usually are not charged with production or distribution and typically do not spend much, if any, time behind bars.
Still, those arrests are not without consequences. In addition to the indignity, embarrassment, inconvenience, legal costs, and penalties they impose, the long-term consequences of a misdemeanor record include barriers to employment, housing, and education. Those burdens are bigger and more extensive than Douthat and Lehman are willing to acknowledge.
Since the 1970s, police in the United States have made hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests every year, the vast majority for simple possession. The number of arrests peaked at nearly 873,000 in 2007 and had fallen to about 350,000 by 2020. The cumulative total since the early 1990s exceeds 20 million.
That is not a small problem, although Douthat and Lehman glide over its significance. Yes, Lehman concedes, "arrests for marijuana-related offenses—possession and sales—plummet" after legalization. But based on a "rough and dirty" analysis, he finds that "marijuana legalization has no statistically significant effect on total arrests."
Is that the relevant question? If police stop arresting people for conduct that never should have been treated as a crime, that seems like an unalloyed good, regardless of what happens with total arrests.
Lehman thinks the results of his analysis make sense. "Marijuana possession (and the smell of pot) is a pretext for cops to stop and search people they think may have committed other crimes, and marijuana possession similarly [is] a pretext to arrest someone," he writes. "If marijuana arrests are mostly about pretext, then it would make sense that cops simply substitute to other kinds of arrest in their absence, netting no real change in the arrest rate."
Again, unless you trust the police enough to think they are always protecting public safety when they search or arrest people based on "a pretext," eliminating a common excuse for hassling individuals whom cops view as suspicious looks like an improvement. Lehman seems to be suggesting that most people arrested for pot possession are predatory criminals, so it's a good thing that police have a pretext to bust them. But when millions of people are charged with nothing but marijuana possession, that assumption seems highly dubious.
Douthat and Lehman's main concern about legalization is that it encourages heavy use. The result, Douthat says, is "a form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn't mortally dangerous" but "can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives." Citing the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), he says "around 16 million Americans, out of more than 50 million users" are "now suffering from what is termed marijuana use disorder."
That estimate should be viewed with caution for a couple of reasons. First, the term cannabis use disorder encompasses a wide range of problems, only some of which resemble the life-derailing "personal degradation" that Douthat describes. Second, while the American Psychiatric Association's definition requires "a problematic pattern of cannabis use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress," the NSDUH numbers are based on a questionnaire that asks about specific indicators but does not measure clinical significance.
In addition to that requirement, the official definition lists 11 criteria. Any two of them, combined with "clinically significant impairment or distress," are enough for a diagnosis.
If you experience "a strong urge to use marijuana" and "spend a great deal of your time" doing so or find that "the same amount of marijuana" has "much less effect on you than it used to," for example, you qualify for the diagnosis, provided you are experiencing "clinically significant impairment or distress"—which, again, the NSDUH questionnaire is not designed to measure. The upshot is that people with mild or transitory marijuana problems, or even people who smoke a lot of pot but do not necessarily suffer as a result, get lumped in with cannabis consumers who flunk school, lose their jobs, neglect their spouses and children, or engage in physically hazardous activities.
Taken at face value, the NSDUH numbers indicate that 31 percent of Americans who used marijuana in 2021 experienced a "cannabis use disorder" at some point during that year. By comparison, about 17 percent of drinkers experienced an "alcohol use disorder," according to the same survey. The criteria for the latter are similar to the criteria for the former, and in both cases problems range from mild to severe.
Does that mean marijuana is nearly twice as addictive as alcohol? Other estimates tell a different story. A 1994 study based on the National Comorbidity Survey put the lifetime risk of "dependence" at 15.4 percent for drinkers and 9.1 percent for cannabis consumers. A 2010 assessment in The Lancet gave alcohol and marijuana similar scores for "dependence" risk.
Even previous iterations of the NSDUH indicate much lower rates of cannabis use disorder than the 2021 numbers suggest. In 2019, for example, 17.5 percent of respondents reported marijuana use, while 1.8 percent were identified as experiencing a cannabis use disorder. That 10 percent rate is one-third as high as the rate reported for 2021.
The measured increase in the rate of cannabis use disorder among users might seem consistent with the story that Douthat and Lehman are telling, in which legalization made potent pot readily available, leading to more marijuana-related problems. But it is unlikely that such an effect would suddenly show up in the two years between the 2019 and 2021 surveys. Another reason to doubt that hypothesis: The rate of alcohol use disorders among drinkers also jumped, from about 8 percent to about 17 percent, during the same period. Both increases seem to reflect the rise in substance abuse associated with the pandemic.
Another consideration in comparing marijuana with alcohol is the consequences of heavy use, which are far more serious in the latter case. The Lancet analysis rated alcohol substantially higher than cannabis for "harm to users" and "harm to others" and as the most dangerous drug overall by a large margin. Alcohol's score was 72, compared to 20 for cannabis.
Even among heavy users, in other words, alcohol is apt to cause more serious problems than marijuana. Yet neither Douthat nor Lehman discusses the potential benefits of substituting marijuana for alcohol. In fact, they do not mention alcohol at all, perhaps because that would raise the question of whether it is sensible to ban marijuana while tolerating a drug that is more hazardous by several measures, including acute toxicity, long-term health problems, and road safety.
While Douthat and Lehman blame legalization for fostering marijuana abuse, they contradictorily note that cannabis consumed in several states that allow recreational use still comes mainly from the black market. Both cite economists Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, who estimate in their book Can Legal Weed Win? that unlicensed dealers account for three-quarters of the marijuana supply in California, where voters approved legalization in 2016. The difficulty that states like California have faced in displacing the black market, Goldstein and Sumner argue, shows the perils of high taxes and heavy regulation, which make it hard for licensed marijuana merchants to compete.
Douthat and Lehman draw a different lesson. Given the hazards of marijuana abuse, they think, high taxes and heavy regulation are appropriate to deter excessive consumption. Yet those policies, they say, help preserve a black market that could be suppressed only by harsh measures that are not feasible in the current political environment. Since "we have spent the past several decades contending that marijuana enforcement is racist, evil, and pointless," Lehman says, "there is little appetite for doing more of it."
That situation creates a dilemma for technocrats who think they can fine-tune the marijuana market to minimize the harm it causes. "On the one hand, a harm-minimizing marijuana market entails high taxation and strict regulation," Lehman writes. "On the other, it also needs to be cheap enough to outcompete the illicit producers who will otherwise swoop in to provide where the licit market does not—thereby producing the same harms the licit market is meant to obviate. In optimizing between these two extremes, we get the worst of both worlds: a thriving illicit market, and also weed widely available enough to harm millions of heavy users."
The only logical solution, Lehman thinks, is returning to the "big, dumb policy" of prohibition. Douthat seems inclined to agree. "Eventually," he says, "the culture will recognize that under the banner of personal choice, we're running a general experiment in exploitation—addicting our more vulnerable neighbors to myriad pleasant-seeming vices, handing our children over to the social media dopamine machine and spreading degradation wherever casinos spring up and weed shops flourish."
Respect for individual autonomy, of course, has always entailed the risk that people will make bad choices. That is true of everything that people enjoy, whether it's alcohol, marijuana, social media, video games, gambling, shopping, sex, eating, or exercise. Even when most people manage to enjoy these things without ruining their lives, a minority inevitably will take them to excess. The question is whether that risk justifies coercive intervention, which is also dangerous and costly.
Answering that question requires more than weighing measurable costs and benefits. It requires value judgments that Douthat and Lehman make without acknowledging them. When you start with the assumption that government policy should be based on a collectivist calculus that assigns little or no weight to "personal choice," which Douthat dismisses as a mere "banner," you can rationalize nearly any paternalistic scheme, no matter how oppressive or unjust.
The post Pot Legalization Is a 'Big Mistake' Only If You Ignore the Value of Freedom and the Injustice of Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While I have fond memories of life in New York, many of them involve defying some stupid rule or regulation. It's a pleasure to now live in Arizona where government, while still idiotic, generally has a lighter touch. Unfortunately for friends and family I left behind, Empire State officialdom still hasn't learned its lessons, as evidenced by the heavy regulatory hand stifling sort-of-legalized marijuana, and proposals to similarly reinforce the black market with an outright ban on cigarette sales.
"Governor Kathy Hochul today signed new legislation to increase civil and tax penalties for the unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis in New York as part of the FY 2024 Budget," the New York governor's office announced this week. "The legislation, first proposed by the Governor in March, provides additional enforcement power to the Office of Cannabis Management and the Department of Taxation and Finance to enforce the new regulatory requirements and close stores engaged in the illegal sale of cannabis."
News of a marijuana crackdown is a bit of a head-turner for a state that legalized the stuff in 2021. But the legislation intended to bring the booming underground market into the open was hobbled from day one. "New York's law…is surprisingly permissive in some respects but includes high taxes and other provisions that compromise the interests of consumers," Reason's Jacob Sullum warned at the time.
Last year, as taxes and regulations added up, and licenses were issued based on social justice grounds, it became increasingly obvious that the state was creating a "legal" market "so hobbled that it will offer uncompetitive prices to consumers and daunting barriers to vendors," as I noted in August.
Now, a bare handful of legal vendors operate across the state. They're somehow supposed to replace a thriving underground market that delivered high-quality weed to my door in the days of the beeper (after I quit the business myself) before further innovating. Unsurprisingly, the "unlicensed and illicit sale of cannabis" has been barely challenged by tax- and rule-hampered legal-ish competitors.
"New York legalized cannabis possession in small amounts in 2021," The Wall Street Journal's Zusha Elinson observed on April 28. "Two years later, just five shops sell marijuana legally in New York City, while 1,400 bodegas, smoke shops and other outlets without licenses do, according to an estimate by the city sheriff."
"Steep taxes and heavy regulation are making it hard for licensed pot sellers to operate in some states, driving more producers and buyers to illegal outlets," adds the story's subhed.
New York officials could have avoided the odd sight of a crackdown on illegal vendors of a legal product if they had learned from others' experience. For instance, they could have observed California's "high taxes and baffling regulation that have crushed small farmers [and] empowered a still-thriving black market for marijuana" as reported last summer by The Washington Post. Or, they could have read the 2018 marijuana-legalization impact assessment they commissioned which examined earlier efforts and cautioned that "some states had to lower their initial tax rate since a higher price did not incentivize consumers to move from the unregulated to the legal market."
New York officials might have learned from their own cigarette policies. Those so burdened tobacco with taxes and rules that they managed to (this sounds familiar!) hand the majority of the market for a legal product to illegal vendors.
"Nationwide, New York continues to have the greatest rate of cigarette smuggling, with smuggled cigarettes accounting for 53.5 percent of total cigarette consumption in the state," the Tax Foundation's Adam Hoffer reported in December 2022. "New York also has one of the highest state cigarette taxes ($4.35 per pack), not counting the additional local New York City cigarette tax ($1.50 per pack), yielding a combined rate of $5.85 per pack."
Eric Garner, let's not forget, was killed during an arrest by New York City cops on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes in violation of state tax laws.
That New York officials are as hooked on authoritarian policies as, well, nicotine fiends are to their smokes is evident from the fact that, instead of freeing the market for marijuana, the state government is considering applying prohibition policies that failed to curb cannabis consumption to cigarettes.
As Reason's Liz Wolfe recently noted, the state Health Department's Bureau of Tobacco Control has been sounding out lawmakers and community leaders. They were polled about their support for "a policy that would end the sale of all tobacco products in New York within 10 years" and "a policy that would ban the sale of all tobacco products to those born after a certain date" (already adopted in New Zealand).
This after the state of New York quasi-legalized marijuana because, as that 2018 impact assessment noted, "marijuana is easily accessible in the unregulated market… The status quo (i.e., criminalization of marijuana) has not curbed marijuana use and has, in fact, led to unintended consequences, such as the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of certain racial and ethnic groups that has a negative impact on families and communities."
Of course, like outright prohibition, heavy regulation and taxation acted as a lifeline for the existing black market in marijuana and sparked the creation of a thriving illicit trade in nominally legal cigarettes. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that prohibition will work this time despite a long history of failure in New York, California, and elsewhere. No way will a tobacco ban once again supercharge an innovative and adept underground industry, we're told, because…because…
There's no "because." Government officials have yet to come up with a solution to the unwillingness of buyers and sellers to abide by expensive and inconvenient restrictions, let alone their repeated refusal to submit to explicit prohibitions. Creatures like Governor Hochul won't acknowledge reality even as they grudgingly sort-of-legalize a product that was widely consumed in defiance of earlier restrictions. Instead, they propose a new round of bans modeled on laws already proven impotent.
In truth, New York officials (who just added a dollar-per-pack to the cigarette tax) are only a little thicker-skulled in their dedication to control freakery than some of their counterparts elsewhere. Politics seems to attract people determined to coerce their neighbors and to be frustrated in the attempt, though the New York variety is especially stubborn in their pursuit of prohibition over and over again.
Then again, New Yorkers have learned to be stubborn too. No doubt, state residents will continue to make fond memories, as I once did, in defiance of stupid rules and regulations. They'll probably enjoy some cannabis or tobacco along the way.
The post New York's Heavy Hand Keeps Illegal Marijuana and Tobacco Dealers in Business appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Drug war nostalgia got you down? Do you miss the police state evolving around you to combat people's desire to get high instead of the vague threats of terrorism or "domestic extremism"? Well, a bipartisan cabal of senators offers just what you need! These lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to force online services to monitor and report any mentions you make of illicit intoxicants. It's a terrible idea that builds on earlier drug policy errors.
"The Cooper Davis Act…requires communication service providers to report to the DEA on the sale or distribution of illicit drugs including fentanyl, methamphetamine, or a counterfeit controlled substance," boasts Sen. Roger Marshall (R–Kan.) of S.1080, introduced (after a failed effort last year) on March 30 with co-sponsors Richard Durbin (D–Ill.), Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), Jeanne Shaheen (D–N.H.), and Todd Young (R–Ind.). The legislation "bolsters DEA's existing data infrastructure to improve intelligence gathering on drug dealers operating across various online communication platforms."
The bill is named after Cooper Davis, a Kansas 16-year-old who died in 2021 after reportedly consuming counterfeit Percocet pills laced with fentanyl he and his friends purchased from a dealer they encountered on Snapchat. Understandably upset, his mother, Libby Davis, became an anti-drug activist. Marshall and company's Cooper Davis Act, "to amend the Controlled Substances Act to require electronic communication service providers and remote computing services to report to the Attorney General certain controlled substances violations," is the result. Unfortunately, it's ill-considered legislation that would double down on bad policy to inflict greater surveillance on the country at large.
"The bill, named the Cooper Davis Act, is likely to result in a host of inaccurate reports and in companies sweeping up innocent conversations, including discussions about past drug use or treatment," warns Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Mario Trujillo. "While explicitly not required, it may also give internet companies incentive to conduct dragnet searches of private messages to find protected speech that is merely indicative of illegal behavior."
The legislation also continues down the prohibitionist path that brought us counterfeit pills of uncertain and often lethal potency. Black markets always rise to meet demand for illegal goods and services, but what they offer is rarely as reliable or safe as offerings from legal providers.
"Fentanyl is just the latest manifestation of what drug policy analysts call 'the iron law of prohibition,'" Cato Institute Senior Fellow in Health Policy Studies Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance on March 1. "A variant of what economists call the Alchian‐Allen Effect, the shorthand version of the iron law states, 'the harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug,' Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes and can be subdivided into more units to sell."
"The iron law of prohibition is why cannabis THC concentration has grown over the years," Singer added. "It is what brought crack cocaine into the cocaine market. And it made fentanyl replace heroin as the primary cause of overdose deaths in the United States."
In a world in which getting high was legal (let's leave age limits aside for the moment), Cooper Davis might have consumed a relatively mild drug of known dosage manufactured by a reputable company that faced serious liability concerns if it varied from safe practices. Instead, we have prohibition encouraging criminal providers to develop ever-more-powerful intoxicants, produced in batches of inconsistent purity and power, that can be easily smuggled past law enforcement and sold to end users.
Legal or not, people who want drugs can get them. But prohibition gives us recurring games of chemical Russian Roulette every time somebody takes an illegal dose. It's that prohibitionist system, which has proven incapable of preventing drugs from getting to the Cooper Davises of the world, that the senators want to enhance with new surveillance authorizations forcibly deputizing communications companies as narcs. And they'll have plenty of incentive to report, or over-report.
"A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (b)(1) shall be fined…in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $190,000," specifies the bill. "In the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $380,000."
But there's no reason to expect that this is the prohibitionist measure that will make the difference.
"If policymakers double down on the same prohibitionist policies they have employed for over 50 years, deaths from illicit drug overdoses will continue to rise," noted Cato's Singer. "Doing the same thing repeatedly, with even more vigor this time, will not yield a different result."
Worse, forcing communications companies to snitch on customers threatens to become a habit all too easy to extend and apply to a wide range of politicians' pet causes.
"This bill is a template for legislators to try to force internet companies to report their users to law enforcement for other unfavorable conduct or speech," cautions EFF's Trujillo. "This bill aims to cut down on the illegal sales of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and counterfeit narcotics. But what would prevent the next bill from targeting marijuana or the sale or purchase of abortion pills, if a new administration deemed those drugs unsafe or illegal for purely political reasons?"
Conservatives might want to contemplate such power in the hands of anti-gun officials, such as the one currently occupying the White House.
After all, there's precedent for surveillance powers growing to meet new fears real and imagined. The proposed bill is loosely modeled on a law mandating reporting of material related to child abuse. The 9/11 terrorism attacks became an excuse to dust off domestic surveillance powers proposed after the Oklahoma City bombing, and to repackage them in the PATRIOT Act. With terrorism fears fading, the FBI is distributing bulletins warning that Revolutionary War imagery might indicate "anti-government or anti-authority violent extremis[m]." If the Cooper Davis Act passes and evolves, simply planning Independence Day festivities via social media could become a touch risky in the future.
Instead of further empowering a surveillance state that is already over-intrusive, officials and advocates concerned about drug availability should look to the real problem: the war on drugs. Prohibition brings us ever-more-powerful intoxicants and little control over how they're produced and distributed. Legalization won't make drugs go away, but it will help make the market for them safer and more responsible. That's more than any snitch bill can offer.
The post New Senate Bill Would Turn Online Services Into Narcs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An explosive new report by the New York Post revealed on Saturday that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, appears to be considering a full ban on the sale of tobacco products.
The director of the state Health Department's Bureau of Tobacco Control recently distributed a poll to local legislators and community leaders filled with questions meant to gauge support for prohibition. "What is your opinion about a policy that would end the sale of all tobacco products in New York within 10 years?" asked one question. "What is your opinion about a policy that would ban the sale of all tobacco products to those born after a certain date? For example, those born after the year 2010 or later would never be sold tobacco," asked another.
"I've never seen anything like this where [the state] uses this kind of focus grouping, alliance building, momentum building," an Albany insider told the New York Post, indicating that Hochul's administration was considering a full ban, something a Health Department spokesman denied.
But it's not crazy to imagine Hochul pursuing all-out prohibition, for which this poll sure looks like a trial balloon. Hochul is currently in state budget negotiations, where she and fellow Democrats have been working out a ban on menthol sales as well as a $1-per-pack tax increase on all cigarettes sold in the state. (The average price of a pack of cigarettes in New York state is $11.96. In the city, that number is higher; I was charged $18 for a pack of cigarettes last week in Manhattan.)
A menthol ban, Hochul said last month, is supposed to prevent New Yorkers from going down "the path of a lifetime of smoking addiction." Such bans are in vogue right now: The Biden administration has been toying with a national crackdown, directing the Food and Drug Administration last year to draft regulations, which came on the heels of a 2020 ban on the sale of some flavored vaping cartridges.
"Caught in the middle are Black smokers, who smoke menthol cigarettes at higher rates than white smokers, and are the main group the ban is meant to help," wrote The New York Times' Luis Ferré-Sadurni yesterday. "Decades of aggressive marketing by tobacco companies have caused Black smokers to consume menthol cigarettes, whose cooling sensation on the throat makes them more appealing and addictive."
Setting aside the fact that sentences like those above deny black smokers any semblance of free will, Hochul and her Department of Health should think twice before adding new categories to the list of banned products. Though making cigarettes harder to access would possibly have the effect of reducing smoking uptake, those who do continue to smoke would most likely end up paying more for black-market products (while also running the risk that such products, like vaping cartridges, be tainted with adulterants).
It was, after all, New York state's prohibition on selling loosies—single cigarettes without tax stamps—that led to Eric Garner, a black man, being placed in a deadly chokehold by New York City Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014. Had New York never regulated the selling of loosies (or raised cigarette taxes so high during the Bloomberg administration, which loosie vendors say led to a noticeable increase in demand for their products), Garner might not have been hassled—and ultimately, brutally killed—by a cop.
Prohibitions, after all, are enforced at gunpoint. And even prohibitions that don't result in police chokeholds can have all kinds of unintended consequences—like the bans on certain vaping products, which are successfully used as smoking cessation tools by tons of smokers who are looking to quit. (Much of the research linking vaping to lung diseases has been shoddily constructed, with causal links too hastily drawn, as Reason's Jacob Sullum has documented over and over again.)
What seems well-meaning to Times writers and Hochul staffers seems to libertarians like a disturbing opportunity for the state to wield power in new ways against the least well-off.
The post New York Governor Gauging Support for Full Ban on All Cigarette Sales appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The number of federal sentences for low-level marijuana possession has plummeted in recent years, thanks mainly to a dramatic drop in prosecutions of people arrested in Arizona. But prior state convictions for simple possession are still boosting federal penalties for other offenses by increasing the number of "criminal history points" considered under sentencing guidelines.
Under federal law, simple marijuana possession is punishable by a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail. Federal charges have always accounted for a tiny share of marijuana possession cases, which typically are prosecuted under state law. But according to a recent report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), federal courts sentenced just 145 defendants for simple marijuana possession in fiscal year 2021, down from 2,172 in FY 2014.
Most of these cases involved people caught with marijuana at or near the U.S.-Mexican border. The USSC says the downward trend was "largely driven" by cases in Arizona, which accounted for 79 percent of the total since FY 2014. Sentences in that state fell from 1,916 in FY 2014 to only two in FY 2021.
Among defendants sentenced in the previous five fiscal years, 86 percent were male, 71 percent were Hispanic, and 60 percent were not U.S. citizens. About 70 percent received prison sentences, which averaged five months.
The USSC attributes the 93 percent drop in simple possession cases since FY 2014 to an "evolving policy shift." It mentions President Joe Biden's mass pardon for low-level marijuana offenders and notes that the Justice Department "generally has treated marijuana possession offenses as a low enforcement priority in recent years." But the downward trend that the report describes predates the pardon, and federal sentences for simple marijuana possession were falling precipitously before Biden took office, beginning at the end of the Obama administration and continuing through the Trump administration.
The report also considers how prior simple possession convictions affect federal defendants charged with other crimes. In FY 2021, 4,405 federal offenders "received criminal history points under the federal sentencing guidelines for prior marijuana possession sentences." Those points put 1,765 defendants in a higher criminal history category, which figured in the sentences they received.
While the impact of a prior marijuana possession conviction might amount to just a few more months behind bars, that additional punishment could easily exceed the penalty imposed in the state marijuana case. The USSC reports that 79 percent of the prior sentences "were for less than 60 days in prison." In effect, these defendants are punished again for marijuana possession, and the second penalty is more severe.
The post Federal Pot Possession Cases Plummet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Every Thursday at Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I go live at YouTube and Facebook with great thinkers, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers and other people who are central to the world in which we live. We're excited to present the audio of those conversations as bonus episodes of the Reason Interview podcast.
This time around, we talked with Ethan Nadelmann, the former head of the Drug Policy Alliance and the host of the excellent Psychoactive podcast. Ethan is one of the the main reasons we live in a world where legal marijuana is increasingly available for adults—and why other drugs are being decriminalized and legalized too.
The main was whether we should legalize all drugs and, if so, how best to go about it? It's an in-depth conversation about all aspects of drug policy, drug use, and drug culture, including decriminalization versus legalization, addiction and treatment programs, and the effects of reforms in Portugal and elsewhere around the world.
The post Ethan Nadelmann: How To Legalize All Drugs! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jeronimo Yanez remembered smelling "the odor of burning marijuana" as he approached the white Oldsmobile sedan he had stopped near the intersection of Larpenteur Avenue and Fry Street in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. It was a little after 9 p.m. on a Wednesday in July 2016, and Yanez, who worked for the St. Anthony Police Department, had been assigned to patrol the streets of Lauderdale, a city just west of Falcon Heights.
The whiff of weed from the Oldsmobile, Yanez later said, figured in the threat he perceived from the car's driver, a 32-year-old school cafeteria worker named Philando Castile. Yanez fatally shot Castile, who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, a few seconds after learning that he had a gun in the car.
The marijuana that alarmed Yanez also figured in public comments about the shooting by Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host who at the time was a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association (NRA). Castile's death seemed to be a clear case of an innocent man who was killed for exercising his Second Amendment rights. But the NRA, which initially called the incident "troubling," never took a position on whether the shooting was justified. Several journalists thought they had an explanation for the NRA's reticence when Loesch brought up Castile's marijuana use, which made it illegal for him to own a gun, let alone carry one in public.
Loesch rejected that interpretation of her comments. But it seemed plausible in light of the NRA's longstanding support for the federal bans on gun possession by illegal drug users and people convicted of drug-related felonies. The organization's enthusiasm for enforcing those restrictions illustrates a blind spot shared by many right-leaning critics of gun control, whose concerns about overcriminalization, law enforcement abuses, and violations of civil liberties usually do not extend to the war on drugs.
That inconsistency is the mirror image of attitudes among progressives, who readily recognize the injustice and racially disparate impact of drug laws while enthusiastically supporting gun laws with strikingly similar historical roots and contemporary consequences. In addition to overlooking their potential common ground, both sides tend to miss the perverse interaction between the twin crusades against guns and drugs, which combine to inflict double damage on people like Castile.
"The reason I pulled you over," Yanez told Castile, was that the car's brake lights were not working properly. The top light was out, and the broken lens on the left light was covered with red tape.
Although Castile had no way of knowing it, that was not the real reason Yanez had pulled him over. The real reason was that Yanez thought Castile looked like a suspect in a recent armed robbery of a nearby convenience store. Surveillance video from the store showed two black men with handguns. One had shoulder-length dreadlocks, while the other had longer dreadlocks and was wearing glasses.
Castile likewise was a black man with dreadlocks and glasses. But at the time of the stop, Yanez told investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) the next day, he could not recall whether the robbers had "corn rows or dreadlocks or straight hair."
In that interview and in a radio call before he pulled the car over, Yanez mentioned Castile's "wide-set nose," a detail that had not been included in the description of either robbery suspect. Jeffrey Noble, a use-of-force expert consulted by local prosecutors, concluded that "no reasonable police officer would have believed that Mr. Castile matched the description of an armed robbery suspect."
When Yanez asked Castile for his driver's license and proof of insurance, a dashcam video showed, Castile handed over his insurance card. "Sir," Castile then calmly told Yanez, "I have to tell you that I do have a firearm on me." Castile presumably was trying to avoid a surprise that might have alarmed Yanez. But his disclosure proved to be a fatal mistake.
"OK," Yanez initially replied. "Don't reach for it then." Castile, who seems to have been responding to the officer's request for his driver's license by trying to retrieve his wallet, repeatedly assured Yanez that he was not reaching for the gun. So did Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was sitting in the front passenger seat. But Castile's movements unnerved Yanez, who drew his gun and fired seven rounds at Castile.
"You just killed my boyfriend!" Reynolds exclaimed. "I wasn't reaching for it," a mortally wounded Castile said. It was one of the last things he said before he died.
"I thought he had the gun in his hand," Yanez told the BCA investigators. "I thought I was gonna die." But Noble found "the weight of the evidence supports a conclusion that the handgun was in Mr. Castile's right front pants pocket at the time of the shooting."
When Yanez was prosecuted for second-degree manslaughter, the jurors were more inclined to credit his account. "Some of us were saying that there was some recklessness there," one juror said after Yanez was acquitted in June 2017, "but that didn't stick because we didn't know what escalated the situation: Was he really seeing a gun?"
According to Yanez, the marijuana he smelled colored his perception of Castile's intentions. Castile's passengers included Reynolds' 4-year-old daughter, who was sitting in the back. "I thought…if he has the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the 5-year-old [sic] girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke," Yanez recalled during the BCA interview, "then what care does he give about me?"
Whatever risk secondhand marijuana smoke might have posed to Reynolds' daughter, it paled in comparison with the danger created by the seven bullets Yanez fired into the car. As Noble noted, Yanez admitted "the girl was in his line of fire."
Yanez said the fact that "the inside of the vehicle smelled like marijuana" also made him wonder why Castile was carrying a gun. "I didn't know if he was keeping it on him for protection…from a drug dealer or anything like that or any other people trying to rip him [off]," he said.
The implication seemed to be that Yanez thought Castile might be an armed and dangerous drug dealer. While "the odor of burnt marijuana would be cause to investigate," Noble noted, "a reasonable police officer would not have believed that Mr. Castile was a drug dealer or that he was armed to protect his illicit activity."
Yanez's claims about the wild inferences he drew from the smell of marijuana may be what you would expect from a cop desperately trying to avoid prison. But it is not clear why anyone else would think Castile's marijuana use was relevant in assessing whether Yanez's use of deadly force was reasonable in the circumstances.
A day after the shooting, the NRA said "the reports from Minnesota are troubling and must be thoroughly investigated." It promised "the NRA will have more to say once all the facts are known."
A year passed before the NRA had more to say. The month after Yanez was acquitted, Loesch discussed the case on CNN as an NRA representative. "I think it's absolutely awful," she said. "It's a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided." But she was notably noncommittal on the wisdom and justice of the jury's verdict.
"I don't agree with every single decision that comes out from courtrooms of America," Loesch said. "There are a lot of variables in this particular case, and there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently. Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this."
Loesch's reference to NRA Carry Guard, a training and insurance program for permit holders, could be read as implying that Castile might still be alive if he had known "what to do during stops like this." That was a common refrain from Yanez's defenders, who said Castile, after disclosing that he had a concealed weapon, should have immediately placed his hands on the dashboard or steering wheel and awaited further instructions from Yanez.
But Yanez never asked Castile to do that. Nor did he tell Castile to stop moving or to keep his hands in plain sight. He did not even ask Castile where the gun was. Instead he told Castile not to pull the gun out, and Castile assured him that he wouldn't. According to Reynolds, Castile thought he was doing what Yanez wanted by retrieving his driver's license. Perhaps Castile could have been more proactive and more sensitive to Yanez's nervousness. But the officer had a responsibility to control the situation, issue clear instructions, take routine precautions, and use deadly force only as a last resort. He failed abysmally on all four counts.
Loesch commented on the case again the following month. The context was a Twitter thread begun by Colion Noir, a lawyer and gun rights activist who had been sharply critical of Yanez. Noir, who at the time was the host of a show on the NRA's now-defunct online video channel, was responding to a tweet by a woman named Laura Weatherspoon.
"How much the NRA cares about your legal right to own a gun is directly related to the color of your skin," Weatherspoon wrote.
Noir, who is black, posted a link to that tweet with the comment, "Good God (forgive me father) enough w/ this lame argument." When another Twitter user asked Weatherspoon for evidence to support her contention, she replied, "Philando Castile followed the safety rules he was taught and he was shot to death. NRA said nothing. They are usually quick to speak up."
That is where Loesch chimed in, saying, "He was also in possession of a controlled substance and a firearm simultaneously, which is illegal. Stop lying."
Police found a bag of marijuana in Castile's car, and Reynolds testified that the two of them frequently smoked pot together. Even leaving aside the fact that Castile was "in possession of a controlled substance and a firearm simultaneously," that recreational choice made it illegal for Castile to own a gun. Under federal law, it is a felony, currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for an "unlawful user" of a "controlled substance" to obtain or possess a firearm. That rule applies to all cannabis consumers, even if they live in states that have legalized marijuana.
The Washington Examiner and other news outlets interpreted Loesch's comment as an explanation for why the NRA "did not defend" Castile. Loesch objected to that characterization on Twitter, saying she was only disputing Weatherspoon's claim that Castile "followed the safety rules he was taught." While Castile's death was "awful and avoidable," she wrote, it was "important" to note the marijuana, which meant his possession of a handgun was "not 'lawful carry.'" On her radio show in 2018, Loesch brought up that detail again, saying "it didn't help" when "it came out that he had pot in the car."
Loesch, who was an NRA spokeswoman from 2017 to 2019, says her parting agreement with the organization precludes her from discussing its official positions or any statements she made on its behalf. But notwithstanding her comments about the "pot in the car," she agrees that it had nothing to do with the legal question of whether a reasonable officer would have shot Castile. "The presence of marijuana is a separate issue," she says.
Loesch does not think much of Yanez's claim that the odor of marijuana made Castile seem more dangerous. "I've never known anybody who smokes pot to be violent," she says. While "nobody knows what was in [Yanez's] head and what he was thinking," she says, "it just didn't make sense as to why there would be that level of fear in that situation."
Still, Loesch remained leery of questioning the verdict when I interviewed her in November 2022. The jurors acquitted Yanez "based on the evidence they were provided," she says, and "I didn't see any of that," aside from the dashcam video, which was released after the trial.
Amy Hunter, the NRA's current director of media relations, takes a similar stance. "We generally don't comment on criminal jury verdicts," she says.
The federal prohibition that Castile violated was first imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968, which made it a crime for "an unlawful user" of "marihuana," "any depressant or stimulant drug," or any "narcotic drug" to "receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce." The current version of that rule forbids possession as well as receipt of firearms.
When Yanez pulled Castile over, violating that ban was punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 increased the maximum penalty to 15 years. That law also created a new offense, "trafficking in firearms," which it defined broadly enough to include marijuana users who buy guns. That crime is likewise punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Gun buyers who falsely deny marijuana use when they fill out the form required for firearm purchases from federally licensed dealers are guilty of yet another felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Despite those stiff penalties, the original rationale for banning gun ownership by illegal drug users was hazy, relying on the assumption that no one who consumes marijuana or other prohibited intoxicants can be trusted with a firearm. The Senate report on the legislation that would become the Gun Control Act, for instance, mentioned "narcotic addicts," along with unsupervised "juveniles," "mental defectives," and "armed groups who would supplant duly constituted public authorities," as a category of people "whose possession of firearms" is "contrary to the public interest."
During a legislative debate in May 1968, Sen. Joseph Tydings (D–Md.) expressed the hope that Congress would "give the law-enforcement officers of our nation the assistance they need in controlling the unrestricted traffic in firearms into the hands of convicted felons, hoodlums, junkies, narcotic addicts, and other persons who should not possess them." Tydings introduced into the record a column in which conservative commentator James J. Kilpatrick averred that "there is no question of the ease with which criminals, thrill-seeking juveniles, narcotics addicts, and mentally defective persons may acquire handguns."
Tydings and Kilpatrick thus equated all "unlawful" drug users—the category covered by the Gun Control Act—with "junkies" and "narcotic addicts." That sort of casual conflation was typical of drug policy discussions at the time, but it left much to be desired as a justification for restricting a constitutional right.
When Florida Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Nikki Fried filed a lawsuit challenging the federal ban on gun possession by medical marijuana users in 2022, the Biden administration likewise compared that policy to state gun laws aimed at "alcoholics" or "intoxicated" individuals. But unlike those laws, the ban for cannabis consumers applies even to moderate or occasional users who never handle guns while intoxicated.
The government's lawyers also argued that Second Amendment rights are limited to "law-abiding citizens," which cannabis consumers are not. They cited a "tradition of restricting the firearms rights of those who commit crimes." But as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted in a 2019 dissent as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, the relevant history does not suggest that any crime, or even any felony, will do. "Legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns," Barrett wrote. "But that power extends only to people who are dangerous."
Barrett disagreed with the majority's conclusion that a mail fraud conviction justified the permanent loss of Second Amendment rights. But she noted that the 7th Circuit had previously said forbidding gun possession by illegal drug users was constitutional because "studies amply demonstrate the connection between chronic drug abuse and violent crime."
In her lawsuit, Fried called that claim, at least as applied to cannabis consumers, "obsolete and without scientific support." She noted a 2013 study commissioned by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that found "marijuana use does not induce violent crime." The Biden administration, in any event, did not assert a link between marijuana use and violence. It instead argued that the law Fried challenged was consistent with longstanding historical precedent.
The implausibility of that argument was compounded by the fact that the "crime" of consuming marijuana or other currently prohibited drugs did not exist when the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. Nor did it exist when the 14th Amendment, which made the Second Amendment applicable to state and local governments, was ratified in 1868. During the 19th century, cannabis, opium, morphine, and cocaine were legally available over the counter and widely consumed as ingredients in patent medicines. It seems unlikely that Americans of that era would have thought eschewing such products should be a condition for exercising the rights protected by the Second Amendment and similar provisions of state constitutions.
Judge Allen Winsor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida nevertheless agreed with the Biden administration. In November 2022, he dismissed Fried's lawsuit, ruling that the gun ban for marijuana users was "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the constitutional test that the Supreme Court has said gun control laws must pass. By way of historical precedent, Winsor noted colonial and state laws enacted in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries that prohibited people from either carrying or firing guns "while intoxicated." The analogy was dubious, since those laws, which applied only when people were under the influence, did not categorically forbid drinkers to own guns.
Largely for that reason, Patrick Wyrick, a federal judge in Oklahoma, ruled in February that prohibiting cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment. While the earlier laws "took a scalpel to the right of armed self-defense," he said, the current federal ban is more like "a sledgehammer."
Although the Gun Control Act of 1968 nullified the Second Amendment rights of drug users and other broad categories of Americans, the NRA did not object. While some of the law's provisions "appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens," NRA Executive Vice President Franklin Orth declared in the American Rifleman, "the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with."
Half a century later, in a 2021 essay, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre explained "what 'enforcing the laws on the books'"—as the organization frequently urges the government to do, rather than enact new restrictions on firearms—"would actually look like." LaPierre noted that "it is a federal felony," then punishable by up to 10 years in prison, "for a convicted felon to buy, receive, transport or possess any firearm or ammunition," and "the same penalties apply to known drug users."
The NRA has long supported more vigorous enforcement of the federal ban on gun ownership by "prohibited persons," including drug users and people convicted of drug felonies. As a model, the organization has frequently cited Project Exile, a program that sends gun possession cases to federal court, where defendants typically face stiffer penalties than they would in state court. "By prosecuting them, they prevent the drug dealer, the gang member, and the felon from committing the next crime," LaPierre told The Wall Street Journal in 2008. "Leave the good people alone and lock up the bad people."
In a speech at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference, LaPierre bragged that "the National Rifle Association originated the National Instant Check System" for gun purchases, which was established by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. He declared that "no one on the prohibited persons list should ever have access to a firearm."
What does that position say about the NRA's understanding of the Second Amendment? If trivial offenses such as pot smoking are enough to strip someone of the constitutional right to armed self-defense, that right is subject to legislators' whims, a proposition that the NRA passionately rejects in other contexts.
When it comes to other restrictions on the right to arms, the NRA does not take the position that "the law is the law" and leave it at that. To the contrary, the NRA criticizes gun regulations that it believes unjustifiably impinge on that right, such as "assault weapon" bans, limits on magazine capacity, "red flag" laws, and restrictive carry-permit policies.
In 2014, the NRA championed the cause of Shaneen Allen, a Pennsylvania carry-permit holder who did not realize it was illegal for her to drive through New Jersey with her handgun. During a routine traffic stop, the NRA noted, Allen "dutifully informed the police officer she had her pistol in the car." She was then arrested and charged with illegal gun possession, which could have sent her to prison for several years. The NRA called that situation "a mockery of justice."
Allen spent 48 days in jail and lost her job but ultimately avoided a prison sentence by enrolling in a pretrial intervention program. In 2015, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who was about to seek his party's presidential nomination, won the NRA's applause by pardoning Allen.
The NRA's support for Allen, an African-American mother of two from Philadelphia, belied the notion that it was only interested in defending the Second Amendment rights of white people. At the same time, it showed that the organization does not always favor "enforcing the laws on the books."
LaPierre's enthusiasm for waging the war on drugs and enforcing the gun restrictions it has spawned is hard to reconcile with his avowed concern for civil liberties. In that 2018 speech, he warned that overweening government threatens due process, privacy, "personal liberty," and freedom of speech. "Some people out there think the NRA should just stick to its Second Amendment agenda and not talk about all of our freedoms," he said. "But real freedom requires protection of all of our rights. And a Second Amendment isn't worth its own words in a country where all of our other individual freedoms are destroyed."
Because it dictates which psychoactive substances people may consume, drug prohibition is a direct assault on "personal liberty." It has steadily eroded privacy by inviting the Supreme Court to whittle away at the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. It is also the main justification for civil asset forfeiture, a system of legalized larceny that makes a mockery of due process. So much for defending "all of our freedoms."
In a 1995 letter to NRA members, LaPierre warned that the federal "assault weapon" ban enacted the previous year "gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us." The same could be said of the drug laws that LaPierre thinks should be vigorously enforced. Criminalizing possession of certain psychoactive substances, like criminalizing possession of certain firearms or firearm accessories, invites armed agents of the state to "break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us."
When Louisville police killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in 2020, for example, drug prohibition was the pretext for invading her home in the middle of the night. She died in a hail of bullets because her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot at the cops, whom he mistook for criminal intruders. Walker, who was exercising what the Supreme Court has called the "core" Second Amendment right to "use arms in defense of hearth and home," initially faced an attempted murder charge, which prosecutors dropped two months later.
In a video on his YouTube channel, Noir said the deadly raid "should terrify every gun owner." As in the Castile case, critics faulted the NRA for not speaking up.
The NRA's selective concern about the dangers posed by "jack-booted government thugs" reflects a broader tendency among conservatives. President Ronald Reagan was a vocal supporter of gun rights during his two terms in office, when he was equally vocal in supporting the war on drugs.
Addressing the NRA's national members banquet in 1983, Reagan hailed the defeat of a 1982 California ballot initiative that would have required registration of handguns. Had it passed, he said, police would have been "so busy arresting handgun owners that they would be unable to protect the people against criminals." He acknowledged the "nasty truth" that "those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun control laws" and called for "reform" of "firearms laws which needlessly interfere with the rights of legitimate gun owners."
In the same speech, Reagan touted his determination to "cripple the drug pushers" through mandatory minimum sentences, "firm and speedy application of penalties," and abolition of federal parole. And although he said "we will never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm," that was plainly not true, since the drug laws he was keen to enforce underlie a policy that denies millions of Americans the right to armed self-defense even when they have no history of violence.
Reagan saw no contradiction between those two positions, and the same is true of many Republican politicians today. Legislators who receive high grades from the NRA, signifying opposition to gun control, are often enthusiastic about drug control. Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), for example, is an NRA member with an "A" rating from the organization. He is also one of the most gung-ho drug warriors in Washington, opposing even modest sentencing reforms. And Cotton is so committed to the ban on gun possession by "prohibited persons" that he has proposed a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for violating it.
Even when it comes to the medical use of marijuana, which 37 states allow and many conservatives have endorsed, the NRA has been slow to defend the Second Amendment rights of people who defy the federal prohibition. In 2014, the Chicago Tribune asked Todd Vandermyde, an NRA lobbyist in Illinois, about a proposed state regulation that would have barred medical marijuana patients from owning guns. Vandermyde said the rule "presents a novel legal conundrum," which was not really true, given the longstanding federal ban. Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, was bolder. "I don't think it's constitutional," he said.
In a 2018 story about Louisiana's medical marijuana program, the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted that the NRA "has not taken a public stance" against the federal gun ban for patients who use cannabis in compliance with state law. Hunter, the NRA spokeswoman, confirms that the organization has not "directly supported" the Florida lawsuit or any other legal challenge to that restriction. But she adds that "it would be unjust for the federal government to punish or deprive a person of a constitutional right for using a substance their state government has, as a matter of public policy, legalized."
That stance suggests the NRA might be moving beyond the anti-drug orthodoxy that LaPierre parroted for decades. It aligns the organization with the position that conservative activist David Keene, who was the NRA's president from 2011 to 2013, took in 2018, when he defended the gun rights of medical marijuana patients in a Washington Times op-ed piece. "The refusal of the federal government to accede to the judgment of the states on the issue," Keene wrote, "has created problems for tens or even hundreds of thousands of gun owners," who "are being forced to either trade their Second Amendment rights for a chance to live pain-free or risk prosecution and imprisonment."
Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, agrees with Keene. He "stands for protecting Floridians' constitutional rights—including 2nd Amendment rights," his office said after Fried, a Democrat, filed her lawsuit. "Floridians should not be deprived of a constitutional right for using a medication lawfully."
Several Republican members of Congress have taken a similar position. In January 2023, Rep. Alex Mooney (R–W.Va.) reintroduced a bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Brian Mast (R–Fla.) and Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), that would eliminate the gun ban for state-legal medical marijuana users.
Loesch would go further. Although she emphasizes that people should not handle guns when they are intoxicated, she does not think Americans should lose their Second Amendment rights merely because they use marijuana, whether for medical or recreational purposes. "I don't think that's one of the things that should be able to cancel out a natural right," she says.
That drastic step, Loesch thinks, should require evidence, such as a history of violent felonies, that someone's possession of firearms poses a serious threat to public safety. "I hesitate in giving government any kind of justification, beyond basic safety against very dangerous individuals," for taking away people's Second Amendment rights, she says. She adds that "I 100 percent agree" with Barrett's 2019 dissent on that point.
Loesch's stance is what you might expect from the author of Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America. But she concedes that defenders of the Second Amendment typically do not pay much attention to the interaction between gun control and drug control. "Conservatives might be worried about muddying the argument," she says. One reason "conservatives are very nervous to talk about the issue of drugs and firearms," she suggests, is that "usually what you hear from the left is, 'My gosh, you want the drug dealer down the road to be able to have their guns and go out and terrorize neighborhoods.'"
Republicans are much less inclined to support drug policy reform than Democrats. According to a 2022 Gallup survey, 51 percent of Republicans think marijuana should be legal, compared to 81 percent of Democrats. Partisan differences on gun control are even starker: While 86 percent of Democrats favor stricter regulation, just 27 percent of Republicans do.
Although Democrats overwhelmingly see the folly of banning marijuana, they are much more optimistic about the government's ability to protect public safety by limiting gun sales and possession. Republicans, by contrast, are far more likely to support marijuana prohibition than they are to support new gun restrictions.
It nevertheless seems clear that the ongoing de-escalation of the war on weed, including recreational legalization in more than 20 states so far, has made an impression on Republicans, who are more than twice as likely to support legalization as they were at the turn of the century. Even among self-described conservatives, nearly half want to end pot prohibition, according to Gallup. Support for legalization rises to 59 percent among conservatives in their 30s or 40s, then rises to 65 percent among conservatives in their teens or 20s.
This is the context in which prominent conservatives such as Keene, DeSantis, and Mooney publicly criticized the federal ban on gun possession by cannabis consumers. It is also the context in which the NRA, after decades of silence on the issue, was willing to agree with them. Such objections, while modest in themselves, could open the door to a broader recognition that drug control, like gun control, is a menace to civil liberties.
The post The Drug Exception to the Second Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In November 2019, Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to ban the sale of all flavored tobacco and nicotine products, including flavored electronic cigarettes and menthol cigarettes. Four additional states have since imposed flavor bans on some products and similar policies are under consideration in many other jurisdictions. Such bans are popular among legislators and anti-smoking groups, but the latest data from Massachusetts highlight the ban's unintended consequences. The state's experiment in prohibition has led to thriving illicit markets, challenges for law enforcement, and prosecution of sellers.
Massachusetts' Multi-Agency Illegal Tobacco Task Force publishes an annual report providing insight into how the state's high taxes and flavor prohibitions affect the illicit market. As opponents of the flavor ban predicted, the law has incentivized black market sales of menthol cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes ("ENDS," or "electronic nicotine delivery systems," in the parlance of regulators). "The Task Force identifies the cross-border smuggling of untaxed flavored ENDS products, cigars, and menthol cigarettes as the primary challenge for tobacco enforcement in the Commonwealth," according to the report. "Inspectors and investigators are routinely encountering or seizing menthol cigarettes, originally purchased in surrounding states, and flavored ENDS products and cigars purchased from unlicensed distributors operating both within and outside the Commonwealth."
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue reports conducting more than 300 seizures in FY 2022, compared to 170 in 2021 and just 10 in 2020. Many of these involve substantial amounts of products and missed tax revenue. For example, a single search warrant yielded "a large quantity of untaxed ENDS products, [other tobacco products], and Newport Menthol cigarettes affixed with New Hampshire excise tax stamps" representing an estimated $940,000 in unpaid excise taxes.
Revenue officials are seizing so many illicit products, in fact, that they are running out of room to store them. The "Task Force's increased investigative and enforcement activities during the past year have led to the seizure of large quantities of illegal tobacco products, resulting in a strain on the Task Force's storage capacity," says the report. But fear not, they are working on leasing additional space "that will significantly increase storage capacity and allow for continued increased enforcement."
Official seizures represent only a fraction of the illicit trade, so the actual extent of illegal products and lost revenue is certainly larger. The state's report notes that tobacco tax revenue has fallen by approximately 22.6 percent over three years. This is partially due to declining rates of smoking, but the authors acknowledge that smuggling of untaxed products may also be a factor.
A recent analysis of sales data by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, found that the decline in cigarette sales in Massachusetts coincided with substantial increases in sales in counties bordering the state.
Advocates of flavor bans downplay the potential for criminal prosecutions, but the experience in Massachusetts demonstrates that opponents are right to highlight this concern. The Task Force takes note of multiple criminal investigations leading to indictment or prosecution. Although violating the flavor ban is not in itself punishable by imprisonment, forcing these products onto illicit markets results in sellers violating state tax law. In Massachusetts, this is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
It's only a matter of time (if it hasn't happened already) before the first American will be sentenced to prison for selling menthol cigarettes or flavored e-cigarettes. It's likely to happen in Massachusetts, where two men were arraigned last month on charges including tax evasion, money laundering, conspiracy to commit tax evasion, and flavor ban violation.
This is exactly what groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers warned would happen under a federal menthol ban in a public letter in 2021. More recently, the New York State Sheriffs' Association wrote Gov. Kathy Hochul last month objecting to a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes on the basis that it will encourage smuggling. "We believe the proposed flavored tobacco ban and excise tax increase will only exacerbate this problem and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional illicit profit to criminals and criminal organizations," wrote Peter Kehoe, the Association's executive director. (New York already bans flavored e-cigarettes.) Massachusetts provides ample reason to conclude that this is a reasonable expectation.
The experience in Massachusetts has vindicated concerns that flavor bans will lead to illicit markets, arrests, and incarceration. Coupled with foregone tax revenue, evidence that the public health benefits may be less than promised, and the risk that banning flavored vaping products will deter smokers from switching to safer sources of nicotine, the unintended consequences of these policies are significant.
The Massachusetts Task Force report concludes with a series of legislative proposals responding to the flood of illicit products. If you were hoping that these proposals might include repealing flavor bans and making it legal to sell flavored vapes or menthol cigarettes to consenting adults, prepare to be disappointed. Instead, the Task Force suggests creating new felony criminal penalties for selling tobacco without a license, obtaining more inspection powers, and making it illegal for licensees to purchase tobacco products with cash.
Last year, while detailing our new era of nicotine and tobacco prohibition for Reason, I wrote that "there is a real risk that American tobacco policy will open a regressive new front in the war on drugs, just as the previous crackdown on psychoactive substances begins to wind down." By responding to the failures of its first-in-the-nation flavor prohibitions with a wish list for more police powers, this is the path Massachusetts appears poised to go down. States that wish to avoid making the same mistake should view Massachusetts as a warning, not a role model.
The post Massachusetts' Tobacco Ban Went as Badly as You'd Expect appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Did President Joe Biden laugh about "a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl"? No, he did not. But the context of his controversial remarks reveals bipartisan complicity in the prohibitionist policies that lead to senseless deaths like these.
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing that was framed as an indictment of the Biden administration's border policies. One of the witnesses was Rebecca Kiessling, a Rochester Hills, Michigan, lawyer whose sons Caleb, 20, and Kyler, 18, died in July 2020 after swallowing counterfeit Percocet pills that contained fentanyl. Although that hazard was created by the war on drugs, Kiessling blames the government for failing to wage that war aggressively enough.
"Law enforcement made it clear to me that this fentanyl came from Mexico," Kiessling said during her tearful, heartbreaking testimony. "I didn't know that my boys were taking anything that could kill them. They didn't think that they were either. They thought that they were safe with pills."
Kiessling urged the government to "do something" about the influx of illicit fentanyl. "If we had Chinese troops lining up along our southern border with weapons aimed at our people, with weapons of mass destruction aimed at our cities, you damn well know you would do something about it," she said. "We have a weather balloon from China going across the country. Nobody died, and everybody's freaking out about it. But 100,000 die every year, and nothing's being done. Not enough is being done….This is a war. Act like it."
Although Kiessling said "this should not be politicized," that is exactly what the Republicans who control the committee were doing, and she lent support to their efforts. "You talk about welcoming those crossing our border, seeking protection," she said. "You're welcoming drug dealers across our border. You're giving them protection. You're not protecting our children."
After the hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) took that implied criticism of the Biden administration a step further. "Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son's [sic] murders because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel's [sic] from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl," Greene wrote on Twitter.
Since Caleb and Kyler Kiessling died six months before Biden took office, of course, it is logically impossible that his border policies had anything to do with their deaths. That's the point Biden was making when he addressed a meeting of House Democrats in Baltimore on Wednesday night.
Greene "was very specific recently, saying that a mom, a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl, that I killed her sons," Biden said. "Well, the interesting thing: That fentanyl they took came during the last administration." Then he laughed.
Biden's laughter offended Kiessling. "This is how you speak about the death of my sons?" she said in a Facebook video. "Because a congresswoman misspoke? You mock the loss of my sons? How dare you? What is the matter with you? Almost every Democrat on the committee offered condolences. They at least had the decency to do that. You can't even do that? You have to mock my pain?"
In context, it is clear that Biden, who described Kiessling as "a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl," was not mocking her pain or the loss of her sons. He was very clearly mocking Greene. His lighthearted demeanor nevertheless was insensitive and tone-deaf, as Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) pointed out on Twitter.
"@POTUS needs to apologize for this immediately," Lee tweeted. "No person, let alone the president of the United States, laughs when speaking about a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl poisoning."
Other Republicans went further. Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee, called Biden "a disgusting person," adding, "Losing children to fentanyl trafficking is never, ever funny. Just vile." Schneider averred that "Biden's laugh at fentanyl deaths for cheap political points exposes the real Joe."
While Lee's take seems about right to me, Schneider himself was trying to score "cheap political points" by hyperbolically claiming that Biden's insensitivity reveals him as "a disgusting person" who "laugh[s] at fentanyl deaths." House Republicans likewise were trying to score "cheap political points" by deploying Kiessling's ordeal as a weapon in their assault on Biden's border policies, which plainly cannot explain the dramatic increase in opioid-related deaths that began more than two decades ago and accelerated during the Trump administration.
This partisan nonsense conceals the reality that Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for policies that have contributed to that trend by making drug use more dangerous. That starts with bipartisan support for prohibition, which creates a black market where the quality and potency of drugs are highly variable and unpredictable. Prohibition also pushes traffickers toward more-potent substances, which are easier to smuggle. Enforcement of prohibition makes drug use riskier still by encouraging substitution of relatively safe products with more hazardous alternatives.
The "opioid crisis" illustrates all three of those phenomena. The crackdown on pain pills replaced legally manufactured, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black-market products of unknown provenance and composition. Meanwhile, prohibition fostered the rise of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute. Because fentanyl is a synthetic drug that does not require conspicuous crops, it is easier to produce without attracting attention. It is also much cheaper and much more potent, which makes shipments smaller and easier to conceal. The rise of fentanyl made illegal drugs even more of a crap shoot.
In light of all this, it is not surprising that the government's ham-handed efforts to reduce opioid-related deaths backfired. As Kiessling noted in her testimony, "numbers are going up, not down." Worse, the upward trend in drug-related deaths accelerated after the government succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which predictably drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that were much more likely to kill them. The anti-opioid campaign hurt bona fide patients while simultaneously increasing the fentanyl death toll.
Now fentanyl is showing up not only in heroin but also in cocaine, methamphetamine, and ersatz pain pills like the ones that Kiessling's sons took. "My children got fake Percocets that were fentanyl," she said. "There was no Percocet in it at all." Although "they thought that they were safe with pills," they were wrong, because those pills did not contain what they expected. That sort of thing does not happen in a legal market. While Kiessling attributes her sons' deaths to inadequate enforcement of prohibition, it was prohibition that killed them.
Because politicians will never admit their complicity in drug-related deaths, they instead call for more of the same. In his first State of the Union address, Biden promised to "beat the opioid epidemic" by "stop[ping] the flow of illicit drugs" and "working with state and local law enforcement to go after the traffickers." But as always, that was a vain promise, because prohibition plants the seeds of its own defeat.
Prohibition enables traffickers to earn a premium for undertaking the special risks involved in supplying an illegal product. That means they are highly motivated to find ways around whatever roadblocks the government throws up between them and their customers. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be transported to people who want them, the idea that the government could "stop the flow" if only it made a more determined effort is a fantasy.
As critics of prohibition often point out, the government cannot keep drugs out of correctional facilities, so even turning the entire country into a prison camp would not do the trick. The most that drug warriors can hope to accomplish is to impose costs on traffickers that are high enough to raise retail prices, thereby discouraging consumption.
The basic problem with that strategy, as drug policy scholars such as University of Maryland criminologist Peter Reuter have been pointing out for years, is that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the "street value" trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls. That dilemma helps explain why throwing more money at source control and interdiction never seems to have a substantial, lasting effect on drug consumption.
Fentanyl compounds these challenges. Because it is much more potent than heroin, a package weighing less than an ounce can replace one that weighs a couple of pounds. These packages are readily concealed and hard to detect, whether they are sent through the mail or carried over the border.
Focusing on the latter route, Republicans say the problem is that Biden is letting too many people in—a charge that Kiessling echoed. But as Reason's Fiona Harrigan notes, fentanyl coming from Mexico typically is transported through ports of entry, and it is usually carried by U.S. citizens. "In order to smuggle fentanyl through a port of entry," says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, "cartels hire primarily U.S. citizens, who are the least likely to attract heightened scrutiny when crossing into the United States."
Reichlin-Melnick "analyzed every CBP press release and official Twitter post mentioning fentanyl seizures from December 2021 to May 2022," Harrigan writes. "Only two involved people crossing between ports of entry, and of the 42 incidents where CBP mentioned a smuggler's nationality, 33—or 79 percent—involved U.S. citizens."
It is plainly impossible to "stop the flow of illicit drugs" across the border, and even substantially increasing the share of shipments that are seized would entail serious disruptions of trade and travel. Intercepting small packages of fentanyl in the mail is an equally daunting challenge.
Even if the U.S. "managed to stop 100 percent of direct [fentanyl] sales to the US, enterprising dealers [would] simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US," Roger Bate noted in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. "Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible." And "whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail, drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US."
Kiessling is understandably frustrated by this situation. "You have to stop it from its source," she told the House committee. But the U.S. government has been trying to do that for more than a century. It has always failed, and it always will, because the effort is doomed by the economics of black markets.
While politicians do not have the power to "stop the flow," they can make matters worse by trying. The deaths of Kiessling's sons are just the tip of that awful iceberg.
The post The Flap Over Biden's Comment About 2 Fentanyl Deaths Obscures Prohibition's Role in Causing Them appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>These are weird times (aren't they all?), but I've lived long enough to see a resurgence of atrocious ideas that I thought had been debunked years ago. Apparently, humanity can only learn lessons for a short time before a new generation needs to re-learn them. "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction," Ronald Reagan said. Perhaps he wasn't exaggerating.
For instance, the Cold War was a backdrop to my formative years with the collapse of communism marking a great advance in the freedom and prosperity of vast swaths of humanity. Despite the gulags, oppression and deprivation, many left-wing thinkers now spend their days—with full belies and from the comfort of their suburban homes—raging against the evils of American capitalism. Just check your Twitter feed.
Likewise, right-wing provocateurs have crept out from under their rocks. I can't fathom how anyone can fall prey to fascistic and bigoted philosophies these days. I also can't understand how some self-styled "conservatives" can champion Hungary's authoritarian leader as a model. There's nothing new under the sun, I suppose, but I naively thought such illiberalism had largely gone away.
The revanchist idea that has really left me flummoxed, however, involves Prohibition. Some serious thinkers have surveyed the American landscape and decided that America's key problem is we don't have enough laws regulating personal behavior. They see vice everywhere—and perhaps they're right on that point. Instead of engaging the culture, they turn to the tried-and-failed method of empowering the government.
In a recent Atlantic column criticizing the legalization of online gambling and marijuana, physician Matthew Loftus argues that these moves embrace the idealistic idea that "responsible, independent adults (should) be able to make decisions for themselves about how they spend their money or use their body." He believes we overlook the degree to which "our habits … are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable."
His solution is to pass laws requiring that "gambling should take place in casinos, not on smartphones, and marijuana should be used only under a healthcare provider's supervision." He even offers a nuanced defense of the Eighteenth Amendment's alcohol Prohibition, which he credits with reducing alcohol-related illnesses and domestic violence. We should structure our laws to provide "guardrails to help people from driving off cliffs of vice," he adds.
Debates about virtue and vice have been around since the dawn of humanity. I'm no personal fan of online gambling or any form of gambling, for that matter, nor do I have any particular interest in cannabis. But, as Jacob Sullum noted in a Reason column debunking Loftus' arguments, only 1 percent of the nation's gamblers have severe gambling problems and only 1.7 percent of marijuana users have a substance-related disorder related to weed.
It doesn't make sense—at least not in a relatively free society—to create laws that restrict activities enjoyed (rightly or wrongly) by the general populace to protect a tiny minority that will undoubtedly partake in those activities anyway, albeit in a less-regulated way. When I was a teenager, it was no doubt a bit harder to access marijuana, but it was widely used nonetheless. We've all heard the term "bookies," who facilitate illegal bet-making. We also know about black markets.
The first problem with the New Prohibitionists is they have an almost childish faith in government regulation. Trying to stop vice is like trying to stop water from flowing down a hill. It finds its way somehow. The world's oldest profession remains illegal yet, I'm betting, takes place pretty much everywhere. Those open-air drug markets that one might find near any homeless encampment involve the sale of drugs that are not—nor likely to be—legal.
The second problem is they focus almost entirely on the ill effects of problem gambling and drug use, but ignore the ill effects of using law enforcement approaches to control people's deep-seated and "inexplicably self-destructive" desires. There were some (mostly temporary) health benefits to Prohibition, but the Cato Institute notes that, "alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became 'organized'…and corruption of public officials was rampant."
More recently, the Drug War led to appalling erosions of our civil liberties, as the government gained wide-ranging powers (e.g., civil asset forfeiture) to fight drug cartels—something they promptly used against ordinary citizens. One might argue that personal "vices" are problematic, but no-knock raids and government property thefts seem far more evil.
"Puritans argue against the goodness of creation, finding the source of evil in material things of pleasure (as tobacco, alcohol, art, and so on) rather than in the disordered human will to misuse the good things nature affords us," wrote the great Christian author G.K. Chesterton. Indeed. If they want to make us more virtuous, today's Puritans need to spend less time changing laws and more time changing hearts.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post Just Say 'No' to New Forms of Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week that it would crack down on imports of xylazine, a non-opioid veterinary sedative used on animals ranging from dogs and cats to deer and elk. The FDA is targeting the drug because black-market sellers have added it to various illicit fentanyl mixtures; the FDA said it has also turned up mixed with stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine. If ingested by humans, xylazine "can depress breathing, blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature to critical levels"; if injected, it can cause tissue decay requiring amputation. It's also known by the street names "tranq" and "zombie drug."
The FDA's new alert authorizes import authorities to "detain without physical examination shipments of xylazine" and any drugs which contain xylazine. The agency's announcement specified that it intends to "prevent the drug from entering the U.S. market for illicit purposes, while maintaining availability for its legitimate uses in animals."
However, government efforts to ensure certain drugs are used only for specific purposes have proven fruitless because prohibition incentivizes circumvention: When it's hard to procure a particular substance, drug traffickers will get the most potent version of it they can find, as a smaller and more easily concealed quantity can be parceled out further over a more significant number of sales.
This is why fentanyl is used in black-market opioids in the first place. Users did not demand a substance that is 40 times more potent than heroin for recreational use; prohibitionist policies made it more challenging to procure pain medication, leading pain patients to seek out heroin. Heroin, however, is a crop drug, which makes it expensive to produce, ship, and buy. Fentanyl is synthetic, making it cheaper to produce, ship, and buy. When the law makes it harder to get legal pain pills, everybody adapts, and you get illegal fentanyl with no quality control.
Similarly, users of illicit drugs aren't clamoring for animal tranquilizers—drug dealers are just adapting to market conditions.
The FDA's regulatory actions on xylazine may sound reasonable, but government prohibition created the problem, and more prohibition won't solve it.
The post FDA Cracks Down on Animal Tranquilizer That Is Sometimes Mixed With Fentanyl appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a recent Atlantic essay, physician Matthew Loftus argues that "America has gone too far in legalizing vice." Because people do not always make rational decisions and sometimes develop self-destructive habits, Loftus argues, the government should make it harder, not easier, to engage in pleasurable activities such as gambling and cannabis consumption. "Just as highways have guardrails for the moments when a driver isn't exercising perfect self-control," he writes, "so we also need guardrails to help people from driving off cliffs of vice."
To his credit, Loftus does not draw arbitrary distinctions between potentially harmful habits based on their current legal status. He argues that alcohol prohibition was successful in reducing the harm caused by excessive drinking, for example, and seems to understand that any pleasure-providing or stress-relieving activity can be the focus of an addiction—a point that psychologists such as Stanton Peele and Jeffrey Schaler have been making for many years.
But Loftus exaggerates how often that happens, obscuring the implication that the government should impose restrictions on everyone based on the mistakes of a minority. He cherry-picks data to support his argument that liberalization of marijuana policies has been harmful. And while he emphasizes human fallibility as it relates to "vice" itself, he ignores its perils in formulating laws and regulations aimed at curtailing "vice."
The term that Loftus uses to describe things that people enjoy is telling. The "vice" label implies that even occasional or moderate gambling, drinking, or cannabis consumption is morally suspect and provides no value that is worth considering. That is convenient for the argument in favor of paternalistic policies like the ones that Loftus supports. But it ignores the reality that people who engage in such activities typically do not develop life-disrupting habits they ultimately regret. By and large, these activities are life-enhancing rather than life-disrupting.
Loftus implies otherwise. "Our hearts and minds are shaped not only by reason but also by our experiences, affections, and, most important, our habits, which are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable," he writes.
That is an empirical claim, implying that roughly half of the people who gamble, drink, or use marijuana develop "self-destructive" habits. The evidence does not support that claim.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), about 60 percent of American adults gamble each year. By comparison, about 1 percent of American adults "are estimated to meet the criteria for severe gambling problems in a given year." That amounts to roughly 2 million people, which is not a trivial problem. But if less than 2 percent of gamblers meet those criteria in a given year, it is clearly not a very common problem.
The NCPG, which was founded in 1972, organizes what it describes as "the world's oldest and largest problem gambling-specific conference." Loftus notes that the organization receives donations from the gambling industry, but he does not question its statistics. He does object to its statement that "the cause of a gambling problem is the individual's inability to control the gambling." He thinks that take misleadingly focuses on individual responsibility instead of the ways the industry lures and profits from problem gamblers.
Loftus complains, for example, that "electronic slot machines are designed to get players addicted" and that "sports-betting companies have enticed colleges and universities to allow them to promote their products on campus, then offered free bets to lure customers in." But if only a small percentage of gamblers have "severe gambling problems," the inherent addictiveness of that activity is plainly not an adequate explanation for those problems. As with other addictions, the explanation has to encompass individual tastes, preferences, and circumstances. The problem lies not in the activity itself but in the gambler's relationship with it.
Likewise with drinking. According to survey data cited by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 70 percent of American adults consumed alcohol in 2019, while less than 6 percent met the criteria for "alcohol use disorder." That 8 percent rate is considerably higher than the incidence of problem gambling among gamblers but still falls far short of the 50 percent rate that Loftus implies.
The numbers for cannabis are similar. According to the same survey, about 17 percent of Americans 18 or older used marijuana in 2019, while 1.7 percent met the criteria for a "substance use disorder" involving marijuana.
These numbers are obviously relevant in assessing Loftus' claim that choices regarding gambling, alcohol, and marijuana "are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable." They are also relevant in assessing the costs and benefits of the "judicious restrictions" he favors, which include limiting gambling to casinos and allowing marijuana use only for medical purposes. The distribution of those costs and benefits also matters, since these policies impose burdens on all gamblers and marijuana users in the name of protecting the small minority whose excessive behavior causes serious problems.
Those burdens include the threat of arrest and prosecution as well as all of the hazards created by the resulting black markets. When Loftus tries to show that lifting those burdens is nevertheless a mistake, he makes highly misleading use of the available evidence.
Loftus claims, for example, that "the best evidence" indicates that "more teenagers use marijuana when it is legalized in their state." He links to a a 2020 BMC Public Health study that actually looked at past-month marijuana use among 12-to-25-year-olds, not just "teenagers." It does not show what he claims.
Based on nationwide survey data from 1979 through 2016, the researchers reported that "the estimated period effect indicated declines in marijuana use in 1979–1992 and 2001–2006, and increases in 1992–2001 and 2006–2016." That "period effect" was "positively and significantly associated with the proportion of people covered by Medical Marijuana Laws…but was not significantly associated with the Recreational Marijuana Laws." In short, the study included adults as well as teenagers, did not look specifically at trends in states that had legalized marijuana, and found no statistically significant relationship between recreational legalization and increased marijuana use among 12-to-25-year-olds.
Contrary to Loftus' gloss, the "best evidence" indicates that, contrary to prohibitionists' warnings, marijuana legalization is not associated with an increase in underage use. Last year, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, testified that "in the United States, legalization by some states of marijuana has not been associated with an increase in adolescents' marijuana use."
Loftus is selective in a different way when he discusses alcohol prohibition. His claim that "Prohibition was effective" at reducing "alcohol-related illnesses" has a firmer basis than his claim that marijuana legalization results in more adolescent cannabis consumption. While economists Jeffrey Miron and Angela K. Dills found that state alcohol bans "had a minimal impact" on cirrhosis of the liver, for example, they estimated that national prohibition reduced cirrhosis by 10 to 20 percent.
But that is hardly the whole picture. "Increases in enforcement of drug and alcohol prohibition have been associated with increases in the homicide rate," Miron noted in another study, "and auxiliary evidence suggests this positive correlation reflects a causal effect of prohibition enforcement on homicide." According to Loftus, "there's no evidence that organized crime increased in strength because of Prohibition, merely that it became more visible." But that increased visibility included an increase in deadly violence tied to the black market, which was one of the reasons that people who had previously supported Prohibition turned against it.
Prohibition also was implicated in rampant corruption, injuries and deaths caused by tainted black-market liquor, and invasions of privacy, including erosion of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Weighing those costs, which are similar to the problems caused by the war on drugs, requires more than comparing them to the real or imagined benefits of prohibition. It requires value judgments that Loftus barely acknowledges. Is it reasonable to dismiss the pleasure that people derive from using psychoactive substance? Is it just to punish the many for the excesses of the few?
Loftus may trust politicians, who are at least as fallible as the people they govern, to make those judgments and impose "judicious restrictions." But given the case he makes that humans frequently behave irrationally, it is hard to see why.
The post The Argument That 'America Has Gone Too Far in Legalizing Vice' Ignores the Cost of Prohibition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman delve into Congress' perpetual lack of interest in meaningful reforms to entitlements and discuss new data on the student exodus from public schools.
0:26: Joe Biden and entitlement spending
32:08: Weekly Listener Question
38:16: New data on school kids exiting public schools
47:54: Super Bowl lightning round
55:03: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The State of Our Union Sucks," by Matt Welch
"Biden Promises To Let Social Security's Ship Keep Sinking," by Eric Boehm
"Joe Biden, Travel Agent in Chief," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Biden and Journalists Agree: Republicans Would Deliberately 'Crash' the Economy," by Matt Welch
"The 19 Percent Solution," by Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy
"Robert Pondiscio: Why Our Kids Can't Read," by Nick Gillespie
"Winsome Earle-Sears: School Choice 'Is New Brown v. Board' Fight," by Nick Gillespie
"How Do Democrats Want To Pay for Free College, Paid Leave, Expanding Social Security?" by Zach Weissmueller and Alexis Garcia
"Social Security, Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg, & Alan Simpson: Ultimate Remix," by Austin Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"Actually, Magic Mike's Last Dance Is About the Awfulness of Urban Zoning Regulations," by Peter Suderman
"Ben Affleck for a Day," by Matt Welch
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Under No Circumstances Did Joe Biden Save Social Security appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, California State Assemblymember Matt Haney (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill that would allow licensed cannabis sellers in the state to also sell non-intoxicating foods and beverages to their adult customers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported this week.
The new bill, A.B. 374, would amend California law to allow licensees to sell freshly made foods that don't contain cannabis and beverages that don't contain alcohol. The bill would also allow sellers to host live musical performances and to sell tickets to same. The bill's passage would meet a growing need—and could result in a welcome proliferation of authentic cannabis cafes and similar businesses.
"Many people want to consume cannabis socially while having a sandwich or listening to music," Haney told the Chronicle. "We should allow that."
We should! Mostly, though, we don't.
In states such as California, where adults can legally buy cannabis, a common problem arises. Other than partaking inside one's home, legal spaces for cannabis consumption—third places—are limited or nonexistent. Commercial establishments where people may legally buy and eat food and buy and drink alcohol are ubiquitous—from bars and restaurants to sports stadiums to concert venues and more. But equivalent, Amsterdam-style spaces in which to enjoy cannabis with food are largely nonexistent.
California lets local governments establish conditions for licensed cannabis sellers to allow customers to consume cannabis and cannabis products on-site. Hence, as AB 374's subject matter suggests, a primary obstacle (though hardly the only one) to the spread of such businesses in California today isn't what they sell (pot)—it's what they can't sell (fresh food).
"Under California law, cannabis consumption lounges are not allowed to sell freshly prepared food to their patrons," High Times noted this week in a report on the new bill. "A rule change adopted in November 2022 allows lounges to offer prepackaged food and beverages and for customers to bring their own freshly prepared items on a limited basis, but the businesses themselves are denied the opportunity to serve [non-cannabis] products to their customers."
At least one ahead-of-the-curve city in California—West Hollywood—has reaped the benefits of allowing such food sales several years ago.
"Officials began making long-term plans to handle cannabis consumption lounges well before California's adult-use became legal in 2017, launching a permit process to have 10 dispensaries and 16 consumption lounges within the compact city of WeHo in short order," Eater L.A. reported last year.
That foresight resulted in the opening in 2019 of the Original Cannabis Café (nee Lowell Café), which Eater dubbed "the nation's first cannabis consumption lounge." The café saw long lines and huge demand, as Reason's Zach Weissmueller detailed after it opened.
But what customers saw at Lowell's—a single business allowing adults to smoke pot while enjoying tasty, freshly prepared food—was largely an illusion. Its opening required plenty of regulatory gymnastics—including creating separate, though outwardly seamless businesses—to get around the food and drink ban and comply with state law. Despite those difficulties, similar cafes in WeHo soon followed.
Passage of the new bill, though, would eliminate the food-and-drink barrier and ensure the further spread of cannabis cafes across California. It would also see California follow nationwide leader Colorado.
"A law that takes effect on Wednesday will allow cannabis consumption in specially licensed pot shops, restaurants, and other businesses, including mobile 'marijuana hospitality establishments' such as tour buses," Reason's Jacob Sullum explained in a 2019 piece on Colorado's first-in-the-nation commercial consumption law. "The law addresses a predicament that has long puzzled out-of-state visitors who stop by dispensaries in cities such as Denver and Pueblo, only to discover that there are virtually no places where they can legally consume the marijuana they have just legally bought."
The Colorado law has already helped launch a host of new businesses. That state recognized that instead of forcing cannabis users to smoke on city streets and in parks—which can promote complaints and conflict—fostering a culture of relaxed, enjoyable consumption of cannabis and food in spaces used for legal cannabis sales is good for consumers, businesses, and non-consumers alike. It's high time California and other states followed suit.
The post New California Bill Proposes Legalizing Authentic Cannabis Cafes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will probably run for president.
People call him a "staunch conservative."
In our extended interview, I give him a hard time about that.
"Conservative" once meant promoting limited government. But lately Republicans push new regulations and drive up America's debt by spending more.
Pompeo surprised me by agreeing that, under former President Donald Trump, Republicans spent too much. He surprised me again by saying that entitlements must be cut and that we don't need to spend more on our military. That was refreshing.
Then we talked about the border.
"Immigrants made America," I point out.
"I'm an immigrant," Pompeo responds. "My ancestors came through a legal process. This is the difference."
But today, I point out, the "legal process" for an ambitious person who wants to work is nearly impossible. "You might get in after waiting 12 years!"
"Whatever the rules…you got to enforce it," Pompeo responds.
"Shouldn't we change the rules?" I ask.
"I actually think it's time to take a break," says Pompeo. Today, people apply for asylum and then stay until their request is accepted or denied. When Pompeo was secretary of state, he says he told Mexican officials, "You're not going to have these people traveling in caravans through your country. We're sending them back to you."
President Joe Biden reversed that policy. "You can now see 4 million illegal immigrants in just 24 months," says Pompeo. "This will fundamentally change the nature of our country…drugs came across our borders. There's not much difference between a cartel leader and a jihad leader."
"Why not legalize drugs?" I ask. "Then cartel leaders wouldn't exist!"
"It's a terrible idea," Pompeo responds. "You see the decimation that we have from our drug culture today."
"That's because it's illegal!" I push back.
"It's not," responds Pompeo. "There's too much product available. Family institutions are beginning to fray in ways that are fundamentally dangerous to the United States."
His answer makes no sense. Families fray, and drugs are shipped despite our drug war. The war creates a black market that causes crime. There are no alcohol "cartels," only because we ended Prohibition.
But I won't convince Pompeo. Or you, probably.
I ask Pompeo why America needs 54,000 troops in Japan and 36,000 in Germany. "We won those wars! Now those countries should defend themselves."
Xi Jinping is the "singular greatest threat in the history of our nation," says Pompeo. If we bring all the troops home, that will "put the American people at enormous risk."
Pompeo calls Edward Snowden "a traitor" who should be executed. Snowden stole documents from the National Security Agency that showed how our government illegally spied on Americans.
I call Snowden a hero for risking his freedom and career to reveal the truth.
Pompeo says secrets Snowden revealed endangered Americans. But our spies often exaggerate their importance. For instance, the NSA claimed its mass surveillance stopped 54 terrorist attacks. Then the number dropped to seven. Then government reviews concluded that mass surveillance did not stop a single attack.
"You can't just steal American secrets," says Pompeo. "If you find something illegal, there is a process to correct it."
But people who used that process had their homes raided—their careers ended. I understand why Snowden sneaked out of the country.
Another area where Pompeo and I disagree is Trump's tariffs.
"Tariffs mainly punish the American consumer," I point out. Tariffs make goods more expensive.
"Tariffs are a very blunt instrument," acknowledges Pompeo, but they "solve a very real challenge. How is it you prevent an adversarial nation from screwing you in their trade relationships?"
The Chinese do cheat. They steal intellectual property. But tariffs haven't stopped that. The Chinese also foolishly subsidize some industries. But so do we!
Free trade benefits everyone. That's one reason I'm a libertarian.
Pompeo does want to cut government. Why isn't he a libertarian?
"I grew up libertarian," he says. "The idea of less government power being better for the American people is something that is very near and dear to my heart."
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post Mike Pompeo Says He 'Grew Up Libertarian' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The problem with San Francisco, according to Stanford University psychologist* Keith Humphreys, is too much "libertarianism." Since the City by the Bay is not exactly known for light governance, that may seem counterintuitive. But Humphreys, who was a senior White House adviser on drug policy during the Obama administration, has in mind something closer to libertinism, which he says has long characterized San Francisco's culture. In a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece published on Tuesday, he blames excessive tolerance of vice, which he equates with libertarianism, for "fueling San Francisco's drug crisis."
That analysis is doubly wrong. Humphreys misconstrues libertarianism while ignoring its critique of drug prohibition, which is essential in understanding why drug-related deaths have reached record levels across the United States not just despite but largely because of the government's efforts to prevent them.
Humphreys thinks the root of "San Francisco's drug crisis" is "a libertarian, individualistic culture" that since the 19th century has attracted people who yearn "to be free of traditional constraints back East, to reinvent themselves, to escape the small-mindedness of small towns and to find themselves." While that culture "underlies the city's entrepreneurialism, artistic energy and tolerance for diversity in all forms," he says, it "has a downside when it comes to addiction, which thrives in such a cultural milieu." San Francisco "has long been one of the booziest cities in the country," he writes, and "heavy use of substances has always been part of how San Francisco defines freedom and the good life."
Conflating "heavy use of substances" with libertarianism is more than a little strange. Libertarianism focuses on the proper role of government; it does not tell people how they should conduct their private lives, except insofar as their actions impinge on the rights of others. Although the idea that the government should not dictate recreational choices (an idea that San Franciscans do not consistently endorse) is obviously appealing to people whose choices politicians do not like, there is nothing paradoxical about a libertarian teetotaler.
Humphreys is keen to rebut "conservative commentators" who blame "soft-on-crime liberalism" for San Francisco's "drug crisis." To the contrary, he says, "San Franciscans' liberalism is why the government offers generous health and social care services, without which overdose deaths would be higher, not lower." The actual cause of ever-escalating drug deaths, he avers, is "the libertarian assumption that given freedom and tolerance, everyone will rationally and productively pursue their self-interest," which "cannot explain why a starving person would, for example, forgo food in exchange for fentanyl or cocaine."
The assumption that Humphreys describes as "libertarian" is plainly at odds with reality. But libertarianism does not assume that people never make mistakes, never develop bad habits, or never engage in behavior they ultimately regret. It simply argues, for moral and pragmatic reasons, that the possibility of error is not enough to justify using force, which should be reserved for conduct that violates other people's rights.
Humphreys suggests that decisions regarding psychoactive drugs are a special case because those substances negate the ability to choose. As I explain in Saying Yes, this belief is a tenet of voodoo pharmacology, which posits that drugs take control of people and compel them to act against their own interests.
Survey data, which show that people can and generally do use both legal and illegal drugs without developing life-disrupting habits, contradict that theory. Observational and laboratory research confirms that the way people react to drugs is not pharmacologically determined but highly contingent on the circumstances and incentives they face, as psychologists such as Stanton Peele, Bruce Alexander, and Carl Hart have been pointing out for many years.
Contrary to Humphreys' scenario of "a starving person" who chooses drugs over food, even heavy users will delay gratification in exchange for small financial rewards. The animal experiments that lent credence to Humphreys' depiction of compulsive drug use turned out quite differently when rats were placed in stimulating environments in the company of other rats. Since humans are a lot more complicated than rats, it is not surprising that their patterns of drug use vary widely across situations.
The same person who uses a drug heavily in one context (at war in Vietnam, for instance) will use it moderately or not at all in another. That point was vividly illustrated by the spike in drug-related deaths during the pandemic, which was plausibly attributed to social, economic, and psychological factors such as financial insecurity, emotional stress, isolation, and disengagement from meaningful activities. As Hart observes, those same factors explain why addiction, contrary to government propaganda, "is not an equal-opportunity disorder."
There is plenty of room for argument about what the government can or should do about the conditions that drive addiction. But one thing is clear: What the government is doing now makes matters worse by creating a black market where the composition of drugs is uncertain, unpredictable, and highly variable. Prohibition compounds that hazard by pushing traffickers toward more potent products, which are easier to smuggle, and by reducing access to less dangerous options.
The ongoing surge in fentanyl-related deaths illustrates all of those phenomena. Black-market drugs were already iffy because of prohibition; the prohibition-driven rise of fentanyl has made them even more of a crapshoot. And these are the substitutes that nonmedical opioid users resorted to after drug warriors succeeded in reducing the supply of pain pills. Instead of legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals, they are consuming mystery pills and powders that are far more dangerous because it is impossible to know what they contain. The upshot of recent restrictions on prescription opioids, in addition to the scandalous undertreatment of pain, is more drug-related deaths, exactly the opposite of what the government ostensibly was trying to achieve.
Humphreys has nothing to say about any of this. Instead he blames San Francisco's supposedly "libertarian" culture, which cannot possibly explain why drug-related deaths have been rising across the country, a trend that accelerated after the crackdown on pain medication. His solution is less tolerance, along the lines of Portugal's drug policy.
"Portugal is in no way a libertarian country," Humphreys writes. "Rather, it's a cohesive, communal society in which drug use is culturally frowned upon rather than celebrated as a sign of freedom. When drug-addicted people commit crimes in Portugal, they are sent to a 'dissuasion committee' that can apply penalties to those who refuse to seek and stay in addiction treatment. Informally, this is backed up by pressure from family and community for addicted individuals to enter recovery."
Humphreys is right that Portugal's approach is not libertarian. While "dissuading" drug users is preferable to arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating them, it shows little respect for individual autonomy. Humphreys is comfortable with that because he thinks individual autonomy is meaningless in the context of drug use. Hence he thinks San Francisco should "use court authority to mandate addiction treatment more broadly than it currently does."
In principle, that court authority, backed by the threat of punishment, could be deployed against heavy drinkers as well as illegal drug users. In practice, that generally does not happen, but only because of the arbitrary line that the government has drawn between alcohol and currently prohibited drugs. If you use the latter, that in itself is a criminal offense that can trigger coercive "treatment." But you are free to destroy your liver and your life by drinking too much unless you commit a crime, such as driving while intoxicated.
Humphreys does not bother to justify that distinction, which he takes for granted. He likewise takes for granted the lethal impact that the war on drugs has on the people he is keen to help.
*CORRECTION: This article originally misidentified Humphreys as a psychiatrist.
The post A Former Obama Drug Policy Adviser Blames 'Libertarianism' for 'Fueling San Francisco's Drug Crisis' appeared first on Reason.com.
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Thinking about putting together a great home cocktail bar? Just interested in this fascinating, highly expressive subculture?
Guest host Peter Suderman, Reason's features editor, talks with Jacob Grier, a craft cocktail bartender and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Grier is a Reason contributor and the co-author, with Brett Adams, of the new book Raising the Bar: A Bottle-by-Bottle Guide to Mixing Masterful Cocktails at Home.
Suderman speaks with Grier about the pleasures of making cocktails, the way the internet and the pandemic have changed home bartending, and what lessons alcohol Prohibition still has for public policy today.
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The post Jacob Grier: Craft Cocktail Freedom and the Terrible Science Behind Vaping Bans appeared first on Reason.com.
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