A Thousand Cuts
I learn something new about the drug war every day:
“The Mexicans have moved to an old recipe that existed in the ’70s and ’80s that is called P2P,” said Jane C. Maxwell, a senior research scientist at the Addiction Research Institute at the Center for Social Work Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It uses precursors that have been banned in the U.S. since the 1980s, but the Mexicans have taken up making it,” Maxwell said of ingredients — including a substance called propanone — used to make the drug. “They are making it in mass quantities, and they are damn good chemists.”
The old recipe became popular again after Mexico banned the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the common ingredients that had been used to make the narcotic. But Mexicans have become increasingly adept at using the old recipe for the drug, which Maxwell likened to a weed in a garden that won’t go away. (emphasis mine)
So Mexico adopted an even more draconian tactic than the U. S. government, by taking common cold and allergy medications completely off the market and inconveniencing Mexican consumers who simply want to clear up a stuffy nose, and it has not done a damn thing to stop the flow of meth. Making customers provide identification and sign a registry hasn’t worked so well in the U. S., either, which is why some states are now requiring prescriptions for what used to be OTC medications.
The bitter irony here is that drug warriors will point to cases like this as proof that the government must never lessen its vigilance in combating illicit drugs. But it is precisely this high adaptability of black markets to prohibition that makes it a futile exercise. Meanwhile, cold and allergy sufferers are being treated like criminals, and declining domestic meth production is taking a more dangerous turn.
If you receive an application for a position requiring a lot of driving or operating heavy machinery, and the applicant has a known history of alcohol or substance abuse, you’d probably be justified in turning the applicant down for the job, right?
You probably already know the answer to this, but: wrong.
A substitute bus driver for the Jefferson County, Colo., school district was cited for careless driving resulting in bodily harm after he struck three teenagers as they crossed the street on Tuesday. The driver, David Shaw, was convicted of DUI in 1992 and according to friends had been in and out of alcohol abuse treatment as recently as 2009.
But even had the school district known this, they could not use it as grounds to terminate him, or even to make a hiring decision:
When asked whether Shaw would have been hired if the district had known he’d been in and out of addiction rehab treatment, a representative cited the American’s with Disabilities Act, which reads “‘It is illegal under state and federal disability laws to deny employment solely on the basis of a history of treatment for alcohol or substance abuse.”
Ignoring the DUI for the moment (which should have been caught in a background check), only the government could come up with employment policies which result in alcoholics driving schoolchildren around in buses.
It’s not that they shouldn’t be hired at all. But the many-headed beast that is the Americans with Disabilities Act has made it virtually impossible to apply common sense when making hiring decisions. And since the ADA has proved to be a potent legal weapon against businesses who have turned down or fired disabled workers, it has actually had the opposite effect it intended: employment of disabled workers have decreased steadily since passage of the ADA in 1989. But as with most other anti-discrimination laws, merely suggesting that the ADA needs to be overhauled (or heavens forbid, repealed) makes one an enemy of the very group of people the law was intended (but failed) to protect.
More from another hater of disabled people, Cato’s Walter Olson, on the occasion of the ADA’s 20th anniversary.
Following a week of ferocious public opposition and a withdrawal of support by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, state Republican lawmakers backed off of a bill that would have required women to undergo an ultrasound before getting an abortion. For most abortions, that meant women would have to submit to an invasive transvaginal ultrasound to determine the age of the fetus. McDonnell acknowledged on Wednesday that “no person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure.”
So a rare win for common decency in the always-heated political fight over abortion rights. But although conservative attempts to restrict abortion tend to receive the most media coverage, it’s worth noting that progressives are known for imposing their own agenda to guarantee access to abortion on demand.
The most recent example comes from Washington state, which has long been favorable to abortion rights, even before Roe v. Wade. Now the state House is considering a new bill that would require health insurance providers who offer maternity care to also cover abortions. The intent of the law is to avoid running afoul of Federal accounting rules that took effect under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), meant to ensure Federal funds aren’t used to cover abortions. Lawmakers fear that insurance companies will simply drop coverage for abortion rather than deal with the more complex accounting rules.
The irony here is that the Washington bill represents the lesser of two evils; the Obamacare requirement is arguably worse. It mandates that everyone enrolled in a health plan that provides abortion services pay into a separate fund, taken from their premiums, to cover only abortions. Unlike the Washington bill, which allows a “conscience exemption” for insurance providers if they object to abortion coverage, the enrollees subject to Obamacare rules must pay into the separate abortion fund whether they’re a man, a woman, or have no plan to ever get an abortion. This is no more justifiable than the state requiring doctors to violate their patients before performing an abortion.
I am pro-choice, but I recognize that many people (including a lot of libertarians) oppose abortion on moral grounds. Forcing them to pay for a procedure they consider to be murder is at least as offensive as forcing those of us opposed to war to pay for Predator drones to kill civilians. And in general there’s a problem with trying to guarantee a positive right to any medical procedure, as it means someone must be forced to provide it. The proposed law in Washington is a stark reminder of that reality.
If a law currently up for vote in the Virginia House passes this week and is signed by Governor Bob McDonnell, it will require many women seeking an abortion to be raped.
No, you didn’t misread that.
The bill, which is similar to laws passed in seven other states, requires women to undergo an ultrasound procedure before an abortion is performed. The ultrasound is not medically necessary; it has not even been rationalized as such by the bill’s defenders. It is simply another tactic adopted by anti-abortion crusaders to humiliate women, in the hopes that they may change their mind about going through with the procedure.
But since most abortions are performed in the first trimester, and abdominal ultrasounds are not able to produce a clear image of the fetus in most cases, Virgina’s law mandates the use of transvaginal ultrasound – that is, a probe must be inserted in the women’s vagina to view the fetus. Women cannot refuse this if they want to get an abortion, and the law does not allow for any exceptions such as rape or to protect the woman’s health.
I can’t even imagine what a rape victim who has become pregnant might think of this, after having already been violated once, and then being told by arrogant politicians that she must be violated again in order to undergo a legal medical procedure. It also forces her doctor to perform a procedure that is not medically necessary, and violates their oath not to cause harm to their patient. As one Virginia House Delegate pointed out, the bill may actually require doctors to sexually assault their patients, as it is a crime to vaginally penetrate women with any object without their consent. (To add insult to injury, the woman must also pay for this state-mandated procedure. Where’s Obamacare when you need it?)
It’s not even cognizant of the doctor-patient relationship that is generally so well-respected – except when women’s medical choices are involved. Then it’s absolutely imperative that the government asserts jurisdiction over a women’s vagina, to ensure she’s actually making the best medical decisions for herself. It’s not just humiliating; it is paternalistic in its very worst sense.
Note that I haven’t even addressed the issue of abortion itself. That is because regardless of where one stands on abortion – if one considers it murder, or the right of a woman to make decisions regarding her own property (i.e., her body) – this intrusion by the state into private medical affairs, which would not be tolerated under virtually any other circumstances, is simply not justifiable. And perhaps anti-abortion crusaders are aware of that, and are adopting these tactics to set up a constitutional challenge that leads to a Supreme Court review of Roe v. Wade, hopefully this time to overturn it for good.
Regardless of the anti-abortion camp’s motives, their degrading and humiliating tactics are despicable.
So my neighborhood King Soopers has been dramatically expanded – nearly doubled in size, spacious new bakery/deli/meat/produce departments, new Starbucks, the works. Apparently, to pay for all this, they’ve had to cut back on some services, like providing cashier checkout after 9:30 pm. Which I didn’t learn about until after I had loaded up a cart with close to $200 in groceries. Yay! (The lady in front of me, who also had a full cart, simply left her stuff at the customer service desk and walked out.)
So I pushed my cart into the self-checkout lanes and started scanning and bagging all of my stuff. Meanwhile, the line of customers started backing up; surprisingly, no one pointed out that I had a lot more than the limit of 15 items in my cart (a good thing; I doubt they would have liked my response). I got down to my last few items…and the entire U-Scan system crashed.
By this time there was about 20 customers in queue, and the security guard directed us to two cashier checkout lanes while they tried to reboot the self-checkout system. So I waited in line again, with nearly all of my items already bagged and the ice cream starting to melt. As soon as it was my turn, they announced that the U-Scan system was back up.
I just looked at the clerk. ”Please don’t make me go back over there.” He didn’t. They were actually quite apologetic about it by that point. But it seems the entire debacle could have been avoided if they had just opened up a cashier lane on demand, like they used to do. I’ve been at that same store at midnight before (yes, I sometimes do my grocery shopping at odd hours; sue me), and they always had a clerk available to check out big orders. Why change that policy now, especially after expanding a store in response to what I can only guess was increased customer traffic?
Even seemingly simple changes in service can result in big headaches for customers. Business owners beware!
I suppose it’s only logical – in that twisted, perverse way unique to the state – that if the president can now detain citizens indefinitely without trial for suspected terrorist activities committed on U. S. soil, the government would be able to arrest them for merely talking about suspected drug activities abroad:
The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal crime for U.S. residents to discuss or plan activities on foreign soil that, if carried out in the U.S., would violate the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) — even if the planned activities are legal in the countries where they’re carried out.
(At this point it should shock no one that the sponsor of this bill is Lamar Smith, the Republican senator from Texas who also backed the free-speech-crushing Stop Online Piracy Act.) So that means if you casually mention to someone that you can’t wait to go to 
Amsterdam to try some hash – which is completely legal there – you might find yourself detained by DEA agents even before you’ve left the country. It would also conceivably apply to any publications, including blogs, which discuss future drug activity, or even advice about drugs aimed at overseas audiences (such as growing marijuana).
So now the country’s lawmakers are reduced to enacting thought-crime legislation, in the state’s futile attempts to prevent anyone from ever getting high. The only thing that surprises me is that they haven’t named it Whitney’s Law. Because nothing drums up popular support for terrible, unlibertarian laws like naming them after dead people.
- Scandinavian show-jumping rabbit mania invades the UK (HT Tyler Cowen). Here is video of the “Rabbit Grand National Final”:
- Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is under federal investigation for allegedly receiving kickbacks for securing city contracts for vendors.
- Warren Buffett makes $154 million on his Bank of America investment thanks to a foreclosure settlement deal between the Obama administration and the five largest U. S. banks (HT Radley Balko).
- If you live in a big house, you’re an immoral asshole. Also, “Randian libertarians” apparently shouldn’t be reading Gawker.
- It appears that the police shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old man in the Bronx was the end result of a stop-and-frisk attempt, a tactic the NYPD have been using for years to trick blacks and Latinos into “publicly” displaying marijuana, which raises simple possession to a crime. Any price worth paying to prevent even one person from getting high, right?
Arizona has long been a rich source of batshit insane laws, usually good for a laugh or a moment of outrage (sometimes both) before they’re quickly struck down by a judge for their utter lack of constitutional sanction. The state’s anti-immigration bill, SB 1070, which contained provisions only a veteran of the Stasi could appreciate, is a prime example of the steaming piles of absurdity which lawmakers in Phoenix grunt out on a regular basis.
Now they’ve pretended the First Amendment has ceased to exist, and added bad words and the occasional boob shot to the list of things people just shouldn’t do if they want to remain employed by Arizona’s public education system:
In what has to be the most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time, senators in the Arizona state legislature have introduced a bill that would require all educational institutions in the state — including state universities — to suspend or fire professors who say or do things that aren’t allowed on network TV.
Since the FCC’s own rules on obscenity are sufficiently vague to warrant a current Supreme Court review of its authority to regulate speech on broadcast television, one has to wonder what the bill’s sponsors – unsurprisingly, all Republicans – fear teachers and professors are doing in the state’s classrooms to threaten impressionable youth. Because what sixth-grader hears on television off-color remarks that aren’t repeated on playgrounds every day? When 12-year-olds are quite adept at finding video content online, all of which is completely unregulated by the FCC, the time for worrying about what teachers might show in class is long past.
Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has more on the FCC’s incomprehensible obscenity rules.
A perfect example of the depths of collectivist stupidity to which California governments have plunged:
The Board of Supervisors this week agreed to raise fines to up to $1,000 for anyone who throws a football or a Frisbee on any beach in Los Angeles County. [...]
The updated rules now prohibit “any person to cast, toss, throw, kick or roll” any object other than a beach ball or volleyball “upon or over any beach” between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Exceptions allow for ball-throwing in predesignated areas, when a person obtains a permit, or playing water polo “in or over the Pacific Ocean”. [...]
Your kids could also end up costing you big bucks: the ordinance also prohibits digging any hole deeper than 18 inches into the sand except where permission is granted for film and TV production services only.
HT Matt Welch at Reason’s Hit & Run, who has plenty more to say about it.
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