Reason Magazine - Staff

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

Marion Barry for School Vouchers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Former Washington, D.C., mayor and current D.C. Council Member Marion Barry comes out in favor of school vouchers, provided the money does not come from the existing public school budget. That proviso relieves much of the competitive pressure that otherwise might encourage public schools to improve, but at least Barry acknowledges the desirability of choice and diversity in education:

I support this package [$74 million in federal money for public schools, charter schools, and private school scholarships] because it provides much-needed financial support to all D.C. schools and because it offers parents a choice without hurting public schools. That's a win-win situation. We must make sure that children in the District are given every chance to attend schools that work for them. To do anything else is wrong.

Is it too much to hope that, if voucher-equipped students leave D.C.'s public schools in droves, the reduced enrollment will one day lead to a lower budget? The Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson estimates that "DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year—roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools."

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:20:00 EDT

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession. A few excerpts:

Used in small amounts, salvia...contains no known toxicities. But when its extract is smoked in larger dosages, it can yield frightening results....
But is strict regulation the best way to deal with salvia? Obviously, any impairing agent could lead to accidents. But there have been no recorded injuries or deaths resulting from its use, as drug-reform activists like Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance point out. "Most people who do it don't want to do it again," says Nadelmann. The salvia panic "is essentially an extension of the old drug-war debate in that there's this knee-jerk reflex on the part of legislators to criminalize first and ask questions later, if ever. There's no stopping to listen to scientific evidence, no cost-benefit analysis of the effect the law would have." California wants to ban the sale of salvia only to minors, a move that Nadelmann supports....
Condemning the drug to Schedule I status (the same class as heroin or cannabis), as some legislators have suggested, would make it virtually impossible for the medical community to obtain for research. It seems that sober thinking is needed on both sides of the debate.

My previous post on "the salvia panic" are here, here, and here.

[Thanks to the Drug Policy Alliance's Tony Newman for the tip.]

Alaska-Size Chutzpah

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Congress Daily reports that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley yesterday over his agency's plans for a 50-cent increase in airline passenger fees to pay for baggage screening equipment:

[Stevens was] adamant in opposing the 50-cent-per-flight fee increase, claiming that his constituents have to fly more intrastate than other Americans because of the size and difficult terrain of Alaska and are seeing none of the security improvements. "I don't know why we have to pay intrastate charges for security we don't get," he said.

And exactly what value would most Americans have gotten from the "bridges to nowhere" that Stevens notoriously championed a few years ago? With a price tag of $453 million, they would have cost every man, woman, and child in the country $1.50, three times the proposed TSA fee that riles Stevens. (Alaska ultimately got the money without explicit earmarks; one of the bridge projects has been canceled, while the other may yet proceed.) Even without those projects, Alaska excels at fleecing U.S. taxpayers, pulling in $1.84 for every dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., according to the Tax Foundation's numbers for 2005, when it ranked third by that measure, thanks largely to Stevens' tireless pork pulling.

Another Reason Long-Distance Relationships Don't Work

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:21:00 EDT

Domenico Salerno, a 35-year-old Italian lawyer, comes to Virginia several times a year to visit his American girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, a 23-year-old copy editor he met a couple of years ago in Rome. Evidently that travel pattern triggered the suspicions of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, who stopped him from entering the country when he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 29. Although visitors from Italy do not need visas, CBP agents have the discretion to deny them entry—and exit. Instead of being sent back to Rome, Salerno was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which shipped him off to a jail in Virginia, where he was detained for 10 days, still officially not in the United States and therefore without legal recourse. The CBP agent claimed he thought Salerno would turn out to be an asylum seeker because he expressed a fear of being killed if he returned to Italy. Salerno, whose English is spotty, told Cooper he never said anything of the kind. ICE kept Salerno on ice despite the intervention of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and the efforts of two former immigration prosecutors hired by Cooper's family. After Cooper contacted The New York Times, he was finally released and driven to Dulles, where he caught a flight back to Rome on Friday. Cooper is thinking of following him there, and staying.

Salerno had the benefit of affluent, well-connected American friends. Other visitors who are arbitrarily detained are not so lucky:

"We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians," said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper's father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. "They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn't happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans."

The Bipartisan Folly of Farm Subsidies

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

"We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately," Barack Obama declared last November. It was a weird thing to say, since the farm bill, which subsidizes an arbitrarily chosen section of the economy at the expense of taxpayers and consumers in general, is special-interest legislation by definition.

The latest version, which President Bush has promised to veto, includes tax breaks for racehorse owners, "marketing aid" for fruit and vegetable growers, research funding for organic farmers, enhanced price supports for domestic sugar producers, increased subsidies for dairy farmers, a $170 million earmark for the salmon industry, and billions of dollars in automatic payments and "permanent disaster assistance" for corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soybean growers. Take that, special interests!

Less than a month ago, the Associated Press reported that "it's not a good year for a farm bill," what with surging food prices, record farm income, a tight federal budget, and a resistant president unconcerned about getting re-elected. But in the logrolling culture of Washington, the solution to wasteful, unjustified spending is more wasteful, unjustified spending.

"This is truly bipartisan legislation," says Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the senior Republican on the House Agriculture Committee. "There was give-and-take on all sides."

Mostly take. In response to fruit and vegetable farmers who have long complained about payments for other crops, the five-year, $300 billion bill expands existing subsidies while paying off the produce growers. In response to food price inflation, the bill continues the price supports and ethanol subsidies that contribute to it while boosting spending on food stamps. It even manages to combine two kinds of farm folly in one program, requiring the government to protect domestic sugar producers by buying imported sugar and selling it at a loss to ethanol refiners.

The bill's supporters are bragging about a new rule that would bar payments to individual farmers earning more than $750,000 a year and couples earning more than $1.5 million. That modest change is expected to affect about 2,000 subsidy recipients, less than 1 percent of the total. But it highlights the extent to which agricultural subsidies are a welfare program for rich people.

Last summer Obama's presidential campaign boasted that the Illinois senator "expressed his support" for "reducing the number of multimillionaires who are eligible for farm bill subsidies." While that sounds better than Hillary Clinton's wholehearted endorsement of the farm bill, which the New York senator says will "help revitalize rural America" and "provide a safety net for our family farms," it's a pretty sad state of affairs when self-styled reformers aspire merely to reduce taxpayer-funded payments to multimillionaires.

Not all farmers are rich, but as a group they are better off than the people footing the bill for their subsidies, with a median income of $55,000 in 2006, compared to the national median of $48,000, and median wealth about five times the national median. Heritage Foundation analyst Brian Riedl notes that most subsidies "go to large commercial farms, which report an average income of $200,000 and a net worth of nearly $2 million."

Riedl estimates that farm subsidies cost Americans $25 billion a year in taxes and another $12 billion in higher food prices. According to a Cato Institute study, the opportunity cost of agricultural support during the last two decades (i.e., the amount we'd have if the money had been invested instead of squandered) is more than $1.7 trillion.

John McCain is the only one of the three remaining major-party presidential candidates who takes a stand against this regressive, market-distorting, trade-disrupting scam. The Arizona senator, who has long opposed agricultural subsidies, recently told voters (in Iowa, no less) that if he were president he'd veto the farm bill because "the subsidies are unnecessary."

By and large, though, Obama is right that farm subsidies "bring Republicans and Democrats together." It's the sort of unity that causes one to lose hope.

The Times Discovers the Tobacco Bill's Flavoritism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:12:00 EDT

The New York Times notices that the bill authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products bans every cigarette flavor but menthol. Not coincidentally, Philip Morris, the only cigarette manufacturer that supports the bill, sells mentholated brands, while those other flavors are used by its competitors. But instead of wondering whether a bill that seems designed to reinforce the advantages of the industry leader is good for consumers, the Times suggests menthol should be banned too. It offers three reasons:

1) Menthol cigarettes are "the most popular cigarette choice of African-American smokers," who account for a disproportionate share of the market for brands such as Newport and Kool. The Times never explains why this is troubling, but the concern is of a piece with the anti-smoking refrain that it's especially reprehensible for tobacco companies to "target" blacks because they, like women and children, are a "vulnerable group."

2) "Menthol smokers may be exposed to higher levels of dangerous compounds than nonmenthol smokers." If so, the greater hazard could be due to chemicals produced by burning menthol or to menthol's cooling, anesthetic effect, which might encourage smokers to take bigger or deeper puffs or hold them longer. But there's no firm evidence that mentholated brands are in fact more dangerous. The Times cites a CDC scientist who refers to "multiple lines of evidence, generally consistent, suggesting that there's reason for concern," while conceding "there are few definitive answers about the health impact of menthol cigarettes." A 2002 review by the CDC and the National Cancer Institute, the Times reports, "said the research up to that point had been inconclusive," and "in five large studies of menthol to date, only one has found higher rates of cancer among menthol smokers than nonmenthol smokers, and only in men."

3) Menthol "may make it harder for the addicted to kick the smoking habit." How so? "One theory suggests that menthol in cigarettes, by providing an additional pleasurable sensory cue to smokers, reinforces addiction." This is just another way of saying that people who smoke menthol cigarettes like the way they smell and taste.

As I noted a few years ago, when an earlier version of this tobacco bill was introduced, anti-smoking activists consider good taste inherently objectionable, ostensibly because it appeals to minors. Former Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), a co-sponsor of that bill, tells the Times, "We were able to eliminate the use of flavored cigarettes, strawberry, mocha, and all this stuff that is clearly targeted at young kids...to start them smoking tobacco." As usual, this argument goes unchallenged, but it is patently absurd to claim that luring underage smokers is the only possible reason for adding flavor to tobacco products. People over the age of 18 have been known to smoke clove cigarettes, vanilla-flavored cigars, and cherry-infused pipe tobacco. Instead of pretending that it's all about the kids, the advocates of FDA regulation should admit that they want to make the smoking experience as boring and unpleasant as possible, the better to deter everyone, whether 16 or 60, from consuming tobacco products.

My most recent column on the tobacco bill is here.

The Cheapening of a Tourism Slogan

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:27:00 EDT

In the 1990s, New York State's tourism board let the trademark on its "I ♥ NY" slogan lapse, encouraging a flood of unlicensed souvenirs carrying the famous logo. Since then the state has renewed its trademark and, in an attempt to rejuvenate the "brand," plans to crack down on what The New York Times calls "unlicensed fakes." But what exactly is inauthentic about T-shirts, towels, salt and pepper shakers, beer can holders, and paperweights that declare "I ♥ NY" without state authorization? Surely they clothe the torso, dry the hands, dispense the seasonings, keep the beverage cold, and hold the paper down at least as well as their licensed counterparts. Is the sentiment itself less sincere because it's not officially certified? Although it's easy to understand why the state wants its license fees, it'd hard to see how consumers are shortchanged by unofficial souvenirs.

In addition to the revenue from licensing, the state wants to control the types of merchandise associated with Empire State love. Ashtrays and lighters, for instance, are right out. The desire to control the messages linked to "I ♥ NY" has gone to decidedly unlovely extremes. The Times reports that the Pataki administration threatened to sue Milton Glaser for trademark infringement over his post-9/11 "I ♥ NY More Than Ever" logo. Who is Milton Glaser? The graphic designer who developed the "I ♥ NY" symbol in 1977 and let the state use it free of charge.

Uncle Sam's Medical Marijuana Program

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:12:00 EDT

In a recent letter, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) asked Michele Leonhart, acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to explain her agency's use of "paramilitary-style enforcement raids" and threats of property forfeiture to suppress the medical use of marijuana in California. "Do you think the DEA's limited resources are best utilized conducting enforcement raids on individuals and their caregivers who are conducting themselves legally under California law?" he asked. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "agency spokeswoman Rogene Waite declined to comment on the questions Wednesday, saying only that 'the federal government does not recognize medical marijuana....The DEA, of course, would be part of the federal government.'"

If the federal government does not recognize medical marijuana, why does it send pot to patients? As the Marijuana Policy Project notes, tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the federal government's own medical marijuana program, under which four patients regularly receive joints from Uncle Sam. Theoretically, they are experimental subjects in a Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) Program, but the government has never bothered to publish any research based on their experiences. At its peak, the IND program for marijuana covered no more than a dozen or so patients, and in 1992 the George H.W. Bush admistration closed it to new applicants after receiving a flood of requests from AIDS patients. But the existing enrollees were grandfathered in, and those who are still alive continue to get a supply of marijuana grown by University of Mississipi scientists under contract with the U.S. government. "Most Americans would be shocked to know that the federal government supplies medical marijuana to patients while claiming that marijuana is a harmful drug with no medical value," says MPP's Rob Kampia. "If federal officials believe their own statements, they're knowingly poisoning four innocent people."

[Chronicle story via The Freedom Files]

The Drug War in Black and White

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:29:00 EDT

In yesterday's column, based on a recent report from the New York Civil Liberties Union, I noted how racially skewed the Giuliani-Bloomberg anti-pot crusade has been. Two studies published this week highlight the racially disproportionate impact of the war on drugs generally. Between 1980 and 2003, the Sentencing Project reports, the rate of drug arrests rose by 70 percent among whites and 225 percent among blacks. Looking at data for 34 states, Human Rights Watch finds that "a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman."

Drug warriors presumably would argue that such disparities reflect blacks' greater propensity to be involved in the illegal drug trade. Human Rights Watch is a bit evasive on that point. "Although whites commit more drug offenses," it says, "African Americans are arrested and imprisoned on drug charges at much higher rates." Or as the group's senior counsel, Jamie Fellner (who wrote the report), puts it, "Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black."

It's true that blacks and whites are about equally likely to use illegal drugs. Whites, being the majority, therefore commit "more drug offenses" and account for "most drug offenders." This comparison is directly relevant in evaluating the fairness of New York City's crackdown on pot smokers: As I noted in my column, blacks are much more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession in New York even though they are no more likely to be pot smokers (and therefore, presumably, no more likely to be carrying small quantities of marijuana in public). But comparable drug use rates do not mean that blacks and whites are equally likely to commit the sort of drug offenses for which people tend to go to prison. For a variety of reasons, including a lack of appealing economic alternatives in inner-city neighborhoods, blacks are disproportionately represented among the low-level drug dealers who are most conspicuous and easiest to catch. That's the main reason they're disproportionately represented among drug offenders who get arrested and go to prison.

If, instead of going after street dealers, police raided homes at random throughout the country, the drug offenders (including users) they nabbed would be more representative of the general population. Needless to say, this is not a change in strategy anyone should be advocating for the sake of racial justice. As Fellner says, "The solution is not to imprison more whites but to radically rethink how to deal with drug abuse and low-level drug offenders."

In a 2006 review of Nate Blakeslee's book about the Tulia, Texas, drug bust scandal, I argued that the drug war's racial impact is just one aspect of a broader injustice.

Addendum: Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance points out that a 2000 Human Rights Watch report cited data on the prevalence of drug dealing among blacks vs. whites:

During the period 1991-1993, SAMHSA [the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] included questions about drug selling in the annual NHSDA [National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, which has since been replaced by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health]. Although the responses are best seen as a rough approximation of drug selling activity, they are nonetheless highly suggestive. On average over the three-year period, blacks were 16 percent of admitted sellers and whites were 82 percent.

So it may well be that whites (currently about 80 percent* of the U.S. population) are just as likely to sell drugs as blacks (about 13 percent of the population) yet much less likely to be caught doing it, perhaps because they are less likely to do it frequently (the survey question asked whether the respondents had sold drugs at all in the previous year), less likely to do it in public, and/or less likely to do it in neighborhoods with a heavy police presence.

[*This figure includes Hispanics who do not identify themselves as black or African American.]

Inhale Your Vapor If You've Got It

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:47:00 EDT

The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that at least two companies are selling electronic nicotine inhalers shaped like cigars, cigarettes, and pipes as tobacco substitutes. The manufacturers aim to avoid FDA regulation by marketing the devices not as a quitting aids (or, as the FDA would see it, treatments for the disease of nicotine addiction) or as safer (and therefore disease-ameliorating) alternatives to cigarettes but as a way to get your nicotine fix when you're not allowed to smoke. The article quotes one anti-smoking activist, Bill Godshall of Smokefree Pennsylvania, who welcomes the inhalers, and another, Alan Blum, director of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, who sounds ambivalent. But both are mavericks within the anti-smoking movement: Godshall also favors smokeless tobacco as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, and Blum at one point was sympathetic to that idea.

I predict most anti-smoking activists will be outraged by these products. First, they will argue (as they do with respect to smokeless tobacco) that the inhalers give smokers a way to endure smoke-free environments more comfortably and therefore blunt the effectiveness of smoking bans as a way of encouraging smokers to quit. That's probably true, but from a "public health" point of view you'd have to weigh the people who continue to smoke because of these products who otherwise would have quit against the smokers who switch mostly or entirely to the inhalers, thereby dramatically reducing their intake of toxins and carcinogens. Second, many, if not most, anti-smoking activists are uncomfortable with the idea of continuing to use nicotine indefinitely, regardless of the health consequences, because they view drug addiction as inherently bad. In their view, complete abstinence is the only acceptable alternative. Again, from a "public health" perspective, which seeks to minimize morbidity and mortality, this stance is highly questionable, since it could well result in more disease, not less.

From a libertarian perspective, of course, the issue is easy: Let manufacturers sell whatever tobacco or nicotine products they choose, as long as they're honest, and let consumers make their own tradeoffs between risk and pleasure, regardless of the impact on collective measures of health. That's not likely to be the way this shakes out, of course. I suspect the manufacturers of nicotine gum and patches, who not only had to get pre-market approval for their products but waited years before they were allowed to sell them over the counter instead of only by prescription, will be irked by the competition from non-FDA-regulated nicotine inhalers. All of these companies are selling essentially the same thing, however they choose to describe it, and it's quite common for people to use patches and gum as long-term cigarette substitutes, as opposed to "cures" for nicotine addiction. It seems like the artificial regulatory distinctions among different nicotine products can't last. Then again, our drug laws are riddled with such inconsistencies.

To Catch a Leaf

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In 2001, shortly before Michael Bloomberg became a candidate for mayor of New York, an interviewer asked him if he'd ever smoked marijuana. "You bet I did," he said, "and I enjoyed it."

Yet as mayor, Bloomberg has presided over what a recent report from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) calls a "marijuana arrest crusade," seeking to punish pot smokers for an activity he enjoyed with impunity. This little-noticed crackdown, which began under Rudy Giuliani, has disproportionately affected young black and Hispanic men, engendering resentment, distrust of the police, and disrespect for the law.

While marijuana arrests have risen between two- and three-fold nationwide since 1990, the increase in New York has been much more dramatic. "From 1997 to 2006," sociologist Harry Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small note in the NYCLU report, "the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 353,000 people simply for possessing small amounts of marijuana. This was eleven times more marijuana arrests than in the previous decade."

Based on their analysis of arrest data and their interviews with police, arrestees, and public defenders, Levine and Small conclude that the pot busts are largely a byproduct of the NYPD's aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may briefly detain people they suspect of involvement in criminal activity and, as a precautionary measure, pat them down for weapons. Taking advantage of this Fourth Amendment loophole, New York City police stopped and frisked people more than half a million times in 2006.

In the vast majority of cases, these stops do not result in arrests. But sometimes people are carrying small amounts of marijuana. Since police cannot legally search for drugs without probable cause, Levine and Small found, they typically trick or intimidate people into revealing their pot, at which point they can be arrested.

Such trickery not only exposes the contraband; it changes the nature of the offense. Under state law merely possessing a small amount of marijuana (up to 25 grams, about seven-eighths of an ounce) is a citable offense similar to a traffic violation. But having marijuana "in public view" is a misdemeanor.

The NYPD makes about 35,000 such arrests each year. Although marijuana possession is either the only or the most serious charge in these cases, the arrestees are nevertheless handcuffed and taken to a police station, where they are fingerprinted and photographed, and they usually spend a night in jail, an uncomfortable, degrading, and often frightening experience.

Contrary to what you might expect, Levine and Small found that people arrested for marijuana possession in New York generally are not smoking pot in public. "Before being approached by the police," they note, "most people arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession...were actually not guilty of what they were charged with."

Why do police waste time and resources manufacturing crimes? Levine and Small note that busting pot smokers is a relatively safe and easy way to pad arrest figures, which creates the illusion of productivity, and generate overtime pay, a practice known as "collars for dollars."

From the collars' perspective, getting arrested for a trivial, victimless offense, which saddles them with criminal records that can impair their ability to obtain an education and make a living, is humiliating and embittering. It is especially rankling because police seem to be targeting poor black and Hispanic men for treatment that would not be tolerated if it were aimed at affluent white New Yorkers.

Survey data indicate that among 18-to-25-year-olds, the age group where the pot busts are concentrated, whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to smoke marijuana. Yet Levine and Small found that in New York blacks and Hispanics are, respectively, five and three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

For pot smokers caught in the NYPD's dragnet, is Bloomberg's position on marijuana—"I enjoyed it; you'd better not"—hard to accept? You bet it is.

'How Would You Like It If You Went to a Wine Tasting and You Couldn't Taste the Wine?'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:53:00 EDT

The Chicagoland International Pipe & Tobacciana Show, held over the weekend in St. Charles, Illinois, was smoke-free this year, thanks to a state smoking ban that took effect in January. Organizers of the event, the country's largest pipe show, had hoped attendees would be allowed to light up as members of a private club:

The hall is strictly staffed with volunteers, convention-goers were to pay $15 to join the club, and attendees were to sign a waiver stating they "freely and willingly accept all the risks of smoking, second-hand smoke, third-hand smoke, and all other risks, both real and imagined, regarding smoking tobacco."

But St. Charles police, DuPage County health officials and anti-smoking advocates didn't buy it.

"This is the first time we've seen such a blatant attempt . . . to actually undermine the law through legal sophistry," said Mike Grady, the American Cancer Society's Illinois director of public policy. "We're very happy with the outcome. This is the perfect example that the law is being enforced."

Pipe smokers, banished to tents outside the convention center, were understandably irked. "How would you like it if you went to a wine tasting and you couldn't taste the wine?" said one. "It's a freedom issue."

[Thanks to Rick Newcombe for the tip.]

D.C.'s Homicide Rate May Be Through the Roof, but Montanans Kill Themselves a Lot

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:21:00 EDT

Citing a connection between gun ownership and "firearm death rates," the Violence Policy Center concludes that the U.S. Supreme Court should uphold the District of Columbia's gun ban:

The five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, Tennessee and Alabama. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.32 per 100,000.
By contrast, states with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership had far lower rates of firearm-related death. Ranking last in the nation for gun death was Hawaii, followed by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York.
VPC Legislative Director Kristen Rand states, "Blind allegiance to the Second Amendment comes at a deadly price. Many residents in pro-gun states cheer the possibility of a June Supreme Court ruling that could place gun controls across the nation at risk, never realizing that those states stand as proof of the need for such laws."

Using state-level data for this comparison is problematic, since it ignores intrastate differences in gun control and gun ownership—between New York City and upstate New York, for instance, or between Chicago and downstate Illinois. In any case, the VPC's full table suggests that the relationship between gun ownership and gun-related deaths is not quite as neat as the group's press release implies. North Dakota, Kansas, Utah, Wisconsin, Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, and Iowa all have relatively high gun ownership rates (above 40 percent), but all have firearm death rates below the national average.

Nor is it clear that the firearm death rate—which includes suicides and accidents as well as homicides but excludes deaths caused by other means—is the correct way to measure the success of a policy (gun control) that presumably aims to achieve a net reduction in deaths, not merely a change in the mixture of methods. Nine out of the 10 states with the lowest overall murder rates—Vermont, Iowa, Utah, Montana, Maine, Wyoming, Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota, and New Hampshire—have relatively loose gun rules. States with relatively strict gun control do look better in the overall suicide rankings. Presumably suicide is the reason why a state like Montana, which ranks near the top in gun ownership, 44th for murder, and first for suicide, comes in third on the VPC's list of states with the highest gun death rates.

It's not clear, of course, whether Montanans' propensity to kill themselves is caused by all those guns. With any comparison like this one, we need to keep in mind that correlation does not prove causation—especially when the correlation is based on a cherry-picked outcome measure and a simplistic top five, bottom five comparison. Even given those parameters, the VPC's presentation of the data is skewed by its decision to leave out a jurisdiction that has both the country's strictest gun control and by far its highest murder rate—more than twice the rate of its nearest competititor. The omission is especially puzzling because it was the controversy over this jurisdiction's gun laws that evidently prompted the VPC to assemble its table.

Speaking of which, shouldn't the constitutionality of D.C.'s gun ban hinge on the Constitution, as opposed to the suicide rate in Montana? By cautioning against "blind allegiance to the Second Amendment," the VPC essentially concedes that D.C.-style gun control is unconstitutional, while arguing that it should be upheld anyway.

The VPC press release prompted a credulous, one-sided UPI story and a Honolulu Star-Bulletin editorial crowing about the superiority of Hawaii's gun laws.

[Thanks to Dan Gifford for the tip.]

Sage Advice: Check State Law Before You Order

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:06:00 EDT

Spurred on by horrific YouTube images of teenagers falling over and giggling, the Salvia divinorum crackdown proceeds apace. The Florida legislature recently approved a ban by a nearly unanimous vote, and the Drug War Chronicle reports that police in North Dakota have made what appears to be the first salvia arrest. Kenneth Rau, a Bismarck bottling plant worker with an interest in altered states of consciousness, is charged with possession of salvia with intent to distribute, a Class B felony, based on eight ounces of leaf he bought on eBay for $32. Rau, who faces up to 10 years in prison, complains that police are falsely portraying him as a dealer. He says he bought the psychedelic herb, which has been used by shamans in Mexico for centuries and is also known as Diviner's Sage, for his own chemically assisted self-exploration. North Dakota's salvia ban, approved last year, took effect on August 1, and Rau says he was unaware of it. "I've never been a drug user, never been arrested," he told the Chronicle. "I started experimenting with this stuff because I thought it was legal. I didn't want to get into trouble, but now they're treating me just like some meth dealer."

My previous posts on the anti-salvia crusade are here and here. The Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center has a recently updated overview of the plant's legal status in various jurisdictions.

Opening Up the Dental Market Is Like Pulling Teeth

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:44:00 EDT

Years ago I wrote an article for reason (not available online) that explored the cost-controlling potential of allowing nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other non-M.D.s to offer services traditionally performed by doctors. Not surprisingly, organized medicine tends to resist these inroads, especially when it comes to operating independently and prescribing drugs. But judging from a recent New York Times story, dentists have been even more effective at fighting off competition from people who have less than the conventional seven or eight years of post-secondary education. The Times reports that "dental therapists," who undergo two years of intensive training after high school, can do basic dental work such as filling cavities and extracting teeth, serving people who otherwise might not get dental care at all. If you've never heard of dental therapists, that's not surprising: Although research indicates their work is just as competent as the average dentist's, they are permitted to operate only in Alaska, under a federally funded program serving people in sparsely populated areas.

Even this limited experiment has drawn fierce opposition from the Alaska Dental Society and the American Dental Association, which say dental therapists threaten ~~dentists'~~ ~~income~~ patients' welfare:

The opposition to therapists follows decades of efforts by state dental boards, which are dominated by dentists, to block hygienists from providing care without being supervised by dentists.
The dental associations say they simply want to be sure that patients do not receive substandard care. But some dentists in public health programs contend that dentists in private practice consider therapists low-cost competition. In Alaska, the federally financed program that supplies care to Alaska Natives pays therapists about $60,000 a year, one-half to one-third of what dentists typically earn....
The American Dental Association...says it does not fear lower-cost competition but instead wants to protect patients from inadequately trained therapists, who may not be able to handle the emergencies, like uncontrolled bleeding, that sometimes occur during routine procedures.

So it's better for someone with a bad cavity to suffer constant pain or yank his own tooth than it is to run the risk of "uncontrolled bleeding" during a visit to a dental therapist. The other argument against dental therapists is even more blatantly paternalistic:

In the long run, the only way to improve dental health is encourage people to take better care of their teeth, Dr. [Amid] Ismail [an ADA consultant] said.
"I'm not in favor of training just to fill teeth, because a solution of filling teeth is not going to reduce disease," he said. "The patients will go home, and they will drink six cans of soda a day, and they will come back with more cavities."

But if the government forces them to suffer with unfilled cavities by blocking access to low-cost dental care, maybe they'll learn to lay off the soda and brush and floss regularly. They'll be better off in the long run!

'There Is No Reason for This Stuff'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:01:00 EDT

A British law criminalizing the possession of "violent and extreme pornography" is expected to take effect next week. The bill, a response to the 2003 murder of Brighton schoolteacher Jane Longhurst by a man who liked violent pornography, would ban simulated sexual violence as well as images of the real thing. The prohibited material includes images of "an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person's life"; "an act which results in or appears to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts, or genitals"; "an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse"; or "a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal" (emphasis added). Critics worry that the definition is too broad and too vague and that the law will punish people for engaging in consensual activities that do not actually harm anyone. "If no sexual offense is being committed," one M.P. who opposed the bill told the BBC, "it seems very odd indeed that there should be an offense for having an image of something which was not an offense."

But the Justice Ministry insists that "pornographic material which depicts necrophilia, bestiality or violence that is life threatening or likely to result in serious injury to the anus, breasts or genitals has no place in a modern society and should not be tolerated." The M.P. who led the fight for the bill in the House of Lords promises the government will target only images that are "grossly offensive and disgusting." Jane Longhurst's mother, who campaigned for the ban, has little patience with the critics:

Speaking from her home in Berkshire, Mrs. Longhurst acknowledges that libertarians see her as "a horrible killjoy." "I'm not. I do not approve of this stuff, but there is room for all sorts of different people. But anything which is going to cause damage to other people needs to be stopped."
To those who fear the legislation might criminalise people who use violent pornography as a harmless sex aid, she responds with a blunt "hard luck."
"There is no reason for this stuff. I can't see why people need to see it. People say what about our human rights but where are Jane's human rights?"

[Thanks to Daniel Reeves for the tip.]

Class Action Lawyers Get Creative

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:09:00 EDT

The good thing about class action lawsuits is that they allow enterprising lawyers to consolidate many small claims, any one of which would not be worth pursuing on its own, and win settlements for consumers who may not even realize they've been injured. The bad thing about class action lawsuits is that they allow enterprising lawyers to consolidate many small claims, any one of which would not be worth pursuing on its own, and win settlements for consumers who may not even realize they've been injured. Which category does Vibhu Talwar and Patrick Finkelstein v. Creative Labs fall into?

According to the settlement agreement, the lead plaintiffs, who filed their federal lawsuit in California, alleged that Creative had misled consumers by exaggerating the capacity of its MP3 players. The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (10⁹) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.

I see the potential for confusion (I'm confused just trying to explain the grounds for the suit), but I'm not sure this amounts to fraud, or that consumers have suffered an injury, or if they have that the injury amounts to anything in practical terms. I've got 8,346 tracks on my 40GB Creative Zen Nomad Jukebox (which for some reason registers on my computer as 38.1 GB, 2 5 percent less than advertised), and I still have 18.4GB to spare. I suspect the machine will die before I fill it up.

Still, according to the email notice I received today, I'm eligible for "a 50% discount off the price of a new 1 GB MP3 player" (which I have no interest in purchasing) or "a discount certificate good for 20% off the price of any single item purchased at www.us.creative.com" (which I might actually use). I guess the measliness of the settlement, which few "class members" will bother to collect, matches the imperceptibility of the injury pretty well. As usual in this sort of class action, the real beneficiaries are the lawyers, Brian Strange and Barry Fisher of Los Angeles, who will collect $900,000 for their trouble.

At least Strange and Fisher have done a public service by encouraging companies to be more honest. Or maybe not. As of 2003, Creative has included in its packaging a notice informing consumers that "1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes," that "available capacity will be less" than total capacity (because of the operating software), and that "reported capacity will vary." But Creative offered that clarification two years before Strange and Fisher sued the company. I wonder where they got the idea for the lawsuit.

That Lethal British Marijuana

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:20:00 EDT

In 2004 the British government downgraded marijuana from a Class B to a Class C drug, making simple possession of small quantities a "non-arrestable offense." The current prime minister, Gordon Brown, seems bent on reversing that reform, saying "we really have got to send out a message to young people [that] this is not acceptable." Shortly after taking office, Brown asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to take another look at cannabis policy. Although the council reportedly has recommended that marijuana remain in Class C, Brown is expected to ignore its advice. On Tuesday he said:

I don't think that the previous studies took into account that so much of the cannabis on the streets is now of a lethal quality....I have always been very strongly of the view that cannabis is unacceptable and we have got to send a message.

According to Reuters, "Brown said he was particularly worried about the growing use of skunk cannabis, which he described as 'more lethal.'" There has never been a documented case of death by marijuana overdose. Based on extrapolations from animal studies, the ratio of marijuana's lethal dose to its effective dose is something like 40,000 to 1 (compared to between 10 and 20 to 1 for aspirin and between 4 and 10 to 1 for alcohol). So even if the average THC content of marijuana has increased as dramatically as drug warriors claim (and it hasn't), and even if pot smokers did not adjust their intake accordingly (and they do), there would be no practical effect on marijuana's toxicity. The chance of a lethal overdose remains, for all intents and purposes, zero. And no matter what kind of stoned logic Brown favors, zero is not more than zero.

[Thanks to NORML's Paul Armentano for the tip.]

It's Safe to Read Again at Indiana University

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:24:00 EDT

Remember Keith Sampson, the janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) who was accused of racially harassing his co-workers by reading a scholarly book about the Ku Klux Klan? When I last discussed the case, IUPUI's Affirmative Action Office had backed off its initial charge—not because Sampson has a First Amendment right to read whatever books he wants at a state-run university but because the office could not determine exactly what he had been thinking while reading the book about the Klan. The implication was that if he ever read another book that a co-worker considered offensive, he could be investigated again and might be subject to disciplinary action if he displayed clearer signs of racial insensitivity than he did the first time around. But in a recent response to a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), IUPUI Chancellor Charles Bantz suggests the university has seen the light:

I can candidly say that we regret this situation ever took place and that IUPUI takes this matter very seriously. IUPUI is committed to ensuring that its future approach to such matters is consistent with and affirms the long-standing commitment of this campus to the principles of freedom of expression, lifelong learning, and respect for the rights of all members of the IUPUI community. In the near future, IUPUI will be reexamining the campuswide affirmative action processes and procedures related to internal complaints.

This is probably as close to an apology as Sampson is going to get. FIRE notes that IUPUI's reconsideration of its harassment-by-reading theory came only after the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana repeatedly contacted the university on Sampson's behalf.

The Investigation Continues, but Here Are a Few Reckless Allegations

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:18:00 EDT

Yesterday, attempting to retroactively justify the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch, Carey Cockerell, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, insinuated that children at the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), had been beaten severely enough to break their bones. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Cockerell told a state legislative committee "at least 41 children from the polygamous YFZ Ranch have had broken bones," which he said was "cause for concern." Yet USA Today reports that the medical textbook Fractures in Children "cites data that suggest 42% of boys and 27% of girls suffer at least one fracture before age 16." According to the latest official count, the state of Texas has taken custody of 464 minors who lived at YFZ, ranging in age from less than 1 to 17. If 41 of them have had broken bones, that's less than 10 percent over all, which, pace Cockerell, does not seem to be "cause for concern."

FLDS attorney Rod Parker notes that some of the children at YFZ suffer from brittle bone disease:

That makes some of the children more susceptible to broken bones. The mothers told CPS about that when they were taken in. They've known all along that the reason they might see higher incidence of broken bones was due to this condition. They have no evidence to support the implication it is due to child abuse.

Lloyd Barlow, a physician who lives at YFZ, said he'd seen no signs of abuse:

"Probably over 90 percent of the injuries are forearm fractures from ground-level or low level falls," Barlow told The Associated Press from his office at the Eldorado ranch. "I can also tell you that we don't live in a community where there is a pattern of abuse."
Barlow said he is an FLDS member but also a licensed physician in Texas and Utah and is required by law to report suspected abuse.
"What they are saying is that in the history of the lives of 400 some-odd children, there have been injuries. They are not saying they have 41 [current] fractures," he said.

Cockerell's department later backed away from his insinuation that the fractures were evidence of beatings:

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Child Protective Services division, said the state was still investigating and Cockerell's comments were not meant to be an allegation of abuse.
"This is pretty early in this investigation, particularly given the number of children we've been interviewing," he said. "We are just looking into it."

This is pretty sleazy: There seem to be a lot of broken bones (though not any more than you'd expect in a random sample of American kids), and we're concerned about that, but we're not saying the kids were abused. We're just strongly implying it.

Cockerell also said "interviews with children and journals found at the ranch" have led investigators to believe some of the boys may have been sexually abused. Anyone who is familar with episodes like the trumped-up McMartin Preschool prosecutions understands how easy it is for social workers, through leading questions and repeated allegations, to elicit testimony from little kids that supports their preconceptions. As for the journals, since Cockerell says only that abuse may have occurred, I assume the written evidence is ambiguous as well.

Although it may turn out that some of the children at YFZ were abused physically and/or sexually, I don't trust Cockerell's investigators to find the truth, because I don't think they see that as their mission. Instead they are intent on showing, in the face of widespread criticism, that the state was right to separate all the children from their parents, even though there was no evidence of abuse in the vast majority of cases. The thing is, they will never be able to show the state was right, no matter what they find. At the time they forcibly removed these children, state officials conceded they had no reason to believe anyone was being beaten or that sexual abuse extended beyond the underage marriage of teenaged girls (the extent of which is disputed by FLDS members). As I noted in my column yesterday, in more than nine out of 10 cases their argument for separation hinged on the idea that bringing children up according to FLDS teachings was inherently abusive. If they subsequently find evidence of physical or sexual abuse, that does not make their rationale for removal any more legitimate.

Mandatory Niceness

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In January an officer of the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission interrogated the Canadian journalist Ezra Levant about his decision to reprint the notorious Muhammad cartoons that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Levant, the former publisher of the Western Standard, did not try to ingratiate himself. He called the commission “a sick joke” and dared the “thug” across the table to recommend that he face a hearing for offending Muslims.

Levant wanted to be convicted, since that would give him a chance to challenge the censorship that Canadian human rights commissions practice in the guise of fighting discrimination. “I do not want to be excused from this complaint because I was reasonable,” he told the officer. “It is not the government’s authority to tell me whether or not I’m reasonable.” That position has attracted broad support in Canada, where editorialists, columnists, activists, and legislators from across the political spectrum have criticized the commissions for threatening freedom of speech.

The national and regional commissions were established in the 1970s to vet complaints about illegal discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of goods and services. But many of them have broad, ambiguous legal mandates that can be used to target controversial speech. Alberta’s Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act, for example, prohibits publishing anything that “is likely to expose a person or class of persons to hatred or contempt.”

Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, claimed Levant did that by running the Muhammad cartoons. “Publishing of cartoons in the Western Standards [sic] is in fact spreading hate against me,” Soharwardy scrawled on a complaint form he submitted to the commission in February 2006. He also complained that “Mr. Ezra Levant insulted me” when the two debated the cartoon controversy on CBC Radio. Until mid-February, when he announced that he planned to withdraw his complaint, Soharwardy was demanding an apology. Human rights commissions can impose fines and gag orders as well.

Meanwhile, the Canadian, Ontario, and British Columbia human rights commissions are considering similar complaints against Maclean’s magazine and the journalist Mark Steyn over an October 2006 article adapted from Steyn’s book America Alone. The Canadian Islamic Congress claims Steyn “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and contempt” and harms their “sense of dignity and self-worth” by worrying about high Muslim birth rates. Levant notes that even if a complaint is dismissed, responding to it requires “thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees” and “an enormous amount of time,” which encourages journalists to steer clear of touchy subjects.

John McCain's Plan to Keep Employer-Provided Health Insurance While Moving Away From It

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:11:00 EDT

Severing the government-supported, market-distorting connection between health insurance and employment would promote choice, allowing people to select the medical plans that best suit their circumstances, and security, addressing one of the main anxieties about health care by making coverage portable. This is one of the few areas where the Bush administration was on the right track, and I'm glad to see John McCain picking up the idea. But I wish his talk were a little straighter on this subject. Here is how he describes the current system, in which most Americans with health insurance get it through their employers, and the change he'd make:

Under current law, the federal government gives a tax benefit when employers provide health-insurance coverage to American workers and their families. This benefit doesn't cover the total cost of the health plan, and in reality each worker and family absorbs the rest of the cost in lower wages and diminished benefits. But it provides essential support for insurance coverage. Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged.
But for every American who wanted it, another option would be available: Every year, they would receive a tax credit directly, with the same cash value of the credits for employees in big companies, in a small business, or self-employed. You simply choose the insurance provider that suits you best. By mail or online, you would then inform the government of your selection. And the money to help pay for your health care would be sent straight to that insurance provider. The health plan you chose would be as good as any that an employer could choose for you. It would be yours and your family's health-care plan, and yours to keep.
The value of that credit—$2,500 for individuals, $5,000 for families—would also be enhanced by the greater competition this reform would help create among insurance companies. Millions of Americans would be making their own health-care choices again. Insurance companies could no longer take your business for granted, offering narrow plans with escalating costs. It would help change the whole dynamic of the current system, putting individuals and families back in charge, and forcing companies to respond with better service at lower cost.

Although you might not guess it from McCain's gloss, the "tax benefit" in question goes to employees, not employers. Companies can deduct money spent on employee compensation as a business expense whether it takes the form of wages or health benefits. But since the government does not treat employer-provided health insurance as taxable income, there's an artificial incentive for employees to prefer compensation in that form, rather than the cash equivalent. If both kinds of compensation were treated the same, most employees presumably would prefer the money; employers would respond by ditching health benefits and offering higher wages instead. Equal tax treatment could be accomplished either by taxing the health benefits as income or, as McCain seems to be proposing, making the money an employee independently spends on health insurance tax-free as well.

Although the policy change has to do with taxes paid by employees, The New York Times has McCain "eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers," which makes it sound as if employers are the ones getting the breaks. And the McCain campaign seems to be downplaying the impact that equalizing the tax treatment of health benefits and wages would have on the prevalence of employer-provided medical coverage. According to the Times, McCain's domestic policy adviser "said he believed that many employers would still offer health insurance to try to attract the best workers." McCain himself says "employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged" for the "many workers" who "are perfectly content" with the status quo. Maybe this is just his way of reassuring people that changes in the compensation mix would be driven by employee preferences. But the main economic rationale for eliminating the health-benefit tax preference is to make employer-provided medical coverage the exception rather than the rule; otherwise we would still have a system in which medical coverage is both artificially expensive, since patients have little opportunity or incentive to economize, and insecure, since losing a job often means losing health insurance.

New York City's 'Marijuana Arrest Crusade'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:36:00 EDT

In an eye-opening new report for the New York Civil Liberties Union (noted by Radley Balko earlier this morning), sociologist Harry G. Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small call attention to a "marijuana arrest crusade" in New York City that began under Rudy Giuliani and continues under Michael Bloomberg:

From 1997 to 2006, the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 353,000 people simply for possessing small amounts of marijuana. This was eleven times more marijuana arrests than in the previous decade, and ten times more than in the decade before that.

Marijuana arrests have been rising nationwide since the early 1990s, but the increase in New York City has been much more dramatic. Levine and Small say the surge in arrests is largely a byproduct of an aggressive "stop and frisk" program in which police pat down young men they (supposedly) suspect of criminal activity, ostensibly to make sure they're not carrying weapons. The targets of these pat-downs are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and so are the people arrested for marijuana possession. Between 1997 and 2006, blacks, who represent 26 percent of New York's population, accounted for 52 percent of the marijuana arrests; Hispanics, about the same share of the population, accounted for 31 percent of the arrests; and non-Hispanic whites, about 35 percent of the population, accounted for just 15 percent of the arrests. Yet survey data indicate that, if anything, whites smoke pot at higher rates than blacks and Hispanics.

Although New York State decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana (less than seven-eighths of an ounce) in 1977, Levine and Small report, New York City marijuana busts typically result in a trip to the police station, fingerprinting, and a night in jail. Instead of charging people who are carrying a little pot with possession, a citable offense simlar to a traffic violation, police typically accuse them of having marijuana "open to view," a misdemeanor, often after tricking or intimidating them into revealing their stash. In the vast majority of cases, the arrestees are not caught smoking pot in public, and the marijuana charge is the most serious offense.

Levine and Small note several incentives that encourage police to hassle pot smokers:

Narcotics and patrol police, their supervisors, and top commanders in the police department benefit from the marijuana possession arrests. The arrests are comparatively safe, allow officers and their supervisors to accrue overtime pay, and produce arrest numbers that show productivity. When needed, commanders can temporarily shift narcotics police off making the misdemeanor possession arrests and assign them to other duties, which provides considerable flexibility. The marijuana arrests are also the most effective means available for obtaining information (including fingerprints, photographs, and potentially DNA samples) from people never before entered in the criminal justice databases.

For the arrestees, by contrast, getting busted is not only humiliating, expensive, inconvenient, and embittering; it gives them a criminal record that can hamper their educational and employment prospects for the rest of their lives.

Latter-Day Taint

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

I'm not quite as old-fashioned as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), which hews to the early-marriage customs of the 19th century and the polygamous practices of biblical times. But I'm old-fashioned enough to believe the government needs a good reason to pull a crying, clinging child away from her mother and hand her over to the care of strangers.

The possibility that the child might marry an older man 10 or 12 or 14 years from now does not cut it. Citing that long-term, speculative danger to justify the certain, immediate damage it has done by forcibly separating hundreds of children from their parents, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has violated its duty to take such extreme measures only when there's no other way to prevent imminent harm.

The department took custody of 463 minors who were living at the FLDS church's Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado after an April 3 raid that was based on an abuse report police believe was a hoax. On Monday state officials said the children, who are now living in group homes or shelters, include 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, of whom 31 are pregnant or have children.

I don't know whether to believe that. Texas officials have proven unreliable even on such basic questions as the justification for the raid, which was a report of physical abuse from a 16-year-old YFZ resident who apparently does not exist, and the number of children seized, a figure that was revised yet again this week. Just a few days ago, the number of underage mothers was said to be 20.

It's not clear how the government determined the ages of these girls. It says many who claimed to be adults were in fact minors, while FLDS members say many of the girls the state describes as minors are in fact adults.

Furthermore, the age of consent for sex in Texas is 17, while the minimum age for marriage, with parental approval, is 16 (raised in 2005 from 14 with the FLDS in mind). Hence a pregnant 16- or 17-year-old is not necessarily evidence that any laws have been broken.

Even by the government's account, 463 children were forcibly removed from their homes because 7 percent of them may have been victims of sexual abuse. Although there's no evidence that boys or prepubescent girls were abused at YFZ, the minors in state custody include 213 boys and about 130 children under the age of 5.

What is the state's rationale for taking girls who were not pregnant or mothers along with those who were, for taking boys along with girls, and for taking infants, toddlers, and preschoolers along with teenagers? In an affidavit, it asserts "a pervasive pattern and practice of indoctrinating and grooming minor female children to accept spiritual marriages to adult male members of the YFZ Ranch resulting in them being abused." As for the boys, "after they become adults, [they] are spiritually married to minor female children and engage in sexual relationships with them resulting in them becoming sexually [sic] perpetrators."

In short, the whole FLDS culture is sick and corrupt, so anyone raised in that environment is ipso facto a victim of abuse. This theory of collective guilt, which was accepted by Judge Barbara Walther after a chaotic and cursory mass hearing on April 17, is the antithesis of the individualized risk assessment that is supposed to justify taking a child from his parents.

Some YFZ residents say they do not approve of marriage before the legal age of consent, while others say they do not practice polygamy at all. Yet all were tarred with the same broad brush, based on a principle that church attorney Rod Parker aptly summed up this way: "If you're a member of this religious group, then you're not allowed to have children."