Tag: prohibition

national politics & policies too much government

Name Your FDA Poison

We’re dealing with a pandemic, here, and the Food and Drug Administration insists upon poisoning us.

Or, more accurately, the FDA sticks to Prohibition-Era poisoning schemes, no matter how unreasonable or counter-productive.

Private enterprise is stepping up to the plate. “Local distilleries like Restorative Republic and rum-maker Cotton & Reed are making artisanal hand cleaner, the primary ingredient in which is high-proof alcohol,” writes Peter Suderman at Reason. “And anyone who buys a bottle of their booze also gets a small bottle of what you might call hipster Purell.”

This should be a feel-good story. But government regulators are not in the feel-good biz.

What is the FDA saying to the 500 or so distilleries across the country who want to pitch in, making up for the supply crunch?

The regulatory agency insists that they denature the alcohol in the sanitizer.

Denatured alcohol is, Wikipedia succinctly states, “ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption.”

The feds thus carry on the old prohibitionists’ tradition of poisoning products to discourage drinking.

It’s an idiotic practice: Preventing children from destroying themselves with alcohol by making the easiest-to-access alcohol unpalatable. But kids have been known to sneak drinks even those they find disgusting and vile, just to get the alcohol buzz. So: let’s kill the kids! That’ll teach ’em.

And insisting that distilleries denature their alcohol means that distilleries would ruin their equipment for making drinkable alcohol.

Though some liquor distillers are trying to up hand sanitizer production, ten times more could be produced were the FDA to change its rules, Suderman explains.

Get out of the way, government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets too much government

The Exceptions Disprove the Rules

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 19, 2020
1 Comment on The Exceptions Disprove the Rules

freedom, prohibition, rules, regulations, red tape, bureaucracy,

“I’ve instructed my prosecutors not to charge certain low-level nonviolent offenses to avoid people being held in jail unnecessarily,” Maryland’s Attorney General Marilyn Mosby informed the state’s Republican governor. She also urged the governor “to release all inmates in state prisons who are over 60,” explains The Washington Times, “approved for parole or scheduled to complete their sentences within the next year.”

This is all to avoid a prison pandemic. Meanwhile, the “Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-19 tests,” Reason magazine tells us, adding that the FDA “has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-based hand sanitizers.”

Reason’s Robby Soave asks the obvious question: “Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?”

The New York Times reports that Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, tried mightily to perform tests on subjects, early in the epidemic, to track how the virus was spreading. She was stymied every which way.

By bureaucracies.

The kludge of bad regulations and laws merely adds cost and annoyance during normal times; during emergencies they present major stumbling blocks to public health.

So, when our leaders make special exceptions, they demonstrate that the regulations were always bad — now just worse.

Real leadership would nix these rules, permanently.

And, for that matter, end the war on drugs — and prostitution and other victimless crimes.

One of the infractions Maryland’s AG decided to go lax on, however, is public urination. That crime has victims and ought to remain a public health violation.

Though perhaps not worth imprisonment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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nannyism too much government

Politicians & Pain

opioid, crisis, pain, drug, law, politician, ban, prohibition, control, medicine,

Whenever a new panic runs through corporate media and the grapevine — and especially when the lesson is supposed to be ‘we’ve gotta do something!’ — it is time to slow down. And look at the facts.

The opioid crisis is one of those panics.

The almost immediate reaction from politicians has been to point their quivering fingers at doctors and drug companies on the theory that doctors have been over-prescribing opiates, instigated by pharmaceutical companies.

Seems a ‘round up the usual suspects’ approach to public health.

Now there appears to be good research to back up our skepticism. According to Cato’s Jeffrey A. Singer, recent studies show “there is no correlation between opioid prescription volume and non-medical use or opioid use disorder among persons age 12 and over.” Nevertheless, Dr. Singer notes, “policymakers and law enforcement continue to pressure health care practitioners into undertreating patients in pain.”

An under-treatment result is scarier, to me, than the desperate and dangerous self-medication problem that must lie at the core of the crisis we read about. Patients in too much pain because doctors are afraid of government harassment are pushed to unsupervised pain management . . . which looks an awful lot like a simple description of the opioid crisis itself.

Singer provides confirmation of an unintended effect: the fentanyl and heroin overdose rate “continues apace” even as the opioid prescription volume plummets.

“At a recent international breast cancer conference experts stated the under-prescribing of opioids to breast cancer patients in the U.S. is now comparable to treatment in third world countries,” warned Singer.

One word: yikes.

I am tempted to define today’s politics itself as a kind of pain mismanagement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies

Won But Not Over

smoking, vaping, ban, prohibition, teenager,

The Office on Smoking at Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not telling the truth about the war on tobacco use.

In an article at Reason, Jacob Sullum convincingly argues that the CDC persists on portraying tobacco use amongst teens as in crisis.

According to the CDC, past progress has been “erased.”

Looked at one way, the stats are alarming: “The share of high school students who reported using e-cigarettes in the previous month jumped from 11.7 percent in 2017 to 20.8 percent in 2018,” Sullum summarizes.

Sounds bad, eh?

But Sullum noticed something:

the increase tobacco use is wholly the result of increased e-cigarette usage, which is less harmful than smoking;
very few of the increased number of vapers actually vape regularly, with less than 6 percent vaping daily; and
smoking has dropped dramatically, with “past-month cigarette smoking among high school students [falling] from 28.5 percent to 5.8 percent.”

So, why isn’t the CDC proclaiming victory?

Well, there is something called “Spencer’s Law.” Taken from Herbert Spencer’s essay “From Freedom to Bondage,” it goes like this:

“The degree of public concern and anxiety about a social problem or phenomenon varies inversely as to its real or actual incidence.”

“In plain English,” philosopher Stephen Davies explains, “this means that when a social problem is genuinely widespread and severe it will attract little notice or discussion. It will only become the object of attention, concern, and controversy precisely when it is in decline and its severity is diminishing.”

Why?

In the CDC’s case, could it have something to do with unlikely funding for a war already won?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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From a photo by Airman 1st Class Brittany Perry

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national politics & policies Popular too much government

E-Panic

One of the better arguments for government relies upon sobriety: we want rational, measured responses to threats, not panicky, hot-headed reactions. We have a rule of law to prevent revenge and vendetta, replacing them with justice and civil order.

But when we expand the concept of “threat” far beyond interpersonal violence and to dangers from our own foolish or merely misguided behavior, “sobriety” too often doesn’t even seem an option.

Take drugs.

Specifically, take “vaping.”

That is the innovative technology of “e-cigarettes” that can be used to replace the smoking of tobacco and other drugs with inhaling drug-laced water vapor.

Vaping is far less dangerous than tobacco, at least for emphysema and lung cancer, but it is not harmless. Several hundred people across several of these United States have become very ill and a few have died of a mysterious lung disease.

So of course the Surgeon General calls it an epidemic, and the White House and Congress take up the cause to regulate and even prohibit vaping. And India just “became the latest country to ban electronic cigarettes,” according to Bloomberg.

Whoa, the subject has barely been studied, and what we know so far is that it was not major-brand nicotine e-liquid, but, instead, boutique product that has caused most of the casualties.

The leap to legislation has been too quick for consumers to alter their own behavior with new information.

Besides, prohibition and regulation haven’t worked to prevent the current opiate overdose crisis.

The rush to “do something very, very strong,” as President Trump puts it, is the very opposite of why we say we want government.

Its lack of sobriety is . . . sobering.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment

Prisoners All

drug war, prison, jail, prohibition, ban, freedom,

The logic for drug prohibition is direct: to keep people from hurting themselves with recreational drugs, we must prevent them from accessing those drugs.

Voilà!

There are a number of things wrong with that, though, and one is this: governments cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prisons.

In California, nearly 1,000 men and women overdosed last year in “an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason, notes that confinement centers are “among the most tightly controlled environments on Earth, yet correction officials can’t figure out how to deal with dramatic spikes in the number of inmates who are dying from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning.”

Doesn’t this make the prohibitionist “solution” absurd?

“If they can’t keep heroin off of death row,” Greenhut concludes, “then maybe they should rethink their ability to control the rest of us.”

There is a problem, here, though — it is easier to control “the rest of us.”

As with gun control laws, it is the law-abiding folks who fall in line. It is the edgier, less civic-minded people who tend to rebel.

But the two issues remain distinct: generally lawful and level-headed citizens still need to defend themselves from criminals, but do not feel a need to take drugs that can be deadly even in innocent hands. Thus the War on Drugs seems a bit less obviously tragic than gun control.

Which is why conceiving of the War on Drugs as unworkable prison policy writ large remains important.

Why would we want to make our society more like drug-ridden prisons?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.