Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2018 in Reason

USUALLY REASON BRINGS you stories about people who have crossed the lines of legality, the people who help draw those lines, and the people who want to erase them entirely. This month we thought we’d try something a little different. In this issue, we offer how-tos, personal stories, and step-by-step guides for all kinds of activities that can and do happen right at the borders of legally permissible behavior. These stories are handily packaged into a removable section in the middle of the magazine. Pull it out and when you’re done reading, you can decide whether to keep the pages for future reference or to follow the instructions printed on the front and burn them. If you decide to hang out on the edges with us, a couple of notes.…

IT WAS MARCH 29, a brisk spring day in Ohio, and President Donald Trump was speaking about his infrastructure plan to a crowded arena. But the comment that grabbed many people’s attention was not about roads or bridges. It was on Syria, and Trump’s message was simple: U.S. troops would soon be packing up their bundles and coming home. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS,” he said. “We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” A week later, at the White House, he told his national security team that he wanted U.S. forces to pull out as soon as the mission could be declared a success. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought it was 2016 and…

CAN THE PRESIDENT of the United States be sued for damages in a civil proceeding? The answer depends on the nature of the president’s alleged misconduct. In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president has immunity from civil suits that arise from the performance of his official duties. “In exercising the functions of his office,” the Court said, “the head of an Executive Department, keeping within the limits of his authority, should not be under an apprehension that the motives that control his official conduct may, at any time, become the subject of inquiry in a civil suit for damages.” The president’s behavior off the job, however, is a different matter. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), the Supreme Court allowed former Arkansas state employee Paula…

IN THE UNFORTUNATE event that your marriage does not last, it may at least end amicably. Or it may not, in which case its final days might need to be accompanied by the kind of aggressive electronic surveillance that once was used only by three-letter federal agencies. But be warned if you’re thinking about snooping on your spouse: A little-known section of federal law enacted in 1968, 18 USC 2512, makes it a crime to manufacture, assemble, or even possess any “device” that is “primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications.” Section 2512 goes beyond merely regulating whether any such device is used for good or ill. Instead, it’s a far-ranging prohibition on everything, up to and including advertising, an eavesdropping device,…

1. Make fists with both hands, palms facing each other. Ensure the locking mechanism is between them. 2. Pull on the zip tie’s tail with your teeth, tightening it as much as possible. 3. Raise your hands above your head. You’re going to use gravity to help you bust open the locking mechanism. 4. In one swift, powerful motion, bring your arms down into your midriff, forcing your elbows to sweep down, back, and out. This maximizes the pressure on the zip tie, which should be enough to break it. 5. The act of forcing your elbows outward should push your shoulder blades back and toward each other. *Note: This technique can break through standard zip ties rated at roughly 50–120 pounds of tensile strength. You’ll want to think twice…

IN CALIFORNIA AND other states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use, you can now sidle up to a bar and sip something sold as a pot cocktail. These drinks tend to look a lot like the Instagram-friendly classic cocktails—think of the old fashioned, the daiquiri, and the Negroni—that have sprung up at establishments around the country, except that they are infused with cannabis. Just don’t expect any of them to get you truly high. Even in places where both pot and alcohol are legal to consume, there are legal barriers that typically prevent bars and restaurants from serving anything with THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient. Instead, bartenders serving pot cocktails infuse their drinks with cannabidiol (CBD), an oil extracted from hemp. CBD delivers a calming “body high” that goes…

YOU’RE ON A plane, returning home from a romantic tour of the Italian countryside. The cabin lights flicker on and you’re confronted by flight attendants passing out slips of official-looking blue cardstock: customs forms. After scrounging a pen out of the bottom of your carry-on, you start to fill out the cramped response fields. Name, address, flight information. Back to the carry-on again, because who on Earth knows his own passport number? Finally, you come to the declaration section, and begin to tick off negative responses to the bizarre interrogatories. Bringing back soil? No. Seeds? No. Disease agents, cell cultures, or snails? No. Food or meat? Your stomach drops as you remember the rustic charcuterie you purchased at a quaint butcher shop in Naples. Delicious, and not cheap, either. What…

IT WASN’T ORIGINALLY supposed to be funny. But improv has taken over comedy and, according to Sam Wasson’s lively book Improv Nation, become “a great American art.” Can he make the case? I hate to give away the punchline, but no, he can’t. The story starts with Viola Spolin around 1940. Yes, there was improv before Spolin—actors have been improvising in character at least since the days of commedia dell’arte—but Wasson is referring to the modern American brand of improv. Spolin worked at Hull House, a community center serving Chicago’s poor immigrants. She taught the children there to play onstage; the idea was to foster self-expression. Spolin developed her techniques and spread them to other venues. Her son, Paul Sills, watched the process and felt improv could be used to…

THE EARLY 1970S were a strange, chaotic, terrifying time. Exactly how strange, chaotic, and terrifying has been largely forgotten, to judge from how many Americans on both sides of the Donald Trump divide view our current tensions as unprecedentedly intense. Journalist-historians Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis are not deliberately trying to deliver a message about historical perspective. But in their thrilling The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, they show how bad things got in a nation truly troubled by vicious culture wars, wracked by violent ideological conflict, and ruled by a near-lunatic abusing his power to pursue personal and political grudges. TIMOTHY LEARY WAS a Harvard professor–turned–psychedelic advocate, a leader of the “head” faction that was…

ON A SHOPPING trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested. Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession. It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes—in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins—had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to…

LYN ULBRICHT MOVED to Colorado last year. She uprooted her life to be near her son, Ross Ulbricht, who is an inmate in a federal maximum security prison an hour outside of Colorado Springs. Ross is serving two concurrent life sentences for his role in the founding and running of Silk Road, a dark web bazaar where users could buy and sell drugs and other illicit items, often using bitcoin. The charges against him included money laundering, computer hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. In a separate indictment, he was charged with procuring murder. Though that charge was dropped, Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York cited it as central to her decision to go well beyond the minimum sentence of 10 years and instead imprison him…

MY FAMILY LIVED in a suburban garden apartment during the New York City blackout of 1977, when just two lightning strikes zipped millions of Americans back to the 19th century for roughly 24 hours. We had left the city several years earlier—fortunately, considering the rough ride urban residents had during that outage. Up the river in Tarrytown, we just congregated on the communal porch to light grills, share gossip, and bum any available candles. I can still remember the hiss of the Coleman gasoline lantern my parents had packed away with a companion camping stove. That thoughtfulness on their part allowed us luxury that those hooked on electricity flowing from far away had to do without. When it came to unexpectedly losing some perks of modern civilization, we thrived because…

WHEN SPANISH CATHOLICS subjugated the Mesoamericans, they eradicated a religion but not its chief sacrament. Psilocybin mushrooms continued to grow throughout Central America and to clandestinely fuel the trips of indigenous psychonauts. In the 1950s, the Mazatec shaman María Sabina led an American banker named Gordon Wasson and his wife in a mushroom ceremony, and the couple returned to the U.S. as proselytizers. Today, psilocybin mushrooms are more popular and easier to cultivate than at any point in recent memory, thanks to the internet’s ability to disperse knowledge in much the same way that Psilocybe mexicana spreads its spores. But it wasn’t always so. The first widely available American treatise on home growing was 1976’s Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide. Authors Terence and Dennis McKenna published under the pseudonyms O.T.…

JOHN PERRY BARLOW, who died this year at age 70, was a Grateful Dead lyricist, a pioneer in the fight for online civil liberties, and possibly a mutant. As Barlow recounts in his posthumously published memoir, Mother American Night, his mother as a girl was treated for tuberculosis by a quack who administered a prolonged beam of X-rays right into her hip. Forty-five minutes of this treatment gave her radiation sickness. Her hair fell out, she suffered severe burns, and she was informed that, oops, she’d been sterilized. The sterilization didn’t take. Two decades later, in 1947, she gave birth to John Perry Barlow. One of his X-Men superpowers seems to have been to unerringly locate centers of the American zeitgeist and discover some pivotal role he could play in…

HERE IN THE U.S., we tend not to think of insects as food, and we’re horrified when they show up in our food. But in other parts of the world, people eat bugs on purpose. The United Nations calls insects “a highly significant food source for human populations.” The website edibleinsects.com claims people in 80 percent of all countries—amounting to one of every three humans—eat bugs. The things Americans want to keep out of our food are actually a great source of protein, fat, and fiber. In some places, the law effectively prevents people from thinking of grubs as grub. A fascinating piece in Food Navigator by Massimo Reverberi, founder of a Thailand-based bug-pasta company, suggests there is a regulatory divide between the English-speaking world, which he says has been…

DO UNLICENSED DOGS have constitutional protections against being shot by police? It depends which federal judge in Michigan you ask. A 2017 Reason investigation found narcotics raids in Detroit left a disturbing number of dead canines in their wake. Pets are considered property under the Fourth Amendment, shielding them from unlawful seizure by law enforcement. Although it takes a lot to prove a police shooting of a dog was unreasonable, cities have still paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than $1 million in one instance, to settle such lawsuits. In an effort to stymie those suits, lawyers representing Detroit have deployed a novel legal argument: If a dog is unlicensed, it counts as “contraband” under the Fourth Amendment, and its owner has no legitimate property interest in it.…

BITCOIN IS THE first uncensorable digital currency: When it moves between buyers and sellers, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. The now-shuttered online marketplace Silk Road couldn’t have existed before bitcoin, because it’s unfathomable that Visa, Mastercard, or PayPal would approve transactions on an e-commerce site for buying and selling illicit drugs. Bitcoin is often mistakenly described as a “fully anonymous” cryptocurrency. In fact, while global superpowers can’t prevent you from spending your bitcoins, that doesn’t mean they can’t figure out what you bought. More than 100 Silk Road users have gotten into trouble with law enforcement since 2012, and the Snowden leaks revealed that the National Security Agency has worked to uncover the identities of other bitcoin users as well. Though you don’t need to give up…

PRISON LEGAL NEWS UH OH—LOOKS LIKE you’ve landed behind bars. You should pick up a copy of Prison Legal News. This monthly magazine, the oldest continual publication written by and for inmates, is an indispensable resource on prison issues, prisoner rights, and the ins and outs of civil litigation in a system seemingly designed to keep prisoners from winning their freedom. America’s 2 million incarcerated people suffer inhumane conditions and civil liberties abuses that are mostly invisible to the rest of the country. Inmates have little recourse and even fewer sources of helpful, relevant information. Of course, many prison administrators prefer that their inmates not be civil litigation experts. As a result, Prison Legal News is possibly the most frequently banned magazine in the United States. It has brought countless…

WHEN JOHN MACKEY founded Whole Foods Market nearly 40 years ago in Austin, he revolutionized the way Americans think about health food. Last year he helped change the game again when he announced that Whole Foods had been bought by Amazon for just under $14 billion. Overnight, America’s most innovative grocery store and its most innovative everything-else store were one and the same. At LibertyCon in March, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Mackey (a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine) about falling in love with the Amazon worldview and what might be coming next. Q: So Whole Foods has merged with Amazon. Are you excited about that? A: I’m superexcited. I’ll tell you a story: Whole Foods was being harassed by shareholder activists who were trying…