Table of contents for July 2019 in Reason

COULD FENTANYL BE a weapon of mass destruction? That was the prompt for a Department of Homeland Security memo that became public in April, exploring the question of whether the prescription painkiller should be treated like the functional equivalent of a suitcase nuke “when certain criteria are met.” What seems absurd—powerful black-market fentanyl has been blamed for a spike in overdose deaths, but it’s not exactly sarin gas—actually hews to a perverse bureaucratic logic. Government focus on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) is down, while interest and resources for fighting fentanyl are up. Meanwhile, the powers granted to authorities for national security are expansive and numerous, and they enjoy special exceptions to protections involving due process, accountability, and transparency. Bundling the two is the administrative equivalent of an American heiress…

JOHANNESBURG’S WORST-KEPT SECRET looks like any other suburban bar, with a bartender who has nothing unusual to offer. Then someone emerges from the back to present the “other menu.” There, marijuana—or “dagga,” in Afrikaans slang—is listed alongside beer and cider. Customers in business suits hand over a few hundred rand, choose from the selection of strains and edibles, and relax. Shortly thereafter, a “special” rainbow rice crispy treat shows up unceremoniously, wrapped in colorful plastic like a convenience store snack. Clouds of smoke drift over the pool tables. Bob Marley plays from the jukebox. Everything appears safe, casual, and aboveboard. But the Amsterdam vibes are deceiving. Johannesburg’s funky new drug scene actually exists in a precarious legal gray zone. Despite reports last year that South Africa’s Constitutional Court had decriminalized…

“I’M GOING TO create borders,” Donald Trump promised while running for president in 2016. “No drugs are coming in. We’re gonna build a wall.” Halfway through his term, the president’s faith in “the border wall” as a way of blocking the “pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs” was unabated, even as spoilsports noted that the supply comes in mainly through legal points of entry, making the wall irrelevant. And if stopping drugs at the southern border is a tall order, the prospect of intercepting them before they get there is even dimmer, as a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates. “The U.S. government’s own assessments have long showed that interdiction has at best only an ephemeral impact on retail prices and supply,”…

MOST MODERN PEOPLE agree that every individual has the right to set his or her own conditions of consent, even if few of us think about daily life in those terms. “You can borrow my car if you promise to have it back by 4 p.m.” is an example of conditional consent at work. “I’ll perform this labor for you in exchange for x amount of compensation” is another. “I will have sex with you if you agree to use a condom” is a third. In the realm of sex, consent has been elevated to the level of a sacred word. But in practice, most of us believe in a host of exceptions. We think that some people (such as minors) should not be allowed to consent to some things…

YOU DON’T HAVE to be an avid consumer of news about the federal government to know that Uncle Sam’s annual budgeting process is a mess. The budget is rarely completed on time, and it always seems to get bogged down with partisan bickering and political scheming. The process is often interrupted or transformed into an emergency by fiscal cliffs and government shutdowns, and it faces numerous chronic problems as well, from dead-on-arrival White House budget plans to perpetually ignored statutory deadlines. When the dust finally settles, the result is usually a bloated agglomeration of goodies for special interests that most likely had a better grasp of the budget’s contents than the elected representatives who voted on it (probably without ever reading it). Of course, almost every budget is bigger than…

ON THE MORNING of March 14, 2016, in a tiny office in Rio de Janeiro, a libertarian businessman named Winston Ling met with Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman running a longshot campaign to be president of Brazil. Some of Ling’s closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil’s libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition. Three years later, Bolsonaro is president. Ludwig von Mises scholars, free market think tankers, and even anarcho-capitalists now occupy top-level positions in his administration, where they hope to slash the government bureaucracy of the nation ranked as the absolute…

Scott Mann, a member of the British Parliament, faced public mockery after suggesting the nation needs a national knife registry to battle knife-related crimes. “Every knife sold in the UK should have a GPS tracker fitted in the handle,” he wrote in a tweet. Former Long Beach, Mississippi, police officer Cassie Barker has pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of her 3-year-old daughter. Barker left the girl in a car seat in her patrol car while she had sex with her supervisor at his home. You’d think that officials in Australia’s Northern Territory would be happy that an unofficial slogan promoting tourism there had gone viral. But the Darwin City Council has voted to ban the sale at markets located on public property of any merchandise with that slogan:…

AFTER THE MONTHSLONG power blackout that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Ricans realized they couldn’t rely on government to meet their basic needs. Enter Biotecture Planet Earth, a New Mexico–based nonprofit that specializes in sustainable building. The organization is constructing an offgrid, hurricane-resistant compound in Aguada, Puerto Rico. Built largely out of garbage such as tires and cans, the buildings include systems that provide electricity, collect water, and grow food. The compound will serve as an education and community center.…

IN HIS 2018 confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) whether or not he considered himself to be an originalist. “Originalism refers to basically textualism applied in the constitutional sphere, with an eye toward identifying the original public meaning of the constitutional text at issue,” Lee observed. So “for our purposes today, you’re an originalist?” “That’s correct,” Kavanaugh promptly replied. Unfortunately for fans of originalism, Kavanaugh flunked his first big test as an originalist on the Supreme Court. That test came in the case of Timbs v. Indiana. Tyson Timbs was arrested in 2013 on drug charges and sentenced to one year of home detention and five years on probation. A few months after his arrest, the state…

FOR YEARS, OREGON has mandated that all filling stations be full-service—meaning that a station employee must work the nozzle. People who are in a hurry and out-of-state visitors accustomed to self-service are reminded firmly but politely (this is Oregon, after all) to keep their hands away from the pump. Oregon and New Jersey are the only states to have this restriction. Mercifully, it’s starting to fall apart. In 2015, Oregon legislators passed a bill allowing gas stations in counties of fewer than 40,000 people to offer a self-service pump between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. A 2017 law expanded this carve-out to allow all-day self-service in those counties. Now legislators are proposing to let people gas up by themselves statewide. In March, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill…

WITH BIRTH RATES plunging and baby boomers retiring, the American economy is going to need workers. Unless someone comes up with a magical formula to boost fertility, that means we’ll need more immigrants. So the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a consortium of politically diverse investors, entrepreneurs, and economists, deserves credit for trying to figure out an immigration-based plan that would spare America from the coming labor crisis that could drain economic growth to under 2 percent. But the EIG’s proposed solution, which is to create a special category of visas that would repopulate Rust Belt towns and other places that have been left behind by the modern economy, is flawed. It’s true that the Northeast and the Midwest have been hit particularly hard and that they risk falling into a…

15 YEARS AGO July 2004 “We live under a constitution shaped by Morris’ smart pen. But in more ways than this, we live in Gouverneur Morris’ America. The worldly patron Founder of cities, trade, materialism, wit, pleasure, and style, Morris stood athwart history and waved it in. He saw the pluralistic, commercial form our freedom would take, and he saw that it was good.” WILL WILKINSON “The Fun-Loving Founding Father” “You could say Spurlock’s experience reflects the reality of addiction: It’s not something you fall into; you have to work hard at it. As the psychologist Jeffrey Schaler has observed, it takes ‘an iron will’ to be an addict. But this understanding of addiction—as a choice, not a disease—works against Spurlock’s attempt to blame fast food chains for making us…

AS PUNDITS DEBATE how much the Trump administration’s penalties have contributed to Venezuela’s economic crisis and as European governments move forward with a plan to trade with Iran in the face of U.S. sanctions reimposed on the Islamic Republic, it’s time for some calm and straight talk about sanctions. People who oppose putatively humanitarian military interventions are frequently charged with supporting genocidal tyrants. In the same way, people who oppose sanctions on disfavored regimes are often criticized as apologists for those regimes. Each charge is a non sequitur. Suppose the American government sought to impose a general trade embargo on Bozarkia, a (fictional) country with a disturbing human rights record. No doubt some people would oppose the move because they happened to like the regime. But there would be good…

IN THE MIDST of a massive financial corruption scandal in Malaysia that led to the ouster of the country’s prime minister, an independent online news outlet named States Times Review published a story last November claiming that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was being investigated and that his country’s banks may have played a role in money laundering. Leaders of Singapore’s central bank were outraged, calling the claims “baseless and defamatory.” The country’s staterun media development agency ordered the story to be taken down. Site founder Alex Tan, a Singaporean political activist living in Australia, refused. So Singapore blocked access within the country to States Times Review and then asked Facebook to remove a post promoting the story. The social media site declined. Singapore’s leadership didn’t take the refusal…

THE GOVERNMENT IN the United States has increasingly become a powerful weapon that two warring tribes repeatedly seize control of and then use against each other. For those of us who are averse to being smashed, it’s long past time to consider the machinery of the state as nothing more than a bludgeon in the hands of dangerous maniacs. Dangerous? Indeed. It’s hard to beat the insight into the malicious heart of government offered by Rep. Ted Lieu on CNN in December. “I would love to be able to regulate the content of speech,” the California Democrat told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “The First Amendment prevents me from doing so, and that’s simply a function of the First Amendment.” Lieu obviously takes it for granted that many politicians would muzzle their…

STEPAN GENERALOV CLINTON, UTAH Custom-built M16A4 clone (5.56x45 mm) “I FIRST STARTED as a skateboarder, but then I learned about parkour. In parkour there was this whole philosophical movement, no joke, about building yourself as a stronger, better individual. One of the sayings that I think very well displays the philosophy behind pretty much everything I do, it goes like this: To be strong to be useful. To be strong to serve. There was a moment in my life when I decided that I am a person that is for progress—for good and against evil. “It’s not just about being able to run fast, or jump obstacles, or jump from big heights. It’s also that sometimes you cannot just run away. Maybe there’s someone with you, like your girlfriend or…

THE WOMEN’S MARCH came to Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Its purpose was to call attention to the incoming president’s history of appalling behavior toward women—behavior to which Trump had all but admitted in the infamous hot-mic moment during an Access Hollywood taping. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump had said. “You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” This was a statement that rightly offended millions of Americans of all political stripes—Trump’s electoral fortunes were never lower than immediately after the tape’s release—and thus the march held the promise of uniting the country around a universal, positive message: It’s not OK to abuse women. More than half a million people descended on D.C. for the march, making…

EXHIBIT FREEDOM: ART AS THE MESSENGER BILLY BINION A girl cartwheeling on the beach. A row of sidewalk newspaper vending machines. A man sitting alone in a subway car, a bright red MAGA beanie atop his head. These images are all part of Freedom: Art as the Messenger, the Cato Institute’s first art exhibit. Currently on view in Washington, D.C., it aims to explore the importance and complexity of American freedom—even as that word’s definition seems to continually morph into something new. Whether the exhibit suffers or benefits from the absence of image captions is up to the individual viewer. The pieces range from the direct (a photograph of the Lincoln Memorial, for instance) to the abstract (an acrylic painting of Life Saver candies). The former is one of the…

Terry Colon rose to indie comics prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was a prolific contributor to the pioneering web magazine Suck, where he shared a masthead with Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie and drew the illustration for the iconic tagline, “A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.” At Reason, he has illustrated the short stories of abuse by authorities in the Brickbats section since 2006. He has also drawn for Entertainment Weekly, Cracked, Time, and many other publications. Since joining Reason, Colon has generated an avalanche of art, but his Guernica is almost certainly “What Part of Legal Immigration Don’t You Understand?”—an illustrated flowchart that details the maddening complexity of coming legally to the United States. The illustration appeared in our October 2008 issue;…