Over the holidays the Trump administration raised the legal age to buy tobacco and nicotine vaping products from 18 to 21. It also took the opportunity to micromanage the flavors companies like Juul can provide. Menthol is in, mango is out.

It’s laughable to think a rule meant to apply to thousands of shops nationwide that can’t all be monitored will prevent any 18-year-old from finding a coveted pack of Parliaments. Our track record of keeping banned products people want out of their hands is abysmal. But with enough enforcement, it would be hard to argue that raising the smoking age wouldn’t prevent at least some young people from picking up the habit, and ultimately save lives.

A 2015 report commissioned by the National Academy of Medicine and touted by the American Lung Association in its efforts to raise the age nationally “revealed that ‘Tobacco 21” could prevent 223,000 deaths among people born between 2000 and 2019. While empirical projections like these are notoriously sensitive to the biases and assumptions every researcher brings to the table, numbers even a fraction of this size cannot just be ignored.

This is a gut-check moment for those of us, including myself, who believe that government bans and minimum ages are virtually never the right approach to society’s ills. We can parse the above report’s methodology and likely find the number of lives saved is overstated. We can point out the inevitability that such a move will have unforeseen and unintended consequences–look no further than the current heroin epidemic fueled in part by the government’s crackdown on prescription narcotics for an even more tragic recent example. Finally, we can point to prohibition and the war on drugs as nearly unassailable proof that bans do not work.

These arguments are important and correct, but in making them all we’ve done is preserve the right of 20-year-olds to smoke. The deeper truth is that a healthy society doesn’t have questions of public health or morality dictated to it by government or other large institutions. Rather, it places trust in parents and young adults to make these decisions for themselves. From these millions of decisions emerge shared cultural and moral standards far more robust than rules that are inevitably broken.

What Would Adam Smith Do?

If that sounds a bit like the difference between a market economy and central planning, it should. As many readers will likely know, the same enlightened Scotsman both celebrated and vilified for championing an economy arising from individual freedom spent the early part of his career investigating morality in much the same way.

Adam Smith first published his Theory of Moral Sentiments seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, at a time when few would have even thought to question that mankind was given morality from on high–God, clergy, king and aristocracy. But as is evident in both his major works, Smith was one of those rare scholars who understood that when millions of people think and act on their own, the whole is different and vastly greater than the sum of its parts.

Anyone unfamiliar with Smith’s earlier masterpiece can find ample synopses as well as the man’s own words in abundance online. For our purposes, suffice it to say that Smith identified our ability to care about both our own self-interest and the interest of others, the latter of which he called sympathy but is today closer to our concept of empathy. Smith also surmised that people could step back and view the actions of themselves and others through the lens of an imagined impartial observer. Through empathy, learning, and millions of ongoing human interactions, morality emerges and evolves.

But what happens when rules are imposed from on high? In a recent piece on a seemingly very different topic, Jeffrey Tucker identified several examples in industry where rules imposed from the top stifled the creativity and vigilance of companies which had every reason to provide safe and high-quality products and services. This is simple human psychology–if you know what you’re going to be told to do, it’s often easier to just do it and expend your limited mental bandwidth on something else.

This would appear to fit perfectly into Smith’s moral framework. Relieved of the “burden” of deciding between right and wrong by government and church, the process that requires each person thinking for themselves would grind to a halt.

Cigarettes and Sentiments

What does this digression, almost worthy of Smith himself, have to say about smoking? I believe it says we’ve been asking the wrong question all along. Rather than comparing the incremental costs and benefits of raising the smoking age, what if we consider a world with no smoking age at all?

At first this sounds unfathomable. But let’s recall Milton Friedman’s famous observation that “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” I see a corollary to Friedman’s idea here–it’s a mistake to judge government policy as an expression of society’s values rather than by its efficacy. People recoil at this suggestion because they feel somehow as though we’re endorsing a six-year old picking up a carton of Newports on the way home from school. That’s ridiculous, but let’s look at the more realistic dilemma of how striking the smoking age from the books would impact teens.

With no smoking age on the books, Smith’s process could much more fully kick in. Instead of shopkeepers asking “will I get caught selling cigarettes to teenagers?” the relevant question becomes “should I sell cigarettes to teenagers?” On the consumer side moral responsibility also accompanies choice. Groups of kids whose default behavior may be scheming to get ahold of cigarettes now lose this rebellious endeavor and along with at least involved parents have vastly greater agency.

Many will say that this approach benefits teens with attentive parents, likely to be prosperous and educated, while leaving the poor out on a cigarette break in the cold. But bodegas in poor neighborhoods are exactly the places law enforcement are likely to ignore, at least for a petty crime like selling cigarettes to minors. Putting that moral responsibility on shopkeeper, teen, and parent could be more effective.

We see examples of nearly this exact phenomenon in history. Around the turn of the twentieth century, there were no laws against pharmacists selling products containing cocaine. This wasn’t for lack of public apprehension–the drug was already being sensationalized in the press as a substance that would whip black men into dangerous frenzies, a playbook repeated all too often.

But concerns over cocaine caused many pharmacists to simply not sell this lucrative product. One journalist claimed that of twenty pharmacists approached, only one was willing to sell the drug, the other druggists providing “the curt rejoinder, ‘No you can’t buy that rotten stuff here.’”

On the consumer side we see similar results that while at first appearing counterintuitive make sense in light of Smith’s framework. Take, for example, the often repeated idea that European countries with lower drinking ages, if any at all, seem to struggle less with binge drinking by young people. This is casual empiricism without a doubt, but one sees its plausibility. Individuals with agency over such decisions and the ability to learn from and react to each other often yield spontaneous outcomes we would initially think impossible.

There’s a telling moment in the 2015 National Academy of Medicine report when the authors argue that while more lives would be saved by further raising the smoking age from 21 to 25, the returns would diminish quickly. The mechanism proposed by the authors is plausible–it’s less the twentysomethings’ futures at stake as teens, who are far more likely to receive cigarettes bought by 18-21 year olds than those over 21. But the observation is clearly a preemptive strike against a sort of unraveling I noted on Twitter with a good bit of sarcasm and more than a little anger.

Just like any age, 21 is arbitrary. At some point, without an all-out war on tobacco, we must allow people to make potentially life-threatening choices. And that’s where Smith’s framework most importantly informs this debate. Individuals and their friends and families, older siblings and mentors all have just a little bit of knowledge about what makes sense for any given person.

The process of discovering each individual’s best balance between instant gratification and health risks down the road is messy. Smith’s critics, as they do in his economics treatise, falsely assume he ascribes super human rationality to his subjects. That only came later when future generations tried to fully mathematize the work of the classical economists.

There is no magic bullet. Whether government-mandated or left in the hands of individuals, tobacco use will lead some to tragic consequences. Kids will get cigarettes either way, and adults will try and fail to stop. In this scenario of no good choices, the course that encourages responsibility and humanity seems like something we might want to try.

Max Gulker

This article is republished with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Image: Valentin Ottone

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To add insult to injury, the head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, claims that Majors was buying marijuana in the park and that is what put her in this dangerous scenario. He explains how he believes that recent limits on enforcement of marijuana laws in New York City contributed to this deadly situation.

What I am understanding is that [Majors] was in the park to buy marijuana….We don’t enforce marijuana laws anymore. We’re basically hands-off on the enforcement of marijuana. I understand the mayor made statements that this is surprising on how this can happen in New York City….I really have to question what world he’s living in to think that this is surprising, when we are watching the city slowly erode, with shootings, stabbings, an increase in homicides and, most importantly, a hands-off policing policy.

Majors’ family is taking offense to Mullins’ comments because, “…they intentionally or unintentionally direct blame onto Tess, a young woman, for her own murder.”

Nick Gillespie at Reason sees Mullins’ words as yet another reference to the old “reefer madness” hysteria, “…in which devil weed is the source of all forms of evil and criminality, even when it remains illegal.”

I can’t define what Mullins meant in his comments. I don’t read hearts and minds and, honestly, I don’t want to. But I did listen to the entirety of his radio interview. It doesn’t strike me as blatant victim-blaming. In actuality, he is taking way more swipes at NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio.

Furthermore, his comments are not textbook “refer madness” stuff because he never once says that these young teens went on a murderous rampage because they took a few too many hits of the devil’s lettuce. In context, Mullins blames the violence on the city (including Majors’ murder) – on somewhat of a lawless society that allows offenders to spin down a more violent hole.

There are many things that Mullins said in the interview that are questionable. Maybe he does hold to disproved parts of “reefer madness” and blames victims for being victims of violent crime, but I didn’t get that from this one radio appearance. He could be giving listeners a probable reason that an eighteen-year-old would be alone in a questionably safe park at night. But don’t take my word for it, listen to it here.

The problem is that NYC law enforcement might have given up on enforcing laws against marijuana consumption and trade, but it is still not legal to be bought and sold. (There is some liberalization on patients using it for medicinal purposes, but its effects are minimal).

In the same way alcohol prohibition enriched criminals, the marijuana black-market just proliferates and seedy characters take advantage of the fast cash they can make while providing consumers with a product that they demand.

The post NYC College Student Stabbing: Reefer Madness Murder? appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The prohibition of alcohol may be one of the greatest examples in the 20th century of the government trying to overstep its bounds by attempting to become the moral arbitrator of right and wrong within civilized society. Instead of transforming men into angels through social engineering, the movement intended millions of Americans suddenly became criminals by trying to consume or sell an alcoholic beverage.

A study conducted by Mark Thorton of the Cato Insitute notes America had seen a steady decline in crime over the 19th and 20th centuries. However, due to the Prohibition of alcohol, the homicide rate in large cities had a 78% increase over the pre-prohibition period due to restrictions placed on alcohol.

The birth of organized crime was another disastrous consequence of the government’s war on booze. This era saw the rise of infamous mob bosses like Al Capone, who greatly profited from the sale of illegal hooch. Dave Roos of History.com makes mention of the fact that it was Prohibition that was the launching pad for organized crime in America in his interview with Howard Abadinsky, author of Organized Crime. “Suddenly gang leaders are making deals with each other,” says Abadinsky, forging mutual protection pacts across state and international borders, and across ethnic lines, to ensure that shipments of illegal alcohol poured freely into the big cities.

“These are very violent people who are used to solving problems by killing them, but eventually they sit down and say, ‘We’ll guarantee peace in your area if you guarantee peace in our area.’ That’s called syndicated crime, this cooperation between criminal groups,” says Abadinsky. “In the absence of Prohibition, we wouldn’t have had the kind of syndicated criminality that occurred. Prohibition was the catalyst.”, says Roos, according to History.com.

As if a sharp rise in the homicide rate and the birth of organized crime in the states was not enough, you can also blame the Prohibition Movement and Progressives of the Temperance societies and their pollical allies for the deaths of around 13,000 people. In 1927, Time Magazine reported that the government introduced a new system for “denaturing” alcohol. Denaturing was the adding of unappetizing or toxic chemicals into industrialized liquor in an effort to keep people from drinking industrial-grade alcohol to avoid paying a tax on alcoholic drinks. The process introduced by anti-alcohol advocates in government made spirits toxic to consume. “The new formula included “4 parts methanol (wood alcohol), 2.25 parts pyridine bases, 0.5 parts benzene to 100 parts ethyl alcohol”, Time Magazine reported. Time also reported that this formula was known to cause blindness.

No matter what an individual may think about the consumption of alcohol or drugs on a personal level, if we learn one thing from Prohibition, it’s that banning things never works. More often than not, it makes the problem much worse. The suffering created by the assault on the liberty of Americans that was created by the 18th amendment was worsened by the $300 million dollars needed to enforce the tyrannical law.

And so we remember the passing of the 21st amendment, which officially marked the end of the era of Prohibition on December 5th, 1933.  May I propose a toast to all my compatriots – I say, have a drink and remember, Prohibition stinks!

The post Have A Drink, Prohibition Stinks: Remembering the Tyranny of Prohibition appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family of modest means in 1912, Friedman distinguished himself scholastically at a young age. After graduating high school at age 16, he attended Rutgers University where he studied math and economics. He continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he received an MA in economics and would ultimately retire in 1977 after more than 30 years of teaching—a year after receiving the Nobel Prize for his contributions to economic science. Friedman continued writing and speaking publicly through various mediums—magazine columns and television, academic journals and newspaper op-eds—until his death in 2006.

12 Truth Bombs

The Economist has described Friedman as “a giant among economists” and “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century.” Here are 12 things he said to serve as food for thought:

1. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” – >Capitalism and Freedom (2002)

2. “I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.” – As quoted in ‪If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People? (2009)

3. “With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.” –Lecture “The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community” (1983)

4. “It’s a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don’t approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.” – America’s Drug Forum interview (1991)

5. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” – Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (Dec. 7, 1975)

6. “You must distinguish sharply between being pro-free enterprise and being pro-business.” – Big Business, Big Government (1978)

7. “The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.” – From “Created Equal,” an episode of the PBS Free to Choose television series (1980)

8. “Governments never learn; only people learn.” – As quoted in The Cynic’s Lexicon: A Dictionary Of Amoral Advice‎ (1984)

9. “We have to recognize that we must not hope for a Utopia that is unattainable. I would like to see a great deal less government activity than we have now, but I do not believe that we can have a situation in which we don’t need government at all.” – As quoted in The Times Herald, Norristown, Pennsylvania (Dec. 1, 1978)

10. “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.” – “Why Government Is the Problem” (February 1, 1993), p. 19

11. “The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do.” – America’s Drug Forum interview (1991)

12. “There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 percent of our national income.” – Fox News interview (May 2004).

This article is republished from Intellectual Takeout.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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Eager for a solution, President Trump was quick to propose banning flavored vape cartridges on the federal level, while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Sunday that he was seeking an emergency ban on flavored e-cigarettes within the state. But in rushing to outlaw potential culprits of this problem, the government is actually worsening the situation and placing individuals in harm’s way.

The truth of the matter is, if we really want to know how this problem came about—and how it can be solved—we need to take a closer look at the role marijuana prohibition has played in making vape products less safe for consumers.

The Rise of Vaping

Currently, flavored e-cigarettes are bearing the brunt of the public’s fears surrounding the vaping issue, but this blame may be almost entirely unwarranted.

While the first e-cigarette came on the market in 2006, it wasn’t until a handful of years ago that vaping became a mainstream alternative to smoking cigarettes. Walk past any bar on any given weekend and you are now sure to see groups of young hipsters huddled outside, taking drags off their Juuls and other e-cigarettes, as clouds of strawberry- and mint-flavored vapor fills the air. You can now buy JUUL in Canada at 180 Smoke.

Many of these young people have never been traditional smokers; they just like vaping. In fact, a recent study found that fewer young adults are using drugs these days, but more and more have reported using e-cigarettes.

As trendy and cool as vaping has become, it initially appealed to consumers because it offered them what was thought to be a safe alternative to ingesting the toxic ingredients found in every cigarette. Instead of lighting up, users could now vape liquid nicotine, giving them their fix without the threat of developing lung cancer from other chemicals and additives.

While the safety of vaping is now in question, there are some studies that suggest that it is 95 percent safer than smoking. In fact, Britain’s Royal College of Physicians released its findings a few years ago and the results seemed more than hopeful that vaping was a viable alternative to cigarettes.

The study is especially interesting, considering that Britain’s Royal College of Physicians was one of the first groups to link cigarettes to lung cancer—a warning America ignored for several years, mind you.

However, now that there are confirmed deaths linked to vaping, the public has grown understandably concerned. These fears have only been exacerbated by the CDC’s recent warning that, ”people should consider not using e-cigarette products.” Some vape users have become so worried, they’ve taken the CDC’s warning to heart and abandoned their e-cigarettes, choosing instead to switch back to regular cigarettes.

As of now, we still do not have a conclusive answer as to what precisely is causing all these new cases of respiratory illness. We do know, however, that cigarettes cause lung cancer. Yet, the CDC is advising nicotine-dependent individuals to forego vaping, effectively sending them right back into the arms of a known carcinogen. For those young people who vape but who have never smoked, this may draw them into cigarettes, posing severe health problems down the road.

Worse still, the CDC’s advice completely ignores vital information that could potentially exonerate nicotine vapes from these speculative charges.

Will the Real Culprit Please Stand Up?

According to a new report that looked at respiratory cases in Wisconsin and Illinois, 83 percent of the patients suffering from this illness admitted to using black market cannabis products. While 17 percent said that they had only used nicotine products, it should be noted that marijuana is still illegal in Wisconsin as well as federally, meaning patients might naturally be more reluctant to admit using it. It is likely, then, that the percentage of cases arising from THC products is higher.

So far, 21 patients in California, all eight in New Mexico, and 24 of 27 patients in Wisconsin have admitted to using black market THC products, while information in other states is still unclear.

And even though the New England Journal of Medicine has suggested that both THC and nicotine products are to blame, as of now, no legitimate vape company has been implicated, giving further credibility to the claims that this is a black market THC problem, not a vape problem.

When you visit a cannabis dispensary in California, Colorado, or Nevada, the products available for purchase list the ingredients used on the package so consumers know exactly what they are getting. And since this is a regulated industry, certain additives are banned from being used in commercially-sold vape cartridges. When you purchase something from the black market, on the other hand, you are not always entirely sure what you are getting.

In order to get the vape liquid to its desired thickness, many black-market producers will “cut” the product with vitamin E oil, which many now believe is to blame for the current crisis. Citing Byrn Mawr chemist Michelle Francl, The Washington Post explains why vitamin E presents such a problem to the respiratory system:

When that vapor cools down in the lungs, it returns to its original state at that temperature and pressure, she said, which means ‘it has now coated the inside of your lungs with that oil.’

Essentially, this oil is turning back into its original state in your lungs after it is inhaled, causing problems for users. While this explanation is consistent with many of the symptoms associated with the reported cases, vitamin E could not be linked to every case of this respiratory illness, which has some cautioning that it is too early to blame this whole debacle on just one additive.

One thing that does seem clear is that the rise of this new lung condition is more closely linked to black market THC than it is to legal nicotine vape products. Which begs the question, why don’t we just legalize cannabis and cut out the black market threat altogether?

What’s to Be Done?

Unfortunately, the government has taken its typical “ban all the things” approach to this problem, even though this tactic is exactly how we ended up in this situation in the first place.

Black market THC vape cartridges, for example, are already illegal. Even in states where cannabis use is legal, you still have to purchase these products from licensed dispensaries. Yet, that hasn’t stopped state entities from proposing more bans on products that are… already banned.

But if more states follow New York’s lead and begin to ban flavored nicotine products along with cannabis products, consumers will just take their business to the black market where they run the risk of coming in contact with these hazardous products. And with an increased demand for flavored nicotine products, it’s likely that more black market dealers will begin dabbling in nicotine as well as THC vape cartridges, putting more people at risk.

If government officials were serious about solving the vape crisis, they wouldn’t waste their time trying to ban nicotine vapes. Instead, they would end federal marijuana prohibition, thereby creating a legitimate market where consumers could safely purchase products.

The reason these illnesses are coming from THC vapes and not nicotine is precisely because the latter is legal while the former is not. By keeping THC illegal, you push consumers and producers underground, where accountability is less likely to occur.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Want to Solve the Vape Crisis? End Marijuana Prohibition appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

“We are going to have to do something about it,” the president told reporters at the White House, describing vaping as a “new problem in the country, according to USA Today.

“I just announced with @POTUS and @FDACommissioner that we will be finalizing policies that will clear flavored e-cigarettes from the market. New provisional data show that youth use continues to rise rapidly, and we will not stand idly by.” Alex Azar, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, tweeted Wednesday. 

“Today, President Trump announced that the Food and Drug Administration will be finalizing guidance that removes all flavored e-cigarettes from the marketplace other than tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes. Why is that important? We are seeing an absolute surge in high school and middle school kids using these flavored products – mint menthol, fruit-flavored, alcohol flavored, bubblegum! We’ve got to stop, or we are going to have a whole generation of children addicted to nicotine, and that’s just horrible, and President Trump as the great public health leader that he is going to put a stop to it. We are going to let these tobacco-flavored e-cigarette products remain on the market until they apply for FDA approval, but that’s just because adults may need them to help with stopping smoking cigarettes or cigars.But if we see actions that target these products toward kids or make them available to kids, or if we see kids going into tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes we’re coming after that too.” Azar said in a video tweeted by the White House official Twitter profile on Wednesday.

These federal actions come on the heels of the news of the sixth person dying as a result of alleged vaping related illnesses.

To date, there have been no specific vaping products linked to the illnesses, including flavored products which have been the target of fearmongering and calls for prohibition. 

The majority of patients have  reported using products containing marijuana-related elements. New York officials are currently investigating the link to high levels of Vitamin E acetate. Officials are warning people against black market and modified vape products.

Although the focus of the calls for prohibition have been children, all of the deaths have been adults, with four of the six being middle-aged or older.

It would do well for our elected officials to remember the lessons of history when it comes to prohibition, and that government intervention often worsens these problems.

Image: Flickr

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“This is delicious but wouldn’t it be great if the original recipe with wormwood were legal again?”

My friend, the economist George Selgin, said; “This has wormwood in it just like the absinthe from the old days!”

I grabbed the bottle and looked at the ingredients. Sure enough, he was right! Printed right on the label was the word. Then I became worried that something terrible or wonderful was about to happen to me, that I would see green fairies, hallucinate that I was floating, and maybe cut off my ear.

It turns out that I was the victim of a 100-year old moral panic about wormwood that has absolutely no basis in fact at all. Wormwood has been used as a medicinal herb since the ancient world, and there is a great deal of legend surrounding the stuff, but there is zero evidence that it has any hallucinogenic properties at all!

What about the belief that it was banned? It was indeed banned, over most of the Western world since the late 19th century. But get this (which you probably already know but I did not): it was relegalized for import into the United States in 2007. Now there are micro-distilleries all over the country that make the real thing, the exact drink about which Oscar Wilde wrote:

After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien.”

Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a bottle right now. Fortunately you can, because your right to drink the stuff has been restored. The century-old moral panic is over. However, with that change, some of the cachet has been drained away from this yummy drink, which, as it turns out, is just a drink like any other: if you drink too much, you get drunk. Nothing special here.

The irony of the history here is that it was precisely the dire warnings, first issued in French medical journals in the mid 19th century, that created the vast demand for absinthe all over Europe and America. Dangerous drink? Bring it on. The British medical journals seemed to agree that absinthe was highly dangerous, citing this strange experiment from 1869:

The question whether absinthe exerts any special action other than that of alcohol in general, has been revived by some experiments by MM. Magnan and Bouchereau in France. These gentlemen placed a guinea-pig under a glass case with a saucer full of essence of wormwood (which is one of the flavouring matters of absinthe) by his side. Another guinea-pig was similarly shut up with a saucer full of pure alcohol. A cat and a rabbit were respectively enclosed along with a saucer each full of wormwood. The three animals which inhaled the vapours of wormwood experienced, first, excitement, and then epileptiform convulsions. The guinea-pig which merely breathed the fumes of alcohol, first became lively, then simply drunk. Upon these facts it is sought to establish the conclusion that the effects of excessive absinthe drinking are seriously different from those of ordinary alcoholic intemperance.

Whoo hoo! You can imagine, then, why that generation of artists, poets, playwrights, and literary gadabouts immediately seized on this drink and caused it to be the most fashionable in the land, spreading the plague of absinthism far and wide. Paintings, poetry, music were written in homage to the great muse of the green fairy. No doubt that people believed it, just as Dumbo thought it was the feather that made him fly.

At the height of the absinthe mania in France, 5:00pm became known as “the green hour.” The french were drinking 5 times as much absinthe as wine. The French producers were shipping all over the world. It became the world’s most notorious drink.

Here we have a classic case: science speaks of danger, daring people jump on the trend, moralists get outraged, government acts. That is precisely the situation that lasted for 100 years until it became rather obvious that absinthe is just a normal liquor.

The reason it gained the reputation for making people insane – Vincent Van Gogh, for example – is that highly fashionable people were drinking far too much of the stuff. It was a classic fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. A confusion of cause and effect. That was enough to effect a century of prohibition.

Here is another medical journal from 1873 about the vast multitudes of “victims of absinthe.”

Originally the only important ingredient in its composition, besides alcohol, was the essential oil of absinthium, or wormwood; and though, doubtless, this added something to the mischievous effects of the liquor, it would be impossible to trace to it, or to the other comparatively trivial ingredients, the more serious of the special results which are now observed to occur in the victims of absinthe. An analysis recently made at the Conservatoire des Arts shows that the absinthe now contains a large proportion of antimony, a poison which cannot fail to add largely to the irritant effects necessarily produced on the alimentary canal and the liver by constant doses of a concentrated alcoholic liquid. As at present constituted, therefore, and especially when drunk in the disastrous excess now common in Paris, and taken frequently upon an empty stomach, absinthe forms a chronic poison of almost unequalled virulence, both as an irritant to the stomach and bowels, and also as a destroyer of the nervous system.

Science has spoken. What can you do but ban it? That didn’t happen until 1915 (the same few years in which every terrible trend in politics happened, from income taxation to central banking). By then, the drink became associated with elaborate rituals that survive to this day, such as the slow-drip fountain that pours over a special steel spoon that holds a sugar cube. So far as I can tell, the ritual is entirely for show (if you want a bit of sweet in your drink, just add simple syrup) but it’s also enormously fun to reenact the faux-decadence of the absinthe generation. Even now, Amazon offers many absinthe fountains, most in the Victorian style of course.

The war on absinthe – this won’t surprise you – created the opposite of its intended effect. It raised the status of the drink and created a completely unwarranted hysteria in both directions: overconsumption followed by bans. Can you think of anything else, perhaps, that has fit that general model? Marijuana perhaps? Liquor in general? Tobacco? Politically incorrect speech?

Bans stemming from moral panics never seem to end, and people never seem to learn from this classic example. But in this case, glory be, the bans gradually came to an end. We’ve lived a full twelve years of absinthe freedom. And sure enough, with that freedom has come a bit of blase attitude toward it. When I ordered it last night, the bartender had to hunt for 10 minutes to find the bottle.

There is surely another lesson here. My own prediction is that once marijuana becomes universally decriminalized it will at that moment become far less fashionable than it has been for 40 years.

It’s my habit, and maybe it should be yours, to celebrate every bit of freedom we gain back from the armies of authoritarians who wield the power of the state to improve our lives. It took one hundred years, but they finally got their mitts off this one market.

To me, this merits a visit from the green fairy as soon as possible. Raise that glass to the freedom to choose, even to hallucinate.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

The post Your Right to Absinthe appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

I’ve been fighting federal overreach for years, but now it’s getting personal!

I’ve been working with the Tenth Amendment Center for almost a decade. That’s a lot of activism.

It should be pretty obvious that I am passionate about the work and that I believe deeply in the principles. You don’t work for an organization like the TAC for fame and fortune. You have to really believe in what you’re fighting for to stay in the fight. To call it wearisome at times would be an understatement.

But I have to be honest; most of the time I’m fighting for an abstraction. We talk about things like “liberty” and “freedom” and “limited government.” I believe deeply in these concepts, but most of the time, they are just that — concepts. Despite tremendous government overreach, I can still go through most days without being consciously aware of it. Of course, I catch glimpses of the beast, like when I’m standing in line in my socks at the airport waiting to get felt up. Or when I write those checks to the IRS. Or when I don’t get to keep my doctor as promised. But by and large, we live under a soft tyranny. It’s like a fish in water. He isn’t really aware that he’s wet.

But this week, the tyranny got really personal.

A friend and fellow liberty activist was indicted on federal marijuana charges. He could face 10 years to life in prison. You read that right.

Life.

For a plant.

I don’t care what you might think about weed; there is no justice in locking a man in a cage for the rest of this life for a plant. I can kill my next door neighbor and not get that much prison time.

Millions of people use marijuana. Many of them use it for medical reasons. Thirty-three states have legalized cannabis for medical use. Ten states have legalized it for general adult use. And yet the feds continue to maintain complete prohibition.

I have to pause here and emphasize that the federal government lacks the constitutional authority to prohibit a plant. If you doubt me, ask yourself why it required a constitutional amendment to institute alcohol prohibition.

But it goes beyond that. The real question is who owns you? If you own yourself, then government bureaucrats don’t have the right to dictate what you can and cannot put in your body. And they don’t have the right to lock people in cages who chose to put a substance that other people disapprove of into their bodies. And they don’t have the right to lock people in cages who engage in voluntary exchanges involving such substances.

Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn’t believe in self-ownership. Somebody else owns you. That means you’re a slave.

It’s as simple as that.

Seeing somebody I know caught up in the system has made the idea of tyranny very real to me. Maybe in some ways, it’s a good reminder. Because I’ll tell you this — liberty isn’t an abstraction to me right now.

You can hear more on this subject in my latest Thoughts from Maharrey Head podcast.

You can help fight this injustice by donating to this liberty activist’s legal fund HERE.

The post American Tyranny Is Real: The War on Liberty Gets Personal appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

When Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, also known as the Farm Bill, last December, it effectively ended the federal government’s prohibition of industrial hemp. And just six months after its passage and subsequent declassification as a federally controlled substance, hemp is already proving itself to be a lucrative crop for farmers, consumers, and job-seekers. In fact, hemp has so much potential economically speaking, it leads many to wonder why it was ever illegal in the first place.

What Is Hemp, Anyway?

If you ask any given passerby on the street what hemp is, it’s likely they will be able to tell you it has something to do with the cannabis plant. However, many might not be able to expand on what exactly sets hemp apart from the marijuana that is typically smoked or consumed to induce feelings of euphoria.

To be sure, while hemp and marijuana are both derivatives of the cannabis plant, they are very different. Its most significant difference lies in the fact that hemp has drastically less tetrahydrocannabinol—or THC, as it is most commonly referred to—than marijuana. While this has always been the case, it was not until the passage of the Farm Bill last year that the legal definition of hemp was officially set to be defined as a part of the cannabis plant that contains less than 0.3 percent THC.

For those unfamiliar, THC is the chemical responsible for inducing the “high” commonly associated with “smoking weed.” But since hemp has such low traces of THC, you would have to smoke ungodly amounts before inducing the same high as you would from, say, smoking a joint. In fact, while it is often said in jest that a person would need to smoke a joint the size of a telephone pole in order to get high on hemp, this is actually not that far off from the truth.

Yet, even though hemp does not contain the same psychoactive compounds as marijuana, the government still lumped it into the same category as heroin and LSD, successfully preventing it from becoming a cash crop for farmers and a commodity for consumers. However, now that there are no longer legal ramifications for its cultivation, the floodgates have been opened for this new market.

The Other Green Rush

Some might be shocked to learn that hemp is one of the earliest domesticated plants and has been cultivated by humans for more than 12,000 years. It is also currently used in some 25,000 products from automotive parts, rope, furniture, textiles, food, beverages, beauty products, and construction supplies. Hemp also contains cannabidiol, or CBD, which has been effective in combating insomnia, anxiety, chronic pain, and other ailments and has been a major reason for the hemp boom currently being experienced throughout the country.

In fact, CBD has become such a popular product in the health and wellness world that one hemp farmer in California even recalls,

I’ve had people come up to me and shake my hand for growing hemp because of the CBD, because they truly think it is going to help them.

While hemp just got the official green light from Congress, the 2014 farm bill allowed farmers to “pilot” the cultivation of hemp so long as they worked with and got approval from local state agricultural programs. This gave many farmers the opportunity to experiment with the cultivation of hemp to see if it was worth their time and money.

In that time, the legal CBD market has taken off, with just about everyone and their mom getting into the business. Google “CBD oil,” and you will be overwhelmed with options. Currently, the CBD market is a multi-million dollar industry but is soon expected to be a multi-billion dollar one.

“The demand for CBD products is exploding. At the moment the demand is far outpacing the supply,” says Heather Darby, a hemp expert at the University of Vermont Extension. “Farmers and businesses are scaling up production quickly and moving from producing an acre to producing 50 acres.”

To put this number into perspective, according to the Brightfield Group, a Chicago-based cannabis research firm, one acre of land can house anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 hemp plants, which can generate $40,000-$50,000 for producers. Looking at the bigger picture, the Brightfield Group also estimates that the legal CBD market could be worth $20 billion by the year 2022.

A Booming Industry

Vote Hemp’s 2017 US Hemp Crop Report found that 23,343 acres of hemp were cultivated in America that year alone. In 2018, that number rose to 77,000 acres. Now that hemp is legal nationwide, this number is expected to skyrocket during 2019.

In rural parts of the country where farmland is plentiful, this presents a huge opportunity for the agricultural sectors. In Massachusetts alone, for example, there are over half a million acres of farmland. And for many farmers, growing hemp has become far more beneficial than growing traditional crops like corn, soybeans, and even tobacco.

In Kentucky, Brent Cornett, a farmer and member of the hemp grower’s group Atalo Holdings, explained how over the last three years he has been increasingly replacing his tobacco crops with hemp. “There’s been plenty of challenges with a new crop, but as of today, a mediocre hemp crop is yielding a better return than an excellent tobacco crop,” Cornett explained. Cornett has also increased his hemp cultivation from 20 acres in 2016 to 85 acres in 2018.

Another farmer in Northern California, Ben Roberti, has also been experimenting with the cultivation of hemp. Traditionally a dairy and alfalfa farmer, Roberti has been worried that he has to diversify his crops if he wants to stay in business.

So many of the dairies are shutting down on the west coast that we just don’t view alfalfa as a commodity for the future.

In addition hemp is one of the easiest plants to grow. It can grow almost anywhere and no need to obtain any special farming equipment. You could sow them in pots or growing kits and, then, transplanting into the ground.  But don’t forget that that cannabis plants need safe, healthy root system, so choosing the right container is important.  If you are interested in growing hemp indoors click for more about growing kits.

While hemp requires less water on average than a tobacco plant, it is harder to harvest. This is largely due to the fact that the harvesting process just hasn’t been perfected yet. According to Roberti, it is labor-intensive since no commercial machinery exists yet to aid in the process. However, if the industry continues to grow at this rate, innovation is inevitable.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Atalo Holdings CEO William Hilliard commented on this agricultural boom, saying,

The hemp CBD industry is growing exponentially and presents a real opportunity for rural economic development, with tremendous enthusiasm from consumers.

With consumers wanting more hemp products, there are more opportunities for entrepreneurs to find new and innovative ways to turn the crop into various consumer goods. And with more hemp-based products on the market, there are now more opportunities for new jobs to be created in the economy.

“Job creation is going to happen in every economic bracket,” said Erica McBride Stark, executive director of the National Hemp Association. “The hemp industry will create high-skilled management jobs, labor-type jobs and everything in between. It’s going to touch all of society.”

While the cultivating, processing, and manufacturing of hemp are the most obvious areas where new jobs can be created, this is just the tip of the iceberg. With new products and companies popping up as a result, the industry will have a pressing need for lawyers, compliance officers, accountants, IT specialists, marketing specialists, retail employees, transporters, researchers, CEOs, CFOs, and everything in between.

HempStaff, a job recruiting site for the cannabis industry, has seen job openings double over the last year, now accounting for 16 percent of its business. Indeed, a more general employment search engine, has seen a sharp rise in job openings in the legal hemp sector. It’s hard to find any downsides to the burgeoning hemp market. The real question is: why did it take so long to get here?

Why Did It Take So Long?

Like many sectors, the lack of growth and innovation in the hemp sector is a result of government regulation. While the cultivation of hemp in America can be traced back to the time of the founding of the Jamestown Colony, in 1937 the crop garnered a bad reputation after it was labeled “the evil weed.”

Due to its relationship to marijuana, hemp was lumped into the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which passed a $100 transfer tax on its sale, making it too expensive to cultivate. However, the reasons behind this tax had more to do with protectionism, specifically involving William Randolph Hearst and the Dupont company.

As explained by Global Hemp:

Those thought to gain the most were Hearst who owned large timber holdings which feed the paper industry. DuPont who dominated the petrochemical market, which manufactured plastics, paints, and other products of fossil fuels and the Secretary of the Treasury and owner of Gulf oil Andrew Mellon who pushed legislation through Congress giving tax breaks to oil companies. The Conspiracy was against hemp, it threaten[ed] certain vested financial and industrial interest especially those in the paper and petrochemical industries.

During World War II, the government made an exception since hemp was a great source for making rope and other textiles, allowing farmers to grow it legally once more. However, as soon as the war ended, so did the government’s leniency.

It may have taken nearly eight decades, but now that federal prohibition is coming to an end and more information about hemp is available, more people are understanding the significant role this part of the cannabis plant can play in stimulating economic growth all across the country.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post Green Rush: How Hemp Is Growing the Economy and Transforming American Farming appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The temperance movement – the collective effort of some to decrease and even eliminate the consumption of alcohol – gained a foothold in the United States in the 19^th century and their efforts culminated in the passage of the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1919; the amendment that ushered in the prohibition of alcohol.

In theory, prohibition was supposed to lessen access to alcohol and therefore lessen its use. Initially the theory seemed to work in practice as overall alcohol consumption did go down. But then alcohol use entered a phase of stead increase as the black market that grew up around prohibition increased the supply of illegal booze to the masses.

But alcohol prohibition had another effect, one that was much more dangerous to society as a whole than alcohol itself could ever be. The prohibition of alcohol was almost immediately accompanied by a drastic increase in crime, across the board. Murder, robbery, assault; all serious crimes saw increases.

From The Cato Institute:

“America had experienced a gradual decline in the rate of serious crimes over much of the 19th and early 20^th centuries. That trend was unintentionally reversed by the efforts of the Prohibition movement. The homicide rate in large cities increased from 5.6 per 100,000 population during the first decade of the century to 8.4 during the second decade when the Harrison Narcotics Act, a wave of state alcohol prohibitions, and World War I alcohol restrictions were enacted. The homicide rate increased to 10 per 100,000 population during the 1920s, a 78 percent increase over the pre-Prohibition period.

“The Volstead Act, passed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, had an immediate impact on crime. According to a study of 30 major U.S. cities, the number of crimes increased 24 percent between 1920 and 1921. The study revealed that during that period more money was spent on police (11.4+ percent) and more people were arrested for violating Prohibition laws (102+ percent). But increased law enforcement efforts did not appear to reduce drinking: arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct increased 41 percent, and arrests of drunken drivers increased 81 percent. Among crimes with victims, thefts and burglaries increased 9 percent, while homicides and incidents of assault and battery increased 13 percent.”

Not only was crime more prevalent, the profits to be made from illegal alcohol caused it to become more organized. Many are familiar with the illegal empires built by the likes of Al Capone in Chicago and Joe Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, and later Charles “Lucky” Luciano in New York City. The profits made from these years allowed the American Mafia to continue to grow in power and wealth long after prohibition was repealed.

A lot of crime that occurred during alcohol prohibition can be traced back to the disastrous economic effects. From the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition:

“Prohibition’s supporters were initially surprised by what did not come to pass during the dry era. When the law went into effect, they expected sales of clothing and household goods to skyrocket. Real estate developers and landlords expected rents to rise as saloons closed and neighborhoods improved. Chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drink companies all expected growth. Theater producers expected new crowds as Americans looked for new ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. None of it came to pass.

“Instead, the unintended consequences proved to be a decline in amusement and entertainment industries across the board. Restaurants failed, as they could no longer make a profit without legal liquor sales. Theater revenues declined rather than increase, and few of the other economic benefits that had been predicted came to pass.

“On the whole, the initial economic effects of Prohibition were largely negative. The closing of breweries, distilleries and saloons led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, and in turn thousands more jobs were eliminated for barrel makers, truckers, waiters, and other related trades.”

The years of alcohol prohibition were also more deadly for police. From 1918 to 1921 alone there was a 46% increase in the number of police officers killed. Put another way, there were 166 officer deaths in 1918; in 1921 that number went over 200, staying there every year until 1936, peaking at 304 deaths in 1930. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 and officer deaths began to decline, dipping below 200 in 1936 and below 100 by 1943. In fact, the number of officer deaths in a year wouldn’t reach 200 again until the year 1970, which is a pivotal year in part 2 of this series concerning the war on drugs.

It is not enough to say alcohol prohibition was a failure. That implies that the results desired weren’t quite reached and that’s the extent of the problem. But alcohol prohibition went way beyond failure; it was an actively destructive force that made many areas of society much worse off than they had been under the status quo. It lead to more crime, more corruption, less prosperity, and more death while laying the foundation for the largest criminal organizations ever created in the United States.

We learned many lessons from the prohibition of alcohol; unfortunately these lessons weren’t enough to prevent similar actions being taken to try and curtail the sale and use of illicit drugs, a subject we will tackle in the next part of this series, coming soon!

The post A History of Prohibition – Part 1: The Rise of the Mob appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.