News Miner 8

Notes on the legislative session, fentanyl, Lauren Boebert, and more.

Welcome to the latest “News Miner.”

Shorten the Session

Recently Complete Colorado published my article, “Let’s shorten Colorado’s legislative session.” I argue:

Lawmakers cram the session with as many bills as they can. If the session were longer, they’d just fill it with more bills. I think we should shorten the session precisely to encourage legislators to pick their battles more carefully. . . .

With fewer bills and a shorter session, regular citizens would have some hope of actually paying attention to what the legislature is up to. . . . Paradoxically, the more government intrudes in people’s lives, the more it becomes the arena of tax-paid political professionals and of special-interest lobbyists. . . .

We should also consider doubling the size of the House.

Read the entire piece.

Polis on the Drug War and Fentanyl

Governor Jared Polis recently told CPR:

I’ve long called the war on drugs a failure. I’m proud of Colorado legalizing marijuana, [being the] first state to do so. Legalizing marijuana did not increase underage use. It does lead to a safer marijuana supply. In fact, this is a perfect example: For states where marijuana is still underground and illegal, it's a lot more likely to be contaminated with fentanyl or other toxins that could kill or severely harm people. Here in Colorado, I'm proud of our regulatory system. 

Just like moonshine killed people when alcohol was illegal because [it was] improperly made. These days, you go to a liquor store, or Safeway, wherever you go—unless you drink too much and have alcohol poisoning, alcohol is not in low amounts, toxic. Same with marijuana. So, it's a good reason to regulate and make sure we have safe marijuana and alcohol. 

We are now worried about fentanyl infiltrating other drug supplies. It’s not that cocaine isn’t dangerous, it is. But [it is in] a totally different category of risk than fentanyl, which can kill instantly. Many drugs like meth and cocaine kill slowly over time.

As Chase Woodruff asked, “Do you think Polis realized midway through this answer that he was directly contradicting the logic of the fentanyl bill?”

Polis is right that today’s street fentanyl is highly potent and can quickly kill someone. But that is the case because people have no idea if the black-market drugs they buy contain fentanyl, or, if they do, how much of the drug they contain. So it’s a crap shoot. As I’ve pointed out, prohibition is the underlying problem that creates this dangerous black market in drugs.

Related. . . Reporter Elise Schmelzer writes (pointing to her article):

Denver police chief said police would focus on violent crimes and drug dealing. But arrest data shows those account for only 8% of arrests. Instead, hundreds of arrests were for minor crimes, like drug paraphernalia, trespassing and drug possession.

Her colleague Alex Burness adds, “Even though all kinds of people use drugs, it's those who do that in public view who will be most likely to face criminal consequences.”

Denverite has this interesting finding: “Of all the substance crimes recorded at or near Union Station, 60% were paraphernalia charges, 32% were for possession, and 7% were labeled with ‘distribution.’” I’m all for cleaning up public areas and keeping them free of people misusing them, but the way to do that is to enforce laws against trespass and the like, not to punish people for possessing plastic and metal objects.

Allison Sherry reports that the FBI arrested three bank robbers who “told investigators they were supporting a fentanyl addiction.” John Kellner commented, “The community impact of fentanyl cannot be overlooked. Increases in burglary, car theft, catalytic converter theft, even bank robbery, linked to fentanyl.” It’s unclear to me what fraction of those problems is clearly related to fentanyl addiction, but obviously Kellner points to a real problem. My response: It is government’s job to protect people’s rights by going after criminals, not to treat possession of drugs as a proxy for rights-violating crimes. Obviously most people who possess fentanyl do not commit rights-violating crimes.

My position is that government should not criminalize the possession of any drug. Possessing drugs violates no one’s rights, so criminalizing such possession does violate people’s rights. Still, I’ve said that the fentanyl bill is better with a requirement that a person knowingly possessed fentanyl to be charged with a felony than without that requirement. But that is not an unqualified improvement, Woodruff notes:

Notable that the one concession opponents will get on this bill is mens rea, which means harsher punishments for people with opioid use disorders, who are more likely to knowingly use fentanyl, while making sure that, say, rich kids with tainted party drugs don’t get swept up in this.

Boebert Watch

Lauren Boebert ranted about “replacement theory” and about immigrants “killing American jobs.” It's amazing how Republicans such as Boebert can rail against socialism and then promote collectivist ideas.

The Denver Post reports, “Boebert met with then-President Donald Trump’s White House officials before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, while they discussed what options the vice president had when faced with certifying the 2020 election.”

Mother Jones published a long critique of Boebert by Abigail Weinberg. I’ll relate a few details. Boebert and her husband Jayson opened Shooters Grill in 2013. Wait staff wore pistols on their hips, something that attracted national media attention. Weinberg interviewed several of Boebert’s employees who don’t especially like her. In 2017 another of Boebert’s food enterprises sickened dozens of people at a rodeo. “A report from the county health department determined the cause to be food poisoning from pork sliders sold at an unlicensed mobile stand and likely stored at an improper temperature,” Weinberg reports.

Boebert could be generous:

Boebert frequently employed previously incarcerated workers, and she could be generous with her money, in one instance buying a former worker a $3,000 car. One worker, Mac Mcglaughn, says that Boebert bailed him out of jail, put him up in a hotel room, and paid him out of the till.

There’s some indication that the restaurant has not been too successful. “According to Boebert’s congressional disclosures, Shooters lost $143,000 in 2019 and $226,000 in 2020,” Weinberg reports.

As Weinberg notes, Boebert became famous in some circles for telling Beto O’Rourke that “hell, no,” he wasn’t going to confiscate guns. Glenn Beck shows video of that and discusses the event. That idiot O’Rourke basically created Boebert as a political force (my take, not Weinberg’s).

Weinberg reviews Boebert’s minor run-ins with the law. Here’s a detail I didn’t know: “Boebert did not win her home county, Garfield County.”

Quick Takes

Speech: Senator Michael Bennet wants a new agency with “the power to interrogate the algorithms powering major tech platforms, and to set new rules to ensure the biggest companies are transparent about how they handle thorny decisions around content moderation on their platforms,” the Washington Post reports. Or we could, you know, have a free market. I do think government has some role in ensuring contracts are clear and enforced.

Guns: Respect to far-left Denver councilor Candi CDeBaca for grappling with the law-enforcement implications of gun restrictions. Denver’s concealed-carry ban on city property "justifies an excessive use of force in any case where someone is accused of having a gun on them,” she warned.

Child Welfare: Because of a preference for kin, Mesa County Human Services bureaucrats took an infant out of the home of a responsible foster parent and put her in the home of abusive relatives, who killed her. One of those adults “pleaded guilty to child abuse resulting in death after admitting to shaking the baby violently, kicking and biting her,” the Gazette reports. A judge ruled the bureaucrats cannot be sued.

Child Welfare II: Aurora fired its former police chief. Allegedly, the chief’s partner “anonymously called in a false child sexual abuse allegation to her employer, the intake unit of Arapahoe child protective services,” against a councilor pushing for the chief’s ouster.

Cuffing Children: “A bill headed to the Colorado governor’s desk bans handcuffing students in most circumstances, requires schools to notify parents promptly when they restrain students, and sets higher standards for school resource officers,” Chalkbeat reports. Sounds like a good idea.

Lying to Kids: “The final bill vote of the 2022 Colorado legislative session: Killing a bill, SB22-23, that was meant to limit police ability to legally lie to kids in order to secure guilty confessions,” Alex Burness reports. Reminder: Don’t talk to the police! And teach your kids about that.

Native Children: “Five Native American boarding schools designed to strip indigenous children of their culture, heritage and language operated in Colorado for decades, part of a centuries-long federal effort to subjugate the tribes and people that lived on this land for thousands of years,” the Denver Post reports.

Violent Rhetoric: State Rep. Patrick Neville nominated Joe Oltmann for governor. Oltmann has called for the governor (among others) to be hanged. Neville claims Oltmann was only joking. Kyle Clark shows otherwise.

More Violent Rhetoric: Right after the Capitol invasion, a woman who is now a candidate for state house said that Trump is right and that “we are headed for a civil war.” She said a lot of other insane things too, as the Colorado Times Recorder reports.

Big Lie: On the day of the Capitol invasion Joe Oltmann met with a top Trump official.

Fees: Polis signed a “bill to delay a bill he previously signed creating . . . a new gas fee at the pump,” Marshall Zelinger notes.

Beneath the Headline: Here is CBS4’s headline, “HVAC Company Says It Will No Longer Service Customers in Downtown Denver.” The third paragraph says “the business decision was also due in part to the fact that the company only had two clients in downtown Denver.” Chase Woodruff rightly calls bullshit.

Falsified Patient Records: What in the hell? “A troubled Western Slope mental health care center falsified assessments of its patients’ conditions for at least nine years in an effort to make its treatment programs seem more effective and secure funding from the state, whistleblowers say,” reports Susan Greene.