Lindsey

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Construction of the new Twinbrook Quarter development has made significant progress in the past couple of months on Rockville Pike. But the tenant everyone is waiting for — an 80,0000-square-foot Wegmans grocery store — still hasn’t begun its buildout. A spokesman tells us Wegmans is looking to start construction this spring, with a projected opening in 2025. The uber-popular grocery store will be the jewel of Twinbrook Quarter, a sprawling retail/residential/office project that will ultimately encompass 18 acres.

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On a November day in 2021, Tony Lewis Sr. walked to a phone bank inside the federal correctional institution in Cumberland, Maryland, and placed a call to his son. Over the prior three decades, these conversations had become the highlight of his daily routine, an essential 15-minute escape from the austerity of prison. But on […]

The post How #freetonylewis Became a Successful Movement first appeared on Washingtonian.

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Bans on cell-cultivated, “lab-grown” meat are about protecting Big Ag.

Last week, Florida became the first US state to ban the production and sale of lab-grown, or “cell-cultivated” meat.

“Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said before signing SB 1084 into law. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

On Tuesday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a similar bill into law; violators could face up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.

Cell-cultivated meat is different from products made by companies like Impossible Foods that use plant ingredients to mimic meat. Instead, cell-cultivated meat is real meat, but made without slaughtering an animal. It’s produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and feeding them a mix of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other ingredients for a few weeks until it grows into edible meat.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has expressed his support for Florida’s ban.

The Florida law’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Danny Alvarez, had claimed the novel technology’s “unknowns are so great,” despite a multiyear review from the US Agriculture Department and US Food and Drug Administration that deemed products from two cell-cultivated meat startups safe to eat.

Florida state Rep. Tyler Sirois, another Republican who introduced a similar bill late last year, stated a different — and perhaps more honest — motivation for banning cell-cultivated meat: to protect the state’s farmers from competition. “Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida,” Sirois said in an interview with Politico in November.

Sirois also called cell-cultivated meat an “affront to nature and creation.” I wonder if he would say the same about some of the pervasive practices used in livestock production — like extreme confinement, feeding pigs feces, and grinding up live male chicks, to name just a few.

Florida state Rep. Dean Black, a Republican cattle rancher, said, “Cultured meat is made by man. Real meat is made by God himself.”

“In a state that purportedly prides itself on being a land of freedom and individual liberty, [Florida’s] government is now telling consumers what meat they can or cannot purchase,” a spokesperson from GOOD Meat, a cell-cultivated meat startup, told Vox in an email. “This bill sends a terrible message to the investors, scientists, and entrepreneurs that have built America’s global leadership in alternative proteins.”

What’s happening in Florida and Alabama is part of a broader political strategy to hinder the nascent cell-cultivated meat industry. Earlier this year, lawmakers in Arizona introduced a similar ban, with one Republican supporter saying, “We want to protect our cattle and our ranches.” One of the co-sponsors is a rancher himself.

Meanwhile, policymakers in other states have advocated for similar legislation, including West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, where violators would have to pay a $1 million fine.

Federal lawmakers in heavy farming states, mostly Republicans but also some Democrats, are also putting up roadblocks to cell-cultivated meat with the support of the conventional meat industry.

In late January, US Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) announced a federal bill to ban cell-cultivated meat in school cafeterias. “Tester champions Montana’s ranchers,” reads part of the headline of Tester and Rounds’s press release about the legislation, which has been endorsed by beef trade groups.

Days later, a bipartisan group of farm-state members of Congress introduced legislation — also endorsed by a number of meat trade groups — in both chambers that would require any cell-cultivated or plant-based meat product to be labeled as “imitation” meat or poultry.

Such protectionism runs counter to the routine platitudes that elected officials — especially those on the right — typically espouse about competitive free markets, regulation, and innovation. DeSantis has boasted that Florida ranks first in the nation in entrepreneurship, yet he just signed a bill into law that will stifle entrepreneurship.

But the policy trend also rings hollow when you consider that cell-cultivated meat isn’t even available for sale.

Cell-cultivated meat has a long way to commercial viability (and it may not get there)

Last summer, two cell-cultivated meat startups made their product available in extremely limited quantities at a couple of high-end restaurants — one in San Francisco, the other in Washington, DC — for less than a year. Both have been phased out.

From 2016 to 2022, venture capital firms poured almost $3 billion into more than 150 startups around the world developing cell-cultivated meat technology, which is pitched as a solution to conventional meat’s enormous carbon footprint and its outsize contributions to deforestation, air and water pollution, and animal cruelty.

While plenty of the startups have demonstrated proofs of concept, it’s far from certain they’ll be able to scale and compete with factory-farmed meat; their products certainly won’t be showing up in school cafeterias anytime soon. Its advocates argue the field needs government funding, like the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries have received, to advance its research and development.

Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

On the surface, bills aiming to ban cell-cultivated meat could be waved away as mere political theater, a ratcheting up of the culture war by attacking alternatives to factory-farmed meat as a cheap way to own the libs during an election year.

But there’s something more troubling at play here. The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein.

The political engine to protect factory farming, explained

Cell-cultivated meat is the latest flashpoint in a long-running fight over the future of protein; meat and dairy analogues made from plants, like oat milk and pea-based Beyond burgers, have already been targeted by hostile politicians.

Over the last decade, as these products entered the mainstream, lawmakers in around 30 states have introduced legislation to restrict how companies can label them, and over a dozen have passed. Some laws went so far as to ban companies from using words like “burger” and “milk” even when their labels already made clear that the products were free of animal-derived ingredients, creating a costly, complicated patchwork of labeling requirements.

The bipartisan federal DAIRY PRIDE Act — short for “The Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, milk, and cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act” — would codify these restrictions nationwide for plant-based dairy products.

The proliferation of state restrictions has led some companies to use awkward descriptors that probably confuse more than clarify, like Trader Joe’s almond milk, which it calls “Almond Beverage.”

Some of the companies making these products have brought First Amendment challenges to push back. Louisiana and Mississippi each softened their regulations after lawsuits, and in 2021, a California judge ruled that the plant-based dairy company Miyoko’s Creamery could use terms like “butter” and “cheese” after the state’s agriculture department tried to prohibit it from doing so. In 2022, a federal judge ruled Arkansas’s labeling law unconstitutional. Challenges to other state laws are ongoing, but the bills keep coming: This year, nearly 10 states have considered restrictive labeling provisions.

If lawmakers are really concerned with deceptive labeling, they may want to focus their efforts in the meat and dairy aisle, where consumers have long been misled by warm and fuzzy terms like “sustainable” and “humanely raised,” both of which have no legal definition. Some terms that are defined and verifiable, like “free range,” often don’t meet consumers’ expectations.

The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.

Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.

Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images

Every state has a “right to farm” law, aimed at preventing rural Americans from suing factory farms for pollution, odor, and other nuisances. And about 10 states have passed “ag gag” laws, which make it a crime to document and investigate animal abuse on farms. Many have been struck down as unconstitutional, but some remain in place.

The sad irony of all the chest-thumping over meat alternatives is that farmers do face many real threats, like a changing climate that makes harvests less predictable and corporate consolidation that has put the majority of America’s meat supply in the hands of a few massive companies that hollow out rural economies and treat some of the farmers who contract for them like serfs.

Addressing these would take serious political courage, but it’s much easier to rile up the base by banning a perceived threat than taking on a real one.

Update, May 9, 3:50 pm: This story was originally published on February 14 and has been updated, most recently with news of Gov. Kay Ivey signing Alabama’s ban on cell-cultivated meat into law.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

You’ve probably heard various renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner, and sometimes singers put a little extra something in the anthem. A bit of flourish. Some attitude. For The Pudding, Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee quantified that extra something into what they’ve dubbed a Diva Score.

Out of the 138 versions they scored, the highest belong to Chaka Khan at the 2020 NBA All-Star game and Patti Labelle at the 2008 World Series.

Tags: diva, music, Pudding

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.

Tags: confidence, inflation, Nate Silver, New York Times, spending

Local governments are trying a new way to address the housing crisis.

Quietly and with little fanfare, the idea of building new publicly owned housing for people across the income spectrum has advanced in the United States.

Governments have successfully addressed housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore in the past, but these examples have typically inspired little attention in the US — which has more restrictive welfare policies and a bias toward private homeownership.

Then one US community started exploring social housing with a markedly more American twist: Leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland — a suburban region just outside Washington, DC, with more than 1 million residents — said they could increase their local housing supply not by ramping up European-style welfare subsidies but through essentially intervening in the traditional capitalist bidding process. Government, when it wants to, can make attractive bids.

Now, with an acute nationwide housing shortage, and declining home construction due to high interest rates, the idea is spreading, and more local officials have been moving forward with plans to create publicly owned housing. They are very clear about not calling it “public housing”: To help differentiate these projects from the typical stigmatized, income-restricted, and underfunded model, leaders have coalesced around calling the mixed-income idea “social housing” produced by “public developers.”

“What I like about what we’re doing is all we have effectively done is commandeered the private American real estate model,” Zachary Marks, the chief real estate officer for Montgomery County’s housing authority, told me in 2022. “We’re replacing the investor dudes from Wall Street, the big money from Dallas.”

By offering private companies more favorable financing terms, Montgomery County hoped to move forward with new construction that they’d own for as long as they liked. They had plans to build thousands of publicly owned mixed-income apartments by leveraging relatively small amounts of public money to create a revolving fund that could finance short-term construction costs. Eighteen months ago, this “revolving fund” plan was still mostly just on paper; no one lived in any of these units, and whether people would even want to live in publicly owned housing was still an open question.

Answers have since emerged: The first Montgomery County project opened in April 2023, a 268-unit apartment building called The Laureate, and tenants quickly came to rent. It’s not the kind of public housing most Americans are familiar with: It has a sleek fitness center, multiple gathering spaces, and a courtyard pool. “We’re 97 percent leased today, and it’s just been incredibly successful and happened so fast,” Marks said.

Montgomery County’s Housing Opportunities Commission

Encouraged by the positive response, Montgomery County has been barreling forward with other social housing projects, like a 463-unit complex that will house both seniors and families, and another 415-unit building across from The Laureate set to break ground in October. While construction has lagged nationwide as the Federal Reserve worked to rein in inflation, private developers in Montgomery County have been able to partner with the local government, enticed by their more affordable financing options.

As word started to get around, city leaders elsewhere began reaching out, curious to learn about this model and whether it could help their own housing woes. Montgomery County was getting so many inquiries, they decided to host a convening in early November, inviting other officials — from places like New York City, Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago —to tour The Laureate and talk collectively about the public developer idea. Roughly 60 people were in attendance.

“I am very bought into the Zachary Marks’s line that there is every reason for cities to be building up a balance sheet of real estate equity and we should be capturing that and using it to reinvest in public goods,” said one municipal housing leader who attended the Montgomery County conference and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. “That’s the vision — and you can just describe it in so many ways. You can say we’re socializing real estate value for public use, or you can describe it as we’re doing public-private partnerships to invest in our communities.”

Paul Williams, who leads the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank supportive of social housing, said growing interest in the public developer model has even led to new conversations with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Public agencies are clearly hungry for tools that allow them to produce a lot more housing, and in the past year and a half we’ve gone from working with Montgomery County and Rhode Island to establishing a working group with a few dozen state and municipal housing agencies who come to our regular meetings,” he told Vox. “That’s gotten HUD’s attention, and we’re now talking with them about ways the federal government can support this kind of innovation.”

Atlanta’s leaders are on track to implement the Montgomery County model

Perhaps no city has run as fast with the Montgomery County idea than Atlanta, Georgia. The city’s mayor, Andre Dickens, took office in early 2022 and set an ambitious goal to build or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units within his eight-year term. The Dickens administration wanted to find ways to do this that didn’t depend on the whims of Republicans in the state legislature or federal government.

One of the key strategies Dickens’s team has embraced is making use of property the city already owns, such as vacant land. “We did not have a good sense of what we had, what we did not have, and what was the best use for any of it,” said Josh Humphries, a senior housing adviser to the mayor.

The Dickens administration convened an “affordable housing strike force” to get a better understanding of the city’s inventory and started studying affordable housing models around the world, including social housing in Vienna and Copenhagen. Atlanta leaders also participated in a national program called Putting Assets to Work and learned about the efforts in Montgomery County.

Humphries said what “really sealed the deal” on social housing for them was simply the scarcity of alternative tools to build affordable housing, since they were already exhausting all the available funding they had from the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC).

By the summer of 2023, armed with money from a city housing bond, the Atlanta Housing Authority’s board of commissioners voted to create a new nonprofit that would help build mixed-income public housing for the city. Leaders estimate it could lead to 800 new units by 2029.

Atlanta’s first bid for private-market developers to construct social housing went out last month, and Humphries says they’re excited about how their new financing could spark new partnerships. “The combination of tools that we plan to use that are similar to what they’re doing in Montgomery County, like being able to decrease property taxes and have better interest rates in your financing, is very enviable,” Humphries said. “It has allowed us to have conversations with market-rate developers who maybe otherwise wouldn’t be interested because they haven’t been able to figure out how to make their other [private-sector] projects work.”

Boston wants to move forward with social housing, and Massachusetts might help

Since 2017, Boston has been working to redevelop some of its existing public housing projects by converting them into denser, mixed-income housing. Kenzie Bok, who was tapped by the city’s progressive mayor last spring to lead the Boston Housing Authority, said that existing work helped pave the way for leaders to more quickly embrace the Montgomery County model. As in Atlanta, Bok and her colleagues have been trying to figure out how to build more affordable housing when they have no more federal tax credits available.

“I think everyone in the affordable housing community is looking around and saying, ‘Gee, we have this [low-income housing tax credit] engine for development but it doesn’t have capacity to meet the level we need,’” Bok told me. And while the federal government could increase the tax credit volume, that requires action in Washington, DC, that for years has failed to materialize.

Bok grew interested in the Montgomery County model since it seemed to offer a way for her city to augment its affordable housing production without Congress. Bok was also intrigued by the potential of the revolving fund to spur more market-rate construction in Boston, which has slowed not only because of rising interest rates but also because institutional investors typically demand such high rates of return.

“The default assumption is that affordable units are hard to build and market-rate ones will build themselves from a profit-motive perspective,” Bok said. “In fact, we have a situation now where ironically it’s often affordable LIHTC units that can get built right now and other projects stall out.”

Bok and her colleagues realized it’s not that mixed-income projects don’t generate profits — those profits just aren’t 20 percent or higher. Mixed-income affordable housing wouldn’t need to be produced at a loss, Boston leaders concluded, they just might not be tantalizing to certain aggressive real estate investors. By creating a revolving fund and leveraging public land to offer more affordable financing terms, Boston officials realized they could help generate more housing — both affordable and market-rate.

In January, in her State of the City address, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu pledged to grow the city’s supply of public housing units by about 30 percent in the next 10 years, with publicly owned mixed-income housing being one way to get there.

To help move things forward, state lawmakers are also exploring the idea. This past fall, Massachusetts’s governor put placeholder language in a draft housing bond bill to support social housing and a revolving fund. The specifics are likely going to be hashed out later this spring, but the governor’s bond bill is widely expected to pass.

In Rhode Island, too, state-level interest in supporting the notion of publicly developed affordable housing has grown. Stefan Pryor, the state’s secretary of housing, attended the Montgomery County, Maryland conference in November, and Rhode Island recently announced it would be contracting with the Furman Center, a prominent housing think tank at New York University, to study models of social housing. “We look forward to the study’s observations and findings,” Pryor told Vox.

Can mixed-income housing help those most in need?

Lawmakers intrigued by what Montgomery County is doing praise the fact that publicly owned mixed-income housing units theoretically offer affordable units to their communities forever, unlike affordable housing financed by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that can convert into market-rate rentals after 15 years. Leaders also like that after some initial upfront investment, the publicly owned projects start to pay for themselves, even delivering economic returns to the city down the line.

Charles Arrington

But while housing complexes like The Laureate can offer real relief to struggling middle-class tenants — a quarter of The Laureate’s units are restricted to those earning 50 percent or less of the area median income — an outstanding question is whether the social housing model could also help those who are lower-income, who might require even more deeply subsidized housing.

In Washington, DC, some lawmakers have been exploring the social housing idea, and one progressive council member introduced a bill calling to support mixed-income housing accessible to those making 30 percent or less of the area’s median income. But critics of the bill say that the rents of those living in nonsubsidized units would have to be so high to make that rental math work.

A housing official speaking on the condition of anonymity told me they think it’s okay if the social housing model can only really work to support more middle-class tenants in neighborhoods that charge higher rents because leaders still have financing tools to build more deeply affordable housing in lower-cost areas. In other words, social housing can grow the overall pie of affordable units throughout a city.

Other leaders, like in Boston and Atlanta, told me they’re exploring how they could “layer” the mixed-income social housing model with additional subsidies to make them more accessible to lower-income renters.

Marks, from Montgomery County, knows there’s still a lot of stigma and reservations about American public housing, which many perceive as being ugly, dirty, or unsafe. Few understand that many of the woes of existing public housing in the US have had to do with rules Congress passed nearly 100 years ago, such as restricting the housing to only the very poor. Besides getting his message out, Marks said he likes to just have people come see for themselves what’s being done.

“The temperature immediately comes down when people can walk around, see how attractive it is, how it’s clearly a high-quality community with nice apartments,” he said. “It’s why getting proof of concept is so important.”

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by Debbie Cenziper, ProPublica, and Michael D. Sallah, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Reeling from one of the most catastrophic recalls in decades, Philips Respironics said it will stop selling sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under a settlement with the federal government that will all but end the company’s reign as one of the top makers of breathing machines in the country.

The agreement, announced by Philips early Monday, comes more than two years after the company pulled millions of its popular breathing devices off the shelves after admitting that an industrial foam fitted in the machines to reduce noise could break apart and release potentially toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

It could be years before Philips can resume sales of the devices, made in two factories outside Pittsburgh. The company said all the conditions of the multiyear consent decree — negotiated in the wake of the recall with the Department of Justice on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration — must be met first.

The move by a company that aggressively promoted its machines in ad campaigns and health conferences — in one case with the help of an Elvis impersonator — follows relentless criticism about the safety of the machines.

A ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found the company held back thousands of complaints about the crumbling foam for more than a decade before warning customers about the dangers. Those using the machines included some of the most fragile people in the country, including infants, the elderly, veterans and patients with chronic conditions.

“It’s about time,” said Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who spent years using one of the recalled machines. “How many people have to suffer and get sick and die?”

Philips said the agreement includes other requirements the company must meet before it can start selling the machines again, including the marquee DreamStation 2, a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, device heralded by Philips when it was unveiled in 2021 for the treatment of sleep apnea. The settlement, which is still being finalized, has to be approved by a court and has not yet been released by the government.

The FDA said it could not comment until the agreement is finalized and filed with the court. The DOJ could not be immediately reached for comment.

It remains unclear how the halt in sales will impact patients and doctors. The company’s U.S. market share for sleep apnea devices in 2020 was about 37% — behind only one competitor, medical device maker ResMed, according to an analysis by iData Research. Philips has dominated the market in ventilator sales, the data shows.

One global market report on Monday referred to the agreement as “very punitive” and noted, “It will be very difficult for Philips to recover its U.S Respironics market position.”

After the announcement, the company’s stock prices plunged by 7% in early trading.

Philips did not address the safety of the recalled devices in its announcement, but the company has previously said that new testing shows the foam causes no “appreciable harm” to patients. The FDA has challenged those claims, saying the company’s tests are not “adequate.”

The settlement comes just weeks after federal lawmakers called for an immediate criminal probe of Philips by the DOJ, and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it will launch an inquiry of the FDA’s oversight of medical device recalls for the first time in years.

ProPublica and the Post-Gazette identified thousands of reported cases of cancer, respiratory illnesses and liver and kidney conditions among users of the recalled machines, as well as more than 370 reports of deaths.

The news organizations found that scientists inside Philips repeatedly raised concerns about the foam and that the company’s own testing called into question its safety claims.

The news organizations also reported that a new and different foam used in the DreamStation 2 and millions of other replacement machines sent out by Philips in the wake of the recall was found to emit dangerous chemicals as well, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. The company has said the new foam is safe, but scientists involved in the testing have again raised alarms and the FDA has said additional safety tests are still needed.

In its announcement, the company said it would provide ongoing service and parts for machines already in the hands of doctors and patients and continue selling its devices outside the United States subject to requirements in the agreement.

“Resolving the consequences of the Respironics recall for our patients and customers is a key focus area and I acknowledge and apologize for the distress and concern caused,” said Roy Jakobs, CEO of parent company Royal Philips. “We are fully committed to complying with the consent decree, which is an important step and provides a clear path forward.”

The announcement was the latest in a series of developments at Philips since the recall prompted a global health emergency that sent millions of patients scrambling to find replacement machines and assess the risk of long term exposure.

Philips has discontinued some of the recalled devices, including ventilators and, just last week, the widely promoted DreamStation Go, a portable CPAP.

In an online update and email to U.S. customers, Philips said the decision to pull the devices off the market in the United States was a “strategic” choice that “streamlined” its portfolio. The email reignited anger and frustration among patients and doctors.

“They used to be one of the most respected industry leaders,” said Dr. Radhika Breaden, a sleep medicine specialist in Oregon. “They have lost the trust of many of our sleep patients and many professionals in the sleep field.”

Michael Korsh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed reporting.

Update, Jan. 29, 2024: This story has been updated with additional information provided by the FDA.

For the second time in just over a year, Popeyes has mysteriously gone dark for several weeks at Westfield Montgomery mall. Last time, when the restaurant finally reopened, employees vaguely blamed the closing on “the kitchen” and “the fryer.” This time, we’re hearing the departure will be permanent. Meanwhile: Just around the corner, another New Orleans-style fast food chain is on the way to the Dining Terrace. Kelly’s Cajun Grill, specializing in bourbon chicken, is taking over the space next to Panda Express.

The post Popeyes goes dark, Cajun food on the way to the mall appeared first on Store Reporter.

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The Fifth Circuit has spent years harassing a civil rights activist, and they gutted much of the First Amendment in the process.

A renegade federal appeals court — one dominated by MAGA-aligned judges who routinely read the law in ways that even the current, very conservative Supreme Court finds untenable — has spent the last half-decade harassing DeRay Mckesson, a prominent civil rights activist and an organizer within the Black Lives Matter movement

As part of this crusade, two of the Fifth Circuit’s judges effectively eliminated the First Amendment right to organize a protest in a case known as Doe v. Mckesson.

Mckesson’s case has already been up to the Supreme Court once, and the justices strongly hinted in a 2020 opinion that the Fifth Circuit’s attacks on Mckesson’s First Amendment rights should end — labeling this case “fraught with implications for First Amendment rights.” But the Fifth Circuit did not take the hint, issuing a new opinion last July reaffirming its attack on First Amendment-protected political protests.

Now the case is before the Supreme Court again, and Mckesson’s lawyers want the justices to restore the First Amendment as fast as they possibly can.

JC Olivera/Getty Images

In 2016, Mckesson helped organize a protest near Baton Rouge’s police department building, following the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling in that same Louisiana city. At some point during that protest, an unknown individual threw a rock or some other hard object at a police officer, identified in court documents by the pseudonym “Officer John Doe.”

Sadly, the object hit Doe and allegedly caused “injuries to his teeth, jaw, brain, and head, along with other compensable losses.”

There is no excuse for throwing a rock at another human being, and whoever did so should be held responsible for their illegal act, including serious criminal charges. But even Judge Jennifer Elrod, the author of the Fifth Circuit’s most recent opinion targeting Mckesson, admits that “it is clear that Mckesson did not throw the heavy object that injured Doe.”

Nevertheless, Doe sued Mckesson, claiming that, as the organizer of the protest where this injury occurred, Mckesson should be liable for the illegal action of an unidentified protest attendee. But that is simply not how the First Amendment works. The Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982) that “civil liability may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence.”

It should be obvious why protest leaders must not be held legally responsible for the actions of random protest attendees. No one will ever organize a political protest if they know that they could face financially devastating liability if a reckless or violent individual happens to show up.

Indeed, as Judge Don Willett, a Fifth Circuit judge who dissented from Elrod’s opinion, pointed out, Elrod’s approach could potentially force protest organizers to pay for “the unlawful acts of counter-protesters and agitators” who show up for the very purpose of undermining the protest organizer’s political goals. Under Elrod’s opinion, Mckesson could be held liable if the unknown rock-thrower turns out to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan who showed up for the very purpose of undermining the Black Lives Matter movement by associating them with violence.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, Mckesson’s attorneys make an audacious ask claiming that Elrod’s “decision is so ‘flatly contrary to this Court’s controlling precedent’ to be appropriate for summary reversal.”

A “summary reversal” is the judicial equivalent of a spanking. It means that the lower court’s decision was so erroneous that the justices decided to skip a full briefing or an oral argument in a case, and issue a permanent order overturning that lower court’s decision.

This process is rarely used, and it is distinct from the temporary orders the Court frequently hands down on its so-called shadow docket. The Supreme Court typically requires six justices to agree before summarily reversing another court’s decision.

Nevertheless, such a spanking is warranted in this case. Elrod’s opinion flouts exceedingly well-established First Amendment law. And it does so in a way that would make organized mass protests impossible, because anyone who tried to organize one would risk bankruptcy.

The Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision openly defies the First Amendment and the Supreme Court

To understand just how ridiculous Elrod’s decision is, and how egregiously she defies the Supreme Court’s caselaw, it’s helpful to start with the facts of the Claiborne case.

Like Mckesson, Claiborne involved a civil rights activist who organized a protest that allegedly included some violent individuals. In 1966, Charles Evers was the field secretary of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP. In that role, he was the principal organizer of a boycott against white merchants in Claiborne County.

The Mississippi Supreme Court claimed that some of the individuals who joined this boycott also “engaged in acts of physical force and violence against the persons and property of certain customers and prospective customers” of these white businesses. Evers, meanwhile, allegedly did far more to encourage violence than DeRay Mckesson is accused of in his case. He allegedly gave a speech to potential customers at these stores, where he said that “if we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.”

The Supreme Court nonetheless held that this “emotionally charged rhetoric ... did not transcend the bounds of protected speech.” Claiborne also warned that courts must show “extreme care” before imposing liability on a political figure of any kind.

That said, the Court’s decision also listed three limited circumstances when a protest leader may be held liable for the violent actions of a protest participant:

There are three separate theories that might justify holding Evers liable for the unlawful conduct of others. First, a finding that he authorized, directed, or ratified specific tortious activity would justify holding him responsible for the consequences of that activity. Second, a finding that his public speeches were likely to incite lawless action could justify holding him liable for unlawful conduct that in fact followed within a reasonable period. Third, the speeches might be taken as evidence that Evers gave other specific instructions to carry out violent acts or threats.

None of these circumstances are present Mckesson. To the contrary, the Fifth Circuit admitted in an earlier decision in this very case that Officer Doe “has not pled facts that would allow a jury to conclude that Mckesson colluded with the unknown assailant to attack Officer Doe, knew of the attack and ratified it, or agreed with other named persons that attacking the police was one of the goals of the demonstration.”

So how on earth did Elrod arrive at the conclusion that Mckesson could be held liable for the actions of an unknown protest attendee? For starters, she claimed that her court could just add new items to the list of three circumstances that could justify such liability in her Mckesson opinion. According to Elrod, “nothing in Claiborne suggests that the three theories identified above are the only proper bases for imposing tort liability on a protest leader.”

This is, to put it mildly, a very unusual way to read a Supreme Court opinion that held that threats to break someone’s neck can be First Amendment-protected speech, which calls for “extreme care” before targeting protest organizers, and which laid out only three very specific circumstances that “might justify” an exception. Elrod cites no other court decision that has ever read Claiborne in such a counterintuitive way.

Then, after giving herself the power to invent new exceptions to the First Amendment, Elrod writes that this amendment does not apply “where a defendant creates unreasonably dangerous conditions, and where his creation of those conditions causes a plaintiff to sustain injuries.”

And what are the “dangerous conditions” created by Mckesson? Mckesson “organized the protest to begin in front of the police station, obstructing access to the building.” He did not “dissuade” protesters who allegedly stole water bottles from a grocery store. And he “led the assembled protest onto a public highway, in violation of Louisiana criminal law.”

Seriously, she said that the First Amendment begins to fade the minute a protest occupies a street.

William Lovelace/Getty Images

It’s hard to imagine a more lawless, unpersuasive, and historically ignorant decision than the one Elrod put her name on in the Mckesson case. And if the Supreme Court can’t find the votes to reverse that decision, the right to engage in mass protest will become meaningless.

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The New York Times v. OpenAI, explained.

If you’re old enough to remember watching the hit kid’s show Animaniacs, you probably remember Napster, too. The peer-to-peer file-sharing site, which made it easy to download music for free in an era before Spotify and Apple Music, took college campuses by storm in the late 1990s. This did not escape the notice of the record companies, and in 2001, a federal court ruled that Napster was liable for copyright infringement. The content producers fought back against the technology platform and won.

But that was 2001 — before the iPhone, before YouTube, and before generative AI. This generation’s big copyright battle is pitting journalists against artificially intelligent software that has learned from and can regurgitate their reporting.

Late last year, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies are stealing its copyrighted content to train their large language models and then profiting off of it. In a point-by-point rebuttal to the lawsuit’s accusations, OpenAI claimed no wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law held a hearing in which news executives implored lawmakers to force AI companies to pay publishers for using their content.

Depending on who you ask, what’s at stake is either the future of the news business, the future of copyright law, the future of innovation, or, specifically, the future of OpenAI and other generative AI companies. Or all of the above.

Ideally, Congress would step in to settle the debate, but as James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told me: “Congress does not like to legislate on copyright unless there’s a consensus of most of the players in the room — and there’s not anything resembling that consensus right now. So Congress may hold hearings and talk about it, but we’re really far from any legislative action.”

So which is it? Advocates of technological innovation would say that AI technology is full of promise and we’d better not stifle that while it’s in the early days of development. Media companies would say that even exciting technology companies need to pay when they use copyrighted content, and if we give AI a free pass, journalism as we know it could eventually cease to exist.

The consensus of casual observers and legal experts alike is that this New York Times lawsuit is a big deal. Not only does the Times appear to have a solid case, but OpenAI has a lot to lose — perhaps its very existence.

The case against OpenAI, briefly explained

If you ask ChatGPT a question about, say, the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s a good chance some of the information in the answer has been culled from New York Times articles. That’s because the large language model, or LLM, that powers ChatGPT has been trained on over 500 gigabytes of data, including newspaper archives. Generative AI tools only work because this training data helps them know how to effectively respond to prompts. In other words, copyrighted data, in part, is what makes this new technology powerful and what makes OpenAI such a valuable company.

The New York Times claims that OpenAI trained its model with copyrighted Times content and did not pay proper licensing fees. That, the lawsuit says, enables OpenAI to “compete with and closely mimic” the New York Times, perhaps by summing up a news story based on Times reporting or summing up a product recommendation based on Wirecutter reviews.

Even worse is what the lawsuit calls “regurgitation,” which is when OpenAI spits out text that matches Times articles verbatim. The Times provides 100 examples of such “regurgitation” in the lawsuit. In its rebuttal, OpenAI said that regurgitation is a “rare bug” that the company is “working to drive to zero.” It also claims that the Times “intentionally manipulated prompts” to get this to happen and “cherry-picked their examples from many attempts.”

But at the end of the day, the New York Times argues that OpenAI is making money off of content and costing the newspaper “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” By one estimate, given the millions of articles potentially implicated and the cost per instance of copying, the New York Times might be looking for $450 billion in damages.

OpenAI has a clear solution to this conflict: Pay the copyright owners upfront. The company has already announced licensing deals with folks like the Associated Press and Axel Springer. OpenAI also claims that it was negotiating a deal with the New York Times right before the newspaper filed its lawsuit.

Just how much OpenAI is willing to pay news outlets is unclear. A January 4 report in the Information said that OpenAI has offered some media firms “as little as between $1 million and $5 million to license their articles for use in training its large language models,” which seems like a small amount of money to OpenAI, currently aiming for a valuation as high as $100 billion. But the mounting lawsuits, should they go against the company, could be far more expensive than paying heftier licensing fees.

The New York Times is also not the only party suing OpenAI and other tech companies over copyright infringement. A growing list of authors and entertainers have been filing lawsuits since ChatGPT made its splashy debut in the fall of 2022, accusing these companies of copying their works in order to train their models. The copyright holders filing these lawsuits extend well beyond writers, too. Developers have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly stealing software code, while Getty Images is embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI, the makers of image-generating model Stable Diffusion, over its copyrighted photos.

“When you’re talking about copyright and you get statutory damages,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “if you lose, the downside and the financial risk is massive.”

The case for innovation

While it’s easy to compare the Times case to the Napster one, the better precedent involves the VCR, according to McSherry.

In 1984, a years-long copyright case between Sony and Universal Studios over the practice of using VCRs to record TV shows made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The studio alleged that Sony’s Betamax video tapes could be used for copyright infringement, while Sony’s lawyers argued that taping shows was fair use, which is the doctrine that allows copyrighted material to be reused without permission or payment.

Sony won. The judge’s decision, which has never been overturned, said that if machines, including the VCR, have non-infringing uses then the company that makes them can’t be held liable if customers use them to infringe upon copyrights.

The entertainment industry was forever changed by this case. The VCR let people watch whatever was broadcast on TV whenever they wanted, and in just a few years, Hollywood studios actually ended up seeing their profits grow in the VCR era. The machine got people more excited about watching movies, and they watched more of them, both at home and in theaters.

“If you have to go to copyright owners for permission for technological innovation, you’re going to get a lot less innovation,” McSherry told Vox.

That in mind, there’s one more copyright lawsuit worth looking at: the Google Books case. In 2004, Google started scanning books, including copyrighted works, so that “snippets” of their text would show up in search results. It partnered with libraries at places like Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan, as well as magazines, like New York Magazine and Popular Mechanics, that wanted their archives digitized.

Then came the lawsuits, including a 2005 class action suit from the Authors Guild. The authors cried copyright infringement, and Google claimed that making books searchable amounted to fair use. As Judge Denny Chin said in a 2013 decision dismissing the authors’ lawsuit, Google Books is transformative because, thanks to the tool, “words in books are being used in a way they have not been used before.” It took about a decade, but Google eventually won, and Google Books is now legal.

Like Sony and Napster before it, the Google Books case is ultimately about the battle between new technology platforms and copyright holders. It also raises the question of innovation. Is it possible that giving copyright holders too much power could stifle technological progress?

In that 2013 decision, Judge Chin said its technology “advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.” And a 2023 economics study of the effects of Google Books found that “digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions” and “allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.” So consider that another point in favor of giving tech platforms room to innovate.

Few would disagree that technological progress has shaped the media business since the invention of the printing press. That’s basically why the earliest copyright laws were written over 300 years ago: Technology made copying easier, and authors needed some way to protect their intellectual property.

But AI is a bigger leap forward, technologically speaking, than the VCR, Napster, and Google Books combined. We don’t know yet, but AI seems destined to transform our understanding of copyright and how content creators get paid for their work. It will take a while, too. A ruling in the New York Times’s case against OpenAI will take years, and even then, questions will remain.

“I think generative AI could be as transformational for copyright as the printing press,” said Grimmelmann, the Cornell law professor. “But that will probably take a little bit longer to play out.”

A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

You don’t just vote for Trump. You stan him.

It’s a common observation that modern-day politics increasingly resembles fandom: Both feature communities created around and united by passion, and both are often heavily fixated on a single public figure. Many pundits are now calling right-wing voters “the Trump fandom,” as though there’s little difference between a Trumpist who flocks to a political rally and a member of the Beyhive snapping up seats to Coachella.

Drawing general parallels between the two movements can seem easy, even simplistic, but when we look closer, what we find are mutually thorny, mutually complex ideological ecosystems with telling overlap. In both subcultures, the rise of social media echo chambers has fomented toxicity, extremism, and delusional thinking. For instance, you may not think there’s any link between QAnon and the belief that this Chinese actor is a hologram, but they both arise from the same basic problems: disinformation and zealotry serving to distort and fracture our shared sense of reality, all in the name of what devotees believe to be a higher cause.

Fandom and politics both depend on big shared narratives

Passionate enthusiasts have existed throughout human history, but fans who identify as “part of fandom” move within larger communities of other actively engaged fans. The word “fan” came into popular use in the late 1880s, with “fandom” surfacing around 1903. The concept flourished in niche geek and sports communities throughout the 20th century, and finally found its way into the mainstream in the aughts and ’10s thanks to the rise of the internet.

While fandom was evolving online in the 2000s, organic political movements were growing more commonplace, with very similar dynamics. At their core, fandom and politics both require emotion, with all the intensity that implies. Fandoms were collectives of people drawn together by their emotional attachment to specific sports teams, creatives, or works of media. Grassroots political movements of the aughts, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, were localized collectives initially drawn together by a shared narrative of what they wanted their country to become.

That communal narrative is crucial connective tissue between politics and fandom; it unites people around not just a shared sense of identity, but a shared story and the idea that they’re building that story together. These narratives aren’t just entertainment. To their proponents, they have a higher moral purpose, whether it’s “draining the swamp,” rooting for your favorite characters in a series to get together, or freeing Taylor Swift from the oppression of the closet. Big fandom narratives often segue into big political ones: Several fandom projects of the early internet spawned offshoot social and political movements, like Fandom Forward, which began as the Harry Potter Alliance, and Project for Awesome, an offshoot of the Vlogbrothers fandom. Both groups encourage fans toward social change. A single piece of Harry Potter fanfiction is arguably responsible for popularizing the Effective Altruism movement.

Trump’s political rise coincides with a specific substrain of intense celebrity fandom that emerged in the new millennium. The “stan,” sometimes referred to collectively as “standom,” is an ironic term borrowed from Eminem’s 2000 song “Stan,” about a stalker fan whose obsession goes too far. The concept of “stanning” was hugely shaped by Twitter’s ability to allow fans to follow their faves in real time, commune with other fans, and even talk directly to the creators they stanned. It hardly seems coincidental that during the era when celebrities and pop stars became more immediately interactive with their fanbases, Trump successfully styled himself not as a politician, but as a celebrity who deigned to do politics just to satisfy his long-suffering fans.

By pretending that he didn’t need politics but politics needed him, Trump established the idea that his political participation was not self-serving, but rather a conduit for the frustrations of his followers. From the outset, he presented himself as a vessel for their beliefs. As one Trump supporter recently told MSNBC’s Garrett Haake, “When Trump is facing all these things, he’s doing it for us in our place.”

But the idea of Trump as a conduit works both ways. If you wanted to see political change, you couldn’t just vote for Trump; you had to transfer your emotional investment from politics at large onto him individually. You had to stan him.

When stans call themselves “stans,” it’s a wryly self-deprecating label that implies plenty of self-awareness on the fans’ parts about the tricky relationship they have with their idols. It also predicts the slippery slope that can result when fans’ investment in their faves gets too intense. Increasingly, however, there are fewer self-aware stopgaps in modern celebrity fandom, and, as January 6 taught us, even fewer in politics.

Our emotions increasingly shape how we view reality and what we’re willing to do to preserve that view

Applying the concept of a shared narrative to political activism imbues that activism with all the heady intoxication of a fantasy role-playing game, whether it’s a fantasy of progress or a fantasy of extremism. In his recently republished 2007 book Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (now retitled Dream or Nightmare), author Stephen Duncombe observed that Trump won the 2016 election not based on facts — he lied often — but upon his ability to create fantasy masked as truth. “Facts, it seems, are not things that are verifiably true or false, merely components in a story,” Duncombe notes. “Over the past decade, right-wing populists from Israel to India, all throughout Europe and the UK, have been inventing facts to fill in fantasies of national greatness, and imminent destruction, in their rise to power.”

This distortion of reality is partly inadvertent slippage. After all, when all your friends are playing the RPG with you, it can be hard to re-enter reality. And when all your friends are creating the narrative with you, it can be hard to remember what parts are real and what parts you constructed together.

The narrative predetermines not only what information you receive, but how you interpret it and order it within the larger story. As Duncombe writes, “We understand our world less through reasoned deliberation of facts, and more through stories and symbols and metaphors.” Received in a community of devotees, such stories and symbols often morph into esoteric codes only true believers can see, from “Q drops” to signs that Louis Tomlinson’s baby is fake. And as with intensely held religious beliefs, such communities tend to double down on their beliefs once challenged or proven inaccurate rather than rethink them. In fandom communities where this happens, we see groups collectively rejecting a more measured version of reality in favor of intense conspiracy theories to support their big narratives, again and again and again and again and again.

In both fandom and politics, these distortions are often also intentionally exacerbated by community leaders. Influential members can manipulate their followers by deliberately twisting or omitting facts to suit the narrative they prefer or the narrative that’s most advantageous to their larger agenda. Their role as a translator of reality to their followers can’t be overstated.

Media researcher Sarah Banet-Weiser, in the recently published Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood, observes that while it’s common to worry we’ve entered a fractured, “post-truth” era, the idea of “truth” itself has always been highly contextual. Moreover, truth in various contexts relies on who’s telling it: “It [depends] on the assumption that certain actors tell the truth, and that these actors have been authorized with the mantle of veracity in their understandings of the world and of themselves.”

When we’re emotionally invested not only in the narrative being bolstered by the truth-teller but in the chosen truth-teller themselves, it becomes even harder to extricate an “objective” version of reality from the version they’re dispensing because the stakes feel so high. These believers aren’t above engaging in what internet researcher Alice Marwick has termed “morally motivated networked harassment”: the simple yet profound concept that being part of an ideologically driven community allows believers to justify even the most toxic behaviors, even if their ideology is unusual and a bystander wouldn’t understand their motivations or goals as moralistic. Left to themselves, most of the people who sieged the Capitol on January 6 would probably never have been instigators; as part of a larger collective being egged on by their leader, however, they came to feel fully justified even in acts as extreme as insurrection.

We project our own symbols onto celebrity personas — even to the point of religious idolatry

While Trump’s stage is the political arena, his aims and tools are about his celebrity, not his politics. “Trump was not using tools of entertainment to appear a better politician,” Duncombe writes. “He was using politics as a better stage for his performance as an entertainer.” You might wonder what celebrity qualities Trump has that allow him to influence his followers to this extent; after all, he’s no Beyoncé. But, as Trump himself is extremely aware, he doesn’t have to be — he only has to encourage his followers to make him into whatever they want him to be.

The public figure’s persona is a collectively created construct. It’s built by the celebrity and what they present to the media and the public, and then built by the media and the public and how they interpret and interact with the famous person. Once fans have created a personal parasocial relationship with their celebrity of choice, they will project whatever positive attributes they want onto that celebrity’s persona — even if they don’t align with reality and even if they’re internally contradictory.

The secret of Trump’s following isn’t that Trump unlocked the be-all and end-all of political campaigning, but rather that he understands how his public persona works. From the outset, he encouraged his followers to project their own desires and fantasies onto him. “Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people,” he said in his party nomination acceptance speech in 2016. “I am your voice.”

While some stars offend their fans by refusing to play into their narratives — see, for example, Taylor Swift battling the gaylors — Trump remains unflappable in the face of any and all interpretations of his persona. By enabling his fans to project their anxieties and hopes onto him, Trump inflated his public persona to a degree that has become completely divorced from the man himself and completely bulletproof. “Trump is our David and our Goliath,” an Iowa voter recently told the New York Times. Not even Beyoncé has range like that.

This level of idolatry seems to have shifted Trump’s fandom beyond relatively normal parasocial relationships. Trump lost the 2016 Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, largely because Cruz courted evangelical voters who were uneasy about Trump’s extreme nationalist politics. In 2024, after he handily won the same state, columnists like Amanda Marcotte and Sarah Posner pointed out that he seems to have usurped the role once held by leaders of the religious right to become a religious idol himself.

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time a celebrity has been compared to a religious figure, but the existential and blatantly fascist threat to democracy presented by this development can’t be overstated. Trump already holds sway over his followers’ fantasies, and he already determines how (or whether) they receive facts and information. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that portrayals of Trump as a near-deity will fuel an even sharper divide — an ever-widening gap between how his supporters view reality, America, and his place in it, and what the rest of us see and experience.

Field drug tests often seem to be more a triumph of imagination than a triumph of science. They’re cheap. Some popular tests run less than $3/per. That’s the literal selling point. When in doubt, a cop can get probable cause by grabbing a substance, dumping it into a field test, and deciding whatever results are generated are evidence of guilt.

It rarely is. Sure, if you run enough tests, you’re bound to have some of these field tests confirmed by lab tests that are far more precise and less likely to be interpreted subjectively by the person performing the test. (Theoretically. There’s plenty of evidence out there showing lab drug tests can be just as faulty as field drug tests, although in these cases, the problem is usually the person performing the testing [or not!] than the test itself.)

Cheap, fast, and easy. And wrong. So very very often wrong. Field drug tests have labeled everything from bird poop (on a car’s hood!) to donut crumbs to honey to the ashes of a deceased loved one as contraband, resulting in the immediate arrest of people not actually in possession of anything illegal.

This is just what’s been observed by those challenging these results in court during criminal trials or filing civil rights lawsuits following wrongful arrests. It’s happened often enough that even a few courts are taking notice, in some cases refusing to accept plea deals predicated on nothing more than field drug tests results.

Data on field drug tests is difficult to obtain. Cops are in no hurry to turn this information over and the patchwork of public records laws across the nation often allows law enforcement to refuse disclosure simply by stating the results are relevant to a criminal investigation (even if the investigation has long since been closed).

What data can be obtained has been collected and parsed by the Quattrone Center for Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania. What’s long been assumed based on mainly anecdotal evidence now has at least some scientific backing: field drug tests aren’t worth what we’re paying for them, even if it is only $3/per. According to the Center’s report [PDF], nearly one third of the money spent on field drug tests is misspent. (h/t C.J. Ciaramella at Reason)

Utilizing a nationwide survey of agencies, the report offers national estimates on the frequency of test usage, finding that each year approximately 773,000 drug-related arrests involve the use of presumptive tests. Using the survey data and national estimates of drug arrests, this report examines the impact of the tests on wrongful arrests, racial disparities in their use, and their subsequent impact on drug possession prosecutions and dispositions.

Although the true error rate of these tests remains unknown, estimates based on the imperfect data that are available suggest that around 30,000 arrests each year involve people who do not possess illegal substances but who are nonetheless falsely implicated by color-based presumptive tests.

Not great. Not even good. Not even close to good. I don’t know where it’s acceptable to rack up a false arrest rate of nearly 4%, but America shouldn’t be one of those places. I realize it’s only probable cause at the point of arrest rather than the courtroom standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But 30,000 bogus arrests a year from a single cause — field drug tests — is unacceptable.

Here’s how that works out in the greater scheme of things, in terms of criminal justice:

The use of presumptive field tests in drug arrests is one of the largest, if not the
largest, known contributing factor to wrongful arrests and convictions in the United States.

It’s not just arrests. It’s also convictions. And those convictions aren’t happening in bench trials or jury trials. They’re plea agreements where people weigh their options and decide that the best option is to “admit” to a crime they haven’t committed rather than subject themselves to indefinite detention and the full weight of prosecutorial forces that love to punish people for insisting on their innocence and/or seek to have their rights respected.

The whole system is stacked against defendants, beginning with the tests that cops treat as actual probable cause when they realistically should be considered nothing more than a hunch. This is the depressing reality of criminal justice in the United States when it comes to field drug tests and people falsely accused by faulty tests.

In our survey, 89% of prosecutors reported that guilty pleas are permitted without confirmatory testing (i.e., follow-up testing by a lab to verify that a field test “positive” result accurately detected an illegal drug).

67% of drug labs in the U.S. report that they are not asked to review samples when there are plea agreements, and 24% do not receive samples for confirmatory testing when there are field test results available.

Even when labs receive samples, 46% report that they will not conduct a confirmatory test if there has been a guilty plea, and 8% report that they will not retest if there has been a presumptive identification

This isn’t justice. This isn’t even a polite hat tip in the direction of justice. This is railroading, aided and abetted by drug labs beholden to cops and almost as disinterested in what happens to people facing criminal charges possibly predicated on incorrect test results. On the law enforcement side, the fact is no one cares and no one cares that no one cares. Courts are the last hope, and even most of those are more than willing to clear dockets quickly and easily by signing off on any plea deal placed in front of them.

As the report notes, it’s not as though cops and prosecutors aren’t aware of the limitations of field drug tests. It’s that they don’t care. All tests come packaged with plenty of verbiage stating how any field test should be verified with a lab test, how dozens of legal substances can trigger false positives, and how tests can be rendered useless by exposure to UV light or elevated temperatures.

But none of that is legally binding. It’s not like improper use results in a voided warranty. It’s not like field drug test makers are going to stop selling to cops just because cops ignore every single instruction printed on the package. Again, this is up to the courts. And low level courts that handle a large percentage of possession cases aren’t going to increase their own workload by forcing prosecutors to verify tests or refuse plea deals based on nothing more than what a cop claimed to have observed while misusing a cheap test prone to false positives.

It’s not that better field drug test tech doesn’t exist. It does. Portable Raman spectrometers, which are capable of producing results comparable to lab equipment (at least according to the Scientific Working Group for the Analysis of Seized Drugs), very few law enforcement agencies are going to trade in cheap drug tests they can buy in bulk with actually accurate testing equipment than can cost up to $20,000 per device.

As the report states, the 30,000 wrongful arrests is an extreme undercount. Its survey managed to only find 93 law enforcement agencies willing to discuss field drug test use and only 82 of those actually provided enough information to warrant being included in this report.

Of the few that did respond, there’s even more bad news. This is quite the pair of sentences:

Twelve agencies recently stopped using the tests due to concerns about fentanyl exposure (i.e., a belief that physical contact with fentanyl is, by itself, dangerous for the officer), and two agencies reported that the tests were an unnecessary expense as suspects were arrested and charged regardless of the test outcome.

Did you get all of that? Twelve agencies have gone full fainting goat and two agencies flat out admitted they arrested people whether or not the tests indicated illegal substances. And if arrest is the inevitable outcome, why blow money on field drug tests?

There’s nothing positive in this report, other than the recommendations it suggests, like refusing plea deals backed by nothing but field tests and ensuring all field tests are verified by lab testing. But if very little of this is happening yet, it’s hard to believe there will be widespread adoption in the future. So, we’ll just get what we’ve been getting for years: tens of thousands of bogus arrests every year — arrests that will be touted by those performing them as indicative of their tireless service to the War on Drugs. The reality, however, will be tens of thousands of destroyed lives and violated rights by tests so questionable they should never have been considered evidence of anything.

You can find Asian restaurants in most places in the United States, but the type of Asian food choices varies. For Pew Research, Sona Shah and Regina Widjaya mapped the distributions of eight major cuisines.

Whenever I’m in a new place, I like to check out the Chinese restaurants, because they’re everywhere. It’s fun to taste the area’s version of universal Chinese dishes. I’ve been to Queens. Now I’m curious about Portsmouth City and Whitman.

Tags: Asian, Pew Research, restaurant

How many Metro stations did you visit last year? How many trips did you make on rail, how many did you make on buses, and how many miles did you travel in total? How much carbon did you save? Previously, your answer may have been, “Why are you asking me about this, Washingtonian magazine?” But […]

The post Metro Launches a Spotify Wrapped–Like Feature first appeared on Washingtonian.

Imagine you have a choice between two meals. The first is pizza, served in a delivery box, the same delicious pie you’ve been eating without incident your whole life. And the second? It’s, uh, something. An off-brand Powerbar, maybe? Definitely processed. An indeterminate meal-like substance. Doesn’t smell terrible. Probably tastes fine. But still. Oh, and […]

The post This Is Why the Rats Are Winning in DC first appeared on Washingtonian.

Earth got its hottest year on record in 2023. Based on data from Berkeley Earth, John Muyskens and Niko Kommenda, for The Washington Post, focused on the geographic areas that experienced the biggest jumps.

The Post has mapped the regions that saw the largest temperature anomalies in 2023 — places that have warmed so fast that the climate is already testing the limits of human infrastructure and the ability of the natural world to cope.

Tags: climate change, global warming, Washington Post