By Glen Raphael, raphael@pobox.com
"Modern medicine can cure your cold in seven days, but if you leave it untreated it'll linger for a week!"
-Francis S. Wagner, my grandfather
In 1989, I was attending UC Berkeley and intensely interested in political issues. Leading up to the 1990 off-year election the most important issue of the day by most accounts was - without a doubt - flag-burning. Yes, somehow the issue of whether ordinary Americans should be legally allowed to set f ire to a piece of colored cloth seemed vitally important. To hear the media and our politicians speak there was an epidemic of flag-burning going on and the country was just tearing itself apart over it. Congress passed a law. The Supremes struck it down. The President made a pledge. There was even going to be a Constitutional Amendment to ban it!
Six months later, the issue vanished.
Flag burning had been A Problem. A big problem. A growing problem. A Federal problem. A problem obviously requiring the attention of our national Congress. "What is your position on the flag-burning issue," we demanded of each potential candidate. And with great seriousness each one contemplated the question of what could be done to address The Problem.
And then The Problem went away, and it was as if it had never existed at all.
This episode of temporary mass hysteria seemed inexplicable until I read an essay* titled "How to Launch a Nationwide Drug Menace" which was about the rise and fall of "glue sniffing" as a political issue during the 70s.
Glue sniffing, it appeared, had had the exact same dynamic.
What happened in the 70s was that a reporter wrote a scary article in a minor newspaper based on the rumor that kids were getting high by sniffing model airplane glue. Kids read the article and tried it. Other reporters read the article and passed the story along. Eventually the Senate was holding hearings and national laws were proposed that would bar teenagers from buying glue. But as soon as a new crisis came along the issue was forgotten.
With two well-documented examples from the past to mull over - and a few others that were approaching at the time, this was starting to look like a trend. I finally came to suspect that the more urgent an issue seems to our politicians and the popular press, the more likely it is that that issue is entirely unconnected with reality.
Consider the issue of teflon-coated "cop-killer" bullets. Here is what President Clinton said about them in a speech:
"It is long past time for Congress to listen to America's law enfor cement officers and ban cop-killer bullets once and for all.
I have sent this legislation to Congress twice before and they failed to act. They should not delay this effort again. We don't need to study this issue anymore...We need a simple test and a straightforward ban. If a bullet can tear through a bulletproof vest like a hot knife through butter, it should be against the law and that is the bottom line. These bullets are designed for one purpose only -- to kill police officers. They have no place on our streets.
-- White house press release, March 5, 1997.
Now here are a few undeniable facts about the
teflon-coated bullets that have been dubbed
"cop-killers":
This is clearly a non-issue, since the type of bullet Clinton is railing against ab ove is a myth. If we wait a while and do nothing, this "problem" will certainly go away.
How about the other major campaign issues? Do we still need Clinton's embarrassing crusade to nationalize health care? Do we still need Dole's embarrassing crusade for more wholesome movies? We waited on those two issues, and many of the symptoms went away or no longer seemed so intolerable.
The most effective prescription for a major nationwide problem seems to be the same as the best prescription for lower back pain: wait a month and the symptoms will disappear on their own. But we don't do that. Instead, even when - especially when - the problem is mythical, transitory or insoluble, as a nation we run around wildly trying to look like we're "doing something" about the situation. Which leads to a great deal of unneccessary stress and tends to produce a lot of bad laws such as those that first prohibited marijuana use.
Those who favor laws to control gun ownership often advocate waiting periods to let flared tempers cool off. I don't usually favor those sort of laws, but in this case I'll make an exception. What we need is a "cooling-off period" for legislation. Six months would probably be good enough to protect us from abuses such as the Clipper Chip or the V-Chip, but I'd prefer at least a year or two just to be on the safe side.
Better yet, keeping in mind that any new changes in federal policy are likely to affect the entire nation for the indefinite future, we should adapt the FDA's stringent standards and require tests to prove the safety and efficacy of new laws before we make these laws available to the general public. The whole drug approval process usually takes a minimum of 15 years and requires dozens of small-scale long-term trial runs. That would probably be about the right degree of delay and inspection appropriate for newly proposed laws.
Here is the mechanism I suggest: after a law is passed, we try it out on Washington D.C. and in a few proxy cities here and there. We'd probably need about a dozen cities of various sizes, communities that volunteered for the effort out of a spirit of civic-mindedness. A lottery mechanism would guarantee that the same cities didn't have to suffer from all the new laws year after year. A fter each new law has been in effect somewhere for at least ten years, a study would compare cities with the new law in effect to two control groups: one conta ining cities in which the new measure was publicized as being passed but never actually enforced (to measure the placebo effect), and another group in which the law had not been passed at all. If the cities with the law being enforced were better off to a statistically significant degree in the relevant metric** than the control populations, then this law would be returned to the current Congress for possible re-ratification over the entire nation.
Our basic principle when proposing a law should be:
"First of all, do no harm."
Undoubtedly a few malcontents will claim that some conditions are so urgent as to need a law passed right away rather than a decade from now. To address their concerns, I suggest a publicity campaign based on the slogan:
Non-approved laws? "Just say no!"
Remember, if it saves just one life, it's worth it.
Comments to: Glen Raphael, raphael@pobox.com
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* "How to launch a nationwide drug menace" was actually a chapter from the book Licit and Illicit Drugs by the editors of Consumer Reports, which, incidentally, is an excellent book for debunking some of the many myths behind our War on Drugs. The book is out of print now but you can find it webbed here or here.
** The metric to be tested would of course have to be specified in advance by the proposers of the law.
This essay is written with thanks to both the Unabomber and Jon Katz, who incidentally have never been seen together at the same time.