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This little ingestible sensor could be the way doctors in the future could see inside you. This is the IMBED, or Ingestible Micro-Bio-Electronic Device. It can diagnose gastrointestinal problems by detecting unhealthy molecules and sending readings to a cellphone.

"That could be important for managing or diagnosing a bunch of different diseases," said Phillip Nadeau, an MIT graduate student.

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Two doctoral candidates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are behind the tech. They told Newsy they aimed to build a less invasive way to detect everything from colon cancer to Crohn's disease. For example, if someone currently needs to be tested for a bleeding stomach ulcer, they'd have to get an endoscopy.

Related Story Google To Use Nanoparticles, Wearables To Detect Disease

IMBED is compact. It's made of a 1.5 inch sensor and a battery that can power the device for a month and a half of continuous monitoring.

Researchers genetically engineered bacteria in the capsule to light up when it detects disease-driving molecules. The light is then converted into a current and sent to a cellphone, where the readings can be seen on an Android app.

Right now, the IMBED is just a prototype, a proof of concept. It hasn't been tested in humans, but it's successfully detected stomach bleeds in pigs.

And it's not the only device of its kind. Earlier this year, Australian researchers ran the first human trials involving a gut-gas detecting capsule that sends results to a cellphone.

But the MIT team says the IMBED is so adaptable, it could one day detect whatever a doctor or researcher wants it to. And they plan to make it easier to swallow, too.

"We think that with further engineering work, we would be able to reduce the size maybe by about a third in terms of the volume to really help drive this towards potential clinical use," said MIT student Marc Mimee.

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Swallowable Sensor Could Test Your Gut And Send Results To Your Phone

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This little ingestible sensor could be the way doctors in the future could see inside you. This is the IMBED, or Ingestible Micro-Bio-Electronic Device. It can diagnose gastrointestinal problems by detecting unhealthy molecules and sending readings to a cellphone. "That could be important for managing or diagnosing a bunch of different diseases," said Phillip Nadeau, an MIT graduate student.

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The European Union wants to ban certain single-use plastic products in an effort to clean up oceans and beaches.

In a proposal released Monday by the European Commission, some single-use plastic products with readily available and affordable alternatives would be banned from the market.

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The new rules would target 10 products that are "most often found on Europe's beaches and seas," including plastic straws, cutlery, plates and cotton buds.

As the EU Commission's vice president said in a statement, "Plastic can be fantastic, but we need to use it more responsibly."

Before a ban can go into effect, the proposal would need to be approved by all EU member states and the European Parliament, which could take awhile. But the commission hopes to get things moving before elections in May 2019.

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European Union Proposes Ban On Single-Use Plastic Products

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The European Union wants to ban certain single-use plastic products in an effort to clean up oceans and beaches. In a proposal released Monday by the European Commission, some single-use plastic products with readily available and affordable alternatives would be banned from the market.

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Accusations of sexual harassment have felled dozens of executives, but in one quiet corner of the financial world, the #MeToo movement looks like a golden opportunity.

Companies that offer money to plaintiffs in anticipation of future legal settlements are racing to capitalize on sexual harassment lawsuits.

That is setting off alarms in some quarters because the industry, like payday lenders, has a history of providing cash at exorbitant interest rates to customers who need the money for living and sometimes medical expenses.

The largely unregulated companies have operated with less public scrutiny than the rest of the litigation finance industry, which provides money to law firms to fund commercial lawsuits.

Historically, settlement-advance businesses have targeted personal injury and medical malpractice plaintiffs, many of them referred by their lawyers. But in recent months, lawyers say, more pitches are directed at women with sexual harassment claims.

For example, days after news broke of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual harassment, LawCash, a settlement-advance company, was trying to cash in. "Sexual abuse is a crime #HarveyWeinstein," read a LawCash tweet. The Brooklyn company offered cash upfront to sexual abuse plaintiffs "if you or someone you know is in need of financial help."

The settlement-advance firms get paid back only if a plaintiff collects money from a lawsuit. They make money by charging interest rates as high as 100 percent, which they are able to do because technically the money is considered an advance - not a loan - and therefore is not subject to state usury laws.

Consumer groups call the industry predatory. The companies counter that they are providing a vital service to people without other options.

Legal and business experts said there are scores of firms providing advances to tens of thousands of plaintiffs each year. The largest firms make cash advances totaling up to $40 million a year, according to an unpublished 2014 report by Diligence, a business intelligence firm.

Legal Bay of Fairfield, N.J., is one of the settlement-advance firms trawling for sexual harassment clients.

In one October news release, Christopher R. Janish, its chief executive, said he had "set aside a large portion of their presettlement cash advance funding specifically for plaintiffs of sexual harassment cases." The next month, the firm trumpeted its "special focus for victims of unwanted sexual advances."

Mr. Janish said he did not know if the pitches had landed any clients. "It just really is more of a public awareness and branding thing," he said.

The firms advertise on television and include hot-button search terms on their websites to lure traffic. That was how Heather Rothermund of Redding, Calif., learned of Nova Legal Funding in Los Angeles last summer. She had sued her employer, an adult care facility, for failing to discipline a co-worker who she said had groped her breasts and forced his hands down her jeans. Along with a state civil rights agency, she sought $250,000 in damages. The facility's owner did not respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Rothermund, 41, said the alleged assault left her with bills for therapy and anxiety medications that she couldn't afford. Her car was about to be repossessed when she came across Nova's online advertisement. The company advanced her $2,000 against an anticipated future legal settlement, she said.

The money got her out of a financial hole and helped her avoid having to accept a lowball settlement offer. She said that if the case settled within the year she might owe $4,000 - double what she borrowed. If the case drags on, she will owe more.

"It is expensive, but it does help and it is available," Ms. Rothermund said.

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Ms. Rothermund at home in Redding, Calif. The advance gave her the financial means to wait for an acceptable settlement offer, she said. Credit Talia Herman for The New York Times

For the past two decades, settlement-advance companies have been chasing the hottest - and most lucrative - trends in litigation. They have provided advances to victims of surgical vaginal mesh products; those suffering from ailments related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks; and former National Football League players with brain injuries.

"There are some companies that are trying to ride that 'me too' thing, and we are not doing that," said T. Thomas Colwell, chief executive of TriMark Legal Funding in Oregon. "That is just opportunistic."

Mr. Colwell said his firm had been providing cash advances to women with sexual harassment claims for 15 years. He said many clients worked in less glamorous industries than Hollywood and needed money to cover basic living expenses.

Only a handful of states regulate or license the settlement-advance firms, and little more than a website is necessary to get into the business.

Mr. Janish formed Legal Bay in 2014, a few years after getting out of state prison in New York for orchestrating a $13 million stock manipulation scheme.

Legal Bay's promotional materials don't mention Mr. Janish's past. He said his legal history wasn't relevant to customers. "My only obligation is to disclose to them the terms of the money they seek," he said.

Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general sued R. D. Legal, claiming the New Jersey firm took advantage of former N.F.L. players who expected to receive money in the league's landmark concussion settlement. The authorities claimed that R. D. Legal had tricked the players "into costly advances on settlement payouts."

Just last week, Colorado's attorney general announced a $2 million settlement with LawCash and another settlement-advance firm, Oasis Financial, saying they charged personal injury plaintiffs "predatory interest rates."

The industry says it charges high fees to compensate for the risk of not being repaid.

But the industry's lucrative model has attracted mainstream financial institutions. The D. E. Shaw hedge fund, the private equity firms Parthenon Capital and Victory Park Capital, and Germany's DZ Bank have either bought stakes in or lent money to settlement-advance firms. D. E. Shaw has sold its stake in Oasis Financial.

In addition to providing cash upfront to sexual harassment plaintiffs, some firms are pursuing the more traditional form of litigation finance, providing money to law firms in exchange for a cut of potential settlements.

Nova - the same company that advanced money to Ms. Rothermund - plans to announce that it will provide financing for lawyers pursuing Hollywood sexual harassment cases.

"We're trying to level the playing field in cases against big Hollywood players," said Ron Sinai, Nova's founder.

And Legalist, a San Francisco litigation finance start-up, said that a Weinstein-related marketing pitch had attracted new clients, and that the company was now bankrolling three lawsuits against alleged sexual abusers.

The practices used by the settlement-advance industry have proved particularly controversial, uniting consumer groups and big business in opposition. Consumer activists argue that recipients don't understand how quickly the costs accumulate. Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue that cash advances artificially drive up litigation costs.

"I would never recommend an individual finance his or her recovery," said Robert Kraus, a New York employment lawyer. "It is inconsistent for a lawyer, if he believes in a client's case, to recommend that he or she should limit their recovery."

Some of the larger settlement-advance firms use lawyers to drum up business. The firms recruit lawyers in much the same way that pharmaceutical companies woo doctors: with perks such as holiday gift baskets and invitations to year-end parties.

At Oasis, one of the industry's biggest players, employees who got a lawyer to send at least three clients in a year were celebrated as "hunters," according to court documents in an employment dispute.

Oasis, which spends millions of dollars each year on TV advertising, said it had provided funds to 200,000 customers since it opened in 2003.

Michael Gibson, a former case manager at Oasis, said he had worked on up to 70 cases a day. The typical customer, he said, borrowed less than $2,000 but paid a fee that was the equivalent of an 80 percent annual interest rate.

"My personal opinion is that legal financings are predatory loans," Mr. Gibson said.

Some customers say the cost is worth it.

Nickie Burdick, 28, had been unable to work for two years after she was injured in a car accident. Ms. Burdick, of Batavia, N.Y., said her attorney had suggested she take out a loan against a potential settlement in her case.

She knew the rates were steep, but she didn't see another viable option, she said. She recently has been borrowing $2,000 a month from Oasis, accruing $220 in fees each time.

"It was either that or I lose my house and be homeless," she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Some in the Finance Industry Are Trying to Cash In on #MeToo. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How the Finance Industry Is Trying to Cash In on #MeToo

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Accusations of sexual harassment have felled dozens of executives, but in one quiet corner of the financial world, the #MeToo movement looks like a golden opportunity. Companies that offer money to plaintiffs in anticipation of future legal settlements are racing to capitalize on sexual harassment lawsuits.

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Executive Summary

In the aftermath of MeToo, some men are privately saying that they have no intention of hiring women for open roles, or of managing young women if they can avoid it. Such candor is rare, and off the record, because such discrimination is illegal. But women will never know why they were passed over. Although men's fears may be grounded in an unconsciously biased view of women as untrustworthy or irrational, the MeToo movement also bears some of the blame for this backlash. The hashtag and media reports have had a telescoping effect, essentially blurring important distinctions between rape, groping, and clumsy come-ons. While neither sexual harassment and assault should be tolerated under any circumstances, they are not the same thing. But the level of condemnation offered to each now seems to be the same. As a result, women are silently being pushed to the side - which is not what women, or activists, want.

Cláudio Policarpo/EyeEm/Getty Images

When my mother graduated from college in 1972, she interviewed at an investment bank where a manager told her that for certain positions, women were interviewed but never hired. Even in the late 1980s, she went on interviews with headhunters who would explicitly tell her, "They want to interview a woman," with the emphasis on "interview"- as in, not hire. Through the decades, as she's climbed the ranks to become a CFO of publicly traded company, I've often told these stories to show how much more opportunity exists in the workplace today.

In the aftermath of the MeToo movement around sexual harassment, I wonder how much progress we've really made; recently, several men have privately told me that they have no intention of hiring women for open roles, or of managing young women if they can avoid it. I now worry that the movement has already sparked a destructive backlash.

As someone who works in finance and is currently a student in the executive MBA program at the Wharton School, I've heard men say that they're less likely to hire or associate with women as a result of the intensity of MeToo. Whether consciously or not, I am not sure how any man in America isn't reassessing his hiring practices. I have heard directly from male executives at two prominent Wall Street firms that they are moving their female direct reports to report to female bosses.

Even if we could get past the troubling message this sends, this isn't practical - women only make up about 25% of the executive team at the top Wall Street firms, and there simply aren't enough women to sustain this model. I've also heard from male fund managers that they didn't want to take on the "risk" of hiring a woman in their small shops. An employee of a large bank shared that any future women analyst hires should be "unattractive."

This environment is particularly troubling for my female classmates and me if we want to obtain a job in financial services, which is what Wharton is known for. Even if I were smarter or more qualified than one of my male classmates, why would an employer hire me when the guy next to me is good enough and is less likely to make an accusation of harassment? Females make up just over 25% of my class, there is no short supply of male MBAs to hire. I have already heard from some men at small hedge funds that they won't hire women because we're too "risky," and from men in VC that they won't have one-on-one meetings with female founders.

But such candor is rare, and off the record, because such discrimination is illegal. And women may never know why they were passed over. In some ways, I think my mother was afforded a better interview experience - at least they were being honest when they flat-out told her they won't hire women. I fear this spring will see many female MBAs interviewing at firms that wish to appear to be striving for gender parity, but have no real intention of hiring any young women.

To some, including the men I spoke with, it seems like the MeToo movement is not just about stopping harassment, but essentially trying to achieve the impossible: desexualize the workplace, which goes against Darwin. Chemistry between human beings can't be stopped, so what's the answer? To many men, that answer is protecting themselves by avoiding socializing with or hiring women. It may be illegal, but that won't stop it from happening - most cases would never get to court, and even if they did, they'd be really tough to prove.

My close friend, Vanity Fair contributing editor, Bethany McLean, views this fear as another excuse to exclude women. Before becoming a writer, she spent her days as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and certainly understands Wall Street culture. "That argument betrays a fundamental lack of respect for women," she told me. "When men say that they're afraid of being alone with women, what they're actually saying is that there is a high likelihood that all women are crazy and will read something into a situation that isn't intended. Women shouldn't buy into the patriarchal point of view that women can't be trusted."

Her point of view is supported by a 2016 study on corporate sexual harassment policies. It found that most corporate sexual harassment policies were ineffective because employees interpreted them as protecting irrational or oversensitive women at the expense of men. "We found that the actual words of the sexual harassment policy bore little resemblance to the employees' interpretations of the policy," wrote one of the researchers. "Although the policy clearly focused on behaviors of sexual harassment, the participants almost universally claimed that the policy focused on perceptions of behaviors."

Although men's fears may be grounded in an unconsciously biased view of women as untrustworthy or irrational, I do think that the MeToo movement bears some of the blame for the backlash I'm currently seeing. The hashtag and media reports have had a telescoping effect, essentially blurring important distinctions between rape, groping, and clumsy come-ons. As a victim of sexual assault who lived through a U.S. federal landmark case, I want to support the movement, but when the social media waterfall started last fall, I couldn't bring myself to share my experience - which brought me to the brink of depression for three years - under the same hashtag as women who were briefly fondled at a holiday office party. While neither sexual harassment and assault should be tolerated under any circumstances, they are not the same thing. But the level of condemnation offered to each now seems to be the same. As Sarah Chiche, one of the main authors of a French riposte to MeToo, told the New York Times, "Men whose only fault was sending a slightly salacious text message or email were being treated, on social networks, exactly the same way as sexual criminals, like rapists." Watching the pendulum-swing of society's reaction to sexual assault has been whiplash-inducing, and to me, worrisome.

I've heard many female peers say that they think the MeToo movement will speed gender parity in the workforce and create access to more executive positions. But we are not at a moment of celebration yet. As a society, we've worked so hard to try to take gender off the table, and now more than ever, it seems like it's very much there.

The response to MeToo shouldn't be to celebrate with expectations about the promise of this future. I don't have the answers, but I do believe the start requires addressing the reality of how scared men have become to work with and hire women as a result, and that trust between sexes in the workplace is broken. If the MeToo movement allows us to address this openly and honestly, then society will be much better for it. My concern is this is not happening; rather, women are silently being pushed to the side, making the road to the C-suite and boardroom just as hurdled as it was for my mother 40 years ago.

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Is #MeToo Backlash Hurting Women's Opportunities in Finance?

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Executive Summary In the aftermath of MeToo, some men are privately saying that they have no intention of hiring women for open roles, or of managing young women if they can avoid it. Such candor is rare, and off the record, because such discrimination is illegal.

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Wall Street's #MeToo moment is going to be huge if the dollars from sexual harassment settlements ever hit the fan, according to a new survey - and disgruntled financial service workers.

Forget about Harvey Weinstein and the world of celebrity high rollers. More than 1 in 5 workers in cash-rich wealth management - from the large firms to smaller broker-dealers peddling stocks, bonds and planning finances - report a "high prevalence" of sexual harassment in the workplace, according to a survey by SourceMedia, a financial media company.

And it's not much better in other pockets of high finance.

"Like all women who work on Wall Street, I sometimes feel like I am at a frat party," Rita Robbins, founder and president of Affiliated Advisors in New York, admitted to The Post, referring to the mostly locker-room bad-boy culture she says pervades financial services. "Virtually every woman I know has a story or four about horrific behavior that they have been subjected to."

The revelations of inappropriate sexual innuendo and playboy antics by co-workers and some bosses come as Wall Street so far remains largely unscathed by #MeToo announcements.

But insiders say if financial industry victims break their silence, the consequences could reverberate from Main Street to Wall Street, with multimillion-dollar lawsuits and settlements.

"Sadly, we have felt powerless due to long-standing, corporate culture attitudes," said Robbins, a female boss who oversees 110 employees.

Insiders and the latest survey reveal how a testosterone-fueled environment rampant with inappropriate behavior bedevils female Wall Street workers.

In a broad survey of professionals that included advisers, bankers, insurance workers and tax accountants, it is the financial advisory staff at brokerage houses who are much more likely to experience unwanted sexual conduct, which is highly prevalent in their sector.

"It's getting better, but it is a carry-over from years past, when the industry included a substantial amount of flirting and hitting on, which today is more likely than not called sexual harassment," one male survey respondent reported.

In fact, twice as many pros, or 22 percent, in wealth management, where the vast majority of advisers are men, reported a high prevalence of sexual advances compared with the banking sector.

The lowest reported prevalence, at 8 percent, was among tax and accounting professionals. That industry has a much more even split of male and female workers.

"The stats are mind-boggling," one former male Merrill Lynch broker told The Post on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution at his next financial services job. "Everyone in the industry is absolutely terrified to comment publicly on sexual harassment, because any comment can be used as a weapon against you - and then next thing, you are standing on the corner with a box with all your office stuff in it."

This Wall Street hot shot said not much has changed since he started his career in the early 1990s.

"I knew of one female salesperson on the institutional side at a wirehouse who had to intimately flirt with clients as she was building up her accounts," he said. "She had to badly compromise herself to keep her job."

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Wall Street's #MeToo moment could hit multimillion-dollar tipping point

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Wall Street's #MeToo moment is going to be huge if the dollars from sexual harassment settlements ever hit the fan, according to a new survey - and disgruntled financial service workers. Forget about Harvey Weinstein and the world of celebrity high rollers.

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Inside Wall Street's Complex, Shameful, and Often Confidential Battle with #MeToo

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Wall Street may not have its own Harvey Weinstein to contend with, but the #MeToo movement has forced the industry to address its own history, practices, and culture in uneven, and sometimes shameful, ways.

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A war of words is raging on many a college campus ... a debate in which the right of free speech itself is under fire. Our Cover Story is reported by Rita Braver:
In the 1960s college students demanded the right to talk about anything on campus, from civil rights to opposing the Vietnam War. All ideas seemed up for debate. But is that still true today?

At Yale University in Connecticut, a faculty member is yelled at by students. The reason? His wife (also a Yale instructor) had suggested students should be free to wear any Halloween costume they choose, even if slightly offensive. A month later, the teacher resigns.

At the University of Missouri, students and faculty try to stop a student reporter from covering their protest. "This is a First Amendment that protects your right to stand here, and protects mine!" the photographer said.

And at the University of California at Berkeley, when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro showed up to speak, there were multiple arrests. The school was on virtual lockdown, and more than half a million dollars was spent on security.

Even comedian Bill Maher faced student calls to cancel his Berkeley commencement address in part because he'd made jokes about Islam.

"Whoever told you, you only had to hear what didn't upset you?" Maher quipped.

But at campuses around the country, some speakers were dis-invited, or simply backed out in the face of student opposition, such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, and the rapper and actor Common.

It's got a lot of people asking, what is going on?

In September 2015, speaking to young people in Des Moines, Iowa, President Barack Obama said, "I've heard some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who, you know, is too conservative. Or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans. Or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women ... I don't agree with that, that you as students at colleges have to be coddled and protected from different points of view."

Some of the protests are in reaction to deliberately provocative figures, like white nationalist Richard Spencer. But what happens when the speaker says he is just reporting on his academic research?

"I think what I'm saying is important for college kids to hear," said Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist with the American Enterprise Institute. His 2012 book "Coming Apart" explores the growing divide between rich and poor white Americans.

"Most of my lectures are going after them as members of a new elite that [is] out of touch with mainstream America," Murray said.

But when he came to talk about it at Middlebury College in Vermont last March, there were protests, as chanting and yelling students shouted him down.

Phil Hoxie, a member of the student wing of the American Enterprise Institute, helped bring Murray to campus. He told Braver he knew that Murray would be controversial: "It wasn't a surprise to us that some people might not like 'The Bell Curve.' But we were not at all hoping that he would discuss 'The Bell Curve.' We were hoping that he would give a lecture on 'Coming Apart.'"

"The Bell Curve" is a previous book of Murray's which suggested race may play a part in determining intelligence, and asserted that blacks do less well than whites on IQ tests. That set off a firestorm when it was published in 1994 ... a firestorm reignited at Middlebury.

"The speakers the college invites play a key role in our mission as a college," said senior Jeremy Alben. "And I don't think Murray's scholarship should be part of the academic mission."

Sophomore Rae Aaron was hoping to ask Murray some tough questions: "It's very ironic that the students who claim to be the most liberal are the ones who are not willing to engage with controversial ideas," she said. "At some point, it turned into, not an argument of, 'We should protest his ideas,' but 'We should protest his right to share his ideas.'"

Murray was set to be interviewed by political science professor Allison Stanger. But seconds after they took the stage, students drowned them out with a tirade of shouts. "We really lost an education opportunity," Stanger told Braver.

"We didn't actually prevent him from speaking," said student Liz Dunn. "He still wrote plenty of articles before and after the talk. It was just saying in this specific time on this specific stage, we're sending you a message that we do not support your ideals."

Students like Dunn and Alben insist that just letting someone like Murray be heard increases the likelihood of violence against minorities.

"If you want to engage with this scholar and you believe that your right to see them and engage with them is so strong that you don't care about the potential trauma or the potential violence this could bring to marginalized students, then I think it's a pretty selfish idea of academic engagement," Alben said.

In fact, Murray's appearance did result in violence, of a different kind. When professor Stanger was escorting Murray out, they were attacked by a mob that included outside activists, and she was left with a concussion and whiplash.

Ironically, Stanger was selected to moderate the event because she was seen as a respected professor with liberal credentials.

"I actually went back and reviewed 'The Bell Curve' and prepared really tough questions that I never really got to ask in front of an audience that was listening," she told Braver. "It was this real group-think mob mentality where people weren't reading and thinking for themselves, but rather relying on other people to tell them what to think."

And it isn't just Middlebury; Murray was shouted down at the University of Michigan this past fall as well.

Braver asked, "What do you think is different [on college campuses]? Have students changed?"

"Well, the identity politics is way more intense," Murray replied. "You are getting this, 'You can't talk to me about any of my life experiences because you aren't a woman, and you aren't Black, or you aren't poor,' and therefore it's almost as if they're saying we have no common humanity."

In fact, some critics say too many college campuses today aren't places for a civil exchange of ideas, but an intolerant world of political correctness.

A recent Gallup poll finds that 54% of college students say people on campus are afraid to say what they believe.

And if you visit a campus these days, you may feel like you need a dictionary for a whole new set of phrases ... terms like "safe space" (a place where students can go where they won't be exposed to topics that make them uncomfortable), or "trigger warnings" (when a professor cautions students that upcoming material could be distressing).

But now, some signs of a backlash.

Robert Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, told Braver, "Discomfort is an intrinsic part of an education."

Last school year, the university sent a letter to incoming freshman that said, in part:

"[W]e do not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own..."

Braver asked, "Why did the university have to put out a letter like that in the first place?"

"Part of the way we operate is that we're a place where there's constant open discourse, constant expression and constant argument," Zimmer replied.

But the war of words is continuing on college campuses across the country, including Middlebury, where students like Liz Dunn and Rae Aaron say the impact of the Charles Murray incident is still being felt.

Braver asked, "Why is this a good thing in your mind that these protests are going forward?"

Dunn replied, "I think that it's always a good thing to realize that we are actually able to challenge authority and that we actually have a voice and a place and the ability to express that, and that what we're experiencing is important and is something that we can change."

"In the end, I think the conversation turned into whether or not we support controversial ideas," Aaron said. "And, for me, it's hands down, of course we do. It doesn't matter how much we disagree with them."

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A war of words is raging on many a college campus ... a debate in which the right of free speech itself is under fire. Our Cover Story is reported by Rita Braver: In the 1960s college students demanded the right to talk about anything on campus, from civil rights to opposing the Vietnam War.

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Outside contributors' opinions and analysis of the most important issues in politics, science, and culture.

"We should refuse to allow hateful speakers on campus," a campus faculty member said.

The statement was met with resounding applause. I mentally prepared for the response to what I was going to say next.

It was September, and I was at a forum at which several professors, including me, discussed free speech issues before a large audience of students at the University of California Berkeley. Several faculty and students had already implored Chancellor Carol Christ to revoke the invitations of conservative provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campus, and their declarations were met with enthusiasm.

Finally, I spoke up. "Be clear that if Chancellor Christ were to exclude speakers based on their viewpoint, she would get sued and lose," I said. "The speakers would get an injunction and be allowed to speak. They would recover attorneys' fees and maybe money damages. They would be portrayed as victims. And since they would get to speak anyway, nothing would be gained."

No one applauded.

I have been dean of Berkeley's law school for several months. But before I arrived at campus, the university, home of the free speech movement of the 1960s, had become a battleground for a new kind of campus speech debate.

In late September, elaborate security precautions were taken when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at Berkeley; $600,000 had to be spent so he could deliver his remarks without disruption. When conservative student groups attempted to host a "Free Speech Week," and invited conservative speakers like Coulter and Steve Bannon, the campus steeled itself to spend in excess of $1 million to allow them to speak while ensuring safety on the campus. (In the end, "Free Speech Week" was canceled by the student group that had organized it.)

I have been teaching First Amendment law to law students and undergraduates for more than 37 years. I have also litigated free speech cases, including at the Supreme Court. I believe that Chancellor Christ and the campus have done a superb job of adhering to the First Amendment, protecting free speech while ensuring the safety of students, staff, and faculty. But it's also become clear to me that current college students are often ambivalent, or even hostile, to the idea of free speech on campus.

Students today are driven by a desire to protect their classmates from hate speech

Disputes over free speech on campus have long occurred, but today is different. Usually in the past, it was students who wanted to speak out and campus administrators who tried to stop demonstrations. Now it often is about outside speakers and outside disruptors, like the radical leftist protest group antifa. The campus is just the place for their battle.

At Berkeley and elsewhere, it is now often students and faculty calling for preventing the speakers while campus officials are steadfastly protecting freedom of expression.

In my seminars the past two years (before Berkeley, I was at UC Irvine's law school), I was surprised by how much the students wanted campuses to stop offensive speech - and the degree to which they trusted campus officials to have the power to do so. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Institute said that four in 10 college students believe the government should be able to prevent people from publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups.

While teaching our class on free speech on campus at UC Irvine, Chancellor Howard Gillman and I realized that the students' desire to restrict hurtful speech came from laudable instincts. This is the first generation of college students to be taught from a young age that bullying is wrong; they have internalized this message. Many spoke powerfully of instances in which they or their friends had suffered from hurtful speech. They want to make campuses inclusive for all, and they know that hate speech causes great harm, especially among those who have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

But I worry, too, that students do not realize the degree to which free speech has been essential for the advancement of rights and equality. There would not have been a 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, without the women's suffrage movement and its widespread demonstrations. The civil rights protests of the 1960s - lunch counter sit-ins, the march on Selma, demonstrations on campuses - were essential to bringing about the end of segregation.

Those events, though, are ancient history for my students. I worry that they equate freedom of speech more with the vitriol of the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak than the anti-Vietnam War protests I participated in when I was in college. I was surprised by how little our students knew about the history of free speech, including the outbreak of McCarthyism, when faculty and students suffered greatly from the lack of legal protection for expression and academic freedom.

Although all of this makes the context different today, the law of the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom are clear and long established. The Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the First Amendment means public institutions cannot punish speech, or exclude speakers, on the grounds that it is hateful or deeply offensive. This includes public colleges and universities.

Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment

Every effort by the government to regulate hate speech has been declared unconstitutional. Over 25 years ago, more than 350 colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes. But every court to consider such a hate speech code declared it to be unconstitutional. The codes inevitably were far too vague in terms of what speech was permitted and what was prohibited. Of course, free speech is not absolute and can be punished when it incites illegal activity, constitutes a "true threat" that causes a person to fear imminent harm to his or her physical safety, or rises to the level of prohibited harassment.

This does not mean that campuses are powerless in the face of disruptive or hateful speech. Even though there is a First Amendment right to speak, that does not mean that protesters have the right to demonstrate in the middle of a freeway at rush hour. A campus surely could prohibit a large demonstration in a classroom building while classes are in session. Campuses can regulate when and where speech takes place in order to prevent disruption of school activities. Controversial speakers can be placed in auditoriums where it is easier to assure safety and prevent disruptions. Demonstrations can be placed in areas away from where classes are in session.

Although the First Amendment applies only to the government, including public universities, private universities should follow these same principles. They are essential to academic freedom, which is at the very core of a university's mission.

There might be a point at which it is impossible to simultaneously protect public safety and allow controversial speech to occur. Then campus officials have no choice but to prevent the speech, given that they must provide for the safety of students, staff, and faculty. But canceling a speaker should truly be a last resort and never based on the viewpoint expressed.

At what point should a campus cancel a speaker because it cannot afford to ensure the safety of students, staff, and faculty? Chancellor Christ has estimated that already this semester, the campus has spent more than $2 million to protect free speech. I believe Berkeley campus officials made the right choice in protecting these speakers from harm, but I also know that such expenditures are not sustainable.

Although speakers have a right to express hateful messages on campus, that does not mean that campus officials should silently tolerate such speech. It is important that campus officials denounce hate when it occurs and explain why it is inconsistent with the type of community we desire.

Education is enhanced when there is more speech, not when speech is regulated by campus officials

The law is clear that a public university may not exclude a speaker based on his or her views, nor may students or faculty be punished for the views they express. In a separate piece for Vox, professor Robert Post challenges this by suggesting that usual free speech principles should not apply on campus. He argues that campuses must of course engage in content-based judgments in evaluating a faculty member's scholarship or a student's work. From this, he concludes that universities are justified in excluding outside speakers that do not serve the educational mission of the campus.

Post's premise is undoubtedly correct: Universities must evaluate the content of faculty and student work. But it does not follow that outside of this realm, free speech principles do not apply on campus. It is a logical fallacy to say that because basic free speech principles sometimes do not apply on campus, they must never apply.

First, it is important to distinguish what the law is from what Post thinks the law should be. Under current First Amendment law, a public university clearly would be acting unconstitutionally if it excluded a speaker from campus based on his or her viewpoint. When Auburn University attempted to prevent white supremacist Richard Spencer from speaking, a federal court ruled against the university.

Second, Post ignores the distinction between the university's ability to regulate speech in professional settings (such as in grading students' papers or in evaluating teaching and scholarship) and its ability to regulate speech in other contexts. The former does not justify a university's ability to restrict campus speakers based on viewpoint or to punish student or faculty speech in a nonprofessional setting.

Professor Post also argues that a primary purpose of a university is to educate students - so a campus would be justified in excluding speakers that it perceives as interfering with this mission. But the law says quite the contrary. It does not allow a public university to exclude a speaker by claiming that the viewpoint expressed would be so offensive to students that it would interfere with their education. Also, this would seem to give unlimited discretion to campus officials to exclude or punish any speaker that they deemed to be inconsistent with students' education. The assumption of freedom of speech, and of academic freedom, is that education is enhanced when there is more speech, not when government officials have the power to censor and punish speech they don't like.

Having seen the enormous amount of time and money invested by the Berkeley campus to deal with the appearances of Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos, I cannot help but wish this had happened someplace else. But I know that Berkeley, especially because of its history with the free speech movement of the 1960s, is a unique place for expression. This is why it is so important that the campus did all it could to ensure freedom of speech. It is also why this campus has the chance to be a model for other schools in upholding the principle that all ideas and views can be expressed at colleges and universities.

Erwin Chemerinsky is d ean and Jesse H. Choper d istinguished professor of law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He is the co-author, with Howard Gillman, of Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017).

The Big Idea is Vox's home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture - typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

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Hate speech is protected free speech, even on college campuses

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Artboard 1 Outside contributors' opinions and analysis of the most important issues in politics, science, and culture. "We should refuse to allow hateful speakers on campus," a campus faculty member said. The statement was met with resounding applause. I mentally prepared for the response to what I was going to say next.

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The free speech debate on college campuses has become a cultural flash point. Rachel Martin talks to Suzanne Nossel, of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, about if free speech can go too far.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

If we look back on 2017, we saw this debate on many college campuses over what constitutes free speech, and when it veers into hate speech, and when it should be silenced. Our co-host, Rachel Martin, recently sat down with Suzanne Nossel of PEN America. That's a free speech advocacy group. And they talked about how the University of California at Berkeley dealt with the far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos earlier this year.

SUZANNE NOSSEL: Someone like Milo Yiannopoulos styles himself as a standard bearer for free speech. I think it's highly problematic that you have a provocateur who's really interested in just instigating, angering and ostracizing students. That said, the thing Milo Yiannopoulos wants more than anything else is to be shut down. If Berkeley says your event is canceled, he then goes - he can sue Berkeley. When people like that have sued campuses, they've won if it's a public university on First Amendment grounds.

He can go and grandstand and fundraise and galavant around the country saying University of California, Berkeley, shut me down. And he did that. You know, he then tried a reprise, to come back in September. And the campus, I think, took exactly the right posture, which was to say, you can come here. We'll provide security at great expense to us. And you know what? The whole thing fizzled out.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: So you're essentially advocating a sort of capitalist solution to this, that you have to let the actual marketplace decide. Students themselves issue a verdict about whether or not they want Milo to come or not by showing up or not.

NOSSEL: Yeah. I mean, on a campus where you have liberal rules, where any student group or any department is allowed to invite a speaker, for the administration to then step in and say this particular speaker is out of bounds, I think, is problematic. They should also speak out. I mean, I don't think it's just purely standing back and letting the marketplace resolve it. I think the university has a voice in this as well. Our universities stand for certain ideals and principles. So they need to speak out on behalf of those values.

I think the university that did it well was the University of Florida. When Richard Spencer came, they scheduled it at the outer limits of the campus. They also mounted a campaign saying, you know, these are not the values that we stand for. And he got through with it, but he didn't get that much publicity. He wasn't able to grandstand. And I think eventually this will run its course if campuses handle it in that way.

MARTIN: We have this collective reverence for the First Amendment, but I wonder if you think it is time to take stock of the fact that it was written exclusively by white men at a time when African-Americans were only considered to be three-fifths of a human being.

NOSSEL: You know, it's interesting because at one of the meetings that we had with student leaders, an African-American student was sort of reminded of the role of the First Amendment by a First Amendment legal scholar. And her response was the First Amendment wasn't written for me. And what she meant by that was both that when the First Amendment was written, her forebearers would've been considered three-fifths of a person, and also that the way she sees the First Amendment being invoked on campus is to protect slurs and other things that seem bent on undercutting her presence as a student.

And it's also the case that First Amendment protections and freedom of speech have been essential to every single civil rights and social justice struggle that has been waged in this country, whether it's the battle for women's rights or rights for African-Americans or immigrants' rights. You could not wage those fights if you were not protected in being able to speak out to challenge authority.

You know, that said, there are many controversies on campus that the First Amendment really doesn't help to answer. In many cases, we see groups of students trying to shut down the speech of others. So this is not the government or even the university administration acting, but it's rather student versus student.

MARTIN: Are college campuses going to remain the front lines of the free speech debate in this country going forward into 2018?

NOSSEL: You know, I think they will. I mean, you have generational attitudes that are different and expectations. There are demands for levels of conscientiousness in language that, you know, adults - people over 40 - can kind of scoff at. And yet to students, you know, these seem very real. They're much more accustomed to growing up in diverse environments. Ways of characterizing people that were perfectly acceptable a couple of decades ago, you know, sound really jarring and really rankle this generation. So I think they are pushing the boundaries. So I don't expect this to die down.

MARTIN: Suzanne Nossel is the executive director of PEN America. Suzanne, thanks so much for talking with us.

NOSSEL: Thank you, Rachel.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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College Students Clash Repeatedly Over Free Speech Issues

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The free speech debate on college campuses has become a cultural flash point. Rachel Martin talks to Suzanne Nossel, of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, about if free speech can go too far.

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The government has ordered an investigation into the growing problem of addiction to prescription drugs such as painkillers and medicines to treat anxiety and insomnia.

Steve Brine, the public health minister, has acted after it emerged that one in 11 (8.9%) patients treated by the NHS in England last year was given a drug that can induce dependency.

Fears about excessive prescription has also been boosted by the more than 100% rise in the number of antidepressants prescribed in England over the last decade and the fact that prescription of addictive medicines has increased by 3% over the last five years.

Britain needed to heed warnings from America, where an estimated 64,000 people a year are dying from drug overdoses, partly as a result of a huge recent increase in addiction to painkillers, Brine said.

"We know this is a huge problem in other countrues like the United States, and we must absolutely make sure it doesn't become one here," he added Brine.

Brine has asked Public Health England to undertake an independent inquiry into the scale of the problem, including the harms caused by dependence on and withdrawal from a range of commonly prescribed drugs.

PHE will assess the evidence relating to the prescription of, and problems resulting from, the use of:

Benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety medications) such as Valium, Ativan and Xanax.

Z-drugs, a similar class of drugs often used to treat insomnia.

Antidepressants.

Opioid pain-relieving drugs.

Pregabalin, which is used for anxiety, insomnia and nerve pain.

Gabapentin, an anticonvulsant used to treat epilepsy

"It's of real concern that so many people find themselves dependent on or suffering withdrawal symptoms from prescribed medicines. Many will have sought help for a health problem only to find later on they have a further obstacle to overcome," said Rosanna O'Connor, PHE's director of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

PHE said it will be conducting a "broad, public-health focused review of commonly prescribed medicines for adults who have pain [excluding pain from cancer], anxiety, insomnia or depression". It is due to report its findings in early 2019.

Brine has asked PHE to make recommendations outlining what it thinks the government and NHS should do to limit problems of addiction.

The British Medical Association, which represents most of Britain's doctors, said ministers should establish a helpline to give addicts help and advice as a matter of urgency.

"A national helpline, similar to the Frank service [for users of illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine], could be set up relatively quickly. This would give individuals suffering with dependence to drugs like benzodiazepines vital, timely support," said Dr Andrew Green, the clinical and prescribing lead on the BMA's GPs committee.

Almost 100 people are dying every day across America from opioid overdoses - more than car crashes and shootings combined. The majority of these fatalities reveal widespread addiction to powerful prescription painkillers. The crisis unfolded in the mid-90s when the US pharmaceutical industry began marketing legal narcotics, particularly OxyContin, to treat everyday pain. This slow-release opioid was vigorously promoted to doctors and, amid lax regulation and slick sales tactics, people were assured it was safe. But the drug was akin to luxury morphine, doled out like super aspirin, and highly addictive. What resulted was a commercial triumph and a public health tragedy. Belated efforts to rein in distribution fueled a resurgence of heroin and the emergence of a deadly, black market version of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The crisis is so deep because it affects all races, regions and incomes

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The Royal College of GPs however sounded a note of caution and said family doctors were not routinely overprescribing drugs that can lead to patients becoming addicted.

"Many addictive medications, when prescribed and monitored correctly, and in line with clinical guidelines, can be very effective in treating a wide range of health conditions. But all drugs will have risks and potential side-effects," said Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, the college's chair.

"It is important not to automatically jump to the conclusion that more drugs being prescribed is always a bad thing. Advances in medical research mean that more medications are constantly becoming more available for patients, and they can increasingly be used to improve their health, and the nature of our NHS is that these medications are available to anyone who could benefit from them," she added.

Limited availability of NHS alternatives to certain drugs, such as talking therapies instead of antidepressants, means GPs can end up prescribing potentially addictive medications.

"We know most patients would rather not be on long-term medication and where appropriate we will explore non-pharmacological treatments, but these - and this is particularly so for psychological therapies - are often scarce at community level," said Stokes-Lampard.
Topics

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The government has ordered an investigation into the growing problem of addiction to prescription drugs such as painkillers and medicines to treat anxiety and insomnia. Steve Brine, the public health minister, has acted after it emerged that one in 11 (8.9%) patients treated by the NHS in England last year was given a drug that can induce dependency.

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Long before the current opioid epidemic, most states developed tracking systems to allow physicians and pharmacists to check patients' use of prescription drugs, including opioid painkillers, to determine whether they may be receiving too many pills, at too high a dose or in dangerous combination with other medications such as sedatives and muscle relaxants. But few prescribers took advantage of the systems.

Now, faced with a drug overdose epidemic that killed more than 63,000 people in 2016, at least 39 states are insisting that health professionals use the systems, known as prescription drug monitoring programs, or PDMPs, to analyze each patient's prescription drug use before writing another prescription for highly addictive drugs such as Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin. In Missouri, the only state without a monitoring program, St. Louis County adopted a local system and made its use by physicians mandatory.

"We saw a big nationwide push this year to make prescription drug monitoring programs mandatory, more comprehensive and effective, and easier to use," said Chad Zadrazil, a legislative attorney with the National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws, a federally funded organization based in Iowa. He said some states also are expanding access to the databases to assist in public health initiatives.

In the past, drug databases were used primarily by police to track down doctors who indiscriminately prescribe opioid medications for cash. Most pharmacists consulted the systems, but few doctors took the time to review the databases before prescribing highly addictive opioids.

Until states began requiring physicians to use PDMPs, fewer than 35 percent of medical professionals used the tracking systems to identify patients who may be at risk for addiction and overdose, Zadrazil said. Now, in states that require doctors to consult PDMPs, he said, physician usage rates exceed 90 percent.

Overall opioid prescribing has declined in those states as well, as have drug-related hospitalizations and overdose deaths. States also are seeing a rise in addiction treatment as more doctors refer patients to programs after discovering they are taking painkillers from multiple sources and are probably addicted, according to an analysis from Brandeis University's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Training and Technical Assistance Center.

New features

In addition to requiring doctors and other prescribers to use the tracking systems before prescribing potentially addictive and deadly drugs, Wisconsin, Utah and a few other states are adding information to PDMPs - including overdose rescues, hospitalizations for drug-related conditions and drug-related arrests - that can help physicians determine when to curtail a patient's drug use.

And for doctors who see a need for addiction treatment, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin include referral information about such services.

Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and a handful of other states are revamping their programs to make them compatible with electronic health record software systems commonly used by physicians and pharmacists, Zadrazil said. And nearly all states have started allowing busy doctors to select a delegate who can access the sensitive information and download patients' drug histories into their medical records before their appointments.

At least 47 states have started adding drug monitoring data from one or more nearby states so that physicians can see whether patients are receiving medications from prescribers in other states.

More than half of all states have added a physician assessment function to their PDMPs so doctors, nurses and other prescribers can see how their prescribing practices compare with others in their state and whether and how often they are exceeding Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and state-imposed dosage and quantity limits. Washington state and Wisconsin send those report cards to doctors' supervisors and medical directors.

A growing number of states also send unsolicited alerts to doctors, pharmacists and law enforcement when a patient starts receiving dangerously high doses of prescription opioids, has been taking opioids for longer than recommended or is taking opioids in combination with other drugs that could cause dangerous interactions.

In a handful of states, new laws give public health departments access to some information on patients who receive opioids to help identify geographical hot spots where residents are receiving large quantities of opioids and other controlled substances and to analyze relationships between prescription drug use and overdose deaths.

In addition, 30 states make drug monitoring data available to coroners, toxicologists and medical examiners to help determine which drugs may have been involved in an apparent overdose death.

Mandatory use

In 2010, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, Nevada and Oklahoma were the first states to require doctors and other prescribers to search patients' drug histories before prescribing opioid painkillers, sedatives or other potentially harmful and addictive drugs. By December 2016, at least 31 states were requiring prescriber use of PDMPs.

In 2017, eight more states - Alabama, Alaska, California, Florida, Michigan, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin - implemented policies requiring doctors not only to log in to the state's tracking system before prescribing a controlled substance, but also to analyze each patient's history of drug use and, if necessary, limit prescription renewals for opioids and certain other medications, according to the Brandeis center.

The CDC, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Bureau of Justice Assistance are encouraging all states to require PDMP use. The same agencies are also providing grants to help states upgrade these programs to make them more effective at identifying patients who may be at risk of addiction, overdose and illicit sales of controlled substances.

Although the American Medical Association supports physician use of drug-tracking systems to identify potential addiction and drug diversion to the black market, some state medical societies have argued against mandatory rules they say interfere with the practice of medicine. Patients' privacy and legitimate pain needs, they argue, could be jeopardized by requiring busy physicians to investigate potential patient abuse of pain medications.

Despite such objections, more states are imposing the requirements. "Comprehensive mandates are incredibly important and valuable," said Pat Knue, director of the Brandeis center. "But it would be better if practitioners used the prescription monitoring systems voluntarily."
- Stateline Read more: New state rules are forcing opioid prescribers to confront 'doctor shopping' Doctors prescribed me pain meds but couldn't help me get off them How Congress weakened the DEA's ability to go after drug distributors

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States require doctors to use prescription drug monitoring systems for patients

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Long before the current opioid epidemic, most states developed tracking systems to allow physicians and pharmacists to check patients' use of prescription drugs, including opioid painkillers, to determine whether they may be receiving too many pills, at too high a dose or in dangerous combination with other medications such as sedatives and muscle relaxants.

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How Doctors Are Fueling the Opioid Epidemic

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Doctors have a lot to do with who develops an opioid addiction, suggests a new study on opioid prescriptions.

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When I was a sophomore in college, the College Republicans invited Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative political activist best known for her campaign against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, to give a speech on campus. There were no barricades around the building where she spoke. Beyond a few campus police officers, there were no state police in riot gear. Bags weren't checked at the entrance. And most of all, no one shouted her down on one of the most liberal college campuses in the country.

Compare that with the scenes that have played out on campuses over the past year at the University of Virginia, the College of William & Mary and the University of California at Berkeley, among others, where appearances by controversial speakers resulted in protests with armed police officers reminiscent of a war zone, with students doing their best to interrupt speakers - all at a great cost to some cash-strapped universities. The University of California at Berkeley said a visit last fall by the conservative writer Ben Shapiro cost more than $600,000 in preparations and security. (The university system agreed to cover half that bill.) By the way, the university ended the fiscal year with a $77 million deficit.

If incidents like these seem more common nowadays on college campuses, chalk it up partly to student attitudes toward the First Amendment and free speech. A new survey released Monday from Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation reveals that students have a tenuous relationship with the First Amendment.

The poll of 3,000 U.S. college students found that they generally endorse the ideals of free speech and campuses that encourage the discussion of a variety of ideas. But once that speech begins to infringe on their values, they're likely to support policies that place limits on speech. Those include free-speech zones, speech codes and prohibitions on hate speech. Only a slight majority (53 percent) think that handing out literature on controversial issues is "always acceptable."

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the First Amendment means public institutions, including state colleges and universities, cannot exclude speakers or punish speech just because it is hateful or offensive. Yet 37 percent of college students in the poll said that shouting down speakers was acceptable, at least sometimes. Another 10 percent said it was acceptable sometimes to use violence to prevent someone from speaking.

It is notable that some of the biggest debates about free speech in the past year occurred at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech movement in the 1960s. Back then, however, the students were the ones who wanted to speak out and the administrators were the ones who tried to stop them. Now the roles are reversed.

In November, when I moderated a panel of campus leaders on this subject, including Carol Christ, the University of California at Berkeley's chancellor, and Rebecca Blank, the University of Wisconsin at Madison chancellor, they were the biggest defenders of free expression on campus.

The new Gallup survey is a follow-up to a similar one taken in 2016, and pollsters noted how opinions have shifted in just a few years. Support for campuses that promote a variety of views has dropped.

Some scholars have noted that one reason current college students are ambivalent, sometimes even hostile, to the idea of free speech is that they were a generation raised to recognize that bullying is wrong. They equate hurtful speech to bullying, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley's law school and co-author of a book released last year called "Free Speech on Campus."

Another reason is social media. The Gallup survey found that social media is a critical part of the lives of college students, and it has shaped their opinions on free speech.

"There's a strong suggestion from this study that college students are souring on social media," Brandon Busteed, executive director of education and workforce development at Gallup, told me. "Students are much more likely to report having discussions of political and social issues on social media rather than in public areas of campus. This is a huge challenge and opportunity for both students and higher education leaders to bring this dialogue back to campus."

More than 6 in 10 students in the poll said the dialogue on social media usually isn't civil, and increasingly students think that social media can stifle expression because of a fear of being attacked or because people block those they disagree with.

Whatever the reason for students' ambivalence on the First Amendment, the free speech battles on campus playing out in the public arena - and sometimes promoted just for that reason - seem to be having a larger impact on higher education. In the past few years, several national surveys have found an erosion of support for colleges and universities. One survey in particular last summer from the Pew Research Center showed that 58 percent of Republicans and right-leaning independents think colleges have a negative impact on the country.

The skepticism about higher education is stronger on the right, but it comes from both sides of the political spectrum. No wonder that public funding of state universities is being slashed in many states or that last year Congress agreed to tax the earnings on the endowments of some universities.

College students, of course, are only passing through campus for a few years, so they don't usually think about the larger consequences of their actions and how they might be perceived by external audiences.

And to be fair, most of the free speech protests have occurred at a small number of relatively affluent, elite colleges, a Brookings Institution study concluded last year.

Unfortunately, not enough college students on enough campuses are protesting with as much passion about the things that directly affect them: cuts to state budgets, taxes on endowments and proposals before Congress right now to revise federal student loans.

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College students support free speech - unless it offends them

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When I was a sophomore in college, the College Republicans invited Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative political activist best known for her campaign against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, to give a speech on campus. There were no barricades around the building where she spoke.

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Here's a shocking fact: Although the U.S. makes up only 5 percent of the world's population, we consume 75 percent of the world's prescription drugs. Think about that for a minute; we are consuming massive quantities of pharmaceuticals on a daily basis.

Drowning in Prescription Drugs

In a culture of quick and easy fixes, prescription medication has become synonymous with "wellness."

The problem of overprescribing medication is rampant in America and pharmaceutical drug overdoses are now one of the leading causes of death in the nation.

However, mega-prescribing is much more than just a reflection of this cultural mantra.

While we value convenience and easy fixes, systemic processes can also lead to overprescribing. Although prescription drugs are necessary and lifesaving in many circumstances, the correlation between prescription drugs and prescription drug addiction is undeniable. And the adverse effects are becoming increasingly apparent.

Prepare Yourself for these Numbers

The numbers are staggering and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now officially labeled prescription drug abuse as an epidemic.

According to CDC data, the percent of people taking at least one prescription drug increased by 50 percent between the years of 2007 and 2010. According to CDC data, the percent of people taking at least one prescription drug increased by 50 percent between the years of 2007 and 2010. And researchers from the Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical research center, report that over 20 percent of Americans now take five or more prescription drugs.

So, who's to blame for overprescribing? Are doctors too heavy on the prescription pad? Are big pharmaceutical companies holding the pen? Or, are we too ingrained into a culture of quick fixes? Truthfully, everyone plays a role in this complex issue.

Flooding the Streets with Prescription Opiates

Many would argue that prescription pads have almost replaced the roles of therapeutic doctors. It's as if healing and sobriety are no longer factors.

Although commonsense lifestyle changes and non-drug treatment may alleviate conditions such as insomnia or simple abdominal pain, there are doctors who rely solely on prescribing drugs to treat patients.

In an almost ironic twist, this may lead to drug cascading, which is the process of prescribing one drug to treat the symptoms caused by another drug. In essence, doctors are prescribing drugs to treat symptoms of prescribed drugs, which may or may not have been necessary in the first place.

Along with drug cascading, doctors are also being criticized for succumbing to the "business" of healthcare rather than the practice. In other words, they increasingly represent a professional front for the billion-dollar drug industry instead of focusing on wellness.

And that brings us to the elephant in the room: Big pharma.

Big Pharma's Role in the Opiate Epidemic

As direct marketing laws regarding prescription drugs began to relax over a decade ago, the drugs themselves became increasingly viewed as a commodity rather than a treatment. This catalyst allowed pharmaceutical companies to grow into powerful money-making juggernauts - it was the birth of "big pharma."

Prescription Drugs are Big Business

Although it's easy to blame big pharma for the opiate epidemic, they're still businesses with shareholders. When it comes down to it, their bottom lines will always take precedent over patient health.

Luckily, tighter industry regulations have been established as a tool to combat the practice of "pushing" more profitable drugs over more effective, affordable or safer drugs.

Supply vs. Demand Mentality

It can be argued that the prescription drug epidemic is merely a symptom of American culture that prefers quicker, faster, and more convenient - a healthcare version of supply and demand, if you will. However, the epidemic of prescription drug abuse is a far more glaring - and serious - symptom of overprescribing drugs.

As result, we're left with statistics that include:

Opioid prescriptions increased from 76 million in 1991 to an astounding 207 million in 2013.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports 4 out of 5 current heroin addicts began using after abusing prescribed opioids.

Overdosing on opioids like OxyContin and hydrocodone has spiked dramatically in recent years. Not surprisingly, many experts directly attribute this rise to overprescribing.

Remember Who's in Charge...

No matter how you feel about America's prescription drug culture or our current healthcare system, it's important to understand that you are ultimately in control of the decisions made regarding your health.

Perform research, seek second-opinions and always be discerning when taking a drug that's designed to affect your mind and body. The more you know, the better off you'll be to make informed and beneficial .

And one more thing; never give doctors, pharmaceutical companies or cultural trends the power to make healthcare decisions for you. You're in charge of your sobriety; your questions, concerns and reactions are valid. Let your voice be heard.

Learn more about the epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

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Are Doctors to Blame for Prescription Drug Abuse?

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Here's a shocking fact: Although the U.S. makes up only 5 percent of the world's population, we consume 75 percent of the world's prescription drugs. Think about that for a minute; we are consuming massive quantities of pharmaceuticals on a daily basis. In a culture of quick and easy fixes, prescription medication has become synonymous with "wellness."

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Americans are addicted to their jobs. U.S. workers not only put in more hours than workers do almost anywhere else. They're also increasingly retiring later and taking fewer vacation days.

A new study tries to measure precisely how much more Americans work than Europeans do overall. The answer: The average person in Europe works 19 percent less than the average person in the U.S. That's about 258 fewer hours per year, or about an hour less each weekday. Another way to look at it: U.S. workers put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans.

Hours worked vary a lot by country, according to the unpublished working paper (PDF) by economists Alexander Bick of Arizona State University, Bettina Bruggemann of McMaster University in Ontario, and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln of Goethe University Frankfurt. Swiss work habits are most similar to Americans', while Italians are the least likely to be at work, putting in 29 percent fewer hours per year than Americans do.

The study was designed to make it easier to compare countries to each other, by capturing the overall hours per person, not just for people with jobs. That incorporates not just the length of the typical workweek but also retirement, vacation, unemployment, and other time spent out of the workforce.

Not all time spent at the office, shop, or factory is time well spent; output is also critical to the productivity equation. But it's important to have a reliable calculation of hours worked per person to accurately measure productivity, the amount of economic value nations get out of each hour their citizens spend working. The study's detailed data could help researchers figure out why Americans toil so much longer than Europeans and which factors most influence productivity.

One theory is that Americans work longer hours because their additional effort is more likely to pay off. People earn a wider range of incomes in the U.S., so "workers have an incentive to try harder to move up the job ladder because a promotion is worth more," said Dora Gicheva, an economist at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, citing a study that compared the U.S. with Germany.

Taxes are an issue. Despite what Donald Trump has said, taxes in the U.S. are substantially lower than in Europe. Studies have suggested that this higher tax burden reduces the incentive to earn more by putting in extra hours.

"Americans are indeed richer than Europeans, and one reason why is because of taxes that depress the incentives to work in Europe," said Lee Ohanian, an economist at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Maybe the key factor is that labor unions, along with other worker protections, are much stronger in Europe than in the U.S. "The data strongly suggest that labor regulation and unionization appear to be the dominant factors explaining the differences between the United States and Europe," economists at Harvard and Dartmouth concluded in a 2006 study (PDF).

Generous pensions in Europe are also a strong factor in discouraging older people from working, the study said. In the U.S., more people over 65 are working than at any point in the past 50 years. The U.S.'s shift from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans makes it harder for Americans to know when it's safe to retire.

One thing is clear. The difference in hours worked between Americans and Europeans is more than a difference in cultures. As recently as the early 1970s, according to several studies, people in the U.S. and Western Europe worked about the same number of hours per week.

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Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds

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Americans are addicted to their jobs. U.S. workers not only put in more hours than workers do almost anywhere else. They're also increasingly retiring later and taking fewer vacation days. A new study tries to measure precisely how much more Americans work than Europeans do overall.

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How many hours a week do Americans work? What's the average amount of hours an employee works in a typical week? How does this change based on factors like age, gender, and race?

The average hours worked vary according to gender, age, marital status, race, ethnicity location, type of job, and education level.

Curious how your workweek stacks up against that of your fellow Americans? Here we break down the average hours worked in the United States, based on these various factors.

We also provide an overview of daily hours worked, based on the 2018 annual data summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Average Hours per Week Worked (US)

Age
Age 16 years and older: 38.9
Age 16-19: 24.1
Age 20-24: 34.8
Age 25-54: 40.5
55 and Over: 38.0

Gender
Men worked an average of 41.0 hours per week in paid employment. Women worked an average of 36.4 hours per week.

Marital Status
Married men worked 4.5 hours more per week than men who had never married. Married women worked 1.7 hours more than women who had never married.

Race
White American: 38.9 hours per week
African American: 38.7 hours per week
Asian American: 38.9 hours per week

Ethnicity
Hispanic and Latino: 38.2 hours per week

Hours per Week Worked in Other Countries

TechRepublic reports that the Netherlands has the shortest average workweek of 29 hours, followed by Denmark at 32 hours per week. Countries with the highest average amount of hours worked included:

Columbia - 48 hours

Turkey - 48 hours

Mexico - 45 hours

South Africa - 43 hours

Average Hours per Day Worked (US)

The average hours Americans work per day vary based on factors like weekend vs. weekday work, working from home vs. working in an office, and self-employed vs. salaried employee status. Factors like gender and education also influence the numbers.

Average Hours per Day Worked (US)

Weekdays average: 8.5 hours

Weekend days average: 5.4 hours

On days worked, employed men worked an average of 34 minutes more than employed women - this difference may be on account of women's higher instance of part-time work (there were almost twice as many part-time female employees as there were part-time male employees).

However, for full-time workers, men still worked longer than women, working 8.2 hours compared to 7.9 hours for women.

Notably, women spent more time with household responsibilities: On an average day, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men spent some time doing household activities, such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or household management. On the days they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on these activities, while men spent 2.0 hours.

Many more full-time employed persons worked on weekdays than on weekend days: 89 percent worked on an average weekday, compared with 31 percent on an average weekend day.

Employed people worked an average of 5.4 hours on a weekend day.

Self-employed workers were more likely to work on weekends than salaried employees, at 41.1% compared to 28.0%.

Multiple jobholders were more likely to work on an average weekend day - 56 percent, compared with 28 percent for those holding down only one job.

On days worked, 81.7% of employees did some or all of their work at a workplace, while 23.7% did some or all of their work at home.

Employees spend more time doing work in the workplace than at home - they spend 7.94 hours working in the workplace, and 2.94 hours working at home.

More people now work at home than they did some years ago. On an average day last year, 23.7% of full-time workers spent at least part of their workday working at home, compared with 18 percent in 2003.

People holding multiple jobs were more likely to work on an average weekday than single-job holders (90.3% vs. 81.7%).

Those with advanced degrees are more likely to work from home: 41.7% of employed people over 25 years old with an advanced degree did some work from home. Only 11.9% of workers with a high school diploma did some work from home.

Workers with advanced degrees are more likely to work on an average day (74.2%) than those with a high school diploma (64.9%).

Those with advanced degrees (bachelor's degree and higher) work fewer hours on average than those with less than a bachelor's degree. Those with a bachelor's degree or higher worked 8.0 hours per day, while those with a high school diploma worked the most on an average day: 8.2 hours.

Key Takeaways

Americans work an average of 34.4 hours per week.

The average hours per week worked varies based on gender, marital status, and race.

7% of workers do at least some of their work at home.

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What is the Average Hours Per Week Worked in the US?

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How many hours a week do Americans work? What's the average amount of hours an employee works in a typical week? How does this change based on factors like age, gender, and race? The average hours worked vary according to gender, age, marital status, race, ethnicity location, type of job, and education level.

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Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world.

More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese.

And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too.

That much most people agree on. What's harder to pin down is exactly how much Americans are working. It may be more than our industrialized competitors, but is it more than we have ever worked before?

The short answer, according to the government, is that it is only slightly more and not so much that most people should really notice.

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a very gradually rising trend through the 1990s that has only just recently tapered off, hovering somewhere just north of 40 hours weekly.

A Month More a Year?

The long answer is, of course, more complicated. It depends who you ask, and about whom you're asking.

Author Juliet Schor, who wrote the best-selling book The Overworked American in 1992, concluded that in 1990 Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970.

There are also volumes of surveys that ask people if they're working more than they used to. Generally, people say yes, of course they are. And they also estimate almost 10 more hours a week than the government does.

A Bunch of Whiners?

Critics pooh-pooh such studies, saying self-estimators are exaggerators, although most of those studies echo the same general trend as governmental figures - a bit of a rise through the '90s with a slight dip recently.

Dissenters to overworked-American theories say it's better to base studies on employers' reports of worker hours, which is what the government does, but that leaves out overtime hours worked by salaried employees.

Critics also point to what they say is a growing number of part-time jobs. How can people be working more if they are not working full-time?

Here's where you have to ask which workers we're really talking about.

Measuring Past the Punch Clock

That's what Schor's book tries to do, as well as two recent releases: The White-Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser, and The Working Life by Joanne B. Ciulla.

All those books have been embraced by a large part of the public that apparently feels harassed by the pressures of the workplace.

The authors all find evidence that many Americans are overstressed and overworked in trends that are not necessarily measured with a punch clock; trends such as road rage, workplace shootings, the rising number of children in day care and increasing demands for after-school activities to occupy children whose parents are too busy or still at work.

They aren't the only ones finding long hours in at least certain parts of the workforce. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released last year, more than 25 million Americans - 20.5 percent of the total workforce - reported they worked at least 49 hours a week in 1999. Eleven million of those said they worked more than 59 hours a week.

Sweat Under the White Collar

Who are these people? Fraser, after four years of interviews, concludes they are white-collar workers, who do not punch a clock and whose hours therefore are the most difficult to track.

The other evidence often pointed to that people are not really working as much as they say is the increasing number of part-time jobs. How can people be working more if more people are not working full-time?

But the anecdotal evidence presented by Fraser, Schor and Ciulla - and met by millions of people everyday - is that many Americans feel they are working more than ever.

An ABCNEWS.com poll released Monday found only 26 percent of Americans feel they work too hard. Although far more feel the opposite, that's still a lot of people and it's twice as many as the 13 percent who told a Harris Poll in 1960 that they felt overworked. And the percentage rises to about a third of people with kids, or people between 35 and 54 years old.

What Happened to 'The Little Woman'?

Even for people who are not actually working longer hours than they used to, there's an explanation for why some of them might feel over-burdened anyway, particularly men.

Experts who accept some of the arguments of both sides of the working-longer debate often focus less on individuals' hours worked, instead looking at household hours on the job.

In Overworked and Underemployed, a study in The American Prospect, Barry Bluestone and Stephen Rose argue that to really understand the situation Americans face, you need to look beyond individuals and numbers.

The overall figures for how many hours a week the average American works have been held down by the increasing number of part-time service and retail jobs in the economy. But since many of the part-time jobs have been filled by the increasing number of women in the workforce, and many of these women had previously been housewives, there are fewer hours when anyone is taking care of household chores.

Instead of coming home to find the refrigerator and cupboards stocked, dinner ready, the table set, the clothes washed, the house clean and the children entertained, men are coming home and finding they have to chip in, because their wives aren't "the little woman," anymore. They are now sharing duties as breadwinner, which means men have to share household chores. The situation is exaggerated when both spouses work full-time - particularly if they don't earn enough to hire help.

If people aren't spending quite as many more hours at work as they think they are, the fact that they aren't allowed as much leisure time once they're off work might account for the apparent illusion.

Authors like Fraser, Schor and Ciullo, though, argue that there is no illusion, and the case made by the harried Americans who fill their books - and fill commuter trains and highways - is hard to discount.

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Americans work more than anyone in the industrialized world. More than the English, more than the French, way more than the Germans or Norwegians. Even, recently, more than the Japanese. And Americans take less vacation, work longer days, and retire later, too. That much most people agree on....

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We, as Americans, work too many hours. If you don't believe so, check out the following data points that compare us to our peers around the world.

American Work-Life Balance

According to the Center for American PROGRESS on the topic of work and family life balance, "in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.". U.S. Department of Labor statistics back up this data, and notes that 75% of those women working full time. I don't care who stays home and who works in terms of gender (work opportunity equality for all - it's a family choice). Either way, when all adults are working (single or with a partner), that's a huge hit to the American family and free-time in the American household.

The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.

Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

American Average Work Hours:

At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.

According to the ILO, "Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers."

Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it's just not the average American worker.

American Paid Vacation Time & Sick Time:

The Impact of Too Much Work

I'm not telling you to work less hours. If you genuinely love what you do and are doing it for the right reasons, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away.

But for many of us, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life. Without time to unwind, take care of your home, spend time with loved ones, enjoy our hobbies, connect with friends, and generally live a more balanced life. Stress is the #1 cause of health problems - mentally and physically. And there are few things that stress us out on a consistent basis like work does, especially when it takes away from all of the other things that life has to offer.

Americans are the Outliers

And if all of this data tells anything, it's that we are the outliers, not the norm. Why are we the outliers?

Our companies fairly ruthlessly let people go. We want to keep our jobs and not be a 'low performer' compared to others.

The decline of the union has led to less paid time off and other leave benefits.

Cultural value of money over everything else. We love money, we want more of it, and we think money can buy happiness. And the more we work, the more we get paid.

It's been drilled in our heads that we are lazy compared to emerging market counterpart workers in India, Mexico, China, and other parts of Asia. Who isn't? And what is our mental image of the work environments in those locales? To validate those fears, our jobs are being outsourced to the cheap labor in those countries. In reality, the U.S. trails only Norway and Luxembourg (2 tiny countries) productivity per person.

Our legislative branch of the government (on both sides of the aisle) has been bought and as a result has shied away from passing laws that protect workers that every other industrialized nation has passed.

We generally don't fight for our working rights. We take what is given to us.

What we All Need to Remember

What we all need to remind ourselves is that it doesn't have to be this way.

It's OK to ask to move to fewer hours at work.

It's OK to take a week-long vacation if we need to.

It's OK to ask to work from home.

It's OK to take a month of unpaid leave while you raise a child.

It's OK... you get the idea.

Don't let life pass you by in the name of fear, circumstance, greed, or misguided hopes. Sometimes you just need to draw a line in the sand and say "enough is enough".

Overworked Discussion:

Do you think we work too hard?

Do you like the cultural norm around your workplace on working hour expectations?

How have you been able to limit unhealthy overworking habits?

Related Posts:

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The U.S. is the Most Overworked Nation in the World

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We, as Americans, work too many hours. If you don't believe so, check out the following data points that compare us to our peers around the world. According to the Center for American PROGRESS on the topic of work and family life balance, "in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked.

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WASHINGTON -- A National Collegiate Athletic Association special commission on reforming college basketball recently ducked the issue of athletes being paid for their name, image or likeness -- currently banned under the association's rules.

But Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state and Stanford University provost, and the panel's chairwoman, last week underscored the confusion some athletics experts felt when a University of Notre Dame women's basketball player who is still eligible to compete at the college level was allowed to go on Dancing With the Stars, a deal that required the NCAA to make an exception.

"For the life of me, I don't understand the difference between Olympic payments and participation in Dancing with the Stars, which are allowed, and what can't be allowed," Rice said during a press briefing, urging the NCAA to act once lawsuits around the issue had been decided.

Inconsistencies in NCAA rules and a potential system of athletes being compensated for their name, image and likeness were debated Tuesday at an Aspen Institute event, featuring both the association's critics and representatives from its member institutions.

The division in opinions was clear. Speakers tied to the NCAA -- such as an athletics director, a former basketball coach and a conference commissioner -- were much more cautious in embracing a system of compensation, either opposing it outright or cautioning that many details would need to be worked out before it was tried.

Researchers and economists, though, said that permitting athletes to be paid in this way wouldn't shatter the amateur model to which the NCAA publicly clings. (NCAA detractors have said college sports have been corrupted too much to be considered amateur any longer.) Instead, granting athletes this control would benefit both them and the NCAA, because it would bring in more money and be fairer, they said.

The Aspen Institute's panel began with a hypothetical -- that the NCAA had adopted a system similar to the Olympics', in which athletes could gain individual or group endorsements from certain sponsors, pay taxes on that income, and have agents or businesses managers represent them.

John Thompson III, former men's basketball coach at Princeton and Georgetown Universities, said that if such endorsement deals were allowed, many wouldn't be "legit" contracts, such as with soft drink companies; they would be manufactured by boosters and interested alumni trying to work around NCAA rules limiting payments to players.

He predicted that institutions would create a new job and hire someone whose sole duty would be to solicit endorsements for players.

While this may be a recruiting tool, it would not heavily influence the competitive scene, said Andy Schwarz, a noted sports economist and one of the minds behind the Historical Basketball League, which plans to premiere in 2019 or 2020 and pay its athletes.

The talented players would still seek out the institutions that invest the most, Schwarz said. Both Thompson and Dan Radakovich, a panelist and Clemson University athletics director, agreed.

Radakovich did not agree with a pay-for-play system, saying it would distract athletes who already have trouble balancing athletic and academic endeavors.

Thompson and Radakovich pointed out possible problems with players signing on with companies that conflict with their institution -- for instance, if an athlete signed on to promote Under Armour, but the college had already made a deal with Adidas to sponsor its teams.

This could be remedied with a contract, similar to when an athlete accepts a scholarship and agrees to the stipulations that come with it, Schwarz said.

He accused the NCAA of being an economic cartel that has exploited athletes, not given them what they are worth and instead funneled money to the NCAA and its members -- particularly the coaches. Revenue among the Power 5 conferences in the NCAA -- the wealthiest and most influential -- increased from $570 million in 2005 to $2.1 billion in 2015.

Salaries haven't leveled off for coaches, either -- Steve Spurrier, formerly of the University of Florida, was the top earner among head football coaches in 2001 with $2.1 million annually, according to USA Today. In 2017, the University of Alabama 's Nick Saban took in more than $11 million.

"Courts haven't seen fit to break up that cartel," Schwarz said.

Thompson and Radakovich advocated other benefits for athletes, though, such as academic advising, medical treatment and conditioning, life experiences and travel, and most of all, college education for free. Schwarz said he wasn't arguing that athletes aren't being given anything -- just not what they're worth.

Nigel Hayes, plaintiff in a compensation lawsuit against the NCAA, and one of the speakers, told the crowd that these "benefits" aren't perks. It's what the NCAA should be doing at the bare minimum, he said. The NCAA says that education comes first, but athletes, particularly basketball players, miss sometimes weeks of class to play games and in tournaments, Hayes said. Division I men's basketball players spent an average of nearly two days a week off campus and missed more than two classes per week during the season, a 2015 NCAA survey revealed.

Once, Hayes missed a class to perform community service and the NCAA found him in violation of the rules -- a finding he appealed, he said.

Hayes, a former basketball player at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and now a professional, said he once tried to organize a boycott during a Atlantic Coast Conference/Big Ten challenge game against Syracuse University to advocate for paying players.

It was an offseason game that wouldn't have affected the team's record -- but because one member of his team was uncomfortable, he and his teammates didn't follow through, Hayes said. But he predicted that athletes would soon have enough of not being compensated and rise up.

Gabe Feldman, Tulane University's associate provost for NCAA compliance and director of its sports law program, floated the idea that athlete endorsement deals be made educational in some way. Athletes could earn college credit by writing papers on their endorsements and learn some form of financial literacy that would help them later if they turned professional, he said.

The discussion at the Aspen Institute comes after the Rice commission announced its recommendations on reforming college basketball last week. The commission was created after federal officials revealed a widespread alleged scheme to direct certain recruits to institutions in exchange for cash, leading to the arrests of 10 men, including associate and assistant coaches with four-high profile basketball programs.

The NCAA's leaders, the Board of Governors, will now need to decide which of the commission suggestions to incorporate -- the most prominent of which was ending the one-and-done rule, by which some athletes play for a single season in college before departing for the professional league.

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Sports officials, economists debate payments for college athletes' name, image and likeness

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WASHINGTON -- A National Collegiate Athletic Association special commission on reforming college basketball recently ducked the issue of athletes being paid for their name, image or likeness -- currently banned under the association's rules. But Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S.

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The debate rages on: Should college athletes be paid to play their sport? Read our take on both sides of the argument and watch our accompanying video here!

Originally Posted: Mar 20, 2017

Should college athletes be paid? People who think college student-athletes should be paid often say the students' names and images are used on products and in advertising, among other things, so they should receive some of the profits. Those who say college student-athletes should not be paid argue that they receive scholarships as a form of payment for their talents. Then there are plenty of other questions: Would athletes be paid differently depending on the sport they play? How do you quantify the true worth of a college sports team, especially if it's making the school much more popular overall and bringing in lots of students? Where would the money even come from? The debate could go on and on. Here's a look at each side.

Why student-athletes should get paid

Being a college student-athlete is a full-time job, bouncing between the weight room, the court/field, classes, and film sessions. College athletics are extracurricular activities, but the schedules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) tournaments require an extended period in which the student-athletes must miss school. Not only do they miss class, but they are absent for nationally televised games that make a lot of money and receive millions of viewers, according to Marc Edelman in his article " 21 Reasons Why Student-Athletes Are Employees and Should Be Allowed to Unionize."

Since student-athletes also bring in revenue for their team and college or university, especially in the championship games, those who debate in favor of paying them say the students could receive a small portion of the profits. Yes, pay would vary, just as the universities with the more successful teams receive more television time or money than those with less successful teams. College football and men's basketball programs earn far more than any other athletic program, so these athletes would likely earn more as well. This may not be considered fair pay, but many of those who argue in support of paying college players point out that team popularity and consumers generally determine what is "fair." These sports also tend to support other less popular sports that do not bring in a lot of money on their own.

Student-athletes are the ones working hard out on the court and field. Coaches might have a big effect on a team, but it is up to the athletes to get it done. Coaches receive bonuses for breaking records, reaching the offseason, and winning the big games; the athletes receive none of it, writes Tyson Hartnett for HuffPost. Most profits from college athletics do not go toward academics. Instead, they go to the coaches, athletic directors, and some administrators, reports Edelman. Student-athletes do not need to receive huge salaries like their coaches; rather, they could still be paid a reasonable amount relative to how much the program makes. Scholarships often cover most of the student-athletes' books and room expenses, but even few extra hundred dollars per year could compensate for the lack of time these students have to earn spending money at a regular part-time job, argues Harnett.

It's also important to note that college student-athletes are not only a part of a sports team; they are a part of the college or university's advertising team. For example, the "Flutie effect" is used to describe a surge in college admission following a big sports win. It's named for Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie; he won the Heisman Trophy in 1984, and the College's admissions rose significantly in subsequent years-though the extent of Flutie's impact has been largely refuted by BC officials since then. Still, colleges and universities use their athletic success to promote their school and entice potential applicants. Student-athletes would be paid for this and all the additional benefits they provide for their schools.

A timeout of the regular season college football game between the University of Michigan at the University of Iowa
📸: Madisen Martinez

Why student-athletes should not get paid

In 2013, survey expert John Dennis found that 69% of the public is opposed to paying student-athletes. (This proposed payment would be in addition to the scholarships given in men's football and basketball programs.) If scholarships were taken out of the deal, and only salaries were given, then it would be more fair and affordable for the university, right? Wrong. If salaries were given, then these college student-athletes would have to pay taxes. Depending on the student-athlete's income, those taxes could be high enough to reduce what they earn until they can barely cover tuition, according to John R. Thelin in his article "Here's Why We Shouldn't Pay College Athletes."

Those who opposed paying college student-athletes say scholarships are the best option; there is no question as to what the scholarship money is going toward. Cash or a salary could be spent on wants rather than necessities, potentially leading the athletes into a debt they would not have with the benefit of a scholarship. Furthermore, those who debate against paying student-athletes say it would change the very nature of college athletics. College student-athletes are given a rare opportunity. It's difficult to earn a position on a college team. Though a dream for many, only about 7% of high school athletes move onto the bigger stage. Another 2% of these athletes reach the Division I level, reports Dave Anderson in his article " Top 10 Reasons College Athletes Should Not Be Paid."

If payments were involved, athletes would be given incentive to commit to the college or university with the highest offer. The next year, they may transfer to another school with an even higher offer. Before you know it, these college sports would be 100% a business. This new "business" could also lead to the downfall of other college programs. The money to pay athletes must come from somewhere, which might put the least-popular college programs at risk of being cut. That, in turn, can deprive other students of their chance to gain the education and experience at the college of their dreams, since their desired program will no longer be offered, says Anderson.

Finally, even though these college student-athletes may be playing at an advanced level, they still aren't playing professionally, Anderson notes. It is not their job to play sports; it is an extracurricular activity that is pursued while pursuing a higher education. Student-athletes are going to school to learn, and many are lucky enough to do so for reduced cost, given the often generous athletic scholarships. If these athletes were paid, it would change their motives as students. They are still in college-which is a privilege in itself-while pursuing their dreams of playing a sport.

What do you think?

Whether student-athletes should be paid is an ongoing debate often brought up during championship seasons, especially the college football playoffs and the basketball post-season. What's your view of this heated debate? Will a salary for college-athletes ever come to be? It's up to the NCAA to decide if they'll break away from their current model of collegiate sports, in which "the young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second."
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Should College Student-Athletes Be Paid to Play? Both Sides of the Debate

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The debate rages on: Should college athletes be paid to play their sport? Read our take on both sides of the argument and watch our accompanying video here!

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It’s time to pay the tab for America’s college athletes | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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College sport is a billion-dollar enterprise built off athletes who receive no compensation. Whatever the solution is, the status quo must change

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In the United States, college athletics have long been a lucrative business. As of 2017, there were more than two dozen schools that generated upwards of $100 million in annual revenue through their athletic programs. Among 127 of the 131 schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivison, the average revenues from football alone exceed $30 million. The NCAA itself-a large portion of whose revenues come from its recently completed men's basketball tournament-raked in more than $1 billion in 2017.

But while some, including many coaches, are making small fortunes off of college sports, compensation for one group is meticulously limited: that of the athletes themselves. To be eligible to play NCAA sports, players must maintain amateur status, which means they can't be paid for participating. This prohibition includes indirect payment, such as money from endorsements, though they may receive compensation of a sort via scholarships to live and study at their respective schools.

The NCAA says that "maintaining amateurism is crucial to preserving an academic environment in which acquiring a quality education is the first priority." However, the growing imbalance between how much money college athletic departments generate and how fully they can compensate their players has led to questions of fairness.

Do the NCAA's rules restricting player compensation benefit schools at the expense of players? To find out, Chicago Booth's Initiative on Global Markets polled the members of its Economic Experts Panel, who answered with a resounding 'yes.' Among respondents, 92 percent agreed that "NCAA Division I schools coordinate compensation for men's basketball and football players (precluding actual pay and limiting non-monetary benefits), providing rents to member schools (which may be shared with others) at the expense of those players." The remaining 8 percent of respondents registered no opinion.

Some respondents noted that though the statement may be true, the NCAA's rules could still be justified.

"There may be socially appropriate reasons for the practice described," wrote Stanford's Darrell Duffie.

Austan Goolsbee, Chicago Booth
"A top NBA coach gets $7 million-$8 million per year, and a top player makes four times that. A top college coach gets $6 million, but the players get nothing."
Response: Strongly agree

Michael Greenstone, University of Chicago
"Only hesitation in complete agreement is that there is lots of redistribution across sports and even within basketball/football players."
Response: Agree

Robert Hall, Stanford
"Wrong question. Should be 'Are the NCAA's limitations on contracting with athletes socially harmful?'"
Response: Agree

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In the United States, college athletics have long been a lucrative business. As of 2017, there were more than two dozen schools that generated upwards of $100 million in annual revenue through their athletic programs. Among 127 of the 131 schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivison, the average revenues from football alone exceed $30 million.

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Last year, Facebook collected over nine billion dollars in ad revenue over just a single quarter. That's a lot of ads. As a trade-off for using a free service, people on Facebook put up with the proliferation of these ads in their newsfeeds. But what if the trade-off involved more than that? What if it involved your personal data being sold off without your consent?

Let's be clear. This isn't an actual data breach. It's merely a no one at Facebook
cared about.

Facebook's latest scandal involves a data analysis firm called Cambridge Analytica, which was supplied with the personal data of 50 million Facebook profiles without the consent of those people, which just happened to be used in the election of a certain presidential candidate. On its own, the scandal is more than a little troubling, and it provides a startling look into how little the world's biggest social media platform is concerned about personal data.

Let's be clear. This doesn't involve an actual data breach. It's merely a policy no one at Facebook cared about.

Under the guise of academic research

Using personal data for the sake of academic research has been a weak point in Facebook's privacy policy for years now - and it's the first vulnerability the collaborators involved with the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploited.

Despite the name, Cambridge Analytica has no official connection to academia. It's a research organization founded with the specific purpose of impacting the electoral process, and was run by former Trump aide Steve Bannon, as well as and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

The facade of academic research was used as an entry point for an important figure in the crew - Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher who worked for both Cambridge University and (briefly at) St. Petersburg State University. According to a report by the New York Times, when doing work for Cambridge Analytica, Kogan told Facebook that he was collecting data for academic purposes rather than political.

The description for the app said, word for word, "This app is part of a research program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge." Apparently, Facebook did nothing to verify that claim. To make things worse, Kogan stated he later changed the reason for his use for the data, and Facebook never bothered to inquire about it further.

Facebook has been giving the data of its users to academic researchers for years now - and not in secret.

Facebook has been giving the data of its users to academic researchers for years now - and not in secret. Facebook freely provided personal data from its users to Harvard University for an academic study back in 2007. Others since then include a partnership with Cornell University on influencing the mood of Facebook users, and yet another in 2017 which studied how AI could guess a person's sexual orientation from only a photograph.

These studies were all met with public outrage, but Facebook emphasized that they weren't the result of data breaches or significant holes in the company's research protocols. It saw them as only "minor oversights."

There's little reason to believe a platform that views massive misuse of data without consent as "minor oversights" cares about your privacy. And that's not where it ends.

Under the guise of a personality quiz

The other area where Facebook's data policies are weak lie in something we all know too well: personality quizzes. They're prominent on Facebook, and Kogan used the vulnerable pinch point to collect the data that Cambridge Analytica purchased from him.

Through Global Science Research (GSR), a separate company he created, Kogan developed a Facebook plugin called thisisyourdigitallife. It paid a group of 270,000 people to download the app and take the quiz. That might not sound like much, but the app was then allowed to collect data from each of those people's friends as well. The result was data for 50 million profiles, now in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. That's a lot of data.

Never did Facebook inform its users that data was being used without their consent. That alone is already calling British law into question.

According to The Guardian, Facebook learned this trick was used to mine massive amounts of data in 2015, which was then used by the Ted Cruz presidential campaign. Facebook's response was to send Cambridge Analytica an official letter, obtained by the Times, stating the following: "Because this data was obtained and used without permission, and because GSR was not authorized to share or sell it to you, it cannot be used legitimately in the future and must be deleted immediately."

Never did Facebook inform its users of all
the data that was
being used without
their consent.

Over two years passed before Facebook would even follow up on its request. "If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook's policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made," a blog post from Facebook stated. Eventually, it did get around to it, but it shows that Facebook's problem isn't that it lacks policies. It's that they aren't enforced.

Cambridge Analytica wasn't the only organization bending Facebook's privacy policies. A previous employee of Facebook spoke to The Guardian, saying that "My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data."

That's from Sandy Parakilas, who was the platform operations manager in 2011 and 2012. "Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on."

Who could be bothered to care?

As reported by the Times, research director Jonathan Albright at Columbia University summarized the problem well: "Unethical people will always do bad things when we make it easy for them and there are few - if any - lasting repercussions."

Facebook will make sure it takes care of this specific problem, sure. After remaining silent for multiple days after the release, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did finally make an official statement, in which he took a bit more responsibility for what happened: "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you."

He also vowed to take others steps, such as auditing suspicious apps or limiting the amount of data developers can access from applications. These policies will all help prevent a very similar scenario from unfolding, but cybersecurity is all about prevention. It requires a proactive approach to stopping holes in the system.

For a company that lives and dies on the trust people have in giving away personal information, you'd think it'd issues a little more seriously across the breadth of its platform. If it doesn't make massive changes to the way things are done across all levels of privacy and security, #deleteFacebook could grow into far more than just a hashtag.

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Facebook was always too busy selling ads to care about your personal data

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Ultimately, the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened because Facebook has always cared more about selling ads than protecting your personal data. When you sell four billion dollars in ad revenue each year, it takes some effort to ensure that people's data is protected.

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This Is the Personal Data that Facebook Collects-And Sometimes Sells

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The latest scandal surrounding Facebook is a reminder that this social networking tool also holds a treasure chest of personal data.

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Facial recognition systems are built on computer programs that analyze images of human faces for the purpose of identifying them.

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Amazon has been essentially giving away facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, paving the way for a rollout of technology that is causing concern among civil rights groups.

Amazon is providing the technology, known as Rekognition, as well as consulting services, according to the documents, which the ACLU obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A coalition of civil rights groups, in a letter released Tuesday, called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it could lead to the expansion of surveillance of vulnerable communities.

"We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country," the groups wrote in the letter.

Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey did not directly address the concerns of civil rights groups. "Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services," she said, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud software division that houses the facial recognition program. "When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer's right to use our services."

She said that the technology has many useful purposes, including finding abducted people. Amusement parks have used it to locate lost children. During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)

The details about Amazon's program illustrate the proliferation of cutting-edge technologies deep into American society - often without public vetting or debate. Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras for police, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras, prompting a similar backlash from civil rights groups. Hundreds of Google employees protested last month to demand that the company stop providing artificial intelligence to the Pentagon to help analyze drone footage.

The technology works through pattern recognition: Customers put known images - of child pornography or of celebrities, for example - into a database, and the software uses artificial intelligence to scan new images for a match with those already stored. The more images that are fed into the system, the more accurate the software becomes.

Amazon publicly introduced Rekognition in November 2016. Marketers could use the image recognition software, developed by the company's scientists to analyze billions of images and videos daily, to recognize celebrities in their videos, while owners of dating apps could use the program to identify unwanted suggestive or explicit content, according to the company's website.

But the vast expansion of facial recognition and other image-scanning technology has been highly controversial and given rise to privacy concerns. Facial recognition can allow strangers to identify people who don't wish to be identified, such as shoppers in stores, individuals in a crowd, or people who appear in photos that get posted on social media.

Privacy advocates point out that in an era in which everyone has a camera on their smartphone, cities have put cameras on traffic stops and other public infrastructure, and police are wearing body cameras, the opportunity to have one's photograph taken, identified, analyzed, and stored in perpetuity has grown immensely.

"Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm can't be undone. We're talking about a technology that will supercharge surveillance in our communities," said Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties Director for the ACLU of Northern California. She said the technology could be used "to track protesters, target immigrants, and spy on entire neighborhoods."

The documents provide a detailed look at how Amazon is marketing Rekognition. It can identify up to 100 people in a crowd, the documents said.

The sheriff's office of Washington County, Ore., built a database of 300,000 mug shots of suspected criminals that officers could have Rekognition scan against footage of potential suspects in real-time. The footage could come from police body cameras and public and private cameras. The county pays Amazon between $6 and $12 a month for the service, a county spokesman said.

According to the documents, Amazon asked the county to tout its experience with Rekognition to other public sector customers, including a manufacturer of body cameras.

Deputy Jeff Talbot, public information officer for the Washington County Sheriff's Office, said the program was not operating in the shadows and had been the subject of several news local stories. He pointed out that jail booking photos are already public and that the software simply allows officers to scan them instantaneously and in real-time, and compare them against footage of actual suspects, which is a valuable contribution to public safety. "Our goal is to inform the public about the work we're doing to solve crimes. It is not mass surveillance or untargeted surveillance."

He could not say how many crimes the program had helped solve and added that the software wasn't always accurate. But he said officers were trained not to rely exclusively on the software to make decisions, and it was just an additional tool in the officer's tool kit. For the cheap price Amazon was offering, he said it made sense to test out the service.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay area office, one of the groups that signed the letter, said many people who are booked into jail are not always charged with a crime or are proved innocent. She said that she worried that people's civil rights are violated when law enforcement keeps their images in a database even after they are proved innocent or were never charged. She said Amazon was contributing to these violations by making it easier to scan people's faces, repeatedly subjecting them to surveillance.

In addition to the ACLU, the coalition of about 40 groups included Color of Change, Human Rights Watch, Muslim Advocates and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Amazon is one of many companies selling artificial intelligence tools such as facial recognition and image-scanning to business clients. Microsoft offers a rival service, called Facial Recognition API. A crop of start-ups market the ability to scan the emotions on people's faces as they walk in and out of stores. Such technology has been touted as a way to prevent shoplifting.

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Amazon is selling facial recognition to law enforcement - for a fistful of dollars

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Amazon has been essentially giving away facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, paving the way for a rollout of technology that is causing concern among civil rights groups.

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Yesterday, Amazon's quiet Rekognition program became very public, as new documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California showed the system partnering with the city of Orlando and police camera vendors like Motorola Solutions for an aggressive new real-time facial recognition service. Amazon insists that the service is a simple object-recognition tool and will only be used for legal purposes. But even if we take the company at its word, the project raises serious concerns, particularly around racial bias.

Facial recognition systems have long struggled with higher error rates for women and people of color - error rates that can translate directly into more stops and arrests for marginalized groups. And while some companies have responded with public bias testing, Amazon hasn't shared any data on the issue, if it's collected data at all. At the same time, it's already deploying its software in cities across the US, its growth driven by one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world. For anyone worried about algorithmic bias, that's a scary thought.

"It doesn't make communities safer."

For the ACLU-NC's Matt Cagle, who worked on yesterday's report, the possibility for bias is one of the system's biggest problems. "We have been shocked at Amazon's apparent failure to understand the implications of its own product on real people," Cagle says. "Face recognition is a biased technology. It doesn't make communities safer. It just powers even greater discriminatory surveillance and policing."

The most concrete concern is false identifications. Police typically use facial recognition to look for specific suspects, comparing suspect photos against camera feeds or photo arrays. But white subjects are consistently less likely to generate false matches than black subjects, a bias that's been found across a number of algorithms. In the most basic terms, that means facial recognition systems pose an added threat of wrongful accusation and arrest for non-white people. The bias seems to come from the data used to train the algorithm, which often skews white and male. It's possible to solve that problem, but there's no public evidence that Amazon is working on the issue.

So far, Rekognition isn't sharing data, and that's not a good sign. The project has extensive developer documentation on everything from swimsuit detection to celebrity privacy requests, but there's nothing on the possibility of racial bias. After the ACLU's report broke yesterday, I asked Amazon directly if the company has any data on bias testing for Rekognition, but so far, nothing has turned up.

It's a glaring oversight, in part because public testing is relatively common among other facial recognition companies. For more than a year now, dozens of companies have been measuring their systems in public as part of a government project called the Facial Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT). Run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the FRVT is one of the most systematic studies of algorithmic bias we have. Vendors submit algorithms, and NIST runs them through a set of controlled tests, reporting the results with as little spin as possible.

The resulting report can show you, among other things, how racial and gender bias plays out across the error rates for 60 different algorithms. It looks like this:

This is basically what bias looks like. The higher the line, the higher the error rate. So anywhere the red line is higher than the blue line, you're seeing racial bias in action. Wherever the full line is higher than the dotted line, you're seeing gender bias. (Technically the X and Y axes are rates for false positives and false negatives, but essentially, higher is worse.) Looking through the chart, you can see that bias is an industry-wide problem, but it's also a solvable one. The best algorithms from NEC and Tongyi Trans show hardly any gap between the lines, presumably because the companies kept working through the training dataset until they fixed the problem.

The other important thing about this chart: Amazon isn't on it. The FRVT is a strictly voluntary process, geared toward federal contractors trying to make a good impression, so it's not entirely surprising that Amazon is not on the list. Still, it's worth considering why not. You could plead trade secrets, but with 60 algorithms already ranked, it's hard to argue there's much of a penalty to participating in this kind of testing. But without some outside power forcing Amazon into it, there's just no reason for it to sign on.

We often talk about algorithmic bias as if it's evil wizardry, but in these terms, the problem is straightforward. Amazon and companies like it need to make bias reviews public before systems like these are rolled out. There are lots of ways to do that, whether it's voluntary industry participation like FRVT or state-level transparency laws, which are becoming popular for criminal justice algorithms. It could be strict regulation or a light-touch norm. But by the time an algorithm like this is being used in public, we should have some sense of how well it works and who loses out.

Amazon's massive cloud infrastructure makes it a daunting competitor in the facial recognition industry, and its real-time pilot shows it's already starting to outpace its more transparent competitors. If you're worried about biased algorithms slipping out into the wild, that's a troubling thought. We know bias is possible, even likely, in these kinds of systems. The question is: what Amazon will do about it?

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Amazon needs to come clean about racial bias in its algorithms

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Yesterday, Amazon's quiet Rekognition program became very public, as new documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California showed the system partnering with the city of Orlando and police camera vendors like Motorola Solutions for an aggressive new real-time facial recognition service. But what about racial bias?

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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For privacy wonks and casual observers alike, border screening and surveillance has become an increasing area of critical concern over the last year. Around the world, invasive governments have particularly threatened people's digital privacy. That extends to the US, where Customs and Border Protection has expanded its demands and searches as well. And a fraught situation for travelers is even more so for US immigrants who are having more and more of their digital and social media footprint monitored by the Department of Homeland Security.

The agency's recent initiatives came into focus last week, when DHS posted updated language in the Federal Register about collecting "social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results" on immigrants, including naturalized citizens and permanent residents. DHS also issued a notice about changes to its Intelligence Records System database that will store "public-source data (including information from social media)" and will gather information from a host of sources, including "commercial data providers and public sources such as social media, news media outlets, and the Internet."

These initiatives, which began during the Obama administration, claim to be part of standard domestic security screening and background checking. But immigration experts and digital privacy advocates alike are deeply skeptical about how effective social media checks really are. Particularly, they cite the open-ended scope of the surveillance, and potential chilling effects of the dragnet, as critical drawbacks that should give the federal government pause.

"Admissions decisions should be based on specific criteria defined in laws or regulations," says Edward Hasbrouck, a travel expert and consultant to the freedom of movement group The Identity Project. "What can you and can't you say on Facebook if you want to be admitted to the country? We're hearing over and over that everybody who's not a citizen is afraid to say anything on social media because they don't know how it might be held against them."

Overreach

Ambiguity over what DHS will collect and why has immediate free speech implications for immigrants and potential immigrants. And language about collecting "social media handles, aliases, [and] associated identifiable information" hints at a more expansive agenda than simply scoping out people's public personas online. DHS seems to be asking people to list the pseudonyms and anonymizers they have used online, potentially exposing past speech they intended to disassociate from their real name.

"Yes, our rights at the border including for citizens are more limited than in other parts of life, but this is a gross invasion of your privacy and is far beyond the boundaries of a reasonable search," says Nuala O'Connor, the president of the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology and a former chief privacy officer at DHS. "With these widespread fishing expeditions, who knows when or where that data about you will pop up again, particularly when you're asked to divulge spaces online where you thought you might have been anonymous or pseudonymous."

Casting such a wide net also inevitably impacts bystanders whom subjects interact with online, creating implications for freedom of association as well.

At this point it's hard to know the bounds of these programs. Most of the new DHS language references "public" data, presumably meaning, for example, public tweets or Facebook posts. But it's not clear what the requirements might be to grant DHS access to more private or limited posts, particularly as US Customs and Border Protection has ramped up demands at the border for access to individuals' digital devices and passwords.

DHS emphasized that it is collecting public data in a statement to WIRED. "The amendment does not represent a new policy," the agency says. "DHS, in its law-enforcement and immigration-process capacity, has and continues to monitor publicly available social media to protect the homeland. In an effort to be transparent, to comply with existing regulations, and due to updates in the electronic immigration system, DHS decided to update its corresponding Privacy Act system of records."

Though the official language in the Federal Register is less clear, limiting the scope to public search results, posts, and social media entries would be a positive restriction. But it wouldn't resolve general concerns about chilling free speech and incidentally involving any number of third parties, including native-born US citizens.

"People may censor themselves because they're worried about coming up for a status upgrade-from being a student visa to being a worker visa or from a work visa to a lawful permanent resident or an LPR to a naturalized citizen," says Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "DHS could open up their file and see that in 2017 they said 'Donald Trump makes me so angry, sometimes I wish he wasn't the president.' So it's a real disservice to freedom of expression on the internet and it's an impoverishment of the national conversation when millions of people with a unique perspective are deterred from participating in social media discourse."

Unclear Gains

The efficacy of mass social media monitoring is also still very much in question when it comes to large-scale domestic security and anti-terrorism. In one evaluation from February, which examined DHS use of social media to evaluate immigration applicants, the federal Office of the Inspector General raised serious concerns about how DHS measured the performance of such programs. "These pilots, on which DHS plans to base future department-wide use of social media screening, lack criteria for measuring performance to ensure they meet their objectives," OIG wrote.

'It's a real disservice to freedom of expression on the internet and it's an impoverishment of the national conversation when millions of people with a unique perspective are deterred from participating in social media discourse.'

Adam Schwartz, EFF

Other agencies like the FBI have conceded at various times that bulk communication collection is an unreliable method for identifying terrorism suspects. "It's Homeland Security's mission to protect national security and they will run up to the letter of the law to do that," CDT's O'Connor says. "Having worked there, I completely respect that, but there's simply no evidence that monitoring and analyzing social media data is effective in general or for counter-terrorism."

Observers emphasize that without describing specific social media criteria the agency examines, it can engage in open-ended, unrestricted bulk digital data collection and surveillance on millions of people.

"Tens of thousands of people a day get off planes-imagine that you're trying to read through all of their Facebook histories in all different foreign languages," The Identity Project's Hasbrouck says. "Forget it. Most of this stuff will never be read by a human, can't possibly be read by a human and will just become grist for the mill for robotic profiling. It will be more effective as a guilt-by-association and suspicion-generating machine."

It is still unclear how the data will be used in practice, and the true impact of DHS's social media scrutiny may not be fully understood until analysts can assess experiences and reports from current and prospective immigrants. But given the overreaching nature of the requests, and the unproven usefulness, it's concerning enough that DHS is collecting that type of information in the first place.

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Feds Monitoring Social Media Does More Harm Than Good

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For privacy wonks and casual observers alike, border screening and surveillance has become an increasing area of critical concern over the last year. Around the world, invasive governments have particularly threatened people's digital privacy. That extends to the US, where Customs and Border Protection has expanded its demands and searches as well.

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The ACLU and a number of other civil liberties organizations are asking Amazon not to sell its facial recognition software to police departments.

Amazon's Rekognition software is designed to analyze images and identify people, objects and text.

Continue Reading

And according to a report from the ACLU released Tuesday, Amazon is actively helping governments deploy the system. The report says the software can identify, track and analyze people in real time.

The ACLU report says at least two police departments use the software. A sheriff's deputy from Oregon told CNN his department doesn't use the software for real-time surveillance. But Amazon's Rekognition web page says Orlando police do use it for real-time detection of "persons-of-interest."

It's that "persons-of-interest" bit that has the civil liberties groups worried. In their letter to Amazon, they raise the possibility that governments could target "suspicious" groups such as undocumented immigrants or black activists. They also worry about the implications of mass facial recognition "at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels."

For its part, Amazon doesn't just market the software to police departments or other government agencies. Rekognition's page includes testimonials from social platform Pinterest and mapping company Here, among other services.

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ACLU Asks Amazon To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Software To Police

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The ACLU and a number of other civil liberties organizations are asking Amazon not to sell its facial recognition software to police departments. Amazon's Rekognition software is designed to analyze images and identify people, objects and text. Continue Reading And according to a report from the ACLU released Tuesday, Amazon is actively helping governments deploy the system.

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Amazon Rekognition

Thousands of images and videos free per month

Quickly add pre-trained or customizable computer vision APIs to your applications without building machine learning (ML) models and infrastructure from scratch.

Analyze millions of images, streaming, and stored videos within seconds, and augment human review tasks with artificial intelligence (AI).

Scale up and down based on your business needs with fully managed AI capabilities and pay only for the images and videos you analyze.

What Is Amazon Rekognition? (1:42)

What can Amazon Rekognition do?

Learn how Amazon Rekognition can enable your business and development teams to solve your most pressing computer vision needs with no ML skills required and at a lower cost.

What can Amazon Rekognition do?

Learn how Amazon Rekognition can enable your business and development teams to solve your most pressing computer vision needs - no ML skills required.

Features

Amazon Rekognition offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information and insights from your images and videos.

Face liveness

Detect real users and deter bad actors using spoofs in seconds during facial verification.

Learn more "

Content moderation

Detect potentially unsafe, inappropriate, or unwanted content across images and videos.

Learn more "

Labels

Detect objects, scenes, activities, landmarks, dominant colors, and image quality.

Learn more "

Face compare and search

Determine the similarity of a face against another picture or from your private image repository.

Learn more "

Custom labels

Detect custom objects such as brand logos using automated machine learning (AutoML) to train your models with as few as 10 images.
Learn more "

Video segment detection

Detect key segments in videos, such as black frames, start or end credits, slates, color bars, and shots.
Learn more "

Face detection and analysis

Detect faces appearing in images and videos and recognize attributes such as open eyes, glasses, and facial hair for each.
Learn more "

Text detection

Extract skewed and distorted text from images and videos of street signs, social media posts, and product packaging.
Learn more "

Celebrity recognition

Identify well-known people to catalog photos and footage for media, marketing, and advertising.

Learn more "

Detect inappropriate content

Quickly and accurately identify unsafe or inappropriate content across image and video assets based on general or business-specific standards and practices.

Content Moderation "

Verify identity online

Use facial comparison and analysis in your user onboarding and authentication workflows to remotely verify the identity of opted-in users.

Identity Verification "

Automatically detect key video segments to reduce the time, effort, and costs of video ad insertion, content operations, and content production.

Media Analysis "

Send connected home smart alerts

Deliver timely and actionable alerts when a desired object is detected in your live video streams. Create home automation experiences such as automatically turning on the light when a person is detected.

Connected Home "

Connect with an expert

Learn more about how you can integrate deep learning-based image and video analysis in
your applications.

Contact Sales "

View customer stories

See how thousands of organizations worldwide are using Amazon Rekognition to add image and video analysis to applications.

Check out stories "

Explore Amazon Rekognition pricing

Explore the three types of Amazon Rekognition usage and pricing.

Find out about pricing "

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Image Recognition Software - ML Image & Video Analysis - Amazon Rekognition - AWS

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Amazon Rekognition automates image recognition and video analysis for your applications without machine learning (ML) experience.

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More than two dozen civil rights organizations are calling on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling its facial recognition technology to the government, according to a letter made public Tuesday by the ACLU.

The technology, called Rekognition, uses artificial intelligence to identify the objects, people, scenes, and more from images or videos. An Amazon executive touted public safety as a "common use case" for the technology in one presentation. For example, it can be used by law enforcement to recognize and track suspects or "persons of interest" in real time.According to Amazon's website, later versions of the tool can identify up to 100 of the largest faces in an image, meaning it can pull out faces from a crowd.

While Amazon may be marketing the technology as a way for law enforcement to more easily catch criminals, civil rights organizations worry it could infringe on privacy rights and be used to target vulnerable populations.

The 41 activist groups and entities that cosigned the letter, which include the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Human Rights Watch, say the tech "is primed for abuse in the hands of governments."

"This product poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build," the letter reads. "People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government. Facial recognition in American communities threatens this freedom."

Related: Facebook is offering facial recognition again in Europe

Through the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU obtained emails between Amazon employees and local law enforcement about the facial recognition technology and its usage.

In email correspondence with Amazon, the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon said it has roughly 300,000 images in its jail booking photo database that it has uploaded to Rekognition. Those photos are used to compare against images of suspects from security cameras or pictures provided by citizens.

The Washington County Sheriff's office said it was using Rekognition to search and identify unknown theft suspects, unconscious or deceased individuals, people of interest who don't have identification, and leads for possible witnesses and accomplices, according to an email obtained by the ACLU.

Deputy Jeff Talbot, public information officer at Washington County Sheriff's Office, said in an email to CNNMoney that the technology has been in use for over a year. "During that time, [we] have been transparent and forthcoming so the local public knows what it is, and equally importantly, what it is not."

He said "a facial recognition match alone, no matter the percentage match, does not establish probable cause to arrest a suspect" and added images used by the system are ones that have been legally obtained. The sheriff's office pays between $6 and $12 per month to use the service.

"The Sheriff's Office does not use the technology for mass and/or real time surveillance. In fact, state law and our policy prohibits it for such use," he added.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said, "Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use [Amazon Web Services]. When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer's right to use our services."

The spokesperson stressed that the technology can be used for many other purposes. For instance, it was used to identify guests attending the Royal Wedding last weekend.

"Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology," the spokesperson added.

Related: Facebook under fire for storing facial recognition data without consent

Amazon, which announced the tech in November 2016 for customers of its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services, has publicly disclosed that Rekognition customers include the city of Orlando, Florida, as well as the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon.

In Orlando, the technology is being used to search for "people of interest" in real time using surveillance footage throughout the city.

Orlando Police said it is not using the technology in an investigative capacity or in any public spaces "at this time."

"The purpose of a pilot program such as this, is to address any concerns that arise as the new technology is tested. Any use of the system will be in accordance with current and applicable law," spokespeople for the department said.

Amazon's promotional materials previously recommended law enforcement use Rekognition to identify people in police body camera footage, the ACLU said in a post. "The company removed mention of police body cameras from its site after the ACLU raised concerns in discussions with Amazon," according to the ACLU.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon uploaded 300,000 security camera images or pictures provided by citizens to Rekognition. It only uploads mugshots.

CNNMoney (New York) First published May 22, 2018: 2:51 PM ET

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Amazon asked to stop selling facial recognition technology to police

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The technology, called Rekognition, uses artificial intelligence to identify the objects, people, scenes, and more from images or videos. An Amazon executive touted public safety as a "common use case" for the technology in one presentation.

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Most are familiar with U.S. surveillance programs

The vast majority of Americans in this survey say they have heard about the surveillance programs to collect information about telephone calls, emails, and other online communications as part of the government's efforts to monitor terrorist activity. Overall, 31% have heard a lot about government surveillance of telephone calls, emails, and other online communications as part of efforts to monitor terrorist activity, and another 56% have heard "a little."

Men (37%) are more likely than women (26%) to have heard "a lot" about the NSA revelations. College graduates (40%) are also more likely than those who have a high school degree (25%) to have heard a lot about government surveillance. Both of these demographic trends echo findings from the first survey in this series. However, when considering other demographics, this issue was likely to be familiar to many Americans in comparable numbers.

Many of the questions in this survey about behavior change were asked of the 87% of respondents who said they were aware of the programs and an analysis of their answers is in the section following this one.

Americans are divided in their concerns about government surveillance of digital communications

In this survey, 17% of Americans said they are "very concerned" about government surveillance of Americans' data and electronic communication; 35% say they are "somewhat concerned"; 33% say they are "not very concerned" and 13% say they are "not at all" concerned about the surveillance. Those who are more likely than others to say they are very concerned include those who say they have heard a lot about the surveillance efforts (34% express strong concern) and men (21% are very concerned).

When asked about more specific points of concern over their own communications and online activities, respondents expressed somewhat lower levels of concern about electronic surveillance in various parts of their digital lives:

39% say they are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about government monitoring of their activity on search engines.

38% say they are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about government monitoring of their activity on their email messages.

37% express concern about government monitoring of their activity on their cell phone.

31% are concerned about government monitoring of their activity on social media sites, such as Facebook or Twitter.

29% say they are concerned about government monitoring of their activity on their mobile apps.

In addition, notable numbers of respondents said that some of these questions were not applicable to them.

In general, men are more likely than women to say that they are "very concerned" about government surveillance of Americans' data and electronic communications (21% vs. 12%). Men are also more likely than women to be "very concerned" about surveillance over their own activities on mobile apps and search engines.

When asked to elaborate on their concerns, many survey respondents were critical of the programs, frequently referring to privacy concerns and their personal rights.
Q: Could you please explain briefly why you have this level of concern about government surveillance of Americans' personal data and electronic communications?
"Every citizen should have the right to their own privacy inside there [sic] own homes and who they talk with. I feel this gives the government too much control."

"The fourth [amendment] originally enforced the idea that each man's home is his castle, secure from unreasonable search and seizure by the government."

"What happened to privacy?"

At the same time, others suggested that the programs could be helpful for prevention of criminal activity and terrorism, and they are not personally concerned because they have "nothing to hide":

"Law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide and should not be concerned."

"I am not doing anything wrong so they can monitor me all they want."

"Small price to pay for maintaining our safe environment from terrorist activities."

References to "terror" or "terrorism" also appeared in many of the open-ended responses, and others pointed to conflicts between personal privacy, individual rights, and national security:

"If in the event I do something unacceptable to the government or country, they have the right to investigate me. Otherwise they are taking away my privacy as an American citizen."

"Monitoring is okay for potential suspects but not every American."

A majority say they are losing confidence that the public interest is being served by the surveillance programs

Those who are aware of the government surveillance programs say they are becoming increasingly skeptical of U.S. surveillance programs. The 87% of the respondents who say they have heard of the programs were asked, "As you have watched the developments in news stories about government monitoring programs over recent months, would you say that you have become more confident or less confident that the programs are serving the public interest?" Some 61% of these respondents said they were less confident and 37% said they were more confident.

Those more likely than others to say they are less confident include those very/somewhat concerned about government surveillance (80%) and those who have heard a lot about the surveillance programs (71%). In addition, those who say they are less confident include those who say they are very/somewhat concerned about government monitoring of their activities on social media, search engines, mobile apps, cell phones, and email.

Republicans and those leaning Republican are more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they are losing confidence (70% vs. 55%).

The public is evenly split about the capacity of the judicial system to balance privacy rights with intelligence agency and law enforcement needs

Many Americans are split on the effectiveness of the judicial system in balancing privacy and national security. Some 48% agree and 49% disagree when asked if they think "the courts and judges do a good job balancing the public's right to privacy with the needs of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to collect information for investigations."

Those who are more likely to say they agree the courts are striking an appropriate balance include: those who have heard only a little about the surveillance programs (56%), those who are not very/not at all concerned about the programs (63%), and those whose confidence in the surveillance programs has grown over time (83%).

However, there are no notable partisan differences on this question.

Americans are comfortable targeting others for surveillance, but not themselves

Even as they express some concern about the reach of government surveillance programs, majorities of Americans think such monitoring is acceptable in certain instances, as long as the targets are not average Americans. Those in positions of power are not seen as exempt; for instance, 60% of all adults say it is acceptable for the American government to monitor communications from America's leaders. Here is the breakdown:

82% say it is acceptable to monitor communications of suspected terrorists

60% believe it is acceptable to monitor the communications of American leaders.

60% think it is okay to monitor the communications of foreign leaders

54% say it is acceptable to monitor communications from foreign citizens

At the same time, only a minority of Americans - 40% - feel it is acceptable to monitor ordinary American citizens. Some 57% say it is unacceptable for the government to monitor their communications.

There are several consistent patterns in people's answers to these questions: Those who have heard a lot about the government surveillance programs are less likely than others to feel that monitoring others, including terrorists, is acceptable. Similarly, those who are concerned about the surveillance programs are less likely to feel that monitoring others is acceptable. And younger adults under the age of 50 are less likely than their elders to think monitoring others is acceptable.

At the same time, those who are more confident that the public interest is being served by these surveillance programs are also more likely to think it is acceptable to monitor others. And those who think the courts and judges are doing a good job balancing the interests of intelligence agencies and law enforcement are also more likely to support monitoring others.

Interestingly, there are no statistically meaningful partisan differences in answers to these questions about which kinds of individuals are acceptable to monitor.

Many think it is acceptable to monitor others in a variety of other situations

In specific circumstances, Americans also generally support the use of surveillance to investigate criminal activity, as well as circumstances when a person's digital activity may cause some suspicion of potential involvement with terrorism or violent acts. These respondents are split on a number of causes for suspicion, including unusual bank withdrawals, the use of encryption to hide software, and situations where individuals are connected to social media users used hateful language about American leaders.

77% of adults believe it is acceptable for the government to monitor communications of a U.S. citizen when the person has visited a child pornography website.

68% believe it is okay to monitor someone who exchanged emails with an imam who preached against infidels.

67% back the idea that the government can monitor a person has visited websites connected to known anti-American groups.

65% believe it is acceptable to monitor a person who made search engine queries for keywords related to explosives and automatic weapons.

51% support the idea of monitoring individuals reported by their bank for making unusual withdrawals.

49% believe it is okay to monitor a person who used encryption software to hide files.

49% think it is acceptable to monitor a person who had friends or followers on social media who used hateful language about American leaders.

Americans ages 50 and older were more likely than those in younger groups to say surveillance is acceptable across many of these specific scenarios. In addition, those who are not concerned about the surveillance programs are more likely to say that monitoring in these situations is acceptable. And those who are confident that surveillance programs are in the public interest are more likely than others to back monitoring people in all of these circumstances, as are those who think the judicial system is balancing the needs of law enforcement with people's right to privacy.

Again, it is noteworthy that there are no partisan differences on these questions.

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Americans' Views on Government Surveillance Programs

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Most are familiar with U.S. surveillance programs The vast majority of Americans in this survey say they have heard about the surveillance programs to collect information about telephone calls, emails, and other online communications as part of the government's efforts to monitor terrorist activity.

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Government Infringement of Digital Privacy

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Americans have long been divided in their views about the trade-off between security needs and personal privacy. Much of the focus has been on government surveillance, though there are also significant concerns about how businesses use data. The issue flared again this week when a federal court ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by one of the suspects in the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, in December. Apple challenged the order to try to ensure that security of other iPhones remained protected, and also to provoke a wider national conversation about how far people would like technology firms to go in protecting their privacy or cooperating with law enforcement.

Events have had a major impact on public attitudes on this issue. Terrorist attacks generate increased anxieties. For instance, the San Bernardino and Paris shootings in late 2015 had a striking impact. A Pew Research Center survey in December found that 56% of Americans were more concerned that the government's anti-terror policies have not gone far enough to protect the country, compared with 28% who expressed concern that the policies have gone too far in restricting the average person's civil liberties. Just two years earlier, amid the furor over Edward Snowden's revelations about National Security Agency surveillance programs, more said their bigger concern was that anti-terror programs had gone too far in restricting civil liberties (47%) rather than not far enough in protecting the country (35%).

At the same time, there are other findings suggesting that Americans are becoming more anxious about their privacy, especially in the context of digital technologies that capture a wide array of data about them. Here is an overview of the state of play as the iPhone case moves further into legal proceedings.
How people have felt about government anti-terror policies
Pew Research Center surveys since the 9/11 terrorist attacks have generally shown that in the periods when high-profile cases related to privacy vs. security first arise, majorities of adults favor a "security first" approach to these issues, while at the same time urging that dramatic sacrifices on civil liberties be avoided. New incidents often result in Americans backing at least some extra steps by the law enforcement and intelligence communities to investigate terrorist suspects, even if that might infringe on the privacy of citizens. But many draw the line at deep interventions into their personal lives.

For instance, our survey shortly after the 9/11 attacks found that 70% of adults favored requiring citizens to carry national ID cards. At the same time, a majority balked at government monitoring of their own emails and personal phone calls or their credit card purchases.

It should be noted that surveys have also found that people's immediate concerns about security can subside over time. In a poll conducted in 2011, shortly before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, 40% said that "in order to curb terrorism in this country it will be necessary for the average person to give up some civil liberties," while 54% said it would not. A decade earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11 and before the passage of the Patriot Act, opinion was nearly the reverse (55% necessary, 35% not necessary).

When The New York Times reported in late 2005 that President George W. Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans, subsequent Pew Research Center surveys found that 50% of Americans were concerned that the government hadn't yet gone far enough in protecting the country against terrorism, and 54% said it was generally right for the government to monitor the telephone and email communications of Americans suspected of having ties with terrorists without first obtaining court permission. Some 43% said such surveillance was generally wrong. Quite similar numbers were found in a survey at when President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

Right after the Snowden revelations in June 2013, a Pew Research Center poll found that 48% of Americans approved of the government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts. But by January 2014, approval had declined to 40%.

And many Americans continue to express concern about the government's surveillance program. In an early 2015 online survey, 52% of Americans described themselves as "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about government surveillance of Americans' data and electronic communications, compared with 46% who described themselves as "not very concerned" or "not at all concerned" about the surveillance.
How people feel about corporate practices
As businesses increasingly mine data about consumers, Americans are concerned about preserving their privacy when it comes to their personal information and behaviors. Those views have intensified in recent years, especially after big data breaches at companies such as Target, eBay and Anthem as well as of federal employee personnel files. Our surveys show that people now are more anxious about the security of their personal data and are more aware that greater and greater volumes of data are being collected about them. The vast majority feel they have lost control of their personal data, and this has spawned considerable anxiety. They are not very confident that companies collecting their information will keep it secure.

In assessing public attitudes, context matters - and so does how the question is framed
One consistent finding over the years about public attitudes related to privacy and societal security is that people's answers often depend on the context. The language of the questions we ask sometimes affects the way people respond.

A recent Pew Research Center study showed that, in commercial situations, people's views on the trade-off between offering information about themselves in exchange for something of value are shaped by both the conditions of the deal and the circumstances of their lives. People indicated that their interest and overall comfort level in sharing personal information depends on the company or organization with which they are bargaining and how trustworthy or safe they perceive the firm to be. It also depends on what happens to their data after they are collected, especially if the data are made available to third parties, and on how long the data are retained.

A study in the wake of the Snowden revelations showed that there was notable change in public attitudes about NSA surveillance programs when questions were modified. For instance, only 25% favored NSA surveillance when there was no mention of court approval of the program. But 37% favored it when the program was described as being approved by courts. Similarly, characterizing the government's data collection "as part of anti-terrorism efforts" garnered more support than not mentioning this (35% favored vs. 26% favored).

Topics: Terrorism, National Security, Online Privacy and Safety, Surveillance

1. Lee Rainie is director of internet and technology research at Pew Research Center.

2. Shiva Maniam is a former research assistant focusing on U.S. politics and policy at Pew Research Center.

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Americans feel the tensions between privacy and security concerns

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Americans have long been divided in their views about the trade-off between security needs and personal privacy. Much of the focus has been on government surveillance, though there are also significant concerns about how businesses use data.

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The opposing side says the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors means they have a moral responsibility to keep patients alive. However, only 14 percent of modern oaths prohibit euthanasia explicitly. Some also argue that legalization of assisted suicide could unfairly target the poor, minorities, and the disabled and create incentives for insurance companies to terminate lives in order to save money. Others go as far to claim it would be a "slippery slope," potentially leading to murder.

One might assume an issue as pressing as the right to end one's life would be at the forefront of discussion of the 2016 Presidential election. However, the topic has seemed to take a backseat to other issues thus far. This could be explained, in part, by the fact that as of now it is a state, rather than federal, decision.

Individual states , not the federal government, licenses physicians and determines what is and is not a legitimate medical practice. This means that the laws regarding end of life options vary drastically from state to state.

Paradoxically, none of the 2016 Republican Presidential frontrunners have taken an official position on the issue. While, the Democratic Platform is silent on euthanasia and assisted suicide, the front runners for the 20 16 Democratic Presidential nomination are both pro- euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.

Hillary Clinton stated in an wi th the Oregon newspaper the Register Guard, "...[W]ith appropriate safeguards and informed decision-making, I think it's an appropriate right to have."

In a groundbreaking case , Gonzales v. Oregon, the US Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to uphold the Oregon physician-assisted suicide law in 2006. Attorney General John Ashcroft, under the Bush administration sought to punish doctors who prescribed drugs to help terminally ill patients end their lives under the Controlled Substances Act. The court decided that the Oregon Law supersedes federal authority to regulate physicians.

One might assume that this controversial topic would be reflected clearly in legislation based on a state's political affiliation. However, legislation is fairly mixed across blue and red states (graphic).

, physician assisted suicide is legal in California, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont. In Montana, it is legal after a court ruling. In 2015, legislation was introduced or active in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Nevada.

Because legislation varies so drastically from state to state, there have been cases of individuals relocating in order to end their life peacefully.

For many terminally ill patients who live in states without right-to-die laws, the options are grim.

Jim Carberry, of Natick, Massachusetts, a state which has yet to pass any right-to-die laws, described watching his wife die a painful death to the . Suffering from cancer, Margie Carberry decided to remove her feeding tube in the summer of 2011 and slowly starved to death over the course of five weeks. She was given prescription narcotics, Ibuprofen, and other pain medications, but according to Jim Carberry, "Doctors told her there was nothing more they could do for her."

The topic of assisted suicide is one of the most divisive topics on a personal and political level. However, the topic has gained increased attention in recent years and legislation hangs in limbo as of this year. There will be many changes in laws and practice soon.

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The "Right-To-Die" in America: New Trends Explained

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The opposing side says the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors means they have a moral responsibility to keep patients alive. However, only 14 percent of modern oaths prohibit euthanasia explicitly. Some also argue that legalization of assisted suicide could unfairly target the poor, minorities, and the disabled and create incentives for insurance companies to terminate lives in order to save money.

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Despite not hearing about it often, assisted suicide is a major issue in the U.S. right now. In more than 20 states this year alone lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize assisted suicide, and almost every single one of them has been struck down - with bi-partisan support. A recent bi-partisan Sense of Congress bill introduced in Washington, D.C., has opened up the discussion at a national level, and paved the way for upcoming bills and debates in 2018. If 2017 was a busy year for assisted suicide legislation, 2018 will be even more so.

Though assisted suicide is promoted as freedom of choice, the economic forces that drive insurance companies, and subsequently patients' coverage options, greatly restrict self-determination for already vulnerable populations, including people with disabilities. There is evidence that economic considerations limit choice when it comes to health insurance coverage. And the deadly combination of assisted suicide and our profit-driven health care system does in fact steer some patients toward lethal drugs, the cheapest form of "treatment."

Dr. Brian Callister , a physician from Reno, Nev., was told by two separate insurance medical directors that assisted suicide would be covered for his California patients, but the curative therapies Dr. Callister had prescribed to save their lives would not.

Callister the concerns of health care advocates, saying that "since assisted suicide became legal in California and Oregon, the practice of medicine across the West has been irreparably harmed for patients who still want their diseases treated but are now simply offered the cheaper option of a quick death." Patients Barbara Wagner and Randy Stroup in Oregon had similar experiences.

Multiple studies show that people with disabilities, senior citizens, poor people, and people of color are more likely to be mistreated by medical professionals, and the likelihood of being mistreated increases if family members view them as an emotional or financial burden.

When it comes to assisted suicide, we see in states like Oregon, where assisted suicide has been legal for two decades, the percentage of Oregon deaths attributed to a patient's reluctance to "burden" their families rose from 13 percent in 1998 to 40 percent in 2014 .

This reveals that the right to die "option" for some vulnerable populations has quickly become more like a duty to die.

The legalization of assisted suicide also devalues the lives of people with disabilities because it creates a double standard - insurance companies and state agencies readily offer to pay for life-ending drugs for individuals with disabilities and serious health conditions when they ask for death, but provide suicide prevention services to non-disabled individuals who make the same request.

But there is more cause for alarm. In states where assisted suicide is legal, nothing prevents a relative who stands to benefit from the patient's death from steering that person towards suicide, witnessing the request, picking up the lethal dose, or even administering the drug. The same goes for abusive caregivers. No witnesses are required when the lethal drugs are administered, and despite assurances by assisted suicide proponents, there are no checks or balances that would prevent abuses.

On top of that, oversight and data reporting are difficult or impossible to enforce. At present, states that have legalized assisted suicide do not even require doctors to record the lethal medication they prescribed as the direct cause of death on the death certificate. Instead, they list the cause of death as, for example, the patient's terminal illness thereby leaving behind a trail of misleading documentation.

When it comes to assisted suicide, mistakes by health care professionals, widespread misinformation, coercion, and abuse all limit the ability of people with disabilities to make informed and independent decisions. And in this profit-driven economic climate, is it realistic to expect that insurers are going to do the right thing, or the cheap thing? If insurers deny, or even delay, approval of costlier life-saving alternatives, then money saving but fatal measures become the deadly default.

The truth is that assisted suicide as public policy is rife with dangerous loopholes and consequences, especially for the vulnerable in our society. We should reject laws that legalize the practice.
Helena Berger is president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities

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Assisted suicide laws are creating a 'duty-to-die' medical culture

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Despite not hearing about it often, assisted suicide is a major issue in the U.S. right now. In more than 20 states this year alone lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize assisted suicide, and almost every single one of them has been struck down - with bi-partisan support.

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Is There a Legal Right to Die? - Euthanasia - ProCon.org

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Is There a Legal Right to Die? Read pros, cons, and expert responses in the debate.

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Does the Death Penalty Cost Less Than Life in Prison without Parole? - Death Penalty - ProCon.org

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Does the Death Penalty Cost Less Than Life in Prison without Parole? Read pros, cons, and expert responses in the debate.

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An appeals court has let stand a lower court ruling overturning a California law that allows physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs to the terminally ill.

California's Fourth District Court of Appeals on Wednesday refused to stay last week's decision by the Riverside County Superior Court, which ruled that state lawmakers should not have passed the law during a special session on health care funding. However, the constitutionality of the law itself - passed nearly three years ago - was not challenged.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra had sought to block the earlier ruling in order to allow terminally ill people to access life-ending drugs while the issue works its way through the courts.

Rejecting the superior court's rationale for tossing out the law, Becerra argued that the health care funding session was "broadly germane" to the assisted suicide measure and therefore its passage was constitutional, according to The Sacramento Bee.

California is one of seven states, along with the District of Columbia, that has enacted legal protections for assisted suicide, covering about one-fifth of the U.S. population.

California's 2015 law, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, allows doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients with six months or less to live.

According to Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group for assisted suicide, in the first year after the law went into effect, more than 500 adults in California received the drugs.

Opponents of the law, such as the Life Legal Defense Foundation, have argued that it could lead to coercion and abuse of terminally ill patients.

"You have people at likely the most vulnerable time of their lives," Alexandra Snyder, the group's executive director, tells member station KQED.

Those people are "potentially facing large medical expenses and that puts them in a position of being vulnerable to pressure not just from families but their own pressure that maybe this is a cheaper, less burdensome way to go," she says.

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Court Upholds Ruling Against California's Assisted Suicide Law

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An appeals court has let stand a lower court ruling overturning a California law that allows physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs to the terminally ill. California's Fourth District Court of Appeals on Wednesday refused to stay last week's decision by the Riverside County Superior Court, which ruled that state lawmakers should not have passed the law during a special session on health care funding.

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The greatest costs associated with the death penalty occur prior to and during trial, not in post-conviction proceedings. Even if all post-conviction proceedings (appeals) were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences.

Trials in which the prosecutor is seeking a death sentence have two separate and distinct phases: conviction (guilt/innocence) and sentencing. Special motions and extra time for jury selection typically precede such trials.

More investigative costs are generally incurred in capital cases, particularly by the prosecution.

When death penalty trials result in a verdict less than death or are reversed, taxpayers first incur all the extra costs of capital pretrial and trial proceedings and must then also pay either for the cost of incarcerating the prisoner for life or the costs of a retrial (which often leads to a life sentence).

The death penalty diverts resources from genuine crime control measures. Spending money on the death penalty system means:

Reducing the resources available for crime prevention, mental health treatment, education and rehabilitation, meaningful victims' services, and drug treatment programs.

Diverting it from existing components of the criminal justice system, such as prosecutions of drug crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse.

Emergency services, creating jobs, and police & crime prevention were the three highest rated priorities for use of fiscal resources.

Schools/libraries, public health, and roads/transportation also ranked higher than the death penalty.

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Death Penalty Cost - Amnesty International USA

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The greatest costs associated with the death penalty occur prior to and during trial, not in post-conviction proceedings. Even if all post-conviction proceedings (appeals) were abolished, the death penalty would still be more expensive than alternative sentences. Trials in which the prosecutor is seeking a death sentence have two separate and distinct phases: conviction (guilt/innocence) and sentencing.

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On January 7, 2020, Louisiana marked the passage of ten years since its last execution. As a result of the milestone, two-thirds of U.S. states have now either abolished the death penalty or gone at least a decade without a...

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On January 7, 2020, Louisiana marked the pas­sage of ten years since its last exe­cu­tion. As a result of the mile­stone, two-thirds of U.S. states have now either abol­ished the death penal­ty or gone at least a decade with­out a...

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Read CNN's Death Penalty Fast Facts to learn more about capital punishment in the United States.

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Anyone who's ever been given one of their friend's Adderall knows the powerful effects brought on by this tiny unintimidating pink pill. Increased energy, enhanced ability to focus and concentrate, and a euphoric sense of being are the most common effects of this drug.

Coincidentally, increased energy, enhanced ability to focus and concentrate, and a euphoric sense of being - are also the most common effects of crystal meth.

So, why are these effects so similar? Because the drugs are nearly identical in their chemical structure.

Dr. Carl Hart is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research into drug abuse and drug addiction. Hart was also the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He received a bachelor of science and a master of science from the University of Maryland and he received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Wyoming. By all accounts, he is the expert in the field of drug use.

In a recent article on his website theinfluence.org, Hart explains that the only major difference between crystal meth and Adderall is public perception.

Hart explains that this perception of illicit meth is largely due to misinformation put out by public service messages.
"Perhaps it has something to do with public "educational" campaigns aimed at discouraging methamphetamine use. These campaigns usually show, in graphically horrifying detail, some poor young person who uses the drug for the first time and then ends up engaging in uncharacteristic acts such as prostitution, stealing from parents, or assaulting strangers for money to buy the drug. At the end of advertisement, emblazoned on the screen, is: "Meth - not even once." We've also seen those infamous "meth mouth" images (extreme tooth decay), These types of media campaigns neither prevent nor decrease the use of the drug; nor do they provide any real facts about the effects of meth. They succeed only in perpetuating false assumptions. Swayed by this messaging, the public remains almost entirely ignorant of the fact that methamphetamine produces nearly identical effects to those produced by the popular ADHD medication d-amphetamine (dextroamphetamine). You probably know it as Adderall®: a combination of amphetamine and d-amphetamine mixed salts." wrongly presented as a direct consequence of methamphetamine use.

Hart admitted that he too believed that methamphetamine was far more dangerous than d-amphetamine, despite the fact that the chemical structure of the two drugs is nearly identical. However, after thoroughly researching the evidence, Hart shattered this belief.

To back up his claims, Hart and his team conducted a study of 13 men who regularly use methamphetamine. During the double-blind study, the men were given a hit of methamphetamine, of d-amphetamine, or of placebo. According to the study:

The significance of Hart's study has a paradigm-shattering effect. On one hand, it shows that a drug, which is legally taken by millions of children in the US, is identical to an illegal substance associated with a slew of negative traits. On the other hand, it shows that meth users are not much different from the millions of Americans who take its legal form.

The use of methamphetamine in the United States is actually on the decline according to U.S. National Drug Control Policy Director R. Gil Kerlikowske. However, there are over 3.5 million American children currently take an ADHD drug, a nearly 500% increase since 1990.
"It took me nearly 20 years and dozens of scientific publications in the area of drug use to recognize my own biases around methamphetamine. I can only hope that you don't require as much time and scientific activity in order to understand that the Adderall that you or your loved one takes each day is essentially the same drug as meth. And I hope that this knowledge engenders less judgment of people who use meth, and greater empathy."
It seems that the pharmaceutical industry has figured out a way to market ADHD to the masses in an attempt to sell them their legal version of meth.

As Dr. Hart so eloquently says,

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world.

Featured at The Free Thought Project

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Top Neuroscientist Explains How Big Pharma's Adderall Is Essentially Crystal Meth

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Anyone who's ever been given one of their friend's Adderall knows the powerful effects brought on by this tiny unintimidating pink pill. Increased energy, enhanced ability to focus and concentrate, and a euphoric sense of being are the most common effects of this drug.

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‘Academic Doping’ On The Rise: Number Of Students Abusing ADHD Drugs Increasing | TODAY

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Since the 1960s, the United States has imposed an embargo against Cuba, the Communist island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The embargo, known among Cubans as "el bloqueo" or "the blockade," consists of economic sanctions against Cuba and restrictions on Cuban travel and commerce for all people and companies under US jurisdiction.

Proponents of the embargo argue that Cuba has not met the US conditions for lifting the embargo, including transitioning to democracy and improving human rights. They say that backing down without getting concessions from the Castro regime will make the United States appear weak, and that only the Cuban elite would benefit from open trade.

Opponents of the Cuba embargo argue that it should be lifted because the failed policy is a Cold War relic and has clearly not achieved its goals. They say the sanctions harm the US economy and Cuban citizens, and prevent opportunities to promote change and democracy in Cuba. They say the embargo hurts international opinion of the United States. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

The United States should maintain the Cuba embargo because Cuba has not met the conditions required to lift it, and the US will look weak for lifting the sanctions.

Proclamation 3447 signed by President Kennedy on Feb. 3, 1962, established the embargo against Cuba to reduce "the threat posed by its alignment with the communist powers."

The embargo was strengthened by the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996 (also known as Helms-Burton) [49] which specified conditions for terminating the embargo. According to US law, Cuba must legalize all political activity, release all political prisoners, commit to free and fair elections in the transition to representative democracy, grant freedom to the press, respect internationally recognized human rights, and allow labor unions. Since Cuba has not met these conditions, the embargo should not be lifted.
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Pro 2

The Cuban government has consistently responded to US attempts to soften the embargo with acts of aggression, raising concerns about what would happen if the sanctions were fully lifted.

President Carter tried to normalize relations with Cuba by opening the US Interests Section (a de facto embassy) in Havana in 1977. Fidel Castro then orchestrated the Mariel Boatlift, which sent 125,000 emigrants (including criminals and mentally ill people) to the United States.

In 2003, President George W. Bush began to ease restrictions for visiting family members in Cuba, but tightened the rules in 2004 in response to Cuba's crackdown against political dissidents.

Since the United States agreed to re-open the US embassy in Cuba, the Cuban government has continued to persecute and arrest its own citizens. Arbitrary short-term detentions increased between 2010 and 2016, from a monthly average of 172 detentions to a monthly average of 827 detentions. While the average had dropped by 2019, the Cuban government was still detaining over 227 people per month arbitrarily.
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Pro 3

The embargo enables the United States to apply pressure on the Cuban government to improve human rights.

The freedom of expression and right to assemble are severely restricted by the government. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act stated that the United States has a "moral obligation" to promote human rights in keeping with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the embargo is a bargaining tool.
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Pro 4

Cuban-Americans support the embargo.

US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Cuban-American, and long-time proponent of the embargo, wrote in a press release, "In addition to imposing economic pressure on the Castro regime and holding it accountable for actions against U.S. interests, the embargo is a moral stance against the brutal dictatorship. Over the last 50 years, the embargo has served as a constant form of solidarity with the Cuban people."

A 2019 poll found 51% of Cuban-Americans supported the embargo.
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Pro 5

Cuba should be subject to sanctions because it is known to have repeatedly supported acts of terrorism.
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Pro 6

Cuba has not demonstrated a willingness to negotiate in good faith with the United States.

President Barack Obama stated in a Sep. 28, 2011 "Open for Questions" roundtable, "Now, what we've tried to do is to send a signal that we are open to a new relationship with Cuba... [W]i have to see a signal back from the Cuban government... in order for us to be fully engaged with them. And so far, at least, what we haven't seen is the kind of genuine spirit of transformation inside of Cuba that would justify us eliminating the embargo."

Fidel Castro responded the following day by calling Obama "stupid" and saying, "Many things will change in Cuba, but they will change through our efforts and in spite of the United States. Perhaps that empire will fall first."

Even though President Obama made efforts to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015, the Cuban government has failed to improve on human rights. According to a 2018 Human Rights Watch report, "Detention is often used preemptively to prevent individuals from participating in peaceful marches or meetings to discuss politics."
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Pro 7

Since there is virtually no private sector in Cuba, opening trade would only help the government, not regular Cuban citizens. And, the US is able to target the Cuban government with its embargo while still providing assistance to Cuban citizens.
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Pro 8

The embargo should be maintained because open travel is insufficient to promote change in Cuba. Many democratic countries already allow travel to Cuba with no results.

Lifting all travel restrictions to Cuba would not lead to improved conditions or the spread of democracy.

More than 2.7 million people from around the world visited Cuba in 2011, including more tourists from Canada than any other country. Despite the steady flow of tourism from western countries, the Cuban government still maintains total control over its people.
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Con 1

The United States should end the Cuba embargo because its 50-year policy has failed to achieve its goals, and Cuba does not pose a threat to the United States.

Feb. 7, 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of the embargo, and the goal of forcing Cuba to adopt a representative democracy still has not been achieved.

Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War raised concerns about US national security, but that era is long over. The USSR dissolved in 1991, and American foreign policy has adapted to the change in most aspects apart from the embargo. The US Defense Intelligence Agency released a report in 1998 stating "Cuba does not pose a significant military threat to the U.S. or to other countries in the region." The embargo can no longer be justified by the fear of Communism spreading throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Fidel Castro resigned his presidency in 2008, and abdicated his role as the leader of Cuba's communist party in 2011 due to illness. His brother Raúl then stepped in to take his place and, in Apr. 2019, Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel, a close Castro ally, was selected as President.

If over 50 years of sanctions have not toppled the Castro regime, there is no reason to think the embargo will ever work.
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Con 2

The embargo harms the US economy.

The US Chamber of Commerce opposes the embargo, saying that it costs the United States $1.2 billion annually in lost sales of exports.

A study by the Cuba Policy Foundation, a nonprofit founded by former US diplomats, estimated that the annual cost to the US economy could be as high as $4.84 billion in agricultural exports and related economic output. "If the embargo were lifted, the average American farmer would feel a difference in his or her life within two to three years," the study's author said.

A Mar. 2010 study by Texas A&M University calculated that removing the restrictions on agricultural exports and travel to Cuba could create as many as 6,000 jobs in the US.

Nine US governors released a letter on Oct. 14, 2015 urging Congress to lift the embargo, which stated: "Foreign competitors such as Canada, Brazil and the European Union are increasingly taking market share from U.S. industry [in Cuba], as these countries do not face the same restrictions on financing... Ending the embargo will create jobs here at home, especially in rural America, and will create new opportunities for U.S. agriculture."
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Con 3

The embargo harms the people of Cuba, not the government as intended.

Cubans are denied access to technology, medicine, affordable food, and other goods that could be available to them if the United States lifted the embargo.

A report by the American Association for World Health found that doctors in Cuba have access to less than 50% of the drugs on the world market, and that food shortages led to a 33% drop in caloric intake between 1989 and 1993. The report stated, "it is our expert medical opinion that the US embargo has caused a significant rise in suffering-and even deaths-in Cuba."

Amnesty International reported in 2011 that "treatments for children and young people with bone cancer... [and] antiretroviral drugs used to treat children with HIV/AIDS" were not readily available with the embargo in place because "they were commercialized under US patents."

In Apr. 2020, Cuba reported that the US embargo was preventing the import of important medical supplies and equipment, as well as other essentials. Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez tweeted that the embargo was "the main obstacle to purchase the medicines, equipment and material required to confront the pandemic."
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Con 4

Promoting democracy by prohibiting Americans from traveling to Cuba is hypocritical. Most Americans want improved diplomatic ties and open travel and trade policies with Cuba.

Restricting American rights as a means of forcing another country to embrace freedom is hypocritical, as is demanding that Cuba adopt a representative democracy given the long history of US support for brutal dictatorships in countries that favor American interests, such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

The United States even backed Cuban dictator, President General Fulgencio Batista (who served as elected president from 1940 to 1944, and then as US-backed dictator from 1952 to 1958 before being overthrown by Fidel Castro), someone known to have killed, tortured, and imprisoned political dissenters, because he was friendly to American interests.

A 2012 opinion poll of more than 1,000 US adults found that 62% of respondents thought the United States should re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba. Among Americans surveyed, 57% think that the travel ban to Cuba should be lifted, while only 27% think the ban should remain. Regarding the trade embargo, 51% of Americans want to open trade with Cuba, compared to 29% who do not.
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Con 5

Cuban-Americans and most of the world oppose the embargo, and maintaining it is detrimental to the reputation of the United States among the international community.

The United Nations has formally denounced the US embargo on Cuba every year since 1991. In 2019, 187 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to condemn the US policy; only Israel and Brazil sided with the United States.
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Con 6

Free trade, not the isolation of an embargo, can promote democracy in Cuba. And, lifting the embargo would put pressure on Cuba to address problems that it had previously blamed on US sanctions.

Trading with China led to economic reforms that brought 100 million people above the poverty line and improved access to health care and education across the country.

Cuban officials have not been forced to take responsibility for problems such as a failing health care system, lack of access to medicine, the decline of the sugar industry, decrepit plumbing systems, and water pollution because they use the embargo as a scapegoat. The Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs reportedly blamed the embargo for a total of $1.66 billion in damage to the Cuban economy.

President Bill Clinton said in a 2000 interview, "[S]sometimes I think [Fidel Castro] doesn't want the embargo lifted... because as long as he can blame the United States, then he doesn't have to answer to his own people for the failures of his economic policy."
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Con 7

The embargo prevents the people of Cuba from joining the digital age by cutting them off from technology, and restricts the electronic flow of information to the island.

Fewer than one in four Cubans accessed the internet in 2011.

Though the Cuban government began permitting internet access in private homes in 2019, most access is too expensive for widespread use, costing residents about 26% of the average salary for what amounts to 7% of the average American's internet data. And the government still controls legal access to the internet.
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Con 8

The United States should not have different trading and travel policies for Cuba than for other countries with governments or policies it opposes.

The United States trades with China, Venezuela, and Vietnam despite their records of human rights violations.

President George W. Bush lifted trade sanctions on North Korea in 2008 amidst concerns about that nation's desire to develop nuclear weapons.

There is no justification for singling out Cuba as the one nation in the world that is off limits.
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Did You Know?

1. President John F. Kennedy sent his press secretary to buy 1,200 Cuban cigars the night before he signed the embargo in Feb. 1962.

2. Congress gave USAID a total budget of $364 million between fiscal year 1996 and fiscal year 2019 to promote democracy and human rights in Cuba.

3. There were an estimated total of 6,602 political detentions in Cuba in 2012, which is among the world's highest on a per capita basis. While the number had dropped by 2019, the Cuban government was still detaining over 227 people per month arbitrarily.

4.TThe United Nations has denounced the US embargo against Cuba for 22 straight years. In 2019, 187 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to condemn the US policy; only Israel and Brazil sided with the United States.

5. Though the Cuban government began permitting internet access in private homes in 2019, most access is too expensive for widespread use, costing residents about 26% of the average salary for what amounts to 7% of the average American's internet data.

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Since the 1960s, the United States has imposed an embargo against Cuba, the Communist island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The embargo, known among Cubans as "el bloqueo" or "the blockade," consists of economic sanctions against Cuba and restrictions on Cuban travel and commerce for all people and companies under US jurisdiction.

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UNITED NATIONS - The United States on Wednesday revived its objection to an annual United Nations General Assembly resolution deploring the American trade embargo on Cuba, a year after having abstained from the vote for the first time.

The reversal, which left the United States nearly isolated on the issue at the United Nations, reflected the toughened attitude toward Cuba by President Trump, who has distanced his administration from the historic thaw in relations begun by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

The vote on the resolution in the 193-member General Assembly was 191 to 2. The United States and Israel, which often acts in concert with its American ally, were the lone dissenters.

The State Department had signaled on Tuesday that the United States intended to vote against the resolution, which calls for a repeal of the embargo imposed in 1962 after the break in relations with Cuba.

"The United States does not fear isolation in this chamber or anywhere else," Mr. Trump's United Nations ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, said in a statement to fellow diplomats before the vote.

In remarks that evoked the Cold War-era language aimed at the Castro government, Ms. Haley said the United States opposed the resolution to demonstrate "continued solidarity with the Cuban people and in the hope that they will one day be free to choose their own destiny."

Under Mr. Obama, the United States restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, easing five decades of enmity with the island nation of 11 million. But the trade embargo, which can be rescinded only by Congress, has remained in force.

The annual vote on the resolution condemning the embargo has become something of a theatrical ritual at the United Nations and a venue for critics of American policy to vent their anger.

Cuba's foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, who also spoke before the vote, denounced the United States and Ms. Haley for what he described as her disrespectful remarks, and said the Trump administration lacked "the slightest moral authority to criticize Cuba."

The atmosphere was in sharp contrast to the vote in 2016, when Mr. Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, abstained, breaking with precedent and receiving sustained applause.

Ms. Power said the abstention did not mean the United States condoned the political and economic restrictions in Cuba. But the abstention reflected the Obama White House's view that decades of American efforts to ostracize Cuba had not worked.

The General Assembly vote came against the backdrop of other tensions between the Trump administration and Cuba, tied partly to mysterious illnesses that have afflicted American diplomats in Havana.

Last month, Mr. Trump blamed Cuba for the illnesses, which led to the abrupt withdrawal of American Embassy personnel. He also expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington.

Cuban officials have denied responsibility for the illnesses and suggested that the Trump administration had concocted an excuse to downgrade ties.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Envoy Defends Cuba Embargo at U.N., Reversing Obama. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Trump Administration Defends Cuba Embargo at U.N., Reversing Obama

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UNITED NATIONS - The United States on Wednesday revived its objection to an annual United Nations General Assembly resolution deploring the American trade embargo on Cuba, a year after having abstained from the vote for the first time.

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By making an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, we ignore and stop looking for what is really going on with the child.

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According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on powerful drugs with lifelong consequences. This is the central fact of the journalist Alan Schwarz's new book, ADHD Nation. Explaining this fact-how it is that perhaps two thirds of the children diagnosed with ADHD do not actually suffer from the disorder-is the book's central mystery. The result is a damning indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, and an alarming portrait of what is being done to children in the name of mental health.

He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

What prompted you to write this book?
In 2011, having spent four years exposing the dangers of concussions in the National Football League and youth sports for The New York Times, I wanted another project. I had heard that high school students in my native Westchester County (just north of New York City) were snorting Adderall before the S.A.T.'s to focus during the test. I was horrified and wanted to learn more. I saw it not as a "child psychiatry" story, and not as a "drug abuse" story, but one about academic pressure and the demands our children feel they're under.

When I looked deeper, it was obvious that our nationwide system of ADHD treatment was completely scattershot-basically, many doctors were merely prescribing with little thought into whether a kid really had ADHD or not, and then the pills would be bought and sold among students who had no idea what they were messing with. I asked the ADHD and child-psychiatry establishment about this, and they denied it was happening. They denied that there were many false diagnoses. They denied that teenagers were buying and selling pills. They denied that the national diagnosis rates reported by the C.D.C.-then 9.5 percent of children aged 4-17, now 11 percent and still growing-were valid. They basically denied that anything about their world was malfunctioning at all. In the end, they doth protest too much. I wrote about 10 front-page stories for The New York Times on the subject from 2012-2014.

In what sense is ADHD an "epidemic," and how was it "made"?
ADHD itself is not an epidemic-ADHD misdiagnosis is an epidemic. If the system functioned in such a way as to stay anywhere near the 5percent diagnosis rate that the American Psychiatric Association's official definition suggests, we wouldn't be in this mess. But the system doesn't function properly, not by a long shot. About 15 percent of American children turn 18 having been diagnosed with ADHD, 20 percent of boys, and 30 percent of boys in much of the South. It's completely indefensible. It's time to figure out how not to necessarily "fix" it, because the genie long left the bottle, but do a far better job in diagnosing the kids who really fit the construct and help the other kids in other ways. Many kids have problems and need help-but those problems in many cases will derive from trauma, anxiety, family discord, poor sleep or diet, bullying at school and more. We must not abandon them. We must help. But we must also be more judicious in how we do that, rather than reflexively giving them a diagnosis of what is generally described as a serious, lifelong brain disorder.

As for "made," it's clear that whatever ADHD is, wherever it comes from and however it manifests itself in different people, it has been built up into something well beyond reasonable proportions. The disorder can exist and be respected without being misdiagnosed in millions of additional children. It's not the disorder's fault that the grownups in charge have mucked it up. We, the adults, have made it into something it didn't need to be.

What role have the pharmaceutical companies played?
A completely predictable one. We are a very capitalistic country, particularly when it comes to medicine, and the pharmaceutical industry has massive financial incentive to produce drugs that address medical needs. We all benefit from this - whether it was the Advil I took last night for a headache, or the chemotherapy my brother underwent for Hodgkin's Disease 30 years ago. So there's nothing wrong with their making a product people want. The problem, in the ADHD world and others-particularly psychiatric-is that the companies hijacked the entire field. It corralled all the top researchers and doctors in the field and paid them five, six, even seven-figures apiece to conduct studies all written in the same key: ADHD is more widespread and dangerous than anyone knows, the drugs work wonderfully and with almost no side effects, and that if you don't diagnose and medicate a child, he or she will be doomed to academic and social failure, crash their car, get venereal disease and more.

All these study findings were founded in small pieces of truth, yes, but they were unconscionably exaggerated specifically to scare doctors and parents into diagnosing and medicating children without much regard to how their problems might not derive from ADHD, but something else, something more complicated, and something worthy of a hell of a lot more attention and treatment than daily amphetamine pills. This was all orchestrated behind the sheen of academic institutions-it's easy to get away with it when the doctors performing the studies have affiliations at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Cal, with only tiny print indicating that their work was subsidized by the drug makers and rewarded with consulting and speaking contracts.

Then, making things worse, the pharmaceutical companies took these studies to compose ads, ultimately to parents themselves, that misrepresented what their product was, what it treated, and what it did. Disgustingly so. ADHD drugs do not give a child "grades that match his intelligence," which is what one Adderall XR ad told parents in People magazine. (The United States is almost unique in the developed world for allowing direct-to-consumer advertising of controlled substances, which ADHD meds are.) Another ad had a mother telling her kid that, thanks to the ADHD drugs, "I'm proud of you." It's sick. But there are really no repercussions for companies that do this. Every ADHD drug - Adderall XR, Concerta, Vyvanse, Metadate, you name it - has received a formal reprimand from the F.D.A. for false and misleading advertising. Every one.

Dr. Keith Conners is such an interesting figure. What do you find so compelling about his story?
He is ADHD's Oppenheimer. It was Conners, in the early 1960s at Johns Hopkins, who conducted the first formal trials on the use of Ritalin in obstreperous children. (The studies were subsidized by Ritalin's manufacturer, CIBA.) The results were incredibly compelling-this drug helped some children who might not have gotten a reasonable education, or lived a decent home life, to follow instructions and pay attention in ways that transformed their lives. These findings helped spur research into what was then called Minimal Brain Dysfunction or Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood, and other drugs emerged as effective treatments for what we essentially now call ADHD Conners became a champion of the diagnosis and medications, treated children in his own university-affiliated clinics, developed a symptom rating scale to help other clinicians identify and treat the condition, and worked for just about every pharmaceutical company conducting trials on new and better medications. This was all done in good faith for the benefit of children. But through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, he was so focused on these honest aims that he didn't pay attention to how the field was going completely off the tracks. He didn't realize what he had become a part of. He now does, and calls ADHD misdiagnoses "a national disaster of dangerous proportions."

You describe this problem as a genie that's left the bottle. What is the way forward?
There is no way to rein in ADHD diagnoses to anything near the 5 percent that the American Psychiatric Associationsays is appropriate, and maybe even the 7 or 8 percent that most people could live with. (No system involving a subjective diagnosis, such as psychiatric disorders, will ever work perfectly, and we shouldn't expect it to.) But eleven percent of children currently aged 6 to 17 already have been told they have ADHD by a medical provider, and by the time they hit college age, 15 percent will have. It has entered the medical and cultural zeitgeist, in part because newly diagnosed kids are in such wide company, and in part because the medications do, in general, help them behave better in home and school. That's very seductive to parents, doctors, teachers and anyone troubled by the child's behavior.

Believe it or not, I would argue that any sort of sudden shift in the handling of ADHD, any significant aversion to allow a diagnosis, would hurt the children who really do fit the construct and benefit from treatments -- we can't overreact. What we must do is simply be more judicious in making the diagnosis. Parents and doctors must be taught that just because a child has a difficult time paying attention or sitting still in school does not, ipso facto, have a potentially lifetime brain disorder. It's complicated. It takes time to figure out what might be best for this individual child.

We, the grownups, must slow down. Be less impulsive. Pay careful attention. What we want from our children we must first expect from ourselves.

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Big Pharma's Manufactured Epidemic: The Misdiagnosis of ADHD

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According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on powerful drugs with lifelong consequences. This is the central fact of the journalist Alan Schwarz's new book, ADHD Nation .

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You may not realize it, but the legal weed industry is among the fastest-growing in the United States. Marijuana Business Daily released a report last year entitled "Marijuana Business Factbook 2017" that called for a whopping 45% legal pot sales growth in the U.S. in 2018 and an aggregate tripling in sales between 2016 and 2021 to approximately $17 billion. The big bump in 2018 is a result of California opening its doors to recreational marijuana sales, as well as organic growth in existing legal states.

Favorability toward cannabis has been a big reason why sales are soaring, as well as why marijuana stocks have doubled or tripled in value over the trailing year. Respondents across five national polls since April 2017 have overwhelmingly favored the idea of legalizing pot for adult use. A separate poll from the independent Quinnipiac University this past August found that 94% of Americans are behind the idea of legalizing medicinal cannabis, compared to a mere 4% who oppose the idea.

The number of U.S. cannabis jobs may more than double between 2017 and 2021

However, the view most people have of the pot industry is probably very linear. They simply see growers, distributors, and retailers, when in reality there's much more. There are consultants, delivery companies, supply chain management providers, processors, venture capitalist, event planners, and so much more that I'm not even mentioning here. You could rightly say there's a "canna-verse" out there that's probably going unnoticed by most of the American public and investors.

Last year, this budding U.S. industry accounted for $9 billion in sales, according to Tom Adams, managing director of BDS Analytics, and more importantly, the industry employed 121,000 people. By 2021, BDS Analytics is estimating that cannabis industry employment in the U.S. will more than double to 292,000 people. That represents a compound annual growth rate in American weed-related jobs of roughly 25%. What industries do you know of where the labor force is expected to grow by 25% a year? My guess is not too many.

What's truly unique about the dazzling growth the cannabis industry has delivered is that it's done so with the federal government maintaining its Schedule I classification on the drug. Schedule I substances are wholly illegal, highly prone to abuse, and are deemed to have no recognized medical benefits.

Jeff Sessions is waging war on the pot industry

A number of loose rules and state regulations have thus far fostered an environment that's allowed the pot industry to thrive. For instance, the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment (also known as Rohrabacher Blumenauer) ensures that the Department of Justice can't use federal dollars to prosecute medical marijuana businesses that are operating in legal states.

Similarly, between August 2013 and early January 2018, the Cole memo, which was drafted by former Deputy Attorney General James Cole, was in effect. This memo provided a loose framework of rules that states would have to abide by in order to keep the federal government from intervening. Some of these factors including keeping adolescents away from pot and ensuring that weed grown in a legal state stayed in that state.

Unfortunately, many of these protections for the cannabis industry are paper thin, and current Attorney General Jeff Sessions is doing what he can to tear them down and wage war on the industry. Last year, Sessions sent a letter to a few of his congressional colleagues requesting that the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment be repealed, with no luck. He did, however, manage to rescind the Cole memo on Jan. 4, 2018, suggesting that it overstepped its bounds when implemented. Its removal clears the way for state-level prosecutors to use their discretion in bringing charges against persons and businesses operating in legal states.

Though 29 states have legalized cannabis in some capacity, including eight that have green-lighted adult-use weed, it's unclear what the future will hold for these states considering Sessions' recent war on pot.

Could Canada become the new marijuana job mecca?

Even assuming the U.S. legal weed industry continues to grow, its ceiling remains limited as long as Sessions, and arguably Donald Trump, are in office. No matter what the polls suggest, it's pretty clear this administration isn't going to give reform the time of day.

However, it just so happens that our neighbor to the north, Canada, could become a breeding ground (or should I say budding ground) for cannabis job growth.

Canada legalized medical weed back in 2001, and it's currently in the process of reviewing legislation that would legalize recreational marijuana by August 2018. Progressive parliament members easily outnumber conservatives in Canada, and the federal government has already worked out a two-year tax-sharing agreement with the provinces. The path is clear for Canada to become the first developed country in the world to green-light adult-use pot.

For example, ( Canopy Growth Corp. NASDAQOTH:TWMJF), the largest pot stock in the world by market cap, currently has 665,000 square feet of growing capacity across seven facilities. Canopy Growth is also in the process of constructing or developing 3.7 million square feet of growing capacity in British Columbia. Once complete, these more than 4 million square feet of growing capacity, not to mention Canopy Growth's multiple distribution channels, could be direct and indirect sources for job creation.

According to Alison McMahon, the founder and CEO of Cannabis At Work, approximately 150,000 jobs are expected to be added by the cannabis industry in Canada over the next couple of years.

If you're looking to take advantage of the green rush as an investor, take the hint and keep your eyes focused on Canada.

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U.S. Marijuana Job Growth Could More Than Double by 2021

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You may not realize it, but the legal weed industry is among the fastest-growing in the United States. Marijuana Business Daily released a report last year entitled "Marijuana Business Factbook 2017" that called for a whopping 45% legal pot sales growth in the U.S.

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The United States maintains a comprehensive economic embargo on the Republic of Cuba. In February 1962, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed an embargo on trade between the United States and Cuba, in response to certain actions taken by the Cuban Government, and directed the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury to implement the embargo, which remains in place today.

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Adderall abuse on the rise among college students

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Students who are having trouble concentrating on their schoolwork are using the drug prescribed for attention deficit disorders to help them focus, but experts are cautioning that anyone illegally buying or selling Adderall will face the same consequences as someone selling cocaine. NBC's Kate Snow reports.

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If you're dreaming about striking it rich in the burgeoning legal marijuana industry, it'll help to have an advanced science degree

But for an industry predicted to employ as many as 300,000 people by 2020, according to analytics firm New Frontier Data, the majority of jobs in the field will pay relatively low wages and require little skill.

Jobs like budtender and bud trimmer, entry level positions, will make up the vast majority.

Bud trimmers prepare marijuana plants for retail sale. They get paid on average between $8 to $12 an hour, according toJacob Silverstein, a former marketing manager for the Las Vegas dispensary ReLeaf who is currently a cannabis industry consultant.

"It takes all of 10 minutes to train someone to do it properly and it takes an hour to get proficient," he said.

Budtenders, who sell marijuana to customers at dispensaries, typically make about $14 an hour. The job requires an in-depth knowledge of cannabis strains and products and a bartender-like rapport with customers. In Colorado and also Michigan, where medical marijuana is legal, budtenders are required to have licenses.

To be sure, there are a handful of jobs that will pay well. But they require science and engineering knowledge.

The greatest demand, according to James Yagielo, co-founder and owner of the Florida-based headhunter HempStaff, is for master extractors. They process the active components THC and CBD from marijuana and hemp to make oils, concentrates, edibles and other products.

The master extractor at Acme Elixirs, a producer of THC and CBD chews and vape pens, earns $250,000 a year, said founder and CEO Peter Pietrangeli. But he said that even with that level of pay it's hard to recruit and keep these workers "because after a while they'll get the funding to build their own labs."

Becoming a master extractor requires a PhD in biochemistry with a background in engineering, which means there's a small pool.

"This is a rat race for talent," said Silverstein.

He said job seekers with degrees in botany, chemistry or pharmacology are the next generation of master growers and lab directors. Like master extractors, lab directors and master growers can earn big dollars.

"I know some master growers who make more than $200,000. They're valuable," said William Simpson, CEO of Golden Leaf Holdings, an Oregon-based chain of dispensaries, cannabis farms and manufacturers. "That is going to be a very sought after, difficult position."

Related: Dozens of pot farms burn down in California wildfires

Elad Spiegel, director of cultivation and breeding for Golden Leaf, said his annual pay is $120,000. He has a bachelor's in plant science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and started working in the cannabis industry in his native Israel before joining Golden Leaf in 2015.

Yagielo of HempStaff said entry level pay for growers is typically $40,000 a year for horticulturalists, or $60,000 for botanists, but pay can grow to $120,000 within three years.

He said that pharmacologists might start at $40,000 managing a dispensary but they could eventually make $100,000 by managing several for a dispensary chain.

Related: Retail marijuana is spreading to California, Massachusetts, Maine

But the people who make the most money in the industry aren't the ones who are getting hired; they're the ones creating the jobs.

Being an entrepreneur requires a lot more risk than getting a job, especially in an industry that's considered illegal by the federal government. But the pay-off, if it all works out, could be lucrative.

"The best paying job?" said Simpson. "Go get a business degree and start your own company."

CNNMoney (New York) First published November 4, 2017: 2:21 PM ET

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It pays to be a scientist in the marijuana industry

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But for an industry predicted to employ as many as 300,000 people by 2020, according to analytics firm New Frontier Data, the majority of jobs in the field will pay relatively low wages and require little skill. Jobs like budtender and bud trimmer, entry level positions, will make up the vast majority.

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IRR The Ethics of Human Genetic Modification

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On March 3 the cover story of the New York Daily News trumpeted a simple imperative to "Design Your Baby." The screaming headline related to a service that would try to allow parents to choose their baby's hair, eye and skin color. A day later the Fertility Institutes reconsidered. The organization made an "internal, self regulatory decision" to scrap the project because of "public perception" and the "apparent negative societal impacts involved," it noted in a statement.

The change of heart will do nothing to stymie the dawning era of what the article called "Build-A-Bear" babies. The use (and abuse) of advanced fertility technology that evokes fears of Gattaca, Brave New World and, of course, the Nazis' quest for a blonde, blue-eyed race of Aryans continues apace. A recent survey found that about 10 percent of a group who went for genetic counseling in New York City expressed interest in screening for tall stature and that some 13 percent said they would be willing to test for superior intelligence. The Fertility Institutes is still building the foundation for a nascent dial-a-trait catalogue: it routinely accepts clients who wish to select the sex of their child.

The decision to scrap the designer baby service came just a few weeks after Nadya Suleman, a single, unemployed California mother living on food stamps, gained notoriety after giving birth to octuplets through in vitro fertilization. The Suleman brouhaha showed that even routine uses of reproductive technologies can be fraught with issues that bear on ethics and patient safety.

The preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) technique used by the Fertility Institutes to test embryos before implantation in the womb has enabled thousands of parents to avoid passing on serious genetic diseases to their offspring. Yet fertility specialists are doing more than tiptoeing into a new era in which medical necessity is not the only impetus for seeking help. In the U.S., no binding rules deter a private clinic from offering a menu of traits or from implanting a woman with a collection of embryos. Physicians who may receive more than $10,000 for a procedure serve as the sole arbiters of a series of thorny ethical, safety and social welfare questions. The 33-year-old Suleman already had six children, and her physician implanted her with six embryos, two of which split into twins. American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) voluntary guidelines suggest that, under normal circumstances, no more than two embryos be transferred to a woman younger than 35 because of the risk of complications.

Of course, any office consultation with a fertility doctor will likely neglect the nuances of more encompassing ethical dilemmas. Should parents be allowed to pick embryos for specific tissue types so that their new baby can serve as a donor for an ailing sibling? For that matter, should a deaf parent who embraces his or her condition be permitted to select an embryo apt to produce a child unable to hear? Finally, will selection of traits perceived to be desirable end up diminishing variability within the gene pool, the raw material of natural selection?

In the wake of the octuplets' birth, some legislators made hasty bids to enact regulation at the state level-and one bill was drafted with the help of antiabortion advocates. The intricacies of regulating fertility technology requires more careful consideration that can only come with a measure of federal guidance. As part of the push toward health care reform, the Obama administration should carefully inspect the British model.

Since 1991 the U.K.'s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has made rules for in vitro fertilization and any type of embryo manipulation. The HFEA licenses clinics and regulates research: it limits the number of embryos implanted and prohibits sex selection for nonmedical reasons, but it is not always overly restrictive. It did not object to using PGD to pick an embryo that led to the birth of a girl in January who lacked the genes that would have predisposed her to breast cancer later in life.

HFEA may not serve as a precise template for a U.S. regulatory body. But a close look at nearly two decades of licensing a set of reproductive technologies by the country that brought us the first test-tube baby may build a better framework than reliance on the good faith of physicians who confront an inherent conflict of interest.
This story was originally published with the title "Designing Rules for Designer Babies"

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On March 3 the cover story of the New York Daily News trumpeted a simple imperative to "Design Your Baby." The screaming headline related to a service that would try to allow parents to choose their baby's hair, eye and skin color. A day later the Fertility Institutes reconsidered.

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In two days, the presidential election will be held and we will presumably learn who the President for the next four years will be. In two days, I hope this essay will not seem very important but I am concerned it will be.

For the second time in twelve years and the fifth time in the nation's history the winner of the popular vote may lose the electoral vote and therefore the presidency. This time it could be the Republican who finds himself shortchanged by an antiquated electoral mechanism. A number of pundits think Mitt Romney could win the popular vote and Barack Obama could win a majority of electoral votes and secure reelection. I hope whoever wins does so with the most votes so that we can avoid the controversy of the 2000 election. Regardless, it's time to abolish this obsolete system.

Pop Quiz: Can you name the three candidates who received votes in the 2004 Electoral College? The correct answers are George W. Bush (286), John Kerry (251) and John Ewards (1). No, you did not read a typo. Not only did a Minnesota elector vote for Democratic Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards for both President and Vice President, but he or she could not spell his ordinary last name correctly. Four years earlier, a District of Columbia elector, Barbara Lett-Simmons, abstained from voting for Al Gore despite the fact he won the District's three electoral votes. She was protesting the lack of voting representation for the national capital in Congress. Considering George W. Bush won 271 electoral votes (270 is needed to win the presidency), it seems reckless to protest with a vote that could have changed the outcome of the election. Imagine if several Bush electors decided to vote for Gore because he won the popular vote. Lett-Simmons' vote could theoretically have mattered; though I doubt the Bush legal team would let that occur without a challenge.

Despite the potential for rogue electors to alter the will of their state or district's voters, only twenty-four states still have laws to punish faithless electors. Yet only once did the Electoral College fail to elect a candidate that it should have. Richard M. Johnson's election as Vice President in 1836 was decided in the Senate after twenty-three Virginia electors did not vote for him for personal reasons; Johnson had fathered illegitimate children with one of his former slaves and acknowledged his relationship with her. These historical footnotes touch on the inherent, though unlikely, danger of 538 electors overriding the will of millions of voters. The real problem is the Electoral College can act properly and still not elect the candidate chosen by the national electorate.

We forget in 2012 that for much of this country's history most people saw themselves as (insert your state here) first and Americans second. The United States of America was founded as a federation of thirteen rebellious British colonies with very distinct cultures and identities. This sectionalism became an increasingly difficult problem as the contentious slavery issue splintered the nation in the mid-nineteenth century. Two quotations by Confederate General Robert E. Lee eloquently describe the importance of one's allegiance to state then.

"I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty." Spring 1861

"I devote myself to the service of my native State in whose behalf alone will I ever again draw my sword." April 23, 1861

You may hold a sense of pride in your state but I doubt you would consider someone a traitor for relocating from one state to another one. Look at the backgrounds of the two major presidential candidates. Barack Obama is an Illinois resident but has lived in Hawaii, Washington (state), California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington (the national capital) as well as Indonesia. Mitt Romney has lived in Michigan, California, Utah and Massachusetts as well as France. I may be missing a few stops but you get the point. George Washington lived in Virginia virtually his entire life with the exception of military campaigns and service in New York and Philadelphia as the first president. I believe his sole trip abroad was accompanying his half-brother Lawrence to Barbados in 1751. We are a much more mobile people now. Education and jobs take many of us far away from our native state. Segmenting our presidential vote by the state name on our driver license seems arbitrary and antithetical to the spirit of choosing national leader.

Voting rights are extremely important in a representative democracy. Six amendments in the Constitution address voting issues. Some of the more important American political movements of the past two centuries used suffrage as a centerpiece issue. Whether racial (1860s and 1960s), gender (early twentieth century until 1920), or youth (lowering the voting age to eighteen to enfranchise many soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War), voting rights campaigns have been proxy fights for better achieving equality under the law. I feel the Electoral College discriminates geographically. Major candidates should have to pander appeal to everyone and not just voters in the so-called "swing" states. Living in Ohio or Florida shouldn't increase the value of your vote but right now it does. Why should a Cincinnati resident's vote count more than someone who lives across the river in Kentucky? Does it seem fair that the candidates are basically ignoring New York, California and Texas or nearly 30% of the population?

I think it would be more equitable to force more nationally-focused campaigns. Imagine Barack Obama speaking to crowds in Dallas or Mitt Romney campaigning in New York City. At the very least, it might engage more people in the national debate. If we ever hope to breach the 60% voter turnout threshold last seen in the 1960s (the last two elections have produced around 57%), this is one way to do so. The lawsuits that emerged in the fallout of the 2000 election will be less likely to reappear. When one state decides an election, it behooves all sides to fight for those electoral votes. If the popular vote decided the winner, I doubt we'd see such fallout again.

Even in the razor-thin 1968 and 2000 elections, the popular vote winners won by over 500,000 votes. It would be awfully hard to litigate a candidate to victory as the absolute numbers grow larger. It is much easier when a state vote is separated by 537 votes as it was in Florida in 2000. Hopefully, this would discourage voter fraud efforts. It is a lot harder to coordinate election improprieties on a national scale than on the state and local levels. Lastly, the Electoral College would be one more expense we can slash from the federal income statement (albeit a small item).

As I mentioned earlier, I hope the Electoral College does not become an issue this year. Nevertheless, in a stridently polarized political landscape, it's time to make the popular vote the ultimate arbiter of presidential elections. If we want every vote to matter, I believe it's the only sensible path to take.

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It's Time To Abolish The Electoral College

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In two days, the presidential election will be held and we will presumably learn who the President for the next four years will be. In two days, I hope this essay will not seem very important but I am concerned it will be.

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Jobs. That is what the marijuana industry hopes will keep the Trump administration from cracking down on cannabis companies.

A new report from New Frontier Data projects that by 2020 the legal cannabis market will create more than a quarter of a million jobs. This is more than the expected jobs from manufacturing, utilities or even government jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS says that by 2024 manufacturing jobs are expected to decline by 814,000, utilities will lose 47,000 jobs and government jobs will decline by 383,000. This dovetails with data that suggests the fastest-growing industries are all healthcare related.

The legal cannabis market was worth an estimated $7.2 billion in 2016 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 17%. Medical marijuana sales are projected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2016 to $13.3 billion in 2020. Adult recreational sales are estimated to jump from $2.6 billion in 2016 to $11.2 billion by 2020.

New Frontier bases these projections on the markets that have already passed such legal initiatives and don't include additional states that could come on board by 2020. Currently there are 25 states with some form of legalized medical marijuana and seven states that have legalized recreational marijuana laws that are in various stages of being implemented.

"These numbers confirm that cannabis is a major economic driver and job-creation engine for the U.S. economy," said Giadha Aguirre De Carcer, Founder and CEO of New Frontier Data. "While we see a potential drop in total number of U.S. jobs created in 2017, as reported by Kiplinger, as well as an overall expected drop in GDP growth, the cannabis industry continues to be a positive contributing factor to growth at a time of potential decline. We expect the cannabis industry's growth to be slowed down to some degree in the next three to five years, however with projected total market sales to exceed $24 billion by 2025, and the possibility of almost 300,000 jobs by 2020, it remains a positive economic force in the U.S."

New Frontier based its projections on analysis from the Marijuana Policy Group, which was hired by Colorado for an economic analysis. According to annual surveys of cannabis professionals by the Marijuana Business Daily, the industry already employs 100,000 to 150,000 workers and nearly 90,000 are in plant-touching companies.

Oaksterdam University in California is one of the few formal institutions that trains potential marijuana workers. "The cannabis job market is growing, but many who are interested in the industry have been fearful of prosecution by the DEA. But that is changing," said Dale Sky Jones, Executive Chancellor of Oaksterdam. "A U.S. appeals court recently decided unanimously that the federal government may not prosecute people who grow and distribute medical marijuana if they comply with state laws. While this ruling currently affects states within the 9th Circuit, the decision will influence other circuits across the country. This is huge, as it is very likely that more people will now feel safer about entering the cannabis industry."

Many employees in the industry seem thankful for their jobs and are genuinely happy with their employment. The alternative culture appeals to many who have no interest in cubicle jobs or working for a big corporate giant. It is increasingly pulling professionals from more traditional industries who are looking for new challenges and different work environments.

"The governments and the programs that they've instilled into these [legalized] states have created great job opportunities and excellent business opportunities for entrepreneurs," said Mark Lustig, Chief Executive Officer of CannaRoyalty. "They've created the right competition."

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Marijuana Industry Projected To Create More Jobs Than Manufacturing By 2020

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Jobs. That is what the marijuana industry hopes will keep the Trump administration from cracking down on cannabis companies. A new report from New Frontier Data projects that by 2020 the legal cannabis market will create more than a quarter of a million jobs.

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Clinton, in the interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, displayed her animus for fired FBI Director James Comey, reflected on her love for the people -- namely former President Bill Clinton -- who helped her get through the crushing loss and blasted the arcane election body that she believes helped Donald Trump win the presidency.

"I think it needs to be eliminated," Clinton said of the Electoral College. "I'd like to see us move beyond it, yes."

Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, a fact she routinely brings up in her new memoir. But Trump won the Electoral College, a body of 538 members who select the president based on the popular vote in each state, meaning the person who gets the most votes nationally doesn't necessarily win the election.

The Electoral College is just one external factor Clinton blames for her stunning loss to Trump in her newly released memoir, "What Happened." Clinton also faults Comey for his "rash" involvement in the election, Russian President Vladimir Putin for directing operatives to meddle in the election and apathetic voters who only got engaged once the election was over and Trump had won.

But Clinton also blames herself in the book, writing that she did not fully understand the American electorate and failed to understand with the anger that animated Trump.

Clinton said Wednesday that October 28, the day that Comey sent a letter to Congress saying he was reopening part of his investigation into Clinton's emails, was the day she lost the election.

"That was the determinative day because it stopped my momentum," she said. "I don't blame voters for wondering what the heck was going on."

Comey, Clinton added, "forever changed history" by reopening the email investigation just to close it days before Election Day.

"I believe ... it became a perfect storm," Clinton said of Comey and Russia's involvement in the election, adding that she hopes "nobody ever faces what I faced with respect to that."

After the 2000 election, when former Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college and the presidency, Clinton also called for an end to the Electoral College.

"I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it's time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president," she told reporters at the time.

Rehashing the election

Another person drawing Clinton's ire in what has amounted to her political burn book: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who challenged Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Clinton writes that Sanders' attacks on her caused "lasting damage" and laid the groundwork for Trump's campaign against her. In her interview with CNN, Clinton says the "political sin" Sanders committed was not unifying the party fast enough by dropping out of the race once his campaign was clearly over.

"The political sin he committed was the failure to move quickly to unify the party and his supporters," she said. "It was clear I was going to be the nominee, like, in March or April. It was beyond any doubt in June."

Clinton said she immediately backed Barack Obama in 2008 when her campaign was over, but that she "didn't get that same respect and reciprocity from Sen. Sanders or from his supporters."

"He could be helpful, if he so chose," Clinton said.

Despite the sting of her loss -- and the wrongs Clinton appears eager to right -- the former secretary of state was also hopeful in her interview, particularly when she spoke about the support she has received from her daughter, Chelsea, her husband and other people close to her.

Clinton said she "wanted to make clear" in her book that politics is not everything in life and "pull the curtain back and say, 'I lost a presidential campaign that I thought I was going to win. It was devastating. But I have so many blessings in my life, starting with my husband and the life we've built together.' "

Clinton emotionally reflected on the darker moments of her marriage to former president, conceding that she had to answer "hard questions" about their relationship in the 1990s.

Clinton, describing her marriage in terms she rarely uses, said she "really had to struggle" with their marriage when the Clinton White House was consumed by the former President's affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.

"Anybody alive in America at that time knows how difficult that period was. And, you know, I really had to struggle. And I had a lot of angst," she said. "I had to call back on my faith and my family, my friends."

The candor about her marriage mimics the tone of Clinton's book, where she writes that in the face of the Lewinsky controversy, she asked herself "do I still love him" and "can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself"?

Clinton told CNN that in the darkest moment of her marriage she resolved not to make "a decision that other people wanted me to make."

"I was going make my decision. And it was based on those two questions and the life we had built together," Clinton said. "And I'm very glad that that's the way I chose to continue my life."

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hillary clinton: time to abolish the electoral college - cnnpolitics

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Clinton, in the interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, displayed her animus for fired FBI Director James Comey, reflected on her love for the people -- namely former President Bill Clinton -- who helped her get through the crushing loss and blasted the arcane election body that she believes helped Donald Trump win the presidency.

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Should the Electoral College be abolished

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The Electoral College is under fresh assault on the heels of Donald Trump's victory last November-the second time in five presidential races the popularly elected candidate lost the election-but it's not due to any groundswell in Congress for a constitutional amendment to adopt a national popular vote. Instead, the most viable campaign to change how Americans choose their leader is being waged at booze-soaked junkets in luxury hotels around the country and even abroad, as an obscure entity called the Institute for Research on Presidential Elections peddles a controversial idea: that state legislatures can put the popular-vote winner in the White House.

It was mid-February, inside a four-star resort in a third-world country, when I heard the pitch to transform American democracy. The institute flew 11 political journalists to Panama for an "educational seminar" on election reform. (My peers included reporters representing outlets ranging from Breitbart to U.S. News & World Report.) The trip presented a bargain: three days of sunshine, sightseeing, fine dining and free cocktails on the institute's dime, in exchange for being educated by seminar coordinators in the pool, at the bar, overlooking the Panama Canal-and most aggressively, during the five-hour workshop in a windowless conference room-about the history and weaknesses of the Electoral College, and the potential of a radical alternative.

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The radical alternative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact-call it the "Compact," for short. The most concise explanation: Rather than abolishing the Electoral College via constitutional amendment, state legislatures would change their laws to award their electoral votes to whoever wins the most votes nationwide, regardless of state-by-state results.

Technically, yes, this could happen. Article II of the Constitution gives states authority to allocate electors however they choose, and in fact two already do so differently from the rest: Maine and Nebraska award electoral votes by congressional district, while the other 48 adhere to a winner-take-all format. The Compact is written with a trigger clause: As soon as enough states have joined the Compact to account for 270 electoral votes, each of their state laws is activated. The next election, those states automatically throw their votes to the popular winner, and-regardless of what non-Compact states do-the leader of the free world will suddenly be determined by the full balance of voters in the union.

If this sounds farfetched-politically cumbersome, mechanically problematic, legally questionable-well, it is. Since its conception in 2006, the Compact has been criticized as a constitutional end run that shouldn't be taken seriously. And yet it's far closer to taking effect than most of us realize. Ten states, plus the District of Columbia, have already joined, representing 165 combined electoral votes. By its own rules, the Compact needs to secure only another 105 electoral votes to trigger the change. That said, those next 105 will prove infinitely harder to collect than the first 165. All 10 states in the Compact, plus D.C., are Democratic strongholds; neither a single battleground state, nor a single red state, has entered. This stands to reason: Swing states don't want to forfeit their privileged status, and Republicans lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections. If it weren't for the Electoral College, Al Gore would have been president in 2001-and Hillary Clinton would be commander in chief today. Republicans, then, are understandably wary of switching to what many believe would be an unfavorable system. (On the other hand, some in the party-including President Trump-believe the GOP would campaign much differently, and stand a better chance of winning the White House, if it focused on every voter in every state. Conservatives, in particular, seem intrigued by testing the "center-right nation" theory.)

If this sounds farfetched-politically cumbersome, mechanically problematic, legally questionable-well, it is.

The complexities of the Compact are equal parts politics and policy, however, and go beyond questions of party loyalty. For instance, would the strategy need ultimate approval from Washington? (Any interstate compact that threatens federal supremacy must get consent from Congress.) The uncertainty snowballs from there: whether it would unfairly diminish the influence of small states and rural areas; whether it would expose elections to widespread fraud because of one-party rule in newly competitive states, as some fear; whether the revised system would actually help the favoritism that exists when a handful of states are responsible for picking presidents, or just spread it around differently.

Hence the seminars. The only way to ensure a nuanced, in-depth discussion of a national popular vote is to lock people in a conference room for hours-and the only way to do that is to lure them to a swanky location promising an otherwise leisurely weekend of free food, drink and entertainment. The seminars initially targeted state lawmakers-whose votes back home will shape the Compact's fate-but beginning last fall they have also been organized for journalists and opinion leaders in an attempt to gain broader recognition. (I attended to report on the Institute's tactics as well as its ideas; I was not asked, nor did I offer, to write about the Compact in exchange for attending the seminar.)

Tens of millions of dollars have poured into the popular vote movement, and until recently, those investments appeared to be paying off.The Compact welcomed its most recent addition, New York, back in the spring of 2014, and momentum was on its side in the run-up to last year's election. Lobbyists working on behalf of the Compact spent 2016 blitzing GOP lawmakers in states where they control both legislative chambers, and with Clinton comfortably ahead of Trump down the stretch of the campaign, Republican leaders in several of those states were preparing to introduce the Compact this year on the heels of an expected November defeat. 2017 was supposed to be a coming-out party.

And then Trump won the White House, while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

Advocates of the Compact suddenly find themselves on the defensive, no longer bullish about picking off their first red state this year. They will be content, at this point, to persuade Republicans not to abandon the idea altogether-to keep this experiment in reshaping American democracy alive where others before it have perished.

***

Distrustful of direct elections, the founders wanted a buffer of sophisticated, discerning people between the unwashed masses and the selection of a president. That explains the Electoral College's genesis, but not why it still exists today. The reality is that that modern-day electors exercise little autonomy-very rarely rejecting the preference of their states' voters-and the system has a long history of dissatisfaction. There have been more than 700 proposals to reform or abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment, according to the National Archives, but none gathered the requisite two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress to be sent to the states for ratification.

The roots of the Compact can be traced to a 2001 academic paper by Robert Bennett, a professor at Northwestern University Law School, who pointed out that states could, legally, pledge their electors to the winner of a national popular vote. Others built on this suggestion, most notably law professor brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, who suggested achieving this "direct national election" via interstate compact. But the proposal grew real legs in 2006, when John Koza-a California Democrat who made his fortune by inventing the scratch-off lottery ticket-got behind it, co-writing a book, Every Vote Equal, and founding the Institute for Research on Presidential Elections. This is the " education" arm, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group; Koza also started a sister organization, National Popular Vote, which is registered as a 501(c)(4) to lobby legislators.

Koza has bankrolled most of the pro-Compact efforts since 2006, including the Panama excursion. In an interview, Koza says he has spent more than $14 million on the project so far and has budgeted at least $2 million per year moving forward-and is hunting for new benefactors. It can be tricky to attract GOP lawmakers' support when they learn the Compact push is funded by a liberal megadonor, so Koza was elated years ago to find a Republican partner, Tom Golisano, founder of the payroll and benefits services company Paychex, who poured $10 million of his own money into complementary efforts. But Golisano has pulled back from the campaign in recent years and is no longer involved. He did not respond to an interview request.

Koza isn't coy about being a partisan. But he claims the Compact is about fairness rather than political gamesmanship. It seemed unfair that George W. Bush won the White House despite losing the popular vote-and extremely unfair that the entire race hinged on 537 votes in Florida. Koza had experience with interstate compacts-Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had formed one to administer a lotto game-and decided two years after Bush's reelection, which boiled down to battleground Ohio, to wage war on the Electoral College. "The current system is insane and unjustifiable," Koza tells me. "It leaves at least 40 of the states out of the process."

The current system is insane and unjustifiable," John Koza tells me. "It leaves at least 40 of the states out of the process."

His pitch is a one-two punch of political populism and electoral egalitarianism: first, that the process corrupts public policy because of the codependent relationships between presidential candidates and battleground states; second, that voters in reliably red or blue states basically have no voice in the election at all. Today, he notes, millions of Americans living in three of the country's four biggest states-California, Texas and New York, none of which has been contested for a quarter-century-don't bother to vote because their winner-take-all rules discourage participation from partisans who know they are badly outnumbered statewide.

He says he was shocked when, shortly after he announced his project in 2006, a number of state legislatures took up the legislative language he and his team of lawyers, lobbyists and political veterans were advocating.The first triumph came in Colorado, where the state Senate passed the bill only for it to die in the House. Then, in California, both chambers approved it-but Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed. Emboldened, Koza's group launched a massive lobbying initiative in 2007 and saw its language introduced in 42 state legislatures. Maryland became the first state to enter the Compact, in 2007, followed in 2008 by New Jersey, Illinois and Hawaii. Washington joined in 2009, then Massachusetts and D.C. in 2010. Vermont and California joined in 2011, followed by Rhode Island in 2013 and New York in 2014.

In the decade since Maryland joined, supporters and opponents of the Compact have refined their arguments to debate its implications. One devastating critique is that it would just create a new imbalance, and a new set of swing states, as presidential campaigns focus all their attention on the biggest cities and the biggest states. "If you look back at the constitutional convention, it's pretty clear the framers thought that without an Electoral College, people running for president would go to the big urban population centers and ignore the more rural parts of the country," says Hans von Spakovsky, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and longtime critic of the Compact. "The Framers designed the system we have so that candidates wouldn't have to win a national election, but a series of regional elections around the country."

Koza and his allies come equipped with rebuttals to every critique imaginable-the latest edition of Every Vote Equal addresses 131 "myths"-but much of this back and forth exists in the abstract. After all, the United States has known nothing but the Electoral College; it is impossible to predict with any certainty the behaviors of candidates, campaigns, parties, interest groups and individual voters if confronted with a wholesale change to how we pick presidents.

Somewhat more forecastable are the political ramifications of a direct national election-at least one might think so, based on typical partisan reactions. "Democrats are reflexively for it, and Republicans are reflexively against it," Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan GOP and our seminar coordinator in Panama, told us.

There are partisan dissidents, however. In deep-blue Oregon, where Democrats control both houses of the legislature, the Compact recently failed for a third consecutive time, having previously been thwarted in 2013 and 2015. It passed the House in May, but the Senate president-who has long voiced concerns about the Compact marginalizing small states-inserted a clause that effectively killed the bill in July. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, key lawmakers in ultraconservative Utah have been whipping support for the Compact, emphasizing one parochial point: It would level the playing field with neighboring Colorado, a key swing state that gets outsize attention from Washington. (Compact supporters note how President Barack Obama signed the stimulus into law in Denver, despite Colorado's unemployment rate in 2009 being lower than those in other states he won easily in 2008, such as Rhode Island and California.)

It can be no easy task convincing Republicans when their nominee lost by 2,868,691 votes last November-and still won the White House.

Intraparty dissent is often explicitly political: In New York, passage was delayed in part due to objections from liberal lawmakers who felt the party holds a clear edge in the Electoral College. (They also feared, surely, that GOP voters accustomed to skipping elections in New York would suddenly mobilize, jeopardizing down-ballot Democrats.) Many Republican endorsers of the Compact, it turns out, share the same concern about the Electoral College-that Democrats start with a structural advantage-and are eager to play under a different set of rules.

"I believe the Blue Wall is real," Anuzis tells me. What he's referring to: Eighteen states totaling 242 electoral votes went Democratic in every election from 1988 to 2012. Assuming they hold those states, Democrats need just 28 electoral votes to win the presidency; Florida alone has 29. Of course, Trump won the presidency by taking back three of those supposed Democratic locks-Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin-albeit by a combined 78,000 votes or so. To many Republicans, 2016 proved the Blue Wall is a myth; to others, Trump's victory was an anomaly that will prove difficult to replicate.

For his part, Koza loathes talk of the Blue Wall and says those three states Trump won should never have been considered safe for Clinton. "There might be a Blue Wall. But it's 196 electoral votes, not 242," he says, subtracting the sum of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Koza says he wishes the Compact debate revolved exclusively around policy instead of political jockeying. But he knows better. If his campaign is ever to hit the 270 mark, it will happen on the strength of conservative legislators in red states. And it can be no easy task convincing them, never mind their constituents, that Republicans are better off under the Compact when their nominee lost by 2,868,691 votes last November-and still won the White House.

***

Jim DeMint did a double take. The former Tea Party senator from South Carolina, recently ousted as president of the Heritage Foundation, was visiting with old colleagues at the think tank's exhibition booth on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency in Denver. The neighboring booth was occupied by National Popular Vote. Both organizations were passing out literature to state lawmakers attending the American Legislative Exchange Council conference in late July. When DeMint glanced over, he was greeted by Anuzis and Ray Haynes, a former California state senator who spoke to our Panama seminar. The confusion on DeMint's face said it all. Both Anuzis and Haynes worked for Ted Cruz's presidential campaign- but they were helming the National Popular Vote booth. DeMint offered a dazed half-smile and walked away.

"There was definitely a level of cognitive dissonance right there," Haynes tells me. He laughs, breaking into a robot voice: "I. Do. Not. Compute."

If Anuzis and Haynes are evangelists for the Compact, coming to ALEC-an association of thousands of conservative state legislators-is like proselytizing a colony of atheists. In the exhibition hall, they encounter Republicans who are mystified, irritated, curious, frazzled, fascinated or some combination thereof. Anuzis and Haynes are in Denver to educate, but they find plenty of attendees already know the issue well. At one point, Anuzis engages a policy staffer with the Colorado Senate for nearly 30 minutes; the staffer, who asked not to be named, wrote the GOP leadership's talking points earlier this year when the Compact came before the legislature. It died in committee on a party-line vote.

Their colloquy was like a short symposium on the complexities of changing an institution as foundational as the Electoral College-even if that institution seems obsolete.

"If you're one of the four out of every five Americans who doesn't live in a battleground state, your vote doesn't count," Anuzis tells him.

"What's wrong with that?" the staffer responds. "What's wrong with the fact that Nebraska is predictably Republican? Or that Oregon is predictably Democratic?"

"What's wrong with it is it perverts public policy. I think we have ethanol because of Iowa. I think we have Medicare Part D because of Florida. I think we have steel tariffs because of Pennsylvania."

"But all you're going to do is change where the battleground states are. You're not going to change the fact that there are battleground states, and that not every state is going to be one."

"It's not that every state is going to be a battleground state. It's that we're going to have campaigns targeting every voter they can get. We would change the way we campaign."

"Yeah, they would go to Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco and L.A.-all Democrat-majority cities. All you're going to do is turn out more Democrats."

Around they go. Anuzis has heard these criticisms before, and he says eight out of 10 people walk away from a thorough debate convinced by his counterarguments. That estimate seems a tad inflated. In Panama, our crew of skeptical, mildly hungover journalists savaged the proposal from all angles-focusing mainly on policy, though a few right-leaning reporters suggested it would be suicide for the GOP-and the minority of us who walked away believing it was logistically achievable still weren't convinced it would improve upon our current, undeniably flawed system.

All you're going to do is change where the battleground states are. You're not going to change the fact that there are battleground states."

Two days after that encounter at ALEC, the staffer's boss, Colorado Senate President Pro Tempore Jerry Sonnenberg, called me unsolicited. He told me not a single Republican senator in his state supported it. "If they want to change the Constitution, I don't believe in using a back door," Sonnenberg said. He conceded, though, that his opposition is rooted in Colorado's battleground status. "If we went to a popular vote, we would never see a presidential candidate in places like Colorado. We have a limited number of voters, and it would decrease our influence."

If no swing state legislators can be convinced, Koza's campaign hinges on a narrower lobbying target-safe red states, whose legislative bodies are dominated by conservative Republicans. It once seemed realistic, even imminent: GOP-controlled chambers in Arizona and Georgia, two safe (for now) Republican states, flirted with entering the Compact last year. The bill passed the Arizona House, 40-16-among Republicans, it was 20 yeas and 14 nays-before dying in the Senate. In Georgia, it passed a House committee and had overwhelming support in the Senate-with 50 of its 56 members co-sponsoring the legislation, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -until the chamber's top Republican, who had previously backed the bill, abruptly quashed it following Trump's victory, saying he had received "new data." Indeed, November 8, 2016, may have been the turning point. This year, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri and Montana considered the legislation and then crushed it. "If the 2016 election had been normal, we believe we would have gotten enactments in red states in 2017," Koza says. "We've been in a holding pattern, waiting to see if things cool down. ... We're currently in the process of figuring out what to do in 2018."

The plan, according to Anuzis, is to kick off the year by targeting not just any Republican states but Utah and Oklahoma-two of the most conservative in the union-in pursuit of a symbolic breakthrough. They boast only a combined 13 electoral votes, but Koza and his team believe passage there could open the floodgates."A lot of Republicans don't want their state to jump first," Anuzis says. "But if we get those two, we'll get four or five more."

Their ace in the hole is Curt Bramble, president pro tempore of the Utah Senate and a former Compact skeptic. Bramble warmed to the idea several years ago after dicing statistics on federal expenditures in battleground states and deciding that the playing field was uneven. With help from Koza's machine, Bramble converted some colleagues, too, and was preparing for a vote this year-until Trump won the White House. Now he expects the legislation to come up early in the 2018 session. The House speaker is supportive, Bramble says, but his more powerful colleague, the Senate president, has concerns. "It won't be an easy bill to pass," he says. "There are a lot of misperceptions-the same misperceptions that I used to have."

"Misperceptions" or not, there is no denying the complex and entirely legitimate questions that surround the Compact. Wouldn't a contested election become a logistical nightmare, since every state has separate recount rules? Couldn't "faithless electors" go rogue against the new system, adamant that whichever presidential candidate won their state should receive its electoral votes? What's to stop candidates, if they are focusing on every single state rather than just a handful, to adopt 50 pet issues instead of a few, exacerbating the problem of federal favoritism instead of eliminating it?

The biggest question of all: Does the Compact require congressional approval? Supporters say no, because states are given constitutional authority to appoint electors, and therefore the Compact does not threaten federal supremacy. Opponents say yes, because the changes would affect the election of a federal official. Both sides agree on one thing: If the Compact hits 270 electoral votes, states not involved would surely file a joint lawsuit against the member states. This would guarantee a trip to the Supreme Court, which would determine whether Congress has jurisdiction on the matter.

None of this drama will unfold anytime soon. Koza's project, he concedes, is "a long, hard haul" dotted with near-victories and lopsided defeats. He is 74 and hopes to see a national popular vote in his lifetime, but he knows it might take much longer. All his troops can do is take it one seminar at a time-buying steaks and margaritas and beachfront hotel suites for legislators and journalists-and presenting them, at the outset, with the most compelling argument of all.

"We have 514,000 elected officials in this country," Anuzis said in Panama. "And all of them are elected by who gets the most votes. Except for one."

Tim Alberta is national political reporter at Politico Magazine.

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The Electoral College is under fresh assault on the heels of Donald Trump's victory last November-the second time in five presidential races the popularly elected candidate lost the election-but it's not due to any groundswell in Congress for a constitutional amendment to adopt a national popular vote.

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In a hypercompetitive world, drugs like Adderall offer students, athletes, coders and others a way to do more -- faster and better. But at what cost?

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College students are using ADD medication to perform better in school:

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Around this time of year, you're more likely to find college students in the library cramming for final exams than out partying. In an environment where the workload is endless and there's always more to be done, a quick fix to help buckle down and power through becomes very tempting.

Prescription ADHD medications like Adderall, Ritalin, and Vyvanse are becoming increasingly popular for overworked and overscheduled college students -- who haven't been diagnosed with ADHD.

"Our biggest concern ... is the increase we have observed in this behavior over the past decade," says Sean McCabe, research associate professor at the University of Michigan Substance Abuse Research Center.

Full-time college students were twice as likely to have used Adderall non-medically as their counterparts who were not full-time students, according to a National Survey on Drug Use and Health report released in 2009.

The numbers vary significantly by school, with the greatest proportion of users at private and "elite" universities. Some researchers estimate about 30% of students use stimulants non-medically.

"When we look at upperclassmen, the number really begins to jump," says Alan DeSantis, professor of communications at the University of Kentucky who has conducted research on stimulant use in college. "The more time you stay on campus, the more likely you are to use."

Of course, by and large the most common use is to concentrate while studying, with more than 90% of users doing it for this purpose.

ADHD stimulants "strengthen the brain's brakes, its inhibitory capacities, so it can control its power more effectively," said Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and ADHD expert. "They do this by increasing the amount of certain neurotransmitters, like dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine."

In a 2008 study of 1,800 college students, 81% of students interviewed (DeSantis 2008) thought illicit use of ADHD medication was "not dangerous at all" or "slightly dangerous." While the picture of a methamphetamine user has hollowed cheeks, rotting teeth, and skin sores, an amphetamine-dextroamphetamine (Adderall) user looks just like anybody else.

"It helps me stay focused and be more efficient, which is very helpful with the chaos of college," says one university student who takes Adderall anywhere from once a month to a few times a week, depending on her schedule and workload. Students did not want to be identified because of their illegal use of the prescription drugs.

Yet these drugs are Schedule II substances, sitting pretty on the Drug Enforcement Administration's list right next to cocaine, meth and morphine.

"College students tend to underestimate the potential harms associated with the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants," McCabe says.

Students may not know the stimulant's documented contraindications (situations in which a drug might be harmful) or recommended precautions or how it may interact with other drugs, McCabe says. Hallowell is also concerned that students taking controlled substances without prescriptions and physician supervision, noting that they may not know the dosage.

Short-term adverse consequences include sleep difficulties, restlessness, headaches, irritability and depressed feelings. Other side effects include loss of appetite, nervousness, and changes in sex drive.

The long term risk of psychological and physical dependence is of concern for routine users that may find they do not feel they can function optimally without it. Schedule II substances are classified by the DEA as having a high potential for abuse.

While students' knowledge of the health dangers are limited, even less consideration is given to the illegality of use. Obtaining stimulants from friends with prescriptions, as the vast majority of college students do, seems less dangerous and illegal than buying drugs off the street.

"The fact that it's illegal really doesn't cross my mind," one student says. "It's not something that I get nervous about because it's so widespread and simple."

The biggest barrier to changing attitudes is the effectiveness of stimulants on campuses where the ends justify the means, researchers believe. After those late library nights, many students praise the little pill that got them through their hefty textbooks and into the morning.

After taking Adderall, says one university student, "I just feel very alive and awake and ready for challenges that come my way."

"I'm on page 15 (of my paper) in just a few hours ... and I'm very confident in it."

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just say yes? the rise of 'study drugs' in college - cnn

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Just say yes? The rise of 'study drugs' in college

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Around this time of year, you're more likely to find college students in the library cramming for final exams than out partying. In an environment where the workload is endless and there's always more to be done, a quick fix to help buckle down and power through becomes very tempting.