Massachusetts keeps arresting people for selling flavored e-cigarettes

Last week the Massachusetts Multi-Agency Illegal Tobacco Task Force released its annual report. That probably isn’t exciting reading for most of you, but it’s a really useful document for understanding the impact of prohibitionist tobacco policies. In 2019, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a comprehensive ban on flavored nicotine and tobacco products. Flavor bans are studied by health academics for how they affect consumer behavior, but this annual report is one of the few sources that reveals how these policies affect law enforcement.

Advocates for flavor bans portray them as simple product regulations, dismissing concerns that they will lead to arrests and prosecutions. This year’s report from Massachusetts shows once again that these advocates are wrong. A few excerpts from the section on criminal investigations:

In May of 2023, Mansfield PD and State Police investigators seized untaxed flavored ENDS products (to include THC ENDS products) following an investigation and search of a residence. This case is being prosecuted by the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office. [Note: “ENDS” refers to electronic nicotine delivery systems, a.k.a. e-cigarettes.]

In June of 2023, the State Police arrested a Lynn man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products, marijuana, and US Currency. This case is being prosecuted by the Essex County District Attorney’s Office.

In June of 2023, the State Police arrested a Boston man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products as well as marijuana. He was charged with tax evasion. The case is being prosecuted by the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office. 

In October of 2023, the State Police arrested a Malden man in possession of untaxed flavored ENDS products as well as Class C and Class D controlled substances. He was charged with tax evasion and motor vehicle offenses. This case is being prosecuted by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office. 

In November of 2023, the State Police arrested a Randolph man while in possession of flavored ENDS products. He was charged with Tax Evasion and Motor Vehicle Offenses. This case is being prosecuted out of the Plymouth District Attorney’s Office. 

In February of 2024, the State Police along with CIB, the Woburn and Worcester Police Departments, and Homeland Security Investigations executed 29 search warrants on businesses, residences, vehicles, individuals, and bank accounts. Investigators seized approximately 280,000 flavored ENDS products as well as flavored cigars and unstamped cigarettes. Investigators also seized approximately seventy (70) pounds of marijuana packaged for distribution, hundreds of cases of THC and Psylocibin-laced products (Class C Controlled Substances), multiple jars of pure THC oil and THC crystalline, and one unsecured firearm. Investigators also seized over $1 million as proceeds of the illegal sales of these products. State Police arrested a New Hampshire man on two counts of Possession with Intent to Distribute a Class C Substance and Possession with Intent to Distribute a Class D Substance. This investigation, which is being prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Office, remains open and ongoing. 

Violating the flavor ban is a misdemeanor, but in Massachusetts as in most other states, selling untaxed tobacco products can rise to the level of felony offense. Flavor bans drive sales of e-cigarettes to the illicit market, putting sellers at risk of being charged with tax evasion. In Massachusetts that can lead to penalties of up to five years in prison.

These cases can take years to resolve in the criminal justice system. A Massachusetts case I highlighted for Reason two years ago, for example, has yet to go to trial. A contraband tobacco case there from 2017 didn’t reach sentencing until last week. But arrests and prosecutions are ongoing, so it’s only a matter of time before someone is sentenced to prison in the United States for selling flavored e-cigarettes to consenting adults, and more cases will surely follow.

Other recent research concludes that flavor bans increase sales of conventional cigarettes, shifting consumption from relatively low-risk vaping to extremely high-risk smoking. So in addition to creating illicit markets and leading to arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonment, the policies likely don’t even benefit public health. Flavor bans are a dumb, illiberal idea that progressives need to move on from.

Previous coverage: I wrote about last year’s report for Reason. And of course, see my recent book The New Prohibition for an in-depth case against illiberal tobacco policy.

I like to drink, drink, drink apples and bananas

What do you call a cocktail with a split base of apple brandy and banana rum? If you grew up with the songs of a certain children’s singer, a tune by Raffi is probably one of the first things to come to mind. The title of this post is a bit long for a cocktail name, but for our February menu at the Multnomah Whiskey Library we went with Raffi’s Daiquiri.

This drink came about from trying the new red banana oleo from Ron Colon. This is my favorite spirit in their line, which I started working with recently in Oregon. In brief, it’s a blend of Salvadoran and Jamaican rums flavored with red banana and lightly sweetened. It marries the funk of Jamaican pot still rum with the sweet aromatics of banana. Even if you’re the kind of person who would be skeptical of a flavored rum, you should try this one. Everyone I’ve tasted it with thinks it’s damn delicious.

While working on a different cocktail project I ended up making this pretty simple shaken drink with the red banana oleo. Give it a shot for your winter imbibing:

  • 1 1/4 oz apple brandy
  • 1 oz fresh lemon juice
  • 3/4 oz Ron Colon red banana oleo
  • 3/4 oz orgeat
  • 1 dash cinnamon-infused Angostura bitters
  • lemon wheel, for garnish

Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, and garnish with a lemon wheel.

Notes on ingredients: Any good apple brandy should work here, but we went with Laird’s bonded. If you can’t find the red banana oleo, you can probably approximate a substitute with some blend of Jamaican rum and good banana liqueur. For the bitters, infuse one 4-ounce bottle of Angostura bitters with two cinnamon sticks for about a week. This idea for making super-cinnamon Angostura bitters comes from my friend Banjo Amberg and appeared in my first book, Cocktails on Tap. If you don’t want to mess with that a dash of regular Ango will work fine.

Two recent pieces on new nicotine products

I’ve published a couple recent articles on new wave nicotine products. First up in Reason, I looked at how heated tobacco (such as IQOS) is transforming the market in Japan:

Japan provides an unlikely model for tobacco policy. The country tends to be more tolerant of smoking than its Western peers; it has high rates of smoking among men, and its government participates directly in the cigarette trade through its partial ownership of Japan Tobacco, the country’s largest manufacturer of cigarettes. It therefore comes as a surprise that Japan is experiencing a dramatic and sustained decline in cigarette sales, a trend that experts credit substantially to heated tobacco products.

And in Slate, I covered the controversy over Zyn nicotine pouches, which have sparked the ire of Chuck Schumer and a vocal “Zynsurrection” among the online right:

Superficially, this might seem like just another dumb culture war among the terminally online, for whom anything from Keurig coffee makers to Taylor Swift can become a symbol of political polarization. But the stakes of tobacco policy matter for the rest of us too, particularly for the health of people who smoke and for the 2024 elections. It deserves to be taken seriously. And as much as liberals and progressives may be loath to admit it, right-wing posters defending the freedom of adults’ right to use Zyn have the better of the argument.

Read ’em both!

Recommended reading: the best books I read in 2023

I always write an annual post with my favorite books from the past year. Sometimes I even get it done before the year ends. This is not one of those times, but better late than never. As always, these are books I read in 2023, not necessarily ones that were published during the year.

Non-fiction

The Individualists, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi — This is now the first book I’d recommend to anyone seeking to understand libertarianism. While it’s not primarily about elucidating Matt and John’s own views, they also hint at a positive vision of what libertarianism could become. Read my review here.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, Kerry Howley — You don’t need me to tell you about this one. Just read it!

The Real Work, Adam Gopnik — It’s rare to see magic treated as seriously as other arts, so I was excited to see it featured in this exploration of skills mastery by Adam Gopnik. Well, it turns out that learning how to urinate in public restrooms gets its own chapter too, so read into that what you will. Very enjoyable, review hopefully forthcoming.

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Lucinda Williams — Memoir from one of the greats of American songwriting, reviewed here.

Amplified, Paul Atkinson — Informative design history of how the Telecaster, Les Paul, and Stratocaster have shaped the electric guitar for 70 years, with forays into their predecessors and modern departures from the form. I bought my first electric (a Strat) in 2023 and this clarified a lot for me.

The Northern Silence, Andrew Mellor — I read this while on a suitably stark and wintry trip to Finland. Niche, recommended if a book on Nordic culture and its uniquely devoted support for classical music appeals to you.

Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia Dunlop — No one has influenced my everyday cooking more than Dunlop, whose cookbooks I adore. No recipes here, but a wonderful exploration of Chinese cuisine.

The Heartbeat of the Wild, David Quammen — David’s recent writing has understandably been focused on COVID, so it’s a pleasure to look back on his nature writing, collected here in essays from National Geographic.

Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson — I cringe at the idea of reading most management books, but this one from Stripe Press is an exception.

Fiction

Whenever I travel to a new country, I pick up novels from there to read while I’m visiting. In 2023 that included Finland and Estonia, which introduced me to two of my favorite novels last year: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aptly described as “Finnish weird,” cleverly weaving Nordic myth into a naturalistic, modern Tampere) and The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirahk (Estonian fantasy with seductive talking bears and loads of violence, set in the magical pre-Christian forests as modernity encroaches).

Other assorted contemporary novel recs: Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (a follow-up to A Visit from the Goon Squad), and White Teeth by Zadie Smith (my first by the author, long overdue).

Obligatory self-promotion

I should also mention my own book that came out in 2023. The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control collects some of my recent essays on how we’re stumbling into a new era of nicotine and tobacco prohibition and the problems that creates. Unfortunately, it appears likely to remain relevant in the year to come too.

A New Year’s resolution for 2024: never tweet

It’s almost a new year, so you may be thinking about making a resolution for self-improvement in 2024. Go to the gym. Eat or drink less. Quit smoking. All of these are worthwhile ideas. Unfortunately, they’re also hard. Here’s an easy one: never tweet.

Maybe you already never tweet. Good for you! You are wiser than I was. I kicked a sixteen year habit in October. 21,000 times I opened that little text box, typed something in, and hit post. 1,300 times a year. 3-4 times a day. Then I decided I was done. I thought I would miss it, but I’ve gotta tell you, it’s great. Sometimes I still open the app to see what’s happening and come across something that I would have responded to in the past. But now I’m pre-committed to not responding. People are wrong on the internet and I simply let it go. It’s bliss.

The short case for leaving Twitter — let’s call it X, because Twitter as it used to be is gone — is that X is bad now. You are better than X. You should put your energy elsewhere.

But I’m not here to scold or make a purely negative case against being on X. The positive case is that while X goes down the tubes, other online spaces are coming up that are fun and rewarding.

The decline of X isn’t just about Elon Musk. The platform had plenty of unique pathologies before he acquired Twitter. We called it a “hellsite” for a reason, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. It often brought out the worst in people, especially with the innovation of the quote-tweet, a feature tailor-made for uncharitable dunks. The crowd could be outright abusive. But Musk has made it worse in ways too numerous to recount here, and with which you’re certainly familiar if you follow such things.

Musk insists on being the main character of X in ways that owners of other social media platforms do not. And what a character he is. A small sampling of his recent activity could note this endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, this weird racist meme, telling companies pulling their ads because of antisemitism to fuck themselves, and running a space with himself, Alex Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other lunatics and dumbasses.

It’s possible to use the site without endorsing this garbage, but this garbage is very much the face of the site now. And I’m hardly one to judge, since it took me long enough to leave, but it’s baffling to me that so many of you are still content implicitly saying, “Follow me on X, because this is the platform I choose as the place to share my work, exchange ideas, and present myself to the public.”

Before Musk took over, there were at least two compelling reasons to be on Twitter despite its many problems and even if you kind of hated it. One was that it was a useful place to link to one’s writing. The other was that despite Twitter’s small size relative to other networks, it was culturally central for journalists, academics, politicians, celebrities, and other influential users.

Neither of those conditions holds as much as they used to. Musk has been capricious with regard to links, temporarily breaking them when they point to Substack or removing headlines, for example. Both decisions were reversed, because they were obviously petty or incredibly dumb. But even now, posts with links in them are apparently downgraded by the algorithm in hopes of keeping users on X rather than clicking out. The site still has some utility for sharing links, but it’s far less than it did as Twitter; in some ways, the platform has been actively hostile to sharing your writing.

Its uselessness is compounded by the fact that so many people have left the platform or substantially reduced their use of it. I never had a huge following on Twitter (about 6,500 followers when I quit posting), but I was connected to influential writers and journalists who did. If I wrote something interesting it might get shared by them, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands more viewers. But that’s much less likely to happen now because 1) my followers are less likely to see my writing in the first place, thanks to the downgrading of posts with links, and 2) a lot of the smart and influential people I was connected to have quit or massively reduced their activity on X.

As a freelance writer myself, I sympathize with anyone struggling to build a following for their work. It’s hard! And it’s even harder with a more fractured internet. But if your goal is getting people to actually click through and read your writing, it should be clear that the usefulness of X has degraded and is unlikely to get better.

The flipside of this is that Musk’s trashing of Twitter has spurred the development of new online communities elsewhere. Personally, I’m finding the closest zeitgeist to the old fun Twitter on Bluesky, which has a smaller userbase but has attracted lots of journalists, academics, and internet weirdos (I mean that in the best possible way). When I log on there, I find smart, interesting people interacting, making jokes, and sharing worthwhile links. There’s some of that when I log onto X, but increasingly my feed there consists of smart people I know arguing with the dumbest people on the internet.

Other writers seem to like Threads, which has greater reach but is kind of boring in my experience. There’s Mastodon too. I’m biased of course, but I’m really enjoying the small but growing community we’re building at Seabird, a platform designed specifically for sharing links online. (Sign up here!)

None of these platforms yet replace the influence of Twitter, but on the whole I think that’s a good thing. The near-term future of the internet is fractured, and that’s probably healthy. As I wrote of Twitter back in April 2022:

We expect too many different things from the site. We want it to be the fun virtual place to watch the Super Bowl, follow breaking news, find smart things to read, learn from experts, keep up with friends, make jokes about the new three-hour Batman movie, look at funny cat memes, share our Wordle scores, go viral, open our thoughts up to comment from millions of strangers, and gather for ritual combat over politics all at the same time while somehow not having the site devolve into Boschian chaos. Maybe that’s just not possible. But if we can’t fix it, we can exit and look elsewhere, at least for some of these purposes.

The old network you had on Twitter is never coming back, but your new networks can be exciting. Yes, it takes time to build up connections on a new platform. But maybe your networks could use some shaking up anyway. I know that after sixteen years on Twitter, mine became a bit rigid as I became reluctant to add too many new people to my feed. But early adopters are more likely to follow each other on a new network and I’m enjoying the freshness of my feeds on other platforms.

The psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris has compared the experience of neural rewiring on a strong trip to “shaking a snowglobe,” disrupting old thought patterns, creating new connections, and making space for more flexibility. That strikes me as an apt analogy for building a network on a new platform too. I’ve lost some of my old connections, but I’ve made lots of new ones. Think of it as a magic mushroom trip for your microblogging feed.

If you’re not yet willing to quit X entirely, there are some half-measures you could try. Some of my friends are now restricting their activity to only sharing their latest articles. (I no longer even do that; my only use of the platform now is to encourage people to leave it, so I’ll make an exception for this post.) Another option is to make X the last place you share things, breaking the habit of making it the first place you go. Or you could try a “dry January” of not tweeting. Pick a new platform or two and commit to exploring them for a month. If by February you’re still pining for X, no one will stop you from going back.

But really, I would encourage you to just quit. My only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner. X is bad. You are better than X. There are plenty of other options now. Find your friends and do your thing somewhere else. New year, new you, no tweets.

Would a Biden menthol ban tip the election to Trump?

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, so I have a new piece at Reason about the lessons that era holds for contemporary efforts to prohibit tobacco and nicotine. It touches on the proposed generational tobacco ban in the UK, the similar proposal just reversed in New Zealand, vape bans around the world, flavor bans in the US, and the total disaster that is Australia, where mere possession of a vape is a criminal offense and rival gangs are torching tobacco shops in a turf war for the illicit market. Read it here!

Relatedly, the Biden administration is further delaying its long-anticipated ban on menthol cigarettes. As Dan Diamond and David Ovalle report for the Washington Post, this seems to be due at least partly to political considerations. The administration now anticipates an announcement in March of next year. Anti-smoking groups are urging immediate action, while others are raising civil liberties concerns and noting the electoral risks.

As I posted on Bluesky yesterday, I think the risk that a menthol ban could contribute to tipping the 2024 election to Trump is worth seriously considering. A lot of Americans smoke menthol cigarettes. The Post cites a 2019 figure of 18.5 million Americans using them; other estimates suggest about 40% of adult cigarette smokers choosing menthol brands, which would put the figure closer to 12 million. Menthol cigars probably bump the figure higher. Regardless, that’s a significant bloc of adults that would be directly impacted by a menthol ban.

A ban would disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic smokers. The 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that about 80% of the former and 50% of the latter use menthol cigarettes, compared to about a third of white smokers. Notably, these are demographic groups that are crucial to Biden’s re-election and among which he is distressingly losing support.

What do voters think of a menthol ban? There’s quite a bit of variance among surveys, but it’s worth looking at data from a 2018 survey funded by the Truth Initiative. Overall, it finds that a narrow majority (56%) of adults support a menthol ban. Support is greater among African-Americans (60.5%) and Hispanics (69%). On the surface, that seems to signal that announcing a menthol ban might be good politics.

There is one important group, however, among which support for a menthol ban drastically plunges: people who smoke menthols. Only 28.5% of adult smokers who prefer menthol cigarettes want the government to ban them. That shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s very inconvenient for ban advocates and potentially for Biden’s electoral chances if his administration moves forward with the policy.

The big question is which of these survey results is most important: the modest support for a menthol ban among these demographic groups as a whole or the overwhelming opposition among the people who smoke them. I’m personally skeptical that a menthol ban would be a major motivator bringing voters to Biden. Do non-smoking voters care all that much about tobacco policy? A ban would be extremely salient to smokers themselves, however. They would identify Biden directly with banning a product they use everyday and Republicans would quite credibly accuse Democrats of using big government to interfere in adults’ choices.

To be transparent about my own biases, I think a menthol ban is bad policy. I also think it’s vitally important for the future of the United States that Donald Trump does not become president again. So, I’m extremely invested in Biden winning the 2024 election even if that does mean we get a menthol ban. But the timing of that ban matters, and I’d be a whole lot less worried about the FDA announcing it in 2025 than in 2024.

With that in mind, I’m not sure what the Biden administration gains by delaying the announcement just to March, even closer to the election. I’d much prefer that he just bury the issue for now and focus on much more important matters, like not handing the country over to an aspiring dictator.

There are a couple objections to this worth addressing. One is that public health shouldn’t be a matter of politics. This is completely wrong; banning menthol is a political issue. Weighing in on issues like this is exactly what elections are for. If Biden is worried that banning menthol would motivate people to vote against him, then he’s justified not banning menthol.

A second objection is that delaying the menthol ban risks losing the opportunity to implement the policy. There is certainly some truth to this and I’d be fine with that result, but ban advocates should be aware that there’s uncertainty no matter what. Regardless of when the FDA finalizes the policy, it will likely take years to take effect. The most important factor for the prospect of a menthol ban is who is president in 2025. If Biden wins, he’ll have four more years to implement the ban. If Trump wins, well, who the hell knows what will happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if took the opportunity to reverse one of Biden’s signature policies. So, even if you do support a ban on menthol cigarettes, I think there’s a reasonable case for giving Biden the slack to wait until after the election to pursue it.

It’s cliché to say, but this election is far too important to risk on a potentially divisive issue like banning menthol cigarettes, especially if one possible result is that the ban gets scrapped anyway when we end up with Trump back in power. And don’t be complacent; Trump’s prospects for winning are alarmingly real.

I’m not saying that a menthol ban tipping the election to Trump is the most likely outcome or that it wouldn’t be an incredibly stupid outcome, but unlikely and incredibly stupid outcomes are what got Trump elected in the first place. Let’s not do that again.

Update 12/7/23: Publication of the final rule is now officially set for March. Further, the FDA has also scheduled publication of its proposed nicotine standard for April. This is a more preliminary stage of rulemaking but it’s an even more drastic regulation: by capping nicotine in cigarettes at a very low level, it would essentially amount to prohibition. More than 28 million American adults currently smoke cigarettes, so announcing one’s intention to ban them in an election year, with the stakes as high as they are, strikes me as an extremely dangerous strategy.

Some additional links: I wrote a case against a federal menthol ban for Reason back in 2021. For a deeper dive into contemporary tobacco politics, read my book The New Prohibition. And on related issues, I recently reviewed the Netflix docuseries “Big Vape” for the Examiner (ungated link).

Image credit: Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash.

Where to find me after Twitter

Twitter (aka X) is bad now. I could write out a long list of reasons, but they should be obvious enough. Here’s where to find me going forward:

Bluesky — Of all the Twitter-like platforms I’ve tried, this is the one I’m getting the most value from so far. I have doubts about whether any Twitter-like format can truly scale but it’s fun for now. Follow me there at jacobgrier.bsky.social. (It’s invitation-only, but invites are fairly easy to come by. As of now I have a few.)

Seabird — One of my main uses for Twitter was finding and sharing links to writing and other media. That’s the only thing we do on Seabird, the platform I’ve been building with two friends, and we have a small but growing community of enthusiastic users. It’s also invitation-only for now; sign up here. (If you’ve signed up and not received an invitation, feel free to ping me to make sure we prioritize getting you in.) Read more about why I’m excited about Seabird here.

Substack — I have an infrequent newsletter there, mostly with updates on my recent writing, book and music recommendations, and cocktail recipes. But I’m tempted to phase out Substack in favor of blogging. We’ll see!

Instagram — I post mostly food and drink photos on the main timeline and I use stories for music, travel, and other personal things. No news and politics!

Facebook — Rarely posting on it these days, also no news or politics. I probably won’t add you there unless we have a personal connection.

LinkedIn — Sigh. If you must.

Other Twitter-like platforms — I have accounts on Mastodon, Post, Substack Notes, and Threads, though I rarely check them. I’m open to becoming more active if they take off.

X/Twitter — I’m not deleting my account, but I’m going to focus elsewhere and likely just do the minimum to keep it from being taken. It was fun, and I enjoyed meeting many of you there, but it’s time to move on.

How can a libertarian live in Portland?

“How can you be a libertarian and live in Portland?” I’ve heard variations on this question a lot in the fifteen years since I left my job at a libertarian think tank in DC to move to one of the most progressive cities in the US. It’s especially relevant now, as perception of the city post-2020 has shifted from quirkily liberal to violently chaotic. The question was posed again recently by a visiting friend, which prompted me to write up this answer.

What is there for a libertarian to like about the politics of Portland, Oregon? Quite a lot, actually.

Ending the drug war has long been one of the top priorities for libertarians. Oregon is a pioneer at liberalizing drug laws, becoming one of the most liberal drug jurisdictions in the world. We were the third state to legalize recreational cannabis. We are the first to decriminalize possession of all drugs. We are the first to implement legalized psychedelic therapy. You can debate how well some of these policies are working out or argue that our moves toward ending prohibition haven’t gone far enough, but where in the US is trying more libertarian drug policy than we are?

Politics aside, one of the things that first attracted me to Portland is its dynamic dining scene, driven in part by food carts that offer niche cuisines and serve as an incubator for entrepreneurs before they go brick and mortar. A report from the US Chamber of Commerce concludes that Portland’s light touch regulations make it the number one city in the country to operate a food truck. “Obtaining all the permits and fees to start a mobile food business in Portland costs just $1,877 compared to $6,211 in Seattle,” reports Eater. And “there are few restrictions on when, where, and how they can operate. In Portland, food carts can remain permanently on almost any commercially zoned parking lot.”

What about alcohol? Oregon is a control state with high taxes for liquor, though in my experience it’s the most consumer-friendly of control states when it comes to selection. Our liquor restrictions are at least partially offset by the ease of getting an on-premise license, which costs just $800; compare to six-figure prices in quota states like California. Our beer taxes are low. Cocktails to-go are permanently legal. Despite our control state status, the huge numbers of breweries, wineries, distilleries, and excellent bars contradict any suggestion that Portland is an oppressive place to be a producer or consumer of alcohol.

Like many cities, Portland has inflated housing costs due to restrictive zoning. Unlike many cities, Portland is doing something about it. The Residential Infill Project passed in 2020 is “the most pro-housing reform to low-density zones in US history,” according to the Sightline Institute. It legalizes up to four homes on residential lots, up to six with regulated pricing, and removes parking mandates from most of the city. Additional reforms passed in 2022 won praise from Reason’s Christian Britschgi. The changes aren’t perfect, but overall they’re a big win for property rights.

How about bodily autonomy? On reproductive rights, Oregon is among the most liberal in the country for access to abortion. At the end of life, Oregon is one of eleven states allowing patients to seek medical aid for assisted suicide.

The state does have capital punishment, but recent reforms drastically reduced its scope and previous governor Kate Brown cleared death row by commuting all existing sentences to life without parole, effectively taking the state of Oregon out of the business of executing residents.

Without endorsing all aspects of the 2020 protests, the core motivation was a sound one. As I wrote at the time, “I’m sure I disagree with marchers on any number of issues. But on the one that matters — the dignity of all people and their right to live free from the fear of state-sanctioned violence — there should be no disagreement about the justice of their demands.”

Portland was far ahead of the curve on same-sex marriage, with Multnomah County issuing more than 3,000 same-sex marriage licenses beginning in 2004 (regrettably later overturned by a statewide referendum and court case). Portland remains a very LGTBQ-friendly city.

Oregon has been a sanctuary state for immigration since 1987, the first in the country to pass such a law. The law was further strengthened in 2021. Portland is also a sanctuary city (mostly redundant given state law, but worth noting.)

There’s a reason Portland has so many strip clubs and the world’s most well-attended naked bike ride: protections for free expression, including via nudity, are stronger in the Oregon constitution than under the First Amendment. (Though do read about the dark origins of the court case setting that precedent.)

As of this summer, drivers in Portland even won the freedom to pump their own gas.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Portland is a libertarian utopia, but where is? Do libertarians who move to red states get asked how they can stand to live there? If I moved back to my home state of Texas, I don’t imagine nearly as many libertarians asking such a question. Yet Texas threatens long prison sentences for things like selling weed or performing an abortion, which strikes me as barbaric compared to how we do things in Oregon.

My impression is that the frequency with which I’m asked how I can live here reflects an outdated perception that libertarians should feel more at home on the right than among the left. There were some eras when this was truer than others, but it’s certainly not true right now, and the liberty movement has always been more diverse than the legacy of Cold War era fusionism suggests. (See Matt Zwolinksi and John Tomasi’s excellent new book on the topic or my review of it here.)

As the late Steve Horwitz observed in when Trump took office in 2017, “Too many libertarians are too focused on economics” and “[… too] many libertarians hate the left more than they love liberty.” Economics is important, but on substantive issues where the cruelty of the state is most forcefully imposed, humane and liberty-enhancing policies often come more from the left than the right. Democrats are currently much better on the preservation of liberal political institutions too, now seriously threatened by the Trumpist GOP. (For all the justified criticism of some Portland protest tactics, it wasn’t the left that tried to overturn a presidential election, violently overran the Capitol, chanted about hanging Mike Pence, and nearly incited a constitutional crisis.) Portland has some dumb economics — can we kill the arts tax, please? — but there’s much else here that libertarians should applaud.

Obviously there is plenty I disagree with in Portland and Oregon politics, some of which I’ve written about. There’s a bland uniformity of thought here which one may be wary of running afoul of if involved in a public-facing business. I’d like lower taxes and less regulation. I’d like more respect for property rights; protesters shouldn’t smash windows of random buildings and businesses should be better protected from property crime. I cringe when I hear some locals talk about the evils of capitalism and I wouldn’t want the median Portland voter setting national economic policy. Cato’s “Freedom in the 50 States” report summarizes, “Oregon is among the worst states on economic freedom but despite a relative slide remains a top-10 state on [personal] freedom.” I don’t expect Portlanders to become ideologically libertarian, but the city would benefit from becoming a little more neoliberal.

The post-Covid hollowing out of downtown and general failures of governance are a genuine blight on the city; the official Portland motto boasting its status as “the city that works” now comes across as a joke. (“Let it ride,” the Bachman-Turner Overdrive-inspired motto suggested by 1980s mayor Frank Ivancie, would be far more apt.) Yet there are reasons for cautious optimism. Voters decided last year to completely overhaul the city government, implementing charter reform and ranked choice voting that will take effect in our next election. The city is trying out expanded enterprise zones with tax abatements. It feels like ages since we had a freakout over something trivial like white women allegedly appropriating burrito recipes; right now anyone opening a business feels like a victory. The recognition that we need pragmatic revival is palpable.

The quality of life is what attracted me to Portland, and despite the city facing some very real problems, I still find it an appealing place to live. I came here to bike to coffee shops, not hang out with libertarians. But to the extent that ideological alignment matters, I could do a lot worse than here.

A libertarian can live in Portland the same way they can live anywhere else: by engaging thoughtfully with their neighbors, advocating for positive changes, and putting politics in its place by making room to relate to others in non-political roles. A better question than asking how a libertarian can stand to live here is asking why more of them don’t. If one gets over bias against the left, you can make a pretty solid case that in policy if not ideology, Portland is among the more libertarian cities in the US. And the coffee’s pretty great too.

Migrating to Seabird

For the past few months, I’ve been debating when I will post my final tweet. Maybe that technically occurred this week, since Twitter is now “X” and Elon Musk has decided to “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” This is fine with me, as I’ve coincidentally been working on a new app that has a bird in its logo:

Yet another app? Bear with me. Seabird is not a Twitter clone. One of the things that has surprised me about the raft of new Twitter competitors is that, despite some substantial backend differences, they all offer more or less the same microblogging format: short posts that can include text, links, pictures, and sometimes videos, presented in an algorithmic or chronological feed, with something like a retweet feature to amplify or quote a post. Pointing this out isn’t necessarily a criticism. Twitter is bad now, so I’m rooting for at least some of these similar competitors to take its place. (For what it’s worth, Bluesky is my favorite so far and the one where I’m most active. We’ll see what happens with Threads.)

Seabird takes a different approach. With my partners Jay Mutzafi and Courtney Knapp, we’ve been working on this project since before Musk’s Twitter acquisition, building an app more narrowly focused on sharing writing and other media. It’s the kind of app we ourselves want to use, inspired in part by what we miss about the pre-social media era and the golden days of blogs and Google Reader. We’ve kept details close to the vest, but now that we’ve soft-launched the first versions of our mobile app we can start talking about what makes Seabird unique.

On Seabird, we intentionally limit both the kinds of posts users can make and how frequently they can post. Posts are presented chronologically from the users a person follows. Posts on Seabird have to include a link to external content and users get only three of them each day. A typical post is a link to an article with a brief note recommending it:

There are a few ways to interact with posts, most obviously by clicking the link to read the article. Users can also bookmark them to read later or hit the like button. But my favorite feature is one that I hope longtime bloggers will enjoy: we’re bringing back the hat tip!

Back in the blogging era, it was customary to offer a “hat tip” to another blogger when they brought something interesting to your attention, via a link back to their original post to give them credit and thanks. It was a nice gesture and also helped lower-profile writers get discovered when a popular blogger credited them. We’ve built this function into Seabird. In the post below, for example, my friend Benjamin shares an interesting article from the New York Times. To share it on my own feed, I click the re-post button circled in yellow:

Now when I write my own post, it automatically includes a link back to Benjamin’s, enabling my followers to click over to it:

We have some additional features designed for writers, including the option to mark a post as a link to their original work so that it will be highlighted in a priority feed and collected in a separate tab on their profile, where it can act as a portfolio of sorts (or as we like to call it, their “SeaVee”). You can read more about the project here.

I’m excited about these unique features, but I’m equally excited about how Seabird focuses exclusively on sharing links without trying to do all the other things we’ve come to expect from social media. In a long post last year, I argued that part of the reason Twitter changed from being a smart, fun, and somewhat inscrutable place into a toxic hellsite is that we demanded too much from it:

[…] as much as I love Twitter, I’m not convinced there’s any way to make it more than marginally better while still keeping what makes Twitter Twitter. We expect too many different things from the site. We want it to be the fun virtual place to watch the Super Bowl, follow breaking news, find smart things to read, learn from experts, keep up with friends, make jokes about the new three-hour Batman movie, look at funny cat memes, share our Wordle scores, go viral, open our thoughts up to comment from millions of strangers, and gather for ritual combat over politics all at the same time while somehow not having the site devolve into Boschian chaos. Maybe that’s just not possible. But if we can’t fix it, we can exit and look elsewhere, at least for some of these purposes.

I’m intrigued by the various Twitter competitors that have sprung up, but I hope that none of them replace Twitter in such an all-consuming way. Instead, I’d like to see more distinct platforms and communities with different purposes. As Noah Smith wrote recently, one lesson from Twitter is that we should desire a more fragmented internet. Share your aspirational photos on Instagram, keep up with friends and family on Facebook, do business networking on LinkedIn, write essays on Substack, joke around and debate the news on Bluesky or in a private Discord server. It’s a maddening mistake to try to do it all on one site.

Elon Musk says he wants X to be an “everything app.” With Seabird, we’re proudly building a “one thing app.” That one thing is sharing and discovering worthwhile writing and other media.

With that in mind, I’d like to highlight something Ezra Klein said on his podcast a couple days ago:

But I will die on this hill. Twitter is a bad way to be informed about the world. It’s just a bad way to do it. […]

It’s about what you’re not doing when you’re on Twitter. And the best way I’ve found to articulate this is I think there’s a really profound difference between feeling informed and being informed. And I think Twitter and, frankly, a lot of things in social media, specialize in giving people, particularly jittery info-hungry journalistic types, the feeling of being informed. But the people who I think of as most informed are the ones who seem the best at not doing things on Twitter.

There’s almost nobody whose knowledge of things is really Twitter-based knowledge or communicated primarily through Twitter who I find that is where I get my information and really value it. For instance, Sam misses a feeling when it seems like everyone on Twitter is reacting to the same thing. And I would say, typically, what they are reacting to is the wrong thing reacting to.

So I have a burner account on Twitter for when I need to read something that’s on there. And I happen to have to use it on the day there was a huge amount of debate about Joe Rogan demanding or challenging or offering money for this vaccine specialist to debate R.F.K. Jr. on Rogan’s show. And everybody in my feed, like Nate Silver, everybody was commenting on this.

And they were all on the same thing. And in a way, being there made me feel like I was informed. I knew what the zeitgeist was that day. I was seeing the conversation. And it was an extraordinarily dumb conversation.

It was just a bad thing to allow into your mental space for that whole day. You would have just been better off reading a report about homelessness or whatever.

And so, to me, in terms of being informed about the world, actually, one of the really difficult disciplines is not letting the wrong mediums or the wrong people decide what you’re thinking about, not being too plugged into a conversation if you think that conversation has turned toxic, or you think the conversation has turned trivial, or you think that conversation is being driven by algorithmic dynamics that do not serve you.

I’ve certainly gotten value out of Twitter. It was a great way to stay in touch with people in the public policy sphere after I left DC in 2008, it was useful for promoting my writing, and at its peak it was smart and fun in ways that no other network has yet replicated. You can debate the extent of its recent decline, but there’s one way subjective way that Twitter has inarguably declined for me personally: a lot of the smart people I follow there post a lot less often, have stopped posting, or have deleted their accounts entirely. It’s become a less rewarding place to devote attention to.

We’ve had a small private beta of Seabird going for more than a year, and during that time I posted prolifically because I wanted to get a sense of what it’s like to be on a platform where I can only share three items a day and where there are no quote-tweets or reply threads for distracting sarcastic dunks and trivial arguments. What I’ve found is that it’s made me a better and more varied reader. I’m less likely to get caught up in the topic of the day; I’m more likely to read in-depth and explore more diverse subjects and sources. Even with a tiny fraction of the audience I have on Twitter, posting on Seabird is a more gratifying and thoughtful experience.

We’re not yet at the point where we can open that experience to everyone. We still have technical fixes and improvements that we’re working on and we need better moderation tools. We want to scale responsibly. But now that our apps are out, we are gradually welcoming new users. If Seabird sounds like something you’d like to try, I invite you to sign up on our website. As Twitter bids adieu to the birds, we’re excited to offer a sunnier place to land.

New book and recent writing

Catching up on recent writing, most notably I have a new book out! The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control collects many of my articles and essays from the past few years:

WARNING: Prohibition kills. Government prohibition of nicotine and tobacco products is hazardous to public health. Prohibitions are often poorly targeted, encouraging smoking by banning safer alternatives and protecting deadly cigarettes from competition. Prohibition creates illicit markets that lead to unregulated and untaxed products, raids and arrests by law enforcement officers, and incarceration of sellers.

We are poised at the edge of a new era of nicotine and tobacco prohibition, one that has failed to learn from past policy failures involving drugs and alcohol. This collection of essays explores how illiberal policies, from unjustifiably extensive smoking bans to laws forbidding the sale of flavored e-cigarettes, lead to dangerous unintended consequences. Fortunately, the aim of saving lives lost to smoking is compatible with a more humane approach to nicotine and tobacco use. The New Prohibition charts a smarter way forward that encourages harm reduction and respects the rights of consenting adults.

With a new introduction by the author, The New Prohibition collects essays previously published in Reason, Slate, Arc Digital, Liberal Currents, and Exponents.

The book is available exclusively on Amazon.

In other book news, I’m still enjoying reviewing books for the Examiner. Lately I’ve covered the new memoir from Lucinda Williams, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s excellent exploration of libertarianism, and a very fun novel from Penn Jillette.

On tobacco policy, I wrote about how badly flavor prohibition is going in the state of Massachusetts and how it’s putting a local immigrant’s hookah shop out of business here in Portland. I also went on a bit of a rant against the FDA’s ineffectual Center for Tobacco Products.

On the lifestyle side of things, for Inside Hook I’ve written about the Chartreuse shortage, the economics of extremely old whiskies, and what’s new in aquavit. Finally, for Slate I gave some tips on making beer cocktails.

« Older posts