Clean needle exchange faces renewed opposition in Indiana and elsewhere

Harm reduction measures in connection with intravenous drug abuse can remain repugnant even where they were successful.

Statnews has the story:

Years ago, a syringe exchange helped end a devastating HIV outbreak. Now it might be forced to close  By Lev Facher

"The Indiana county at the center of a devastating HIV crisis in 2015 may soon close the syringe exchange program widely credited with helping to end its outbreak.

"For public health advocates in Scott County, home to 24,000, the controversy is all too familiar. Six years ago, the county drew national attention for recording roughly 200 HIV cases in a single year, largely driven by injection drug use. Critics have charged that the state government’s slow response and monthslong refusal to permit needle exchanges only made the crisis worse.

"Closing the exchange now, they warn, could lead to a new wave of HIV and hepatitis C cases and increased drug overdoses. Nationally, too, many are worried it could trigger a broader wave of closures. Scott County’s syringe exchange was hailed as a success in 2015 and paved the way for other programs to open across the country. Many fear that shuttering the program, similarly, could inspire activists from coast to coast seeking to close syringe exchanges in their communities.

...

"The new debate in Indiana comes amid a wave of anti-syringe-exchange activism across the country, including a controversial new law in West Virginia that critics say could force many local programs there to close. West Virginia is experiencing a worst-in-the-nation HIV outbreak not unlike Indiana’s six years ago.

...

"Despite the reduced rates of transmission, Scott County is still among those most vulnerable to HIV outbreaks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It sits at the western edge of the country’s largest HIV hotspot: An area spanning several hundred miles that includes parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, where much of the HIV transmission is thought to be driven by injection drug use.

"Still, neighbors and local lawmakers there have sought to close the exchange, citing fears it encourages or facilitates drug use and crime (data shows that such programs do not). They have also charged that syringe exchanges lead to hazardous litter, like stray needles — a problem that, in some cases, harm reduction advocates have acknowledged and pledged to help address."

INFORMS 3rd workshop on market design in July (submission deadline June 1)

 Alex Teytelboym sends me the following announcement:

The INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design is organizing its 3rd Workshop on Market Design, traditionally held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.  

The two-day workshop with invited speakers and a sequence of submitted papers will be held virtually on July 23-24, 2021.  The submission deadline is June 1, 2021.  Further information is available here.

Keynote speakers

Tommy Andersson, Lund University

• Wedad Elmaghraby, Univ. of Maryland
• Asu Ozdaglar, MIT

Organizers

• Martin Bichler, Technical University of Munich
• Sasa Pekec, Duke University
• Alex Teytelboym, University of Oxford

We look forward to your participation and to getting your submissions!

Martin Bichler, Technical University of Munich

Sasa Pekec, Duke university

Alex Teytelboym, University of Oxford

A glimmer of hope for German kidney transplants: a discussion of kidney exchange

 Axel Ockenfels (who, along with Dorothea Kubler has been at the forefront of advocating for kidney exchange in Germany) forwards me this announcement (translated from German):

"the German Federal Ministry of Health is organizing a digital symposium on Tuesday, June 29, 2021, from 09:30 to approx. 15:30 on the topic of "Expanding the donor pool for living organ donation - a perspective for Germany?", to which we cordially invite you. Please feel free to forward the invitation to interested parties from your industry.

"An organ transplant is often the only way to save the lives of seriously ill people or to restore their quality of life. In view of long waiting times for a post-mortem organ donation, the question of living donation sometimes arises. Living organ donation has been permitted in Germany since 1997 within narrow limits and under special conditions. The donor and recipient must be "manifestly close in a special personal bond." However, living donation may be excluded in such cases for medical reasons. In order to increase the chances of organ transplantation for patients who are affected by this, some countries have established so-called kidney exchange programs.

"The symposium will take a look at various possibilities for extending organ donation: What are the opportunities and risks associated with cross over donation, pooled donation and so-called non-directed living donation? What procedures are necessary to protect donors? These and other questions will be discussed from a medical, legal and ethical perspective with an interdisciplinary audience. 

"We would be delighted if you could contribute your expertise to the discussion and if we could welcome you at the event on

"Tuesday, June 29, 2021, 09:30 - approx. 15:30 hrs.

...

"welcome to the event. The invitation is explicitly transferable. 

"If you would like to attend the event, please register by June 28, 2021 at the following link: Event Management Tool link.

Yours sincerely

"Joachim Becker

"Head of the Department of Medical and Professional Law, Prevention

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)"

****************

This seems like a potentially very positive first step, despite (or maybe because) of the fact that it seems to be signed by the Ministry of Health's department of prevention... (Leiter der Abteilung Medizin- und Berufsrecht, Prävention)

A previous post observed that kidney exchange receives popular support in Germany:

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Surrogacy and global kidney exchange receive popular support even where banned, in PNAS by Roth and Wang

(It turns out that I have a lot of previous posts related to kidney exchange in Germany...)

Keeping pilots in the Air Force, in the face of renewed, post-pandemic demand from airlines

 I spent a good deal of time last year working on understanding the internal labor market of the Air Force, and how it interacts with the larger American labor market.

During the pandemic, with airlines cutting back on flights, it may have seemed as if the problem of retaining pilots had eased. But airline demand for pilots is growing,rand the Air Force will have to think creatively about retention of pilots who are at or near the end of their service obligation.

Here's a short piece in Defense One, by two Air Force officers:

The USAF’s Bad Bets on Pilot Retention Show It Needs Outside Help. Service leaders think the same old tactics can reverse a pilot shortage in a resurging economy.  By BRIAN KRUCHKOW and TOBIAS SWITZER

"Despite the pandemic, the Air Force is still short of pilots, thanks to low retention and strong airline hiring. Before COVID-19 reached the United States, the Air Force had a deficit of more than 2,000 pilots, requiring $15 billion to train replacements. The pandemic temporarily paused airline hiring to the Air Force’s relief, reducing pilot losses, but Covid-19 also hampered pilot training, leaving the overall shortage almost unchanged. Instead of using the reprieve as an opportunity to try bolder retention initiatives, the Air Force recently placed a large wager against airline recovery and renewed airline pilot hiring.

...

"Before the pandemic, the Air Force offered retention contracts as short as three years to pilots completing their initial ten-year commitments. Seizing on the collapse of airline hiring in 2020, though, the service changed the terms of its contracts. Gone are three- and four-year contracts; the shortest pilot contract is now five years, which gets you about 70 percent of the maximum retention bonus. To get the full amount authorized by Congress—$35,000 per year—the Air Force requires at least an eight-year commitment. These are hardball terms compared to past years and are a strong bet that airline pilot hiring will be weak for an extended period. 

...

"Air Force pilots are poised to leave active duty, not stay, according to our research. Despite the incredibly dire economic and health conditions in 2020, only 51 percent of the Air Force’s eligible pilots signed retention contracts, a small increase from recent years. Of those pilots who signed retention contracts last year, though, we found that 33 percent signed on for only three years. The rest stayed on active duty without service commitments and are now free agents able to depart on short notice. Air Force pilots are keeping their options open and believe airline hiring will return soon, offering better opportunities.  

*****************

Earlier:

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

The labor market that is the military: a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

The international market for fonts

 There was a time when printing was a local business, and so fonts had local markets. And the buyers were printers, so even if the ultimate customers had artistic preferences (e.g. newspapers liked to look different from books), the names of the fonts were not a big issue.

But Microsoft's announcements of new fonts for Word has opened up a window (so to speak) on some considerations that I hadn't thought about.

CNBC has the story, including an interview with Lucas de Groot, the designer of the previous default font, Calibri:

Microsoft is rolling out a new default font to 1.2 billion Office users after 14 years — and the designer of the old one is surprised  by Jordan Novet

"Coming up with the name was not easy. For both of his fonts, Microsoft wanted names that started with the letter C.

"As de Groot put it in an email, “I had proposed Clas, a Scandinavian first name and associated with ‘class,’ but then the Greek advisor said it meant ‘to fart’ in Greek. Then I proposed Curva or Curvae, which I still like, but then the Cyrillic advisor said it meant ‘prostitute’ in Russian, it is indeed used as a very common curse word.” Microsoft legal workers also checked each possible name to see if it had already been trademarked.

"The company came up with the name “Calibri,” and when de Groot first heard it, he found it odd. It was similar to Colibri, a genus of hummingbirds. But then Microsoft employees said that it related to calibrating the rasterizer in the company’s ClearType font rendering system."

**********

I realize that I like fonts with serifs, which for example distinguish my name from the acronym for Artificial Intelligence: Al and AI.

In a sans-serif font, those are Al and AI.

Apparently sans-serif fonts were easier to read on low resolution computer screens.

Texas electricity market design: replace ERCOT experts with political appointees

 The Texas Tribune has the story:

Overhaul of ERCOT board could replace experts with political appointees  By MITCHELL FERMAN

"AUSTIN, Texas -- During February's deadly winter storm, Gov. Greg Abbott and many state lawmakers quickly criticized the Electric Reliability Council of Texas because several members of its large governing board reside outside of Texas.

"Many of the out-of-state board members are experts in the electricity field, but resigned following criticism of the agency's oversight of the state's main power grid during the storm that left millions of Texans without electricity for days in freezing temperatures.

"State lawmakers are now trying to change the way ERCOT is governed by requiring members to live in Texas and giving more board seats to political appointees - changes that experts say may do little to improve the power grid.

"One former board member who resigned after the storm, Peter Cramton, criticized legislation for politicizing the grid operator's board.

"These people would be political types without electricity expertise," he told The Texas Tribune.

The Texa"s House has already approved House Bill 10, which would remove independent outside voices on the ERCOT board and replace them with five political appointees. The governor would appoint three of those people, while the lieutenant governor and speaker of the House would each appoint one. None of the appointees would be required to be electricity experts. The only requirement is that appointees live in Texas."

******************

Other posts on ERCOT.

Akhil Vohra and Mike Shi defend their dissertations

 We're still locked out of the Economics building, but science progresses and dissertations are defended.  I've been remiss in celebrating them: here are two recent ones.

Akhil Vohra, whose job market paper I blogged about  here.

Akhil Vohra (top center) with Al Roth, Itai Ashlagi, Matt Jackson, Gabe Carroll and Fuhito Kojima

And Mike Shi, one of whose papers is this one:

The Burden of Household Debt  By ALEJANDRO MART´INEZ-MARQUINA and MIKE SHI *

Mike Shi (upper right) with Al Roth, Jeremy Bulow, Muriel Niederle, Luigi Pistaferri, and Nick Bloom

Welcome to the club, Akhil and Mike.

How can medical residency candidates be evaluated more reliably?

 Standardized tests as measures of physician aptitude are falling into disrepute and disuse.  Consequently the medical profession needs to develop better ways for evaluators (e.g. med school professors) to communicate information about applicants to residency programs.

Here are two reflections on the current state of afairs in Orthopaedic surgery.

Are Narrative Letters of Recommendation for Medical Students Interpreted as Intended by Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Programs?  by Egan, Cameron R. MD; Dashe, Jesse MD; Hussein, Amira I. PhD; Tornetta, Paul III MD

Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research: February 25, 2021 - doi: 10.1097/CORR.0000000000001691

"Background: Narrative letters of recommendation are an important component of the residency application process. However, because narrative letters of recommendation are almost always positive, it is unclear whether those reviewing the letters understand the writer’s intended strength of support for a given applicant.

"Questions/purposes: (1) Is the perception of letter readers for narrative letters of recommendation consistent with the intention of the letter’s author? (2) Is there inter-reviewer consistency in selection committee members’ perceptions of the narrative letters of recommendation?

"Methods: Letter writers who wrote two or more narrative letters of recommendation for applicants to one university-based orthopaedic residency program for the 2014 to 2015 application cycle were sent a survey linked to a specific letter of recommendation they authored to assess the intended meaning regarding the strength of an applicant. A total of 247 unstructured letters of recommendation and accompanying surveys were sent to their authors, and 157 surveys were returned and form the basis of this study (response percentage 64%). The seven core members of the admissions committee (of 22 total reviewers) at a university-based residency program were sent a similar survey regarding their perception of the letter.

...

"Conclusion :Our results demonstrate that the reader’s perception of narrative letters of recommendation did not correlate well with the letter writer’s intended meaning and was not consistent between letter readers at a single university-based urban orthopaedic surgery residency program.

"Clinical Relevance: Given the low correlation between the intended strength of the letter writers and the perceived strength of those letters, we believe that other options such as a slider bar or agreed-upon wording as is used in many dean’s letters may be helpful."

**********

CORR Insights®: Are Narrative Letters of Recommendation for Medical Students Interpreted as Intended by Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Programs? by Zywiel, Michael G. MD, MSc, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research: April 29, 2021 - doi: 10.1097/CORR.0000000000001780

"With the upcoming transition of the USMLE Step 1 to a pass/fail score, and as we continue to gather more evidence calling into question the current selection criteria used for surgical training, programs are increasingly left to wonder how they can select learners that are most likely to succeed. Similarly, learners are increasingly left wondering how they can appropriately determine whether they are likely to succeed in a chosen specialty.

...

"Going forward, we need more research within the domain of selection criteria for training. This includes identifying more reliable predictors of technical skill, nontechnical skill, as well as performance in independent practice. The failure of most current selection criteria to adequately predict performance suggests that novel, specialty-specific instruments may need to be developed, evaluated, and ultimately incorporated at the medical student level to better predict future performance."

Vaccine shortages are more about congested supply chains than about patent protection: Alex Tabarrok at MR

 Alex Tabarrok has a nice post at Marginal Revolution about the actual problems in worldwide vaccine supply, involving congested supply chains much more than protected intellectual property.

Patents are Not the Problem! by  Alex Tabarrok May 6, 2021 

Milgrom on Auctions, Theorems, and the practice of Market Design, in the AER

 The latest issue of the AER publishes a version of Paul Milgrom's Nobel lecture:

Auction Research Evolving: Theorems and Market Designs  By Paul Milgrom

American Economic Review 2021, 111(5): 1383–1405   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.111.5.1383

Here are a few of the introductory paragraphs:

"Game-theoretic modeling of auctions began in the 1960s with a pair of seminal papers by William Vickrey (1961, 1962) and the brilliant but unpublished doctoral dissertation of Armando Ortega-Reichert (1968). Robert Wilson (1977, 1979) became the next important contributor to auction theory research and, as Wilson’s student, I was inspired to make auctions and bidding the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

...

"Most of my work published in academic journals is theoretical, proving theorems about the properties of abstract models, but developing and participating in real-world mechanisms requires more than that. Two important lessons that I learned from working on high-stakes auctions are that they operate in an almost infinite variety of contexts, and that this variety is the reason for the paradoxical importance of including unrealistic assumptions in models built to understand and illuminate reality. No single set of assumptions is adequate to describe all the various settings in which auctions are used, and too much specificity in models can blind the analyst to important general insights.

...

"Why do economists rely on such unrealistic assumptions? It is because a well-chosen simplification can remove the dust and smoke that obscures our view of the workings of economic forces. Although we celebrate the resulting theorems for the insights they deliver, we can apply them successfully only by being vigilant, working hard to understand not just the insights that simplified analyses provide but also how the designs and rule choices they inspire must be adapted to withstand the dust and smoke and also the much larger disturbances of the particular worlds in which the mechanisms will operate."

And here are the concluding paragraphs:

"Auction theory has changed substantially since I made my first studies in what were still its early days. Although the “unrealistic” models of those times have proved their worth in guiding practical auction designs, some of that guidance was off point. In my own work, this showed up in the traditional analysis of the exposure problem. Despite the theoretical worst-case conclusion that exposure problems are intractable, we found that they could sometimes be quite manageable in practice.

"For the future, simulations and computational methods are likely to be increasingly important. Yet, it still takes theory to understand problems and the scope of proposed solutions. The time has come for old methods and new to work hand in hand."

VEM FÅR VAD – OCH VARFÖR? Who Gets What--and Why in Swedish

My 2015 book, Who Gets What and Why? has been translated into Swedish, and published by the Ohlin Institute, "Founded In The Spirit Of Bertil Ohlin."

VEM FÅR VAD – OCH VARFÖR?

"The Swedish translation also contains a preface written by Tommy Andersson, professor of economics and world-leading researcher in market design who recently published the book  Algorithmmaker .

The book will be presented in a conversation on May 6 at 12–13 between Professor Tommy Andersson and Andreas Bergström, board member of the Liberal Economics Club and vice president of the think tank Fores. Of course, there will be room for questions and posts from the audience.

The seminar is a collaboration between the Ohlin Institute, which has published the book, and the Liberal Economics Club (LEK). 
Connect via the link below! No pre-registration required. 

The book can be purchased at Bokus or Adlibris .

About the Webinar:
Zoom meeting on 6 May at 12–13 (click on the link to join the meeting).

Meeting ID: 842 8902 0304 Passcode: 620368"

Daron Acemoglu receives the CME Group-MSRI Prize for Innovative Quantitative Applications

 Congratulations to Daron Acemoglu, who joins a distinguished group of winners of the CME-MSRI prize. The ceremony is tomorrow.

CME Group - MSRI Prize Virtual Seminar and 2020 Award CeremonyMay 05, 2021 (08:00 AM PDT - 10:30 AM PDT)

Description

2020 CME Group-MSRI Prize Announced

The 14th annual CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications will be awarded to  Daron Acemoglu. The ceremony will be held virtually on May 5, 2021 from 10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Central Time (8:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time). To register for this seminar, click here.

The CME Group-MSRI Prize is awarded to an individual or a group to recognize originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics.

About Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT and an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, inequality, labor economics, and economics of networks. He is the author of five books, including Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (both with James A. Robinson).

Acemoglu has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, and the Global Economy Prize in 2019. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

About the event

The event will feature a panel discussion on Perils & Promise of Big Data with the following panelists:

• Dr. E. Glen Weyl, Political Economist and Social Technologist, Microsoft Research
• Prof. Pascual Restrepo, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Boston University   
• Prof. Maryam Farboodi, Jon D. Gruber Career Development Professor; and, Assistant Professor, Sloan School of Management, MIT  
• Prof. Joshua Gans, Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and, Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Special guest Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson will present on the prizewinner's work.

• Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI); Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab; Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR); and, holds appointments at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Department of Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
   

Register for this event

 

CME Group-MSRI Prize 2020  Selection Committee: Susan Athey, The Economics of Technology Professor; Professor of Economics (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences; and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford Business School; 2019 CME Group-MSRI Prize David Eisenbud, prize committee chair; Director, MSRI; and, Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley Jack Gould, Steven G. Rothmeier Professor and Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Albert S. (Pete) Kyle, Charles E. Smith Chair in Finance and Distinguished University Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland; 2018 CME Group-MSRI Prize R. Preston McAfee, Distinguished Scientist, Google Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus, CME Group; and, Chairman and CEO of Melamed & Associates, Inc. Al Roth, Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University; Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University; 2012 Nobel Prize Myron Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business. 1997 Nobel Prize Winner  Robert Wilson, The Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business; 2016 CME Group-MSRI Prize; 2020 Nobel Prize

Medal awarded to the winner of the CME Group-MSRI Prize

 

The CME Center for Innovation’s mission is to identify, foster and showcase examples of significant innovation and creative thinking pertaining to markets, commerce or trade in the public and private sectors.

 

A list of past winners can be found on the CME Group-MSRI Prize site.

 

Can heroin be used responsibly? Is the war on drugs worse than the crime?

 The psychologist Carl Hart, who studies drug addiction, has a book in which he describes his own careful use of heroin, and suggests that pharmacology isn't fate:

Drug Use for Grown-Ups. Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear.

The New Yorker has an article about him and the book in its latest issue.

Is There a Case for Legalizing Heroin? The addiction researcher Carl Hart argues against the distinction between hard and soft drugs.   By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Here's a description of a drug injection clinic in Switzerland that caught my eye:

"In Geneva, he met a physician who invited him to visit a heroin-maintenance clinic with which she was affiliated. Hart spent several months there in 2015, watching heroin users behave as efficiently and functionally as the weighted gears in a watch. Patients checked in twice a day for injections, during one period that began at seven in the morning and another at five in the afternoon. In between, many of them went to work. The patients were each assigned a cubby to stash their respective belongings, and often one would leave a beer there, to drink after injection. Hart noticed that though American doctors worried endlessly over the harms of mixing booze and opioids, it didn’t seem a very big deal to the Swiss users, maybe because they knew the exact dose of heroin they were getting and could trust its purity. When one patient had to attend a wedding in less enlightened England, utterly lacking in injection clinics, she carefully planned out her doses and travel arrangements so she could make the trip. When Hart told me about the Geneva injection clinic, he spoke about it in the way that liberal parents speak about Montessori schools—as a fanatically engineered expression of trust. Of the users, Hart said, “They were always on time.”

"Shortly after visiting the clinic, Hart began regularly snorting heroin, as he recounts in a new book, “Drug Use for Grown-Ups.” 

Repugnance as paternalism: bans on flavored tobacco products

 The NY Times has the story on the recent FDA policy:

Biden Administration Plans to Propose Banning Menthol Cigarettes. The move has been long sought by public health and civil rights groups, after decades of marketing aimed at Black smokers.  By Sheila Kaplan

"The Biden administration is planning to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes, a long-sought public health goal of civil rights and anti-tobacco groups that has been beaten back by the tobacco industry for years, according to a federal health official.

"For decades, menthol cigarettes have been marketed aggressively to Black people in the United States. About 85 percent of Black smokers use menthol brands, including Newport and Kool, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Research shows menthol cigarettes are easier to become addicted to and harder to quit than plain tobacco products.

"The F.D.A. is being forced to act by a court deadline — a federal district judge in Northern California had ordered the agency to respond by April 29 to a citizens’ petition to ban menthol. But the odds are unlikely that a ban would take effect anytime soon, because any proposal is likely to wind up in a protracted court battle. The proposal would also include a ban on all mass-produced flavored cigars, including cigarillos, which have become popular with teenagers.

...

"Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of the Center for Black Health and Equity, one of the organizations behind the petition, called the decision a victory for African Americans and all people of color.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Mr. Jefferson. “We’ve been fighting this fight, since back in the 1980s. We told the industry then, we didn’t want those cigarettes in our communities.”

...

"Menthol is a substance found in mint plants, and it can also be synthesized in a lab. It creates a cooling sensation in tobacco products and masks the harshness of the smoke, making it more tolerable." 

***********

Here's the announcement from the Food and Drug Administration:

FDA Commits to Evidence-Based Actions Aimed at Saving Lives and Preventing Future Generations of Smokers  Efforts to ban menthol cigarettes, ban flavored cigars build on previous flavor ban and mark significant steps to reduce addiction and youth experimentation, improve quitting, and address health disparities

"April 29, 2021: Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it is committing to advancing two tobacco product standards to significantly reduce disease and death from using combusted tobacco products, the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. The FDA is working toward issuing proposed product standards within the next year to ban menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and ban all characterizing flavors (including menthol) in cigars; the authority to adopt product standards is one of the most powerful tobacco regulatory tools Congress gave the agency. This decision is based on clear science and evidence establishing the addictiveness and harm of these products and builds on important, previous actions that banned other flavored cigarettes in 2009.

“Banning menthol—the last allowable flavor—in cigarettes and banning all flavors in cigars will help save lives, particularly among those disproportionately affected by these deadly products. With these actions, the FDA will help significantly reduce youth initiation, increase the chances of smoking cessation among current smokers, and address health disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations, and LGBTQ+ individuals, all of whom are far more likely to use these tobacco products,” said Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. “Together, these actions represent powerful, science-based approaches that will have an extraordinary public health impact. Armed with strong scientific evidence, and with full support from the Administration, we believe these actions will launch us on a trajectory toward ending tobacco-related disease and death in the U.S.

...

"If implemented, the FDA’s enforcement of any ban on menthol cigarettes and all flavored cigars will only address manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, importers and retailers. The FDA cannot and will not enforce against individual consumer possession or use of menthol cigarettes or any tobacco product. The FDA will work to make sure that any unlawful tobacco products do not make their way onto the market.

"These actions are an important opportunity to achieve significant, meaningful public health gains and advance health equity. The FDA is working expeditiously on the two issues, and the next step will be for the agency to publish proposed rules in the Federal Register allowing an opportunity for public comment. "

Repugnant language: "How the N-Word Became Unsayable" in the NY Times, by John McWhorter

 The linguist John McWhorter, author of the book Nine Nasty Words,  may be familiar to some readers of this blog through his podcasts with the economist Glenn Loury.  McWhorter, who is Black, published an essay adapted from his book in the NY Times yesterday, called

 How the N-Word Became Unsayable.

He writes:

"Its evolution from slur to unspeakable obscenity was part of a gradual prohibition on avowed racism and the slurring of groups. It is also part of a larger cultural shift: Time was that it was body parts and what they do that Americans were taught not to mention by name — do you actually do much resting in a restroom?"

The fact that the essay spells out the N-word (frequently, in different variations) caused the NYT to publish with it a brief essay about the editorial process, and their decision that an essay about the evolution of a particular word, and how it became repugnant, couldn't be written without printing the word itself :

Why Times Opinion Decided to Publish This Slur. On today’s guest essay by John McWhorter.

"His article both uses and refers to several obscenities — most notably a slur against Black people, the use and history of which is the topic of the essay. Instead of using a phrase like “the N-word” or “a slur against Black people” in this article, we print the word itself. It’s an unusual decision for The Times — and we want to share the reasoning behind it with you."

Not all excess mortality during the pandemic comes from infection: overdose deaths in Cook County

 A recent paper in JAMA reminds us that not all excess mortality during the pandemic is due to infection with Covid-19:

Mason M, Arukumar P, Feinglass J. The Pandemic Stay-at-Home Order and Opioid-Involved Overdose Fatalities. JAMA. Published online April 23, 2021. doi:10.1001/jama.2021.6700

"A total of 4283 opioid overdose fatalities occurred in Cook County from January 2018-December 2020, ranging from 12 to 53 weekly (eFigure in the Supplement). There was a mean of 23.0 deaths per week during the initial 100-week period (2018-2019), with little apparent seasonal variation. During the subsequent 15 weeks beginning in December 2019, deaths increased to a mean of 35.1 per week, followed by an even more pronounced increase during the 11-week stay-at-home order: 44.1 mean weekly deaths. In the 29 weeks after the stay-at-home order was lifted mean weekly deaths sharply declined and then began to increase toward the end of the period, at 32.7 deaths. Although deaths have declined below the peak weekly numbers seen during the stay-at-home period, opioid overdose deaths following the stay-at-home period remain elevated above pre-2020 levels."

NYC to stop prosecuting prostitutes (but will continue to prosecute their customers)

 NYC will stop prosecuting prostitution, but will continue to prosecute the customers of prostitutes, and pimps.

The NY Times has the story:

Manhattan to Stop Prosecuting Prostitution, Part of Nationwide Shift.    By Jonah E. Bromwich

"The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced Wednesday that it would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage, putting the weight of one of the most high-profile law enforcement offices in the United States behind the growing movement to change the criminal justice system’s approach to sex work.

"The district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., asked a judge on Wednesday morning to dismiss 914 open cases involving prostitution and unlicensed massage, along with 5,080 cases in which the charge was loitering for the purposes of prostitution.

"The law that made the latter charge a crime, which had become known as the “walking while trans” law, was repealed by New York State in February.

...

"Criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers,” Mr. Vance said in a statement.

"The office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers, promoting prostitution and sex trafficking, and said that its policy would not stop it from bringing other charges that stem from prostitution-related arrests.

"That means, in effect, that the office will continue to prosecute pimps and sex traffickers, as well as people who pay for sex, continuing to fight those who exploit or otherwise profit from prostitution without punishing the people who for decades have borne the brunt of law enforcement’s attention."

Selective NYC high schools aren't as hard to get into as is sometimes reported: Sam Abrams in the Columbia Journalism Review

 In the Columbia Journalism Review, Sam Abrams explains how data from NYC's deferred acceptance algorithm for assigning students to schools is often misunderstood in the press, when it comes to reporting on how selective the schools are.

Getting Education Data Right: The Case of High School Admissions  By Samuel E. Abrams

"The trouble with the story about high school admissions begins with official data. The admissions numbers in the annual high school directories published by New York City’s Department of Education are indeed alarming. Eight consecutive schools in the 2019 directory, for example, exhibited daunting odds: Bard High School Early College, 30 applicants per seat; Baruch College Campus High School, 44; Beacon High School, 19; Business of Sports School (BOSS), 13; Central Park East High School, 37; Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, 14; City College Academy of the Arts, 22; and The Clinton School, 21. These odds translate into acceptance rates ranging from 2.3 percent, in the case of Baruch, to 7.7 percent, in the case of BOSS. 

"But these students are not applicants in the conventional sense. They are students who rank a school by order of preference as one of up to 12 with which they would like to match. This process—introduced in 2004 and derived from the National Resident Matching Program for doctors introduced in 1952—employs an algorithm allowing only one match. Accordingly, if every eighth-grader in New York City exercised his or her right to list 12 schools, each school, on average, could in turn accept only one of 12 students, or 8.3 percent of applicants.

...

"I began encountering this reporting problem in 2005, when the Times published an article on then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to create several new high schools to address the surplus demand for seats in exam and screened schools. The Times reported that Beacon had 6,000 applicants for 250 seats the previous year, meaning an acceptance rate of 4.2 percent.

"As a teacher at Beacon at the time, I knew the admissions process from the inside and emailed a correction to the paper: 6,000 students ranked Beacon as one of up to 12 schools in which they were interested; about 1,800 students submitted the requisite portfolio of their best work and visited the school for the mandated interview; and approximately 500 offers were made to fill 250 seats. This meant an acceptance rate of about 28 percent if all 1,800 applicants ranked Beacon first, which is highly improbable, given that approximately 50 percent of applicants to Beacon today who fulfill application requirements rank the school first. But that correction went nowhere, and I resigned myself to explaining the numbers to anxious parents fretting that their children had no chance of getting into Beacon given what they had read in the Times.

...

"Following the 2017 article about 10 of the city’s high schools being more selective than Yale, I wrote a letter to the Times. As that letter went unacknowledged and as the newspaper did not run another letter to elucidate the process, I published a critique on the Web site of a research center I run at Teachers College, Columbia University. That critique led to an article published by Chalkbeat and another by Phi Delta Kappan, which interviewed Alvin Roth, a professor at Stanford who shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for work decades earlier on market design and who, with two other economists, Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak, developed the algorithm used by the DOE. Roth explained that the Times had indeed greatly exaggerated the number of applicants because the algorithm pulled students from the applicant pool once they were matched. “If I applied to you as my seventh choice, and I got accepted by my first choice, I wasn’t rejected by you,” Roth said. “You never saw me.”

"With a matching algorithm, the closest one can truly get to an acceptance rate is a match rate through adding the number of students who matched with a particular school to the number of students who matched with a school they ranked lower than that school and then dividing the number of matches by that sum.

...

"What is nevertheless certain is that the algorithm developed by Roth with Abdulkadiroglu and Pathak has significantly streamlined the enrollment process in New York. The three economists developed the algorithm, they wrote in a 2005 article published in the American Economic Review, to “relieve the congestion of the previous offer/acceptance/wait-list process” that conferred “some students multiple offers” and “multiple students … no offers.:

Cannabis in Canada

It's not so easy for a heavily regulated legal market to compete with an unregulated black market.  The NY Times has the story:

After ‘Green Rush,’ Canada’s Legal Pot Suppliers Are Stumbling. Most marijuana producers in Canada are still reporting staggering losses two and a half years after legalization.  By Ian Austen

"When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s legalized marijuana in 2018, a primary goal was to create a more equitable justice system — not a major new business sector.

"Investors, however, thought otherwise, and in the time leading up to legalization, a “green rush” swept the Toronto Stock Exchange. Money poured into companies starting up to service not only the Canadian market, but also eyeing other opportunities, particularly the U.S. market, where more states were embracing legalization.

...

"Even with a slight recovery propelled by the spreading legalization in the United States — New York legalized marijuana last month, and voters in four states backed legalization in November — one marijuana stock index is still down about 70 percent from its peak in 2018.

"Two and a half years after legalization, most marijuana producers in Canada are still reporting staggering losses.

"And a major new competitor is looming: Mexico’s lawmakers legalized recreational pot use last month. So the business climate for Canada’s growers could become even more challenging."

Cross border sales of cannabis between Oregon (legal) and Idaho (illegal)

 It's hard to effectively ban a transaction in one jurisdiction if it is legal just across the border.  The patchwork of marijuana laws in the U.S. makes this clear.

Politico has the story:

Border weed: How the hometown of tater tots became a cannabis capital. Ontario, Ore., has nine dispensaries for 11,000 residents. But most of their customers are coming from Idaho.  By NATALIE FERTIG

"Marijuana remains illegal in Idaho. In fact, it is one of only two states left in the nation that bans all forms of cannabis, including hemp and CBD products. But drive across the border into Oregon, and Idahoans can purchase every conceivable type of cannabis product, from THC infused artisan grape taffy to 1.5 gram pre-rolled joints.

"In the year and a half since Ontario began allowing weed sales, nine dispensaries have opened. It’s estimated that the city will generate $120 to $130 million in annual sales when the cannabis industry is fully up and running — that’s more than 10 percent of Oregon’s sales in 2020.

...

"Ontario is just one of dozens of border communities around the country that have been transformed into marijuana boom towns thanks to the country’s patchwork quilt of cannabis laws. Eighteen states now embrace full legalization, and all of them but California and Alaska share a border with at least one state where cannabis is illegal. Spokane, Wash., Sauget, Ill., Trinidad, Colo., and Great Barrington, Mass., are just a few towns where marijuana entrepreneurs have found fertile ground in these border regions between legal and non-legal states.

...

"People are willing to travel far for legal cannabis, even if illicit products are available in their hometown. Michelle drives four hours from southeastern Idaho every few months to visit Hotbox in Ontario. She said it’s worth the trip for the peace of mind.

“The problem is, you don't know what you're getting [in the illicit market],” said 46-year-old Michelle — who asked that her last name be left out because she planned to take products back across the border into Idaho. There’s less risk in consuming the Oregon products, she added, because you know “it didn't get transported in a gas tank.”