Like making sausage

Improving the legislative process

Plenty of bad policy ideas originate in California. But every once in a while, a worthwhile proposal emerges from the Golden State. Take the California Legislature Transparency Act. How many times we have seen lawmakers hurriedly pass bills before the ink even dries, barely having time to digest the final summaries, let alone consider all the fine print tossed in by special-interest lobbyists? Too many times, that’s how many.

Well, the transparency act, likely to appear on the Nov. 8 ballot in California, represents a much-needed effort to prevent such nonsense. Not surprisingly, Democrat lawmakers there are pushing back.

The Associated Press reported last week that Charles Munger Jr., a wealthy, GOP donor, and former California Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee have collected and submitted signatures for an initiative that would require lawmakers to publish all bills at least three days before the full Senate or Assembly may vote on them.

“You have no choice but to vote what’s in front of you without the information necessary,” Mr. Blakeslee said during a joint committee hearing last week. “That is the ‘gut-and-amend’ process that we want to put an end to once and for all.”

At its core, the initiative is meant to promote more transparency and, in turn, more government accountability. It’s a disgrace that California Democrats would complain about the proposal, but that highlights just how embedded they and their lobbyist friends remain in the status quo — as well as how much they stand to lose by reform.

Backers of the Blakeslee/Munger proposal have submitted 930,000 signatures when only 580,000 are required for ballot access — an indication of the initiative’s popularity. Cynical Democratic lawmakers have responded with a somewhat similar, but comparatively toothless, measure in order to confuse voters.

Their actions just reinforce the need for the measure they are trying to defeat.

It makes eminent sense to provide lawmakers with adequate time to absorb the final language of the bills they must consider, rather than forcing them to rush votes on important issues. Let’s hope a majority of California voters agree.

Meanwhile, even casual observers of the Nevada Legislature appreciate that similar concerns resonate in Carson City, where special-interest fingerprints too often dominate amended legislation. Offering lawmakers more time to actually understand what they’re voting on might help improve the process here in Nevada, also.

The Review-Journal’s June 9 editorial, “Stifling a public health victory,” rests on the absurd presumption that the primary purpose of vape shops is the harm reduction business. The editors then draw the dubious conclusion that the Food and Drug Administration’s recently asserted authority to regulate e-cigarettes stands in the way of the new industry’s purported promise to improve the public’s health.

Almost every assertion in the editorial is inaccurate. It is patently inaccurate to say that “it must be noted that e-cigarettes contain no tobacco.”

Plenty of evidence suggests that smoking cessation is a principal reason many people try e-cigarettes. Most public health professionals agree, however, that it is premature to call e-cigarettes a safe alternative to traditional cigarettes, and it is irresponsible of industry and vape shops to market them as cessation aids.

In the most recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, Stanton Glantz concludes that “unfortunately the evidence to date indicates that smokers who also use e-cigarettes are actually less likely to quit smoking than smokers who do not use cigarettes” or smokers who use nicotine replacement therapy.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this much we do know: 1) nicotine poses dangers to pregnant women and fetuses, children and adolescents; 2) youth use of nicotine in any form, including e-cigarettes, is unsafe and detrimental to adolescent brain development; 3) in order for adult smokers to benefit from e-cigarettes, they must completely quit combusted tobacco use; and 4) e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless “water vapor” and is not as safe as clean air.

Many chemicals found in e-cigarettes are themselves carcinogenic and otherwise harmful to their users.

Finally, despite the steady “de-normalization” of tobacco use over the past quarter century, the public health community is alarmed by the rapid rise of e-cigarettes use by youths over the past couple of years. Currently, half of Nevada high schoolers have used electronic vapor products and nearly 30 percent have used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. In addition, there is good evidence that vaping leads to tobacco use in many of its users.

While e-cigarette manufacturers promise a less harmful and more socially acceptable alternative to conventional cigarettes, current evidence of e-cigarette safety and therapeutic efficacy remains thin. It is noteworthy that, as of this date, no e-cigarette manufacturer has ever submitted an application to the FDA to market e-cigarettes for smoking cessation.

As for the harm-reduction potential of vaping, if there is a public health benefit to e-cigarettes, then certainly those products can withstand the scientific scrutiny required of any device or good making medical claims under the purview of the FDA.

Let’s stop empowering these killers by calling them religious zealots, jihadists, terrorists or any other euphemism. All news articles should call them what they really are: lowlife cowards who prey on defenseless innocent men, women and children.

They are pitiful souls who do not deserve to be called by any other name.

Also, their pictures should never be published as they do not deserve to be acknowledged as part of the human race. Instead, they should be treated as the animals they really are. No God would ever condone their actions.