Editorials from around New England

Editorials from around New England:

CONNECTICUT

The Connecticut Post

Sept. 1

The findings in a new report on the opioid crisis in Connecticut are chilling and are a call for action that is impossible to ignore.

Drug overdoses in the state are occurring at a pace pointing toward more than 1,000 deaths by the end of the year.

In the first six months of 2017, there were 539 drug intoxication deaths, according to a report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, a rate that forecasts 1,078 by New Year’s Eve.

To put these numbers in some perspective, 1,078 would be an increase of more than 100 deaths over 2016 and more than triple the number of overdose deaths five years ago, when there were 357.

And, according to Chief Medical Examiner James Gill, these deaths are largely attributable to opioids, the pain-killing drugs that many state residents have legally in their home medicine cabinets.

In fact, since 2012, the number of overdose deaths has risen steadily every year.

The scourge has scarred communities from Greenwich to Bridgeport to New Haven. Addiction can put a deadly grip on professionals of every stripe - physicians included; regular people hooked as the result of a legal prescription after an accident or surgery; experimenting teenagers; and on and on.

Prescription opioids include common painkillers like oxycodone and hydrocodone. And if an adult parent has a problem, that might explain the growing number of 1- to 4-year-olds who have been hospitalized as a result of opioid ingestion.

The epidemic - opioids kill more Americans than guns or automobiles - is nationwide and has drawn attention from, thankfully, Donald Trump’s White House down on through states, cities and towns.

A bit of good news is that first responders in the state have been equipped with - and trained in the administration of - naloxone, a drug that can counteract the effects of an overdose. Connecticut State Police, for instance, say they have saved more than 180 people as a result of timely intervention with the antidote.

That obviously is not the solution to this problem.

Fortunately, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is a public official who not only recognizes the severity of the problem, but has acted.

On Thursday, he signed into law several measures intended to strengthen the state’s position in fighting the problem.

Public Act 17-131, An Act Preventing Prescription Opioid Diversion and Abuse, among other things tightens access to certain controlled substances prescriptions by requiring electronic prescriptions. It also cuts the maximum opioid prescriptions for minors from seven to five days.

The key to the solution is a combination of education, treatment and enforcement.

Youngsters, in particular, have to be taught early about the dangers of opioids and the insidious nature of addiction.

People showing the early signs of addiction must have treatment options.

And the doctors who prescribe opioids play a central role. They can buy into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for prescribing opioids. According to the CDC, some primary care physicians have reported insufficient training in prescribing opioids.

It seems learning has to happen all around.

Online: https://bit.ly/2evAunI

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MASSACHUSETTS

The Salem News

Aug. 31

When one thinks of startups and job-creating innovation, what usually comes to mind is a small high-tech firm toiling in cramped quarters in an industrial park or cluttered garage.

While that can certainly be the case, there’s another Massachusetts industry that is constantly innovating, creating jobs and helping to bring new life to downtown areas. And the state has a unique opportunity to give that industry a boost by reworking the outdated laws that govern it.

We’re talking, of course, about the craft brewing industry. And before you chuckle, know that its impact is real.

The industry has doubled in size over the past several years, from 45 brewers in 2011 to 110 in 2016, the Boston Business Journal reported earlier this year. There could be as many as 30 new craft brewers by the end of this year. That’s not even taking into considering the new distilleries, cider rooms and wineries that dot the region.

Those small businesses create jobs. The 66 firms that make up the Massachusetts Brewers Guild employ more than 2,000 people statewide. Often, their presence enlivens downtown. Consider Ipswich Ale in Ipswich, Cape Ann Brewing Co. off the historic St. Peter’s Square, or the newish Notch Brewery tap room on Salem’s Derby Street.

That these businesses are succeeding is something of a miracle, given the amount of red tape they face in trying to put their product in front of their customers.

A state Alcohol Task Force, under the direction of Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, whose office oversees liquor laws, has been meeting for several months, and will hold hearing on Beacon Hill later this month.

Brewers have modest expectations.

“We would like (the laws) to be a little less confusing and dizzying,” Katie Stinchon, executive director of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild, told reporter Ethan Forman.

While the task force is looking at a wide range of issues, there are several steps that can be taken to make life easier for these small businesses without making sweeping changes:

- Make it easier for small breweries to switch distributors. Under current law, there is little recourse for craft brewers to get out of a contract if a distributor is not delivering on its promises. Brewers who want to change wholesalers must go before the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission to show “good cause” for the change. That is a slow, red-tape bound process that makes a private transaction the state’s responsibility.

“It’s like being in a divorce and living with your spouse,” Stinchon said.

- Bring tax rules for hard cider makers into line with their counterparts in the brewing industry. Under current state law, cider with less than a 6 percent alcoholic content is taxed at 3 cents per gallon. Ciders over 6 percent are taxed at a whopping 70 cents per gallon - like champagne - for no apparent reason.

- Standardize the rules for brewery licenses. Under the current law, the ABCC offers three types of brewery permits. Farmer-brewer licenses, which include self-distribution and retail privileges are by far the most popular. But there is confusion over how much beer a brewer can distribute and still have a farmer-brewer permit.

- Allow local craft brews to be sold at farmers markets. Local wineries can already offer their product for sale. There’s no reason not to extend the law to other local businesses.

“From my perspective, it’s all about economic development,” Gary Rogers, owner of the new True North Ale Company in Ipswich, told Forman. “We think that we can be a part of this community and this state as the brewing industry is continuing to grow, that we can do some good things in the state. Building jobs and bringing in tourists, that’s a good thing.”

Online: https://bit.ly/2wYaRnh

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RHODE ISLAND

The Providence Journal

Aug. 31

There are three openings to fill in the ranks of Rhode Island’s court magistrates, and the nominees read like a Who’s Who of political insiders: the legal counsel to the House speaker, a legal adviser to the governor, and a former state lawmaker.

Sound familiar? It should. The selection of court magistrates, who take on judge-like roles but bypass the public screening process used to select judges, has long been marked by a preference for the politically connected.

The latest picks, who still need Senate approval (which seems all but assured), are no exception.

Richard Raspallo, nominated by Superior Court Presiding Justice Alice Gibney, is legal counsel to House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello. Andrea Iannazzi, nominated by Family Court Chief Judge Michael Forte, is a legal adviser to Gov. Gina Raimondo and the sister of Senate President Dominick Ruggerio’s chief of staff, as well as the daughter of a prominent former union official. J. Patrick O’Neill, nominated by District Court Chief Judge Jeanne E. LaFazia, is a former state representative and was the House majority whip.

Before voters approved a constitutional amendment that requires judges to be vetted by a judicial nominating commission, Rhode Island had just two magistrates. The count has since exploded to 22 magistrate positions, in what many see as a subversion of the public selection process that voters wanted.

“When a judge is vetted in a public hearing, the public can testify pro and con regarding the qualifications of the finalist, and a list is sent to the governor as a public document,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. “When magistrates are selected, it’s done by a more typical hiring process, through the presiding justice of the court, and it’s therefore much more opaque.”

Past appointees under that opaque process include former state Sen. Charles J. Levesque, former state Sen. John McBurney, former Senate President Joseph Montalbano (who is now a Superior Court judge), and John J. Flynn, who was legal counsel to former House Speaker Gordon Fox.

Whatever the qualifications of these people, the process makes it clear that connections rule the day. That surely discourages talented but less connected people from applying for jobs that pay $148,460 a year. And, as Mr. Marion noted, it may also make Rhode Island’s bench less diverse, “because one of the stated purposes in the statute that creates the judicial nominating commission is to seek diversity on the bench, and the same is not true for the statutes that create these magistrate positions.”

Political connections are a huge factor when judges are appointed to their lifetime positions, to be sure. But at least the public has an opportunity to weigh in. That is not the case with magistrates, who typically serve 10-year terms and can be reappointed. They enjoy many of the same powers as judges, though they do not hear trials.

It is time for Rhode Island’s magistrate selection process to change. As long as they are performing duties similar to judges, they should be subject to a similar selection process, submitting their names to the judicial nominating commission and facing scrutiny from the public they are supposed to serve.

Online: https://bit.ly/2eqf1ch

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MAINE

Centralmaine.com

Aug. 31

An old recruiting slogan for the Navy used to begin, “It’s not just a job …” and nothing could be truer about service in America’s armed forces.

Ordinary jobs don’t demand that you be willing to die for your country, but the military does, and everyone who serves has made that commitment.

The future of thousands of those men and women has been thrown into chaos by their commander in chief, who wants to reject their sacrifice because of their gender identity.

In a series of tweets and an executive order, President Donald Trump has begun a process that could ban otherwise qualified people from serving their country. He is playing to an audience of Americans who are uncomfortable with the pace of change regarding transgender rights. His stand might be good politics, but it would be a serious mistake.

The military has an obligation to assemble the best fighting force that it can, and it won’t achieve that by arbitrarily rejecting talent.

The most important qualification for military service should be the one that makes it “more than a job” - the willingness to die for your country. Everything else pales in comparison.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has announced that he is assembling a panel that will prepare a recommendation for the president on how best to keep transgender men and women out of the service, in compliance with Trump’s order of Aug. 25. In it the president said that the ban would go in effect, unless Mattis can convince him that it’s a bad idea.

Fortunately, the president will not have the last word.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of transgender service members who would be affected by the change in policy. The suit calls on the courts to find that Trump cannot refuse to allow people to serve their country simply because they identify with a gender that is different than the one that was assigned to them at birth.

The notion of transgender people in the military is fairly new, but it follows a series of developments involving the status of women, as well as lesbian and gay service members, that challenge traditional beliefs that don’t impact performance.

Leaders in the armed forces have been able to apply objective criteria that can apply to all service members and recruits without discriminating based on gender or sexual orientation.

Last year, former Defense Secretary Ash Carter issued rules that permitted openly transgender men and women to serve, finding that there was no reason to exclude them on that basis alone.

There are still reasons that the government can legitimately exclude people from serving. Recruits have to pass intelligence and physical fitness tests. A serious criminal history is also disqualifying.

And the military can demand that service members abide by codes of conduct that can lead to discharge if not followed.

But if transgender people can meet those standards, they should be allowed to serve. Rather than rejection, they deserve the nation’s thanks.

Online: https://bit.ly/2gpHFdZ

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VERMONT

The Caledonian Record

Aug. 31

There’s one thing we’ve liked about Donald Trump’s presidency - his effort to remove terrible but entrenched federal workers.

When he came to office, Trump proposed “hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions,” according to the Washington Post.

“Look at what’s happening with every agency - waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump said on the campaign trail. “We will cut so much, your head will spin.”

There are 2.1 million federal workers - almost a million more than you’ll find in manufacturing. According to its last report on the topic, the Government Accountability Office found 53,000 government employees were paid not to work over the three year period of their review. Those workers were all paid to stay home “on administrative leave” while they were investigated for misconduct.

They not only get paid, they continue to accumulate vacation and sick days, pensions and pay-scale seniority.

The total bill to taxpayers was well over $775 million but, the GAO said, their report only audited three-fifths of the federal workforce and so understated the true scope of the problem.

“We’re going to have to get the country to understand how big the problem is, the human costs of it and why it’s absolutely essential to reform,” said Newt Gingrich who advises Trump.

It’s huge. One of the country’s largest unfunded liabilities are the lifetime health care and pension benefits of federal workers.

Despite the enormous cost, “The civil service system fails at almost everything it was designed to do,” Paul Light, a civil service expert at New York University, told the Post. “It’s very slow at hiring, negligent in disciplining, permissive in promoting.”

Unfortunately, as bad as federal workers can be at working, they’re like cockroaches when it comes to trying to get rid of them.

Public sector unions exist exclusively to negotiate more benefits, less work and higher salaries for government employees. Accountability and performance are abhorred by the union - which specializes in protecting bad employees and delivering low quality service at top-shelf prices.

That’s why the Trump administration - backed by like-minded Republicans in both Houses of Congress - is having such a hard time downsizing.

A Post report this week - “’You’re Fired’ may be harder than Trump thinks when it comes to federal workers” - details the claw and fang fights being waged by the unions to protect the worst among them. Despite consensus among all branches of government, the President is struggling to get rid of known grifters, abusers, and harassers.

We agree with the liberal icon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who argued strenuously that people whose primary responsibility is to serve the public good should never be in a position to sabotage that mission by holding the public hostage. But, at every level, that’s what public sector unions do. They should be outlawed as a matter of national security.

Online: https://bit.ly/2iOLopY

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

The Concord Monitor

Aug. 31

Dartmouth College lecturer Mark Bray, author of the book “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” has become a popular source for journalists in the wake of the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, clashes between white nationalists and those who oppose them.

That has not made Dartmouth President Philip Hanlon happy.

After Bray appeared on Meet the Press on Aug. 20 and said things such as, “When pushed, self defense is a legitimate response to white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence,” conservative websites that subscribe to President Donald Trump’s “all sides” narrative on Charlottesville jumped all over it. Campus Reform, for example, published a story by Sandor Farkas under the headline “Dartmouth scholar endorses Antifa violence.” That’s a simplistic interpretation of what Bray said, although that probably doesn’t matter one bit to Farkas.

When Campus Reform reached out to Hanlon for a response to the story, it received this statement from the Dartmouth president: “Recent statements made by Lecturer in History Mark Bray supporting violent protest do not represent the views of Dartmouth. As an institution, we condemn anything but civil discourse in the exchange of opinions and ideas. Dartmouth embraces free speech and open inquiry in all matters, and all on our campus enjoy the freedom to speak, write, listen and debate in pursuit of better learning and understanding; however, the endorsement of violence in any form is contrary to Dartmouth values.”

There’s a lot we agree with in Hanlon’s statement. We, too, embrace “free speech and open inquiry in all matters.” We, too, support the notion of allowing people the “freedom to speak, write, listen and debate in pursuit of better learning and understanding.” In fact, that is the very purpose of our Forum section. The problem is that Hanlon apparently allowed Campus Reform, Breitbart and the Daily Caller to interpret Bray’s words and do his thinking for him. So much for the pursuit of understanding.

As we mentioned in a previous editorial written after Charlottesville, we agree with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s position that nonviolence is the best way to confront hate groups. Bray disagrees, and he does so based on his historical knowledge of fascism and anti-fascism. But in no way does he come across as somebody who is trying to incite violence.

On Meet the Press, Bray said: “We’ve tried ignoring neo-Nazis in the past. We’ve seen how that turned out in the ’20s and ’30s. A lot of people are under attack, and sometimes they need to be able defend themselves. It is a privileged position to be able to say that you never have to defend yourself from these kinds of monsters.”

We’re not sure what Hanlon found offensive to “Dartmouth values” in Bray’s remarks, and neither are the more than 100 Dartmouth faculty members who sent a letter to Hanlon asking him to remove his statement from the school’s website and apologize to Bray for exposing him to death threats.

“There is nothing that Professor Bray has said that is in violation of Dartmouth’s stated free speech and academic freedom policies,” they wrote. “We urge you to consider the lasting damage to Dartmouth’s reputation that follows from such actions as well as the personal danger in which Professor Bray now finds himself.”

Hanlon is the president of Dartmouth College, and he is entitled to handle that office as he sees fit. But in a time when the president of the United States and his allies and supporters are using lies and threats to discredit and silence journalists and academics, his statement unfairly admonishing Bray for offering his perspective in his area of expertise should be deeply troubling for the Dartmouth community.

Online: https://bit.ly/2wY8Qat