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Cato Daily Dispatch for July 11, 2003

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House Panel Approves Plan for Vouchers at D.C. Schools
W.T.O. Rules That U.S. Steel Duties Are Illegal
Canada to Offer Marijuana to Medical Patients

House Panel Approves Plan for Vouchers at D.C. Schools

The Washington Post reports that "the House Government Reform Committee narrowly passed a bill yesterday to create a private school voucher program for Washington's public school students after a spirited debate over how to best reform the struggling school system in the nation's capital."

According to Cato Institute education policy analyst Casey Lartigue, in his Policy Analysis, "The Need for Educational Freedom in the Nation's Capital", "To improve education in the nation's capital, we must consider options beyond spending more money in a system that even supporters acknowledge is troubled. Change must not be limited to propping up the current system. Public schools that are little more than holding pens must not be sheltered from private competition. The city must find a way to create competition within the system, with the goals of giving parents power over the education of their children, fostering an environment that will create a climate for education entrepreneurs to flourish, and taking education out of the hands of feuding politicians."

W.T.O. Rules That U.S. Steel Duties Are Illegal

According to the Associated Press, "The World Trade Organization ruled against heavy duties on steel imports imposed by the Bush administration, saying Friday that they violate global trade rules. The European Union and seven other countries that had opposed the tariffs demanded Washington immediately lift the duties, which were supposed to protect the U.S. steel industry from cheap imports."

In a Cato Institute Trade Policy Analysis, "Import Curbs Would Delay Reforms, Hurting Consumers and Steel Users", trade policy analyst Daniel Ikenson writes:

"The U.S. integrated steel industry is ailing. But massive import curbs are bad medicine, which would only prolong necessary structural reforms within the industry and adversely impact steel users, consumers and exporters.

"The steel industry's woes will persist unless and until significant domestic capacity reduction is realized. Aggressive import competition is merely a symptom of what plagues the industry, not the cause. Unhealthy domestic competition caused by large, unnatural barriers to exit is the real problem. These barriers are the product of intransigent unions, unscrupulous steel management, and enabling government policies.

"New import restraints will impede legitimate steel industry reforms, raise the costs to consuming industries and consumers, and further threaten prospects for exporters."

Canada to Offer Marijuana to Medical Patients

"The Canadian government announced an interim plan today that will provide marijuana on a regular basis to several hundred people who are authorized to use the drug for medical reasons," reports The New York Times. "Coming six weeks after the federal government introduced a bill decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and only days after it approved a trial 'safe injection site' in Vancouver for intravenous drug users, the marijuana plan was one more sign that Ottawa is moving in a very different direction on drug policy from the Bush administration."

According to the Cato Institute's Handbook for the 108th Congress, "The failures of drug prohibition are becoming obvious to more and more Americans. A particularly tragic consequence of the stepped-up war on drugs is the refusal to allow sick people to use marijuana as medicine. Prohibitionists insist that marijuana is not good medicine, or at least that there are legal alternatives to marijuana that are equally good. Those who believe that individuals should make their own decisions, not have their decisions made for them by Washington bureaucracies, would simply say that that's a decision for patients and their doctors to make. But in fact there is good medical evidence of the therapeutic value of marijuana -- despite the difficulty of doing adequate research on an illegal drug.

"Whatever the actual value of medical marijuana, the relevant fact for federal policymakers is that in 1996 the voters of California and Arizona authorized physicians licensed in those states to recommend the use of medical marijuana to seriously ill and terminally ill patients residing in the states, without being subject to civil and criminal penalties.

"One of the benefits of a federal republic is that different policies may be tried in different states. One of the benefits of our Constitution is that it limits the power of the federal government to impose one policy on the several states."

Christopher Kilmer, editor, ckilmer@cato.org