Alex Berenson: Dumb or grifter?

Correction: People who learned math in the public school system should not throw stones at glass houses. Berenson’s math is right, mine was wrong, the update has been changed to reflect that. The rest of the point still stands.

Professional contrarian™Alex Berenson appears to have scoured the timeline of Dr. Ryan Marino, an addiction expert, and pinged his employer, University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, to claim the addiction specialist mocks fentanyl victims (after sniffily decrying cancel culture, the professional contrarian™ right of passage).

Why did this grown-ass man tattle?

Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson

Is this the kind of public and professional demeanor that @UHhospitals thinks is appropriate and wishes to be associated with?

Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson

This x10000. @RyanMarino is a licensed physician. These “jokes” both discourage potential users from taking fentanyl’s risks seriously and harm family members of people who have overdosed. 64,000 Americans died in 2020. It’s time for @ohiomedboard @UHhospitals to step in.

Marino is clearly mocking fentanyl misinformation, like the falsehood that you can overdose from touching fentanyl or the idea, depicted above, that dealers were trying to hook kids with “rainbow fentanyl.”

That Marino is mocking dangerous drug panics, rather than making light of a dangerous substance, is so obvious that we have to ask. Berenson: Dumb or grifter?

Let’s scour his timeline to find out.

Murder rates are up 50 percent in the United States since 2015. 50 PERCENT,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “That is a catastrophic failure for decarceration and cashless bail and cannabis legalization and all the other soft-on-crime policies, and the left needs to own it.

Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson

Murder rates are up 50 percent in the United States since 2015. 50 PERCENT. That is a catastrophic failure for decarceration and cashless bail and cannabis legalization and all the other soft-on-crime policies, and the left needs to own it.

He then adds that he meant 2014.

The conclusion he draws from his nonexistent data is so cynically manipulative that he might be a propagandistic genius.

There hasn’t been large-scale decarceration. Mass incarceration peaked in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-aughts. It began to drop in the mid-aughts. But today, there are still more people behind bars than there were at any point before 1985.

This timeline has nothing to do with marijuana legalization, which Democrats only embraced in the 2020 election cycle. It has nothing to do with cashless bail, which still doesn’t exist most places. What the timeline corresponds to exactly is the drug panic of the mid-to-late 1980s, which led to the adoption of draconian mandatory minimums. And the 1995 crime panic that led to the adoption of draconian habitual offender laws at the federal and state levels. As prosecutors began to leverage terrifying potential sentences to rack up guilty pleas, we virtually stopped having trials and the freest nation in the entire history of the world had (and still has) more people behind bars than any place on earth.

What accounts for the drop? In part probably the rise of home-confinement during the pandemic. That mostly applied to older, feebler inmates who statistically are highly unlikely to reoffend. And if a large enough number of them had committed a murder to “double” the homicide rate, trust me, we would have heard about it.