The Washington Post National Weekly - June 17, 2018

SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2018

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Mr. CrossFit vs. Big Soda A fitness guru muscles his way into policy. PAGE 12

Politics Trump bets on symbolism 4

Nation Save sea lions or fish? 8

5 Myths Pardons 23

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THE FIX

Lawsuit may be hard to shake A MBER P HILLIPS

them “liars.” The lawsuit, which courts have allowed to go forward, could provide evidence of Trump allegedly kissing Summer Zervos a e used his namesake charity to benefit decade ago and then groping her a month later. himself, both financially and politicalBut those are two moments in Trump’s life. ly. He broke state and federal law Despite what the evidence may or may not multiple times. His charity may have present in the Zervos lawsuit, those moments violated tax and campaign finance law. The can and probably will be rationalized by some president of the United States should be Trump supporters. Or he’ll continue to deny banned from running any charity in New York groping more than a dozen women for a decade because he was so reckagainst their will. less and unethical with his.

The District of Columbia and MaryThat’s the bottom line of a stunning land allege that Trump receives unconlawsuit filed against President Trump stitutionally improper payments from and his three oldest children Thursday in foreign governments by their staying at New York. It comes from New York’s his D.C. hotel. His defenders can plausiattorney general, who announced the bly argue that these foreign governlawsuit after a nearly two-year investigaments made their own decision to stay at tion by New York authorities of wrongdothe hotel, just blocks from the White ing at the Trump Foundation.

House.

What’s so striking about this lawsuit is This New York lawsuit feels different. how much wrongdoing it alleges. The It’s much harder to separate the person lawsuit’s takeaway slams you in the from the actions. It alleges that he used face: Trump’s use of the charity was unethithe charity’s money over the past decade cal and illegal. His primary motivation, to settle legal disputes involving his foraccording to the lawsuit, was to enrich JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST profit business. And the lawsuit alleges himself rather than helping others. Read that when he was running for president, another way, the state of New York is alleg- From left, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump and things got worse, not better. It alleges that ing that the president’s charity was a sham. Donald Trump Jr. are named in a lawsuit by the New York he used the money to donate to certain New York attorney general Barbara attorney general that alleges widespread charity fraud. veterans’ charities that could be politicalUnderwood, a career official with decly beneficial to him, for example. women, and whether he tried to obstruct an ades of distinguished legal work, alleges that The lawsuit alleges that this wasn’t just a FBI investigation into his presidential camTrump and his children engaged in “persistentmistake on his staff’s part or bad apples in his paign’s ties to Russia. ly illegal conduct” with the charity. campaign acting on their own. Trump had been But to date, most of the allegations and Trump’s core message to voters was that he using the charity to enrich himself consistently lawsuits only incrementally chip away at the could clean up a political system filled with for decades. He knew what he was doing when president’s conduct. And he has plenty of plaupeople who are in public service for themselves he used it to run for president. sible deniability to try to convince his supportonly. A thorough, nonpartisan investigation by Underwood said: “Mr. Trump’s wrongful use ers that he’s being wrongly attacked. state officials just alleged that for decades, of the Foundation to benefit his Campaign was For example, a former “Apprentice” contesTrump used his own charity, set up to help willful and knowing.” n tant is suing Trump, alleging that he defamed others, to knowingly help himself. That’s as her and other Trump accusers when he called swampy as it gets. ©The Washington Post BY

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The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold first highlighted many of the misuses of funds, like using charity money to decorate one of his golf resorts with a $10,000 portrait of Trump.

Of course, Trump is facing numerous ethical and legal inquiries that include his business practices as president, his fidelity to his wife and payments to women to allegedly keep them quiet, whether he forcibly kissed and groped

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 36

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENVIRONMENT BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER CrossFit founder Greg Glassman says the soda industry has corrupted the science around sugar. Photo illustration by ANDY BATT for The Washington Post

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

THE TAKE

Are tough stances enough, or do voters want results?

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS

B Y D AN B ALZ

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resident Trump is now embarked on two ambitious foreign policy initiatives — redrawing the rules of international trade and defanging a nuclear-armed North Korea — that represent significant personal gambles.

The question is, can he gain something politically from these efforts in the absence of demonstrable accomplishments?

The twin meetings of the past week, beginning with the Group of Seven gathering in Canada and followed immediately by the

summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, highlighted a president always willing to shake the traditional order in defiance of norms and procedures. This was how he got elected, and it is how he has operated from the start — governing by breaking crockery.

The G-7 gathering and the Singapore summit taken together highlighted the president’s willingness to go against the grain, to offend his friends when they get under his skin and to butter up his adversaries in a calculated effort to get his way. His petulant

President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un leave after signing documents that acknowledge the progress of their talks and pledge to keep momentum going, after their summit in Singapore on Tuesday.

reaction to relatively mild criticism from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who said he would stand up for his country’s interests) and his praise for one of the world’s most brutal leaders produced headspinning on all fronts.

What has been on display are hallmarks of the Trumpian style: policy initiatives and processes that trample across political and establishment lines, great swings in rhetoric, promises and threats, anger and flattery. But then what? Trump is betting that it adds up to more than constant motion, that it is a winning

political strategy in the end. It continues to bind him closely to his base. It infuriates his opponents but often keeps them off balance at the same time.

On trade, more Democrats than Republicans support his tougher, more confrontational policies, though their general dislike of the president keeps many from expressing it.

Establishment Republicans, generally a bulwark of freetraders, dislike those policies, but few have truly confronted him.

Many in Trump’s base see them as part of the president’s promise to put America first, and they

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NEIL HALL/POOL/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

applaud the president’s instincts, even in the absence of results.

But his reaction to Trudeau’s post-G-7 news conference — Trump withdrew U.S. support for the member nations’ joint statement — generated widespread criticism and condemnation (though most elected Republicans remained silent). Trade adviser Peter Navarro apologized Tuesday for saying on Sunday that there was “a special place in hell” for Trudeau, but the president remained peeved. In Singapore, he again attacked Trudeau and said the prime minister’s comments would cost Canada “a lot of money.”

His approach to North Korea may be even more unconventional. Earlier threats of “fire and fury” may have contributed to Kim’s decision to seek a summit, although successful tests of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles no doubt did as much. But by elevating a ruthless dictator onto the international stage, Trump handed the North Korean leader a propaganda victory that other presidents were unwilling to grant.

Initial reactions to the public scenes and photo-ops from Singapore were cautiously positive, a reflection of the desire to lower temperatures on the Korean Peninsula. But as Tuesday wore on and more people examined a joint communique that was longer on talk of peace and prosperity than on commitments by North Korea to get rid of its weapons, skepticism rose, and judgments of the summit’s value grew harsher.

Many politicians and former government officials see nothing but trouble in the president’s approach. They assert that his economic policies threaten destructive trade wars that would hurt all parties involved, including the U.S. economy and the well-being of American workers and consumers. If he were to focus more singularly on China’s trade policies, he might enjoy broader support.

By squabbling with allies over tariffs, and by invoking national security as the rationale, Trump has weakened relations and perhaps elongated the time it will take to resolve differences. Allies needed on the North Korea

negotiations may be warier about working with him. He talks about an expeditious timetable for negotiations over the verifiable and irreversible elimination of the North’s nuclear weapons, yet after almost a year, his administration has not completed renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

While Trump enjoys support for diplomacy with North Korea over the saber-rattling of the recent past, his performance at the summit prompted questions from those who have experience in the region. He declared that he trusts Kim to make good on the commitment to denuclearization, but he got no new assurances in writing. In calling off decades-old joint military exercises with South Korea, and by calling them “provocative,” a word used by U.S. adversaries to describe such exercises, he gave Kim a major concession with nothing tangible in return.

Trump, a gut player, thumbs his nose at those kinds of critiques. He defied the odds as a candidate and believes he can

President Trump sits with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, for breakfast June 9 at the Group of Seven summit. The meeting was marked by repeated disagreements between the United States and its closest allies.

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continue to do so as president.

What has been tried in the past hasn’t worked — or so he believes. In his view, multilateral trade agreements have disadvantaged American workers and created an imbalance between nations. He argues that the old bottom-up approach to North Korea has produced nothing but lies and a string of broken promises.

What’s the harm of trying something different? Why not shake up the system?

His critics find all this beyond the pale. Democrats see a double standard in the way Trump’s allies interpret the Singapore summit vs. how they might have treated President Barack Obama had he staged a meeting of virtual co-equals with Kim, against a backdrop of American and North Korean flags; delivered little that was tangible; and then voiced his trust for the “talented” leader. Yet some Democrats privately fear that their party’s leaders still underestimate the president and believe that he could be formidable in a reelection bid.

Republicans hope that in November, the public will set aside questions of presidential behavior, controversial policies and the Russia investigation writ large and look only at the state of the economy, along with the negotiations with a dangerous adversary to give up its weapons, and see a president standing up for the interests of ordinary Americans, no matter who might be offended around the world.

But some experts think Trump’s threats of tariffs are likely to produce, in the end, only modest changes in overall trade practices with Canada, Mexico and European allies. Foreign policy analysts remain skeptical about the negotiations with Kim’s regime, which they fear could be long and slow and eventually end the way other efforts have — in failure. If that is the case, then how will voters judge the president’s record?

Trump’s biggest gamble could be his confidence that his unorthodox approach, regardless of the outcomes, will produce tangible political dividends for 2018 and especially 2020. That is an important part of what is at stake now. n

©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Democrats appear wary of outsiders BY

M ICHAEL S CHERER

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or a guy who says he is not running for president, Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz sure checked a lot of political boxes this month.

Upon announcing his resignation from his company, he published a snappy new website, with a direct-to-camera video and a fashionable black-and-white photo of him smiling on a Seattle street. He revealed plans to write a book, likely to be published early in 2019, about his philosophy on running a socially responsible company. And he sent an open letter to his employees announcing his desire to explore “public service.”

But it took less than 24 hours for Schultz to divulge something else — a willingness to challenge the liberal orthodoxy that courses through the Democratic Party.

“We have to go after entitlements,” he said in an interview June 5 on CNBC, after dismissing as “falsehoods” the proposals for single-payer health care and guaranteed federal jobs that have become all the rage on the left.

So it has gone for months, as Democrats poke around at the possibility of finding a non-politician candidate to challenge Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020. In theory, there is a real opportunity for an outsider to take over the party and challenge Trump, the first American to be elected president without political or military service, on his own terms. The problem has been finding the right person to do it, particularly in a party whose voter base is more inclined to favor government experience. The potential 2020 field already includes about two dozen traditional politicians.

The political outsiders who have explored candidacies include some of the biggest names in the corporate world — Disney chief Bob Iger, mega-mogul Oprah Winfrey, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. But each of those people ultimately decided to give up the dream, at least for now, after

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Well-known people without political experience have struggled to find a foothold for a 2020 run feeling out Democratic strategists.

As it stands, the only remaining brand-name business leaders besides Schultz known to be actively considering a run are the liberal financier Tom Steyer, who is traveling the country to build a grassroots effort to impeach Trump, and the celebrity entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who has taken few steps to build inroads in the Democratic Party, after saying last year he would rather run as a Republican or an independent.

Cuban, 59, owner of professional basketball’s Dallas Mavericks and a star of the investment show “Shark Tank,” said in an email exchange that he has been focused on policy development, including a plan to reshape the nation’s health-care system, among other ideas that would “make it interesting.”

“Make a commitment to AI to assure that in the next 20 years, first autonomous, weaponized robots ever put to use are made in America and not in China or Russia,” he wrote.

Steyer, 60, continues to spend heavily on television advertising that casts him as a movement leader, while hosting town halls about impeachment in states including South Carolina and Colorado. He said in a recent interview that he is focused on the midterm elections.

“As far as I am concerned, anybody who is thinking about 2020 is taking their eye off the ball,” he said.

Among those who have demurred, the reasons vary. Sandberg found her trajectory complicated by the sudden 2015 death of her husband, and more recently, the manipulation of Facebook by the Russian government in the 2016 election. Her recent commencement speech at MIT did not directly touch on politics, though she expressed pride in Facebook’s role in promoting movements such as the Women’s March on Washington and Black Lives Matter while lamenting that “we didn’t see all the risks coming, and we didn’t do enough to stop them.”

While Oprah Winfrey, top, explored and decided against a presidential run, Starbucks executive chairman Howard Schultz, above, says he isn’t planning to run but seems to be exploring it.

Iger’s ambition was hijacked by corporate happenstance. The boards of both Disney and 21st Century Fox implored him to sign a contract extension through 2021 as a condition of moving forward with the proposed combination of the two companies.

Winfrey, 64, and her friends made calls to Democratic strategists and leaders after she delivered a well-received speech in January at the Golden Globes, said a person familiar with the effort.

Winfrey’s speech, in which she recognized victims of sexual harassment and lauded the press for “uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice,” sparked buzz that this trailblazing African American talk-show host could be the one to take on Trump.

Winfrey, though, later revealed her conclusion in an interview with InStyle magazine: “I don’t have the DNA for it.”

One challenge for all non-politicians trying to feel out a campaign is navigating the clear differences in how Democrats and Republicans think of outsiders in politics.

A test case is playing out now in New York, where the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon has launched a campaign to topple Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the primary.

A Quinnipiac University poll in late April found a clear partisan split among voters in the state over whether they preferred to elect a governor who has experience in politics or one who is new to politics.

Republicans preferred someone new to politics by a margin of 47 percent to 38 percent. Democrats, by contrast, said they preferred experience by a margin of 75 percent to 17 percent, even though 28 percent said they supported Nixon’s campaign in the same poll.

“Democratic primary voters in general have been looking for candidates who have government experience,” said Jefrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who counts Cuomo, a potential 2020 contender, among his clients. “They are afraid of electing people who don’t

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POLITICS ANALYSIS have the experience because it reminds them of the disaster that is happening in Washington.”

Nixon has tried to deal with those concerns by introducing herself to voters as a lifelong subway rider, school activist and women’s advocate, while making wonky liberal policy a centerpiece of the campaign.

Schultz has in many ways been preparing far longer than the other non-politician candidates for a potential run. Born in Brooklyn to an impoverished family, he built Starbucks into a $78 billion juggernaut with more than 28,000 stores in 77 countries.

As a corporate executive, he has traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to learn about immigration concerns, studied the opioid epidemic, and convened meetings around the country to discuss race relations after high-profile police shootings. When Trump announced a ban on U.S. visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Schultz announced a company goal of hiring 10,000 refugees in stores around the world. He has also styled himself as a booster of veterans’ causes.

His family foundation also works to create youth job opportunities.

In an email June 8 to The Washington Post, Schultz said he was not certain of his future.

“I remain profoundly concerned about the direction of the country, our standing in the world, and the millions of people being left behind,” he wrote. “As Americans we are all in this together and I’m committed to using my citizenship to be in service of others.”

But the rules of political combat within the Democratic Party are unlikely to change without a fight, and there is a lot of public polling suggesting that the Trump era has pushed Democratic primary voters to embrace more progressive policy solutions with diminishing concern for the growing national debt.

Asked recently on CNN about Schultz’s contention that singlepayer health care was an unaffordable falsehood that liberals were selling to voters, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is also making moves to prepare for another presidential campaign, did not mince words.

“I think his comment is dead wrong,” Sanders said. n ©The Washington Post

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Two central themes to 2018: Women, defenders of Trump BY

P HILIP B UMP

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ust over 12 hours passed between the time President Trump tweeted his support for Katie Arrington’s House Republican primary bid in South Carolina and when he took credit for her victory. It’s very unlikely that his endorsement, coming only three hours before polls closed, made much of a difference.

But that’s not how Trump presented it early Wednesday morning.

“My political representatives didn’t want me to get involved in the Mark Sanford primary thinking that Sanford would easily win — but with a few hours left I felt that Katie was such a good candidate, and Sanford was so bad, I had to give it a shot,” he wrote. “Congrats to Katie Arrington!”

There is a near-zero chance that Trump tweeted what he did thinking that Rep. Mark Sanford was cruising to an easy win, but that’s beside the point. What’s notable about Arrington’s victory is that she encapsulates two of the central themes of the 2018 midterm contests: She is a Republican who enthusiastically supports Trump — and she is a woman.

Sanford earned Trump’s ire for his sharp criticism of the president. Shortly after Trump took office, Sanford referred to himself as a “dead man walking,” recognizing that bucking Trump bore political risks. On losing, he said that he could “stand by every one of those decisions to disagree with the president.”

Arrington, on winning, declared that “we are the party of President Donald J. Trump.”

This is not the first time a Trump critic has paid a political cost. In Alabama, Rep. Martha Roby (R) was forced into a runoff to defend her seat after having condemned Trump following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016.

Nor is it the first time a fervent Trump supporter has managed an unexpected victory. In Virginia on Tuesday, former gubernatorial

KATHRYN ZIESIG/CHARLESTON POST AND COURIER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

State Rep. Katie Arrington, seen after she voted in Tuesday’s primary, beat Rep. Mark Sanford (R), who has been critical of President Trump.

candidate Corey Stewart narrowly won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate and will face Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in November. Stewart, who served on the Trump campaign, earned a tweet of support from the president as well — despite Stewart’s embrace of the state’s Confederate history.

Incumbents pay close attention to how the winds are blowing, and among Republicans, the breeze is to Trump’s back. On the other side of the aisle, the pattern is — understandably — quite different.

This year, there has been a record surge in women running for the House and the Senate, as data from Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) makes clear. Nearly three times as many women are running this year for both the House and the Senate as have run in any year since 1974.

Not only are they running, but they’re winning. Tuesday’s primary results bolstered that trend, with women winning Democratic House primaries in Maine, Nevada (in two districts), South Carolina and Virginia (six districts).

Women won Republican House primaries in Virginia, Nevada and, of course, South Carolina.

Some of those victors were in-

cumbents, including Democrat Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota’s Senate primary. But, particularly on the left, women are running strong even when they aren’t defending their current seats.

According to the CAWP data, 132 women (38 of them incumbents) have won House primaries this year. Of those, 106 were Democrats. On the Senate side, five women have won primaries, four of them Democrats.

Part of the surge in women filing to run for office this year stems from the emergence of the #MeToo effort, of course, but the strength of that effort itself derives from the heightened importance of gender issues in politics that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. Women are engaged in politics to some extent because of Trump.

Republican candidates may not embrace all of Trump’s policies, but they recognize that bucking the president can have a political cost. Democrats are increasingly picking women to represent them in November. Those two trends are helping to define partisanship in this year’s midterm races.

Katie Arrington is both a representative of those trends and an exception to it. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Killing one species to save another BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

F

or years, hundreds of California sea lions have colonized the docks in the Oregon port town of Astoria, their loafing brown bodies serving as both a tourist attraction and a nuisance begrudgingly tolerated by officials. Authorities have deployed deterrents — including beach balls, electrified mats and a mechanical orca — in futile attempts to scare off the pinnipeds without harming them, because they are protected under federal law.

But when it comes to sea lions that swim their way from the coast to inland rivers, Oregon officials are no longer feeling so indulgent.

After years of nonlethal hazing efforts, the state wildlife agency is seeking permission to kill them.

The sea lions are a target because of their voracious appetite for threatened and endangered fish. They gobble up so many winter steelhead at Willamette Falls, south of Portland, that state biologists say there’s a 90 percent chance the fish run will go extinct.

If granted a special permit from the federal government, Oregon could trap and kill as many as 92 sea lions at the falls each year.

The conflict pits one protected species against another in an unusual battle that kill-plan proponents say is lopsided in favor of a thriving predator and that opponents say makes the species a scapegoat. Although hunting, bounties, habitat loss and pollutants caused the California sea lions’ population to drop below 90,000 in the 1970s, it has steadily risen since the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and now numbers nearly 300,000, or what the act calls “optimum sustainable population.” With the increase of the hulking animals has come tension over resources from beaches to fish.

“The real issue from our standpoint is just trying to find a balance,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), a veterinarian who cosponsored legislation that would make it easier for Oregon, Washington, Idaho and tribes each year

DON RYAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

States seek balance as protected sea lions’ appetite threatens endangered fish in Northwest to kill more than 900 sea lions that dine on protected fish in rivers.

The prospect of losing the steelhead run, Schrader added, is “just unacceptable to this veterinarian.

I love animals, but fish are animals, too.”

Although they are marine mammals, California sea lions have proved to be able freshwater inhabitants. After spending the summer breeding in Southern California, the 700-pound males typically voyage up the coast in the late summer or autumn and stay until May. While there, a few dozen adventurous individuals speed up the cool waterways of the Columbia River along the border of Oregon and Washington, hang a right at the Willamette and then park below Willamette Falls, a U-shaped cascade where Chinook salmon and steelhead stall while waiting their turn at the fish ladder they use to reach upriver spawning grounds.

For sea lions, the spot is a sashimi bar. According to a 2017 state report, more than 15,000 winter

steelhead were making it over the falls 15 years ago. This winter, about 1,000 did — more than the record low of 512 in 2017, but still the second-lowest number ever counted, said Shaun Clements, a senior policy adviser for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. At least 25 percent of the run this year was eaten by sea lions, the agency says.

The pinnipeds at the falls are also eating Chinook salmon in the spring, Clements said, and sea lions have begun to be spotted in other Columbia river tributaries with fragile fish populations.

The state’s proposal follows nonlethal efforts to haze sea lions with firecrackers and rubber bullets, methods that “they basically just habituate to,” Clements said.

Earlier this year, the state carried out an elaborate trap-and-release operation, capturing 11 sea lions when they hauled out to sunbathe on specially placed docks, trucking them 2½ hours to the coast and then letting them loose.

It didn’t work. Each relocated

In March, a California sea lion waits to be released into the Pacific Ocean in Newport, Ore. The federally protected California sea lions are traveling into the Columbia River and its tributaries to snack on fragile fish populations.

sea lion — which had been marked with brands, shavings or flipper tags — made its way back to Willamette Falls in less than a week.

One was relocated and returned twice. “It’s just not a long-term solution,” Clements said.

The agency is confident that taking out the sea lions that have figured out the route to the falls — about 40 of them were spotted there this winter — would curb the problem, because those animals would no longer be able to “share this knowledge with their friends,” as Clements put it.

The Humane Society of the United States is dubious. In public comments to the National Marine Fisheries Service, which will rule on the state’s permit application, the organization pointed to the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia.

For a decade, Oregon and Washington have been authorized to trap and kill sea lions there to save protected fish. Yet removed sea lions “are rapidly replaced by others,” Humane Society Marine Wildlife Field Director Sharon Young wrote, “since the situation that attracted predators remains unchanged,” resulting in an “endless and ineffective treadmill of death.”

The Humane Society and other opponents say Oregon’s focus on the sea lions plays down the effects of events that landed the fish on the Endangered Species List — habitat loss and dams that block migration — as well as competition from hatchery fish.

The decision on Oregon’s application is unlikely to come until later this year, at the earliest. The proposed congressional legislation, which has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, and has been backed by tribes, sportfishing organizations and some newspaper editorial boards in the Pacific Northwest, could lead to earlier action, although the measure hasn’t made it past the Senate in previous sessions.

“This is not like we’re going to wipe out sea lions or open a hunting season,” Schrader said of the bill. “It’s about targeted involvement at a critical time.” n ©The Washington Post

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Examining drugs’ role in depression BY

C AROLYN Y . J OHNSON

M

ore than a third of American adults are taking prescription drugs, including hormones for contraception, blood pressure medications and medicines for heartburn, that carry a potential risk of depression, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study found that people who took multiple drugs associated with a possible increased risk of depression were also more likely to be depressed, but researchers couldn’t distinguish whether the medications were the cause.

It’s possible people already had a medical history of depression before taking the drugs, or the medical conditions they were being treated for could have contributed to their depression.

The work is part of a provocative and growing body of research that documents how polypharmacy — the use of multiple prescription drugs at the same time — has risen in the United States.

The number of Americans taking at least five prescription drugs at the same time rose sharply between 1999 and 2012, and the elderly are particularly at risk for dangerous interactions between drugs.

The study examined drugs that list possible adverse side effects including depression and suicide, but that does not mean the link was always well-characterized — or that people should stop taking a drug that could be helping them. Painkillers and antidepressants were listed, which could be related to underlying reasons for the depression.

Dima Qato, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Pharmacy who led the study, said that while there has been attention to social factors that increase risk for depression, there is often little attention to the role of medications.

“We know polypharmacy is growing, we know it is not always promoting good health and longevity in patients, and we know a

ISTOCK

More than a third of Americans take medications that carry possible risk of depression, study finds lot of drugs have certain adverse effects — and one of them is depression and suicidal symptoms,” Qato said. “As a pharmacist, when a patient comes in and reports depressive symptoms, I just think it's really important to think about what other medications they are on.”

The study analyzed a detailed survey of thousands of American adults taken every two years between 2005 and 2014, in which people opened their medicine cabinets and showed researchers all the prescription drugs they

had taken in the last month. They were also assessed for depression.

Over the decade, Qato and colleagues found that 37 percent of U.S. adults, on average, took medications associated with a side effect of depression.

The team also found that the number of people taking at least three medications that carried a potential side effect of depression increased over the survey time period, from 6.9 percent in the 2005-2006 survey to 9.5 percent in 2013-2014. The rate of depression tripled in people tak-

The study found that the number of people taking at least three medications that carried a potential side effect of depression increased from 6.9 percent in the 20052006 survey to 9.5 percent in 20132014.

ing at least three medications with a possible side effect, compared to people taking no drugs with that side effect.

The researchers found the same pattern, even when excluding people who were taking antidepressants. Taking multiple medications that didn’t carry a depression risk was not associated with increased depression.

Michael Steinman, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, pointed out that for many drugs, the risk of depression as a side effect is not well understood and may even be controversial. Studies have shown mixed evidence, for example, about a link between commonly taken high blood pressure drugs called beta blockers and depression.

But even if doctors don’t have definitive proof that a particular drug is causing a depression, the study is a reminder that physicians should consider the role of medications — particularly for patients on multiple medications associated with increased risk of an adverse side effect, which the study shows are commonly used.

“It should up the ante about having the conversation about whether a medication is really helpful,” Steinman said. “A lot of times, people stay on medications for a long time. It’s easier to continue than to stop them. It’s a reminder to always be thinking: does this person really need this medication?”

Qato said that pharmacists stick labels on pill bottles, warning that drugs increase the risk of drowsiness, that people should take food or not drink alcohol with a certain medication, but that many patients — and doctors — may be unaware of the depression risks of certain prescription drugs.

“Even if the same doctor is prescribing drugs, the fact is that it’s really difficult — there’s no software that tells a doctor, ‘your patient is on three drugs that predispose them or are associated potentially with depression or suicidal symptoms,’” Qato said. n ©The Washington Post

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Canadians unite after Trump’s taunts S ELENA R OSS in Montreal BY

B

efore he was elected Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau faced a consistent type of criticism from his opponents: He was too young and too eager to please, conservatives said. His economic plans added up to “unicorns and rainbows.” He did not have the gravitas to represent Canada internationally.

But President Trump has helped bring together the most bitter of Canadian enemies, as he lashed out at Trudeau after the Group of Seven meeting in Quebec, and even the country’s staunchest conservatives have publicly backed up their Liberal prime minister for taking a tough tone in the U.S.-Canada trade conflict.

“I think sometimes, you know, you have to tell the schoolyard bully that they can’t have your lunch money. And I think that’s what the prime minister did,” said Jaime Watt, a Toronto-based conservative political strategist. “I think most Canadians would say that they were proud of their prime minister.”

James Smith, a spokesman for the federal New Democratic Party, which is left of center, echoed those on the right. “All Canadians stand united against these inflammatory attacks on our government officials,” he said. “Mr. Trump has made a career out of using bully tactics, and we all know there’s only one way to stop a bully.”

Canada’s House of Commons adopted an unusual unanimous resolution Monday backing Trudeau after Trump’s criticism, while Americans lent support to their northern neighbor on Twitter through a special hashtag #Thank Canada.

But that sense of solidarity extends further than Trudeau’s approach last weekend, said Watt and other Canadian political insiders from across the ideological spectrum.

Whatever the prime minister’s other actions on the world stage,

JACQUES BOISSINOT/CANADIAN PRESS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Prime Minister Trudeau has gained support from both sides in his handling of the U.S. president dealing with Trump is a unique dilemma, they said, and they have not been bothered by Trudeau’s decision to stick to civility until now.

“I can’t fault Trudeau for how he’s handled Trump or tried to handle it,” said Andrew MacDougall, who acted as communications director for former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

Trudeau’s critics still love to complain about his cutesy idiosyncrasies: wearing flashy socks, being seen shirtless in public, or photobombing regular Canadians. That is beside the point, MacDougall said.

“Yeah, the socks, the selfies, whatever,” he said. “That’s kind of fun to moan about — it’s not serious. But this is a very serious issue, our economic relationship with the United States. . . . Who knows what to do with Trump? Nobody knows what to do with him. His

own people don’t know what to do.”

Canadians agree last weekend was a turning point, and maybe an overall historic low, in Canada-U.S. relations. The two countries’ trade conflict has been ratcheting up for weeks, but twice recently — before and after the G-7 meeting — Trudeau repeated a certain comment, saying Canada was “polite” but “will not be pushed around.”

Trump took the second such comment, made in a news conference after the Quebec meeting, badly. In a tweet, he depicted Trudeau as two-faced, saying the prime minister had been “meek and mild” during the meetings, only to lash out afterward. “Very dishonest & weak,” he tweeted.

Perhaps some of the falling-out boils down to a misunderstanding of Canadian etiquette, said Bruce Heyman, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada — especially for somebody who’s coming from the

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, seen at right during a Group of Seven meeting with the prime minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, third from left, was the subject of insults

by President Trump after the summit.

world that [Trump] is coming from, and has been so blunt and so confrontational in his conversations and approaches.”

Canadians, Heyman said, “are collaborators who try to find paths to solutions.” It could be easy for someone to misread them, “not taking them seriously or not understanding the resolve they have.”

In the bigger picture, Trump’s provocations are gauged to elicit a reaction, others said.

“You know, I think this is a case of ‘kick the dog,’ ” said Fen Hampson, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“My reading is that Trump is, you know, trying to negotiate with the Koreans and dealing with much bigger players, the Chinese and the Europeans, on trade issues. I think he’s trying to make an example of Canada. Canada’s a small, super-friendly ally . . . and I think he’s just kind of sending a message to the rest of the world: ‘If we can treat the Canadian this way, you ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of what might be coming your way.’ ” Trudeau has two good reasons to change his tone now, Hampson said: First, the NAFTA talks are unlikely to be resolved any time soon. Second, the next federal Canadian election is next year.

“I think he and his government feel under some pressure to talk tough and to do so publicly.”

But when it comes to their international image, Trudeau has been generally keeping with what Canadians demand, said Nik Nanos, a leading Canadian pollster.

“I think that Canadians do pride themselves on an international image where we’re seen as being cordial, friendly and evenhanded in terms of trying to get along with other states,” he said.

“The reality is that even under the best of circumstances, Canada is a middle power and, you know, when you’re a middle power, you have to get along with larger powers. You’re not necessarily going to get along with larger powers by aggressively attacking them.” n ©The Washington Post

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Not a laughing matter to everyone

BY G RIFF W ITTE AND L UISA B ECK

T

he German Reichstag is normally a solemn place, its walls etched with a dark history, its debates marked by an earnest sobriety.

But ever since the Alternative for Germany stormed into the national Parliament last fall, becoming the first far-right party to do so in more than half a century, the glass-domed chamber on the banks of the River Spree has resounded with an unexpected sound: laughter.

Not the funny kind. The derisive kind. When other parliamentarians speak, AfD members try to drown them out with coordinated cackles.

“We were elected by people who want us to tell the truth,” said Georg Pazderski, an AfD party leader. “If [opponents] are talking nonsense, what should you do?

Should you boo or should you laugh? We are laughing.”

The tactic represents just one way the AfD is transforming politics in Germany, turning a system long marked by civility and stability into one increasingly characterized by point-scoring and provocation.

Party members also freely hurl insults at opponents and boisterously cheer their own, giving synchronized ovations to those who use their time at the lectern to unleash attacks on the centrist government or swing debate toward their favorite topic: contempt for immigration.

To AfD stalwarts such as Pazderski, the change represents nothing less than a democratic revival, the return of “a real opposition” after more than a decade of cozy consensus under Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Yet the party’s critics see something far more ominous: a coarsening of debate and the denigration of minorities in a country where that combination has led to catastrophic consequences.

Other European nations have grown accustomed to a far-right presence in their parliaments. But because of Germany’s past, the

ODD ANDERSEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Members of the Alternative for Germany party taunt political opponents with cackles and insults AfD’s emergence as a political force has been especially jarring.

Rather than shy from the controversy, the party has leaned into it. This month, AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland dismissed the Nazi era as a “speck of bird poop” in the broader sweep of Germany’s “glorious history.” Critics said the comment was part of a pattern in which the party attempts to minimize the crimes of the Third Reich.

The AfD has also drawn rebukes for adopting in debates some of the phrases and rhetorical techniques popularized by the Nazis.

“Some AfD members and media refer to these discussions as ‘more lively,’ ” said Petra Pau, a leader of the Left party, which occupies the opposite end of Parliament’s ideological spectrum. “But they are simply more aggressive and racist.”

There was the time in mid-May, for instance, when AfD co-leader Alice Weidel used a routine budget debate to denounce “girls in head-

scarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good-for-nothing people.”

The comment prompted an official rebuke from the parliamentary president, who described it as insulting to Muslim women. But it also earned Weidel an incendiary video for the party to post on Facebook. The clip quickly racked up thousands of likes.

“The AfD is trying to split society,” the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung concluded after reviewing 1,500 speeches delivered since this Parliament convened in late October. “And the Bundestag is cracking.”

If that was the goal, it’s happened quickly: The AfD is just five years old. It got its start by capitalizing on German resentment over European bailouts for Greece. Its popularity spiked after the 2015 migration crisis, when the arrival of more than 1 million asylum seekers in Germany spawned a backlash against the govern-

Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, react to a Free Democratic Party member in the first session of the new German Parliament in October.

ment’s welcoming stance.

Party leaders advocate mass deportations, question climate science and suggest that Germany may have to abandon the euro and return to the German mark.

In recent months, the AfD has taken on an outsize role for a party that won less than 13 percent of the vote in September elections and holds 92 seats out of the 709 in the Bundestag, the lower house of German Parliament.

The AfD’s status as the largest opposition party gives its speakers the first opportunity to rebut representatives of Merkel’s centerright Christian Democratic Union or their center-left partners, the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

More important is the AfD’s willingness to bend or even break unofficial rules of decorum.

Personal attacks on fellow lawmakers, for instance, were long considered out of bounds. But Aydan Özoguz, a former federal migration commissioner, has been on the receiving end of several, with AfD politicians dismissing her as “a failed example of integration.” Özoguz was born in Hamburg to Turkish immigrants and has been a Bundestag member for nearly a decade.

“We’re all prepared for confrontations that happen again and again and which previously weren’t common in Parliament,” she said. “They’re often at the limits of what’s legal.”

But what to do about it is a question that has divided the AfD’s opponents. The CDU has largely chosen to ignore its provocations. Other parties have taken a more combative approach. The Left and the Greens, in particular, have chosen to match some of the AfD’s tactics, issuing their own taunts and mocking guffaws.

Surveys show that about twothirds of the German public say they would never consider voting for the AfD. But that leaves a third who would, Pazderski noted hopefully, leaving ample room to grow.

And as for those who denounce the AfD as a resurrection of Nazi tactics and beliefs, he shakes his head: “I can only laugh at that.” n ©The Washington Post

Greg Glassman launched CrossFit as a business in 2000.

There are about 14,000 CrossFitaffiliated gyms around the world.

COVER STORY

Fizz Ed

The founder of CrossFit goes to war with Big Soda BY

M URRAY C ARPENTER

O

n a bright November morning, Congressman Scott Taylor is meeting with a visitor at his Capitol Hill office. Even in his dark suit and striped tie, the steely eyed, fit Republican from eastern Virginia looks every bit the Navy SEAL he once was. His visitor — Greg Glassman, founder and sole owner of CrossFit, a fitness company famous for its brutal full-body workouts — is older and dressed informally. He wears a ball cap over unruly ginger and gray locks, plus a three-day stubble, a flannel shirt, faded jeans and sneakers.

Taylor tells Glassman that his first CrossFit workout, way back in the early days, was in the garage of a fellow

SEAL who is now a top CrossFit staffer. Taylor wants to talk about other friends he has in common with Glassman, other SEALs who are CrossFitters.

Glassman, however, has a different conversation in mind. He wants to discuss Department of Defense money — specifically why a group called the National Strength and Conditioning Association should not receive Pentagon contracts. “We’ve watched these guys for years, knowing that their science was bulls---. We knew they fell asleep at the switch. While everyone was doing lateral raises and curls, and eating high-carb, the nation got profoundly ill,” Glassman tells Taylor. “CrossFit was born out of our realization of how f---ed up it was.”

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY BATT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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For Glassman, his visit to Taylor and his denunciation of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) are part of a very specific agenda: He is at war with America’s soda industry, which he accuses of corrupting the science around sugar while acting as an enemy to the general health of the country. The NSCA — which licenses physical trainers and is thus something of a competitor to CrossFit — was the starting point for his crusade, as well as its original target: The group publishes a journal that, several years ago, featured a study with a negative statistic about CrossFit injury rates; Glassman in turn discovered that the NSCA was partly funded by soda industry money. His indignation over this has now spiraled into a full-fledged war against Big Soda.

Glassman’s estimated net worth is $100 million, and he hired the Podesta Group (which would soon be defunct) to coordinate the lobbying on this trip to Washington. Yet in talking to Taylor, he presents himself as more of a citizen-advocate.

“I’m not fat with lobbyists. I don’t have soda-pop support,” he tells Taylor. “We don’t know our way around town.”

Taylor listens attentively. “I’d need to know both sides, of course, but obviously I’m an ally,” he says. “I know what you do, I respect what you do, I understand it, and I’m very intimately familiar with it. . . . So, if we can be helpful, we will, for sure.”

Three hours later, Glassman and his sixperson posse — made up of some of his top staffers and a lobbyist — are a half-mile away, visiting Jim McCleskey, who represents the interests of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in Washington. Glassman is talking about legislation that has worked its way through the state’s assembly. It’s arcane and complicated, something about the licensing of dietitians and nutritionists. Again, Glassman — determined, dogged, methodical — follows the story back to the influence of his competitors and, looming behind it all, Big Soda.

“What they can’t win with their bad physiology and their soda sponsorship, they’re trying to do with legislation,” Glassman says.

“This is the first I’ve heard of this,” McCleskey replies. “We haven’t heard from the soda people.”

The feud with soda companies is of a piece with Glassman’s highly competitive streak. Accompanying him on his D.C. visits are CrossFit employees Russ Greene and Russell Berger — blogging as “The Russells” — whose mission is “defending the brand against junk science.”

They do so with the wonkiness of healthscience experts and the ferocity of pit bulls. One of their posts from last year showed a mock-up of a hypodermic needle with a Coca-Cola logo, and the headline, “Why You Should Worry About Coca-Cola More Than Opioids.”

Glassman, too, is holding nothing back. And with 3 million followers on Facebook, 2.4 million on Instagram and nearly a million on Twitter, not to mention about 14,000 affiliated gyms around the world, CrossFit has given him

ANDRÉ CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

a massive preexisting soapbox — albeit a highly unconventional one for a policy crusade.

Glassman, now 61, started with far more modest goals when he developed the rudiments of CrossFit as a high school gymnast in California in his parents’ garage. He was trying to simulate a ring routine that required strength and composure during two minutes of maximum effort. “So I just brought the bar to my chest and went down deep into a squat, then shot back up and pushed the weights overhead.

I did three or four of those, and I go, ‘That’s the feeling,’ ” he recalls. “And then I mixed that with pullups. I did 21 of each, 15 of each, nine of each, and it made me sick. So I went and told the gymnast across the street — he was a pommel horse guy — and he did it, and he got sick. And we knew we had it.”

Glassman later competed as a gymnast at Pasadena City College, one of several colleges and junior colleges he attended. (He never completed his bachelor’s degree.) He was hampered somewhat by leg injuries from an early bout with polio, and by broken bones from hard dismounts that today have left him with a limp.

He then became a physical trainer, and by 1998, he was teaching classes at Spa Fitness Center in Santa Cruz. One of the members, Eva Twardokens, a former Olympic Alpine skier, says she became “hooked” on his CrossFit-style workouts — which were more akin to throwing hay bales and jumping over fences than they were

Suzanne Luther, above, works out at CrossFit DC. Glassman, opposite page, speaks at a training course at the original CrossFit gym in Soquel, Calif., in the early to mid-2000s.

to leg extensions or curls in exercise machines.

After leaving Spa, he rented a spartan space in a jujitsu studio. A small cadre of athletes, including Twardokens, followed him.

He launched CrossFit as a business in 2000, with his then-wife, Lauren Jenai. (The couple have four children. Glassman bought her out of the business after she filed for divorce in 2009.)

The company really took off, he says, when they started posting “The Workout of the Day” online. “I had 30 clients, and I was busy full time,” Glassman says. “You aren’t going to start a revolution with 30 people, you really won’t.

But we gave these workouts to the Net, and they came around.” In 2007, CrossFit held its first CrossFit Games, where men and women compete for the titles of fittest man and woman on Earth. By early 2008, the Globe and Mail reported, there were 350 affiliated gyms — or “boxes” — worldwide.

Today, Forbes estimates that CrossFit Inc. generates annual revenue of some $100 million. The company makes money by licensing its name to gyms for an annual fee and charging trainers for certification. “I grew a business accidentally,” Glassman explains. “What I did was I provided a remarkable opportunity, and I stayed the hell out of the way of my affiliates.

And they’ve grown like kudzu around the world.”

One of the most attractive elements of CrossFit is the communities it builds, which Glassman had not anticipated. “You take the

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CROSSFIT

headphones out, and you actually care about the person on, say, the bike or the treadmill next to you, and it’s better for everyone,” he says. “The hard thing would have been thinking how to effect that. It was not engineered; it was not.”

For all the camaraderie inside CrossFit boxes, though, the business itself has seen its share of conflict. There was the Glassmans’ acrimonious divorce and a bitter multiyear feud with Jeff and Mikki Martin, godparents of Glassman and Jenai’s children, over a CrossFit Kids brand the couple developed. (Jeff Martin declined to comment.) CrossFit affiliates have also been hit with a few personal injury lawsuits. (So far, only one has been found partially liable, the company says.) And through it all, Glassman has spoken out forcefully against any critics.

“He’s able to call people out in a pretty blunt way that gets their attention,” Twardokens says.

“And that’s what he’s doing with Coca-Cola.”

The study that set Glassman off on his quixotic campaign was published in 2013 in the National Strength and Conditioning Associationowned Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Although the study found aerobic and body composition improvements among CrossFitters, it also suggested there was a high rate of injury. CrossFit filed a federal lawsuit against the NSCA over the paper, claiming the group intentionally published false information about CrossFit to protect its training certi-

“He’s able to call people out in a pretty blunt way that gets their attention.

And that’s what he’s doing with Coca-Cola.”

Eva Twardokens, a former Olympic Alpine skier who followed Glassman to his first gym

fication business. The NSCA then filed a state lawsuit against CrossFit, Glassman, Greene and Berger in California, alleging “false and disparaging statements.” Both cases are making their way through the courts.

Some thought Glassman was overreacting — the nut of the study had actually been that CrossFit improves fitness — but the injury data was indeed flawed. The journal retracted the paper in 2017, and the next day, the lead researcher resigned from his position at Ohio State University. (The NSCA did not respond to requests for comment.)

Along the way, Glassman noticed that the NSCA was partly funded by PepsiCo. And the closer he looked, the more soda money he found — supporting not just training organizations, but also health nonprofits, medical organizations, diabetes foundations, even the foundations supporting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. (A 2016 study by Boston University researchers found nearly 100 national health and medical groups were sponsored by Coca-Cola Co. or PepsiCo. The American Beverage Association, which speaks for the industry, said in response that it was “proud to support” organizations focused on “strengthening public health.”)

Some research suggests such funding taints soda science. A 2013 analysis by a team of European researchers found that literature reviews sponsored by the food and beverage

KLMNO WEEKLY

industry were “five times more likely to present a conclusion of no positive association between SSB [sugar-sweetened beverage] consumption and obesity than those without them.” A 2016 study by American researchers that was funded

by NIH found similar results. (In response to such findings, ABA spokesman William Dermody says the industry’s “support for scientific research is strictly to inform and clarify discussions through scientific inquiry, and it is held to the highest standard of integrity.” He also argues that if there is a correlation between soda consumption and obesity, then obesity rates should have dropped along with recent declines in soda consumption, but they have not.)

Although the soda companies were not going after CrossFit directly, their role in funding scientific research seemed wrong to Glassman.

In early 2014, he posted on a CrossFit message board, “It’s time to drive Big Soda out of fitness and by extension, the health sciences.” As a long-term advocate of low-carb diets, Glassman was no fan of sodas, and he was outraged on principle.

Glassman also started venting on Twitter. In 2015, he tweeted an image of a Coke bottle next to the phrase “open diabetes,” a riff on the ad slogan “open happiness.” The rest of his tweet read, “Make sure you pour some out for your dead homies.”

That year, he also dropped in on a conference of the American College of Sports Medicine in San Diego, near one of his homes. The ACSM is another of the mainstream exercise science groups that certifies physical trainers, and it, too, is viewed by CrossFit as a competitor.

Coca-Cola was a founding partner of its signature program, Exercise Is Medicine, which emphasizes activity over diet.

At the 2015 conference, James Hill, an obesity expert at the University of Colorado, delivered the keynote speech on a new nonprofit initiative: the Global Energy Balance Network.

The network was pitching the message that consumers need not worry so much about what they are eating and instead should focus on staying active enough to burn those calories.

Don’t look at the soda in your hand, the campaign suggested; look at your own sluggish lifestyle.

The corollary to this is that a calorie is a calorie, whether it comes from cashews, kale or Coke. It’s an idea that is antiquated, and a growing body of research suggests it’s false.

Frank Hu, of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says all calories are not equal, and there’s also a “continuum of carbohydrate quality.” On the healthful end are minimally refined grains and legumes; soft drinks are at the opposite end. “One can of soda a day is associated with about a 25 percent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes,” says Hu. “It’s significantly associated with increased risk of weight gain and obesity in both children and adults, and associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and also increased risk of fatty liver disease, gout and some other conditions.”

Sitting at the ACSM conference in May 2015,

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Glassman says, it was clear to him that the Global Energy Balance Network was partly funded by Coke. “What I saw was that Coca-Cola was holding forth on chronic disease in my back yard,” Glassman told me. In July, he sounded off with a typically profane tweet about it. (A spokesman for ACSM referred me to the group’s website, which says that ACSM “maintains a clear and well-defined separation between the financial support of partners and the programmatic decisions that are made by the [organization] on matters of science, policy and advocacy.”)

Glassman’s was the first public criticism of the network, but it’s hard to say what effect it had. His missive was only retweeted 14 times, and others in the nutrition community were making the same point. Either way, though, his hunch was correct: In a front-page scoop that appeared a few weeks after his tweet, the New York Times reported that the Global Energy Balance Network was, in fact, rooted in $1.5 million of undisclosed funding from CocaCola.

After the funding was exposed, Coca-Cola’s then-CEO Muhtar Kent wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed pledging to be more transparent.

He released a list of Coke-funded public health professionals. In all, Coke had spent $118 million on its health campaigns over five years.

Following the exposé, Coke disbanded the Global Energy Balance Network, the University of Colorado returned $1 million to Coke in research funds, and Hill left his post as executive director of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Health and Wellness Center. (Hill did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, he said, “This was a difficult decision but I feel the need to devote more time to the Colorado Nutrition Obesity Research Center and to my own research in weight management and behavior change.” The University of Colorado said it returned the money because “the funding source has distracted attention from its worthwhile goal.”)

Glassman has also criticized the sugary sports drink Gatorade, which is owned by PepsiCo. He even convened a 2015 symposium to reconsider the hydration guidelines Gatorade has promoted. Overhydration can cause hyponatremia — when excessive fluid intake makes blood sodium levels drop dangerously low. In rare cases, it can be fatal.

PepsiCo did not respond to requests for comment. In the past, it has said: “Gatorade has made athlete safety and performance a priority for decades — and we continue to do so. . . . Any allegation to the contrary has no merit and stands in contrast to Gatorade’s actions to better educate athletes and advance the scientific understanding of athletic performance.

The overwhelming majority of experts agree that hydration is very important for athletes — and fluid needs vary from athlete to athlete.”

For its part, Coca-Cola spokeswoman Kirsten Witt Webb says the corporation has made changes since the 2015 episode involving the Global Energy Balance Network. “While we have given to organizations in various ways in

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY BATT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

the past, in 2016 we implemented new guiding principles that define how we will provide financial support for well-being related scientific research and partnerships,” Webb said in an emailed statement. “We have discontinued our funding of some programs and partnerships.”

As Glassman came to view the soda companies

as enemies, he began to pitch CrossFit as more than a killer workout; it was “the answer” to chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. “I see each of my 14,500 gyms as a lifeboat against a tsunami of chronic disease,” he told a group of doctors, nurses and nutrition researchers in Boston during a talk in December.

He has sought to spread this message through the CrossFit community. On a brisk fall day, he attends the CrossFit annual convention in a conference center just west of Dallas.

Inside, the halls are full of people in business-casual attire who look like typical Americans — a bit out of shape, more than a bit heavy.

But interspersed among them are some supremely buff men and women, in shorts or tights, and T-shirts. They are 140 of the top trainers from all over the world who play a critical role in the CrossFit organization.

The trainers stream into a large conference room and settle into rows of folding chairs.

Nicole Carroll, CrossFit’s director of training and certification, takes the stage and reminds them about the importance of their work.

Carroll is a CrossFit legend with nearly 72,000 Instagram followers, and she knows how to energize a crowd.

“It’s your mission. We’ve entrusted it to you,” Carroll says, her words echoing through the conference room.

With the crowd warmed up, Carroll introduces Glassman. He takes the stage, to a sustained standing ovation. Pacing, he tells

“I don’t want to have to practice fitness looking over my shoulder at Coke and Pepsi. I’ve got to get soda out of the health sciences. For me it’s a holy war. They are selling poison.”

Greg Glassman

Glassman has a major soapbox.

CrossFit has millions of followers on social media.

the trainers they are in a unique position to improve lives.

“Our affiliates are in possession of an elegant solution, so elegant it may be optimal, to the world’s most vexing problem,” Glassman says, “and that’s chronic disease.” The elegant solution? CrossFit, of course.

“Chronic disease is self-inflicted. It’s also preventable. That’s powerful stuff,” Glassman tells the trainers. “The solution is off the carbs and off the couch.”

Then Glassman begins talking about the NSCA. He casts himself, and CrossFit, as underdogs in battles with the NSCA, and with Coke and Pepsi. Afterward, he takes questions. The first comes from a trainer who seems mystified by his new focus. “How has the mission changed?” she asks. “Outside the room, people are confused by this.”

Here, Glassman starts to ramble a bit. He mentions the evils of sugar. He talks about the replication crisis, where researchers are unable to replicate results for long-accepted studies.

Soon, he’s talking about the “science wars” and holding forth on the scientific method. For a second, it seems that he risks losing the crowd.

On the whole, though, the audience of CrossFit faithful seems to take what he says at face value. The tougher question may be whether Glassman — as he barnstorms across the country speaking to doctors, researchers and lawmakers — is managing to influence the discussion about health and soda outside the CrossFit community.

“His clientele is obviously paying attention,” says Robert Lustig, a pediatrics professor at the University of California at San Francisco. “The rank and file of America are not listening, because they are kind of sugar-addicted.”

William Dietz, an obesity expert at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, says he doesn’t hear much about Glassman. “In the things I read, and the people I talk to, his name rarely comes up,” Dietz says. “I think he’s traveling in a different circle. Maybe it’s his own circle.”

Glassman wants warning labels on soda cans, and he backed a failed California bill to require them. In another of his policy pushes, he has asked lawmakers to strengthen conflictof-interest guidelines at the CDC and NIH. When I ask Glassman if his interest in fighting chronic disease is really just a shrewd way of growing the business, he says: “Nope. It’s a reorientation of what’s really happening when you go into the gym every morning, what’s the important part. It’s not the biceps you see, it’s the Alzheimer’s you won’t see.”

After the convention, Glassman says he’s in this fight for the long haul.

“I don’t want to have to practice fitness looking over my shoulder at Coke and Pepsi.

I’ve got to get soda out of the health sciences.

For me it’s a holy war. They are selling poison, and they are corrupting the health sciences,” he says. “I’m going to keep at it till it happens. I have the patience for a 100-year war, but if it takes five, I’m fine with that.” n ©The Washington Post

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More firms join effort to ditch plastic BY

D ARRYL F EARS

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ess than two weeks after a pilot whale died off Thailand with 80 plastic bags in its stomach, three major companies — SeaWorld, Ikea and Royal Caribbean — have vowed to remove plastic straws and bags from their properties.

The companies are now linked to a host of businesses, governments and others across the world that have joined an effort to dramatically reduce the 8 million metric tons of plastic that pollute oceans each year — “one garbage truck into the ocean every minute,” according to a 2016 report released by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The corporate activism is evidence that a fledgling movement to ban plastic straws, which sprang from outrage over plastic’s impact on the environment and animals, continues to stir.

Movement organizers have recruited Girl Scouts, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who, on World Environment Day this month, announced his nation’s effort to eliminate single-use plastic by 2022.

“Let us all join together to beat plastic pollution and make this planet a better place to live,” Modi urged.

His call to action apparently was not ignored. SeaWorld Entertainment announced days later that its 12 theme parks had removed “all single-use plastic drinking straws and single-use plastic shopping bags.” In a statement, interim chief executive John Reilly called the move “a testament to our mission to protect the environment, the ocean and animals . . . which are currently threatened by unprecedented amounts of plastic pollution.”

The same day, Royal Caribbean Cruises said its fleet of 50 ships “will ring in 2019 free of plastic straws.” That includes luxury liners under all of its brands, including Celebrity Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and Royal Caribbean

ZINYANGE AUNTONY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Royal Caribbean, Ikea and Sea World are among the companies seeking to reduce ocean pollution International. “For over a year now, RCL ships have begun implementing a straws upon request policy,” a statement said. “That program will be taken a step further by the start of 2019, when guests requesting a straw will receive a paper straw instead of a plastic one.” Guests will get wood stirrers for coffee and bamboo garnish picks as part of the drive to reduce trash.

By 2020, Ikea said, its stores will no longer hand out plastic bags or straws as part of an effort to become “people and planet positive” within 10 years. Lena Pripp-Kovac, the furniture giant’s sustainability manager, said that moving forward, Ikea “will design all products from the very beginning to be repurposed, repaired, reused, resold and recycled.” Ikea plans to take the effort a step further by introducing low-cost home solar products and even offering vegetarian food selections at its in-store cafeterias.

On July 1, Seattle will become the largest U.S. city to cut out all plastic straws and eating utensils in restaurants, while the California General Assembly is weighing legislation to ban straws and plastic bags statewide. Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Theresa May has announced her government will introduce a ban on the sale of plastic straws, stirrers and plastic-stemmed cotton swabs throughout the United Kingdom. The European Commission also has proposed rules banning 10 single-use plastic products throughout the European Union. (Its caveat: Alternatives would need to be “readily available and affordable.”)

In Europe, where the push for environmental sustainability and conservation is stronger than in the United States, Starbucks agreed recently to phase out all plastic straws and cutlery. But the Seattle-based company is resisting pressure to do the same at

Of the billions of tons of plastic produced since 1950, most of it is still sitting in landfills, such as the one above in Zimbabwe; recycling facilities; and the ocean, a study last year concluded.

home after a celebrity shareholder, Adrian Grenier, drafted a resolution demanding it start removing plastic and using paper. Starbucks has offered a $10 million grant to any group or individual with a workable idea for an environmentally friendly cup.

The global Plastic Pollution Coalition estimated last year that 1,800 “restaurants, organizations, institutions and schools worldwide have gotten rid of plastic straws or implemented a servestraws-upon-request policy,” said Jackie Nunez, founder of a group called the Last Plastic Straw.

In addition to the pilot whale that died June 1 after swallowing the dozens of plastic bags — which weighed 17 pounds at autopsy — a sperm whale that had ingested an estimated 65 pounds of trash was found dead in April on a Spanish beach.

The anti-straw campaign exploded after a YouTube video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose went viral in 2015. The video, which featured a cringe-inducing effort to pull the plastic out of a bloody nostril, has been viewed more than 26 million times.

Plastic production has surged from 15 million tons in 1964 to more than 310 million in 2014 and is expected to double over the next 20 years, according to that 2016 report. Like straws, plastic bags are easily swept upward by winds and deposited in drains that lead to open water.

The trouble with plastic, studies say, is it seldom goes away. Of the billions of tons produced since 1950, the vast majority is still sitting in landfills, recycling facilities and the ocean, a study last year concluded. A tiny percentage was burned in incinerators, which also produced pollution.

By midcentury, according to a 2016 study by the World Economic Forum, the amount of plastic in the ocean will outweigh the amount of fish. Plastic abounds on the high seas because about a third of what humans produce escapes collection, about “five bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world.” n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Long before Facebook, a fear of prying eyes N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID G REENBERG

O THE KNOWN CITIZEN A History of Privacy in Modern America

By Sarah E. Igo. Harvard.

569 pp. $35

f all the forces that revolutionized society in the 1960s — the civil rights struggle, the antiwar movement, the Beatles — none mattered more than the Supreme Court. The court’s confident activism under Chief Justice Earl Warren not only bequeathed Americans a Christmas tree’s bounty of new rights, it also furnished traditionalists with a target in assailing the overreach of unelected liberal elites. And no Warren court ruling prompted greater ridicule than Justice William O. Douglas’s assertion, in the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that . . . create zones of privacy.” On this famously (or infamously) insubstantial turf came to rest the establishment of a “right to privacy” that the court would use to legalize, in this instance, birth control and, eventually, abortion, gay sex and more.

But Douglas’s argument, if intellectually acrobatic, wasn’t without legitimacy. As the historian Sarah E. Igo reminds us in her masterful (and timely) new survey, “The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America,” amendments in the Bill of Rights do implicitly recognize privacy rights — specifically the Third (on the quartering of soldiers), Fourth (barring unreasonable search and seizure) and Fifth (against self-incrimination). In fact, the high court had rejected as early as 1886 “all governmental invasions of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.” The question in 1965 wasn’t so much whether citizens were constitutionally entitled to privacy but what precisely that right should encompass. Griswold, while surely a landmark, did not resolve that question. Critics at the time wondered whether the new constitutional allowance would cover protections from government surveillance, em-

JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

We seek privacy but also security, such as through surveillance by New York City’s counterterrorism center.

ployer-mandated psychological testing, invasive policing methods or even telemarketers. Some charged that Douglas had misnamed the right he plucked from the penumbral ether: Perhaps, they said, he should have spoken of the “dignity of the individual” or “the right to be left alone.”

That latter phrase, legal scholars will recognize, appeared in the seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren, “The Right to Privacy” — the point where Igo essentially begins her story. The attorneys proposed this right in response to newly aggressive forms of journalism that were turning individuals’ trysts and debaucheries, or even mere gossip, into headline fodder. The Gilded Age saw the advent of keyhole journalism, instantaneous photography, tappable telephones, surreptitious letter-opening and the prying moralism of sex crusaders like the notorious postal inspector Anthony Comstock.

As this diverse mix of threats suggests, the right to privacy has from the start been something of

a muddle, or maybe a smorgasbord — a series of distinct but somehow related entitlements to be free of society’s intrusions.

“The Known Citizen” shows us that Americans have invoked “privacy” to shield our papers, correspondence, families, homes, physical likenesses, health, sexual practices, personal relationships, conversations, whereabouts, purchasing habits, Internet browsing and even the history of our behaviors. Incursions upon it, meanwhile, have come from nosy neighbors and the federal government, from corporations and journalists, from law enforcement officers and parents of teens.

Igo’s final chapters chronicle a threat to privacy coming not from government or big business but from ourselves. Our current culture of disclosure and self-disclosure has fed a craze for confessional memoirs, stoked the news media’s willingness to report on politicians’ and celebrities’ private lives (and private parts), and flooded our screens with ordinary citizens’ oversharing about their illnesses, their kids and their sex-

ual encounters with Aziz Ansari.

But she underscores that our contemporary zeal for publicity has coexisted alongside a renewed anxiety about its limits. As a society, we want to learn as much as we can about ourselves; as individuals, we seek to preserve a margin of anonymity.

Over time, Igo argues, Americans have largely judged the rewards of social knowledge to outweigh the liabilities. As much as we have lobbied for a right to privacy, we’ve chosen to countenance practices of observation, surveillance and study that will help us in “reporting the news, protecting national security, tracking public health and social welfare, understanding human psychology, improving commercial efficiency” and more. Igo’s research and conceptualization of this topic are utterly original, and yet in some sense hers is a story as old as Adam and Eve: We are undone by our quest for knowledge. n Greenberg is an author and history professor at Rutgers University. This was written for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Clinton, Patterson are awkward duo

Master of baseball looks at early life

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

R ON C HARLES

ormer president Bill Clinton and thriller writer James Patterson have teamed up to write a novel together, which for pure marketing genius would be like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Katy Perry releasing a duet.

This isn’t the first work of fiction by a U.S. president, but “The President Is Missing” is, nonetheless, an extraordinary event. As the publishers gush, it’s the first novel “informed by insider details that only a president can know.”

The CIA can relax. “The President Is Missing” reveals as many secrets about the U.S. government as “The Pink Panther” reveals about the French government.

And yet it provides plenty of insight on the former president’s ego.

The novel opens with the commander in chief, President Duncan, preparing for a House select committee.

“My opponents really hate my guts,” Duncan thinks, but “here I am”: just one honest man “with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor.” Facing a panel of sniveling political opportunists intent on impeaching him, Duncan knows he sounds “like a lawyer” caught in “a semantic legal debate,” but darn it, he’s trying to save the United States! Although Congress insists he explain exactly what he’s been up to, he can’t reveal the details of his secret negotiations with a terrorist who is set on destroying the country.

As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan should be studied in psych departments for years.

But there are also curious differences: Rather than shrewdly avoiding military service, President Duncan is a celebrated war hero. Rather than being pleasured in the Oval Office by an intern, Duncan was tortured in Iraq by the Republican Guard. And rather

than being the subject of innumerable rumors about extramarital affairs, Duncan was wholly devoted to his late wife and now lives in apparent celibacy.

But onward! After all, this is, at least partially, a James Patterson book, and soon we’re crashing through his famous two-page chapters. The whole 500-page novel takes place in just a few days as a terrorist named Suliman Cindoruk plots to activate a computer virus devised by a beautiful Abkhazian separatist. Her virus has infected every server, computer and electronic device in America.

In a matter of hours, the country’s financial, legal and medical records will be erased; the transportation and electrical grids will crash. Hungry and Twitterless, without access to porn, fake news or Joyce Carol Oates’s cat photos, America will be plunged into the Dark Ages.

Only one handsome man can stop this, but it’s not easy for the president of the United States to slip out of the White House and foil international terrorists, particularly with those congressmen hot on his tail, intent on impeachment.

For much of “The President Is Missing,” Patterson seems to have deferred to the First Writer. That’s a problem. Rather than those insider details we were promised, the novel is full of tepid moralizing.

The larger problem, though, is how cramped the novel’s scope remains. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password.

It’s enough to make a reader nostalgic for the Dark Ages. n Charles is book editor for The Washington Post.

A

THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING

By Bill Clinton and James Patterson Little, Brown and Knopf. 528 pp. $30

I’M KEITH HERNANDEZ A Memoir

By Keith Hernandez Little, Brown. 341 pp. $28

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REVIEWED BY

A RAM G OUDSOUZIAN

t the outset, Keith Hernandez promises that he is not writing the formulaic memoir so common among baseball books. If only. “I’m Keith Hernandez” is something worse: It is a narrative mess, doomed by sloppy writing and a lack of self-awareness.

Hernandez has more to offer.

He defies the stereotype of the dumb jock. He conquers crossword puzzles and collects art and books. He enjoys the company of creative types such as artists and writers. “Seinfeld” aficionados will recognize the book’s title from his iconic appearance in an episode called “The Boyfriend.”

On the field, he was an outspoken leader, and he has deep knowledge of his sport’s intricacies. The mustachioed star attracted attention, whether in baseball’s backwaters or the nation’s media capital. He had a gorgeous line-drive swing, and he mastered the art of fielding first base, earning 11 Gold Glove awards. With the St. Louis Cardinals, he won the National League MVP award in 1979 and the World Series in 1982. With the New York Mets, he presided over the notorious band of hard-living, fun-loving personalities that won the 1986 World Series. He also stood near the center of Major League Baseball’s 1985 cocaine scandal, testifying in federal court about his drug use.

But “I’m Keith Hernandez” avoids most of the highlights from his heyday. Instead, it concentrates on his formative years in professional baseball, from his minor league debut in 1972 through his emerging stardom in 1980.

Hernandez seeks to explain how he developed his batting approach and gained the confidence to thrive.

Hernandez does provide some colorful sketches of minor league life: eccentric teammates and ramshackle ballparks, pill-popping and raunchy high jinks, the crazy tales and basic routines of a baseball life. He is at his best when

explaining the years-long refinement of his style at the plate. When he describes his adjustments, such as crowding the plate against lefthanded pitchers who had been flummoxing him with breaking balls, he conveys the details that make baseball so compelling.

“I’m Keith Hernandez” is stuffed with bad writing choices.

Almost half the pages have a footnote that offers a superfluous fact or purposeless story. His sentences are dotted with cliched phrases. Most annoying, he seems addicted to italics, especially for corny asides.

Hernandez’s writing style is frustrating, but the book is a failure because he resists any cleareyed reckoning with his insecurities. Hernandez does not explain why he lacked self-belief. Perhaps it is unclear to him. But it is obvious to any reader: His father, John, a former minor league first baseman, forced his major league dreams upon his son. Hernandez matter-of-factly tells a host of stories in which his father imposes his will, all in the service of Keith’s baseball career. At his father’s behest, he even delayed his first marriage for a year.

“I’m Keith Hernandez” does not grapple with the irony of his rise to stardom. Without his father’s tutelage and drive, he may have never reached the big leagues. Yet to be truly great, he had to shape his own destiny and become his own man. As the memoir closes, his father beams with pride while showing an old home movie of young Keith swinging the bat, and the adult Keith feels validated. “I realized why he’d been so hard on me,” he reflects.

This final gesture of acceptance seems inauthentic. It provides an unsatisfying ending to a flawed book. n Goudsouzian is chair of the Department of History at the University of Memphis.

His books include “King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution.”

He wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Maybe now we can finally talk about suicide PETULA DVORAK is a columnist for The Washington Post.

About 123 people die of it every day, but we still don’t want to talk about it. Those left behind often don’t receive casseroles or cards, flowers or fundraisers, hugs or visits.

The obituaries, too, are evasive, resorting to euphemisms such as “died in his home” or “died suddenly.”

This is what’s killing nearly 45,000 Americans every year, a rate that has soared in the past two decades, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released after Spade’s death and before Bourdain’s.

The silence, the stigma and the fear keep us from having real conversations — and taking action — when it comes to such a determined killer.

Cancer? We’ll beat it. Gimme a pink ribbon!

Drunken driving? Posters, billboards, legislation, police checkpoints. Drag that wrecked car in front of the high school during prom week. In your face.

Heart disease? Let’s get that cute, healthy heart mascot to dance around the convention floor! Wear your red dresses, ladies!

But suicide?

Shhhhh. The 10th-leading cause of death for Americans — the No. 2 killer of teens — cannot be discussed.

“Where are what I thought were my friends?” a woman wrote in a forum on the Alliance of Hope website, a suicide survivor support group, after her friends pulled away following her daughter’s suicide.

Another woman spoke of how her father’s suicide became taboo.

“One of the hardest elements of suicide, and one that isn’t spoken of much, is the stigma it carried,” she wrote. “I spent years growing up ashamed of how my father died. I worried that others would see me as broken or similarly troubled, as

he was. I struggled with how to explain my father’s death to new boyfriends, and then eventually my own children, who had many questions.”

I remember interviewing a mom whose son killed himself.

No one came to their house after the funeral. They became pariahs.

It’s a toxic mix of anxiety and judgment, not wanting to say the wrong thing to the survivors while wondering quietly what happened and whether they did anything to contribute to the suicide.

The blame game is always there.

Just read the raw, honest and virtuoso piece of writing by my colleague Roxanne Roberts on her father’s suicide. It wasn’t long after she cleaned the kitchen and buried him that other family members speculated on what her mother may have done to push him to suicide, or even whether they were the ones who pulled the trigger.

Schools certainly don’t want us to write about suicides, worried that the reporting will spark a copycat cluster.

We kill ourselves more than twice as much as we kill each other. In 2016, the United States had about 45,000 suicides and about 17,250 homicides.

That same year, there were

LEFT: BEBETO MATTHEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS; RIGHT: ANDY KROPA/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain have brought discussions of mental health into the open.

about 1.3 million unsuccessful suicide attempts, and at least 650,000 of them required medical attention, according to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center.

Next year, we will spend more on cannabinoid research ($144 million) than studying suicide causes and suicide prevention treatments ($103 million), according to the spending projections for the National Institutes of Health.

It remains in the shadows.

Some families are trying to change that.

Like the folks who’ve made news by publishing honest and detailed obituaries about the deaths of loved ones ravaged by the opioid epidemic, others are doing the same with suicide.

“No one came up to me or Ruth and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ If she’d gotten in an accident they would have said kind things, but now everyone knew and no one looked at us, like it was a character flaw,” Ed Shoener told my colleague Colby Itkowitz in 2016, after his daughter Katie had killed herself and he decided to write an obituary that detailed her struggle with mental illness.

“We felt shamed,” Shoener said. “We felt like maybe we weren’t good parents. They didn’t know what to say. As a

society we don’t know how to talk to each other about this. We don’t have a language for how to talk about mental illness.”

But with the deaths of Spade and Bourdain, we’ve all been talking about suicide. Why? How? They looked so happy?

They were so successful! They were rich!

Besides busting some of the myths about suicide — it happens across demographics — this publicity has had immediate results.

Twitter has been filled with inspirational stories of people who survived their brushes with suicide.

Counselors at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline were busy over the weekend, with a 25 percent jump in calls to its hotline, 1-800-273-8255, said Frances Gonzalez, spokeswoman for the Lifeline.

And, most importantly, the calls aren’t only from those who are feeling suicidal. They are coming from folks who are worried about those around them.

We tell folks who are having suicidal thoughts to “reach out.”

But that does no good unless someone else is there to pull them through.

That’s the key. Helping others.

Breaking the silence. Ending the stigma. n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

One way to ease the opioid crisis ROBERT WEISSMAN AND LEANA WEN Weissman is the president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington. Wen is the Baltimore City health commissioner. This was written for The Washington Post.

President Trump declared the opioid addiction epidemic a publichealth emergency in October, but more than seven months later, he and his administration have yet to take the steps that would help those fighting the epidemic on the front lines. Addressing a crisis that is devastating communities across the country and killing more Americans than gun violence or car crashes requires the federal government to take difficult actions — including providing robust resources and aggressively challenging the stigma associated with addiction.

But there also are easy actions to take, and the federal government is failing there, too.

One that could be done with the stroke of a pen: Use existing legal authority to slash prices for the lifesaving drug naloxone — an opioid-overdose antidote — and for its easy-to-use, patented delivery devices.

Our two organizations, the Baltimore City Health Department and the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, have petitioned Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president and the administration’s “opioid czar,” to employ this authority. Under federal patent law, any officer of the U.S. government has the authority to use a patented invention without permission from the patent holder, as long as

the government pays “reasonable” compensation.

In practical terms, this would mean the government would authorize and purchase generic versions of Narcan and/or Evzio (Narcan is naloxone with a nasal spray; Evzio delivers naloxone with a “talking” device that guides the user through injection) and distribute the products to local and state governments, nonprofit providers and others.

Alternatively, the government could authorize recipients of federal funding to procure the naloxone treatments from generic providers.

This approach would cut prices to a fraction of their current level and make lifesaving naloxone with easy-to-use devices far more available.

Narcan’s list price is $75 a dose,

and it is available to public providers at $37.50. Evzio lists for more than $2,000 a dose and is available to public providers at $180 a dose. Yet generic naloxone is available from Indian suppliers for as little as 15 cents a dose. Nasal inhalers like those used for Narcan list for less than $5 each and can be obtained in bulk for a small fraction of that price.

Easy-to-use naloxone makes a life-or-death difference. In October 2015, Leana Wen, an emergency room physician and the Baltimore City health commissioner, “issued a blanket prescription” for naloxone to all 620,000 Baltimore residents.

Since then, citizens have used that drug to save the lives of more than 2,000 family members, friends and neighbors. First responders have saved the lives of more than 12,000 others.

Baltimore has seen firsthand that training residents how to use naloxone and distributing this lifesaving medication will save lives and allow people with the disease of addiction the chance to be connected with treatment.

But Baltimore is being forced to ration naloxone because of its high cost. The city health department can afford only so many doses per week; officials must routinely make hard

decisions about who will receive the medication and who will have to go without. The surgeon general emphasized the importance of community members who may come into contact with people at risk for opioid overdose knowing how to use naloxone and having it in reach. But for Baltimore to provide a two-dose Narcan kit to every city resident would cost $46.5 million — more than Baltimore City’s entire contribution to the annual budget of its health department.

The Trump administration has at hand an easy cure for this problem in the form of its government-use authority, which the federal government routinely employs, particularly in the military realm. The only reason it is not used more often for pharmaceuticals is the political power of Big Pharma.

The choice before Conway and the Trump administration is simple: They can choose to lower prices and save lives. Or they can choose to perpetuate the rationing of lifesaving treatments and avoid offending Big Pharma at the cost of letting people across the country die for lack of access to affordable, easy-to-use naloxone delivery devices. We should not be priced out of the ability to save lives. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY CLAYTOONZ.COM

The cowardice of our politicians ROBERT J. SAMUELSON writes a twice-weekly column on economics for The Washington Post.

The trustees for Social Security and Medicare issued their annual reports this month. This is cause for discouragement because it reminds us how much we’ve mortgaged the country’s future to spending for older Americans.

Already, Social Security and Medicare constituted 42 percent of federal spending in fiscal 2017, say the trustees. If they had included Medicaid, the share would have exceeded 50 percent. As more baby boomers retire, these amounts will grow.

With interest payments on the national debt at almost 7 percent of spending in 2017 — and projected by the Congressional Budget Office to hit 13 percent in 2028 — there isn’t much room for anything else.

Here’s the conclusion of a new study by Eugene Steuerle and Caleb Quakenbush of the Urban Institute, a think tank: “We project that over the coming decade, nearly all growth in [federal] spending will go towards higher health [care], Social Security, and interest costs — with little left for almost everything else: infrastructure, research, education, defense, housing, and most basic government functions.”

From 2017 to 2028, they estimate that Social Security spending, after inflation, will grow 3.8 percent a year and

Medicare 4.9 percent.

Meanwhile, defense spending increases only 0.3 percent a year and most other spending — food stamps, highways, federal courts — rises a mere 0.7 percent annually.

None of this is a secret. Indeed, I have written columns like this for more than 30 years — and that’s why it’s so discouraging.

Many public-policy problems are genuinely hard to solve. Some are surprises. Say, 9/11. Other social problems are so complex that, even with the best of political will, it’s hard to make progress. Say, improving schools.

But an aging population doesn’t fit this formula. The problem is clear; solutions are at hand.

We have known for decades that Americans 65 and older would increase from 12 percent of

BY ADAM ZYGLIS FOR THE BUFFALO NEWS

the population in 1990 to about 15 percent now and 20 percent in the late 2020s. That’s no surprise.

Similarly, we have known that health costs are rising faster than national income, even as the health status and life expectancies of older people improve. Finally, we have known that many elderly households have sizable retirement savings.

We need to rewrite the social contract between generations to reflect these changed conditions — longer life expectancies and greater private wealth. Eligibility ages need to be raised; benefits for wealthier recipients need to be trimmed. At age 65, typical Americans live two more decades. We simply cannot afford to subsidize a fifth of the population for an additional 20 years or so.

Instead, politicians freeze at the mere mention of cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

There are three common explanations for this: People sympathize with the elderly, who are usually someone’s parents or grandparents; recipients have been “promised” their benefits; and the elderly — and their lobbies — will retaliate at the ballot box against politicians who threaten their benefits.

Democrats bear a disproportionate responsibility

for the stalemate, because Social Security and Medicare are their signature programs. For decades, liberals have accused anyone who suggests benefit reductions as being cruel, uncaring and immoral.

Naturally, Republicans find debate on these terms unattractive and have increasingly abstained. The result has been to make political cowardice intellectually respectable.

The irony is that the progovernment (Democratic) party is, quietly, weakening government by its staunch support of Social Security and Medicare, which systematically squeezes other programs. This also precludes any serious effort to reduce budget deficits.

Let’s be clear: Even modest reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits would still leave huge programs and would not eliminate conflicts between generations. But spending cuts would make for a fairer generational balance and would relieve the pressures to cut other programs, including defense.

We are passing along to our children a governmental apparatus that invests heavily in the past and shortchanges the future. Shame on us. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2018

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Presidential pardons BY

B RIAN C . K ALT

Last month, President Trump pardoned boxer Jack Johnson and pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and he recently declared that he can even pardon himself.

The pardon is the most kinglike power our presidents have; they can apply it whenever and to whomever they like. Still, many misconceptions surround this constitutional perquisite.

MYTH NO. 1 You must be charged and convicted to be pardoned.

Some state governors are limited in this way. Presidents are not. Most pardons are funneled to the president through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which considers applications only from people who have already served their sentences. But presidents can, and do, bypass that process. In Ex parte Garland, the 1866 Supreme Court settled the question of preemptive pardons. The justices decided that while pardons could reach only past acts, the pardon “may be exercised at any time after [the act’s] commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

Even before Garland, President Abraham Lincoln (among others) pardoned dozens of people — including alleged traitors — preemptively. More recently, President Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of Vietnam draft evaders, including those who had not been charged or convicted. And, most famously, President Gerald Ford pardoned President Richard Nixon, who had not yet been charged with anything.

MYTH NO. 2 Nixon resigned only after Ford promised to pardon him.

It is true that Nixon’s chief of staff, Al Haig, had asked Ford a week before the resignation to pardon Nixon. But Ford was noncommittal. Fearing that Haig might have taken this as tacit agreement, Ford called him in the

presence of witnesses to say he had not committed, and would not commit, to pardoning Nixon.

Two months later, in response to a House panel’s question about a possible quid pro quo, Ford recounted the timeline and assured the panel that “there never was at any time any agreement whatsoever concerning a pardon to Mr. Nixon if he were to resign and I were to become president.” If Ford, an honorable man by all accounts, flat-out lied to the House committee, there is no proof of it.

MYTH NO. 3 President Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning.

After facing criticism for his pardon of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Trump retweeted Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich’s reproach that Obama had pardoned Manning, “a traitor who gave U.S. enemies state secrets,” and Oscar López Rivera, “a terrorist who killed Americans.”

But these were commutations, not pardons. A full pardon provides absolution; it ends and/ or preempts any punishment for an act. A commutation merely mitigates the punishment; it leaves a criminal conviction in place but reduces the consequences. Obama shortened Manning’s sentence from 35 to seven years and López Rivera’s from 70 to 36 years. Both were freed, but they are still convicted felons.

MYTH NO. 4 Accepting a pardon means you are guilty.

In 1915, the Supreme Court

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

President Trump in May shows his pardon of black boxer Jack Johnson, who was convicted in 1913 for violating a Jim Crow-era law.

wrote in Burdick v. United States that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it.” Over the years, many have come to see a necessary relationship between a pardon and guilt.

But Burdick was about a different issue: the ability to turn down a pardon. The language about imputing and confessing guilt was just an aside — what lawyers call dicta. The court meant that, as a practical matter, because pardons make people look guilty, a recipient might not want to accept one. But pardons have no formal, legal effect of declaring guilt.

Indeed, in rare cases, pardons are used to exonerate people. This was Trump’s rationale for posthumously pardoning boxer Jack Johnson, the victim of a racially based railroading in 1913.

Ford pardoned Iva Toguri d’Aquino (World War II’s “Tokyo Rose”) after “60 Minutes” revealed that she was an innocent victim of prosecutors who suborned perjured testimony in her treason case. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger because he thought the former defense

secretary, indicted in the Irancontra affair, was a victim of “the criminalization of policy differences.” If the president pardons you because he thinks you are innocent, what guilt could accepting that pardon admit?

MYTH NO. 5 The law on self-pardons is clear.

The law simply is indeterminate here. This is an unsettled legal question with colorable arguments on both sides; all we can say is that a president could try to pardon himself, and that it might or might not work.

In my opinion, the best reading of the Constitution suggests that a self-pardon would be invalid. (I first wrote against self-pardons in the Yale Law Journal in 1996.) But saying what you think a judge should do is very different from knowing what a judge will do. n Kalt, a law professor and the Harold Norris faculty scholar at Michigan State University, is the author of “Constitutional Cliffhangers: A Legal Guide for Presidents and Their Enemies.” This was written for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2018

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