This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 14th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

States and the feds have laws on the books governing drug paraphernalia

with associated charges for buying selling transporting those items.

Those laws stand in the way of public spirited citizens attempting to set up non-profits

to help their fellows get access to clean needles and maybe other services as well.

Cato's Jeff Singer is co-author of a new paper on the trouble with drug paraphernalia laws.

We spoke yesterday.

Whenever you see a drug bust, police like to post these on social media and they like to

spread out their booty, if you will, on a table and say this is what we've seized. It'll be some amount of drugs, some amount of cash,

and often drug paraphernalia. And drug paraphernalia has a legal definition in every state and at the federal level.

So what is drug paraphernalia?

Okay, well on a federal level, it's against the law to transport drug

paraphernalia and the federal statute to transport drug

profane across state lines and the federal statute spells out what it

considers drug paraphernia and And it's generally anything, any device

or implement that can be used to consume, make,

or test illicit drug.

That's federal law.

On the state level, it's against the law to possess, sell, or distribute drug paraphernalia.

And again, each state in their statute usually spells out what they consider

drug prefane and different states actually are different about that. Some are more specific and

...