Jacob Sullum

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason, a monthly magazine that covers politics and culture from a libertarian perspective. During two decades in journalism he has relentlessly skewered authoritarians of the left and the right, making the case for shrinking the realm of politics and expanding the realm of individual choice. ... In 2004, he received the Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties, and in 2005, he received the Drug Policy Alliance's Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism.

Sullum has also written for National Review, Cigar Aficionado, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Sullum writes about a wide range of issues, including drug policy, gun control, censorship, privacy, education, and religious freedom. ... Sullum, a fellow of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, has been a featured speaker at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform ... In 1988 he won the Keystone Press Award for investigative reporting, and in 1991 he received First Prize in the Felix Morley Memorial Journalism Competition.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist ... Sullum's weekly column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, is carried by newspapers across the U.S. ... Saying Yes has been praised by both sides of the political spectrum. National Review called it "a highly effective debunking," and Mother Jones described it as "a healthy dose of sober talk in a debate dominated by yelping dopes." For Your Own Good also was widely praised by reviewers, who called it "compelling" (The Wall Street Journal), "meticulously logical" (The New York Times), and a "cogent and thorough...must-read" (The Washington Post).

Jacob Sullum: I started identifying in college as a classical liberal, picked up my first copy of reason after graduating, and saw this whole intellectual tradition ... One of the best things about reason was that it gave me all these things to read. I hadn't read any Rand, Hayek, Mises, or Bastiat. I started getting pointers about things to read in political philosophy and economics. I thought the magazine was kind of crazy because it was very extreme. But the more I read, not just reason but things reason led me to, the more I started to see the thread of consistency.

The Chong raids had no effect on the national marijuana market or on the vast majority of the 20 million Americans who use cannabis each year. Author Jacob Sullum observed,

Although the thought of a bong-bearing hippie under every bed may keep Ashcroft awake at night, it's hard to see how seizing marijuana pipes can be expected to have any impact on drug use. As long as there are paper and aluminum foil, pot smokers will have ready alternatives.

Ron Paul is not just a rare politician. The Texas Republican's combination of principle and plainspokenness ... has helped his presidential campaign break fund-raising records while attracting a strikingly diverse and enthusiastic crowd of supporters ... On CNN Paul emphasized that racist libertarian is an oxymoron, since libertarians judge people as individuals. He should follow through on that point by identifying the author(s) of the race-baiting material and repudiating not just the sentiments it represents but the poisonous, self-defeating strategy of building an anti-collectivist movement on group hatred.

It used to be said that Social Security was the "third rail" of American politics: If you touched it, you were dead. Nowadays it's more like the first and second rails: You can take a stand on it ... until a train comes along ... Social Security, which forces relatively poor workers to subsidize relatively affluent retirees, is not a fair system, and any attempt to fix it–or, better yet, dismantle it–will not be entirely fair either. Yet we need to start talking about how the suffering should be distributed. We can't dodge the train or stop it, but if we all get down on the track we can at least spread out the pain of its impact.

Reason: How did you become interested in guns?
John R. Lott Jr.: About six years ago, I was teaching a class dealing with crime issues at the University of Pennsylvania, and it dawned on me that my students would be interested in some papers on gun control. It forced me to look at the literature systematically to decide what papers to assign to the class. I was shocked by how poorly done the existing research on guns and crime was. ...
Lott: I understand the constitutional arguments, but I think for the vast majority of people the bottom line is whether the presence of guns, on net, saves lives or costs lives.

Simply having one of Thomas Szasz's books on your shelf can lead to an argument. Explaining his most familiar contention—that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as "mental illness"—almost invariably does. And the very mention of his name has been known to provoke a heated response from certain people ... Szasz ... has produced some 700 articles and two dozen books, including Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry (1963), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1965), The Manufacture of Madness (1970), The Myth of Psychotherapy (1976), The Therapeutic State (1984), and Our Right to Drugs (1992).

While preparing a 20/20 segment on multiple chemical sensitivity that aired in January, John Stossel sent ABC associate producer Deborah Stone and her sister-in-law, Julie, to Dr. Grace Ziem, an MCS specialist in Baltimore ... The National Press Club has recognized [Stossel] five times for excellence in consumer reporting ... [E]xposing scams has been a persistent theme in Stossel's career as a consumer reporter, and he continues to go after hucksters, swindlers, and charlatans, even when they happen to work for the government or serve a fashionable cause.