We are (we think) in the final weeks (Days? Hours?) of the 2021 legislative session, with all the misery and confusion that entails. I’m not sure how many bills are left (though I’d wager that either or both of you who are reading this probably know exactly), but it remains a substantial number.

Many (oh, so many) of those bills are, shall we say, horrid, and I will probably comment on those in due course. Like the concentric circles of intensifying misery in Dante’s Inferno, there are tiers of bad — at the peak are those which inflict their harm intentionally; the slew of bills we hear about each week targeted at various objects of the left’s hatred — business, the police, charter schools, the successful and so forth. This year’s session has provided many of these poisonous wells from which to dip, but let’s consider the potential impacts of one, which seems to have escaped scrutiny.

HB 1251 concerns the use of chemical restraints. You may recall the tragic incident from 2019 where Elijah McClain died after being injected by paramedics with ketamine, a sedative, following a struggle with police. It was an all-around lamentable situation, but not one which clearly cried out for a new law. Especially one which bears with it the potential consequences that 1251 does.

Ketamine is administered, on occasion, by paramedics who are called to a scene where police have had to subdue a suspect who continues to resist, placing himself, first responders, and potentially others at risk of injury. It is a sedative that is used – again, by paramedics – to address medical emergencies that can manifest in highly agitated people after a prolonged struggle. The problem with the bill is not in prohibiting a police officer from administering the drug; trust me, no cop wants that added responsibility. The trouble lies in where it says that a law enforcement officer cannot “direct or unduly influence” the use of ketamine by another person. In effect, the bill classifies a police officer’s words as a physical use of force, equivalent to utilizing physical restraints, using a baton, deploying a taser, or discharging a sidearm.

It is not difficult to see how this could play out badly in the real world. The police are generally the first to respond to a complaint or a disturbance, and their job is to secure the scene for others — paramedics, for instance — to do their jobs. In the case where a subject continues to resist, the paramedics may determine, in their medical judgement, that a sedative like ketamine ought to be used. To make that determination, they need to know what happened up until the point they laid eyes on the person. That means talking to the responding officers. Only now, those responding officers are going to be hesitant, to put it mildly, to provide an accurate description of what transpired or how the subject behaved, for fear of “unduly influencing” the paramedics decision, insofar as providing accurate information to the paramedics could result in criminal charges.

This bill creates a whole new viper’s nest of problems without offering anything that would have prevented the death of Mr. McClain.

So many of the new laws gestating at the capitol do not accomplish much, at least not what they intended to, though I suppose it is a blessing of sorts that not all of them come with the same adverse consequences as the ketamine bill. Most of this session’s gun-related bills, for instance, are, in my judgement, not especially egregious – attribute it to my end-of-session fatigue, if you will, but I’m not one to lose sleep over stronger background checks or a requirement to report if my guns get lost or stolen. But will any of these bills actually do a thing to reduce gun violence? No, of course not.

It has long bothered me that our impulse to Do Something generates so many hundreds of new pieces of legislation each and every year. Most of those bills germinate from a lovely, epiphanistic idea, as abstract as it is altruistic. But the world that lies outside the marble and granite of the State Capitol, the world of businesses, households, churches and families which are subject to the laws generated within that building, is not an abstract. It would be good if we could pause in our reformist zeal long enough to ask, with each of these bills, what will this actually accomplish? And what harm will it do?