The Badger Institute’s president acknowledged Tuesday that the sole author listed on their published “Real Facts” policy briefs on marijuana legalization personally favors legalization and works for national organizations that are aggressively pushing marijuana legalization and criminal justice reform nationwide.
Despite all of that, Badger Institute’s President Mike Nichols insists Jeremiah Mosteller doesn’t have an “agenda” when writing about marijuana legalization for the ostensibly conservative Wisconsin think tank.
Responding to our Monday article exposing Mosteller’s pro-legalization biases, Nichols also claimed that Badger Institute is going to balance out Mosteller’s views with “yet-to-be published marijuana research” by Badger Institute’s policy director Pat McIlheran in the future, “some of which will have his name on it.”
However, the four extensive marijuana legalization policy briefs published by Badger Institute from August 2023 through Sunday contained only Mosteller’s name. An article that ran Monday is authored generically “Badger Institute.”
Nichols’ intro to the project, which presents the briefs as unvarnished “real facts,” only mentioned Mosteller. McIlheran has shared Mosteller’s stories on X without mentioning his involvement.
Although Nichols presented Mosteller’s work as “real facts,” he now says McIlheran is involved because of Nichols’ desire to have “two individuals with unimpeachable backgrounds in law and journalism – and different viewpoints on legalization as well as the humility to be open to new facts.”
Mosteller’s articles have been published in the build-up to Republican legislators announcing Monday that they are proposing a medical marijuana bill.
As we wrote Monday, we question why Badger Institute was publishing a paid pro-legalization advocate’s research on marijuana legalization as if it was agenda-free in the first place. We think Badger Institute should have been more transparent about his pro-legalization advocacy and work, and we think that, if they were going to have McIlheran do future work on the topic, they should have made that clear at the beginning of their series. After all, the series started in August during a crucial time frame in Wisconsin’s marijuana legalization debate.
Questions Were Raised in 2021
Frankly, we have had some concerns about Badger Institute’s direction since they started publishing a series of articles on “criminal justice reform” in 2021, when that became a national liberal media crusade in the wake of George Floyd.
That series highlighted “racial disparities” in the criminal justice system. It pushed shorter supervision terms for criminals and called for “police reform.” As one “solution,” the Badger Institute proposed that Wisconsin “establish lower maximum caps for length of extended supervision.”
They also proposed allowing “inmates to petition for a sentence adjustment after serving a smaller percentage of their time.” We do not believe urging the state to be more lenient on incarceration for criminals is the right emphasis.
The state director of the Charles Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity was listed at the bottom of that Badger Institute criminal justice reform plan. AFP is the same prominent group that employs Mosteller.
In recent years, Charles Koch has been extremely vocal about his pro-marijuana legalization and criminal justice reform agendas. In addition, as American Prospect noted in 2019, “Since at least 2015, the Koch brothers had been preaching a newfound dedication to ending overcriminalization … it was puzzling to see one of the most arch-conservative political outfits in the country dive into an issue seen as a province of the political left.” They noted that even BLM activists had teamed up with Koch representatives to advance Charles Koch’s newfound desire for criminal justice reform; David Koch died in 2019.
We asked Nichols, “Who is paying for his fellowship?” referring to Mosteller, who is listed as a Badger Institute fellow. Specifically, we also asked, “Has Badger taken money from AFP, Charles Koch, or the Cannabis Freedom (Alliance)? When and how much?”
This was Nichols’ response: “Mosteller and McIlheran, for what it’s worth, are both paid with general operating funds. There is no specific donor funding either of them. None of the money for anything Mosteller or McIlheran does here has ever come from AFP or Charles Koch or the Cannabis Freedom Alliance that Mosteller has been a part of.”
We sent Nichols a new request asking – again – whether Badger has accepted any money from Koch, AFP, and/or the Cannabis Freedom Alliance. He refused to say, writing, “We never confirm or deny the names of donors but I will say we have never taken money to do marijuana research. It’s a big topic all around the country and one that keeps coming up in Wisconsin so we just thought it would be helpful to provide as many facts as possible to anyone interested.”
Mosteller is currently listed as a “Policy Director at Americans for Prosperity.”
If McIlheran is going to be doing future research on marijuana legalization, though, that’s great. We respect him and believe the public deserves a fuller accounting of the topic. We believe what Badger Institute publishes sometimes influences legislators and, occasionally, the public.
“Jessica McBride and Jim Piwowarczyk noted in a Wisconsin Right Now piece they ran Monday that Jeremiah Mosteller, a Badger Institute visiting fellow working on our ‘Real Facts’ policy briefs, is personally in favor of marijuana legalization. That much is true,” Nichols wrote.
“Mosteller is a policy director at Americans for Prosperity, a national public policy organization. It’s supported by Charles Koch, who, as McBride and Piwowarczyk wrote, publicly favors marijuana legalization,” he confirmed.
Nichols continued, “AFP, too, favors legalization and is in the Cannabis Freedom Alliance, a coalition founded in part by Weldon Angelos, who was convicted of selling marijuana — and pardoned for it by President Trump. The coalition includes other pro-legalization center-right organizations with a diversity of perspectives.”
Nichols added: “Conservatives who pay attention know none of this is a secret.” According to Nichols, there is a spectrum of conservative and libertarian views on marijuana legalization. “It is unclear how being somewhere on that spectrum disqualified Mosteller to work on a project for a conservative think tank in Wisconsin – any more than it disqualifies McIlheran,” he wrote.
There are several issues and omissions in Nichols’ statement worth noting:
- It’s not that being somewhere on the spectrum – ie blatantly pro-legalization – disqualifies Mosteller from writing about it. The problem is that Badger Institute presented his research as if it was neutral “real facts” and didn’t disclose his pro-legalization agenda to readers.
- Nichols waters down Mosteller’s views as personal views about marijuana legalization. Everyone holds personal views. However, Mosteller, as his writings make clear, is aggressively pushing a pro-legalization agenda nationwide.
- Nichols leaves out that – according to a pro-legalization column that Mosteller co-authored for Newsweek on Nov. 15 – Mosteller was listed as executive director of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance. Its mission? The group’s website says it “seeks to end the prohibition and criminalization of cannabis in the United States in a manner consistent with helping all Americans achieve their full potential and limiting the number of barriers that inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship in a free and open market.” The Newsweek column says of President Joe Biden, “We appreciate his willingness to acknowledge the failures of marijuana prohibition.”
- Nichols leaves out the fact that rapper Snoop Dogg helped inspire the alliance, which was formed, in part, by the pro-legalization Charles Koch. According to the Hill, “The idea for the Cannabis Freedom Alliance sprouted from a Zoom call between Angelos, Snoop Dogg and Koch last summer.”
- Mosteller’s Badger Institute bio does not tell readers he was part of the Cannabis Freedom Alliance at all. His LinkedIn page doesn’t mention it, either. The bio does say Badger selected him because of his work nationally to “shape state and federal marijuana policies.” If he’s trying to “shape” policies, how can his work for Badger simultaneously be agenda-free and neutral? What?
WRN wrote that the Badger Institute “should have hired a researcher with a ‘countering’ agenda that would present a fuller picture.” That’s where Nichols says McIlheran comes in, described by Nichols as “avowedly skeptical of legalization” and a self-described “paleoconservative.” In addition to working on not-yet-published pieces that Badger never announced as part of the project until WRN’s story, Nichols claims McIlheran is editing Mosteller’s work.
“Between the two poles of the libertarian Koch and the populist Trump, one finds a large tent enclosing most of the broad conservative movement in the United States and including differing opinions on legalization,” Nichols wrote.
The other problem with this statement is that, nowhere in his intro to the project nor in the published articles themselves did Nichols mention McIlheran’s involvement.
Although Nichols denies it, we detected a pro-legalization tilt to Mosteller’s articles.
Example: His fourth installment, which starts, “Cannabis legalization might be a policy that many would assume is a negative for a state’s workforce, but our analysis of the limited available research paints a much more complex and positive picture.”
Because McIlheran has “editing oversight” over “absolutely everything Mosteller has written,” Nichols says the result “is a factual and neutral approach that we can always add to if one side or the other wants to weigh in.”
We will leave it to the public to decide whether a non-neutral, paid pro-legalization advocate can be “factual and neutral” on the topic.
Nichols also wrote that Wisconsin Right Now, among other things, “notes that it hasn’t seen a paper from Badger Institute about the psychosis-linked effects of using cannabis.”
Nichols admits “that’s true” and then claims that, as with all of his other stories on the topic, McIlheran is apparently working on it.
Nichols’ response to us also mentioned polling numbers that say 52% of conservatives “favor legalization in America.”
“Getting those details right is crucial to providing credible answers to Wisconsinites,” he wrote.
On that, we agree: We want Wisconsinites to have credible research on marijuana legalization in which authors’ agendas are clear.
Nichols then states that Wisconsin Right Now “pointed out an article in the Chicago Tribune that referenced a study that had found the rate of fatal crash drivers who tested positive for marijuana rose from 25% to 37% in the two years after legalization.”
He then acknowledges Mosteller left that out.
He said that Badger “did not include this finding in the report we published because — as we noted on the first page — we have considered only research that is academic, peer-reviewed, and original.”
He added: “The study referenced in the Chicago Tribune piece is a report published by the Illinois Adult Use Cannabis Health Advisory Committee that serves as the state’s annual evaluation of the implementation of legalization.”
In a section on “road safety and traffic fatalities,” Mosteller acknowledged that “the main psychoactive substance in cannabis – tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – does diminish a user’s ability to drive” but noted “researchers have so far been unable to identify a definitive association between a mere detection of THC, the amount consumed, and someone’s level of impairment,” and added that OWI “of any substance” has “declined” in America in recent years.
Nichols then admits that he was “so upset” because he doesn’t believe he received enough time to respond to the article. However, what he doesn’t tell people is that he did respond just over two hours after the article’s publication on Monday night.
When we offered to immediately put Nichols’ response into the article before many people had read it – even though he was not disputing the core facts – he declined, saying he needed until the following morning to respond.
We sent Nichols the request for response at 1:42 p.m. Monday afternoon before the story ran. Although he indicated he read the email a little over two hours later, he sent us his response [read it in full at the link] at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. That means he took more than 17 hours to formulate a response after first responding to our inquiry.
“We are seeking discussion and dialogue,” Nichols wrote.
Great. We are too. If our article results in a fuller presentation of this important topic at a critical time for the state, then it accomplished its intent.
Table of Contents
