Technically this has nothing to do with lead and crime, but since I’m Mother Jones’ senior lead correspondent it’s up to me to put up this outlandish little item from Maryland:
Gov. Larry Hogan’s top housing official said Friday that he wants to look at loosening state lead paint poisoning laws, saying they could motivate a mother to deliberately poison her child to obtain free housing.
Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.
Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.
I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t actually work, but that hardly matters. It’s just another example of the peculiar Republican penchant for governance via anecdote. They’re all convinced that someone, somewhere, is trying to rip them off, but they can never find quite enough real examples of this. So instead we get Reaganesque fables about stuff they heard from some guy who heard it from some other guy who said, you know, it could happen.
By the way, if you’re tempted to do this, please don’t. Licking a lead fishing weight once probably won’t actually cause a detectable rise in blood lead levels, but it’s still a really bad idea.
