“Oregon’s three-and-a-half-year experiment with decriminalization is over. Last September, the state legislature overrode the ballot initiative, known as Measure 110, and recriminalized drugs.
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With few treatment facilities and lax enforcement, Portland became a safe haven for drug users to pitch tents on the street and get high out in the open. A meth user named Michael, who lives in a tent with his girlfriend on a Portland sidewalk, told Reason that he saw more drug users flow into the city after decriminalization.
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“When you look at the frustration that was built up by people who were just doing the things that everybody gets to do, get to take their kids to school, go to work. I mean, I felt it the same way,” says Schmidt. “I don’t like seeing people shooting up where I have to explain to my kids what’s happening right now, and then also maybe not feeling safe because you’re not sure if a person’s in their right mind. Like, that’s not okay.”
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decriminalization as a concept is “obviously not” doomed to fail. He points to several Western European countries and cities that have successfully implemented decriminalization policies for years.
Portugal became the first country to decriminalize all drugs in 2001. Overdoses and disease transmission fell, inspiring similar approaches in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich, where the police enforced “zero tolerance” against open-air drug scenes with the goal of moving drug use off the streets and indoors.
“When you decriminalize drug possession, that doesn’t mean that you’re decriminalizing drug use on the streets. It doesn’t mean that you are decriminalizing disorderly behavior on the street. Those things need to go hand in hand. That’s what the European approach taught us,” says Nadelmann. “That sort of pragmatism is really what we need in the U.S.”
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A robust treatment infrastructure and protection of public spaces made Portugal’s decriminalization sustainable. When the country decriminalized drugs, police stepped up enforcement as the policy took effect. The authorities in Lisbon dismantled shanty towns, relocated their inhabitants, and broke up an open-air drug scene known as “the supermarket of drugs.” As Zurich decriminalized, authorities took a “zero tolerance” approach towards large public gatherings of drug users, which they described as “destructive to co-existence.”
In Portland, by contrast, decriminalization coincided with the defund the police movement and a 6 percent budget reduction for the Portland Police Bureau.
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as decriminalization took effect in Portland, the city effectively paused street camping removals because of COVID-19, exacerbating a decades-long unsheltered homelessness problem.
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The fentanyl epidemic caused a surge in overdose deaths in Portland starting in 2016. Overdoses soared in 2019, two years before decriminalization was implemented.
Only full commercial legalization could stop the fentanyl crisis because it would allow users to buy the drugs they’re seeking from reputable manufacturers, as has happened with cannabis, instead of a black market dominated by cartels selling extremely potent and deadly fentanyl.
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Portugal’s system can punish drug users for refusing treatment, but it’s rare in practice. Most who appear before the drug panel get off with a warning. Those deemed to have an addiction are referred for treatment. And a small subset of those refuse and face fines or other sanctions.”
Submachine guns can’t penetrate modern armor which is more common than it was during WWII. Supplying separate ammo makes logistics more difficult. Short carbines can do the jobs submachine guns did in the past.
Another reason investors deserve their income is that by having a system where corporations work toward the goal of increasing investor return, they have the incentive to be productive. So indirectly, by taking part in such a system, investors produce things with their money.
“Yes, homes cost more now, but census data show more Americans own their homes now than when I was a kid.
And today’s homes are much bigger and twice as likely to have central air, dishwashers, garbage disposals, etc.
We want more now.
Also, young people can afford more now.
Today, Americans actually spend a smaller percentage of our money on food, clothing, and housing than we used to, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data.
“We have a lot more things and we don’t have to work as hard to get them,” says Michel. “Now it’s the norm to go out for dinner.”
When I was young, few people did that.
Few people flew places for vacation. They didn’t have the money, and flying cost much more. Adjusted for inflation, a cross-country flight cost $1,000. Now it’s about $300.
“People did not just go on vacation,” says Michel, “did not fly all across the country.”
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Gen Z, overall, is doing better than young people once did. A typical 25-year-old Gen Zer has annual household income that’s 50 percent above Baby Boomers’.”
“Before being shut down, the Council of Inspectors General was a shared resource for the dozens of inspectors general’s offices located in various government agencies across the executive branch. It provided training for investigatory staff and ran a tip line to collect reports of waste, fraud, and abuse.
By shutting down the council, the White House may have also shuttered the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), which was created as part of the CARES Act and operated as a subcommittee of the council. (However, its website was still active on Wednesday morning.)
The PRAC was tasked with overseeing pandemic relief spending—which was absolutely rife with fraud—and was recently reauthorized by Congress until 2034 as part of the 2025 tax bill.
The White House’s decision to close the two federal watchdog agencies has drawn criticism from at least two Republican senators. “We urgently request an explanation for these actions and ask that you to promptly reverse course so that CIGIE and PRAC can continue their important oversight work uninterrupted,” wrote Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) in a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought this week.
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Like with the earlier attempt at firing dozens of inspectors general from their posts, this latest effort at undermining the viability of the government’s watchdogs suggests the Trump administration is less interested in draining the swamp than in pushing aside people who might sound the alarm about corruption.”
“Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”
Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.
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The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.”
“Set aside the fact that the so-called epidemic of autism does not result from a surge in actual cases but from a broadening of the diagnosis over the past 50 years—from what psychiatrists in the 1970s called a form of childhood schizophrenia, marked by early social withdrawal, impaired language, and rigid, repetitive behaviors, to today’s ASD. This new understanding includes highly capable, sometimes gifted individuals who simply interact with others in unusual or atypical ways. Additionally, because social, educational, and health care services are now more accessible to children with ASD, increased parental awareness and more screening by pediatricians, school psychologists, and educators have led to greater detection.
That nuance seems lost on Kennedy, who treats autism as if it were an infection or a tumor.
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What we know so far about the link between prenatal acetaminophen and autism—that it remains inconclusive—is based on independent clinical studies not influenced by a government agenda. Without government interference, these studies might find definitive proof that prenatal acetaminophen causes ASD, or they could lead to dead ends, encouraging scientists to explore other possibilities.”
“”Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” OMB Director Russell Vought wrote Wednesday in a post on X. While there is not yet an official announcement, he added that there would be “more info to come” from the Department of Energy. Vought said the newly rescinded funds would come from terminating projects in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
If it feels like those 16 states have something in common, it’s true: All voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent, in the 2024 election. In fact, other than Maine, Rhode Island, and Virginia, Vought’s list includes every single state that didn’t go for Trump.”