“The war has ebbed and flowed over the past 54 years, but the results are clear. Drugs won. But instead of learning the requisite lessons, the Trump administration is ramping up anti-drug-war rhetoric to lunatic levels. The president recently issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” He’s empowered the military to destroy Venezuelan boats that likely aren’t carrying that synthetic opioid or even headed to the United States.
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“Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes.” Now “other highly potent synthetic opioids are becoming more attractive for drug trafficking organizations to produce and sell.”
Drug-warriors ignore how their own policies helped create the latest crisis. The feds began cracking down on prescription opioid analgesics (OAs) to combat their overprescribing to people with pain issues. “Unfortunately, opioid dependence and addiction do not simply dissipate with the contraction in the availability of OA pills…Instead, individuals who lost access have turned to cheaper, more accessible and more potent black market opioid alternatives,” per a 2017 article in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The prime alternative was heroin. The feds cracked down on that, too, and then black markets shifted to fentanyl.
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Most Americans are aware of the foolhardy nature of alcohol Prohibition, which empowered organized crime, led to alcohol poisonings as illicit operations rarely have great quality control, corrupted police agencies and politicians, and caused prison overcrowding. We see similar results after a half-century of drug prohibition.”
“Thanks to a bill approved as part of the package that ended the federal shutdown, intoxicating hemp products will be federally prohibited as of November 13, 2026, a year after President Donald Trump signed the legislation. Unless Congress intervenes, that ban will put an end to a $28 billion industry that offers psychoactive beverages, edibles, flower, and vape cartridges to consumers in dozens of states.”
“As the Senate prepared to vote on the funding bill to reopen the federal government earlier this month, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) warned that passing the legislation would “regulate the hemp industry to death.” Buried deep inside the continuing resolution was a provision that would completely reverse nearly seven years of industry progress—and potentially wipe out small hemp-based businesses.
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Under the new provision, any consumable hemp product must contain no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC—not per serving or gram, but per entire container.
Paul is right: This new rule is a death sentence to the hemp industry. If allowed to stand, it could eliminate 95 percent of all hemp-derived cannabinoid products made in the United States.
The government should not destroy the livelihoods of countless Americans, and it most certainly should not pull the rug out from under a burgeoning industry less than a decade after giving hemp its blessing.
States are squeezing hemp from one side, and now Washington is crushing it from the other—and small businesses, like Cornbread, are stuck in the middle.”
“Trump’s contention that Mexico and Canada could “easily solve” the drug trafficking problem was equally dubious. For more than a century, politicians have been promising to “stop the flow” of illegal drugs, and they have never come close to achieving that goal—not for lack of trying, but because the economics of prohibition doom all such efforts.
Prohibition allows traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium that provides a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers that governments manage to erect. Drugs can be produced in many different places, and they can be smuggled into the country in a wide variety of ways. Any serious effort to prevent drugs from entering the United States would entail intolerable disruption of travel and trade, and it still would not succeed. That challenge is magnified in the case of a highly potent drug like fentanyl because large numbers of doses can be transported in small packages that are hard to detect.
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Since Canada accounts for only a tiny percentage of fentanyl entering the United States, “flood” seems like an exaggeration. In any case, it is not clear what would qualify as “adequate steps” or “satisfactory resources” as far as Trump is concerned. Taking Trump at his word, there is no such thing, because there is nothing that Canada or Mexico can do that will be sufficient to achieve the impossible goal of stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States.”
Twenty-six U.S. states have banned certain medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria. In a free country, the barrier for straight up banning a medical intervention needs to be very high. The evidence needs to be overwhelming that such interventions are bad—that they do far more harm than good. That is not the case for puberty suppressing drugs, hormone replacement therapy, or even surgery. Such bans are an insult to liberty and should be removed.
If a doctor, parent, and child, all agree that a particular medical intervention is the best solution for their problem, then who the Hell is the government to stop them? Who the Hell are you to stop them? It doesn’t matter how you feel about transgenders, unless such interventions are clearly net bad for patients to the point where no reasonable person would perform them, they should not be banned.
There are lots of studies on transgender interventions, and there is some evidence that puberty suppression, hormones, and/or surgery help children and adolescents with their gender dysphoria, their quality of life, depression, and even lessens their chance of suicide. Unfortunately, that evidence is mixed and the studies are far from conclusive. Researchers on both sides seem biased and exaggerate the quality of evidence for their positions while undervaluing the evidence in favor of other positions.
The evidence is mixed enough that doctors and parents need to approach such decisions with a heavy dose of caution. The burden of evidence for stopping, and especially changing, a child’s natural puberty needs to fall on the intervention. If doctors are negligently transitioning kids who should not be transitioned, then those doctors should be charged and sued under normal medical malpractice or negligence laws. We don’t need to ban procedures to enforce basic medical law.
I strongly encourage parents and medical professionals to be careful about transitioning children, and for parents to get second opinions from different-thinking doctors. The evidence in favor of such interventions is quite modest, and it’s hard to tell which children are more likely to benefit from them. Nevertheless, such decisions should be in the hands of the parents, doctors, and the children, not the government. We are not truly a free country if medical interventions can be banned on such weak justifications.
What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows Heather Boerner. 2022 5 12. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-science-on-gender-affirming-care-for-transgender-kids-really-shows Mastectomy John Hopkins Medicine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/breast-cancer/mastectomy#:~:text=A%20mastectomy%20is%20surgery%20to,a%20high%20risk%20for%20it. Correction: Access to gender-affirming hormones during adolescence and mental health outcomes among transgender adults Jack L. Turban et
“States’ efforts to create and then tightly regulate legal markets for pot have, ironically, made the black market for weed bigger than it’s ever been.”