On February 9th, 2026, the New York Times editorial board published a piece titled "It's Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem." I read it. I read it again. I sat with my coffee and I thought: after fifty years of calling cannabis a dangerous drug, after helping architect the moral panic that sent millions of people to prison for a plant, after cheerleading a drug war that killed tens of thousands and enriched criminal organizations across two continents — the Times has decided the problem with marijuana is that people are using too much of it.

"The War on Drugs" is a 12-track musical history project chronicling America's century-long crusade against psychoactive substances — told through music, lyrics, and the kind of receipts that don't get taught in school. Each track corresponds to a specific era, a specific truth, and a specific act of institutional theater dressed up as public health policy.

Yesterday — as in literally 24 hours ago as I write this — Texas Democratic primary voters approved a ballot question asking whether the state should legalize cannabis for adults and automatically expunge criminal records for past low-level offenses. They approved it by 80% to 20%. With 92% of polling locations reporting.

This is the apocalypse we actually got — not the dramatic cinematic one with the mushroom clouds and the clear enemy and the hero's journey. The slow one. The one where the institutions keep functioning just enough to maintain plausible deniability while clearly not functioning at all. The one where you can't tell if you're witnessing the birth of tyranny or just a very bad few years. The one where the elites keep doing elite things and everyone is slowly losing their mind trying to decide how seriously to take all of it.

The enemy changes—communists, terrorists, witches, heretics, the other political party—but the mechanism remains the same. Polarization. The deliberate construction of an "us vs. them" narrative that reduces complex human beings into simplistic categories: good or evil, patriot or traitor, with us or against us. This isn't politics. This is social engineering.

A sudden, simultaneous substitution of fentanyl with nitazenes across the entire supply chain would trigger immediate pattern recognition — a spike in overdose deaths so dramatic that it would generate emergency federal response within days. The military framing would become unavoidable. The political will to respond would crystallize quickly.

Over the past few years, THCa flower has become one of the most discussed categories in cannabis. As consumers across the United States search for alternatives to traditional dispensary markets, many people are discovering that hemp-derived cannabis products have opened the door to a new kind of accessibility.

In the first piece, I argued that the United States is losing a chemical war with China, and that the only asymmetric counter-strategy with any historical precedent for success is domesticating the drug supply — legalizing the agrarian, organic substances that humans have used for millennia, regulating them intelligently, and stripping the cartels of their customer base through market competition.

Yale University is one of the pioneering institutions in psilocybin research. So much so that they have their own multidisciplinary program dedicated to studying the effects of psychedelic agents and their therapeutic potential. They are currently running several psilocybin clinical trials, to better learn about its effects on various aspects of mental health, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic headaches, and cluster headaches,among others.

Here's something that should fundamentally change how we think about autism and cannabis: autistic children have significantly reduced plasma levels of endocannabinoids. The endocannabinoid system (ECS) is a ubiquitous neuromodulatory network that regulates socioemotional responses, cognition, seizure susceptibility, pain perception, and neuronal plasticity. In other words, it governs precisely the areas where autistic individuals struggle most.