So when the Lancet team searched databases for RCTs treating mental disorders with cannabis as the primary treatment, they found a sparse pool — and then concluded the sparse pool means cannabis doesn't work. That conclusion is circular. You can't run a rigorous trial with plant material you can barely access, in the doses people actually use, then fault the plant for the absence of results.
Nixon was a law-and-order president who weaponized federal agencies against political enemies, escalated a war he inherited, used moral panic to consolidate power, and ran a domestic drug policy built more on politics than pharmacology. He resigned in disgrace. Trump in his second term is operating in an eerily similar register. The rhetoric around drugs — fentanyl, the border, cartel activity — has been maximalist and deliberately inflammatory.
The New York Times flipped on cannabis last month. We covered that. Filed it, sourced it, called it what it was — institutional cowardice dressed as public health journalism. Then this week, the Wall Street Journal ran its version. AOL pushed its version. The same week. Different mastheads, same message.
The engine is Gen Z. Analytics firm Headset found that over the past year of national cannabis sales, Gen Z spent 38% of their dollars on vapor pens and only 32.5% on flower — the exact inverse of Millennials, who put 40% into flower and 25.7% into vapes. Gen Z is also the first cannabis-consuming generation to prefer the cart over everything else as their primary format.
What it became is one of the most consequential cannabis-related cases the Supreme Court has ever heard — sitting at the crossroads of the Second Amendment, federal drug law, and the legal fiction that cannabis users are inherently dangerous people who can't be trusted with firearms.
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.
