According to the lawsuits that four drug companies agreed to settle last week, the “opioid epidemic” was caused by overprescription of pain medication, which suggests that curtailing the supply of analgesics such as hydrocodone and oxycodone is the key to reducing opioid-related deaths. But that assumption has proven disastrously wrong, revealing how prohibition makes drug […]
President Joe Biden wants to suppress speech that discourages Americans from being vaccinated against COVID-19. Because the First Amendment does not allow him to do that, he is asking Facebook and other social media companies to do it for him. Or at least that’s the way White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who calls the […]
The day after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling for a “whole-of-society” effort to combat the “urgent threat to public health” posed by “health misinformation,” President Joe Biden accused Facebook and other social media platforms of “killing people” by allowing the spread of anti-vaccine messages. Bridling at the homicide charge, Facebook noted that […]
Los Angeles County, the country’s most populous local jurisdiction, yesterday reimposed a general face mask mandate for people in indoor public places, whether or not they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. The Department of Public Health cited recent increases in cases, most of which involve the especially contagious delta variant of the coronavirus. “This is […]
The United States saw a record number of drug-related deaths in 2020. The total exceeded 93,000, which was up 29 percent from 2019, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 2020 spike—the largest ever recorded—was largely attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic and the legal restrictions it provoked. […]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) reportedly has been working for months to generate bipartisan support in his chamber for repealing the federal ban on marijuana. If so, there is little evidence of that effort in the draft legislation that he unveiled today, which is larded with new taxes, regulations, and spending programs that seem […]
President Joe Biden yesterday condemned a “21st century Jim Crow assault” on voting rights, epitomized by election legislation in states such as Georgia and Texas. Republicans, he warned, have launched a “concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote.” The Democratic lawmakers who have fled Texas to deprive the state legislature […]
The town of Lantana, Florida, is demanding that Sandy Martinez pay it $165,000 in fines, which is nearly four times her annual income and more than half what her house is worth. The municipal code violations that led to those fines are decidedly less impressive: driveway cracks, a storm-damaged fence, and cars parked on her […]
Last November, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell filed a federal lawsuit in Michigan that described “a massive election fraud” aimed at “illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to manufacture an election of Joe Biden as President of the United States.” Powell’s evidence included an affidavit in which Russell Ramsland, a cybersecurity analyst and […]
Eric Adams, who recently won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City and is therefore expected to succeed Bill de Blasio in January, yesterday agreed with CNN’s Jake Tapper that his party’s obsession with banning so-called assault weapons reflected “misplaced” priorities. Yet as a state senator, Adams supported an expansion of New York’s […]
