What Happened Today: June 9, 2023
Trump's lawyers quit after indictment; Netflix locks up; Sugarcubes on Hansberry
The Big Story
On Friday, just a day after Donald Trump became the first former president ever indicted on federal charges, two of his lawyers defending him in the case tendered their resignations. Trump’s former personal aide was also charged in the case, though prosecutors have not specified the allegations against him. Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social that “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN” after he was indicted on Thursday night on 37 criminal counts stemming from what U.S. attorneys say is the mishandling of sensitive government files he’d taken with him after leaving the White House in 2021. CNN reported on Friday that there’s an audio recording of Trump saying in a 2021 meeting that he’d kept secret military documents—a piece of evidence that’s likely to feature prominently at trial.
Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday, yet despite his ongoing legal trouble, his standing with Republican voters remains strong. Current polls show him still as the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Regarding the indictment, his rivals have so far supported him, condemning the Justice Department for what they’ve described as politically motivated abuse of the justice system. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, currently polling in a distant second behind Trump, wrote on Twitter.
Should Trump win the election in 2024, legal analysts say there’s no current basis to prevent him from taking office, even if he were found guilty and imprisoned. Regardless of the election implications, Trump still faces legal troubles on two other fronts, including a probe into his involvement in the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, as well a Georgia state prosecutor’s investigation related to attempts Trump made to reverse the outcome in that swing state during the 2020 election.
In the Back Pages: The Age of Drug Normalization
The Rest
→ Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam, which exploded on Tuesday in the Russian-occupied Kherson region, causing catastrophic flooding and mass evacuations, was likely hit with a bomb just before its collapse. According to a senior White House official, spy satellites captured infrared data consistent with a bomb attack immediately prior to the dam’s destruction. Several thousand people have been evacuated from the area below the dam, which saw water levels rise by as much as 39 feet. With this latest satellite data providing yet more evidence that Russia was behind the dam’s destruction, Moscow insists that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the attack on the country’s own infrastructure.
→ Following Monday’s lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging 13 charges against crypto exchange Binance for its “web of deception” and mishandling of customer funds, Binance’s American arm announced that it would stop accepting deposits made in U.S. dollars and would give existing customers until Tuesday to withdraw their money in dollars. At the time of the announcement, Binance.US held customer assets worth at least $2.2 billion in crypto securities and roughly $377 million in dollars. The legal and operational trouble for the world’s largest crypto exchange comes amid a wave of regulatory crackdowns on the crypto industry following the implosion of FTX earlier this year.
→ Thread of the Day:
https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1666921077434462208
Free speech advocacy group FIRE outlines in the thread here the unconstitutional move by the New College of Florida to sack an adjunct professor because of their political views. As it notes, trustee and right-wing political activist Chris Rufo boasted on Twitter that the “visiting history professor’s contract wouldn’t be renewed due to his ‘left-wing’ teaching, views, and criticism of university leadership.” Beyond the constitutional implications, FIRE adds that “even if it was for a lawful reason, a trustee publicly stating that faculty are losing their jobs for exercising their First Amendment rights will itself chill campus speech.”
→ Number of the Day: 102%
That’s the growth in new subscribers at Netflix after it began cracking down on rampant password sharing in more than 100 nations. The total surge is more than Netflix had seen even during the COVID-19 pandemic and comes amid a wider effort across all platforms to tighten belts amid intensifying competition and struggles to make money even off of breakout-hit programming.
→ Ireland’s climate targets could soon force the government to cull the nation’s cattle herds by some 200,000 cows in the next three years, a move that’s seen support across the pond from John Kerry, the White House’s special envoy on climate. “We can’t get to net-zero. We don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution,” Kerry said. Radically altering current agricultural practices has also become a pet project for Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who’s poured money into projects like gas masks for cows and seaweed-based food products. But farmers say these undertakings are often shortsighted, especially when it comes to drastic cuts in farm animal head counts, as animals are key drivers in drought resistance, wildfire reduction, and grass foraging. “Groupthink happens a lot around the climate change conversation,” said Kacy Atkinson, a farmer and agricultural activist in the United Kingdom. “We get tunnel visioned on one piece of it without considering the full ramifications of what’s going to happen if we remove cattle from the land.”
→ With all those daring rescues of affluent and inexperienced climbers on Mount Everest we mentioned last week, perhaps this was inevitable: a dispute over the $10,000 rescue fee that some climbers offered a Sherpa if he’d bring an unconscious woman found near the mountain’s summit back to safety. According to the South China Morning Post, the woman, identified only as Liu, was found by two climbers and a guide. The Sherpa only agreed to save Liu when the two climbers offered the reward. But the woman, upon her recovery, only had $4,000 to reimburse them and has faced some backlash for not finding the rest of the money. One of the climbers, though, insists she’s not at fault. “Saving her is our choice, and expressing gratitude is hers. These are two separate things,” he told the paper.
Today’s headlines come from Sing Tao Daily, a Chinese newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong and New York City’s Chinatown. Founded in 1938, Sing Tao, a pro-government paper, is China’s oldest-running daily and is read by roughly 100,000 people per month.
Trump faces criminal charges for second time as he rewrites presidential history // Smoke from wildfires in Canada spreads with the wind, causing the air pollution index on the east coast to hit record highs // Homicides in major U.S. cities drop by 12% year-on-year on average after the pandemic // Lack of safety standards for outdoor workers on East Coast forces people to work in dangerous conditions // The default tipping option offends the public and makes them more stingy // Supreme Court rejects Alabama redistricting case, saying it violates African Americans rights // Florida woman who shot neighbor admits to racist remarks // On the campaign trail in Iowa, Mike Pence hits Trump with full firepower // Tesla's African American employees file class action lawsuit alleging discrimination // Nearly one month after Clause 42 expired, the number of border arrests dropped by 70%
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
Written by Lorraine Hansberry and Directed by Anne Kaufmman
Playing at the James Earl Jones Theatre through July 02
What ever happened to the machine? Or, for that matter, to the man? Those lumpy but constructive hippie critiques—terms that persuasively gathered the myriad forces of power in pat and persuasive critique and derision—are long gone, and it is the New Right, these days, with its Borgs and Cathedrals and Red Pills and Disinformation Industrial Complexes, that presents us with metaphors for talking about power.
In The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a 1964 play written by Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), the machine and man are still bandied about, but the play dramatizes their waning value: For the Jewish intellectual, the unwitting feminist, the gay playwright, the Black activist, the sex worker, there are numerous machines and many mans. The play questions whether these disparate visions can cohere into cogent politics; the play is a tragedy and they cannot.
It is remarkable that Hansberry grasped, decades before the rest of us, the blockades slicing through the Progressive bloc. Written in the heyday of the New Left—before, even, the formation of the Black Panthers—the play, though tremendously uneven, is microscopic in its analysis of these fragilities and growing fissures. Hansberry also showed—in a lesson the left can still learn—that the machine of the Democratic Party will always drop the curtains on our dreams. The man is never to be trusted.
TODAY IN TABLET:
An Ivy League Powwow by Maggie Phillips
Dartmouth grapples with its original mission to educate Native American and indigenous students
Do You Remember 2005? by Liel Leibovitz
Twenty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained his views about vaccines on The Daily Show—and was met with respect and interest. In the years since, what’s changed?
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Age of Drug Normalization
Drug policies promising a more humane approach to addiction are being embraced by the White House. But are they working?
By Jim Hinch
Sessi Blanchard, a 26-year-old harm reduction specialist in New York, sees herself as the future of drug use in America. “I am a living example of how you can use crystal meth in moderation,” she told me recently.
Blanchard is a case manager for homeless New Yorkers with mental health or substance use issues. When I talked with her last year, she was a community organizer at VOCAL, a New York-based drug reform advocacy organization with seven statewide chapters and an annual budget of close to $3 million.
In addition to crystal methamphetamine, Blanchard said she also used heroin and “lots of different things under the sun.” A trans woman, she said she began using drugs while engaging in sex work after graduating from Vassar College in 2018. She added heroin to her intake when the pandemic temporarily cut off her meth supply.
After becoming dependent on heroin, Blanchard said she sought a prescription for buprenorphine, an opioid-replacement drug used to ease cravings. “I have my own battle with the city of New York to get a simple prescription for this lifesaving medication,” she said.
Like other activists at VOCAL, and throughout America’s nationwide drug policy reform movement, Blanchard’s ultimate goal is, in her words, to “decriminalize all drugs” and create a “safe supply”—guaranteed access to state-regulated, toxin-free drugs. She envisions a time when drugs, like alcohol, are legal, widely available and free from stigma.
“A century ago, people could go to their doctor and get the heroin they needed,” she said, referring to an era before the onset of federal narcotics regulation in 1914. “There’s a danger in suggesting this is a radical, progressive leap.”
It’s not as radical as it used to be.
To an extent unimaginable just a generation ago, United States drug policy is undergoing a quiet revolution. After decades of a costly War on Drugs widely judged a failure, American policy makers are rethinking almost every aspect of the country’s approach to narcotics.
Last year, the Biden administration’s 2022 National Drug Control Strategy set itself the historic goal of “shifting the focus of drug policy from punishment and social exclusion to healing.” The strategy lists law enforcement as its last priority and foregrounds methods long championed by drug policy reformers. Chief among those policies is a practice called harm reduction, which seeks to ameliorate the public health dangers of drug use without punishing users or requiring them to abstain. Harm reduction is mentioned 198 times in the strategy. Neither the Trump nor Obama administrations used the term publicly at all.
Top federal researchers are studying the feasibility of decriminalizing possession of all drugs, a policy already introduced as a bill in Congress. Last year, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which coordinates addiction research for the federal government, broadened its definition of recovery from addiction to include the possibility of continued drug use. “Recovery from substance use disorders means different things to different people,” the agency’s new strategic plan says.
The state of Oregon decriminalized personal drug possession three years ago and last year legalized production and use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Other cities and states have achieved similar goals by deprioritizing prosecution of drug crimes and boosting funding for harm reduction. Since 2009, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses declined by nearly a third. Two cities—New York and Providence, Rhode Island—have authorized so-called “safe injection sites,” where users take drugs under the supervision of volunteers. The sites operate openly and with the support of their city governments despite remaining illegal for now under state and federal law.
The flurry of new policies coincides with seismic changes in Americans’ attitudes toward drugs.
The War on Drugs now ranks as one of America’s least popular public policies. Eighty-three percent of respondents to one recent poll—Republicans and Democrats alike—called the enforcement-focused strategy a failure. Just a quarter of Americans now support prosecuting drug users instead of offering treatment, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. More than 90 percent of Americans believe marijuana should be legal for personal or medical use. The drug already is legal for personal or medical use in 38 states and Washington, D.C. Psychedelic drugs, including LSD and the club drug MDMA, are being studied as possible treatments for mental illness at prominent universities. Federal health officials approved one such drug, Ketamine, as a treatment for acute depression in 2019. Recreational users of psychedelics now include what a recent NPR segment called “thousands of moms…microdosing with mushrooms to ease the stress of parenting.”
It’s a brave new world. But is it working?
The short answer is: No. Despite the rhetorical passion and best intentions of advocates—many of whom contend that their policies need more time to be judged fairly—so far, at least, harm reduction has not lived up to its many promises.
Drug policy reform means different things to different people but in essence the movement seeks to replace law enforcement with public health as the de facto response to drug use. Key goals include reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for drug use; providing users with sterile drug equipment to reduce disease spread; using drug-replacement therapies to treat addiction; distributing overdose reversal medication; expanding availability of supervised drug consumption sites; and giving drug users a greater role in setting and implementing drug policies that affect them. The ultimate goal, for harm reduction advocates like Blanchard, is nationwide drug decriminalization, a guaranteed safe supply of drugs and an end to stigmatizing users. Their efforts are bearing fruit. New York City’s Health Department funded a harm reduction advertising campaign last year that featured posters bearing the slogan: “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely.”
The movement is international. This year’s bi-annual Harm Reduction International conference in Melbourne, Australia featured participants from every continent discussing topics ranging from the effect of Covid-19 on worldwide harm reduction to “Substance Use in Pregnancy: A Toolkit for All of Us.”
A lodestar for U.S reformers is the nation of Portugal, which eliminated criminal penalties for drug use and implemented a nationwide treatment system in 2001. People caught using drugs in Portugal are arrested and required to forfeit their drugs but they are not sent to jail. Instead, they appear before a civilian-led Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Abuse, which evaluates users and refers those with a drug problem to treatment, with sanctions for those who fail to comply. The focus on treatment, combined with vigorous policing of narcotics trafficking and public drug use, has led to one of the developed world’s lowest rates of drug-induced deaths.
Reform advocates promise similar results in America once the last traces of the War on Drugs are swept away. “If we want better outcomes for people with addiction…the answer isn’t to force them into our jails or prisons or our frequently fraudulent and poor-quality addiction treatment system,” wrote journalist and prominent reform advocate Maia Szalavitz recently. “Instead, spending less on coercion and more on improving quality is both more compassionate and more effective.”
For years, such claims were mostly theoretical in the United States or the subject of academic study. Today, as the pace of reform accelerates, it is becoming possible to test whether the end of the War on Drugs truly does herald a bright new day for narcotics in America.
San Francisco’s public health department, for example, adopted harm reduction as official policy more than two decades ago. The city of Seattle effectively decriminalized most drug use beginning in 2010, when City Attorney Pete Holmes was elected on a promise to stop prosecuting low-level drug offenses, including all marijuana possession cases. A 2014 California ballot measure downgraded drug possession to a misdemeanor and shifted funding from prisons to treatment and prevention programs. Syringe exchanges, both formal and informal, have operated in numerous U.S. cities for years, in some cases decades.
At the same time, West Virginia, Indiana and other conservative-led states have moved to restrict or block many reform initiatives. Former Vice President Mike Pence earned a black mark on his record when, as governor of Indiana, he stymied efforts to establish a syringe exchange in a rural county hit hard by opioids, leading to an entirely preventable outbreak of needle-born HIV and hepatitis.
If advocates are right, it is reasonable to assume that cities and states with more advanced drug policy reforms would be outperforming their more traditional peers on measures of drug user health. The latest drug death estimates from the Centers for Disease Control show no discernible relationship between reform policies and reduced overdose deaths. West Virginia, despite its longstanding hostility to reform, saw an 11 percent decline in overdoses during the 12 months ending in November 2022. Indiana experienced a similar decline. Oregon, which decriminalized drugs in 2020 and shifted funding from law enforcement to harm reduction, saw a 5 percent rise. Neighboring Washington performed even worse.
City-level data are similarly contradictory. San Francisco experienced a record high number of overdoses in 2020, and drug deaths remain what city officials last year called “a public health crisis.” The same is true for Seattle and surrounding King County. Eighteen months after opening the nation’s first supervised drug consumption centers, New York City continues to experience a surge in opioid deaths. By contrast, Cabell County, West Virginia, once called the “overdose capital of America,” saw a modest decline in drug deaths during the 12 months ending in September, 2022.
Advocates say such results are misleading because reform policies need more time, funding and widespread adoption to become effective. One North American jurisdiction, however, has been wholeheartedly embracing reform for decades. The city of Vancouver, Canada, is known as the birthplace of North American drug user activism. The city opened North America’s first supervised drug consumption center in 2003, and for many years the local health authority has funded syringe services, medication-assisted therapy and programs ranging from vending machines for opioids and drug paraphernalia to a managed alcohol program that taught problem drinkers how to make their own alcohol so they didn’t have to resort to consuming mouthwash or finding other non-beverage methods of intoxication. In January of this year, the province of British Columbia became the first in Canada to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs.
Last year, overdoses in Vancouver reached an all-time high, capping a five-year period during which drug deaths rose faster than in the United States. A study conducted by researchers at Simon Fraser University found that the city’s drug policies had attracted users from outside the metropolitan area, coinciding with a tripling of the local homeless population. Sixty percent of homeless people in Vancouver reported being addicted to drugs in 2020.
“It’s a big mess,” longtime Vancouver treatment counselor Tony Kennedy told me in an interview. Kennedy, who has worked with drug users at a Salvation Army shelter in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood for nearly 15 years, said he now sees users forgoing treatment in favor of obtaining free prescription opioid replacement medicines, which they grind up and inject. “I don’t see anything improving,” he said. “Harm reduction has not resulted in a decrease.”
What accounts for this discrepancy between policies that have proven effective elsewhere and results so far on this side of the Atlantic? Among the many answers to that complicated question, one that stands out is suggested by the name of the civil commissions that evaluate drug cases under Portugal’s drug laws. Dissuasion Commissions are predicated on the idea that, in the words of Portugal’s National Drug Strategy, “drug addiction [is] an illness” and the government has a vested interest in “minimiz[ing] the effects of use among addicts” and reducing “the criminality associated with certain forms of drug addiction.”
Key to Portugal’s success is a robustly funded network of inpatient and outpatient drug treatment centers that use a variety of methods—drug replacement therapies, counseling, 12-step support groups—to help chronic users resolve drug problems. Users also receive help reintegrating into society and finding jobs and housing. The strategy presumes that problem drug use is not a public good, and that overcoming addiction sometimes requires help that users themselves may not be able to seek on their own. Users are encouraged to comply with Dissuasion Commission referrals by a series of mounting sanctions that include possible fines, loss of social privileges (such as a driver’s or professional’s license) and mandatory community service.
Drug policy reform in the United States is based on a different presumption. “Drug use is inherently a human right,” a prominent drug user activist named Jess Tilley told me in an interview. Tilley, a longtime heroin user now on methadone, leads a drug user activist organization in Massachusetts and last year was one of several drug users who helped Biden administration health officials set benchmarks for a $30 million federal harm reduction grant program. “It’s the puritanical rule that says you can’t use drugs,” Tilley said. “Using drugs together and bonding is beautiful.”
Biz Berthy, of VOCAL in New York, used similar language to liken drug policy reform in America to other homegrown right-to-choose movements, such as abortion rights and the right to gun ownership.
“When it comes to the War on Drugs, it’s an issue of bodily autonomy, same as access to abortion,” she said. “In America, one of the fundamental things people are always obsessed with is autonomy: ‘Don’t tell me not to have guns.’ It’s so weird that we are obsessed with policing what people put in their bodies. I would push people to understand that…you can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.”
Some harm reduction advocates go beyond this focus on personal autonomy to make a more sweeping argument that the dangers of drug use itself have been exaggerated. Columbia University neuroscientist and longtime recreational drug user Carl Hart is a leading voice for this claim that any risks associated with drug use are caused not by drugs themselves but by bad laws and ignorance. Sam Rivera, executive director of New York’s recently opened safe injection site in Harlem, told me during a tour of the center that drug users should be able to measure their quality of life not by whether they use drugs but by whether they can “participate in life while using.” He told of friends who, after years of sobriety from drug use, “realize they don’t need to be sober. They can drink or smoke pot…Treatment is one path among many. What’s your recovery? People should be able to identify their own.”
Observers seeking to understand why drug policy reform so far has not resulted in fewer overdoses or a reduction in social problems, such as homelessness, that often accompany drug use, might look first to the libertarian, pro-drug philosophy of many of the reform movement’s leading activists. The first strategic priority listed by the Drug Policy Alliance, America’s largest reform advocacy organization, is ensuring that drug users have the right “to put what they want in their own bodies” and “to live freely regardless of drug use.”
Leaders of the Alliance, which authored Oregon’s historic 2020 decriminalization law and spent close to $5 million to pass it, said they modeled the Oregon initiative on Portugal’s drug strategy. But there are important differences between Measure 110 and Portuguese drug laws. There are no Dissuasion Commissions in Oregon. Instead, people caught with a controlled substance are issued a $100 ticket, which is waived if violators call a treatment referral hotline. A state audit published last year found that, 18 months after the law took effect, a total of 119 people had called the hotline, with just 27 asking for treatment. Many police departments declined to issue the tickets because they viewed them as unenforceable.
On voter ballots, Measure 110 was called the “Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act.” But the law actually provides no funding to treatment organizations dedicated to sobriety. Instead, eligible programs are required to be “patient-centered, non-judgmental and centered on principles of harm reduction.” Providers are specifically forbidden from “mandating abstinence.”
An oversight council governing distribution of funding generated by the initiative is required to include at least three people previously arrested for drug offenses, two “recovery peers” with past drug use experience and one drug user activist. The audit found that the council’s first round of funding decisions was chaotic, with 19 canceled meetings, allegations of nepotism, “applications assessed by reviewers without specific program expertise” and grants issued to organizations that left entire sections of their applications blank.
Earlier this year, a Measure 110-funded Behavioral Health Resource Center in Portland abruptly closed four months after opening. Described by county officials as “a first of its kind” resource center for people with drug addiction and other problems, the center “employs a workforce with lived experience” and provides harm reduction and other services in downtown Portland. Staff demanded the closure after being inundated by client overdoses, outbursts and graffiti. A subsequent investigation found that a security contractor was using drugs onsite.
The most recent state data available show that, 12 months after Measure 110 took effect, drug deaths in Oregon reached an all-time high, rising more than twice as fast as the rest of the U.S. “It’s time for other states to follow” Oregon’s lead, Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Kassandra Frederique said in a statement marking the law’s one-year anniversary.
Where does all of this leave American drug policy? It is hard to feel optimistic at a time when the nation appears caught between the failures of the old War on Drugs and a new harm reduction approach that, despite its public health pedigree and robust federal support, so far appears hobbled by an activist philosophy at odds with the everyday realities of drug use in America.
The most promising path forward might be an American version of Portugal’s grand compromise. Less incarceration, but enough criminal enforcement to bolster programs such as drug courts, which have been shown to be highly effective in a wide variety of settings. Proven harm reduction services should be supported, such as syringe exchanges and drug-replacement medications, but so should sobriety-focused treatment programs, especially 12-step groups, which consistently outperform other forms of therapy. Supportive housing and other assistance for homeless residents but also less tolerance for public drug use.
To achieve this balance, Americans will have to decide whether their commitment to personal liberty extends to mind-altering substances that impair people’s ability to exercise that liberty compassionately and responsibly. In that sense, debate over drug policy is a debate over American identity itself. “When we talk about uprooting the Drug War from these different systems, it’s not just from the systems. It’s from our spirits,” Kassandra Frederique of the Drug Policy Alliance said in a recent speech.
Supporters and opponents of drug policy reform can agree, at least, that she was right about that.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at Guideposts magazine, where he oversaw a two-year series on addiction and recovery in America. He also has written for Bloomberg, Politico Magazine and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Ignoring the physiologic effect these drugs have on the mind and body, especially longterm, is enough to prove that this so-called Reform initiative is no more than a drug-induced fantasy.
Measure 110 has been a big Ol’ disaster