We would like to inform you that the Morning Briefing will be off from tomorrow, the Feast of the Assumption, until Monday, August 25th. Hence your Friday Essays are your Thursday Essays this week. Enjoy the Summer!

NEW: Opinion: You Can't Restore Merit To University Admissions Without A National Exam

ALSO: New episode of the Sphere Podcast!

In this week's conversation, Sphere Media publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry welcomes Wilfred Reilly, professor at Kentucky State University, author, and podcast host. They talk about his upcoming book about why experts get things so wrong so often, what the "Womanosphere" is and why it's so toxic, and various other issues of the day.

Watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Subscribe to the Sphere Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Exclusive: Luke Niforatos on Trump's Decision on Marijuana Rescheduling

We were puzzled to see the sudden emergence of marijuana rescheduling as an issue on the calendar, as well as the visibly-astroturfed social media campaign in favor of it. Which is why we sought to talk to an expert.

Luke Niforatos is Executive Vice President of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan drug policy organization focused on opposing the legalization and normalization of marijuana.

The following interview was conducted over the phone and lightly edited for clarity. We think it covers the issue very well and comprehensively.

PolicySphere: Why are we talking about marijuana classification now?

Luke Niforatos: This started with the Biden administration. President Biden's campaign team wanted to legalize marijuana, thinking it would appeal to progressive voters. But Biden himself—and many don't know this—was actually the original author behind forming the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He's pretty anti-drug.

I think he didn't want to legalize it, so he came up with a compromise: downscheduling marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, which wouldn't legalize it but would send a message to progressive voters. They weren't able to complete the ruling due to politics within the DEA process, so now this decision sits as a notice of proposed rulemaking at the Drug Enforcement Administration. It's on President Trump's lap to decide whether to withdraw it or allow the process to continue.

PolicySphere: What is reclassification? What does it mean legally and practically, and what is the process?

Luke Niforatos: First, let me address the biggest myth about drug scheduling. Schedules I through V categorize controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Many people think this is a harm index—that Schedule I drugs are the worst and Schedule V are least harmful. That's simply not the case.

It's actually based on two criteria: potential for abuse and whether it has currently accepted medical use. Marijuana is in Schedule I because it has high potential for abuse—which has only gotten higher as potency increases—and the whole plant has no FDA-approved medical use.

People point to states calling it "medical marijuana," but the FDA and scientists never made that determination. That was done politically by vote, and that's not how we do medicine. Components of the marijuana plant have been rescheduled when approved by the FDA. Pure THC has been downscheduled as an approved prescription called Marinol. Epidiolex, which is pure CBD, has also been downscheduled. We reschedule components that have medical value, but we don't reschedule entire drugs just because some components may have medical uses.

PolicySphere: So someone with chronic pain doesn't actually need to smoke marijuana—they can get a prescription for THC?

Luke Niforatos: Basically correct. You can get a prescription for Marinol, a specific preparation of pure THC. But it's not that popular, and other medicines are much more effective for pain than THC. Research shows that marijuana actually reduces your pain threshold and makes you require more pain-killing opioids.

PolicySphere: What's the process to reschedule a drug?

Luke Niforatos: The process is notice of proposed rulemaking. Anyone can petition for review—Biden asked HHS to conduct a review of marijuana's scheduling status. Interestingly, the Obama administration reviewed this in 2016 and determined marijuana should stay Schedule I.

HHS changed from the typical five-part test to a two-part test with no justification—a political fix to achieve a predetermined outcome. They recommended rescheduling to III, the FDA backed this up, then it went to the DEA for notice of proposed rulemaking, which opened a 60-day public comment period.

Because it's controversial, it goes to an administrative law judge who conducts hearings. That's where the marijuana scheduling decision is stuck now.

PolicySphere: But to be clear, the final decision rests with the President and he can give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down?

Luke Niforatos: That's correct. Ultimately, if the president wants to tell the administrator to withdraw the rule, they can do that.

PolicySphere: Now, does changing the schedule really have an impact? What would change, concretely, in the real world?

Luke Niforatos: Two big impacts. First, the public gets the wrong message that marijuana isn't that harmful—especially problematic for youth when these drugs are more addictive than ever and causing more mental health problems.

Second, the marijuana industry gets a two-plus billion dollar tax windfall. They'll get an exemption from Section 280E of the tax code, which prevents people selling Schedule I substances from deducting business expenses like advertising and payroll. Moving to Schedule III gives them access to those tax breaks, meaning more advertising and products targeting kids—gummies, candies, ice creams—that we're seeing in states that have "legalized" it.

This opens floodgates for a $50 billion federally illegal industry. We're seeing Chinese and Mexican cartels operating state-licensed marijuana businesses in states like Maine and Oklahoma, laundering fentanyl and human trafficking dollars through state legal marijuana businesses. This would essentially be a cartel tax break.

Many states have trigger laws—Texas, for example, has a law that if marijuana's federal scheduling status is downgraded, it immediately triggers their Department of Health to promulgate medical regulations around marijuana products. Other states have such laws.

So it would create a cascade of events.

PolicySphere: Wow. We tended to assume it was just an administrative box-checking exercise that didn't do much in the real world. Now, on the merits. Why do you believe this is bad policy?

Luke Niforatos: The number one reason is that every state and city that has legalized marijuana has seen huge increases in crime, cartel activity, and destruction of families. Addiction breaks up families. Fathers addicted to high-potency products like dabs and concentrates become unable to work, potentially committing crimes.

Every state that has legalized marijuana has seen a 25% increase in cannabis use disorder—addiction to marijuana. This next generation of Americans is more addicted to high-potency drugs than ever before. In the 1970s, marijuana was 2-3% potency. Now products reach 99% potency.

For youth regularly using these products, they are five-plus times more likely to develop permanent schizophrenia or psychosis. They're also more likely to have a permanent 5-7 point IQ drop—going from a B-plus to B-minus student for life.

Rescheduling would send a message of federal sanction for continued drug dealing and consuming, incentivizing this industry and its backers—alcohol, pharma, tobacco, cartels—to proliferate these products nationwide.

PolicySphere: Ok. I'm going to push back. I won't debate the medicine or the science, but there is an interesting political question here. President Trump expanded the coalition to new voters—podcast bros, Joe Rogan listeners, so-called Barstool conservatives, and so on—who take a libertarian view on pot. Shouldn't we show those new voters that they're welcome in the Big Tent, instead of sending a message that it's still Nancy Reagan's Republican Party?

Luke Niforatos: The main answer is that it's already brought those people into the coalition. Looking at poll data, marijuana legalization has never been a major electoral issue. Gallup's top 20 reasons voters come to polls never includes marijuana. The industry tries to promote the idea that there's a "cannabis vote" out there, but data doesn't support that supporting legalization adds to your voter base.

Look at Florida—Trump floated support for their marijuana measure, but it still failed. Trump has already allowed de facto state decision-making on marijuana by not enforcing federal law, similar to his approach with abortion. Not rescheduling doesn't send a message that marijuana supporters can't support this president.

Plus, he put RFK in charge of HHS, who has progressive views on drugs and psychedelics and an interest in the medical potential of different drugs. There are other ways to address those voters' interests.

More boradly, I don't think it's good politics to support drugs in society. Our president is cracking down on crime in cities—we need safer streets. Cities with crime problems all have hundreds of marijuana stores and hundreds of incidents where marijuana played a role. Every shooting we hear about seems to involve someone who was high or chronically using marijuana.

This isn't about making communities safer. I think it's good politics to say folks can make their own decisions at home, but we won't make policies endorsing drug use or allowing continued open-air drug use in cities. Instead, we should prioritize preventing drug use, protecting kids from accessing these products, and dealing with cartels who use state-sanctioned legalization as cover for illegal activities. It's all about how you position it.

PolicySphere: We saw you calling out pro-rescheduling influencers on X. Want to call out some people?

Luke Niforatos: People need to understand that in this day and age, people get paid to post on social media. DC Draino took $200,000 from Trulieve for Florida's marijuana ballot measure to send two supportive tweets. Latest FEC reports show he got $300,000 from the marijuana super PAC pushing rescheduling. He's been sharing other conservative influencers saying the same things.

Alex Bruce and Bruce Lavelle are saying the same things with the same tags. Gunther Eagleman is also sharing similar content. When you see multiple people under the same flag saying the same things, and one got paid $300K, it's reasonable to suspect they're all being paid.

But this weekend, after Trump said they'd make this decision soon, we saw a huge organic wave of conservative influencers with bigger followings opposing this—Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, Michael Knowles. That organic response was much more powerful than paid posts.

Policy News You Need To Know

#DEIDelendaEst #DeepState — Very important: the State Leadership Initiative has published a report showing how ostensibly neutral associations, such as the National Association of State Treasurers (NAST), National Association of Medicaid Directors (NAMD) and the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), in reality act like a "progressive shadow government" at the state level, even in red states, pushing woke policies such as DEI. Fox News has a good report. This is very important because the NGO blob is a huge way of how the left gains power, manages to consolidate gains or limit losses even in the face of electoral defeat, and seems to be much more able to "shape the culture," including or even especially through ostensibly-neutral bodies. (Think of the role the AMA and APA played in the transgender craze.) Exposing these organizations and networks, and possibly putting them under legal scrutiny, is very important.

#DCLiberation — Interesting report from Nathan Worcester at The Epoch Times on preleminary plans by the Trump administration to extend its control over DC police. The Home Rule Act provides that the Federal government can federalize the DC police for a period of 30 days; anything after that requires asking Congress for an extension, which the Democrats very much do not want and would presumably filibuster. One possibility being contemplated is a national emergency declaration. Another would be to tie it to a must-pass bill.

#Impoundment — Ah, standing. A new decision by a panel of the DC Circuit (PDF) is allowing Trump administration to block foreign assistance funds appropriated by Congress. Most importantly, if it holds, it might clear the way for more uses of impoundment, through an issue of standing. The Court held that under the Impoundment Control Act, only the Comptroller General (now, the head of the GAOGAO) can bring a lawsuit to enforce compliance if the executive branch impounds funds without following ICA procedures. The ICA's structure implies it precludes other parties from suing, the panel held, as it provides a specific mechanism for congressional oversight and enforcement. Quote from the opinion: "The ICA created a complex scheme of notification of the Congress, congressional action on a proposed rescission or deferral and suit by a specified legislative branch official if the executive branch violates its statutory expenditure obligations." The plaintiffs' attempt to frame this as a separation-of-powers violation was rejected, with the panel ruling that the dispute is "fundamentally statutory" rather than constitutional. The executive's actions, even while potentially violate statute, don't create a judicially enforceable constitutional right for private parties. Quote: "Constitutional rights do not typically come with a built-in cause of action to allow for private enforcement in courts." The GAO is an arm of Congress, though, so it's not like there won't be any future judicial disputes over impoundment or attempts at impoundment. Nevertheless, Russ Vought hailed the decision as a "big win."

#RareEarths #Chyna — Since April, China has tightened its control on exports of rare earth minerals. There have been several plans floated as ways to break western reliance on this Chinese export. A big one was just announced by DOE: $1 billion in funding opportunities, channeled through six different programs. There is a $50 million Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator program focusing on rare-earth magnet supply chains and semiconductor materials like gallium and germanium; a $250 million program for recovering valuable mineral byproducts from existing industrial processes; a $135 million Rare Earth Elements Demonstration Facility to reduce dependence on foreign REE sources by recovering them from mine tailings and waste streams; a $500 million Battery Materials Processing and Manufacturing grant program targeting lithium, graphite, nickel, and other battery-critical minerals; and a $40 million ARPA-E RECOVER program to extract critical minerals from industrial wastewater. These programs are taking a crack at seemingly every bit of the value chain, from mining to processing to manufacturing technologies. Let's hope they have a real impact.

#RareEarths #Chyna — Meanwhile Australia, which is famously very resource-rich, is seriously contemplating stepping up to the plate. The BBC has a good report.

#Family — You may have seen that divorce has been on the decline. Good news? Not necessarily, writes Leah Libresco for the Institute for Family Studies. The decline in divorces is a result of a decline in people pairing up to begin with. "The declining divorce rate is much more a compositional effect, driven by who isn’t getting married than it is a victory for marriage preparation and promotion." Can't get divorced if you're forever alone… And this is obviously not something to celebrate.

#LawAndOrder — Potentially interesting: the Virginia Police Benevolent Association, which backed Republican Glenn Youngkin in 2021, is endorsing Democrat Abigail Spanberger for Virginia governor this year. This is interesting because it goes against a national trend of police and police unions supporting Republicans, and Youngkin has generally been successful. There are local issues at play, however, involving issues with local police budgets and police pensions, on which the Democrat voted in the union-friendly way.

#LawAndOrder — Speaking of law and order and shadow governments: left-wing dark-money megadonors have contributed $20M to groups funding protests against President Trump’s DC crime crackdown, Victor Nava at the Post reports.

#ReligiousLiberty — Is it still 2010? In a nationwide ruling against a Trump Administration religious conscience rule, a federal district Court today ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor. The Court sided with Pennsylvania and New Jersey in their years-long effort to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide contraceptive and abortion coverage in their healthcare plans. Today’s ruling keeps that effort alive, and the Little Sisters have vowed to appeal the decision, writes The Becket Fund, the great public interest lawyers for religious liberty. The Supreme Court ruled decisively in favor of the Sisters in 2020, but state governments have continued harassing them. As many have pointed out, this includes especially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania under Governor Josh Shapiro, who is so often touted as a "moderate."

Thursday Essays

The humanities inside academia are dying. The Trump administration, which many will blame, was only the last blow: the majors have been less and less popular over years, universities have funding stresses that go well beyond demands for settlements over DEI, and the high school graduate population has peaked. All of this means that humanities departments are headed for the chopping block. They're a convenient scapegoat for everyone: for the right because it's full of blue-haired gender studies majors, but also for centrist/reformist liberal types to be able to say they're just taking a green-eyeshade approach and saving the majors that create the most value, i.e. STEM. Eric Adler has a good essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, describing, accurately, how "they're killing the humanities on purpose."

Ted Nordhaus, Director of Research at the Breakthrough Institute, wrote an essay titled "Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist." It's a very even-handed, non-ideological tour through climate science—that is to say, the actual science—and through the policy options that are on the table for dealing with climate change. It's a very good "rational environmentalist" statement on this issue, if you're looking for one to inform your own views.

"I spent last week in Washington, D.C., and my impressions deepened an intuition. Though it contains many of the same leaders and managers, the second Trump administration is a radical departure from the first," writes the great Chris Rufo in City Journal. His thesis is that the institutions of DC are, however reluctantly, accepting Trumpism 2.0 as a "new status quo" rather than mobilizing to thwart it.

Derek Thompson warns us about what he calls a "looming social crisis of AI friends and chatbot therapists." It's worth paying attention to, given that this concern is usually associated with the socially conservative right, and Thompson is a proud card-carrying pro-technology liberal. "This is not meant to be some kind of Luddite wholesale rejection of the technology," he reassures us. However, "I'm worried about a 'structurally sycophantic' technology becoming an intimate source of life advice for hundreds of millions of children, given the evidence that over-validation and you're-so-special-and-right treatment is a very high predictor for the development of narcissism." Indeed.

Modern Age is one of the oldest and grandest journals of conservative thought. Which is why they can do something like what they've just done, which is republish an old essay from the 1980s by none other than Murray Rothbard on none other than Frank S. Meyer. This "classic provocation" remains "relevant today," the editors inform us, and rightly so, because Rothbard's provocation is that the fusionist is a "libertarian manqué." Given all the debates we are currently having around paleoconservatism, populism, post-liberalism and so on, if it's true that fusionism really was just libertarianism in a skinsuit, well, that's relevant for where conservatives and other right-of-center people who are not libertarians, should go.