Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed | Trump’s Violent Rhetoric Is Unambiguous | U.S. Military's New Defense Budget Makes No Sense, and more

Waged in the courts, in Congress and in the seething precincts of the internet, that effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation in the social media era. It tapped into — and then, critics say, twisted — the fierce debate over free speech and the government’s role in policing content.
Projects that were once bipartisan, including one started by the Trump administration, have been recast as deep-state conspiracies to rig elections. Facing legal and political blowback, the Biden administration has largely abandoned moves that might be construed as stifling political speech.
While little noticed by most Americans, the effort has helped cut a path for Mr. Trump’s attempt to recapture the presidency. Disinformation about elections is once again coursing through news feeds, aiding Mr. Trump as he fuels his comeback with falsehoods about the 2020 election.

The U.S. Military’s New Defense Budget Makes No Sense  (James Holmes, National Interest)
Last week the Biden Pentagon submitted its budget request for fiscal year 2025. If executed as written, the request would shrink the U.S. armed forces at a time when grave dangers—and thus the demands on the armed forces—are surging around maritime Eurasia.

Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed  (Keith Humphreys and Rob Bovett, The Atlantic)
America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended, after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed. Although the measure was touted by advocates as a racial-justice policy, support for its repeal was especially strong among African American and Hispanic Oregonians.
The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users. More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment. The original campaign for the measure was well funded by multiple backers, most prominently the Drug Policy Alliance, based in New York. Supporters hoped that ending penalties—and reducing the associated stigma of drug use—would bring a range of benefits. Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all.
But disappointments stacked up rapidly. Measure 110 failed because its advocates misunderstood addiction, and also because they misunderstood the culture and political history of Oregon. Both of these misunderstandings should be of keen interest to other states and municipalities contending with the fentanyl crisis, and to the federal government. An appreciation of what went wrong can help other places land on a drug policy that is both humane and effective, instead of veering toward one extreme or another.

Monday’s Supreme Court Hearing Addressed a Far-Right Bogeyman  (Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
On Monday, the US Supreme Court heard a case that will determine whether the government can communicate with social media companies to flag misleading or harmful content to social platforms—or talk to them at all. And a lot of the case revolves around Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
In Murthy v. Missouri, attorneys general from Louisiana and Missouri, as well as several other individual plaintiffs, argue that government agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), have coerced social media platforms to censor speech related to Covid-19, election misinformation, and the Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy, among others.
In a statement released in May 2022, when the case was first filed, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleged that members of the Biden administration “colluded with social media companies like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to remove truthful information related to the lab-leak theory, the efficacy of masks, election integrity, and more.” (The lab-leak theory has largely been debunked, and most evidence points to Covid-19 originating from animals.)
While the government shouldn’t necessarily be putting its thumb on the scale of free speech, there are areas where government agencies have access to important information that can—and should—help platforms make moderation decisions, says David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization. The foundation filed an amicus brief on the case. “The CDC should be able to inform platforms, when it thinks there is really hazardous public health information placed on those platforms,” he says. “The question they need to be thinking about is, how do we inform without coercing them?”