Somewhere in Germany this morning, someone typed a family name into a search box and learned, in about the time it takes to read this sentence, that a grandfather or a great-uncle had once carried a Nazi Party membership card. It is happening millions of times over. For eighty years the plain fact of who actually joined Hitler’s party lived in millions of paper cards that almost no one could reach. This year, at last, it became searchable online — and almost immediately a fight broke out over who is allowed to use it.

I have a particular reason to write about this now. In 1994 and I spent time inside the Berlin Document Center vault where those cards were kept, and I reported on them for The New Yorker. I argued that a record this important should be open to everyone. It has taken thirty-two years for that to come close to happening — and in the end it took a German newspaper and artificial intelligence, not any government, to do it.

The piece I published then, “Secrets of the Files,” was about a decision that drew little notice in the United States: the American government had agreed to hand the original Nazi Party membership records — some eleven million cards, representing perhaps seven million members, about ninety per cent of everyone who ever joined — back to German custody. The U.S. Seventh Army had found the cards intact in April 1945, at a paper mill near Munich where the Nazis had sent them to be pulped. Ever since, they had been under American guard, in a Berlin bunker in the Zehlendorf district that had once been one of Hermann Göring’s wartime listening stations.

1994: a bunker and a reading room

The timing was not incidental. For nearly half a century the Americans had run the Berlin Document Center, and 1994 was the year that arrangement was ending. The center’s American director then was David Marwell, a historian who I had met when I was researching my biography of Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele in the early 1980s. Marwell, who happened to be Jewish, had been at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit. “I savor the irony that I am the custodian of these files,” he told me.

Past the blast doors and motion sensors, the eleven million membership cards still sat in the original wooden cabinets the Nazis had filed them in. I pulled open a drawer and found the Party card of Oskar Schindler, the industrialist Steven Spielberg had made famous for saving more than a thousand Jews from the death camps. Schindler had been a dues-paying member. The card I pulled out was a faded blue rectangle, Schindler’s application dated 1939. A few cabinets away was the file of Amon Goth, the camp commandant “Schindler’s List” had just made infamous. The whole place had that quality: the machinery of a genocide, filed as tidily as a tax office.

Downstairs, in a chamber the length of most of a football field, a crew was microfilming everything for the U.S. National Archives before the paper originals went to Germany. I wrote about the real worries at the time: that some cards, printed in dark ink on dark stock, were nearly impossible to read even in the original; that errors were creeping into a rushed copy; and that German privacy laws could wall the originals off from historians. The pace alone was a warning sign — thousands of pages a day, by hand, with no reliable way to confirm afterward whether a given file had been copied correctly, or copied at all. My argument was simple: this is a record that belongs to history, and it should be as open and searchable as possible.

In 1994, “searchable” meant a spool of microfilm and a reading room. That was the state of the art. What I was really arguing for was a future that didn’t yet exist.

The slow decades

For three decades after the files went back to Germany, they stayed anything but open. A request to Germany’s Federal Archives was slow going. Accessing the American microfilm copies meant a trip to Washington and hours at a machine. If you didn’t already know roughly where to look, you often didn’t find what you were after.

Even the moment that should have been a breakthrough came with friction. Earlier this year, when the National Archives began posting the records online, the material arrived scattered across thousands of PDF files — and public demand crashed the site more than once. The records were finally “online,” but they were still, in any practical sense, a haystack.

This is the part of the story that rarely makes it into a byline: the years in which nothing much happens, and a problem you documented simply sits there, waiting for the world to catch up.

2026: a search box

Then the German newspaper Die Zeit assigned a team of reporters and data scientists to the enormous task of running millions of scanned cards through AI and turning them into a searchable public database. What had been a haystack became a search box. That database has already drawn millions of searches, with Germans finding relatives whose party memberships had stayed buried for a lifetime.

A rival in German media, Der Spiegel, has since built its own AI-assisted search database on the same files.

This was, more or less, the future I’d wanted in 1994 — one name at a time, instantly. It just took thirty-two years, and a technology no one in that Berlin bunker could have imagined.

Almost closed — just a paywall away

My complaint with the Die Zeit and Der Spiegel databases is that they are available only to subscribers. That is unfortunate. I understand they spent a great deal of money and staff hours creating these tools, but it would be a real public service to make them available to all researchers and historians, at the very least, without a paywall. (Non-subscribers can sign up for a free trial to get around it, but that is not the same as open access.)

The free-access problem isn’t hypothetical — it has already been tried and lost. This spring in Germany the investigative outlet Correctiv and the magazine Katapult jointly published a free, openly accessible version, explicitly as an alternative to the paywalled offerings of the two big weeklies. It lasted two days before they took it down.

And here is the frustrating part. The German Federal Archives holds the higher-quality originals — in color, high resolution — but under German law, because some former party members may still be living, free online publication is not currently possible. The Bundesarchiv plans to put the full index online only once the protection periods expire: 100 years after a person’s birth, or 10 years after death.

None of that clock is new. Back in 1994 I reported that if a former member’s death couldn’t even be established, his file stayed sealed for a hundred and ten years from his birth. Three decades later, the same arithmetic is still the thing standing between the public and the best copy of these records. What technology solved, the law has not.

So the situation I flagged in 1994 has inverted in a strange way. The cards are now searchable by any German with a Die Zeit or Der Spiegel subscription, while the archive’s superior version remains available only through a formal application in Berlin-Lichterfelde.

All I did in The New Yorker was to identify the problem and then wait thirty-two years for someone with better tools to finish the job. That’s the trade in investigative journalism: you rarely get to close your own stories. You just have to be patient enough to see them closed.

This one is almost closed — just a paywall away.

Note: as I finish this piece Wednesday night, Graham Platner has just dropped his Maine Senate bid amid a sexual assault allegation. That's a real story, but it's a different one from the story below. Platner was never a DSA candidate, and he isn't leaving the race because Democratic voters rejected him — he's leaving because his endorsers fled overnight, not because of an ideological reckoning. What follows is about something else: a disciplined, organized movement that is winning clean primary votes against sitting incumbents, and doing it again and again.

In the spring of 2010, as Tea Party insurgents began knocking off Republican incumbents in primaries, the party establishment reached for a familiar reassurance. GOP leaders repeated the idea that the Republican party was a big tent, welcoming the movement as an infusion of energy that could be absorbed, and managed. Ohio Congressman John Boehner said “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.” The RNC chairman, Michael Steele, embraced the activists as a grassroots gift. The insurgents, the thinking went, would supply votes in November and then take their seats quietly in the back benches.

Six years later, the back benches ran the party. What Boehner and other Republicans failed to appreciate was that widespread agreement on issues was not the same as tolerance for the existing leadership, and grievances that start in safe districts do not necessarily stay there. The Tea Party’s raw anti-establishment energy hardened into a governing bloc that toppled a sitting House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a 2014 primary no one saw coming; drove Speaker Boehner into retirement in 2015; and finally found its vessel in Donald Trump, who seized the party’s presidential nomination over the objections of virtually its entire leadership. The “big tent” had not absorbed the movement. The movement had absorbed the tent.

Democrats should study that history closely, because they are living its opening chapters now.

Start with what has happened. On June 23, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept New York City’s House primaries. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old organizer who helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, unseated Adriano Espaillat, the five-term chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who had outspent her significantly. The same night, Claire Valdez, a one-term state assemblywoman and DSA cadre member, routed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by 25 points for the open seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez — even though Velázquez herself had endorsed Reynoso.

A week later, on June 30, the pattern repeated 1,700 miles away. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old first-time candidate, unseated Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver, ending a run in Congress that had begun three decades earlier, before Kiros was born. DeGette was no institutional dinosaur — she was a leading member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who had voted against additional military aid to Israel and served as a House impeachment manager against Trump. It didn’t matter. Kiros ran against incumbency itself, attacking DeGette’s ties to the industries she regulated, and closed to win by six points.

A year ago, the DSA had two members in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. It is now on track for at least five, with its leaders openly discussing a competitive presidential run in 2028. By the organization’s own count, DSA-endorsed candidates have won 35 primaries this cycle, out of roughly 150 they backed, running the gamut from city councils to Congress. That is a bigger farm system than the number suggests, because DSA’s national count doesn’t capture the down-ballot sweep underneath it: in the same June 23 New York primary night, DSA-aligned candidates also won state Senate and Assembly seats in Brooklyn and Queens by margins as large as 58 points, building the bench that produces the next generation of Congressional candidates. The organization itself has grown to roughly 100,000 dues-paying members and more than 200 elected officials nationally, up from just a few dozen a decade ago.

And how did the Democratic establishment respond to the recent DSA victories? CBS News reported that a handful of liberal leaders themselves called it a “progressive Tea Party” moment, explicitly invoking the 2010 conservative insurgency. But that was not the dominant perspective. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar shrugged that voters have a right to vote and said he took nothing more from the results. Other party veterans have offered the same soothing vocabulary Republicans used in 2010: the party “is a big tent” said several congressmen; the newcomers bring energy; primaries in deep-blue districts don’t tell us anything about the party’s direction. It was reminiscent of Boehner’s comment that “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.”

The parallels between the early tea party and the DSA are not simply rhetorical. Both movements arose from a genuine grievance the establishment was slow to credit—for the Tea Party, bailouts, deficits and a sense that Washington Republicans had gone soft on spending; for the DSA, an affordability crisis that its candidates have ridden with discipline and a radical anti-Israel hardline that is appealing to many young voters steeped in years of schooling that has fed them an oppressor/oppressed narrative. Kiros, Avila Chevalier and Valdez all made a version of the same argument: their opponents had good voting records but were captured by the machine, the donor class, or both. Espaillat had taken $670,000 from AIPAC-linked donors, a fact Avila Chevalier repeated at every debate. DeGette’s own progressive record on choice and impeachment wasn’t enough to inoculate her against the charge that thirty years in Washington had made her part of the furniture.

Both the tea party and the DSA built durable infrastructure rather than chasing a single election: the Tea Party through local chapters and talk radio, the DSA through its dues-paying members, tenant organizing and transit campaigns that double as candidate farm teams. Both learned that a primary electorate is small, ideological and winnable long before the establishment learned to defend it. And both benefited from party leaders who mistook geography for containment—assuming that what happened in a safe district would stay in a safe district.

The Democratic establishment’s belief that democratic socialists can’t win outside deep-blue enclaves like Brooklyn or Manhattan is being tested in real time, and not favorably. Colorado’s 8th District is the definition of a swing seat: Trump carried it by less than two points in 2024, and the sitting Republican, Gabe Evans, won it by less than one point. The Democratic primary there was won by Manny Rutinel, running explicitly as the more progressive candidate against a moderate opponent backed by Emily’s List — not a DSA nominee, but a data point that the leftward pull is not confined to safe seats.

More striking is Wisconsin, a presidential battleground with a Republican-controlled legislature, where state Rep. Francesca Hong — a DSA member since 2020, endorsed by DSA chapters across the state — has led several polls in the crowded August 11 Democratic primary for governor against sitting Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. If Hong wins that primary, Democrats will be forced to test the “can’t win outside Brooklyn” theory in a state that decides presidential elections.

New York’s Mamdani, the movement’s most prominent figure, is actively remaking his city’s congressional delegation and lending his coalition to insurgents nationally, much as Trump-aligned figures once lent theirs.

The Republicans learned the lesson the hard way. Virginia’s 7^th District was solidly red. Dave Brat, a Tea Party-aligned economics professor, pulled off in June 2014 one of the biggest upsets in modern congressional primary history when he defeated Eric Cantor, then the sitting House Majority Leader and the No. 2 Republican in the chamber. His victory decapitated the Republican House leadership.

There is one more echo worth noting. The Republicans who dismissed the Tea Party did so partly because they found its foot soldiers unserious—amateurs with Gadsden flags who would be tamed by Washington. Democrats now console themselves that democratic socialists cannot win general elections. Perhaps. But the Tea Party’s candidates weren’t supposed to win either, until they did, and the people making that prediction were the same ones who failed to see Cantor’s defeat, Boehner’s fall and Trump’s nomination coming.

None of this makes the DSA’s capture of the Democratic Party inevitable, and it’s worth being precise about why not. The Tea Party’s rise required years of establishment complacency and a Republican leadership that treated every individual loss as an isolated fluke rather than a pattern. Democrats still have an opening the GOP didn’t take in 2010: they can contest the argument on the merits — on affordability, on what “electability” actually means in a district-by-district sense, and on policy differences on ICE, immigration, law and order, and foreign policy — rather than simply wishing the movement away with the same “big tent” bromide Republicans once sang to themselves.

That bromide turned out to be less a strategy than a lullaby, and Republicans sang it right up until the moment they woke up in someone else’s party. Democrats are humming the same tune now. The difference is that this time, they’ll get an answer within months, not years — Wisconsin votes on August 11. I hope they are paying attention.

There is a viral video making its way across social media this week that every Democrat who cares about the future of the party should be required to watch. It runs about three minutes. It is not comfortable viewing.

In it, Scott Wiener — California state senator, frontrunner for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, gay Jewish progressive with one of the most consequential LGBTQ legislative records in American history — sits with his back against a wall at an Irish sports bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, watching a World Cup match. An activist named Jesus Coba has cornered him. For three minutes, Coba screams, demands, and harangues. He repeatedly calls Wiener a Zionist. He tells him to get out of his neighborhood. He demands, again and again, that Wiener look into the camera and say “Free Palestine.”

Wiener mostly says nothing. His face is the face of a man who has just understood something he didn’t fully understand before. The ultra-progressive movement he helped build has come for him.

Three days later, Wiener showed up at San Francisco’s Trans March — an event he had attended for 22 consecutive years, an event that exists in part because of laws he wrote. A crowd confronted him, shouted obscenities, and made it, in his own words, “impossible for me to safely remain in the park.” He left. A video of the expulsion racked up roughly six million views by the following afternoon.

The activist who filmed it captured the moment’s terrible irony in a single sentence, shouted at Wiener’s back as he retreated through Dolores Park: “It sucks because you’ve been wonderful… for trans people, and you’ve been terrible… on Gaza.”

There it is. That sentence is not just about Scott Wiener. It is the clearest possible statement of what has happened to a significant faction of the American left.

The Most Progressive Jew in California

To understand why these two videos are so remarkable, you need to understand who Scott Wiener actually is.

He is not a centrist Democrat who got tagged with a progressive label. He is the real thing — a Harvard-educated attorney and 55-year-old gay man who has spent a decade in the California State Senate methodically dismantling the legal architecture around LGBTQ rights, one bill at a time.

Start with SB 107, his 2022 law that made California the first state in the nation to establish itself as a formal refuge for transgender youth and their families. When Texas, Alabama, and Idaho began criminalizing “gender-affirming care” for minors, Wiener’s law made California a legal sanctuary for those families fleeing extradition orders, subpoenas, and custody battles. Last year he strengthened it further with SB 497, which added warrant requirements for healthcare data and expanded shield protections for trans patients, their families, and their doctors.

Before that there was SB 239, which removed California’s HIV-specific felony statute. Before that, it was a felony to intentionally expose someone to HIV infection. Wiener’s bill reduced those offenses to misdemeanors and allowed prior convictions to be vacated.

SB 145 ended mandatory registration as a sex offender for cases of same sex “consensual” sex in which the victim was between 14-and 17 years of age and the adult was no more than 10 years the minor’s age.

Wiener also wrote the nation’s first LGBTQ Seniors Bill of Rights, protecting residents of long-term care facilities from discrimination based on sexual orientation or HIV status. He made PrEP available from a pharmacist without a prescription — also a first in the nation. He secured $15 million in state funds to cover gender-affirming healthcare that the Trump administration was cutting from Medicaid.

This is not simply a legislative record but rather an ultra-progressive architecture. No California politician has built more of the legal infrastructure protecting trans people.

He is also running for Congress in a heavily watched race — the frontrunner, having taken roughly 42 percent of the primary vote for the seat Nancy Pelosi held for nearly four decades. His November general election opponent is SF Supervisor Connie Chan, backed by Pelosi herself.

And in the last week, he has been cornered in a bar and expelled from a parade he helped make possible.

The Capitulation That Was Never Enough

What makes the Wiener story a genuine morality tale — and not just a local San Francisco drama — is the sequence of what he gave up before any of this happened.

At a candidate forum on January 7, Wiener sat alongside two progressive opponents — Supervisor Connie Chan and former congressional staffer Saikat Chakrabarti — and was asked to hold up a sign: Does Israel commit genocide in Gaza? Chan held up “yes.” Chakrabarti held up “yes.” Wiener declined to answer. It was a moment of genuine moral seriousness: a Jewish politician who knew what the word genocide meant to his community, refusing to deploy it as a campaign prop.

The backlash from the activist left was swift and furious.

Four days later, Wiener released a 90-second video and reversed himself. “I’ve stopped short of calling it genocide,” he said, “but I can’t anymore. To me the Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out. And that qualifies as genocide.” He had read the polls and felt the pressure.

Two weeks after that, he resigned as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus — a position he had held since 2023. Wiener never took AIPAC money. He has called for a halt to U.S. arms sales to Israel. He now calls out Israel’s military response to the October 7 terror attack as “indefensible.” That was still not enough to satisfy the Gaza wing of the party.

The man who confronted Wiener at the Napper Tandy bar on June 24 was not some random stranger. Jesus Coba had targeted Wiener before — in 2024, he filmed himself confronting the senator on a flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, posting an image with a Hamas targeting symbol superimposed over Wiener’s head, then following him through the airport calling him a “weak-ass Zionist” and telling him his “whole bloodline’s cowards.” This is a man who makes a practice of hunting elected officials. And Wiener — who had already publicly declared Israel guilty of genocide and resigned his Jewish institutional leadership as a consequence — was still his target.

That is not a policy dispute. It has become a loyalty ritual.

Gaza Has Replaced Everything

Let me be direct about what these two incidents, taken together, reveal.

There is a faction of the Democratic Party — centered in the DSA, energized by the anti-Zionist left, and now demonstrably capable of winning elections, as the recent New York City primaries showed — for which Gaza has become the single organizing principle of political identity. Not climate. Not abortion rights. Not trans rights. Not Black Lives Matter. Not economic inequality. Gaza. Specifically: Gaza framed exclusively as genocide, with no acknowledgment of October 7, no acknowledgment of Hamas, no complexity, no history.

These activists have erected genocide as a non-negotiable litmus test — a single phrase that every Democrat must publicly affirm or be treated as an enemy. And critically: even affirmation doesn’t buy you immunity, as Wiener discovered. What they want is not agreement. What they want is the ongoing spectacle of submission.

The message of the Trans March video — “you’ve been wonderful for trans people, and terrible on Gaza” — could not be more explicit. A decade of legislative work protecting trans lives counts for nothing. The only currency is Gaza. Trans people, one presumes, should be grateful for whatever they’ve received, but that gratitude does not entitle their champion to attend their march.

The Infection in the Party

The Scott Wiener story is a flashing yellow warning light, and Democratic Party leaders who ignore it do so at their peril.

The DSA-aligned left is not a fringe curiosity. It is winning elections — in New York, in progressive enclaves across the country — and it is doing so by organizing around a cause that has, by design, no resolution. A demand for a ceasefire can be satisfied. A demand that every Democratic politician publicly endorse a genocide finding, on pain of expulsion from progressive spaces, is not a policy position — it is an ideological filter that will keep running forever, eliminating candidate after candidate who won’t pass it.

What that means in practice is the systematic destruction of the Democratic coalition’s most reliable progressive actors. Scott Wiener didn’t wander in from the center. But he is being expelled now from the movements he helped build and empower. The movement he helped arm with moral certainty had turned that certainty on him.

If the Democratic Party cannot protect politicians like Scott Wiener from this kind of targeted harassment — if it cannot articulate clearly that chasing a man out of a bar and a trans march because he won’t say the right words on Gaza is not progressive politics but its opposite — then it is surrendering its coalition to a litmus test that will drive a wrecking ball through the Democratic coalition.

Scott Wiener’s face in that bar video — blank, still, as though he is trapped and does not know what to do — is the face of a man who realizes he has been caught in a contagion sweeping the party’s far left.

It is not ultimately a story about Scott Wiener. It is a story about where a piece of the Democratic Party is going — and how it threatens to take down the party along the way.

I don’t often use this newsletter to recommend interviews I’ve done, but this one felt different.

If you’ve ever been curious about how I actually do the work—how stories begin, how sources are cultivated, how archives yield secrets, and how books come together—this is one of the deepest conversations I’ve had about it.

Earlier this week I joined Jack Carr on his podcast, Danger Close: The Fourth Option, for what turned into one of the longest and most in-depth interviews I’ve done in years—nearly one hour and forty minutes.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews over the past four decades, including conversations with some legendary interviewers. Yet I have to admit I was especially excited when Jack invited me onto his new podcast.

If you don’t know Jack, he’s a former Navy SEAL, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and the creator of The Terminal List, the thriller series that became the hit Amazon Prime show starring Chris Pratt. His podcast brings together authors, journalis…

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I registered as a Democrat the week I turned eighteen. My first presidential vote, cast in San Francisco in 1972, went to George McGovern. I didn’t think much of it at the time — in the San Francisco I grew up in, there wasn’t really a Republican Party to speak of, so being a Democrat wasn’t a choice so much as the only option on the table. McGovern’s 49-state loss to Nixon was the first time I understood how badly out of step my hometown was with the rest of America.

I stayed a registered Democrat for nearly thirty more years, until shortly after September 11, when I became an independent. I’ve been there since, watching for whatever remains of the vanishing middle in either party.

I haven’t had to watch very hard on the Republican side. What began as the Tea Party insurgency in the early 2010s became, under Donald Trump, a hostile takeover of the party I grew up around. The Bushes were pushed out. Mit…

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The summary isn’t wrong. It’s just not where the story is.

Read closely, three provisions don’t do what the celebratory coverage assumes — and each one matters more than the headline number attached to it. A nuclear fix that’s designed to be undone. A blockade whose removal may be permanent in a way the text obscures. And a war declared over by two of the three sides actually fighting it.

What’s concrete. The blockade language is specific and front-loaded: removal begins immediately, full termination within 30 days, naval traffic restored in proportion to pre-war volumes. Strait of Hormuz passage for commercial vessels is similarly immediate, though Iran’s …

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This is another in my occasional series on the pediatric trans industry.

Imagine a 14-year-old walks into a therapist’s office and announces she has bipolar disorder. She read about it online, she says. The symptoms match. She wants an antipsychotic prescription medication.

No competent therapist anywhere would write the prescription. The therapist would do what therapists are trained to do, explore family history, the circle of friends, the social media diet, the possibility that what the 14-year-old has concluded is bipolar disorder might be anxiety, depression, trauma, or simply the ordinary adolescent turbulence. That careful, skeptical, exploratory process is not an obstacle to good care. It is the care.

Now imagine the same 14-year-old announces instead that she is a boy.

In that case — and only in that case — the rules of therapy are inverted in the United States. The patient’s self-diagnosis is the diagnosis. The therapist’s job is to affirm it. And if a bill now moving through the California legislature becomes law, a therapist who asks too many questions could be sued for it — and minors can file claims until they turn 40.

Senate Bill 934: Litigation as Ideology Enforcement

This week, Senate Bill 934 cleared the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on a 7–3 party-line vote. The bill is authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat now running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat. The ultra-progressive lawmaker is responsible for several controversial bills, including measures restricting parental involvement in their children’s ‘gender affirming care’ and a separate effort to narrow sex-offender registration requirements.

Wiener’s latest bill allows former patients to bring malpractice suits against licensed therapists for so-called “conversion therapy.” It has a statute of limitations unlike almost anything else in civil law. Patients who were minors at the time of treatment can sue until they turn 40. Adults get 10 years from their last session, or five years from “discovering harm.” In other words, the moment they decide the therapy harmed them.

Plaintiffs can seek damages for medical expenses, mental health treatment, lost wages, pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. And, of course, attorney’s fees and, in cases of alleged fraud, punitive damages.

Wiener has been candid about why he authored the bill. In April, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in Chiles v. Salazar that state bans on talk therapy touching sexual orientation and gender identity must survive strict scrutiny. That is the Constitution’s most demanding test. Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, and the case was remanded to lower courts.

Chiles v. Salazar put California’s own 2012 ban, the nation’s first, on shaky legal ground. Wiener acknowledged as much to California Senate committee: there have “already been rumblings” of a legal challenge to the California law, “so here we are.”

What to do if the courts will not allow the state to ban a category of speech between therapists and patients? Wiener noted publicly that Gorsuch’s opinion did not cover malpractice suits and therefore he designed a statute-by-litigation workaround by which the state will make practicing standard talk therapy when it comes to gender, financially ruinous. What the First Amendment forbids by statute, SB 934 accomplishes by litigation exposure.

The Definitional Sleight of Hand

The bill’s defenders and sponsors include prominent LGBT advocacy groups, Equality California, Lambda Legal, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, and the Trevor Project. They invoke the genuinely discredited practices that the phrase “conversion therapy” conjures: the aversion treatments, the oppressive religious boot camps, the electroshock horrors of decades past. Wiener slams it all as “psychological torture.”

Historically, that discredited legacy was abusive and is rightly condemned.

If SB 934 targeted only that, it would be unremarkable. Those practices are denounced by every major medical association, already banned for minors in California, and already grounds for professional discipline. Wiener has used that concept as a cudgel, saying the bill gives victims “the right to hold charlatans accountable for this debunked torture.”

But that is not how the bill is written. Its definition of prohibited “change efforts” sweeps in any attempt by a licensed mental health provider to direct a patient toward “a particular sexual orientation or a particular gender identity.”

That language is the critical hinge of the bill. The chilling effect isn’t a side effect but rather its mechanism. A therapist who spends six months helping a gender-distressed 13-year-old examine whether her confusion might be rooted in autism, internalized homophobia, or social contagion — and who watches that distress resolve without a single medical intervention — has, in the eyes of a plaintiff’s lawyer, “directed” the patient “toward” her birth-sex identity. That is not conversion therapy.

That is therapy. For every other condition in the diagnostic manual, it is called the standard of care.

The Chilling Effect Is the Point

Clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo said it plainly at last Tuesday’s committee hearing: “In supervising therapists today, I constantly hear their anxiety over their legal exposures or risks to their license if they do just that — practice traditional exploratory psychotherapy. These are not conversion therapists. These are honest clinicians who want to practice traditional psychotherapy with gender-distressed young people, but they’re afraid to do so.”

SB 934 bakes that fear into statute. Few therapists in private practice can absorb the cost of defending a malpractice suit, even a winning defense — and no malpractice insurer will look kindly on a clinician whose patient population carries a two-decade liability tail. The rational response for a therapist is to choose not to explore or question, not to have “watchful waiting,” what used to be considered the gold standard for treating minors with questions about their gender.

The safest path will be to affirm the child’s self-diagnosis, write a referral letter, and move the child along to the endocrinologist. The medical pipeline of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery becomes not just the path of least resistance, but the path of least litigation.

Among those who testified against the bill was Jonni Skinner, a 23-year-old detransitioner. Skinner grew up in a devoutly religious family in small-town Michigan. He described being a feminine boy who constantly was bullied and later diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Skinner told lawmakers he encountered trans influencers online as a teen: “They said, ‘Change your body and your life gets better. Don’t, and it gets worse.’”

Skinner told the committee that doctors told his mother that he would kill himself if he was not allowed to transition. The therapy he needed, the kind that might have asked and challenged whether an autistic, gender-nonconforming, bullied kid was actually a girl, is precisely the therapy SB 934 makes legally radioactive.

A child like Skinner has no comparable remedy. The bill creates a 22-year window to sue any therapist who counsels caution. Meanwhile, it is not intended to create an equivalent window to sue the clinic that prescribed puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or irreversible surgical interventions to a confused minor. Under SB 934, it is caution that carries potential liability. The scalpel may not.

How We Got Here

None of this happened overnight. Two years ago, I traced the history in “Who Put the Kids in Charge?” — how gender dysphoria entered the diagnostic manual only in 2013, the first time the disorder was applied to minors; how a Dutch protocol built on a handful of patients, and underwritten in part by a pharmaceutical company holding a puberty-blocker patent, became the global template; and how American gender clinics adopted the most permissive interpretation of it, multiplying from a single Boston clinic to dozens of dedicated pediatric gender centers over a decade.

The therapist’s predicament was then compounded by the profession’s own gatekeepers. In 2024, the American Psychiatric Association published Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, the first textbook of its kind — and, as I wrote in the New York Post, it is less a clinical reference than a handbook for affirmation-only practice. Its 26 chapters, each featuring at least one author who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or “gender-expansive,” instruct the next generation of psychiatrists that their role is to affirm, facilitate, and refer — not to explore. A young clinician trained on that textbook, practicing under SB 934, will not need to worry about the law’s liability because that clinician will only wave patients as fast as possible from the therapy couch into the pediatric gender pipeline.

The Rest of the World Is Walking This Back

What makes California’s timing so remarkable is that it comes as the countries that pioneered pediatric gender medicine are retreating from it. England’s National Health Service, following the landmark Cass Review’s conclusion that the evidence base for youth gender medicine is “remarkably weak,” ended the routine prescription of puberty blockers for minors and closed its Tavistock clinic for pediatric patients. Sweden and Finland — early adopters of the Dutch protocol — have restricted hormonal interventions for adolescents and restored psychotherapy as the first-line response to gender distress.

In other words, the careful, exploratory approach that SB 934 would expose to two decades of litigation risk is the approach now recommended by the health authorities of the very nations that invented this field. California is not protecting children from a discredited fringe practice. It is threatening therapists for practicing what is becoming, everywhere but here, the international clinical consensus.

What Is Next

I have no quarrel with protecting genuine victims. Anyone subjected to the coercive, shame-based practices that deserve the name conversion therapy should have their day in court, and the bill’s authors could have written a statute narrowly targeting exactly that. They chose not to. The breadth of the definition is not sloppy drafting; it is the mechanism by design.

A legislature that wanted to protect gender-distressed children would want more therapy for them, not less — more time, more questions, more of the in-depth analysis and skepticism that we demand from clinicians treating every other condition a child might claim to have. SB 934 delivers the opposite: a legal regime in which the only safe thing a California therapist can say to a confused 13-year-old is yes.

The bill now moves toward a floor vote in a legislature where its passage is assured and a governor’s signature is likely. What Sen. Wiener may not expect is a future wave of lawsuits from a constituency he seems not to be watching: detransitioners now reaching adulthood. Under the bill’s own language, after all, a clinic that fast-tracked a child toward a particular “gender identity” — complete with new pronouns, blockers, and a medical roadmap — has arguably committed the very offense the statute creates.

I expect some creative plaintiffs’ lawyers to notice. And they might use the statute to seek damages from the clinicians and institutions that moved children at warp speed into a medical system that left them with lifelong consequences.

California will then discover it has built a weapon that points both ways.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood at the White House podium this past Thursday and held up a mock design: a $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s portrait. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward about it,” he said. The bill, he added, would honor the president serving during America’s 250th anniversary. Congress just needs to pass the legislation, and Treasury will print it.

Before going any further, let me be direct about something: this argument is not about Donald Trump. Supporters who admire him may find it entirely fitting that the president in office during America's 250th anniversary should appear on a new bill. Critics who oppose him may find the idea an affront. Both reactions are beside the point. My objection would be identical if the president were Biden, Obama, or any future Democrat or Republican. The problem is not whose face is on the bill. The problem is opening the door at all — because once it is open, every future pres…

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The two teenagers who opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego mosque left a 75-page manifesto that is the clearest and most chilling portrait yet of what online radicalization is doing to kids.

Eighteen-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez of Chula Vista and 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark of San Diego livestreamed the attack to Discord. Their 75-page document contained both of their separate manifestos, with a title built like a flag: The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant — a tribute to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who slaughtered 51 Muslims in two New Zealand mosques in 2019.

These two boys did not invent a worldview. They inherited one — assembled, piece by piece, from the open sewer of the modern internet.

That is the part of this story that should keep parents awake. The *Sons of Tarrant* manifesto is not the work of a single ideology with a single grievance. It is, in every meaningful sense, the kitchen sink — every poisonous current of the last f…

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There is a word for what is happening in Miami Beach right now. It is not “civil rights litigation.” It is not “accountability.” It is not even, in any meaningful sense, “free speech advocacy.”

The word is lawfare.

And if you believe in open political debate — regardless of where you stand on Israel, Gaza, or anything else — what is unfolding in South Florida should alarm you deeply.

Let’s Start With What Actually Happened

Last September, Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Miami Beach, Mayor Steven Meiner, and Commissioner David Suarez, alleging that the city’s anti-protest ordinance was unconstitutionally designed to suppress pro-Palestinian …

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and I have published a new essay in Skeptic examining what has changed about antisemitism since October 7.

It has not simply increased in volume—it has shed its inhibitions. The stigma has collapsed.

We write:

“Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence.”

The normalization has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels.

On the left: Israel is framed as inherently illegitimate — hostility becomes an ethical obligation. The line between Jews and Israelis keeps disappearing.

On the right: Jews reemerge as omnipotent puppet masters — orchest…

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There are moments in a long-running public scandal when history seems to write the coda itself.

Last week, while much of the national press barely noticed, Joss Sackler, wife of former Purdue Pharma board member David Sackler, appeared in federal court in Miami and pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation. She admitted deleting WhatsApp messages that would have shown she was the intended recipient of prescription painkillers seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Miami International Airport in June 2024. Sackler was addicted at the time to the opioids that had helped ignite the deadliest prescription drug crisis in American history while simultaneously creating a multi-billion-dollar empire for the family into which she had married. She is scheduled for sentencing in July and faces a statutory maximum of 20 years, though the guidelines are expected to call for a far lighter sentence.

That would be a sad story in almost any family.

In this family, it is something more.

Her husband, David Sackler, is the son of Richard Sackler, the former Purdue president and chief executive, and he served on Purdue’s board before the company entered bankruptcy.

I have written extensively about the Sacklers, Purdue, and OxyContin, including in my book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, and in follow-up reporting and commentary in the New York Times and here on Just the Facts. I argued then, and I believe now, that the people who directed Purdue deserved at the very least a criminal investigation commensurate with the scale of the lethal catastrophe they had sparked.

Instead, Purdue Pharma, the corporate entity, pleaded guilty in 2020 to federal conspiracy and fraud charges related to its business practices. It had pled guilty in 2007 to a felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. But no member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged for Purdue’s conduct.

That remains one of the great failures of accountability in modern American public health.

The opioid epidemic has killed on a scale that is often forgotten. The Associated Press, using federal data, reported that more than 900,000 deaths in the United States have been connected to opioid overdose since 1999. The early wave was driven by prescription opioids, led by OxyContin, and followed by heroin and then fentanyl.

Those numbers are not abstractions. They are parents who never came home. Children found dead in bedrooms. Veterans. Nurses. Construction workers. Teenagers. Grandmothers. People who were prescribed pills after surgery. People who were told their pain could be safely controlled. Patients who trusted doctors, who believed drug labels, who had faith in a system that had already been compromised. I have met and talked to many of the families of the victims. For every person who died from an opioid overdose, there are relatives and friends whose lives have forever been changed.

For years, many of those families fought the Sacklers in court, in bankruptcy proceedings, in the press, and in public memory. They demanded something more than money. They wanted admissions and accountability. Many wanted the Sackler name to stop floating above the wreckage, insulated by trusts, lawyers, philanthropy, and the antiseptic language of civil settlements.

Instead, what they finally received was a flawed multibillion-dollar bankruptcy deal. On May 1, 2026, a $7.4 billion national Purdue and Sackler settlement became legally effective. It is the messy and unsatisfying conclusion to a decade of litigation over Purdue’s and the Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. The Sackler family owners are required to contribute at least $6.5 billion, Purdue is being replaced by Knoa Pharma, the Sacklers are barred from selling opioids in the United States, and more than 30 million documents related to Purdue’s opioid business are to be made public.

That is a tiny measure of accountability. But it is not the accountability for which the families fought.

It does not bring back the dead nor restore hollowed-out communities. It does not erase the years Purdue spent turning pain into profit. It does not answer the question that has haunted this story from the beginning: how can a company plead guilty to crimes of such consequence while the people who controlled and profited from it avoid criminal charges?

That is what makes the Joss Sackler case so grimly arresting.

It is not justice in any legal sense for the victims of OxyContin nor a substitute for the prosecutions that never came. It is not a reason to mock a person who says she suffered from addiction. Addiction is not a punchline or a moral failure.

But the symbolism is inescapable.

The epidemic that Purdue helped unleash did not stop at the gates of privilege. It did not care about the security guards, the private schools, the family offices, the wealth managers, the art collections, the high-end philanthropy, or the careful legal architecture built to preserve Sackler family fortunes. It did not care whether someone was sleeping under a highway overpass or living inside one of America’s most notorious fortunes.

It is a vivid reminder that addiction spares no one.

One of the reasons the Sacklers became a symbol of the opioid crisis was because they insisted, for so long, that the harms of OxyContin were someone else’s problem. Bad doctors. Needy patients. Criminal diversion. Personal weakness. Misuse and abuse. Anything but the predictable outcome of a business model that pushed a powerful opioid with catastrophic consequences.

Now, in a bitter historical turn, the opioid crisis has reached inside the family perimeter.

That does not make Joss Sackler responsible for Purdue’s decisions. Her lawyer is right that her case is legally separate from Purdue Pharma and other members of the Sackler family. That distinction matters. She pleaded guilty to her own conduct, not to Purdue’s.

But journalism is not only about legal distinctions. It is also about meaning. And the meaning here is unavoidable.

The family whose fortune was inseparable from OxyContin now has a member of its inner circle standing in federal court, acknowledging conduct tied to her own opioid addiction. That fact landed with force among the online communities of relatives and friends who lost loved ones to OxyContin and spent years demanding justice. For them, while it was not the justice they had sought, it seemed a kind of karmic reckoning.

I understand why.

For decades, America treated addiction as something that happened to other people. Purdue initially concentrated much of it Oxycontin marketing in the rural and blue-collar towns through Appalachia. Those were people who could be dismissed from a distance. And Purdue advanced the assumption that respectable medical treatment could not possibly create the kind of addiction associated with street drugs. That a pill prescribed by a doctor, promoted by a major pharmaceutical company, and wrapped in the language of pain relief must be safe enough.

That lie helped build a fortune and the wreckage is still with us.

The people who wanted criminal accountability for Purdue’s leaders did not get it. But the criminal justice system has now reached a woman who married into that same family, and it is a lesson that the forces unleashed by the family greed did not remain neatly contained. It exposes the fiction that wealth can build a wall high enough to keep consequence out.

I hope Joss Sackler has recovered. I mean that sincerely. Addiction is a disease, and recovery should be available to everyone, whether they live in a mansion or a shelter. But I also hope this story is not allowed to disappear as a strange footnote. It belongs in the larger record of the Sackler and Purdue saga because it reveals something essential about addiction and power. The opioid crisis was never only about drugs. It was about who gets believed. Millions of ordinary Americans learned that lesson the hardest way possible.

Now, in the family that set the fire, the story has come home.

I’m working now on several longer-form pieces, and those will arrive here as usual.

But I also wanted to flag something for readers who mostly see my work only when it lands in their inbox: I’ve been writing quite a bit on Substack Notes. These are often quicker, more immediate observations on a wide range of subjects — pieces that may not become full columns but are still part of the conversation I’m having with readers.

I realize many of you mainly follow my reporting when a longer piece arrives by email. So this is simply a reminder that a lot of my day-to-day writing is happening on Notes.

You can find my recent Notes here: https://substack.com/@posner/notes

No need to do anything differently if you prefer the longer essays in your inbox. But if you want to see the shorter, more immediate posts as well, Notes is the place to check.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Gerald

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The near-miss at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner put a spotlight on a flaw in American government that has been hiding in plain sight. Seven of the top eight senior officials in the presidential line of succession attended that dinner. Had catastrophe struck the president, vice president and House speaker, the next man in line was 92-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore of the Senate, at home in Iowa.

This is a constitutional roulette wheel, not a sensible continuity plan.

The current line of succession comes from the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. After Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman became president, Truman urged Congress to revise the old succession statute. His argument was simple: If both the president and vice president were gone, the next successor should be an elected official rather than a Cabinet officer chosen by the president. Congress agreed, placing the speaker of the House after the vice president, then the Senate president pro te…

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Not merely present. Not quietly publishing on the margins. Thriving.

As of April 2026, Tate’s month-old Substack profile shows more than 1.1 million subscribers and a top spot on the platform’s new-bestseller rankings. In other words, this is not a case of Substack reluctantly tolerating a controversial user in some forgotten corner of the internet. This is a case of Substack visibly rewarding him with prominence.

That matters.

Because Andrew Tate is not controversial in the ordinary sense of the word. He is not simply a dissident thinker, an inconvenient columnist, or a writer with unfashionable politics. He is a man whose “red-pill” ideology is built on misogyny, domination, humiliation, and the monetization of resentment toward women. He has been accused for years of helping normalize a poisonous culture online, especially for young men and boys. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have …

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Today, as the Trump administration makes a historic move by reclassifying state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, I wanted to resend this piece. Whatever your view of today’s change, it is impossible to understand the current debate without knowing how marijuana ended up in Schedule I in the first place. That history is far less familiar than it should be.

Cannabis is not killing 100,000 American annually, the number of opioid overdose and poisoning victims. So why does the federal government list it along with heroin, LSD and ecstasy, as a Schedule I narcotic, the most dangerous category of the Controlled Substance Act? It ranks ahead of lethal Schedule II drugs such as fentanyl and OxyContin.

Marijuana’s inclusion on Schedule I was not the result of medical studies or clinical testing. It was instead political payback from Richard Nixon, who was miffed that a commission he had appointed to study marijuana, returned with a recommendation to decriminalize the drug. In Pharma, I tell the story of how that happened from an insider’s perspective, the view of Michael Sonnenreich, then a young Department of Justice attorney. In 1969 Sonnenreich had singlehandedly rewritten the federal guidebook to the nation’s drug laws (Handbook of Federal Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Laws).

John Dean, later of Watergate notoriety, was then an associate deputy serving under John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general. Dean had been an associate staff director to LBJ’s National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws. After Sonnenreich had rewritten the drug law handbook, Dean asked him to meet with the attorney general.

What follows is an excerpt from Pharma about how marijuana ended up on the strictest drug schedule in America. An added bonus that it also includes the lobbying efforts of Arthur Sackler (yes, the same Sackler family as OxyContin infamy) for his client, Hoffman La Roche. Sackler wanted to keep Roche’s blockbuster benzos, Valium and Librium, off any of the Controlled Substance Act’s schedules.

Today’s move to Schedule III doesn’t erase the political origins of prohibition, but it does adjust a half-century-old policy rooted more in resentment than evidence.

When Sonnenreich and Mitchell met, he told the attorney general that the “drug laws are archaic” and the enforcement and regulatory framework was a confusing and sometimes contradictory hodgepodge of laws and amendments that had been cobbled together over the decades. In 1951 Congress instituted the first mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions and barred probation for first offenses. Five years later a different Congress increased the minimum jail terms. In 1965, faced with a wave of unknown psychedelic drugs, it criminalized manufacturing or possessing those hallucinogens and gave HEW enforcement responsibility.

None of the laws addressed treatment, Sonnenreich told Mitchell. He believed it was not enough for reforms to curb supply. They should also cut the demand for drugs. Mitchell asked Sonnenreich if he would meet with Nixon.

“Of course, I’d be willing to talk to the president.”

A few days later in the Oval Office, Sonnenreich told Nixon about his idea for a commission to examine existing laws before making any final recommendations. Nixon liked that. Sonnenreich was transferred to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. There, as deputy chief counsel, he began drafting what would become the heart of the Controlled Substances Act. He established “schedules” by which drugs were listed, balancing their medical usefulness, if any, against their potential for abuse.

Sonnenreich was thirty-one years old and liked his work. He expected to spend his career in government service. “My wife and I were happy; we had no problem in wanting more. We did everything we wanted to do.… One day this guy comes in with some Roche people and he says to me that ‘If you schedule Librium or Valium, we’re gonna challenge this, we’re gonna challenge that.’”

It was Arthur Sackler. Sonnenreich had never heard of him.

“I welcome your challenge, it makes my day,” Sonnenreich replied.

Sackler again warned that Roche would battle any effort to restrict the sale of its drugs.

“I’m going to do something better,” said Sonnenreich. “I’m going to file an administrative action to put your drugs under control and put them on the three times prescription rule [a controlled substance limited to a maximum of three refills].”

When Sonnenreich later held that administrative hearing to determine whether Roche’s benzodiazepines should be covered in one of the Controlled Substances Act schedules, he recalls “they had all the big law firms there, the biggest D.C. powerhouses. They were wrong if they thought that might scare me. They didn’t understand I was having a good time. They had just irritated me so much. I was still getting paid the same $7,900 a year, it didn’t make any difference to me.” Sonnenreich and the Justice Department won the administrative action. “Arthur was obviously very, very upset,” he recalls.

Sonnenreich’s draft of the Controlled Substances Act was at the heart of sweeping reorganization legislation—the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act—that the Nixon administration submitted to Congress in early 1970.

In creating four schedules of “controlled substances,” Sonnenreich had in part relied on extensive research and guidelines set out earlier that year by the World Health Organization. The public initially misinterpreted those schedules to think the drugs were listed in order of danger. Sonnenreich had instead balanced the potential for abuse with whether a drug had “any currently accepted medical use.” Although Cicely Saunders was then praising heroin as an effective pain reliever at her London hospice, it was judged to have no medical benefit. There was grim evidence of its abuse between hospital admissions and deaths from overdoses. It, along with LSD and ecstasy, were on Schedule I. So was marijuana, although that was a political compromise. The assistant secretary of health had suggested it be placed there temporarily until Nixon appointed a commission to recommend a final status.

Cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone, and fentanyl at least had demonstrated medical uses—cocaine in dental surgery as a topical anesthetic—and were listed on Schedule II, although they had a risk of “severe psychological or physical dependence.” Drugs on Schedule III were those with recognized therapeutic benefits but with a moderate risk of “physical or high psychological dependence.” That is where Miltown, along with amphetamines and barbiturates, was put. Schedule IV was designed to include combination drugs that had a “low potential for abuse.”

What was notably missing from the statute sent to Congress was any mention of Librium and Valium. Sonnenreich had expected they would later be added to the same category as Miltown, the industry’s original mild tranquilizer. Roche, however, argued that could not happen while its judicial appeal of the FDA’s effort to regulate more strictly the benzos was still pending. A new round of administrative hearings attempted to settle the matter once and for all. Neil Chayet, the founder of the Law-Medicine Institute at Boston University and a member of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Narcotic Addiction and Drug Abuse Committee, appeared in hearings as “an expert in legal medicine.” He set forth Roche’s position: Valium and Librium were not “drugs of abuse in the usual sense.” Roche even presented eleven letters from police departments that stated that none had seen criminal problems associated with either Valium or Librium.

Roche’s lobbying worked. When Congress passed the law in the fall of 1970 it had a fifth grouping, what some called “the Roche schedule.” It covered drugs with the lowest potential for abuse, and it included Valium, Librium, and a few codeine-cased cough syrups that contained codeine.

As Congress debated the bill, Neil Chayet called Sonnenreich. The two had been Harvard law school classmates. Chayet said he did legal work for Arthur Sackler and suggested the next time Sonnenreich was in New York, Sackler would like to meet him “to discuss Roche’s drugs and federal oversight.”

“Why should I meet with that idiot?” Sonnenreich replied. (“Those are the types of things you say when you’re very young,” Sonnenreich told the author).

Shortly after that conversation, Sonnenreich visited New York. Chayet arranged a dinner at Sackler’s sprawling apartment at United Nations Plaza. The twin thirty-eight-story towers had opened only a couple of years earlier and had been designed by the same architects who did the United Nations. Sonnenreich knew it was home to some of New York’s most prominent families.

“We had dinner,” recalls Sonnenreich, “and during the discussion Arthur got frustrated and started yelling at me. Well, I don’t respond well to being yelled at and I yelled back. Marietta was there and she got up from the table and left the room. Neil sat there quietly. And Arthur and I went on arguing for several hours. I had all the confidence and cockiness of a young guy and I kept telling him he was an ‘old dog who didn’t know the new things that had to be done.’ He was trying hard to persuade me that I was wrong on the regulations. Neither of us convinced the other.”

The next day, when Sonnenreich was back at the Department of Justice, Sackler’s secretary called.

“I got on the phone.”

“You know I like you,” Sackler started. “I would like you one day, if you leave the government, to do some work for me. Think about it.”

“I am going to stay in the government,” Sonnenreich told him. “This is what I’m happy doing, this is where I’m staying.”

Sonnenreich’s career was moving fast. Nixon had embraced Sonnenreich’s idea of a national commission to study and recommend how the government should address marijuana. Going into private practice did not entice him.

The president appointed nine of the thirteen members on the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They included doctors, academics, psychiatrists, and attorneys. The congressional leadership appointed two U.S. senators, and two congressmen. Former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Raymond Shafer was its chairman (it was mostly referred to later as the Shafer Commission). Nixon tapped Sonnenreich to become the executive director, in charge of a staff of seventy-six.

Nixon expected that the conservative Republican majority with which he had stacked the Shafer Commission would return with an uncompromising finding about the dangers of marijuana. Instead, after eighteen months of testimony from dozens of experts, Sonnenreich and Shafer knew they had reached a conclusion that Nixon was not likely to embrace: they had not found evidence that marijuana was physically addictive, nor was it a gateway drug.

“When I told them at the White House what we were planning to say,” Sonnenreich told the author, “they thought I was crazy. They could not understand that we were going to recommend decriminalization.”

“You need to take marijuana out of the criminal justice system,” Sonnenreich argued in vain. “These young people are not criminals. You are degrading the criminal system. It can’t handle all of them.”

Sonnenreich was not a proponent of the drug but thought criminalizing it was the wrong solution. He pointed out when Nixon had come into office, the government “spent a total of $66.4 million for the entire federal effort in the drug abuse area.” That ballooned to $796.3 million by 1972, and for the next budget it would exceed $1 billion.

The administration hard-liners were furious with the interim report. They feared the public would interpret decriminalization as an endorsement for using marijuana. “From that moment on,” Sonnenreich told the author, “I was cut off from the White House.”

The Shafer Commission did not finish its final report, with 3,700 pages of appendices, until 1973. Nixon ignored its recommendations.1

Excerpt from PHARMA: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America, by Gerald Posner (pp. 254-259). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

This is a somewhat different kind of post for Just the Facts.

Many of you come here for my reporting on current events and investigative stories. Others may have found me through one of my books. But I suspect a fair number of subscribers are not familiar with the full body of my work, much less the role my wife, , has played in every one of those books.

So today I wanted to share something more personal. It is also, I hope, a glimpse into the real world of publishing and long-form investigative nonfiction as I have lived it. I’ll be back soon with the reporting I’m working on now. But in the meantime, I thought it was worth opening a window onto the story behind the books, and behind the name on the cover.

Readers see a single name on a book cover and assume authorship is a solitary act.

It rarely is.

Over the past four decades, I have written 13 books. My name is on the spine of each one, and with that I have gotten the the praise and the criticism. But anyone who knows me well knows tho…

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Readers come to Just the Facts for many different reasons.

Some of you subscribed because of Pharma. Others because of my reporting on the pediatric gender debate, antisemitism, and the business of journalism and publishing. But many of you are also here because of Case Closed and the continuing arguments over who killed President Kennedy.

So I wanted to pass along a brief note for that part of my readership, and for anyone else who may want to revisit the evidence.

For the next few days, Open Road Media has put the digital editions of Case Closed on sale for $2.99.

This is the updated edition, with my 60th-anniversary afterword reviewing newly released JFK files and assessing the 2023 account by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis.

More than three decades after I first published the book, my view has not changed. The case still points overwhelmingly to Oswald, and the core evidence remains far stronger than the mythology built up around it.

For those who want to revisit the cas…

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I wanted to share a new interview I did with because it gave me the chance to talk about something that has been on my mind for a long time: why straightforward, evidence-based journalism now feels rarer than it should.

Over the years, I have reported on subjects as different as the Kennedy assassination, the opioid epidemic, Vatican finances, and, more recently the medicalization of children under the banner of gender medicine. Different stories, different stakes, different worlds. But the method has always required the same discipline. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Do not begin with a preferred conclusion. Do not tailor the facts to fit an approved narrative. Do the reporting first, and accept where it takes you.

That ought to be the most ordinary description of journalism imaginable. Instead, it increasingly feels like the standard of a bygone era.

Too much reporting today is shaped before the real work even begins. Some stories are softened while others are narrowed…

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There are mistakes, and then there are mistakes that tell a much larger story.

The New York Times has corrected its embarrassing print headline that described NATO as the North AmericanTreaty Organization rather than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Ordinarily, a correction would end the matter. News organizations are human enterprises. Errors happen, especially as copy desks are stretched and the pressure to publish quickly is relentless.

But this was not just a stray copyediting error. It deserves more than a shrug and a technical fix.

The problem here is not merely that someone in production failed to catch a glaringly mistaken headline. The problem is that the erroneous headline appears to reflect the underlying conceptual frame of the article itself.

That is what makes this episode so revealing.

The byline was by Steven Erlanger, one of the paper’s most experienced foreign correspondents, a deeply accomplished reporter with decades of coverage across Europe, diplomacy, war, and …

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