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Multiple States Facing Marijuana Legalization Repeal Threats in 2026

Prohibitionist-led efforts are underway in multiple states to repeal voter-initiated adult-use marijuana markets.

In Maine and Arizona, campaigners are collecting signatures to place ballot questions before voters undermining those states’ cannabis legalization laws. If passed the Arizona initiative would repeal the state’s licensed retail marijuana market. The initiative in Maine would similarly wipe out the state’s regulated adult-use market, while also eliminating consumers’ ability to legally grow personal use quantities of cannabis at home.

In Massachusetts, campaigners have already collected the necessary number of signatures to place a similar repeal measure, titled An Act to Restore a Sensible Marijuana Policy, before voters. In Massachusetts and Maine, allegations persist that voters’ signatures in support of the proposals were fraudulently obtained.

“2026 is going to be a pivotal year for the marijuana reform movement,” NORML’s Deputy Director Paul Armentano said. “If successful, these measures will wipe out regulated cannabis markets — eliminating tens of thousands of jobs, ballooning state budget deficits, and disrupting safe access to millions of consumers. How successfully we respond to these challenges today will determine the degree to which our movement continues to move forward tomorrow.”

Also, in Idaho, a constitutional amendment will appear on the November ballot that, if approved, will forbid voters from ever again having the opportunity to decide on statewide marijuana policies. State lawmakers voted last year to place the amendment on the 2026 ballot.

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The War on Drugs Failed Because It Never Understood Why People Use Drugs

The conversation around drugs has long been framed by cost. Policymakers calculate the billions lost every year to productivity gaps, hospitalizations, law enforcement and incarceration. The U.S. alone spends an estimated $193 billion annually dealing with the fallout of illicit drug use, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Yet there is a blind spot. People do not only use drugs because of the usual suspects: trauma, poverty or pathology. They also use them because they feel good. Pleasure. Connection. Belonging. A stronger sense of self.

There is an old joke that goes: “Do you know what’s the problem with drugs? That they feel too good.” And it is spot on. Ignoring this basic human driver has a cost of its own.

Researchers and frontline harm-reduction workers are now introducing a radical, almost counterintuitive idea: what if drug policy and education started not from fear, but from pleasure? What if acknowledging the real reasons people use could reduce overdoses, improve mental health and save governments millions?

As Valentine and Fraser noted in their 2008 study of methadone patients: “Although pleasurable and problematic drug use are often thought to be mutually exclusive, pleasure is reported from both the effects of drugs such as heroin and methadone and from the social worlds of methadone maintenance treatment.”

This is the frontier of “pleasure management” or “pleasure maximization,” a new way of thinking about consumption that blends economics, public health and lived experience. Daniel Bear and colleagues argue that harm reduction too often “foregrounds risks at the expense of benefits.” Their framework of Mindful Consumption and Benefit Maximization (MCBM) begins by asking users why they consume, what benefits they seek and how to reduce risks while preserving those benefits.

Zara Snapp, director of Instituto RIA in Mexico, reminds us that this is not a new invention. She points to ancestral traditions across Latin America where psychoactive plants were used to foster vision, knowledge and connection to the sacred. In this sense, today’s debates about pleasure management are part of a much longer human story about using substances for meaning and wellbeing, not only risk.

Silvia Inchaurraga, a psychoanalyst and president of ARDA (the Harm Reduction Association of Argentina), frames it in terms of rights: “The concept of harm reduction cannot stand without legitimizing the right of people to consume drugs… interventions must always start from recognition of this right and the user as a citizen.” She argues that pleasure management challenges abstentionist logics that seek to eliminate risk altogether, instead of acknowledging that people use for multiple reasons, including wellbeing.

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From Noriega to Maduro: The Long US History of Kidnapping Foreign Leaders

While it has undoubtedly shocked the world, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro fits into a long history of United States kidnapping of foreign leaders.

On January 3, U.S. Special Forces entered Venezuela by air, captured Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, killing around 80 people in the process. They were flown to the United States, where Maduro was put on trial on spurious drug trafficking and possession of firearms charges.

Despite President Trump himself declaring that “kidnapping” was an appropriate term for what happened, corporate media around the world have refrained from using the obvious word for what transpired, preferring to use “capturing” or “seizing.” These terms reframe the incident and cast doubt on its illegality, helping to manufacture public consent for a grave breach of international law. Indeed, managers at the BBC sent out a memo to its staff, instructing them in no uncertain terms to “avoid using ‘kidnapped’” when reporting on the news.

Targeting Venezuela

Maduro is not the first Venezuelan official Washington has helped kidnap. In 2002, the Bush administration planned and executed a coup d’état that briefly ousted Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, from power.

The U.S. government had been organizing and financing the ringleaders of the coup for months, flying the key players back and forth to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top officials. On the day of the coup, American Ambassador Charles Shapiro was at the mansion of local media magnate, Gustavo Cisneros, the headquarters of the coup.

Two U.S. warships entered Venezuelan waters, moving towards the remote island of La Orchila, where Chavez was helicoptered to. Chavez himself stated that senior American personnel were present with him during his abduction. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration immediately endorsed the proceedings, describing them as a return to democracy.

Chavez was only saved the same fate as Maduro after millions of Venezuelans flocked into the streets, demanding a return of their president. Their actions spurred loyal military units who retook the presidential palace, and the project fell apart. After the coup, the United States quadrupled its funding to the coup leaders (including Maria Corina Machado) through vehicles such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

A further kidnapping of a Venezuelan official occurred in June 2020, when the United States downed the plane of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Saab was in Cabo Verde at the time, traveling back from a diplomatic mission to Iran, where he has been helping break American sanctions. He was only released in 2023, after Venezuela negotiated a prisoner swap which included a number of CIA agents captured in Venezuela in the act of carrying out terror attacks against the country’s infrastructure.

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Iran’s Inflation Protests Turned Into an Uprising. Will Trump Get Involved?

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made Iran an Islamic republic in 1979, famously said that revolution was “not about the price of watermelons.” He held economics in contempt as the science of feeding donkeys. As his successor, Ali Khamenei, is learning, people will make a revolution about the price of watermelons. Demonstrations against inflation in late December have become some of the most violent unrest in Iran since the 1979 revolution.

The country has been under a total communications blackout since January 8, but the information that has emerged from Iran indicates that there has been a massive, bloody crackdown. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a nonprofit in Virginia, has verified 483 civilian deaths and 47 deaths of police and military personnel. On Sunday, Iranian state television broadcast video from a morgue in Tehran overflowing with bodies; authorities claim that the situation is now under control and hosted a progovernment rally in Tehran on Monday.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran if the government kills protesters. He told reporters on Sunday that “it looks like” his line has been crossed, and that he “might meet” with Iranian negotiators, or that “we may have to act because of what is happening before the meeting.” His cabinet is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss options, including war, to support the protesters.

Trump’s promise to intervene “encouraged [Iranian authorities] to act much more aggressively and brutally,” Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Professor Vali Nasr said during a panel hosted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where I used to work. “You just end the protests quickly and take this off the table, so if that’s the excuse for intervention, it’s not going to be there anymore,” he explained, quoting a hypothetical Iranian official. 

As the space for political dissent has shrunk in Iran, protests have become more frequent and violent. In 2009, around 72 people were killed in protests by the reformist movement against a contested presidential election. In 2019, the government responded to protests about fuel prices by shutting down the internet, killing at least 321 people, and banning reformists from parliament. In 2022, when Iranians rose up against mandatory hijab laws, the crackdown killed at least 551 people.

This round of protests began with a merchants’ strike that was triggered by the Iranian rial hitting a record low against the U.S. dollar. (Unlike many of Iran’s self-inflicted economic problems, economist Esfandyar Batmanghelidj pointed out, the currency crisis has been directly caused by U.S. economic sanctions.) In the midst of the protests, the government announced that it would cut billions of dollars from import subsidies—increasing prices in the short term—and instead give citizens an additional $7 per month.

The unrest suddenly escalated in the second week of January. Video evidence from before the communications blackout, compiled by military observer Mark Pyruz, shows that protest sizes ballooned by five times between January 5 and January 7. Then, several Kurdish parties and Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince exiled in 1979, called for their followers to come out on the night of January 8. At that point, authorities shut down the internet.

It’s unclear how much control Pahlavi actually has on the ground. Last summer, after the Israeli war with Iran, he claimed to have recruited 50,000 defectors from the Iranian government online. On Sunday, the former crown prince called on oil workers to go on strike in a video message. There’s no evidence that Pahlavi has been able to summon either the defectors or the strikes; on Sunday, he went on Fox News to appeal publicly to Trump, who has refused to meet with him, for help.

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The Rubicon crossed – Team Trump’s nihilistic anti-values paradigm

So, finally an act of unvarnished predatory action by Trump and his team – the abduction of President Maduro in a lightning night-time military strike – has launched 2026 into a pivotal moment. A pivotal moment not just for Latin America, but for global politics.

The “Venezuela method” is aligned with Trump’s “business first” approach which is rooted in constructing a “financial reward system,” whereby diverse stakeholders to a conflict are offered financial benefits that permit the US to (ostensibly) achieve its own objectives, whilst locals continue to extract rewards from the exploitation of (in this case) Venezuelan resources – under US close supervision.

In this template, the US does not need to create a new governing régime from scratch, nor put “boots on the ground” – for Venezuela, the plan is that the existing government of the newly-sworn in President, Delcy Rodriguez, will remain in control of the country – so long as she follows Trump’s wishes. Should she or any of her ministers fail to follow that blueprint, they will receive the “Maduro treatment,” or worse. Reportedly, the US has already threatened Venezuela’s Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, that he will be targeted by Washington unless he helps President Rodriguez meet US demands.

Put another way, the plan comes down to a single underpinning premise that the only thing that matters is the money.

In this context, the US approach to Venezuela resembles that of a Vulture Hedge Fund “buy-out”: Remove the CEO and co-opt the existing management team with money to run the company to new dictates. In Venezuela’s case, Trump likely hopes that Rodriguez (who has been “talking” with Secretary Rubio via the Qatari royal family, and who is also the Minister responsible for the oil industry) has squared off all the factions that compose the Venezuelan power structure to accept the relinquishment of state sovereign resources to Trump.

What is so pivotal here is the shedding of all pretence: The US is in a debt crisis and wishes to seize – for exclusive US use – Venezuelan oil. Submission to Trump’s demand is the only variable that matters. All masks are off. A Rubicon has been crossed.

“Venezuela will be turning over 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil to the United States of America, sold at market price with the money controlled by me,” Trump has written on Truth Social.

The erasure of the American “project” – the substituting of self-interested hard power for the American narrative of it being “a light to all nations” – constitutes a revolutionary change. Myths and their supporting moral stories provide the meaning to any nation. Without a moral framework, what will hold America together? Ayn Rand’s celebrated belief that rational selfishness was the ultimate expression of human nature cannot reconstitute social order.

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Bill Clinton defies congressional subpoena, Comer says contempt charges moving ahead

Former President Bill Clinton appears to have defied a congressional subpoena to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday morning.

Clinton was compelled to sit for a sworn closed-door deposition in the House’s bipartisan probe into Jeffrey Epstein, but Fox News Digital did not see him before or after the scheduled 10 a.m. grilling.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., had threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Clinton if he did not appear Tuesday.

Comer said Tuesday morning, “We will move next week in the House Oversight Committee … to hold Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress.”

“I think everyone knows by now Bill Clinton did not show up. And I think it’s important to note that this subpoena was voted on in a bipartisan manner by this committee,” Comer told reporters after formally ending the deposition.

“No one’s accusing Bill Clinton of any wrongdoing. We just have questions. And that’s why the Democrats voted, along with Republicans, to subpoena Bill Clinton.”

He said “not a single Democrat” showed up to the deposition on Tuesday.

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Mike Pompeo Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About ‘Popular’ Regime Change in Iran

Former Secretary of State and Director of the CIA Mike Pompeo is one of the most bloodthirsty and prominent neocons in the United States today. He is militantly pro-Israel and has openly and consistently pushed for regime change in Iran. In the first Trump administration, he was one of Trump’s most hawkish advisors. As one of the main advocates for the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, Pompeo clearly is not bothered by military action which is illegal under international law. However, one factor which differentiates Pompeo from his neocon cronies is his blunt, nigh-idiotic honesty.

While Washington has orchestrated numerous coups around the globe, few prominent officials have been so bold or careless as to acknowledge that the United States or Israel is helping foment a revolution in real time. However, Pompeo did just that when he tweeted, “The Iranian regime is in trouble… Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege – Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan.  Next stop:  Baluchistan… Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets.  Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…”

Pompeo’s remarks are important because of what it casually assumes: Israel is intimately involved in the current protests in Iran. This undermines the US and Israeli governments’ narrative that the protests are an organic development. Contrary to neoconservative narratives, the fact that every protester is not literally on a State Department payroll does not make the protests organic. While some, if not most, of the protesters might genuinely oppose the government, the fact remains that funding, intel, media amplification, training, and sanctions have all been used as tools to influence political outcomes inside Iran to the benefit of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The biggest historical example of this is the 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. After Mohammad Reza Shah was installed by the Iranian military on behalf of the US and UK, the CIA hired mobsters to stage riots in favor of the Shah. On top of this, the CIA also paid for buses and trucks full of demonstrators to protest in Tehran. Following the Iranian Revolution, the US trained members of the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) who previously killed American soldiers. With the rise of the internet, the US government provided funding for online activism targeting the Iranian government, asked Twitter to delay site-maintenance to help 2009 Green Movement protesters communicate, and carried out cyberattacks in collaboration with Israel. In short, for decades the US has tried to destabilize Iran to foster regime change. Pompeo’s remark suggests that this long-standing policy has not changed under the nominally “anti-war” second Trump administration.

Like the Obama administration, the second Trump administration is following the “Arab Spring playbook.” The Arab Spring was a series of protests, insurrections, and rebellions across the Arab world which sought to “promote democracy.” In reality, many of the figures and groups involved in the Arab Spring received not only training, but also funding from American NGOs like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House. These organizations all receive money from the US government via Congress or the State Department. Most of the aims of the Arab Spring failed. Instead of democracy, the protests led to an authoritarian backlash from Arab governments. This “counter-revolution” was beneficial for Israel as the failure of the Arab Spring made normalizing relations with destabilized, divided Arab regimes easier.

Ultimately, the main beneficiaries of regime change are not the United States or its people, but instead Israel. Unfortunately, so many figures in the American government, like Mike Pompeo, have a theology which places support for the secular State of Israel in high regard. In fact, Pompeo once suggested that God sent President Donald Trump to save Israel.

To put it frankly, there is nothing godly about Israel, especially with regard to its conduct in its proxy war against Iran. A godly nation would not have its intelligence agency pose as the CIA in an attempt to recruit terrorists for a false flag operation against Iran. The terrorist group in question, Jundallah, has been responsible for murdering both Iranian government officials and civilians.

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Trump 2.0, Year 1: A Libertarian Nightmare

A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.

Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.

Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he’s declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.

While he’s gone hog wild so far in 2026, the pattern of his core authoritarianism was already well demonstrated in 2025. Trump wielded state power to punish enemies and reward friends, sent the military into city streets under bogus pretenses and over the objections of local elected officials, authorized masked cops to enforce “papers, please” policies on U.S. citizens moving in public (the loosing of such largely undisciplined shock troops in American cities where they are not wanted has predictably resulted in the unconscionable murder of a citizen), ordered the serial murder of suspected drug smugglers, and disrupted the global economy by making Americans pay sharply increased taxes on imported goods, for starters. 

He has concentrated what was supposed to be the competing branches of the federal government into the whims of one man, and erased distinctions between federal and state, public and private. America has never had a president who acted more like a monarch.   

Not all of Trump’s actions and statements are mired in his core authoritarianism. This does not absolve him. Not everything negative reported about Trump’s actions, or the specifics or reasonable implications of something he said or did, ultimately bears out. This does not make him acceptable. Yes, previous administrations have also violated Americans’ and the world’s economic and political liberties and lives. This does not mean Trump deserves a pass. His specific, documented exertions of state power over the past year should be enough to declare him a dangerous foe of American liberty. 

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Data Centers Use Lots of Electricity. This Bill Would Let Them Go Off the Grid.

Tech companies are building data centers as quickly as possible to run AI. These facilities are controviersial because they use copious amounts of electricity and might tax an electrical grid that in some areas is already straining.

In a bill introduced last week, Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) proposed an idea: letting these companies get off the grid altogether.

“Power officials have been raising concerns that the grid isn’t equipped to handle the sheer number of data centers tech companies are seeking to build,” Katherine Blunt wrote last week at The Wall Street Journal. “They say it will take many years to build new transmission lines and power plants needed to support the surge in demand while keeping the lights on for other customers.” Some officials, Blunt noted, “have proposed either requiring or encouraging data centers to stop using [the grid] when there is a risk of blackouts, either by powering down or switching to backup electricity supplies.”

Jowi Morales of Tom’s Hardware reports companies are “looking at alternative power sources to bring their projects online, regardless of the availability of power from the grid.” Microsoft, for example, is recommissioning the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to generate 835 megawatts of energy for its data centers (though not without a $1 billion loan from U.S. taxpayers).

“These initiatives will take years to take off, though,” Morales adds. “The Three Mile Island plant is expected to be operational only by 2028.”

Last week, Cotton introduced the Decentralized Access to Technology Alternatives (DATA) Act of 2026. Under the bill, “a consumer-regulated electric utility” would be “exempt from regulation” under federal law so long as it doesn’t connect to the overall electrical grid.

When one company contracts to sell electricity to another company, “that retail transaction presently would put you under the jurisdiction of a bunch of people” at the state and federal levels, says Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute.

And that brings a cumbersome level of red tape. “The rapid pace of innovation means the AI revolution won’t wait for multi-year permitting fights, cost-of-service hearings held by regulators, or planning processes built for the analog era,” Fisher pointed out last year in an article co-written by Cato’s Jennifer Huddleston. “And yet those are the structures that still govern electricity in much of the country. Building a new transmission line in the US now takes about 10 years, while generation projects spend multiple years stuck in interconnection queues, with more than 2,600 gigawatts of capacity now in queues nationwide.”

The DATA Act would lower the level of regulatory intrusion for enclosed systems that don’t connect to the grid. “It just serves data centers that are probably going to be clustered around it without taking electricity supply off the market for Arkansas families and businesses,” Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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President Trump Posts Picture of Himself as ‘Acting President of Venezuela’

President Trump on Sunday shared a picture of a fake Wikipedia page that described him as the “Acting President of Venezuela” as he continues to push the idea that the US is “running” the country following the attack to abduct President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump has insisted that the real acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president, is willing to go along with his plan, which has received a cool reception from US oil companies.

While Rodriguez has said she’s willing to cooperate with the US, her government has maintained a message of unity and defiance in the face of US aggression and continues to call for the release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

“In these difficult times our country is experiencing, Venezuelans have once again demonstrated that our greatest strength is national unity and historical awareness,” Rodríguez said in a post on Telegram on Monday.

“The collective response has been one of firmness, serenity, and determination to preserve peace, raise our voices for the release of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and defend the constitutional order, which guarantees protection and social justice for our people,” she added.

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