On Friday, I debated cannabis legalization at AmericaFest 2025, the annual convention for Turning Point USA, the group led by Charlie Kirk until his assassination in September. Here’s my opening argument:

My opponent this afternoon is Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and a staunch libertarian. Katherine’s pinned post on X calls for the legalization of heroin, so at least she is consistent.

I too am consistent. I believe the liberal and libertarian effort to destigmatize, normalize, legalize, and even promote the use of ‘drugs of abuse‘ has been a catastrophe for the United States. 

We are a global outlier on this issue. We have reaped nothing but pain for a generation of ideologically driven decisions to make drugs more accessible to both young people and adults.

By ‘drugs of abuse,’ I mean drugs that produce a subjective high that makes people want to keep using them and to use more over time. The precise biochemical mechanism and whether the high is stimulating, sedating, or intoxicating matters less than the fact of its temporary pleasure. Of course those drugs include cannabis. Yes, alcohol is a drug of abuse too. So are medically prescribed drugs, from Oxycontin to Adderall to Valium.

Unfortunately, Thursday’s decision by President Trump to ‘reschedule’ cannabis and make it more accessible will only worsen this self-imposed crisis and lead to more drug-driven misery and death.

Let’s be clear about cannabis. Cannabis — particularly cannabis today, which is very high in THC, the chemical that intoxicates users — is very much a drug of abuse.

When they have been tested in rigorously controlled trials — and they have been tested over and over — cannabis and THC have shown almost no medical benefits. But they have many side effects, to both brain and body.

Normalizing drug use normalizes drug use. Pretending drugs of abuse are medicine normalizes it even faster.

Cannabis can cause psychotic episodes where users lose touch with reality and become paranoid that friends or family members want to hurt them. It can sometimes cause those users to become violent in response. It can cause episodes of prolonged vomiting that send users to emergency rooms. It is associated with traffic accidents and deaths. It raises the risk of heart attacks in users dramatically. And, yes, it is a gateway drug.

Overall, cannabis is probably at least as dangerous as alcohol. It is less obviously physically harmful, for despite its cardiovascular risks, it does not cause direct overdose. But it is more psychiatrically harmful.

Now we come to the simple, facile libertarian argument: but alcohol is legal! Cannabis should be legal too. In fact, all drugs should be legal — and again, I do appreciate the fact Katherine was honest enough to say that out loud.

My drug, my body, my choice.

Sounds good. Except that to use drugs is inevitably to risk consequences both to yourself and to other people that cannot be foreseen. Drugs follow their own logic.

Some drugs — especially opioids — frequently kill their users from overdose. Many drugs cause users to behave in antisocial ways — to become violent, or simply to stop caring about the possible consequences of their actions. And all drugs of abuse have addictive potential.

The libertarian solution to this problem is to ignore it, to say that users are responsible for their own behavior. If they become addicted, too bad for them.

This theory sounds nice. But it ignores reality.

The children and families around users and addicts inevitably bear the brunt of their antisocial behavior, and the rest of us cannot ignore its public harms. Even when it does not lead to full-bore addiction, drug use that is more than casual almost inevitably worsens the problems users have turned to it to solve. It is the most selfish of acts. It divorces users from the lives of people around them — and their own lives.

A religious person might call that behavior immoral. But one doesn’t have to be religious to recognize it has what economists call externalities. The user feels the subjective pleasure, while everyone else faces the potential consequences.

As a society, we seem to have become desensitized to the potentially horrific consequences of drug use.

We should not be. We must not be.

We — as individuals, and as a nation — must do everything possible to remind people of them. We must discourage it at every turn. That means stigmatizing drugs of abuse, not legitimizing them, not building industries that profit from heavy use and addiction.

It means driving up the price — in dollars and potential legal consequences — of drug use to discourage people who have not used from doing so, rather than making drugs cheap, openly advertised, and easily accessible.

It means understanding that every drug is a gateway drug, not just biochemically but societally. Normalizing drug use normalizes drug use. Pretending drugs of abuse are medicine normalizes it even faster.

Legalization is a red herring. Alcohol is legal, but we arrest people for alcohol consumption all the time — for underage use, for public drinking or intoxication, for drinking and driving. We will continue to arrest people for using cannabis too, even if the drug is fully legalized at the state and federal level.

But whatever the legal status of cannabis, we are not going to put every — or even many — cannabis users in jail. We don’t now, and we didn’t a generation ago. 

The question is whether we want encourage use: of cannabis, of Adderall, of alcohol, of OxyCONTIN, of fentanyl, of cocaine, of every legal and illegal drug. Legalizing cannabis is another step on that path to ruination.

I hope we do not take it.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared on the author’s Substack, ‘Unreported Truths.’

A photo of former President Bill Clinton topless in a dimly lit hot tub with his arms folded behind his head was included in a massive trove of Jeffrey Epstein files released Friday by the Department of Justice (DOJ).

In another photo, Clinton is seen wading in a pool next to Ghislaine Maxwell and a woman whose face was redacted by authorities.

Subsequent photos showed Clinton posing with American pop stars Michael Jackson and Diana Ross and seated on a plane next to a female wearing an American flag pin whose face was redacted.

He was also seen smiling arm-in-arm with the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Epstein at what appeared to be a dinner party, wearing a festive shirt.

The locations where the photos were taken were not included, and no context was provided.

White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson took to social media Friday afternoon to comment on the never-before-seen photos of the former POTUS.

‘Here is Bill Clinton in a hot tub next to someone whose identity has been redacted. Per the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ was specifically instructed only to redact the faces of victims and/or minors,’ Jackson wrote. ‘Time for the media to start asking real questions.’

Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Angel Ureña, accused the White House of trying to ‘hide [things] forever,’ in a statement on X, implying President Donald Trump continued a relationship with Epstein after his crimes were revealed.

‘The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever,’ Ureña wrote in the post. ‘So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be. Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton.

‘There are two types of people here,’ he continued. ‘The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that. Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats.’

The DOJ dumped thousands of documents and hundreds of photos on its website Friday, all supposedly obtained by authorities during investigations into Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking cases. 

Other photos showed interior and exterior views of Epstein’s properties, personal photos of Epstein with various people and heavily redacted potential victim exhibits.

While more than a dozen politically known individuals appeared in the files, Clinton and other notable figures’ inclusion in the files does not necessarily imply wrongdoing.

The document drop was triggered by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the DOJ to make the files public 30 days from its Nov. 19 signing by President Donald Trump.

Some files may be withheld by the DOJ if disclosure would jeopardize an ongoing investigation or prosecution, to safeguard victims’ privacy or to avoid publishing sensitive child sexual abuse material.

Ross’ communications teams did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.

The Department of Justice began releasing final documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein Friday, with a massive trove of documents that predominantly shows photos and heavily redacted materials categorized into four different sections. 

The DOJ on Friday afternoon released four different data sets of thousands of photos, New York grand jury material and evidence related to investigations surrounding Epstein. The documents and photos were released on the DOJ’s official website. 

Epstein was a well-connected financier who rubbed elbows with those at the highest echelons of government and private industry. He was convicted of sex trafficking minors in 2008 and served just more than one year of incarceration, which also included a controversial work-release arrangement under a plea agreement. 

He was arrested again in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking before he was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell from suicide that same year, officials reported. 

DATA SET ONE: 

The first data set shows thousands of photos of the interiors and exteriors of Epstein’s properties, including in New York and on his private island, Little St. James. 

DATA SET TWO: 

The second data set released shows Epstein in personal photos with high-profile individuals, including former President Bill Clinton. The photos in the second data set show Epstein shirtless while sitting on a sofa, standing near a helicopter and many photos of him on boats.  

A photo in the set included Clinton shirtless in a hot tub. 

When asked about the photo, Clinton spokesperson Angel Urena directed Fox Digital to a statement he posted to X in response to the Epstein drop. 

‘The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,’ he wrote. ‘This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be. Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton.’

Urena said there are ‘two types of people’ involved in the Epstein scandal: those who did not know of Epstein’s crimes and cut him out of their lives upon his conviction and a second group of people who ‘continued relationships with him after’ his crimes came to light.

‘We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that,’ the Clinton spokesman continued. ‘Everyone, especially MAGA, expects answers, not scapegoats.’ 

DATA SET THREE:

The third data set released by the Department of Justice included heavily redacted photos of potential victims, documents from Epstein’s 2019 grand jury records that were also heavily redacted, and potential victim exhibits. 

DATA SET FOUR: 

The fourth data set in the document drop mostly showed evidence and exhibits from the investigations into Epstein, including documents dated 2005 and 2006, when the Palm Beach, Florida, Police and FBI began investigating Epstein over tips of potential sex trafficking. 

President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan law in November that required the Department of Justice to release all ‘unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials’ within 30 days of Trump’s signature.  

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday morning during an appearance on Fox News that the Department was set to ‘release several hundred thousand documents today,’ while adding that the DOJ anticipates releasing ‘more documents over the next couple of weeks.’

The Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically directs the Justice Department to release all unclassified records and investigative materials related to Epstein and his longtime partner Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as files related to individuals who were referenced in Epstein previous legal cases, details surrounding trafficking allegations, internal DOJ communications as they relate to Epstein and any details surrounding the investigation into his death. 

It’s not just Minnesota.

The past few weeks have made clear that fraudsters stole billions of dollars from states’ welfare programs, much of it from Medicaid. It also appears that Democratic politicians tolerated the heist for their own political benefit. 

Yet politicians in virtually every state have let waste, fraud and abuse spread like wildfire in Medicaid, putting taxpayers on the hook for an estimated $2 trillion in improper spending over the next decade alone. 

Thankfully, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have given states a reason to clean up this mess and spare taxpayers that pain.

In a new paper, I show how Democrats have turned Medicaid into one of the most fraud-ridden programs in America — and how Republicans are fixing it. While Medicaid has long been plagued with improper spending, Democrats supercharged this crisis in the Obama years.

ObamaCare added tens of millions of able-bodied adults to the program, yet that population is much more likely to be ineligible.

The Obama administration refused to rigorously check eligibility, and the Biden administration adopted the same policy, deliberately hiding an explosion in waste, fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, states refused to police their Medicaid programs, confident that the federal government would look the other way and cover the tab.

The first Trump administration found that 27.4% of federal Medicaid spending was improper in 2020, or about $120 billion at the time. The administration also found that four out of every five improper payments were the result of eligibility errors. This money flowed to people who shouldn’t have been on Medicaid and therefore diverted money and care away from its intended recipients. Five years later, it’s highly likely that at least one in five Medicaid dollars is still wrongly spent.

Call this what it is — an assault on taxpayers. It’s also a clear violation of federal law. States are legally required to reimburse the federal government for Washington’s share of Medicaid payments if their improper payment rates are above 3%, a far cry from the 27.4% rate in 2020.

The Trump administration is once again conducting eligibility checks, but even without that info, it’s all but certain that every state already exceeds the 3% threshold. The only reason they’ve avoided a budget blowout is by receiving so-called ‘good faith waivers’ from Washington. Essentially, states have promised that they’ll tackle fraud and abuse, even when they have no intention of doing so.

Republicans called time on this rigged game in the law President Trump signed July 4. They effectively eliminated good-faith waivers and told states that, starting in 2030, they will be forced to cover the federal share of any improper payments above 3%. While five years may seem like an eternity, it’s an acknowledgment that states have a mountain to climb to bring their error rates into the low single digits. 

Consider Ohio. In 2019, it had an improper payment rate of nearly 45%, giving the Buckeye State the worst record in the nation for waste, fraud and abuse. Based on its most recent spending levels, Ohio would be on the hook for $9.7 billion, equal to roughly 15% of its current state budget. Illinois, with a 35.4% rate, would pay $6.4 billion, a tough ask given the state’s famous fiscal woes. Even states with lower improper payment rates, like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Missouri, would still be looking at annual costs of more than $1 or $2 billion.

Without reform, I estimate that states will pay a combined $100 billion in penalties beginning in 2030. Their only hope to avoid this fiscal pain is to immediately start rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. In the state legislative sessions that start in January, lawmakers should focus on several key reforms.

First, stop allowing Medicaid recipients to self-attest their income, address and other personal information. Using the honor system invites abuse.

Second, review recipients’ eligibility at least twice a year for able-bodied adults and once a year for everyone else, thereby removing ineligible individuals early and often.

Third, cross-check Medicaid data with easily accessible information such as wage, hiring and tax records; returned mail and changes of address; out-of-state food stamp transactions; and prison and death records. These basic good government measures can quickly identify people wrongly receiving taxpayer money.

Waiting to tackle Medicaid fraud is the most foolish thing states can do. So is hoping that Democrats get their wish and successfully repeal Republicans’ Medicaid reforms. That won’t happen while Trump is president. And if states wait to see the outcome of the 2028 election, they may be disappointed. At that point, they’d face an even steeper hill with barely a year to get their act together.

There’s no avoiding the reality that Democrats broke Medicaid — in Minnesota and everywhere else — or that Republicans have given states an urgent mandate to finally root out the waste, fraud and abuse.

 Michael Greibrok is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Moscow would refrain from launching new attacks on other nations provided his country is treated ‘with respect.’

The Kremlin made the remarks during his annual televised press conference in Moscow as concerns persist among European nations that Russia poses a security threat, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

‘Will there be new special military operations? There will be no operations if you treat us with respect, if you observe our interests, just as we have constantly tried to observe yours,’ Putin said.

Putin uses the phrase ‘special military operation’ to describe Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, according to AFP.

He added there would be no further Russian invasions ‘if you don’t cheat us like you cheated us with NATO’s eastward expansion,’ according to the BBC.

The Russian leader also claimed he was ‘ready and willing’ to end the war in Ukraine ‘peacefully,’ though he offered few details suggesting a willingness to compromise, the BBC reported.

The yearly news conference, which typically runs at least four hours, features questions from reporters and members of the public across Russia. 

More than 2.5 million questions were submitted for this year’s event, which focused heavily on the war in Ukraine, Reuters reported.

Putin also noted during the event that the nation’s ‘troops are advancing’ and expressed confidence that Russia will accomplish its objectives through military means if Ukraine does not assent to Russia’s terms during peace talks, according to The Associated Press.

‘Our troops are advancing all across the line of contact, faster in some areas or slower in some others, but the enemy is retreating in all sectors,’ Putin declared.

As the war drags on, the European Union has just agreed to provide Ukraine with a loan of over $105 billion.

Fox News Digital’s Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.