Cannavictory

Plus: Polymarket bets on when killers will be apprehended, how locking up phones saves high school, and more...

Thank you, President Trump! He's actually following through on the thing he teased last week: Rescheduling pot from Schedule I—the most restrictive category drugs can fall into, which deems them to have high abuse potential and no accepted medical use—to Schedule III, which includes prescription drugs such as ketamine, certain steroids, and Tylenol with codeine. He signed an executive order yesterday that will downgrade the plant. The change would make it much easier to legally conduct medical research, which is how Trump's pitching it:

"We have people begging for me to do this, people that are in great pain for decades," Trump said. "This action has been requested by American patients suffering from extreme pain, incurable diseases, aggressive cancers, seizure disorders, neurological problems and more—including numerous veterans with service-related injuries and older Americans who live with chronic medical problems that severely degrade their quality of life."

"Trump emphasized that his order 'doesn't legalize marijuana in any way, shape or form, and in no way sanctions its use as a recreational drug,'" writes Reason's Jacob Sullum. "That is true, since state-licensed marijuana businesses will still be criminal enterprises under federal law. Those businesses nevertheless will benefit from marijuana's rescheduling because it will allow them to claim standard deductions on their income tax returns. Their inability to do that, the result of a law targeting businesses that illegally supply Schedule I or Schedule II drugs, results in staggeringly high effective tax rates that impose a huge financial burden on the cannabis industry."

This is a massive, welcome change for the pot industry and a huge victory for libertarians who have been making the case for cannabis freedom for so many decades.

Closure in Brown/MIT case: The man who is believed to have carried out the killings of two Brown University students and one Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. A manhunt had been underway for Valente, who studied physics for a short time as a graduate student at Brown University back in 2000–2001. He doesn't appear to have known the students that he shot at Brown, but he does appear to have had an unclear relationship of some sort with the MIT professor he killed.

"Authorities said Mr. Valente was believed to have attended Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, the same university where the slain M.I.T. professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, studied physics," reports The New York Times. "Dr. Loureiro, 47, was found shot in his home in Brookline, Mass. on Monday night and was pronounced dead Tuesday morning. Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said she believed Mr. Valente knew Dr. Loureiro but did not elaborate on the nature of their relationship."

A Reddit tipster who said he'd encountered the suspect helped lead authorities to Valente.

Valente had come to the United States years earlier, becoming a permanent resident through our diversity visa lottery. The Trump administration announced, following this heinous crime, that they're suspending this visa program, per Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. This crime seems like an issue with the criminal, though, not with the visa program; if there was some sort of red flag that should have been discovered during vetting, then that changes the equation, but so far, nothing like that has emerged.

Also, here's an insane modern quirk to this story: Betting markets now exist on whether killers will be apprehended.

Polymarket is offering gambling on the Brown University murders. That's right, it is offering a "swap" on whether the shooting suspect will be caught. More than $200K has already been traded on this market. We are officially off the rails. https://t.co/7f0DbYlUp2

— Daniel Wallach (@WALLACHLEGAL) December 18, 2025

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Scenes from New York: "Within weeks of the Great Phone Lockup, teachers began to notice an incidental (and arguably even more compelling) benefit: The teens were talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie," reports Anya Kamenetz for Intelligencer. "At Rosalmi's school [in Harlem], dominoes rule the cafeteria. 'Dominoes is really a staple Dominican game. People get passionate. You have to slam that first piece down on the table!' she says, adding that there's trash talk 'but it's game trash talk. It's really funny.' About 11 miles south, at Brooklyn Technical High School, the name of the game is poker, the trash talk is (sometimes) in Russian, and instead of chips or cash, the kids bet with hair ties. Josh (not his real name), a junior there, says about half a dozen games go on during free periods. He tends to play Texas Hold'em with a group of friends he made this year. Their antics draw spectators and even side wagers: 'We have one player who is probably the least skilled, but a lot of people bet on him because he has absurd luck,' he says. 'He pulled our group's first-of-the-year full house with pocket aces. He's very entertaining.'"

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QUICK HITS

• The Kennedy Center will be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, the White House announced yesterday.
• A good read from The New York Times on Kristin Cabot, the woman caught on a Jumbotron canoodling with her boss: "The Ritual Shaming of the Woman at the Coldplay Concert." She claims both parties had been in the middle of separations, so it wasn't really a situation involving infidelity. My question: Why the hell do the mobs care? Why waste time gawking at these people, regardless of their moral fiber, and trying to exile them from public life?
• Did private equity eat fly-fishing?
• "The Trump administration is moving to broadly curtail gender transition care for young people, proposing Thursday to eject medical providers from major federal health insurance programs [Medicare and Medicaid] if they provide services including hormone therapy or procedures such as mastectomies to children and teenagers," reports The Washington Post. (I reject the use of the term gender transition care, which presupposes a benevolence and medical necessity to these interventions, though your mileage may vary.) The American Civil Liberties Union says they'll sue. The Food and Drug Administration says it's going to go after the manufacturers of chest binders, "alleging they are illegally marketing them to children as a treatment for gender dysphoria." Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz says that, for too long, health care providers have been treating gender-dysphoric children like "lab mice."
• Nice long thread and beautiful sentiment:

ive come to care an awful lot about my distant ancestors after having kids let me work out how much those ancestors probably worried over my well-being without ever knowing me and struggled their entire lives to build a world to pass down for my benefit https://t.co/R8FvsXRJUX

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) December 19, 2025