Latest news with #ReasonFoundation
Boston Globe
16-07-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Will RFK Jr.'s push for psychedelic therapy help or hamper the emerging field?
His suggested timeline for green-lighting psychedelic therapy surprised even the most bullish supporters of the drugs. And it comes as psychedelics are making inroads in deep red states like Texas, where former Trump cabinet secretary and ex-governor Rick Perry has thrown his full support behind the effort. The administration's embrace of psychedelics has sparked both excitement as well as concern from those in the field, who worry the drugs might be discredited if they appear to be rushed onto the market or are too closely linked with Kennedy, who is known for controversial views on vaccines, antidepressants and fluoride. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I'm quite optimistic,' says Rick Doblin, whose organization has pursed the medical use of MDMA (or ecstasy) since the 1980s. 'But I'm also worried that the message the public might get is 'Well, RFK likes psychedelics and now it's approved.'' Advertisement FDA may reconsider MDMA Under President Joe Biden, the FDA rejected MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing flawed data and questionable research. Regulators called for a new study, likely taking several years. It was a major setback for Doblin and other advocates hoping to see the first U.S. approval of a psychedelic for medical use. Advertisement But the agency appears ready to reconsider. FDA chief Marty Makary, who reports to Kennedy, has called the evaluation of MDMA and other psychedelics 'a top priority,' announcing a slate of initiatives that could be used to accelerate their approval. One new program promises to expedite drugs that serve 'the health interests of Americans,' by slashing their review time from six months or more to as little as one month. Makary has also suggested greater flexibility on requirements for certain drugs, potentially waiving rigorous controlled studies that compare patients to a placebo group. That approach, considered essential for high-quality research, has long been a stumbling point for psychedelic studies, in which patients can almost always correctly guess whether they've received the drug or a dummy pill. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and FDA also recently hired several new staffers with ties to the psychedelic movement. 'These are all very promising signs that the administration is aware of the potential of psychedelics and is trying to make overtures that they're ready to approve them,' said Greg Ferenstein, a fellow at the libertarian Reason Foundation, who also consults for psychedelic companies. 'We didn't hear anything about that in the Biden administration' A spokesperson for HHS did not respond to a request for comment. As a presidential candidate, Kennedy discussed how his son and several close friends benefited from using psychedelics to deal with grief and other issues. A number of veterans lobbying for psychedelic access have already met with Trump's Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins. 'What we're seeing so far is positive,' Collins told House lawmakers in May. Advertisement But some experts worry the hope and hype surrounding psychedelics has gotten ahead of the science. Philip Corlett, a psychiatric researcher at Yale University, says bypassing rigorous clinical trials could set back the field and jeopardize patients. 'If RFK and the new administration are serious about this work, there are things they could do to shepherd it into reality by meeting the benchmarks of medical science,' Corlett said. 'I just don't think that's going to happen.' Texas goes all-in on ibogaine research As officials in Washington weigh the future of psychedelics, some states are moving ahead with their own projects in hopes of nudging the federal government. Oregon and Colorado have legalized psychedelic therapy. And last month, Texas approved $50 million to study ibogaine, a potent psychedelic made from a shrub that's native to West Africa, as a treatment for opioid addiction, PTSD and other conditions. The research grant — the largest of its kind by any government — passed with support from the state's former GOP governor, Perry, and combat veterans, some who have traveled to clinics in Mexico that offer ibogaine. Ibogaine is on the U.S. government's ultra-restrictive list of illegal, Schedule 1 drugs, which also includes heroin. So advocates in Texas are hoping to build a national movement to ease restrictions on researching its use. 'Governmental systems move slowly and inefficiently,' said Bryan Hubbard of Americans for Ibogaine, a group formed with Perry. 'Sometimes you find yourself constrained in terms of the progress you can make from within.' Ibogaine is unique among psychedelics in both its purported benefits and risks. Small studies and anecdotal reports suggest the drug may be able to dramatically ease addiction and trauma. It was sold for medical use in France for several decades starting in the 1930s, but the drug can also cause dangerous irregular heart rhythms, which can be fatal if left untreated. Advertisement Some veterans who have taken the drug say the risks can be managed and ibogaine's healing properties go far beyond antidepressants, mood stabilizers, counseling and other standard treatments. Marcus Capone struggled with anger, insomnia and mood swings after 13 years as a Navy Seal. In 2017, at the urging of his wife Amber, he agreed to try ibogaine as a last resort. He described his first ibogaine session as 'a complete purge of everything.' 'But afterward I felt the weight just completely off my shoulders,' he said. 'No more anxiety, no more depression, life made sense all of a sudden.' A nonprofit founded by the Capones, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, or VETS, has helped over 1,000 veterans travel abroad to receive ibogaine and other psychedelics. But federal scientists have looked at the drug before — three decades ago, when the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded preliminary studies on using it as an addiction treatment. The research was discontinued after it identified 'cardiovascular toxicity.' 'It would be dead in the water,' in terms of winning FDA approval, longtime NIDA director Nora Volkow said. But Volkow said her agency remains interested in psychedelics, including ibogaine, and is funding an American drugmaker that's working to develop a safer, synthetic version of the drug. 'I am very intrigued by their pharmacological properties and how they are influencing the brain,' Volkow said. 'But you also have to be very mindful not to fall into the hype and to be objective and rigorous in evaluating them.' Advertisement
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New Real Estate Regulations in Massachusetts Shrink Homebuyers' Negotiating Power
Both buyers and sellers in one of the country's most competitive real estate markets could soon have less negotiating power. In 2024, Gov. Maura Healey signed the Massachusetts Affordable Homes Act. The sprawling legislation included a measure requiring realtors to let potential buyers have a home inspection before purchasing a house. Buyers can still choose to waive an inspection as "long as the decision is not influenced by the seller or their agent," according to a press release put out by Healey's office. It adds that the law, which goes into effect on October 15, will also require "a separate written disclosure informing buyers that acceptance of their offer is not contingent upon the waiver of a home inspection and that the buyer may choose to have the home inspected." The Greater Boston Real Estate Board has pushed back against the bill, accusing it of having "vague and overreaching liability provisions." The board has also questioned whether the state has enough inspectors to meet expected future demand. But the biggest problem with the new law is that it would block buyers and sellers from using a common property negotiation strategy: waiving or limiting home inspections to get a better deal. In the words of Adrian Moore—vice president of policy at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website—the bill's proponents "are saying it's bad for people to bargain and negotiate when they're buying and selling homes, which is insane." "There's no reason why home inspections shouldn't be one of the bargaining chips. I don't know what problem they're actually trying to solve," Moore adds. "The only people that benefit from this are the home inspectors. Now one of their members gets hired for every single transaction." Sure enough, members of the New England Chapter of the American Society for Home Inspectors lobbied the legislator responsible for this part of the Affordable Homes Act. The inspectors "approached me with concerns that home buyers felt pressure to sacrifice their home inspection, and we talked about the liability that someone could incur by not having the home inspection," state Sen. Michael Moore (D–Worcester) told In fact, Moore—Adrian, not Michael—says the bill "takes away an option people used to have, forcing them all to choose what father knows best." He notes that virtually any business can credibly argue that its services make consumers safer. And while individuals sometimes make poor choices, the mistakes of a few shouldn't take away the rights of many. The post New Real Estate Regulations in Massachusetts Shrink Homebuyers' Negotiating Power appeared first on
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Archives: Manny Klausner's Greatest Hits
In the 1970s, Manuel "Manny" Klausner co-founded Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine, and served as an editor and publisher of Reason. In March, Klausner died at age 85. He was a longtime libertarian and Reason Foundation trustee and a happy warrior for free minds and free markets. What follows is a sampling of Klausner's writing in Reason over the years. "As support for gay marriage increases in America, it becomes increasingly unlikely that gay couples will encounter serious difficulty in finding a florist or baker for their weddings. When one vendor turns a couple away, there are numerous others lining up to win that couple's business. The economic harm falls squarely on the person with the moral qualms. There's no doubt that emotional harm can result from being turned away from a business establishment because of who you love. But surely there is also harm when an American is forced to participate in an event that is contrary to his or her deeply held beliefs. A voluntary, market-oriented approach is the best way to reconcile the competing interests in such situations….Reason has favored gay civil unions since the 1970s, long before they received widespread support. But we've always insisted that the law respect views held by minorities, and as libertarians we oppose using coercion to compel conformity in the private sector." "Debate: Bakers Should Not Be Forced To Produce Cakes for Same-Sex Weddings" "Although it is commonly asserted that public schools are necessary to educate the poor, the term 'twelve-year sentence' has been aptly used to describe the public schools as analogous to a huge prison system which incarcerates the young. Perhaps the strongest case to maintain the present system is the ironic argument that the poor intentionally should be impeded and repressed by inferior schooling. It is hard to visualize a system of schooling that would function any worse for the poor than the system we have today. We urge radical educational reform as a top priority for those interested in personal liberty and in the goal of an educated populace. The program we advocate calls for the complete removal of government from the classroom." "Get Big Brother Out of the Schools" "What does REASON propose? We're strong advocates of allowing New York City to default. The consequences of a default would be positive and healthy. Instead of a bailout, which would benefit primarily the banks and wealthy investors who chose to buy New York City bonds—at a high yield—we believe it just for those who voluntarily put themselves in the position of lending money to the government to bear the risk of a default. Since these banks and investors never offered to forego their profits when times were good, we're hard put to see anything fair about them insisting that we now share their losses. Whether or not the city defaults, times are going to be rough in New York for awhile. But sooner or later, the city will be forced to change its ways and abandon its big-spending, high-taxing style. The financial crisis in New York was inevitable, and it presents an historic opportunity for reform for the aging metropolis: default." "Default" "In viewing the recently disclosed willingness of the Nixon administration to embrace extreme measures in the name of national security, it is pertinent to contrast the widespread acquiescence of the public towards encroachments on personal freedom which have regularly been taken by government in the campaign against drugs. The 'Watergate mentality' has its genesis in the imperial attitude that government knows what is best for its citizens and may use any means to accomplish its ends. The President's 1970 'intelligence operations' plan, devised for Nixon by Tom Huston, was not unique in providing for illegal entry and bugging against political dissenters. Authorization for surreptitious entry is expressly contained in the no-knock sections of the Drug Control Act of 1970." "Breaking and Entering as a Way of Life" "President Nixon's executive order providing for stabilization of prices, rents and wages is an act of supreme defiance against the free market and the freedom of Americans. Nixon's action was born of desperation, in the face of extreme pressure both domestically and internationally. His game plan to reduce inflation and end the recession was not on target, and Nixon was faced with rising unemployment together with rising prices in a dramatic practical refutation of the monetary and fiscal economic policies he sought to implement." "The Wage Price Freeze" The post Archives: Manny Klausner's Greatest Hits appeared first on
Gulf Today
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Today
If your commute is a nightmare, blame Congress
Matthew Yglesias, Tribune News Service America's mass transit agencies are teetering on the brink of collapse. The money they got from Congress to help them through COVID-19 is running out, but ridership remains below what it was before the pandemic. Lower fare revenue plus higher wage costs equals a bigger deficit. Unless state governments fill that gap, agencies will need to dramatically curtail service. Yet service levels are one of the primary determinants of ridership. Hence the increasing risk of a 'death spiral,' where revenue shortfalls lead to service cutbacks, which lead to lower revenue, which lead to service cuts, and so on. State legislatures should try to avoid this doom cycle, even though finding the money may be difficult. But there is a deeper issue here, beyond the question of less funding versus more, or higher versus lower levels of service: the declining labor productivity of transit agencies. The tasks performed by transit workers have remained basically the same for decades even as wages have risen to keep up with economy-wide trends. The agencies themselves deserve some blame for not finding ways to modernize operations and improve efficiency. But Congress itself is a major culprit — specifically, and sorry to wonk out here, Section 13(c) of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964. This provision, as Marc Scribner of the Reason Foundation points out, makes cost-saving reforms difficult if not impossible. Some background: In the early 1960s, many private transit companies were being taken over by state or city governments. The rise of the automobile greatly had reduced the commercial viability of these networks, yet then as now they were seen as important public services. Private transit companies were widely unionized at the time, but public sector unions were rare. There was a (quaint-sounding by contemporary standards) concern that taking agencies public would serve as a form of union-busting. So the law required that agencies which receive federal funding, which was essentially all of them, to protect collective bargaining rights, guarantee re-employment of workers who lost their jobs, and safeguard employees 'against a worsening of their positions.' The upshot is that not only do transit agencies face all the usual obstacles to making their workforce more efficient, they are in many respects prohibited from doing so. For example, there are basically two ways that a transit agency can provide bus service. The standard way in the U.S. is that the transit agency owns and maintains the buses and employs the drivers. In the rest of the world, however, it is more common for the transit agency to act as a contractor: It draws up the service map and frequency it wants, and lets private companies bid on the job. As a striking paper published in 2017 notes, by fully switching to a contracting model, U.S. transit agencies could reduce bus operating costs by 30% with no reduction in service. That sounds like an almost ridiculously large cost saving. Yet the result doesn't stem from any magic privatization fairy dust — it's simply that union contracts pay bus drivers (and other transit employees) above-market wages. So transit agencies could privatize in order to avoid the union premium and save money. Or they could deprive workers of their collective bargaining rights and save money. Except that under federal law, they can't actually do either of those things. In the longer term, of course, there is incredible promise in autonomous driving. Right now in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, it's possible to ride in a driverless taxi. It will soon be possible in other cities. Creating a driverless car that works is a difficult engineering challenge. A self-driving train, by contrast, is fairly trivial — it turns on tracks and does not need to steer around objects or even engage with other vehicles except to have an emergency stopping function. Precisely because the driverless train is a much simpler problem, the technology is neither new nor particularly exotic. The subway systems of Dubai and Copenhagen are fully automated, and the Paris Metro is partially so. Automated train systems are used in many US airports. Automated trains provide a kind of double dividend — they are both cheaper to operate and, since they can drive safely with less spacing between them, allow for more frequent service.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Abundant Life of Manny Klausner
Tariffs are, among other things, a crime against Manny Klausner's dinner table. As a man who reveled in the pleasures of a perfect bottle of wine and an impeccably crafted cheese—no matter what distant land they hailed from—he found the protectionist impulse that has taken hold in the current political moment not just economically illiterate but personally offensive. Manny's libertarianism wasn't an abstract policy preference. It was rooted in his life: a life lived joyfully, passionately, and without permission. Klausner, co-founder of Reason Foundation and longtime torchbearer for individual liberty, passed away in March at the age of 85. He was many things—a lawyer, an editor, a generous mentor, a tireless advocate for free minds and free markets—but above all, he was a man who fully appreciated the fruits of freedom. Shortly after its inception, when Reason was a scrappy operation running on fumes and mimeograph ink, Manny helped put it on more stable footing that made its long run possible. Along with Bob Poole and Tibor Machan, he established Reason Enterprises, which took over the task of publishing the magazine in 1971. Swapping the various roles of editor and publisher with the other two men, he steered the publication through its adolescence. "One of my favorite stories from the Reason Enterprises days," writes Poole, "was the aftermath of our 1973 Ayn Rand issue of Reason." This was an issue of the magazine featuring a pop-art portrait of the Atlas Shrugged author and a lengthy essay comparing that work to Plato's Republic. The issue is, if anything, a love letter. But Rand was famously hostile to libertarianism in all of its guises—and Machan had been excommunicated by Rand in the 1960s for asking the wrong questions in a letter. "Several months after it appeared," Poole explains, "we got a letter from Rand's attorney demanding that we publish a retraction and cease selling any back issues. Manny engaged in correspondence, which made no progress until he suggested that he would welcome the opportunity to defend us in a legal case named Rand v. Reason. That was the last we heard from that attorney." Long before it was fashionable, Manny took seriously the idea that libertarians should win. Not just in the courts—where he brought cases alongside his close friend and fellow litigator Ted Olsen—but also in the broader culture. (He was less successful in his early efforts to attain political office under the banner of the fledgling Libertarian Party.) He believed that beauty, pleasure, and good taste were not indulgences to be justified but evidence of a life well lived. He made the case, by example, that a principled life could also be an abundant one. It's fashionable at the moment to talk about living with less and returning to the old ways. Manny understood, better than anyone, the ways that physical stuff facilitates the good life—one of connection, engagement, and leisure for intellectual pursuits. He was an irrepressible optimist, who saw a better future around every corner. A passionately devoted husband, he saw no allure in a past where his marriage to the accomplished and beautiful Willette would have been illegal under miscegenation laws. In an era when many libertarians hoped to win the day with either stridency or mainline respectability, Manny cut a different path: sharp, stylish, and deeply principled. He was the kind of man who could debate the finer points of antitrust law over a perfect roast duck, and leave both the argument and the diner better off for it. In his obituary for co-founder Machan, Manny recalled that in early days of Reason, "no one had any sense of 'the libertarian moment.' Rather, it wasn't unusual to be referred to as a libertine—and I was once even mistakenly introduced as a librarian." In fact, Manny studied with Ludwig von Mises and sat at the feet of Murray Rothbard, but he wore his erudition lightly. He understood that no one changes their mind by being beaten down. One must persuade with carrots—ideally braised in brown butter and served alongside an aged rib-eye—not sticks. On Reason's fifth anniversary, Manny quoted Rothbard, who had recently declared that "no libertarian periodical, regardless of promotion, advertising, layout, or whatever….has been able to get its circulation above two or three thousand" and that "there seems no real warrant for gauging the [libertarian] movement at more than 3000." "We are delighted," wrote Klausner, "to be able to prove Dr. Rothbard's pessimism premature." He remained closely involved with Reason throughout his life, serving on Reason Foundation's board of trustees for decades and offering sharp-eyed copy edits on everything from fundraising appeals to cover stories. He was one of the magazine's fiercest protectors—always pushing us to be better, braver, and truer to our mission. To know Manny was to experience his generosity: with his time, his table, and his spirit. He hosted dazzling dinners full of laughter and smart people. And he never lost faith in the idea that persuasion, done right, could move the world. Manny Klausner lived his values. He knew that freedom isn't just about the right to say no—it's about the opportunity to say yes: to travel, to taste, to think, to risk, to love. And yes, to a bottle of burgundy that no government had any business trying to tariff into oblivion. He will be missed—and toasted often. The post The Abundant Life of Manny Klausner appeared first on
