The NYT Admits America Has a Marijuana Problem

Pot problems, Chinese peptides, reindustrialization and more in this week's digest.

The New York Times published a lengthy editorial (gift link) on how marijuana legalization did not pan out as promised. While they don’t support banning it again, they do think major reform is necessary.

At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as “relatively minor problems.” Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use.

It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong. Legalization has led to much more use. Surveys suggest that about 18 million people in the United States have used marijuana almost daily (or about five times a week) in recent years. That was up from around six million in 2012 and less than one million in 1992. More Americans now use marijuana daily than alcohol.

This wider use has caused a rise in addiction and other problems. Each year, nearly 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain. More people have also ended up in hospitals with marijuana-linked paranoia and chronic psychotic disorders. Bystanders have also been hurt, including by people driving under the influence of pot.

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The unfortunate truth is that the loosening of marijuana policies — especially the decision to legalize pot without adequately regulating it — has led to worse outcomes than many Americans expected. It is time to acknowledge reality and change course.

This was the most widely discussed NYT editorial I can remember in quite a while. Click over to read the whole thing.

Chinese Peptide Scams

As a follow-up to Tom Owen’s essay on the scam economy, I wanted to highlight this Financial Times article that sheds light on the Chinese peptide market.

In nondescript office blocks across China, salespeople are pitching injectable drugs to overseas customers, fuelling a fast-growing black market in peptides — compounds that online influencers claim can improve everything from sleep and memory to skin elasticity.

The surge has been driven partly by the runaway success of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide [Ozempic/Wegovy] and tirzepatide [Mounjaro/Zepbound], which belong to a broader class of peptide-based therapies.

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But many of the compounds circulating online are either banned for human use by regulators — including in the US — or remain prohibitively expensive through legitimate medical channels. That has pushed demand towards online sellers, many of them based in China.

Sensing an opportunity, hundreds of Chinese traders have established operations exporting low-cost peptides to western buyers, according to interviews with multiple sellers and an FT review of online marketplaces. What has emerged is a highly secretive, unregulated shadow economy.

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Despite the proliferation of sellers, industry insiders said the underlying supply chain was far more concentrated. Most peptides are produced by about a dozen factories clustered in Shenzhen and Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. These facilities originally manufactured active pharmaceutical ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry before pivoting towards the grey market. Multiple layers of intermediaries now sit between factories and consumers.

“We never touch the product. We don’t know who makes it,” said one seller. That opacity is deliberate, even as traders circulate videos purporting to show vials on production lines, creating the impression that buyers are dealing directly with manufacturers.

Finding sellers online is easy. They advertise openly on cross-border ecommerce platforms such as Global Sources, as well as on Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp. Tracking their physical presence is far harder. The FT visited the registered addresses of eight suppliers and found that most used false locations, with no functioning phone numbers or email contacts.

Chinese authorities have been cracking down on domestic sales of unregulated GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, arresting scores of sellers. A review of court records shows at least 40 cases of people being charged with black-market peptide sales. Penalties can include fines of up to 10 times the revenue earned. As a result, peptides popular in the US are all but unavailable to Chinese consumers.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Two things are going on here.

In one case, people are buying peptides like BPC-157 that used to be widely available in the US, including in pill form marketed as an ordinary supplement, but have since been the subject of FDA crackdowns. BPC-157 works, as I can attest from personal experience, having used the oral form when it was still available. It healed up a nagging hip injury that had been lingering for many months. Frankly, I don’t blame people for trying to get access to these kinds of peptides that are no longer available through legitimate channels in the US.

But we also see, as Owens highlighted, pirated versions of patented drugs sold by major pharmaceutical companies. These are very widely available such that anyone who wants to buy these pirated versions can easily obtain them. It’s an example of how even multi-billion dollar companies with very valuable IP and the country’s best lawyers can’t effectively protect it even domestically under today’s globalization regime in the US.

Reindustrializing America

With all the talk and debate about reindustrialization in America, it’s worth looking at companies that are successfully doing high tech manufacturing domestically. One such company is glass maker Corning, which makes fiber optic cables. The Wall Street Journal just had an interesting profile (gift link) of that business, that makes a number of key points.

Corning stock is hovering around its all-time high, boosted by a recently announced $6 billion deal with Meta to supply fiber-optic cable for the company’s rapidly growing array of AI data centers. Corning said it is in talks with others for more such deals. It’s also working on what could be its next big act—fiber that goes inside servers, instead of just connecting them to each other.

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About half of Corning’s manufacturing remains in the U.S., a feat, given how many others have offshored high-tech manufacturing. In a North Carolina factory, it pulls glass strands as thin as a human hair, yet upward of 30 miles long. They’re so transparent, if you filled an ocean with them, you could see straight to the bottom.

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What made Corning’s fiber reinvention possible is that the company outsources almost nothing, says Mazzali. It even designs the machines used to manufacture its optical fiber and cable.

Weeks says this is part of the “Corning Way.” That self-containment also applies to the workforce, says the CEO. When the company shifts direction, it reassigns engineers rather than laying them off, so they accumulate expertise over decades, across different projects. “The things our engineers do, you can’t learn them from a textbook,” says Weeks.

After the onset of the pandemic, Corning endured six consecutive quarters of shrinking revenue, its lengthiest drop since the 2001 telecom crash. Instead of laying off workers and shrinking factories, the company gave employees the option to take some of their compensation in stock.

“We were probably carrying 4,000 to 5,000 more employees than our revenue could support,” says Weeks. Corning currently employs about 56,000 people worldwide.

Now that demand for fiber is booming, the company needs all of those workers and capacity—and more.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Vertical integration, and generally doing things in house rather than relying on suppliers, has been a key feature of Elon Musk’s manufacturing ventures like Tesla and SpaceX. They can move faster because they don’t have a larger and fragmented supply chain.

Also, Corning was able to preserve its experienced labor force, something many other companies, which often cut workers loose the minute there’s a downturn, have been unable to do.

Thought I didn’t quote this part of the piece, Corning also stuck with the fiber manufacturing business even when it wasn’t financially attractive. Now they are reaping huge rewards for it.

All of these practices are difficult for companies in America to implement, because there is so much pressure from the financial markets to do otherwise.

In a related topic, the Financial Times also covered China’s genius plan to win the AI race. China’s focus is on identifying its top domestic talent to route through the best talent development programs at its best schools. This is not America’s strategy, which is heavily focused on foreign talent. In fact, we are so focused on it that, as the FT piece implies, that our universities are actually educating some of China’s top talent for the benefit of the Chinese economy.

Best of the Web

Brad Wilcox: Get Married Young - One very interesting stat in this piece is that a woman who is childless at age 30 has about a 50% chance of being permanently childless.

The New Yorker: The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Mansion in Los Angeles - A sick article about how our surrogacy system actually functions. Some guy from China had a couple of dozen kids via surrogacy and allegedly abused and neglected them.

Scott Greer: The Right’s Culture Problem - It’s not the best sign for the Trump admin to shut down DC’s preeminent cultural institution

Stiven Peter: Prolegomena to a Future Protestant Elite - Peter is a New Yorker who attended the elite Stuyvesant High School before going on to the University of Chicago.

Christian Smith/First Things: Why I’m Done with Notre Dame - A renowned sociologist of religions packs is bags in frustration. This bit caught my eye:

Why can’t the fast-and-high-quality-but-­expensive option work [to become a globally preeminent research university]? In the current environment, no amount of money can generate enough believing Catholic scholars who are also top-shelf researchers and excellent teachers. It would take massive investments across many decades to produce anything like a pipeline of such scholars. What is available today? Scholars who can advance Notre Dame’s research agenda, yes, but many of them are neutral-to-hostile toward Catholicism.

Evangelicals like to envy Catholic intellectuals, but Smith says that there aren’t enough truly top notch Catholic scholars to fill even one top global research university.

Comment: The Dark Side of Servant Leadership

Next City: Three Years In, America’s First New Black-Led Bank in 20 Years Is Picking Up Steam - This piece has some very interesting observations about locally institutions.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned in the Telegraph (UK), and also in the Stand Firm podcast.

I was a guest this week on Jon Harris’ podcast discussing my evangelical elite article.

New this week:

• Evangelism Is Not Enough - Winsome apologetics can win souls, but it can’t run cities or drive successful outcomes in other high-stakes domains

• The Scam Economy - Guest author Tom Owens on why a populist-tort lawyer alliance is needed to start pushing back

• My podcast this week is with economist Chris Briem on America’s greatest Rust Belt collapse.

Cover image by Elsa Olofsson/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0