Weekly Update: September 22-26, 2025

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Killing time Dept

It does not take a billionaire to figure out that Trump’s War on Drugs using the US Navy for extrajudicial executions is likely to be ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. (Billionaire Richard Branson Says Trump "Bound to Fail" at Militarizing Drug Law Enforcement).  In a letter to The Guardian: Branson wrote that “Your editorial on the so-called war on drugs (Donald Trump is turning a failed metaphor into a more dangerous reality, 7 September) is correct in stating the extrajudicial killing of alleged drug traffickers will not solve the US fentanyl crisis.  Branson serves as a Commissioner for Global Commission on Drug Policy

Fire Away Dept

Former CDC Director Susan Monarez, in her testimony before a Senate Committee on September 17, said that in all parts of HHS (including CDC, FDA, NIH), leaders are being told to fire anyone not willing to get on board with HHS priorities, and keep firing the next person down the chain until someone complies.  Is this happening at NIAAA and NIDA?

And, He left Andreessen Horowitz to help Trump downsize the government. Can Scott Kupor eliminate nearly 300,000 federal jobs without the DOGE chaos?   Scott Kupor, a former managing partner at venture capital firm, is the new director Office of Personnel Management, a little known part of the Executive Branch responsible for federal hiring and firing, performance standards and removal civil service job protections for tens of thousands of government employees in policy-related roles. He is also the subject of an article that attempts to answer this question about the MAGA program: Can a level-headed operator demonstrate that deep workforce reductions and reforms can actually produce a more efficient government? Or will he prove that a kinder and gentler version of the slash and burn activities of the DOGE mission is indeed very bad policy for a modern industrial state?  This is an empirical question that ASDN is attempting to answer in our own review of the chaotic first nine months of the Trump administration.  Chaos theory has been used to understand the complex biological systems that underly addiction, but I doubt that Trump’s version of chaos theory will lead to any breakthroughs other than the abyss of complete chaos.

Censorship Ain’t Funny Dept.

The controversy surrounding the firing of comedians Stephen Colbert and Jimmey Kimmel has just inspired a new department in the ASDN Weekly Update: Censorship ain’t funny!  Time to share our favorite Trump Jokes. 

• What is the difference between Washington, Nixon and Trump? George Washington couldn’t tell a lie.  Richard Nixon couldn’t tell the truth.  Donald Trump can’t tell the difference

• A swastika has been spray painted over Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.....Police say it's impossible to tell if the act was committed by Trump's opponents or supporters.

• How is Donald Trump going to ensure the shut down of the department of education? By renaming it Trump University.

Relatedly, the Story that will not die.  The Government Is Burying A Shocking New Report That Links Alcohol To These Terrifying Health Conditions – BuzzFeed. One of the best ways to educate the public that “moderate” drinking increases the risk of seven types of cancer is for the alcohol industry to pressure HHS to suppress an expert committee report with evidence to the contrary.  

Food for Thought Dept.

In the New York Times op-ed Forced Drug Treatment Isn’t Horrific. It’s a Relief, Dr. Keith Humphreys (Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University) claims that mandated treatment can be effective and downplays the benefits of harm reduction approaches. Reactions from the addiction science and practice community have been swift to disagree, and bring the evidence and some humanity to the issue in these rebuttal letters to the editor.

Addiction Science Back in the USSR Dept. 

The rapidly deteriorating situation around the First Amendment and free speech in the USA reminds the writer (TB) of several visits made to the USSR in the late 1980’ and 1990’s.  One trip was made just after Mikhail Gorbachev become Soviet leader in 1985.  The old, repressive, Stalinist system was still in deep state mode in the USSR bureaucracy, despite Gorbachev’ initial attempts to open the Soviet economy by joining international collaborative projects like the World Health Organization’s multi-country studies that led to the development of the AUDIT screening test and the first cross-national evaluation of alcohol screening and brief interventions in primary health care.  I remember one evening in Moscow in particular when I was invited by a Russian sociologist to dinner at his flat with a group of his academic friends.  Much of the dinner conversation consisted of sharing favorite jokes about the absurdity and incompetence of the soon to crumble Soviet system, which under Stalin became the model for George Orwell’s 1984 and proved to be a test case for Putin’s and Trump’s high tech totalitarian regimes today.  Science is an important bulwark against disinformation and misinformation.  Comedy and jokes may be good for group therapy at a dinner party, but they are not sufficient to stop censorship, oligarchy and autocracy.

On another visit to the USSR, I went to see the addiction research program at the Bekhterev Institute in St. Petersburg.  Vladimir Bekhterev (1857 –1927) was a prominent Russian neurologist whose examination of Joseph Stalin reputedly led to a diagnosis suggesting paranoid schizophrenia.  Bekhterev died unexpectedly the day after he made the diagnosis, causing speculation that he was poisoned by Stalin.  After Bekhterev's death, his name and all of his works were removed from Soviet textbooks on Stalin’s orders.

Both Ivan Pavlov and Bekhterev independently developed theories of conditioned reflexes, which have influenced addiction science and treatment in many ways.  Soviet era addiction science was strongly biological, often favoring unsubstantiated procedures like blood cleansing to remove dependence-producing toxins.  Treatment services included correctional centers conveniently located next to factories where the first treatment episode lasted six months and the second three years.  The narcology  treatment hospital I visited in Moscow had bars on the windows, perhaps because the therapy was so effective they had to prevent people with alcohol dependence from breaking into the facility?  The All-Union Research Center, the USSR’s equivalent of NIAAA, was a mix of well-trained scientists and political operatives, the latter often seen outside WHO expert committee meeting rooms smoking cigarettes and looking at their watches.  Most of their research was published in Russian.  Needless to say, a 2016 bibliometric search of the world’s addiction research publications did not include the USSR among the most productive contributors.   For a country that in the past 25 years has recovered from one of the most serious alcohol problem epidemics in modern history, the lack of a multidisciplinary network of scientists devoted to addiction research could perhaps be interpreted as evidence of the irrelevance of addiction research.   Or it could be an indication of the ways autocracy stifles science and substitutes coercive treatment, wars on drugs and other types of political repression to deal with alcohol and drug problems.   

Illegitimi non carborundum!