state politics
What do rent control and 340B have in common?
Drug discounts and rent control don't typically have anything in common, but in the multiverse that is the California ballot measure system, there's a connection.
Michael Weinstein, a controversial AIDS activist in California, has been pushing rent control ballot measures for years. Apartment builders don't like it, so they're going after one of the biggest revenue generators of Weinstein's AIDS Healthcare Foundation: the 340B drug discount program.
Read John Wilkerson's story for more details about one of the weirdest ballot measure combinations this election.
addiction
Bolstering addiction treatment polls well across parties, new survey shows
Drug addiction was a campaign-trail mainstay in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. But this time around, candidates for the White House and Congress are largely steering clear of the issue, save for cursory mentions of fentanyl crossing the U.S. border. The issue is so absent that in President Biden's final debate before dropping out of the race, neither he nor former President Trump used the word "treatment" in response to a direct question about the ongoing drug overdose crisis.
But a new poll from the Legal Action Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, shows that Americans are more supportive than ever of a robust drug-epidemic response and access to addiction treatment. According to the survey, 64% of Republicans, 72% of independents, and 86% of Democrats believe drug addiction should be treated more as a medical issue than a criminal problem. Nearly two-thirds reported that they personally knew somebody affected by the drug crisis, a significant increase from a nearly identical survey in 2019, when just 44% of those polled said they knew someone affected.
The overall share of Americans who believe drug addiction should be treated medically, not criminally, also increased in the last five years — as did support for syringe exchange programs, increased government spending on addiction treatment, and screening and reentry programs for incarcerated people.
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