Good morning, citizens, it's Monday, August 17. This week we're filing a moral panic that never really ended, plus the strange business of hemp walls and phone bans.
The Senate is banning AI companions for minors, and the receipts show we've run this exact playbook before.
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This Week's Moral Panic
The Senate Judiciary Committee has advanced a bill from Sen. Josh Hawley to ban children and teens from using AI "companion" apps, one piece of a broader 2026 legislative blitz that a critic quoted in the coverage calls a "techno-panic." The measure moved out of committee markup as states and Congress race in parallel to write rules for chatbots that didn't exist five years ago, with one governors' meeting reportedly spurring lawmakers who had already failed to keep kids off social media to redirect that same energy at AI. Minnesota, meanwhile, is already in court: a judge denied xAI's bid for a temporary restraining order against the state's near-unanimously passed ban on AI "nudification" apps, and the Attorney General's office says it will keep defending the law through an August hearing.
The pattern is not new. Psychology Today traces today's smartphone-panic playbook straight back to 1950s Senate hearings, when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham told Congress comic books endangered children and the industry caved into self-censorship soon after. A policy-think-tank analysis argues the current "addiction" narrative around kids and tech, popularized by Jonathan Haidt, rests on a flawed reading of the evidence, while advocacy groups pushing outright smartphone bans are running into school districts that are reversing those same bans, because kids need phones to reach help during emergencies like school shootings.
> Minnesota's AG keeps defending the nudification ban through August (More)
> The 1950s comic-book hearings that started the modern panic playbook (More)
Quick Hits
Britain is preparing an Australian-style ban on social media for children under 16, possibly as early as this year, while also moving to close a loophole that leaves some AI chatbots outside child-safety rules; Spain, Greece, and Slovenia say they plan similar bans. (More)
Congress is weighing Farm Bill language that could effectively ban most intoxicating hemp products, and Forbes reports American hemp businesses are racing the clock to save jobs and revenue tied to a multibillion-dollar industry before lawmakers act. (More) | Farm Bill language, explained (More)
The Week in Weed ★
A hempcrete house nicknamed "Casa Feita por Muitas Mãos," or "House Made by Many Hands," is showing off hemp's thermal-insulation and natural humidity-regulation properties in a real, lived-in home rather than a lab demo. (More) | Hempcrete, explained (More)
Paraphernalia
One 49-second TikTok sound built entirely on a joke structure worth studying: it opens sincere, "you never take me to Bangladesh," then escalates into absurd demands for sausages, oil, novels, and revenge drinks, and the sincerity-then-absurdity pivot is exactly what thousands of imitators are copying. (More)
Historybook
1954: Senate subcommittee hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquency open in New York, setting the stage for the industry's self-censoring Comics Code; 1930: Harry Anslinger is appointed the first commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a post he'd hold for 32 years; 1938: Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast airs two months later than legend prefers, but the panic it inspired became shorthand for media-fueled hysteria; 1969: the Woodstock festival closes its third day in upstate New York, drawing roughly 400,000 attendees despite predictions of chaos that never fully materialized; 2003: the "Blaster" worm forces Microsoft to scramble patches across an estimated 8 million infected computers, feeding an early tech panic about the internet itself.
, Winston Churchill
In partnership with the Bureau of Evidence
The Bureau reminds citizens that hysteria is a renewable resource, but so is skepticism. Supplies, records, and further reading available at reefermadness.shop.
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Behind the Name: "Reefer Madness" began as a 1936 propaganda film so overwrought in its warnings about cannabis that it flipped into unintentional comedy, eventually becoming the go-to shorthand for any moral panic that outruns its evidence. The musical parody and this Bulletin both borrow the name on purpose, filing the week's hysterias with a wink instead of a warning label.
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M&D Playhouse North Conway, NH, USA · August 27 – September 13, 2026 |
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Iowa Stage Theatre Company Des Moines, IA, USA · October 2–11, 2026 |
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Long Beach Playhouse Long Beach, CA, USA · October 10 – November 15, 2026 |
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San Diego Musical Theatre San Diego, CA, USA · October 19 & 20, 2026 |
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Stuart's Opera House Nelsonville, OH, USA · October 22–24, 2026 |
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Hornsby Musical Society Hornsby, NSW, Australia · November 13–22, 2026 |
