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Pharmaceutical Industry Suffers Billions In Losses After States Legalize Marijuana, New Study Finds

The pharmaceutical industry takes a serious economic hit after states legalize marijuana—with an average market loss of nearly $10 billion for drugmakers per each legalization event—according to a first-of-its-kind study.

The peer-reviewed research article, published in the journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday, looked at stock return and prescription drug sales data for 556 pharmaceutical companies from 1996 to 2019, analyzing market trends before and after the enactment of medical and adult-use cannabis legalization laws at the state level.

The stock returns were “1.5-2 percent lower at 10 days after legalization,” the study authors founds. “Returns decreased in response to both medical and recreational legalization, for both generic and brand drugmakersInvestors anticipate a single legalization event to reduce drugmaker annual sales by $3 billion on average.”

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Millions Of Americans Face Eviction In Coming Months

The economy is fine, so we’re told. There is no recession, so we’re told. The Federal Reserve has everything under control, so we’re told. Meanwhile, 3.8 million Americans say they could face eviction in the next two months.

It doesn’t sound like everything is fine.

The median rent in the US eclipsed $2,000 per month in June for the first time ever. It’s another symptom of rampant inflation burning through the US economy.

While the CPI cooled slightly in July, shelter costs rose another 0.5% month-on-month. On a yearly basis, shelter costs have spiked by 5.7%, according to government numbers. And the CPI drastically understates the cost of housing. Actual rents have increased more than 15% in the last 12 months, according to data compiled by Zillow.

With rents skyrocketing, households representing 8.5 million people are behind on their rent, according to the Census Bureau. Of those, 3.8 million say they are somewhat or very likely to be evicted within the next two months.

According to Yahoo Finance, “The combination of soaring inflation, the end of most eviction moratoriums and rental assistance payments and an extremely low vacancy rate has pushed rents up — and many renters out.”

Nearly half of all renters experienced rent hikes in the past 12 months, according to Census Bureau data. Eleven percent have seen rent increases of over $250 per month.

To make ends meet, people are turning to credit cards and loans, raiding savings, selling assets, and dipping into retirement funds. According to the Census Bureau, 57% of renters said they were forced to resort to one of these desperate measures to keep up with their rent.

This dovetails with the skyrocketing levels of household debt. Americans added another $40.1 billion to their debt load in June alone. That represented a 10.5% year-on-year increase. Credit card balances increased by $46 billion in the second quarter of this year. Over the last year, credit card debt has exploded by 13%, the biggest increase in over 20 years.

According to Yahoo Finance, the Fed’s efforts to stem inflation are adding to the pain. With mortgage rates rising, renters who were hoping to buy homes have been priced out of the market.

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4 Farmers Found Dead in Wheat Field, Throwing Town’s Entire Harvest Season Into Turmoil

A North Dakota farmer and three farm hands, all three from the same family, were found dead on Monday in what law enforcement officials have described as a likely murder-suicide.

In the small town of barely 1,000, in the midst of harvest season, loved ones are living what they’ve called a “complete nightmare.”

Douglas Dulmage, 56, a farmer, husband and father of two, was found shot dead in his combine in his family’s field south of Cando, North Dakota.

Outside of the combine, Justin Bracken, 34, Richard Bracken, 64, and Robert Bracken, 59, also of Cando, lay dead in the field they’d been helping him harvest. A .357 revolver was found near the bodies, according to The Associated Press.

In a statement released via Facebook on Tuesday, Towner County Sheriff Andrew Hillier described what his deputies found.

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A Guided Tour of How Cops Can Browse Your Location Data

In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results.

In this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we were able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data.

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72% of America’s Top Medical Schools Use Racial Politics to Eliminate Applicants

Seventy-two percent of America’s top medical schools use racial politics to weed out applicants, according to a review conducted by medical advocacy group Do No Harm.

According to the review, 72 percent of the nation’s top 50 schools and 80 percent of the top ten ask “probing questions to elicit responses from the applicant about his or her views on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics.”

The Duke University School of Medicine — ranked number six in the country — boasts that it has been “nationally recognized for its commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.” In an essay prompt for applicants to the school, admissions asks:

Potential sources of health inequities include race, gender, education, income, disability, geographic location, and sexual orientation. Moments to Movement (M2M) is Duke’s collective stand against systemic racism and injustice. The name signifies going beyond passive moments of reflection and becoming more active as we build to make lasting change for our patients, their loved ones and each other. Describe your understanding of race and its relationship to inequities in health and health care. [Emphasis added].

The number 14-ranked school — the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine — prompts applicants to answer the following:

We are interested in combating all forms of systemic barriers, and would like to hear your thoughts on opposing specifically: systemic racism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, and misogyny. How will you contribute?

In addition, the number 43-ranked medical school in the country at the University of Minnesota asks applicants whether they have “personally experienced or acted with implicit or explicit bias,” and then goes on to prompt a response to the following:

Our country is reckoning with its history, racism, racial injustice, and especially anti-black racism. Please share your reflections on, experiences with, and greatest lessons learned about systemic racism.

As Breitbart News previously reported, the Association of American Medical Colleges released new standards for teaching medicine that require students to achieve “competencies” in “white privilege,” “anti-colonialism,” and “race as a social construct,” among other race-essentialist ideas.

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A Former Member of the JFK QAnon Cult Tried to Kidnap Her Own Children

When Samantha Ricks was kicked out of the JFK-QAnon cult led by Michael Protzman at the beginning of December, she was already in a downward spiral. 

A couple of weeks later, Ricks was accused of substance abuse by the woman who had taken her family in. Then, child protective services said she had exposed her children to “inappropriate sexual behavior.” Three days before Christmas, Oklahoma Child Protective Services knocked on her door and took her 6-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son into foster care. 

Ricks then raged online about how child protective services was secretly trafficking children. She accused everyone, including those who tried to help her, of collaborating to take her children away from her, beliefs founded in QAnon conspiracies about global child sex trafficking rings that are reinforced by extremist groups who have made it their mission to prey on vulnerable parents.

After months of spreading misinformation, lashing out at everyone around her, and even fundraising, Ricks took matters into her own hands. 

What happened next was the culmination of her extremist views and desperate outlook: On August 8, Ricks tried to kidnap her own children. 

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Man Tries to Assassinate Argentina Vice President Cristina Kirchner

A man was arrested after a failed assassination attempt on the vice president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, on Thursday.

Videos posted to social media sites show a crowd outside Kirchner’s home in Recoleta, downtown Buenos Aires, then a man suddenly pointed a gun at the vice president at point blank range.

The assailant fired his gun at the vice president but failed. The vice president left the place unharmed.

“A man pointed a firearm at her head and pulled the trigger,” President Alberto Fernández said during a national broadcast. He said the gun didn’t fire.

After the attack, the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, criticized the attack and asked for a fast investigation to conclude the case. He declared a national holiday on Friday for “peace and harmony to our people so that they can defend life”.

A Brazilian man named Fernando Sabag Montiel, 35, has been charged with attempted murder.

He was arrested by police officers from Kirchner’s security team shortly after the incident. In the attempt against the vice-president, the Brazilian was using a Bersa 380 pistol with five ammunitions.

Since the Argentinean Public Ministry asked for Kirchner’s condemnation, supporters of the vice-president usually gather in front of her house to lend their support. She is accused of corruption and influence peddling during the term of her ex-husband, former President Nestor Kirchner.

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America’s Secret Government By Proxy

There are 1,271 counterterrorist, homeland security, and intelligence organizations; 1,931 private sector analogues; 10,000 locations of these organizations; and ~854,000 people with top-secret security clearances as of 2010. To make matters worse, the line between private and public is obscure in this industry.

This massive effort requires massive tax collection. Since government endeavors do not compete and do not participate in reciprocal exchanges, then they have no profit-and-loss test to determine if their efforts are worth the money taken from citizens. Additionally, since only the free market can determine prices, government endeavors must continually disseminate propaganda to convince citizens that the endeavor is useful.

Interestingly, officials in this industry have explicitly admitted that reports from government agencies are not trusted by the public, so the tactful solution is to hire someone to produce those reports that would have otherwise been produced by the government agency itself. Since security state agencies cannot produce evidence that their services are needed, they hire private businesses and nonprofits to disseminate their propaganda for them.

Naturally, the need to justify the existence of government—propaganda—evolves into techniques to disseminate that propaganda in addition to censoring opposition to it. Therefore, a proxy government is established—a front for the actual government to do what it wants to do but otherwise cannot. This also sets the stage for information control:

How to control Information:

  1. Stop ideas (censorship)
  2. Force other ideas (redirection)
  3. Justify this control (propaganda)

The US government has incentivized a group of organizations to do just that. “Big tech censorship” and other control measures were not the result of free-market phenomena.

The think tanks that refer to themselves as “counter-violent extremists” (CVEs) are America’s proxy government responsible for censoring, shadow banning, ad feed tampering, search result manipulation, and “racism/extremism” deception.

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