Tag: california

California Governor Newsom Vetoes Psychedelics Legalization, But Calls For New Bill On Therapeutic Access Next Year

The governor of California has vetoed a bill to legalize certain psychedelics and create a pathway to regulated access—a move that comes at a time when two states have already enacted comprehensive psychedelics policy reform and as two campaigns are working to put the issue on California’s 2024 ballot.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D)—who was one of the most prominent and earliest lawmakers to call for an end to the war on drugs as mayor of San Francisco and later push for the legalization of cannabis as lieutenant governor of California—vetoed the bill, SB 58, from Sen. Scott Wiener (D) on Saturday.

In a veto message, the governor caveated that he wants the legislature to send him a new bill next year establishing guidelines for regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics and also consider a “potential” framework for broader decriminalization in the future. But at this stage, he’s unwilling to let the reform be enacted with his signature.

“Both peer-reviewed science and powerful personal anecdotes lead me to support new opportunities to address mental health through psychedelic medicines like those addressed in this bill,” Newsom said in a veto message on Saturday. “Psychedelics have proven to relieve people suffering from certain conditions such as depression, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and other addictive personality traits. This is an exciting frontier and California will be on the front-end of leading it.”

“California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines—replete with dosing information, therapeutic guidelines, rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments, and medical clearance of no underlying psychoses,” he continued.  “Unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to these guidelines going into place, and I cannot sign it.”

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Lawyer, 81, who advised judge in Charles Manson trial shoots dead his wife, 75, before turning the gun on himself in murder-suicide in their $3.5 million Long Beach homes

A lawyer who was the legal advisor in Charles Manson’s murder trial shot dead his wife before turning the gun on himself.

Police in Long Beach, California, are probing the deaths of Lawrence Eric Taylor, 81, and Judy Strother Taylor, 75, as a murder-suicide.

Authorities responded to a welfare check at their $3.5million home in Naples on Wednesday, after the couple stopped answering their phone and front door.

Taylor set up his own legal firm after serving as the trial judge’s legal advisor in Manson’s trial and was Supreme Court counsel in the Onion Field murder case.

His wife worked under President Richard Nixon at the now-closed White House Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention.

Long Beach Police Department found the couple dead in their home, with Judy suffering from ‘gunshot wounds to the head’ according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office

Taylor also suffered a ‘gunshot wound’ to the head, with cops recovering a firearm at the scene.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Taylors’ death as a suicide and Judy’s as a murder.

Cops confirmed that the Medical Examiner will conduct an independent investigation. 

The couple were both pronounced dead at the scene, and the motive for the shooting is currently unclear. 

Judy worked as a youth mentor  and within the juvenile justice system for more than 20 years,

She teamed up with Mentor Management Systems President Jerry Sherk to bring an employee-to-employee mentoring program to the US Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Colorado Springs.

Taylor was retained by the Attorney General of Montana as an independent Special Prosecutor to conduct a one-year grand jury probe of governmental corruption.

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California cop who won award for ‘most DUI arrests’ is arrested for DUI

A Sacramento police officer arrested for driving under the influence had previously been given an award for arresting drunk drivers, KCRA 3 reported Wednesday.

Raymond Barrantes was arrested last weekend after California Highway Patrol pulled him over. He has since been bailed out of the San Joaquin County Jail.

According to the report, the West Sacramento Police Department confirmed that in 2015, Barrantes was given an award by the national organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), along with a Facebook post with the caption that Barrantes and another officer had “the most DUI arrests for our Agency in 2014.”

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California State Guidelines Discourage Schools From Offering Advanced Middle School Math

A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.

In San Francisco, public schools have eliminated accelerated math courses in middle and high school since 2014, and several Seattle schools had rolled out detracking efforts by 2016. Earlier this year, a Detroit-area school district eliminated middle school honors math classes, while schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began phasing out advanced middle school math in 2017—though the district announced it would reverse course in August. Outrage erupted in February when one Los Angeles–area school eliminated honors English courses for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

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The predators’ playground

Clara didn’t think much of it when the social science teacher gave her his phone number.

She’d met Alex Rai in her fifth-period journalism class. He was friends with the journalism teacher, Eric Burgess, and often stopped by Room 16 during his prep period to kill time. Burgess introduced Rai to Clara, telling her that Rai had been his student a decade before. Burgess thought they’d get along.

In the weeks that followed, Rai would perch on Clara’s desk, leaning over as he asked about her day and who she hung out with after school. He’s only a few years older than my sister, Clara thought when Rai texted her one day after volleyball practice. It was a hot Southern California afternoon in 2008, the kind where dry heat radiates off the asphalt. She was bored. Why not pass the time by chatting with the cool teacher?

Soon, Rai was texting her regularly. At first, the messages were flirtatious. Before long, he was calling Clara late at night. She recalled him asking whether she’d had sex yet with any boys her age. Halfway through her senior year, Clara dropped her humanities class so she could become his teacher’s aide.

She loved her humanities class. But Rai had encouraged her to make the switch. They could spend more time together, she recalled him telling her, and he could make her truancies from ditching other classes disappear.

Clara remembers her sister warning her not to get too close. She’d heard stories about Rai from girls who’d attended Rosemead with him, when he was a wrestler on a team known as much for its aggressive pursuit of teenage girls as its state champions. But Clara brushed the concerns aside. She didn’t show her sister the texts Rai sent, teasing her — “you wish you were sleeping next to me” — and asking if she missed him.

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California Governor Signs Bills To Let Doctors Prescribe Psilocybin And MDMA If They’re Federally Rescheduled And To Change Marijuana Testing Rules

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has signed a bill that would allow doctors to immediately start prescribing certain currently illicit drugs like psilocybin and MDMA if they’re federally rescheduled, and he also approved separate legislation to amend THC variance testing requirements for marijuana.

The governor signed off on the measures—which are just two of more than a dozen cannabis and drug policy reform proposals on his desk—on Saturday.

AB 1021, sponsored by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks (D), Isaac Bryan (D) and Corey Jackson (D), says that, if the federal government reschedules any Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), California health professionals will automatically be able to legally prescribe and dispense it.

This could be especially relevant to the psychedelics psilocybin and MDMA, which have been designated as breakthrough therapies by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are expected to be approved for medical use as early as next year.

Following a recent Phase 3 clinical trial, a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature last month found that treatment with MDMA reduced symptoms in patients with moderate to severe PTSD. The findings mean federal regulators could consider approving the drug for wider use as soon as next year.

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California Looking To Restrict Travel For Classic Cars

The state of California is looking seriously at instituting or allowing local governments to institute zero-emission zones in the near future. In preparation for such a move, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) reportedly is gathering information about classic cars and how their owners use them. We knew something like this was coming to the US and California would likely be first, but this is still concerning.

According to a Daily Caller report, on August 2 CARB sent a survey to owners of classic cars from model year 1978 or earlier. The questions were aimed at ascertaining how those classics are used and store, as well as where they’re driven. It even asks about how many miles show on owners’ odometers. Knowing how increasingly authoritarian many government agencies seems to be trending, this is concerning to many car enthusiasts who still live in the Golden State.

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Federal Judge Blocks California Online Age-Checking Law as Unconstitutional

A federal judge has granted an injunction blocking a California law that would force online businesses and social media platforms to estimate the ages of people visiting their sites and protect children from seeing content that might cause harm, stating that the law likely violates the First Amendment and would likely lead to online government-fueled censorship.

The law in question, the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), is one of the recent crop of bills seeking to “childproof” the internet by either demanding age verification checks of users or by locking away content. CAADCA, passed in 2022 unanimously by the state legislature and supported by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires every business in the state with an online component to create a report showing how any new good or service they provided would be accessed by children and investigate and account for any sort of “harms” children might face. Businesses that are not in compliance with the law face fines of up to $2,500 per violation.

NetChoice, a trade organization representing tech firms, sued earlier this year to try to block the law. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the trade organization argued that this overly broad law violates the Constitution by “enact[ing] a system of prior restraint over protected speech using undefined, vague terms, and creat[ing] a regime of proxy censorship, forcing online services to restrict speech in ways the State could never do directly.” In short, the end result of the law would lead to businesses and online platforms having to censor content in order to keep children from seeing it, even though a lot of this content is likely to be protected First Amendment speech.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, agreed and blocked the state from enacting the law, which was scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2024.

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In win for AI, Newsom vetoes driverless truck ban

Gov. Gavin Newsom made his choice Friday when confronted with a bill that pitted organized labor versus the tech and business community promoting artificial intelligence. 

Newsom chose AI. 

He vetoed AB316, which would have required a human driver to be present in the deployment of driverless heavy-duty trucks for at least five years as the state evaluates their safety. 

Newsom called the proposed legislation “unnecessary” for the oversight of autonomous trucks,  writing in his veto message that “existing law provides sufficient authority to create the appropriate regulatory framework.” 

Newsom’s veto goes against the wishes of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, which has 250,000 members in the state and whose president, Sean O’Brien, traveled to California this week for rallies in favor of the legislation. Union officials said the measure eventually could put  350,000 drivers out of work in California.

In his veto message, Newsom said he was directing the state’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency “to lead a stakeholder process next year to review and develop recommendations to mitigate the potential employment impact of testing and deployment of autonomous heavy-duty vehicles.”

The veto drew a swift rebuke Friday from Lorena Gonzalez, leader of the 2.1 million-member California Labor Federation, who called out Newsom for siding with his business world allies over his friends in labor. 

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Federal Judge Blocks California ‘High-Capacity’ Magazine Ban for Second Time

U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez blocked California’s ban on ammunition magazines holding more than ten rounds on Friday.

This is the second time Benitez has issued a decision against the ban.

On June 29, 2017, Breitbart News reported that Benitez blocked the ban to prevent “otherwise law-abiding” citizens from being criminalized.

He noted that the ban takes away Second Amendment rights “and amounts to the government taking people’s private property without compensation.”

On Friday, Benitez issued a decision against the ban again by following the Bruen (2022) framework, which requires tradition to be on the side of the gun control in question.

KQED quoted Benitez noting, “There is no American tradition of limiting ammunition capacity.”

He noted that, historically speaking, detachable magazines “solved a problem with historic firearms: running out of ammunition and having to slowly reload a gun.”

He added, “There have been, and there will be, times where many more than 10 rounds are needed to stop attackers,” Benitez wrote. “Yet, under this statute, the State says ‘too bad.’”

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