Tag: new mexico

New Mexico Bill Would Legalize Psilocybin Therapy In Supervised Medical Setting

Newly introduced bipartisan legislation in New Mexico would establish a therapeutic psilocybin program in the state, legalizing the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms for use in a supervised medical setting.

Under SB 219, titled the Medical Psilocybin Act, patients with certain qualifying conditions would be able access psilocybin and use it under the guidance of a licensed healthcare provider. Therapy would consist of a preparation session, an administration session and a follow-up integration session.

Text of the measure as introduced says the act’s purpose “is to allow the beneficial use of psilocybin in a regulated system for alleviating qualified medical conditions.”

Qualifying conditions under the bill include major treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, substance use disorders and end-of-life care, though the state Department of Health could approve additional conditions.

The state would also license psilocybin producers to grow mushrooms and process psilocybin. Synthetic psilocybin and synthetic analogs of the substance would not be allowed under the proposal.

The 18-page bill has five listed sponsors, including four Democrats and one Republican. It’s been referred to the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee.

“The Medical Psilocybin Act creates a carefully designed framework for the Department of Health to establish a medical program for psilocybin use,” said lead sponsor Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D) in statement posted to social media. “Ensuring New Mexicans have access to every available treatment for serious behavioral health challenges is critical, and this proven therapy offers new hope for those in need.”

Republican sponsor Sen. Craig Brandt, meanwhile, said he’s “excited to be able to offer this breakthrough medical treatment to New Mexicans.”

“Medical psilocybin is proving to be effective in treating traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and other mental health conditions,” he said. “As a veteran I’m hopeful that this new medical option will provide help to my fellow veterans.”

The state health department would be responsible for establishing guidelines around training for clinicians and producers, including dosage, approved settings for administration, production and storage protocols and other best practices.

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A Guilty Plea Implicates ‘Almost the Entire’ Albuquerque DWI Unit in Longstanding Police Corruption

From 2008 to through 2023, federal prosecutors in New Mexico say, Albuquerque police officers conspired with a local defense attorney, Thomas Clear, and his investigator, Ricardo Mendez, to make DWI cases disappear in exchange for bribes. Mendez pleaded guilty on Friday to eight federal charges in connection with the long-running scheme, which prosecutors say mainly involved officers assigned to the Albuquerque Police Department’s DWI unit but also included employees of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) and the New Mexico State Police (NMSP).

The details of this massive corruption scandal have been slowly emerging since January 2024, when FBI agents searched Clear’s office. The federal investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD), which also involved searches of officers’ homes, resulted in the dismissal of some 200 DWI cases and an internal probe. So far, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports, “at least a dozen Albuquerque police officers have been placed on leave,” and many of them have dodged interviews with internal investigators by resigning. But Mendez’s guilty plea is the first public confirmation of criminal charges in the case, and it reveals more extensive corruption than the initial press reports suggested.

According to the charges against Mendez, which include racketeering, bribery, and “interference with commerce by extortion,” he and his boss, Clear, had a mutually beneficial arrangement with Albuquerque cops who specialized in nabbing drunk drivers. The officers would generate business for Clear by referring arrestees to his office. Those clients, who typically paid Clear in cash, were amazed and delighted at his ability to make their cases go away, sparing them prosecution and revocation of their driver’s licenses. But federal prosecutors say that impressive track record was not due to Clear’s legal skills so much as his payoffs to the cops, who conveniently failed to show up at pretrial interviews or court hearings, allowing the aptly named Clear to seek dismissal of the charges on the grounds that the crucial witnesses against his clients were absent.

Initially, those no-shows involved pretrial interviews (PTIs) of witnesses that defendants were entitled to arrange. After March 24, 2022, when the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended PTIs for cases filed in Bernalillo County Municipal Court, the must-miss events were motion hearings and trials. As a reward for their poor attendance record, prosecutors say, officers “were often paid in cash but, at times, also received other benefits and things of value,” including “free legal services, gift cards, hotel rooms, and other gifts.”

According to prosecutors, Albuquerque officers sometimes would, contrary to department policy, refrain from charging DWI suspects and instead provide their contact information or their driver’s licenses to Mendez. Those drivers “were asked to pay several thousand dollars in U.S. currency in exchange for the APD officer not filing charges against the DWI Offenders.”

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New Mexico Officials Approve Medical Marijuana As A Treatment For Female Orgasm Difficulty

A New Mexico regulatory board has given preliminary approval to make female orgasm difficulty (FOD) a qualifying condition for the state’s medical marijuana program, voting 7–2 to recommend the change at a meeting on Monday.

The New Mexico Medical Cannabis Advisory Board’s vote does not immediately add FOD as a qualifying condition. A report with the board’s recommendation will next go to the secretary of health, who will review the proposal and consult with staff before either accepting, denying or modifying the recommendation.

That’s according to an email from the acting director of the New Mexico Department of Health’s Center for Medical Cannabis forwarded to Marijuana Moment by Suzanne Mulvehill, a clinical sexologist and researcher who’s helped lead the charge to add FOD as a qualifying condition in a number of states with legal cannabis.

Mulvehill told Marijuana Moment that she’s “very pleased” with the movement in New Mexico, noting that officials in Connecticut and Illinois have also taken steps to add FOD as qualifying conditions in those jurisdictions.

“FOD affects millions of women worldwide,” she added, “and there are no conventional treatments.”

Two additional states are currently considering adding FOD as a medical marijuana qualifying condition. Oregon held a virtual public meeting earlier this month and is accepting public comments through Friday. And in Arkansas, which held a public meeting about FOD last month, officials are taking comments until October 14.

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I witnessed a UFO crash and aliens flee the ship – and I have a piece of the craft to prove it

A man from Los Angeles claims that he witnessed aliens fleeing from a UFO after it crashed landed in the desert – and he has a piece of the spacecraft to prove it.

Jose Padilla was just a nine-year-old boy growing up in San Antonio, New Mexico, when he and his friend discovered the ‘avocado-shaped’ UFO.

To this day, he swears that what he witnessed was real. 

The encounter occurred that very same year, and at first, Padilla thought the sound of the crash was just another bomb test, he told CBS News Los Angeles. 

‘I told my friend, ‘it must be another test from the bomb’ and he said, ‘no, it’s not a bomb, look at the smoke coming out of the ground,” Padilla said.

Upon closer inspection, the smoke appeared to be coming from a crashed aircraft.

Then, all of a sudden, three extraterrestrials emerged from the aircraft and began ‘sashaying and running in circles,’ he said. 

But Padilla wasn’t afraid of these creatures. 

‘They had crashed at my father’s ranch, and they needed help,’ he said. 

Over the next ten days, the military cleaned up the wreckage while Padilla and his friend watched from a nearby ridge, despite being warned to stay away.

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Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off

Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Chief Harold Medina operated his department-issued pickup truck “in an unsafe manner” on February 17, when he ran a red light and broadsided a car, severely injuring the driver. So concludes a recent report from internal investigators who looked into that shocking incident.

Duh, you might say if you have seen surveillance camera footage of the crash, which shows Medina crossing Central Avenue, a busy, four-lane street, against the light. He crosses the westbound lanes through a gap between two cars, forcing one of the drivers to brake abruptly, before barreling across the eastbound lanes, where he rams into the side of a gold 1966 Mustang driven by 55-year-old Todd Perchert.

Although Medina’s recklessness seems obvious, the Albuquerque Police Department’s Fleet Crash Review Board (CRB) earlier this year concluded that the crash was “non-preventable.” How so? Medina, who was on his way to a Saturday press conference with his wife when he took a detour to have a look at a homeless encampment, said he ran the light to escape an altercation between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire at the intersection of Central and Alvarado Drive.

While “the initial decision to enter the intersection is not in question,” Lt. James Ortiz says in the Internal Affairs report, “the facts and circumstances do not relieve department personnel of driving safely to ensure no additional harm is done to personnel or to citizens.” Medina, Ortiz says, clearly failed to do that: “By definition, driving into a crosswalk, darting between two vehicles driving on a busy street, and crossing through an intersection with vehicles traveling eastbound were unsafe driving practices.” In this case, he notes, those unsafe practices “resulted in a vehicle collision with serious physical injuries to the victim, including a broken collarbone and shoulder blade, 8 broken ribs (reconstructed with titanium plates after surgery), collapsed lung, lacerations to left ear and head, multiple gashes to his face, a seven-hour surgery, and hospitalization requiring epidural painkiller and a chest tube for nearly a week.”

Ortiz not only disagrees with the CRB’s conclusion about Medina’s crash; he says the board never should have reviewed the incident to begin with, since its mission is limited to accidents “not resulting in a fatality or serious injury.” Ortiz says Commander Benito Martinez, who chairs the CRB, violated department policy when he decided the board should pass judgment on Medina’s accident.

Martinez acknowledged that department policy “prohibited the CRB from hearing serious injury crashes” and that “allowing such a case to be heard would be a policy violation.” Why did he allow it anyway? “He explained that his reasoning for permitting the Chief’s crash to be reviewed by the CRB was based on his belief that someone wanted the crash to be heard,” Ortiz writes. “Cmdr. Martinez clarified that he believed someone from Internal Affairs wanted the case to be heard by the CRB to ensure full transparency. However, he did not consult with anyone in Internal Affairs to verify the accuracy of this assumption.”

Both the CRB’s decision to review the crash and its implicit exoneration of Medina are hard to fathom. But Medina’s explanations for the third policy violation identified by Ortiz—the chief’s failure to activate his body camera after the crash—are even weirder.

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UFO records archive finds new home with Rio Rancho Public Schools

The City of Vision is home to the largest collection of records about UFO sightings in North America.

KOB 4 found out you’ll soon be able to read through all of them yourself, and it sounds like they’ll need a lot of time.

“How you interpret what a UFO is, you know, is it miss identification of something prosaic? Is it alien? Is it something else? It doesn’t matter, at the end of the day it’s history,” said David Marler, executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center.

Marler believes that history belongs to everyone.

“Whether you relegate UFOs, to fact fiction or folklore, it’s part of our history, it’s part of our culture. And I feel that regardless of belief, or non belief in the subject, we need to preserve this element of our culture,” said Marler. 

Marler built an addition to his Rio Rancho home to house the thousands of documents he’s collected over the years. Everything from declassified Project Blue Book files to newspaper clippings, air traffic control radio recordings are all packed inside a small room.

“It is essentially a traditional historical archive, albeit dedicated to a non-traditional subject,” said Marler. 

His collection, officially known as the National UFO Historical Records Center, is growing. Marler says more archivists are sending him their collections, so everything is under one roof.

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New ‘compelling evidence’ found at Roswell UFO site could prove alien craft crashed in 1947, experts say

America’s most famous UFO case is still producing more evidence as scientists and civilians are on a mission to prove that the Roswell crash was not of this world. 

The 1947 incident made headlines when the US Army Air Force issued a press release stating that it had recovered debris from a ‘flying disc’ — only later to reverse course, claiming that the material had really just belonged to a downed weather balloon.

Geologist Frank Kimbler is among the many experts who have challenged the military’s official version of what crashed on the outskirts of this New Mexico town, where he has scoured the alleged UFO’s crash site with a metal detector since 2010.

Kimbler has since uncovered over 20 unusual scraps of metal material, most no bigger than a fingernail, and has now submitted one uniquely odd metal for testing to the Discovery Channel’s new series ‘Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction.’

Testing revealed that the metal was ‘100-percent pure aluminum,’ which experts said was ‘compelling evidence’ that could prove aliens crashed in the area decades ago.

‘I was really trying to champion truth throughout,’ the new series’ cohost, Chrissy Newton, told DailyMail.com, adding that she was not afraid to debunk a few celebrated UFO cases, if that’s where the facts led.

‘I want to prove that it’s identifiable,’ Newton said, ‘not everyone’s gonna like that.’

Nevertheless, Newton found the tests on the pure aluminum mystery metal to be compelling, she said, in part because a former Pentagon UFO investigator has told her that ‘pure aluminum has been connected to multiple other UFO crash sites.’

While Newton did not name her Pentagon source, she described them as ‘a source formerly from AATIP,’ the US military’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which from 2007 to 2012 had been tasked (in part) with studying UFOs.

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Congressman Seeks To Block Feds From Seizing Marijuana From State-Legal Businesses Amid New Mexico Border Patrol Controversy

U.S. border patrol agents would be prevented from using its funds to seize marijuana from state-licensed businesses under a newly filed amendment to a large-scale spending bill.

Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) submitted the amendment for consideration as part of 2025 Fiscal Year appropriations legislation covering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The move appears to be responsive to recent reporting about Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cannabis from state-legal businesses in New Mexico over recent months.

The amendment, which would need to be made in order for floor consideration by the House Rules Committee, reads:

SEC_. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to seize cannabis or products containing cannabis that are possessed, sold, or transferred by a cannabis distributor, licensed by a State, or a business in a State where cannabis has been legalized for recreational or medicinal use.

This is the latest in a series of drug policy-related amendments to be filed from lawmakers across the aisle that they’ve sought to attach to spending bills. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) has also filed an amendment to the DHS measure—as well as to separate appropriations legislation covering State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs—that would prevent the relevant agencies from testing job applicants for cannabis in states where it’s legal.

While Garcia has repeatedly attempted to enact that reform as part of numerous legislative packages, this is the first time that the language of the Vasquez amendment has been introduced.

The Rules committee is expected to meet next week to decide which amendments to the bills can receive floor votes.

The controversy over CBP seizures of marijuana from state-licensed businesses has prompted responses from multiple levels of government.

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Woman, 24, who grew up in a CULT lifts the lid on all the ‘extremist’ rules she was forced to follow as a member of the religious sect

A young woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has taken to TikTok to speak out about her upbringing in a Christian cult.

Marissa Martin, 24, was spurred to address her childhood after admitting she was lucky for the lack of ‘hate’ she has usually received on her posts – but with one major exception: Christians on the defensive.

‘I want to talk about the fact that I don’t ever get hate on my videos, which is amazing, I have really amazing viewers,’ she began, also simultaneously testing out a recipe combining raspberry syrup and iced matcha.

‘But the one kind of video that I make that I get hate on every time is when I talk about the cult I grew up in,’ she described.

‘This cult I grew up in, yes it was a Christian cult. So a lot of Christians that watch my videos or see the video get personally offended by me saying, “I grew up in a cult,”‘ she went on.

‘But here’s the thing – it was an extremist Christian religion. Extremist, okay?’

Specifically, her family had been in the Independent Fundamental Baptist church.

The organization, composed of local churches preaching deeply fundamentalist Christian messaging, was the subject of 2023 docuseries Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals.

The harrowing docuseries highlighted in particular the unchecked sexual abuse of women and children running rampant across the congregations.

Marissa went on to elaborate on the strict dress code that only permitted ‘solid white’ casual shoes – while ‘dress shoes’ could be solid black.

She continued: ‘We had to wear skirts down to the mids of our calves. We couldn’t show our ankles. We had to wear crew socks. We also had to wear pantyhose [under skirts].

‘We couldn’t show our shoulders. We couldn’t show our collarbones.’

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Raunchy Drag Show During New Mexico Prom Leads to Principal Being Removed and Several Employees Placed on Leave

A New Mexico high school principal has been removed, and several employees were placed on leave after a raunchy drag performance at the prom left parents outraged.

Students say that the drag performer flashed their crotch, “did twerk on a couple of students,” and “let students twerk on them.”

The lewd performance took place at the prom for Atrisco Heritage Academy High School in Albuquerque on April 20.

NBC News reports, “In a video on TikTok, students can be seen gathering around the performer in thigh-high black boots and a matching body suit, as the performer is bending over, squatting and dancing provocatively.”

The performer has been identified by local station KOB 4 as “Mythica Sahreen.”

“Honestly, it was really interesting, and I didn’t mind it. But the thing is it’s the place and where it happened, full of minors, you know, it wasn’t very appropriate for prom,” a student told the station.

Another student added, “Could have kept it more on the side of like it being more PG with the fact that they kind of did twerk on a couple students it wasn’t exactly the best, but it was something that did happen. And they did let students twerk on them.”

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