Tag: oregon

Oregon is being invaded by huge bug-eyed fanged fish — and no one knows why

People are finding huge, scaleless fish with sharp fangs and bulging eyes on the beaches of Oregon — and it’s not clear why it’s happening, according to the Associated Press.

“Within the last few weeks, several lancetfish have appeared on beaches from Nehalem, in northern Oregon, to Bandon, which is about 100 miles (161 kilometers) from the California border, Oregon State Parks said on Facebook,” reported Becky Bohrer and Beatrice Dupuy. “The agency asked beachgoers who see the fish to take photos and post them online, tagging the agency and the NOAA Fisheries West Coast region.”

These fish are capable of growing up to seven feet long, per the report.

Nobody is exactly clear what’s driving the appearance of these deep-sea fish, said University of California San Diego marine biologist Ben Frable — although, he noted, it’s not the first time it’s happened.

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Oregon Licenses First Psilocybin Lab, But Treatment Access Remains Stalled

On April 21, Portland-based Rose City Laboratories, LLC (RCL) announced that it had been licensed by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) to test psilocybin products for the state’s therapeutic centers. It’s the first lab to receive the required OHA license, but psilocybin treatment still can’t move forward.

In January, OHA opened its licensing applications for labs vying to test state-regulated psilocybin products, along with the manufacturers that will produce those products, the service centers where they’ll be consumed and the “trip facilitators” who will supervise the treatment sessions.

At publication time, OHA had not yet licensed any service centers. Meanwhile, only three manufacturers and four facilitators have so far received licenses. OHA is still expecting the first service centers to open their doors in 2023, but it’s not yet clear how widespread access will be at that time.

RCL will test psilocybin products for the two benchmarks of a regulated drug supply: potency and purity.

RCL began operating in 2012 and has been primarily known for testing cannabis. It began working toward psilocybin testing services in 2020, in anticipation of Measure 109—which legalized therapeutic psilocybin use at licensed service centers—being approved later that year. In January 2023, received Oregon’s first psilocybin lab accreditation, making it legally eligible for the OHA license it has now received.

Licensed manufacturers can formulate psilocybin as extracts, edibles or just the mushrooms themselves. Finished products are sent to RCL, which tests them for the two benchmarks of a regulated drug supply: potency and purity.

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Oregon’s Appetite for Psilocybin Is Being Fed Outside the Law in the Mushroom Underground

Three thousand five hundred dollars.

That’s how much it’s going to cost to swallow 4 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and undergo a six-hour therapy session at EPIC Healing Eugene—if and when the clinic gets its license to run a “psilocybin service center” and its owner, Cathy Jonas, gets her facilitator license after undergoing 300 hours of training and passing a state-mandated test.

Together, those two licenses will cost her $12,000 a year. On top of that, she must spend thousands on a security system, liability insurance, and a 375-pound safe. All in, Jonas estimates she’ll spend $60,000 to open her service center and, at $3,500 a session, she expects to barely break even. “They have really made this hard,” Jonas, 56, says.

Two and a half years ago, Oregon voters approved Measure 109, making Oregon the first state in the nation to legalize the supervised use of psilocybin mushrooms. But that freedom comes with fine print. The program requires users to trip only in the presence of a trained facilitator in a service center using psilocybin grown by state-approved manufacturers and tested by state-licensed labs.

All of that adds costs. The result is a price tag that’s going to astonish the fungi-curious. A single session—5 grams, six hours—will cost more than the median Oregonian’s biweekly take-home pay.

Still willing to pony up? Sorry, get in line. At press time, no service centers—the only places you’re allowed to take psilocybin legally—had been licensed by the Oregon Health Authority. Three manufacturers, one testing lab, and just four facilitators had been licensed as of April 25.

In other words, the ballot measure created an appetite that the regulated system seems unprepared to satisfy. The outcome? The legalization of psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon is spurring an expansion of the decades-old illegal market.

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Oregon teachers’ aide, ‘drag mom’ to child drag queen sentenced to less than 1 year in jail for 11 felony child sex crimes

A former Oregon elementary school teaching assistant and “drag mom” to a controversial child drag performer has been convicted of 11 felonies over the distribution of child sex abuse content and sentenced to less than a year in a local jail. 

Kelsey Meta Boren, 33, was convicted in Lane County, Ore. on March 23 of 11 felony counts of encouraging child sexual abuse in the first degree. A single charge of using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct was dismissed as part of the plea deal. Boren was sentenced to 330 days in county jail—30 days for each felony count—in a sweetheart deal agreed upon between the district attorney’s office and her counsel.

“Our office must decide each case individually, taking into account the facts of the offenses, and the nature of the offender,” wrote Lane County Deputy District Attorney Robert Lane to The Post Millennial. “This case was assigned to me, and I made those decisions.”

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Oregon Considers Mandatory Lessons About Climate Change in Public Schools

Lawmakers in the state of Oregon are considering legislation which would mandate the teaching of climate change in public schools.

The only other state that is already doing this is the solidly blue state of Connecticut in liberal New England.

Public schools across the country are struggling with students who can barely read or do basic math but advancing the left’s political agenda on claimte change is being given special attention in blue Oregon.

FOX News reports:

Oregon eyes mandate for climate change lessons in schools

Oregon lawmakers are aiming to make the state the second in the nation to mandate climate change lessons for K-12 public school students, further fueling U.S. culture wars in education.

Dozens of Oregon high schoolers submitted support of the bill, saying they care about climate change deeply. Some teachers and parents say teaching climate change could help the next generation better confront it, but others want schools to focus on reading, writing and math after test scores plummeted post-pandemic.

Schools across the U.S. have found themselves at the center of a politically charged battle over curriculum and how matters such as gender, sex education and race should be taught — or whether they should be taught at all.

One of the bill’s chief sponsors, Democratic Sen. James Manning, said even elementary students have told him climate change is important to them.

“We’re talking about third and fourth graders having a vision to understand how this world is changing rapidly,” he said at a Thursday state Capitol hearing in Salem.

Connecticut has the only U.S. state law requiring climate change instruction, and it’s possibly the first time such a bill has been introduced in Oregon, according to legislative researchers. Lawmakers in California and New York are considering similar bills.

Manning’s bill requires every Oregon school district to develop climate change curriculum within three years, addressing ecological, societal, cultural, political and mental health aspects of climate change.

This is a recipe for disaster.

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Oregon alcohol regulators may have snatched up rare liquors for personal consumption

The state of Oregon is investigating allegations that multiple members of its powerful alcohol regulatory agency may have abused their authority to secure rare liquors for their own use.

State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a press release on Friday that the Oregon Department of Justice “is opening a criminal investigation into the matter involving ethics violations related to the purchase of liquor by some staff of the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission  and possibly others.”

A state investigation published by the Oregonian this week indicated that multiple members of the OLCC leveraged their position at the regulatory agency to secure liquors as part of preferential treatment.

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Oregon Democrat Proposes Increasing Congressional ‘Diversity’ by Adding Seats

Within weeks of allegations that his wife engaged in insider trading when she acquired $15,000 worth of Amgen stock, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has introduced legislation to expand the number of Congressmen and women in D.C.

The Restoring Equal and Accountable Legislators in the House (REAL House) Act aims to increase the number of representatives and increase their “diversity,” as well as the diversity of the Electoral College because Blumenauer thinks that congressional districts are too large.

“The number of constituents living in a single congressional district has dramatically increased since the number of House members was arbitrarily capped in 1929,” Blumenauer said. “Current district sizes threaten the direct constituent connection on which the House was founded.”

Currently, there are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives, a cap from when the U.S. population was only 122 million people.

“The REAL House Act will help our government better reflect our districts and constituents’ needs,” Blumenauer said in a statement online. “To restore the House’s direct link to the public and to foster greater diversity among members and the Electoral College, we must increase the number of representatives.”

The proposal did not outline how much it would cost to increase the size of the U.S. government by his suggested 149 seats.

Since 1929, Blumenauer argues the U.S. population has more than doubled to 328 million people and, as a result, the size of congressional districts has nearly tripled while the number of representatives has remained stagnant.

“The average congressional district now includes 800,000 constituents. If Congress fails to act, by 2050, each member of Congress is on track to represent more than one million people,” he said.

In December 2022, the Democratic National Committee approved a move to remove Iowa as the first state on the party’s presidential nominating calendar—as has been tradition since 1972.

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Oregon Eyes 2023 Crackdown On Illegal Marijuana Growers

Oregon lawmakers are looking to crack down on illegal marijuana growers who aren’t abiding by the state’s 2014 laws governing recreational use and cultivation.

Year-to-date, approximately 95 metric tons of illegally grown marijuana have been seized across the state, according to the Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. In 2019, they seized just 8 metric tons.

The 2014 legislation was supposed to eliminate problems caused by “uncontrolled manufacture” of the drug, however growers haven’t all magically agreed to the taxes and red tape that accompanied the legalization. Now, officials who have heard complaints from everyone from legal growers to the police are looking to crack down, AP reports.

Now, a draft bill set for introduction in the 2023 legislative session would double the maximum fine and prison sentence for illegal grows to 10 years and $250,000 for those growing more than 100 plants, or possession in excess of 32 times the legal limits.

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Oregon Corrects False Information On Child COVID-19 Hospitalization Rates

A report promoted by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has been corrected after falsely claiming nearly 50 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital treatment.

The Rede Group, which created the report for the authority, acknowledged the misinformation in a memorandum obtained by The Epoch Times.

“There was an issue with the numerator for hospitalizations in Figure 40 on page 180. When we calculated the percent hospitalized for each age group, we mistakenly thought the weekly hospitalization data from OHA were unique; they are not,” Danna Drum with the Rede Group told OHA in the memo. “We should have noticed this earlier and apologize for the error. Figure 40 has been corrected in version 1.1 of the report using data provided directly from OHA.”

“Thank you for your attention to the matter and we apologize again for this error,” Drum added.

The old version of the report claimed that 47.4 percent of children aged 12 to 17 who contracted COVID-19 required hospital care.

According to OHA data, that percentage is actually at or below 1 percent.

The report also claimed that the hospitalization rates for all age groups were at or above 30 percent and portrayed the child hospitalization rates as higher than those of the elderly.

The new version of the report (pdf) presents significantly lower rates.

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Oregon Gov. Kate Brown Pardons Everyone Convicted Of Simple Marijuana Possession

Democratic Oregon Gov. Kate Brown issued a pardon Monday for those in her state who have been charged with simple possession of marijuana.

“No one deserves to be forever saddled with the impacts of a conviction for simple possession of marijuana — a crime that is no longer on the books in Oregon,” Brown announced in a press release. “Oregonians should never face housing insecurity, employment barriers, and educational obstacles as a result of doing something that is now completely legal, and has been for years. My pardon will remove these hardships.” The move will eliminate over 47,000 convictions from criminal records impacting about 45,000 people.

Calling the criminal justice system in Oregon “flawed, inequitable, and outdated,” Brown further added that “Black and Latina/o/x people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates.”

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