Tag: police state

Ohio Officials Will Begin Accepting Recreational Marijuana Sales Applications This Week, But The Market Won’t Launch Immediately

Ohio’s top marijuana regulator says that while the state will open up applications for medical cannabis dispensaries to start selling to adult-use consumers by Friday, the exact timing for when they’ll be able to launch depends on whether they’ve satisfied a list of conditions.

Ohio Division of Cannabis Control (DCC) Superintendent James Canepa has previously suggested that businesses with dual licenses approved could begin selling to patients and recreational consumers as early as this month. That’s still a possibility, but he declined to commit to any specific timeline in a new interview with Cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer.

He said it’s likely there will be a “trickle in the beginning,” with a limited number of hybrid shops that are able to meet requirements to open their doors, such as enhanced security and updated point-of-sale systems to differentiate between medical and adult-use purchases.

Most dual dispensaries are expected to launch later, he said, “not that they’re not ready but that they’re a little more thoughtful about the scale for a new customer base.”

“Everybody keeps trying to get me to circle a day, and it’s impossible because like with liquor, you have to process the applicants as they are,” Canepa, who previously served as the state’s top alcohol regulator, said in the new interview. “You have to take them as they come to you. And there’s a whole checklist that they have to meet.”

In addition to the security and sales system updates, the superintendent also noted that businesses will need to ensure that their employees are properly badged. Their medical cannabis licenses must also be up-to-date in order to apply for a dual license.

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DEA Exemption Process For Religious Psychedelics Use Needs Clearer Timelines And Standards, Government Watchdog Agency Says

A federal government watchdog agency says in a new report that the Drug Enforcement Administration should improve the process through which it considers granting religious exemptions for psilocybin and other controlled substances, asserting that the existing route lacks clarity on timing, evaluation and other matters.

The 80-page report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) notes that although psilocybin remains a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), people may petition DEA for exemptions to use it—or other controlled substances—for religious purposes.

“DEA has established a process for these petitions, but its guidance doesn’t set clear timeframes for the decision-making,” it continues. “Exemption petitions have taken from 8 months to over 3 years to be resolved.”

GAO focused specifically on psilocybin use under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which is meant to protect religious practices from undue government burdens. The agency found that the DEA exemption procedure itself was burdensome.

“Selected stakeholders reported several barriers to the legal access and use of psilocybin for religious practices under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” GAO says. “For example, DEA established a process for parties to petition for a religious exemption from the Controlled Substances Act to use controlled substances for religious purposes. However, DEA’s guidance does not inform petitioners on its timeframes to make determinations on completed petitions.”

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Minnesota Marijuana Regulators Destroy Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars’ Worth Of Illegally Sold Hemp Flower

Since Minnesota began cracking down on the illegal sale of raw cannabis flower in many registered hemp retailers, its agents have confiscated a lot of product worth a fair amount of money.

According to numbers released by the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM), inspectors have confiscated and destroyed 12,094 units of flower—such as bags, jars or pre-rolled joints—with an estimated retail value of $278,000. The illegal products were taken from 58 different retail locations and amounted to nearly 73 pounds of raw cannabis flower.

While it has been legal to possess and use cannabis in Minnesota since last August, it is not yet legal to sell it and won’t be until sometime next spring. And while many hemp-derived low-potency products like gummies and beverages have been legal to sell since the summer of 2022, raw cannabis flower falls into a gray area. That is, if it has low THC content, it could be legal. But most of what has been sold exceeds the potency levels that separates hemp from marijuana.

If the confiscated products have likely been illegal under both the 2022 hemp-derived products law and the 2023 recreational cannabis law, why did it take this long for the state to crack down? Blame an inadvertent gap in the 2023 law that attempted to provide temporary state regulation of hemp products while the new Office of Cannabis Management was being set up.

The Office of Medical Cannabis was given temporary say over the two-year-old hemp-derived market but was not given control over raw flower, only products made from the plant like gummies and drinks.

That gap identified by regulators late last year allowed some stores to sell the flower that looks, smells and intoxicates like marijuana. At the same time, other retailers who wanted to follow the new law were left at a competitive disadvantage.

The raw flower was often sold as a hemp plant with high concentrations of THCA (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid). The same products are offered for sale from out-of-state businesses and mailed to customers where cannabis is not legal, or not yet legal as in Minnesota.

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Canadian measure would remove free speech protection for quoting Bible, sacred texts

Legislation introduced in Canada’s Parliament would eliminate the use of “belief in a religious text” as a defense against hate crime charges.

Repealing the exemption in Canada’s criminal code could criminalize sermons and messages using the Bible or other religious texts as the basis for critiquing other religions or addressing issues such as transgender rights, critics warn.

Yves-Francois Blanchet, leader of the minority Bloc Quebecois party, submitted the “private member’s bill” — defined as a measure not sponsored by a Cabinet minister or parliamentary secretary — in November and again last month. The measure received an initial reading in the lower chamber, but no action has followed.

Mr. Blanchet said when he introduced the bill that its purpose is to allow authorities to prosecute antisemitic speech. The measure is needed to “refrain from giving inappropriate and undue privileges to people within a society who use them to disturb the peace and harmony, especially if those privileges enable people to sow hatred or wish death upon others based on a belief in some divine power,” he told Parliament.

Two-thirds of Canadians surveyed Feb. 16-18 by the polling firm Leger said they support the measure.

But Jeff King, president of the Washington-based International Christian Concern, said Thursday the proposal is “designed to silence” people whose opinions differ from prevailing thought.

“We cannot urge direct violence against somebody,” he said, “but free speech means we all have very different opinions in a democracy [and] we’re supposed to have vigorous debates.”

He said the legislation could open the door to prosecuting anybody expressing sincere beliefs based on their religion’s sacred texts.

Under the proposal, he said, “you can’t say the Bible says so-and-so, or you could be arrested to be charged, you can be fined.” Despite labels, Mr. King said, “this [measure] has nothing to do” with combating antisemitism.

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Ottawa’s Hidden Agenda: Bill C-26 Aims for Secret Surveillance Backdoors

Canada’s Bill C-26, currently making its way through the country’s parliament, includes “secretive” provisions that can be used to break encryption, researchers are warning.

As far as its sponsors are concerned, Bill C-26 is cyber security legislation intended to amend the Telecommunications Act and other related acts.

But the way the Telecommunications Act will be amended is by allowing the government to force companies operating in that industry to include backdoors in networks protected by encryption, a pair of University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab researchers suggest.

In case the government decides its surveillance needs require altering “the 5G encryption standards that protect mobile communications” – then this can also be done, should C-26 become law.

This raises several important questions, such as whether the bill’s purpose might be precisely to undermine encryption, considering that the government decided not to include amendments in the text that would prevent this.

Another worrying aspect is that given the already lacking level of security in the telecommunications space, the government would be expected to try to fix the existing problems, rather than create new ones, the researchers note.

The amendment that could have rectified this situation was proposed last year by the Citizen Lab, while civil society and industry leaders and experts also participated in parliamentary hearings concerning C-26 to recommend restricting what are said to be the draft’s broad powers to prevent “technical changes from being used to compromise the ‘confidentiality, integrity, or availability’ of telecommunication services.”

However, these warnings fell on deaf ears, with the bill now progressing through parliament without the recommended changes, and despite MPs stating that facilitating and broadening mass surveillance in Canada was not the motive behind C-26.

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Government Undermines Civilization

The good, great, and prosperous society depends on ever-widening trust among strangers. It’s not blind trust — ways to hedge against cheaters abound — but trust is vital. It is as vital as respect for private property and privacy. Like the system of private property, the system of trust can withstand repeated assaults, but it is not invulnerable. It can crumble and fall.

We deal constantly with people around the world whom we do not know (we don’t even know their names) and will never meet. We’re better off — richer and more comfortable — for it. Trust is fostered through repeat dealings, reputation, credit-card dispute resolution, loan collateral, online ratings of sellers and buyers, and more. Think of eBay and Yelp. We need to trust people who have things we want to buy or rent but also people who know more than we do. No one can know everything. Hence, we rely on experts and authorities in the nonpolitical sense.

Imagine if all your dealings were exclusively with the members of your small tribe (assuming you could trust all the members). Life would be far poorer, not to mention short. Adam Smith famously spelled out the reason: the division of labor, specialization, innovation, greater productivity, and trade. Smith went on to say that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” Globalization — worldwide trust — is the thing to strive for.

The point is that whatever undermines trust on a large scale necessarily undermines civilization, civility, prosperity, and the ability to flourish. It is no small matter.

No individual or private group can erode trust on a large scale. But the government can. To state the obvious, the people who constitute the government routinely exercise powers no one else may exercise. Its monopoly excludes competition and suppresses disagreement. It can disparage rivals and protect its status as the only source of valid information. The state is centralized decision-making in contrast to the decentralized competitive decision-making of the marketplace. Disagreement cannot be suppressed, only rebutted. The marketplace encompasses the production of ideas, not only goods and services. Indeed, if government controls the production of goods and services, it necessarily controls the production of ideas and vice versa.

The state’s power flows from a combination of ideology (analogous to religion) and force that most people consider legitimate because of the ideology they’ve been taught. That’s why the state invests so much in propaganda through schools, media, and other vehicles.

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Trump’s Conviction Requires Him To Surrender His Guns. Civil Libertarians Should Be Troubled.

Last September, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung caused a kerfuffle by mistakenly reporting that the former president had bought a Glock 19 pistol decorated with his portrait during a visit to a gun dealer in Summerville, South Carolina. At the time, Trump faced four criminal indictments, which would have made him guilty of several federal felonies—the purchase itself, plus two more felonies related to falsely presenting himself as an eligible buyer—if he had actually completed the transaction that Cheung described. Now that a New York jury has convicted Trump of 34 felonies involving falsification of business records, he is barred from possessing firearms as well as buying them.

Trump, who had a concealed carry permit, owned at least two handguns prior to his conviction: a Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol and a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. As the New York Post notes, Trump will now have to surrender those guns and any others he has acquired or transfer them to someone (such as one of his sons) who is legally allowed to own firearms. The fact that Trump, a self-described “very strong person on the Second Amendment,” has lost the right to keep and bear arms may add to the delight of opponents who welcomed his conviction. But however you feel about Trump, this detail is a reminder that federal law arbitrarily strips people of their Second Amendment rights for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety.

Leaving aside the shaky legal reasoning that allowed New York prosecutors to convert a hush payment into 34 felonies, falsification of business records, even to aid or conceal “another crime,” is not the sort of offense that marks someone as apt to injure or kill people with a gun. 18 USC 922(g)(1), which prohibits receipt or possession of a firearm by anyone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration, is “wildly overinclusive,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes, because it encompasses many people with no history of violence.

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Authorities may seize Infowars offices, equipment as early as tomorrow

“The situation with InfoWars being shut down by the government is accelerating. Although InfoWars dodged a bullet over the weekend, likely due to all the huge outpouring of public awareness, things are heating up as early as tomorrow, and there’s a very real possibility the courts may attempt to shut down the InfoWars offices (locking the doors, seizing equipment, etc.) TOMORROW (Monday, June 3rd), and force them to stay offline until an upcoming emergency hearing on June 14th, during which the court is apparently going to decide whether InfoWars assets are to be immediately liquidated, effectively terminating the InfoWars broadcast infrastructure, which has always been the goal of the cabal in power.

“You are watching America slide into blatant despotism, where the government targets and jails its political opponents (Trump), tortures and jails peaceful protesters (J6) and shuts down opposition media by force. Stay tuned in to infowars dot com for live broadcasts by Alex and crew. Pray for them all, and make this whole situation go viral so that everybody sees the full force tyranny being unleashed against independent media in America. I’m trying to reach Alex for any further information but have so far been unsuccessful. I do know for sure that Alex would call for everybody to be peaceful and don’t use this situation to escalate into any form of violence. If the government shuts down InfoWars, the backlash against the regime will be historic. This will only further increase support for Trump and an electoral revolution in November.”

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‘An Embarrassing Mistake’: Neil Gorsuch Rails Into Florida’s Use of 6-Person Juries

The right to a trial by jury was designed to be part of “the heart and lungs of liberty,” enshrined into the Constitution to protect people “against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs,” according to John Adams.

It is, in theory, still supposed to do that. But the Founders would likely be dismayed by the ways in which the government has watered down that right since their passing.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuked one such way today: the use of six-member juries, as opposed to the historical practice of 12-person panels.

His opinion was pegged to Cunningham v. Florida, a case concerning Florida woman Natoya Cunningham who was sentenced to eight years in prison after a six-person jury found her guilty of aggravated battery and retaliation against an informant to whom her nephew sold crack. Florida is one of six states—the others are Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Utah—that permits either six- or eight-person panels for such criminal trials.

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Farmers are being booted off their land in a drive for more solar power, former union chief warns

The former head of Britain’s farming union yesterday spoke out against large-scale solar farms, declaring ‘there’s a huge amount not to like’.

But Minette Batters warned they will continue to be built while her members faced uncertainty about the future of dairy and arable farming – and while wealthy investors are free to buy up large chunks of the countryside.

Ms Batters, the ex-president of the National Farmers’ Union, also highlighted ‘horrific examples’ where tenant farmers are being booted off land for huge solar schemes so the landowner can make more money.

She said such changes of land use will continue while investors including overseas financiers and private equity firms are able to buy up huge chunks of the rural landscape unchecked, warning: ‘The country is up for sale’.

Ms Batters called for the next government to prioritise a new land strategy, so protections are given to traditional farming and its economic value is properly-acknowledged.

She added: ‘We are a country up for sale. We are selling off land to people who don’t pay their taxes here. It does have to change.’

Ms Batters was speaking during a debate at the Hay Literary Festival on Tuesday, in response to a question from an audience member horrified about the proliferation of giant solar farms covering several square miles of land.

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