Tag: police state

Rescheduling Won’t End The War On Cannabis, But Could Open A New Battlefront If We’re Not Careful

Contrary to decades of reefer madness propagated by our federal government, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now admits that marijuana does have accepted medical use. However, reports of the death of cannabis prohibition are exaggerated. No doubt, the conclusion of FDA’s scientific review of marijuana’s current Schedule I status is a welcome milestone in federal cannabis policy.

But while the Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) August 29, 2023 recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reschedule marijuana based on FDA’s review will finally bring relief from the federal gross receipts tax levied on struggling state-licensed cannabis businesses, it also underscores the urgent need to both (1) continue pressing forward on descheduling efforts before critical momentum evaporates and certain industry stakeholders effectively settle for rescheduling without full decriminalization, and (2) demand that marijuana be exempted from existing categories of FDA-regulated products to preserve state medical and adult use cannabis markets.

Before proceeding, it’s important to remember that rescheduling would not apply the federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) to marijuana for the first time—it applies right now, and like the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), would continue to apply after rescheduling. But absent any statutory authority permitting FDA to do otherwise, the FDCA would continue to apply after descheduling too, just as it does to hemp products. I previously noted this in “Cannabis Cannibalism: How Federal Rescheduling Could Consume the State-Licensed Industry Without Safe Harbors Under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act,” available here.

However, moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III will shift enforcement priorities (and the incentives to vigorously pursue these priorities) at both DEA and FDA. Indeed this has been the experience after the CSA’s prohibitions on hemp were relaxed beginning with the 2014 Farm Bill, and then scrapped under the 2018 Farm Bill which descheduled hemp by carving it out of the federal CSA’s definitions of “marijuana” and “THC.” Soon after, purveyors of hemp CBD products began receiving FDA cease-and-desist letters citing prohibited product claims and numerous grounds under the FDCA for prohibiting the interstate commerce in such cannabis products.

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Marijuana Should Be De‐​Scheduled, Not Re‐​Scheduled

Bloomberg News is reporting that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine has sent a letter to Drug Enforcement Administrator Anne Milgram asking her agency to reclassify marijuana (cannabis) as a Schedule III drug. The DEA defines Schedule III drugs as “drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” The agency currently classifies marijuana as Schedule I: a drug “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Of course, that definition begs the question, “Currently accepted by whom?” But an even more important question is, “Why should a plant people have been growing and using recreationally for millennia be scheduled as a drug when alcohol is not?”

When Congress authorized the law enforcement agency to judge the clinical applications, efficacy, and potential dangers of drugs, it authorized cops to practice medicine. And they have been engaging in malpractice. For example, no serious person would argue that marijuana has “no currently accepted medical use.” As far back as 1916, Sir William Osler, the so‐​called “father of modern medicine,” recommended cannabis as the “drug of choice” for treating migraines. But cannabis’s history of “accepted medical use” dates back to at least 2800 B.C.

The DEA also schedules diamorphine (brand‐​named “heroin” by Bayer, its manufacturer in the 19th century) Schedule I even though it is legally used in the U.K. and much of the developed world to treat pain and is employed for medication‐​assisted treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD) in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, the U.K, Denmark, and Spain.

And even though a bipartisan consensus is emerging that psychedelics may be extremely helpful in treating post‐​traumatic stress disorder, depression, addiction, and compulsive disorders, and in end‐​of‐​life care, the DEA placed them on Schedule I, depriving researchers, clinicians, and patients of these tools for 50 years.

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Did Banks Hand Private Financial Data to the FBI Without Legal Process?

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating banks for sharing Americans’ financial information with the FBI without regard for privacy concerns. In fact, there’s no doubt about the threat to civil liberties posed by the government’s leverage over the financial industry; that’s long established. At question in this investigation is whether the danger to our freedom inherent in that cozy relationship is being wielded in political warfare between the country’s political factions. But the larger problem should be fixed no matter what lawmakers discover.

“Today, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Citibank for documents and communications related to the Judiciary Committee’s and Weaponization Select Subcommittee’s investigation into major banks sharing Americans’ private financial data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) without legal process for transactions made in the Washington, D.C., area around Jan. 6, 2021,” the House Judiciary Committee announced August 17.

The subpoena followed June 12 queries to Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Company, PNC Financial Services, Truist, U.S. Bankcorp, and Wells Fargo after testimony by FBI whistleblowers that Bank of America voluntarily handed the FBI records on people who had used its services in the Washington, D.C. area around the time of the January 6 Capitol riot. “Individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA product were reportedly elevated to the top of the list,” according to a May report.

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‘They’re everywhere!’ Residents complain as their Texas town of 250 people employs 50 cops

The tiny Texas town of Coffee City is taking the concept of “over-policing” to a whole new level.

Local news station CBS 19 reports that Coffee City, with a population of just under 250 people, employs 50 full-time and reserve officers – that’s one police officer for every five residents.

And these officers appear to be very busy as well, as CBS 19 has found that they issued a whopping 5,100 citations last year that generated more than $1 million in revenue for the town budget.

This has left many residents questioning why such a small town needs an overwhelming number of police officers.

“They’re everywhere, literally everywhere,” complained one woman to CBS 19 who asked not to be publicly identified.

And that’s not all.

Local news station KHOU 11 Investigates found that a surprisingly large percentage of police employed by the town had been fired from previous law enforcement jobs.

In particular, KHOU 11’s investigation found that “more than half of the department’s 50 officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs” for actions including “excessive force, public drunkenness, untruthfulness and association with known criminals.”

Greg Fremin, a retired Houston Police Department captain who is now a lecturer at the Sam Houston State University College of Criminal Justice, tells CBS 19 that he’s “astounded” by the tiny town’s massive collection of rogue cops.

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HOW CALIFORNIA COPS EXPLOIT LEGAL GRAY AREAS TO CONTINUE THEIR WAR ON CANNABIS

Zeke Flatten was driving southbound on Highway 101 in Northern California in December 2017 when he was pulled over by an unmarked SUV with flashing emergency lights.

Two officers clad in green, military-style garb and bulletproof vests approached Flatten’s vehicle but didn’t identify themselves. After asking Flatten if he knew how fast he was going, one of the men told him they suspected he was transporting cannabis, according to court documents. Flatten was immediately suspicious.

“He never mentioned anything else about the reason, probable cause, why he stopped me,” Flatten said in an interview with The Appeal.

The officers were correct, however: Flatten, a film producer and former undercover cop who’d temporarily relocated to Northern California, had three pounds of marijuana, including a few rolled joints, in the car—worth over $3,000 at the time. Flatten says he was working on a number of cannabis-related projects and was driving to a lab to test the weed, which he’d hoped to sell legally.

Just over a year before the stop, California had voted to legalize the personal cultivation and possession of up to an ounce of marijuana with the passage of Proposition 64. Under the measure, possession of larger amounts of cannabis was reduced from a felony offense to a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months of incarceration and a maximum $500 fine.

But marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, classified as a Schedule 1 substance alongside drugs like heroin, LSD, and MDMA, known as Ecstasy. When the officers identified themselves as members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, Flatten said he started to realize something was off.

“There’s no patches, there’s no badges, there’s no name tags,” Flatten said.

Flatten says he offered to show the officers his medical marijuana card, which should have allowed him to have the cannabis. But they didn’t want to look at the card. He figured if the agents believed the marijuana was illegal, they’d take it and provide him a receipt for the seizure, which would give him a chance to argue his case in court, Flatten said.

Instead, they proceeded to confiscate the cannabis from the back of Flatten’s car without running his name for warrants, or issuing a traffic ticket, court summons, or even documentation of the seizure, Flatten said. The officers did tell him that he might be getting a letter from the federal government. But he never did.

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FSC Secures Preliminary Injunction Against Unconstitutional Texas Law

Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs, a coalition of major adult platforms and creators, have been granted a preliminary injunction against the Texas antiporn law, HB1181. Texas is blocked from enforcing the law while the case is litigated.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

The Court agreed with FSC and our co-plaintiffs on nearly every argument:

  • The law violates First Amendment rights of creators and consumers
  • The law has a chilling effect on legally-protected speech
  • Parental filters are a less restrictive and more effective method of protecting minors
  • The state does not have the right to compel speech in the form of health warnings

HB 1181 required sites with adult content to force their visitors to provide digital IDs or other official proof of age, as well as display pseudoscientific “health” warnings. Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs argued that the requirements are unconstitutional and expose consumers to significant privacy risks.

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New York Police to Use Drones to Monitor Backyard Labor Day Parties

New York police will use drones to monitor backyard Labor Day parties this weekend.

Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner made the announcement during a security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival.

Daughtry’s plan to use police drones to monitor backyard barbecues got immediate backlash from civil liberties groups.

Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics, according to AP. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

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Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

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Missouri Judge Denies Effort To Stop Recall of 62,000 Marijuana Products

A Missouri judge denied on Wednesday a marijuana company’s effort to stop the recall of 62,000 products containing the company’s THC concentrate that the state deemed a “potential threat to health and safety.”

The company, Delta Extraction, is a Robertsville-based licensed marijuana manufacturer that specializes in making THC distillate, a highly potent and pure form of THC used for things like vape pens, infused pre-rolled joints and edibles.

On August 2, the state regulating agency suspended Delta Extraction’s license after accusing the company of sourcing untested “marijuana or converted hemp from outside of a Missouri licensed cultivation facility.”

The state issued an administrative hold on the products days after and then a full product recall on August 14.

Delta Extraction argued in its August 16 motion for a temporary restraining order that the state’s actions were an “unlawful campaign to destroy Delta’s business through arbitrary, unjustified, and unexplained administrative actions targeting Delta’s products.”

Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker ruled Wednesday that the company did not have grounds to challenge the recall because it has not exhausted the administrative appeal process.

The day after the state suspended their license, Delta filed an appeal with the Administrative Hearing Commission. That decision is still pending.

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FBI Data on Active Shootings Is Misleading

Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.

Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.

Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.

The FBI is also susceptible to political pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher.

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