Tag: the war on (some) drugs

New Jersey Lawmakers And Marijuana Activists Push To Legalize Home Cultivation, Which Is Still A Felony

For the last two years, people have been able to stroll into New Jersey dispensaries to buy weed. But growing your own cannabis plant remains a third-degree felony.

Despite a growing number of nearby states legalizing the growing of marijuana plants at home, bills to do the same in New Jersey have languished every session since cannabis was legalized.

A state senator and chief sponsor of a bill to allow medical marijuana patients to grow cannabis, plus another bill that would expand that to 10 plants for medical patients and six plants for recreational users, said the fight for home grow is “at a standstill.”

“We said we were doing this bill for criminal justice purposes, and to partially correct the very failed multi-billion war on drugs campaign that happened for decades in New Jersey, so this is frustrating. I feel like we’re not headed in the right direction,” said Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth).

Under the state’s cannabis laws, the only people allowed to grow marijuana are those with cultivator licenses. Lawmakers, particularly Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), have previously voiced hesitancy over a home grow program, saying it would stunt the growth of the legal industry and allow the underground market to flourish without regulations. Scutari long pushed to make marijuana legal and sponsored the recreational legalization law.

In an interview last April, he said discussions had started about “perhaps allowing for a very, very slim amount of home grow applicants, some of the more significant or medical patients.”

Scutari did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

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It Took Me Months To Get the ADHD Meds the DEA Says Are Overprescribed

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been warning that prescription stimulant abuse could be the next opioid epidemic. After a monthslong quest to get my hands on some legally, I can report back that the agency’s fears are not only overblown; they are hurting people who legitimately need medication.

Bloomberg reported last week that a senior DEA official saw the early signs of a drug abuse crisis in the increased demand for stimulants, which are commonly used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy:

“I’m not trying to be a doomsday-er here,” said Matthew Strait, deputy assistant administrator in the diversion control division said in an online seminar. But he compared the current situation with stimulants to the beginning of the opioid crisis and said “it makes me feel like we’re at the precipice of our next drug crisis in the United States.”

Among the factors Strait cited were stimulant abuse, the lack of standard guidelines for diagnosing ADHD, unscrupulous telehealth companies and internet advertisements, and more manufacturers making the drugs. Bloomberg reported that the agency is drafting regulations to restrict telehealth prescriptions.

I read Strait’s comments with a mixture of amusement and outrage, because this year I went through the laborious process of getting diagnosed and prescribed medication for adult ADHD.

I don’t remember when a doctor first diagnosed me with ADHD. It was probably in first or second grade. I have a vague memory of a doctor, not my regular pediatrician, asking me a bunch of questions. The doctor then explained in careful sentences that I had “attention deficit disorder.” (This was before the “H” was added.) I don’t remember what I thought back then about having a disorder. I don’t recall it being a blow to my self-esteem. I was precocious and unflappable. I liked being me, and this was just another thing about me. I had brown hair. I wore glasses. I had attention deficit disorder.

I wasn’t an idiot, though; I knew why I’d been sent to a special doctor. My teachers complained that I didn’t stay on task, and it was creating problems in the classroom.

I didn’t think there was anything unreasonable about being bored in school or fidgeting when the teachers refused to let me doodle, but I also knew time got away from me in strange ways. I often got lost in thought, staring into space while the rest of the world moved like a VHS tape on fast-forward. I forgot things constantly. Things I should remember to do, things I wanted and intended to do, obligations to friends and family. They all flitted out of my mind, making me seem thoughtless, lazy, and rude. Chores and homework piled up. Deadlines were missed. My desk drawers became stuffed with organizational notebooks and planners given to me by the well-meaning women in my life.

I struggled in college as the amount of long-term projects and research papers increased. I could watch myself fail classes, but I couldn’t seem to stop it from happening. When I was offered a newspaper fellowship that required dropping out of school, it was less an opportunity than an escape hatch.

Except for a few brief stints, I’ve gone through almost all of my life unmedicated. The last time was when I was living in Washington, D.C., in my mid-20s. I got an Adderall prescription filled by a doctor in a small, barely furnished office after a 5-minute interview. But that lasted only a few months. I kept forgetting to get the prescription refilled. I knew myself well enough by then to find this darkly amusing.

By my late 30s, I was no longer amused. I didn’t like myself anymore. I was tired of letting down people I cared about, sick of messing up at work because I was too scatterbrained, and filled with dread at the thought of spending the rest of my life like this.

Unfortunately, I live in a fairly remote area. I couldn’t find a psychiatrist anywhere near me who was in my insurance network, specialized in adult ADHD, or had gotten their license after the Reagan administration. But one referred me to a psychiatrist who offers telehealth appointments.

During the early stages of the COVID pandemic, the DEA temporarily lifted restrictions on doctors’ ability to write prescriptions for controlled drugs via telehealth. The agency announced last October that it was extending those policies through December.

While the DEA and Bloomberg warn that online appointments have allowed companies to push Adderall prescriptions to people who didn’t really need them, it was a godsend for me. My psychiatrist was thorough and professional. After an hour-long virtual intake session, she diagnosed me with moderate to severe ADHD. It turns out that taking a year to be able to remember what day the garbage can goes to the curb is pretty definitive. She also diagnosed me with mild anxiety, likely related to being a married adult who can’t remember what day the garbage truck comes.

That was the bad news. Next came more bad news: The psychiatrist was prescribing me generic Vyvanse, but there was a national shortage of the stimulants used in ADHD medicine.

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Second California Senate Committee Approves Bill To Legalize Psychedelic Service Centers

A second California Senate committee has approved a bill to legalize psychedelic service centers where adults 21 and older could access psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline and DMT in a supervised environment with trained facilitators.

About a week after an initial panel cleared the legislation, the Senate Public Safety Committee passed the measure from Sen. Scott Wiener (D) in a 3-2 vote on Tuesday. It next heads to the Appropriations Committee.

The “Regulated Therapeutic Access to Psychedelics Act” has been drafted in a way that’s meant to be responsive to concerns voiced by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last year when he vetoed a broader proposal that included provisions to legalize low-level possession of substances such as psilocybin.

Instead, the new bill that’s now being unveiled would provide regulated access to psychedelics in a facilitated setting, without removing criminal penalties for possession outside of that context. It does not lay out any specific qualifying medical conditions that a person must have in order to access the services.

The measure had already undergone a series of mostly technical amendments before reaching committee. Wiener also agreed to revise the legislation at last week’s hearing to make it so psychedelics facilitators would need to have an existing professional health license, such as those for psychiatrists, social workers, drug and alcohol counselors and nurse practitioners.

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Yet Another Drug War Failure

An especially hot news item in 2024 has been the surge of drug-related violence in Ecuador.  Until recent years, Ecuador was hailed as an island of relative stability in the swirling violence of the illegal drug trade in the Western hemisphere.  The situation there contrasted with the level of chaos and violence in neighboring countries such as Peru and Colombia, as well as the central arena of drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.  American retirees found the country to be an especially appealing destination.

That presumption of stability was always somewhat exaggerated.  In Ecuador violent criminal gangs “have existed for decades,” security analyst David Saucedo notes, “but with the arrival of the Mexican cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), they made local alliances, and in this way, they became their operating arms for drug trafficking.”

The notion of today’s Ecuador as one of Latin America’s safer countries is a tenacious episode of nostalgia.  The murder rate in that country has soared from 6.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to 26.7 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, and preliminary statistics indicate that the upward trend is continuing.  When voters elected Daniel Noboa president in October 2023, he made it clear that he would take an especially hard line against the drug cartels.  Drug policy experts now talk about Ecuador with similar degrees of concern that they had reserved for Mexico and other central players in the drug trade.

Even members of the political elite in Ecuador are increasingly vulnerable to the violence.  One prominent candidate in the October 2023 presidential election was assassinated just eleven days before the balloting.  Shortly thereafter, Ecuador’s youngest mayor, Brigette Garcia, was kidnapped and murdered in the coastal town of San Vicente.  Following the January 2024 unrest, new President Daniel Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered national security forces to neutralize more than 20 armed groups classified as “terrorists.”

Despite such spectacular policy failures, drug warriors in the United States and other countries cling to hard-line strategies and refuse to face an inconvenient economic truth.  Governments are not able to dictate whether people use mind-altering substances.  Such vices have been part of human culture throughout history.  Governments can determine only whether reputable businesses or violent criminal gangs are the suppliers.  A prohibition strategy guarantees that it will be the latter – with all the accompanying violence and corruption.  The ongoing bloody struggles among rival cartels to control the lucrative trafficking routes to the United States merely confirm that historical pattern.

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Maine Governor Signs Bill Allowing Marijuana Convictions To Be Sealed Upon Application

The Maine Legislature passed two bills that would expand eligibility for sealing criminal records, one that drops the age requirements for record sealing and another that allows for sealing now-legal marijuana crimes.

While these plans require people to apply to have records sealed, another proposal that would have automated the process failed after criticism that doing so would violate the First Amendment. That bill specifically applied to criminal records for marijuana possession and cultivation that’s since been legalized in Maine.

The Legislature signaled that Maine’s reconciliation with when it may be appropriate to seal criminal records is far from over, as it also passed a bill to make permanent a commission to continue to study the issue.

Unfinished work on this matter was made clear during floor speeches on these bills, as well, from lawmakers who voted both for and against the range of measures.

The bill that removed the age-related prerequisite for sealing criminal history, LD 2188, passed the House 87–59 and the Senate 25–9. Ahead of the Senate vote, Sen. Lisa Keim (R-Oxford), who voted against the bill, argued record sealing is the incorrect means to give people a fresh start.

“I’m very in favor of second changes and letting people rebuild their lives after making mistakes,” Keim said. “My problem with this legislation, and similar legislation, is the false sense of security.”

Rather than shielding the records from public view, Keim said Maine should instead develop a more robust pardon process.

While legislators agreed to provide a way for people to apply to have certain criminal histories sealed, the majority of the House and Senate did not go so far as to make record-sealing the default.

The bill the Legislature killed, LD 2269, would have tasked state agencies with reviewing criminal record information on a monthly basis and then sealing records for crimes that are no longer considered illegal under Maine’s adult use cannabis law, which was enacted in 2017.

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Controversies Involving Speaker Mike Johnson and His Son Resurface — From Monitoring Each Other’s Porn Usage to Arrest of His Adopted Son on Charges of Running Illegal Cannabis Business

Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself entangled in controversy once more, as past incidents involving his ‘adopted’ son resurface amidst legislative tumult.

Last week, the House of Representatives, under Johnson’s leadership and his comrades, passed two “America last” legislations.

Firstly, the House approved an extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a measure initially enacted following the September 11, 2001, attacks, in a 273 to 147 vote. This provision allows for the warrantless surveillance of American citizens, a move that has raised concerns about privacy and civil liberties.

An amendment proposed by Rep. Andy Biggs, which sought to impose a requirement for the FBI to obtain a warrant before conducting surveillance on Americans under FISA, ended in a 212-212 tie vote, leading to Speaker Mike Johnson casting the tie-breaking vote against the amendment.

This decision drew sharp criticism, including conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, who accused Johnson of betraying the American people and undermining the Constitution.

In an attempt to halt the momentum of the FISA Section 702 extension, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna employed a procedural strategy to delay the Senate’s consideration of the bill. Despite her efforts, the bill passed again. The vote displayed a uniparty alliance, with 147 Democrats and 126 Republicans supporting the bill, while 88 Republicans and 59 Democrats opposed it.

The second major legislative action under Speaker Johnson involved the passing of three bills aimed at providing financial aid to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and other regions engaged in conflicts outside U.S. borders.

The Democrats waved Ukrainian flags on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as they voted to send $60 BILLION of taxpayer money to secure a foreign border.

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Senator Tom Cotton Demands Secret Service Release ALL Info Related to Cocaine Found in White House

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is demanding that the Secret Service turn over all information regarding the cocaine recently discovered in the White House.

The story about where the drugs were found keeps changing and Tom Cotton rightly calls this a national security issue. If someone can sneak illegal drugs into the White House, what is to stop someone from sneaking a much more dangerous substance into the building?

The media is preparing to drop the story and move on because they want to protect Biden. Cotton is not letting it go away.

The Daily Mail reports:

Top Republican Senator demands Secret Service release ALL information on White House cocaine – including lists of guests who avoided screenings – to determine if President’s home is secure

Sen. Tom Cotton wants more clarity after the Secret Service found cocaine inside the White House over the weekend – and is demanding Americans and Congress receive their well-deserved answers.

Cotton, the top Republican on the Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, wrote a letter to U.S. Secret Service (USSS) Director Kimberly Cheatle on Wednesday with six questions he wants answered.

He demanded that Cheatle schedule a briefing with his staff.

‘Congress and the American people deserve to know how cocaine got into the White House,’ he said in a tweet along with an image of the letter…

‘According to public reports, the Secret Service has not yet confirmed where in the West Wing the cocaine was found,’ Cotton wrote in his Wednesday letter. ‘I urge you to release that information quickly, as the American people deserve to know whether illicit drugs were found in an area where confidential information is exchanged.’

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Recreational cannabis use may lower your risk of cognitive decline, study says

When you light up or down an edible, you may be lowering your risk of cognitive decline, according to a new study comparing recreational cannabis users to nonusers. As marijuana isn’t without its health harms, these findings came as a surprise even to the scientists behind the study.

Researchers at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University found that nonmedical cannabis use—regardless of how or how often it was consumed—lowered a person’s odds of subjective cognitive decline (SCD) by 96%. The results were published in February in the journal Current Alzheimer Research. 

“I was expecting cannabis to be linked to an increased risk for cognitive decline, because that’s pretty much what’s consistent in previous research,” study coauthor Roger Wong, Ph.D., an assistant professor of public health and preventive medicine at the university’s Norton College of Medicine, tells Fortune. “I was stunned by the opposite finding.”

Dual use of cannabis, for both medical and nonmedical purposes, as well as medical use alone also correlated to decreased risk of SCD, the self-reported worsening or increased frequency of confusion or memory loss. However, those associations weren’t statistically significant.

Previous research suggests people with SCD are 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia and 1.8 times more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment. About one in nine U.S. adults ages 45 and older experience SCD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We don’t have a way to prevent dementia right now,” Wong says. “But if we can prevent subjective cognitive decline at the very beginning and track it, that’ll hopefully fix some of the issues that we’re having right now with dementia later in life.”

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Personalised medicine will make drug experimentation on populations the norm

In June 2023, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (“MHRA”) announced it will be the first drug safety regulator in the world to pilot its own genetic “biobank,” to better understand how a patient’s genetic makeup can impact the safety of their medicines.

“The Yellow Card biobank, which will contain genetic data and patient samples … forms part of a long-term vision for more personalised medicine approaches … [to] enable doctors to target prescriptions using rapid screening tests, so patients … receive the safest medication for them, based on their genetic makeup,” a press release said.

In February 2024, as a personalised medicine project, the MHRA began recruiting patients who have experienced excessive bleeding after taking blood thinners to establish whether they have any special genetic traits which predispose them to excessive bleeding.

It may sound exciting however, personalised genetic medicine is a step towards an era where drug use and experimentation on populations become the norm.

As Dr. Guy Hatchard notes, whilst most pharmaceutical drugs entail adverse reactions and unanticipated side effects, drugs that are tailored to genetic characteristics may potentially have even more serious consequences and long-term adverse outcomes. This is because genetic systems are involved in all the functions of the physiology, its organs, bio-molecular messaging and overall immunity.

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Pennsylvania GOP Senator’s Bill Would Let Medical Marijuana Patients Get Gun Carry Permits

A Republican senator in Pennsylvania has formally introduced a bill meant to remove state barriers to medical marijuana patients carrying firearms after previewing the legislation and soliciting co-sponsors earlier this year.

Sen. Dan Laughlin (R) introduced SB 1146 on Wednesday, which state Senate Republicans noted in a press release was also 2A Day, celebrating the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

The GOP statement called the proposal “a bold step toward ensuring the rights of all citizens,” saying it “acknowledges the importance of the right to bear arms, a fundamental aspect of American freedom.”

“My legislation will make sure a valid medical marijuana cardholder is no longer considered an unlawful marijuana user,” Laughlin said in the release. “Although marijuana remains illegal under federal law, we should be updating Pennsylvania’s laws to ensure valid medical marijuana cardholders are not denied their rights.”

The two-page bill would amend the Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act, which currently says a concealed carry license “shall not be issued” to someone who “is addicted to or is an unlawful user of marijuana.” SB 1146 would add that “the term ‘unlawful user of marijuana’ does not include an individual who holds a valid identification card” under the state’s medical marijuana act.

It would also add a qualifier to a provision barring carry permits for an “individual who is prohibited from possessing or acquiring a firearm under the statutes of the United States,” asserting that the restriction “shall not apply” to someone prohibited from gun ownership “based solely on the individual’s status as a holder of a valid identification card” for medical marijuana.

The changes would take effect 60 days after becoming law.

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