Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Michigan City Council Member With Violent Past Charged With Election Fraud

Flint, Michigan, City Council Member Leon El-Alamin, seems to believe honesty is the best policy. 

“I deal with a lot of different types of people. I’m always me regardless of who they are. Whether it’s the governor or mayor, I’m still going to be honest and tell you the truth of what’s going on, and the things that you can do to help,” El-Alamin said in a profile produced by Muslims for American Progress (MAP) Project. 

But the community activist and face of Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sweeping criminal record expungement program finds himself allegedly at odds with the truth, once again in trouble with the law — this time facing election fraud charges amid his re-election campaign. That may be the least of the former drug dealer’s problems in a swing state notorious for election integrity issues. 

‘Political Distraction’

El-Alamin is free on a $5,000 personal recognizance bond after his arraignment earlier this month, according to mlive.com. He was expected to appear in court for his preliminary hearing on Thursday. If convicted of the charges against him, Flint’s 1st Ward councilman could be sentenced to a maximum five years in prison, and he’d lose his place on the November ballot. 

El-Alamin, 45, stands accused of lying on his affidavit in April 2025, claiming he resided within Flint’s city limits to qualify for the council seat. He did not, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton told ABC 12 in Flint. Instead, El-Alamin was residing in nearby Mt. Morris Township, residents and others told police. A tenant at the Flint address listed on the councilman’s affidavit also told investigators that El-Alamin did not live there, but that he was the landlord of the property. 

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Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot’s challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

“I’m thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn’t just about me or my airplane anymore,” Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. “I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach.”

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi’s case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi’s case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant’s specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. “As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach. We’re confident that it will do so here.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

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HORROR: Whistleblower says Native Americans were drugged, locked in fake rehab houses so criminals could steal billions from Medicaid – up to 2,000 dead or missing

A massive Medicaid fraud scheme in Arizona has left up to 2,000 Native Americans feared dead or missing, with whistleblowers and attorneys sounding the alarm that the nightmare is still ongoing.

New whistleblower allegations claim vulnerable Native Americans were allegedly lured into white vans with promises of treatment, then plied with fentanyl, methamphetamine, alcohol, and other drugs before being imprisoned inside fake behavioral health homes where operators allegedly billed Medicaid for months of fraudulent “treatment.”

Arizona officials have previously estimated the fraud exceeded $2.5 to $2.8 billion, while the latest whistleblower allegations contend the broader network may have generated up to $12 billion in fraudulent Medicaid claims over time.

Even more chilling, as many as 2,000 Native Americans may be dead or missing as a result of the sprawling scheme, according to NewsNation Now.

Arizona officials knew about the fraud as far back as 2019, according to the lawsuit.

The news outlet reported:

A Navajo advocate who has blown the whistle on fraudulent “sober living” homes in Arizona says she began shining a light on the Medicaid scam targeting Native Americans after her own cousin was kidnapped by operators who plied her relative with drugs and alcohol.

“They told her she would go to Phoenix for the day and (they would) take her home. All throughout the ride they gave her alcohol,” Reva Stewart told “Jesse Weber Live” on Friday.

She said the people who took her cousin demanded personal information from her as they tried to persuade her to stay at a residence. When her cousin refused, Stewart said, they gave her a fentanyl pill and “told her that she would have to find her way home.”

When Stewart learned of her relative’s ordeal, she realized there was a connection between other missing Native Americans and white vans that were observed cruising around tribal communities.

A civil lawsuit against the Arizona government says state officials enabled what essentially was a plot to divert as many as 7,000 Native Americans to fake sober living homes in Phoenix.

Operators allegedly charged billions in Medicaid services that were not provided as handlers plied residents with drugs. An estimated 2,000 victims are still missing, attorneys have said.

During a recent interview, Stewart detailed the ongoing lawsuit and whistleblower testimony, describing conditions that resemble human trafficking more than addiction treatment.

According to whistleblower accounts, recruiters allegedly drove through tribal communities in unmarked white vans looking for vulnerable people struggling with addiction.

Victims were allegedly offered food, shelter, and treatment before being transported to bogus treatment centers.

Once inside, many never received legitimate medical care.

Instead, whistleblowers say patients were deliberately kept addicted because every additional day meant another Medicaid reimbursement.

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The Woman Who Came Back: What One Dose of Psilocybin Revealed About the Self We Thought Alzheimer’s Had Erased

In 1971, psilocybin was declared to have “no accepted medical use.” In 2026, it appeared to reach into the ruins of an advanced Alzheimer’s brain and switch a human being back on.

Not permanently. Not by reversing the disease. But for days and weeks—long enough for her family to have her back, long enough to force a question that mainstream neurology has spent decades trying not to ask.

I’ve reported before on psilocybin as a longevity molecule—the Emory findings showing psilocin extending human cellular lifespan by up to 57%, aged mice surviving 60% better, telomeres preserved, neuroplasticity switched on. In that piece I listed Alzheimer’s among the “neurological frontiers” where this ancient fungal ally was beginning to be tested. I did not expect the frontier to move this fast.

The paper is titled, in the careful language of clinical medicine, “Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration.” Behind that title is a woman.

She was an octogenarian Japanese-American woman living under continuous family and caregiver supervision. Her Alzheimer’s had been progressing for roughly ten years. For the last five, her speech had collapsed into monosyllables. She was chronically incontinent. She could not dress herself, could not walk unaided, struggled to swallow, and had lost most of her capacity for spontaneous interaction. Her affect was flat. By every conventional measure, she was in the late, “irreversible” stage of the disease—the stage where medicine offers comfort and little else.

Under supervision, she was given a single oral dose of 5 grams of psilocybin-containing mushrooms (the “Enigma” strain)—a deliberately high dose, well above what modern psychiatric trials typically use.

The acute phase was not gentle, and I want to be honest about that up front. She showed signs of autonomic overdrive: clinically suspected hyperthermia, profuse sweating, and a long, deep, sleep-like state. This is not a small detail, and I’ll come back to why it matters enormously.

Then, approximately nineteen hours later, at 3:30 in the morning, she woke up and began to talk. Not in fragments. She spoke about her own life—autobiographical, spontaneous, coherent—for something on the order of four hours.

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Federal Ban on Home Whiskey Distilleries Now Heading to Supreme Court

When I was a young man, roaming around the woods and hills of northeast Iowa, two old guys had a still tucked away somewhere in the woods near Highlandville. I know that moonshining is something generally associated with the South, but nobody seems to have told these two old fellows, and from them you could buy a Mason jar of what they called “corn squeezings” for $10. It wasn’t bad, although if you had any left after a night’s revelry, you could always use it to strip paint and blast stumps.

Now, selling homemade hooch is one thing, I admit. But honestly, this is a free country; one should be able to set up a small still and make your own booze for personal use. And now, a case with that as a possible result, is headed to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to legalize home whiskey distilleries in the United States by a conservative-leaning think tank in Ohio.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that the federal ban against home whiskey distilleries is unconstitutional. However, the 6th Circuit upheld the federal ban.

The federal government said the law is constitutional because it was enacted to prevent tax evasion and that it would be easier for a distiller working out of their home to conceal the business and therefore avoid paying taxes.

That last bit seems a bit of a trite argument; it’s certainly possible now for a person to do this, just as it would be if home use were legalized, as it is now for wine and beer. And, if anyone can point out to us in the Constitution where the government is authorized to regulate booze, I’d love to see it. 

As evidence of the ambiguity of all this, we might note that two different courts of appeals issued conflicting rulings in this matter, which is why the case is going to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the Buckeye Institute filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to decide between the two conflicting appeals-court rulings.

“Two courts of appeals considered the same provisions, against the same constitutional challenge, on materially identical facts, within 11 days of each other, and issued opposite judgments,” Buckeye’s Monday petition to the Supreme Court states.

That seems a pretty clear-cut argument for the escalation.

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Arkansas GOP Governor And Democratic Challenger Agree On Opposing Marijuana Legalization

Medical marijuana has generated more than $1 billion in Arkansas since voters legalized it in 2016.

After the state opened its first dispensary in 2019, thousands of Arkansans joined the program and spent a record $291.1 million on medical marijuana in 2025, according to the state’s Department of Finance and Administration.

Tax revenue from those sales now supports free breakfast for public school students, following approval of legislation by lawmakers last year.

Medical marijuana programs have expanded across the country, as has recreational marijuana. Two dozen states, including neighboring Missouri, permit recreational marijuana use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Arkansas voters in 2022 rejected an effort to expand legalization to recreational marijuana, despite national groups spending millions in support of the measure.

Restrictions on marijuana have relaxed at the federal level, with the U.S. Department of Justice downgrading the drug classification for medical cannabis earlier this year.

Here’s what Arkansas’s gubernatorial candidates—Democratic state Sen. Fred Love, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Libertarian Colt Shelby—say about legalizing recreational marijuana.

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Calif.: Bass faces mockery after arguing L.A.’s homeless population uses illicit drugs ‘to stay awake for protection’

Los Angeles Democrat Mayor Karen Bass is facing public backlash following controversial remarks regarding methamphetamine (meth) and drug use among the city’s homeless population.

Critics have quickly labeled the comments as an avoidance of the severe substance abuse epidemic fueling the local homelessness crisis. In a recent public discussion regarding the ongoing street crisis, Bass (D-Calif.) bizarrely argued that individuals sleeping on the L.A. streets do not initially use substances out of pure addiction, but rather, turn to illegal stimulants out of “fear” for their personal safety.

During the remarks, Mayor Bass claimed further that a large portion of street-level drug use stems from a survival mechanism rather than standard recreational abuse. Speaking on the city’s encampments, Bass declared that homeless individuals often “use drugs to stay awake for protection” on the city’s streets.

According to Bass’s representatives, who have since come out in support of her message, the mayor’s statement was meant to “highlight the high rates of violence and victimization” experienced by people living in outdoor encampments.

Nonetheless, the framing immediately prompted sharp rebukes from political opponents, community groups and local business owners who argue that the Democrat administration is heavily downplaying the destructive grip of heavy narcotics like fentanyl and methamphetamine.

The political fallout also comes amid a highly contentious mayoral race, where candidates are clashing over the visible reality of open-air drug markets and encampments across “the City of Angels.” Opponents have seized on the mayor’s rhetoric, pointing out that such explanations clearly ignore the criminal infrastructure behind the city’s meth epidemic.

During a recent primary debate, then-mayoral challenger Spencer Pratt directly challenged the city’s current approach to street outreach and voluntary services. Expressing deep skepticism over the concept that those living on streets are simply seeking safety, Pratt asserted, “These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or supermeth.”

While the mayor’s administration frequently champions initiatives like Inside Safe — which focuses on moving individuals from street encampments into temporary hotel rooms — many residents argue that the underlying crises of mental illness and severe drug addiction remain largely unaddressed on the ground.

As the city continues to navigate record expenditures, Bass’s comments have amplified demands for a major policy shift that prioritizes strict law enforcement alongside medical detoxification rather than a permissive view of illicit drug consumption.

Meanwhile, many volunteers and outreach workers on the ground argue that a substantial segment of the street population has abandoned traditional societal expectations entirely.

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Combining Marijuana And Music Enhances Medical Benefits, Reduces Prescription Drug Use And Boosts Emotions, Government-Funded Study Shows

A new government-funded study is putting quantifiable evidence behind the idea that marijuana use enhances the experience of listening to music. But the new research also suggests that the combination can bolster the therapeutic benefits of cannabis.

The study, published in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research and conducted by researchers at Dalhousie University and other schools in Canada, examined self-reported data from 122 marijuana consumers who completed an exhaustive, 176-question survey.

The findings support one of most anecdotally well-established effects of marijuana use: That is, “most participants viewed the combination of cannabis and music favorably, reporting enhanced relaxation, improved mood, and increased feelings of connection,” the paper says.

Marijuana use was further linked to “altered responses to imposed music in various settings and a heightened likelihood of using music during routine activities,” the research, which was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, determined.

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ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Whose Criminal Record Dates Back 35 Years

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested an illegal alien in Miami-Dade County, Florida, whose criminal record dates back to 1991, Breitbart News has learned.

On June 11, ICE agents in Miami arrested 58-year-old illegal alien Elias Cardoza-Torres of Cuba, who has been convicted of selling heroin, burglary, and vehicle theft, among other crimes.

“ICE works closely with our law enforcement partners to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities,” Acting ICE Director David Venturella said in a statement.

According to Venturella, Cardoza-Torres entered the United States in 1989 as a parolee and never adjusted his status to secure a green card. In November 1991, he was convicted of felony cocaine possession and in August 1997, he was convicted of burglary.

In October 1999, Cardoza-Torres was convicted of selling heroin. The following year, in April 2000, a federal immigration judge ordered him deported from the United States but he remained in the country for more than 26 years.

“We’re talking about an individual who completely disregarded our immigration laws and went on to ignore our criminal laws, as well,” Venturella said. “Fortunately, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office has turned him over to ICE custody, where he’ll remain pending removal.”

In more recent years, Cardoza-Torres was convicted of vehicle theft, drug possession, cocaine possession, and felony weapons offenses.

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Saturday in the Park in Portland: Naked Man, Snatched Child, Angry Tourists — No Cops

After the details sunk in and the revulsion wore off a bit, what happened in Portland, Ore., over the weekend settled into a low, droning case of the sads. Here we were at the new normal. The  communist DSA city councilors, the woke mayor, his protester-loving police chief, and their kindred have virtue-signaled my hometown into the slovenly, low-expectations, burnished turd of a place that it is today.

And I have incontrovertible proof. 

First, the cop shop usually sends out press releases on only the crimes most Portland people agree are, you know, bad or of high priority to Portlanders. So you know that limits things quite a bit.

For example, Portland has decided that teens who conduct street takeovers are bad actors. They’re obviously a pain in the ass, block traffic, scare the children, and someone usually ends up hurt.

Official Portland really hates street takeovers, and everyone can get behind police efforts to stop them.

These episodes are usually followed by a Portland Police press release recounting how many cars were towed. Sometimes there are photos of crunched-up Nissans. 

Everyone’s a hero. Got it. 

Drug dealers: bad. Unless they’re homeless, but that’s another story for another paragraph. So stay with me. 

One time not long ago, the Portland Police Bureau sent out a press release about a bad guy caught on Skid Row for selling drugs he shouldn’t have had. Drug dealers are anti-social. Everyone agrees. 

We got a look at the photo that came along with the press release. No, not a photo of the bad guy we should be watching out for when they invariably let him out of jail without bail. Ever since Antifa members started getting caught, mugshotted, released — and Andy Ngo started showing their faces — Portland has stopped releasing mugshots to the public.

Mug shots: bad.

But we did get a photo. We got a look at the bad guy’s booty. The drug dealer may have had, say, eight $1 bills in the photo. He was a high roller.

Meanwhile, Antifa and drug addicts who populate the streets with impunity and make everyone afraid are left to turn the city into the festering boil that it is.

Fun fact: The arrest of female Portland drive-by shooter Isis Symone Irving, in a politically and possibly racially motivated hate crime committed against a group of conservatives last February, has resulted in zero charges.

It was only after the gun was readied, aimed, and fired at the Donald Trump supporters that they realized it was a pellet gun. Pull a gun and not shoot it to ward off an onslaught of Antifa members coming to attack you for a second time? That’ll get you thrown in jail in Portland.

Hey, is there a bomb in that dumpster being rolled by Antifa protesters in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Southwest Portland over last weekend? Why, yes, there is.

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