Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Microdosing Magic Mushrooms A ‘Growing Trend’ Among Some Suburban Moms

Magic mushrooms have long been considered a serious drug — the federal government puts it in the same class as heroin — but it’s catching on in the oddest place: suburbia.

Moms in communities around San Diego are “microdosing” mushrooms, which contain the mind-altering substance psilocybin, a new report says.

“It’s so necessary for some of us to be out and forward because we need to move the needle. We need to help give permission to other mothers, to fathers and other families,” said a woman identified only as Mikaela, according to the local CBS affiliate, which published a story headlined “Micro-dosing magic mushrooms: A growing trend among San Diego moms.”

In microdosing, people take a small dose in various forms, which can be pills, gummies, and chocolate. “So a dose that would give you a classic psychedelic effect would be anywhere between a gram to five, six, seven grams and so a microdose is a fraction of a gram,” Mikaela told the station.

Keep reading

Video of Hunter Biden Buying Enough Crack to Put Him in Jail for Years, Proves the Elite are Above the Law

In the ostensible land of the free, there are two sets of justice systems: one for all those within and connected to the system, and one for everyone else. A perfect example of this two tiered system is the fact that people are jailed every day in this country if they are caught with crack cocaine. Currently, over half of the entire federal prison population is doing time for cocaine. However, when the president’s son is seen on video smoking it and even trafficking large amounts of it, he faced no consequences.

Sunday night, yet another damning video of Hunter Biden was released showing him purchasing crack from an alleged prostitute. In the video, Hunter is seen filming himself smoking a cigarette before reversing the camera onto a scale with a white substance, reportedly identified as crack.

Had Hunter been caught with this much crack prior to 2002, he could have gone to jail for over 20 years. In fact, the president himself, and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden spearheaded a law while he was a senator that required crack to be penalized at a rate 100 times more than that of powder cocaine. It was called the “100-1 rule” and it was used to lock countless Black men up for decades, tearing families apart and fueling future fatherless generations for years to come.

Coincidentally, white people were caught more often with the powder form of cocaine while Black people were caught more often with crack and as Ron Paul pointed out after this law was passed, only Black people were going to jail for it despite getting caught with the same amount of cocaine.

Keep reading

Did Minnesota accidentally legalize weed?

Minnesota just sorta, kinda, almost legalized weed.

A law took effect earlier this month allowing anyone at least 21 years old to purchase edibles or beverages with up to 5 milligrams of hemp-derived THC per serving. Those relatively low potency products with up to 50 milligrams per package still pack enough of a psychoactive punch to get most users plenty high.

But some key lawmakers who approved the significant change in drug policy were seemingly confused about what they’d done.

Marijuana legalization has been a divisive issue in the Minnesota Legislature for years. The Democratic-controlled House passed legislation last year that would allow anyone at least 21 years old to legally purchase and possess the drug, but the GOP-controlled Senate has remained staunchly opposed to recreational legalization. Yet a legalization provision was adopted during a marathon conference committee meeting in May without debate or objection.

“That doesn’t legalize marijuana?” Sen. Jim Abeler, the Republican chair of the Senate Human Services Reform Finance and Policy Committee, asked after it was adopted by a voice vote. “We didn’t just do that?”

Keep reading

Donald Trump Calls for Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers to Get Death Penalty 

Former President Donald Trump called on drug dealers, human traffickers, and those who kill police to get the death penalty during a Save America rally held in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Friday night.

Trump said:

So this is a little controversial. And I will either get a standing ovation – and I don’t care about the ovation, I care about the country – or people are going to walk out of the room for what I’m about to say. But it’s time finally to say it. If you look at countries all throughout the world…The only ones that don’t have a drug problem are those that institute the death penalty for drug dealers. They’re the only ones, they don’t have any problem.

Trump also added that human traffickers and those who kill police should face the death penalty.

“Those who kill police officers as well as those who kill through human trafficking,” he continued.

“So we can be streetwise tough and smart and end our problem or we can be politically correct, weak and frankly, extremely stupid,” Trump said. “Which is probably the way we will continue to be and lose millions and millions more people to a scourge the likes of which our country and most other countries have never seen before.”

“So do something about it. It’s The only way you’re going to win the only way you’re going to win all right,” the former president added.

Keep reading

Five Stories You’re Missing While Obsessing Over The “Current Thing”

In recent years and months it has become apparent that more often the attention of the American public is easily diverted. With increasing frequency we are seeing attention spans decrease, swaying incoherently from one curated narrative to the next, often irrational and logically inconsistent, to align with the “current thing” that establishment officials and their obedient talking heads on the ‘tell-lie-vision’ proselytize.

The new “current thing” takes the place of the old “current thing” in a seemingly never-ending game of Simon Says: Empire Edition. In just a month’s time we’ve seen virtue signalers exchange Ukrainian flags for Pride Flags, and COVID hysteria for monkeypox hysteria, with a smattering of gun control hypocrisy in between; shifting back and forth from “No one needs an AR-15!” to “Weapons for Ukraine!”, and “all cops are racist!” to “Only cops should have guns”.

All aided and abetted by an establishment media all too willing to participate in the degradation of common sense so long as it bolsters their abysmal ratings. It is tiresome for the intellectually competent.

But under the fanfare of these ridiculous charades a number of actually important news stories are either being ignored or at the very least obfuscated in favor of these insufferable ineptitudes.

Keep reading

Despite 144 Million Americans Living in Legal States, DEA Making More Cannabis Arrests Than Ever

Since 2012, 19 states and Washington, DC have legalized marijuana for adults over the age of 21. In total, 38 states and DC have legalized medical marijuana — meaning that a majority of Americans have access to cannabis, whether medically or recreationally. There are just 12 states in the country left who outlaw cannabis entirely — and even they are fading fast.

Currently, 144 million Americans live in states where recreational marijuana is legal and decriminalization measures are currently sweeping through all the other states where it is not. The war on weed is crumbling and the drug warriors who’ve ruined an untold number of lives over this plant are quickly finding themselves on the wrong side of history.

Despite the prohibition wall collapsing and legal cannabis winning the drug war, there are still police state-addicted tyrants holding strong while attempting to maintain their relevancy through enforcement. The US Drug Enforcement Administration is full of these tyrants and their latest numbers prove just how bad their addiction to the drug war is.

In the last two years, one would think that cannabis plant seizures and arrests related to marijuana would go down thanks to widespread legalization. Unfortunately, however, one would be wrong. The DEA is still carrying out their Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program with a vengeance.

Federal law enforcement agents and their partners seized over 5.5 million cultivated marijuana plants and made more than 6,600 marijuana-related arrests in 2021, according to annual data compiled by the DEA.

According to figures published in the DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program Statistical Report, agents and their partners confiscated approximately 5.53 million cultivated cannabis plants last year – a 20 percent increase over 2020’s totals. Law enforcement also reported making 6,606 marijuana-related arrests, a 25 percent increase over the prior year’s totals (when agents reported 4,992 arrests) … for a plant.

These numbers are record breaking and are the highest since 2011 — before any states had legal weed. Since then, arrests have been going down, but in 2021 a surge began once more as police-state worshipping tyrants ramped up their hatred of this amazing plant and the people who choose to grow it.

Keep reading

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms

On a Sunday afternoon in March, a group of 30 strangers huddle under a park pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah, sipping hot cocoa and shaking hands shyly as snow clots the cottonwoods. A clean-cut gang of mostly white professionals, they are united by their interest in the Divine Assembly, a two-year old church with 3,000 members that considers psilocybin its holy sacrament. 

The church’s co-founders, husband and wife Steve and Sara Urquhart, mingle quietly with the psychedelic-curious, many of whom are either new to tripping or considering their maiden voyage. Steve sticks to the sidelines, every so often reaching to smooth a conical white beard that, combined with his blue eyes and bearlike frame, make him look like a punk Santa Claus. The long beard is the only outer marker of his new identity: Before pivoting to mushroom churches, Urquhart was one of the most powerful Republicans in the Utah State Legislature, serving from 2001 to 2016, with a stint as majority whip in the House before eventually moving over to the Senate. Former colleagues and friends recall his small-government brand of Republicanism as “rock-ribbed.” He was also, like more than 60 percent of Utah and approximately 86 percent of the Legislature in 2021, deeply, devoutly Mormon. 

“We were all the way in,” Urqhuart says of the proudly peculiar American religion with about 6.7 million adherents in the U.S. and about 16.6 million globally. Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 during the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as church authorities requested it be called in 2018, though many Latter-day Saints, or Saints for short, still use the term “Mormon”) bases its teachings on the revelations of Smith, whom they consider a prophet. According to Smith, who claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from a pair of gold plates inscribed with “reformed Egyptian,” Latter-day Saints are God’s chosen people destined to restore the original Christian gospel — a gospel that included, they professed up until 1890, polygamy. 

“I knew all the secret handshakes,” Urquhart later divulges after one shot of tequila, and he means it quite literally, demonstrating a dizzying pattern of grips, bumps, and daps that look straight out of a Monty Python skit. 

In all likelihood, Urquhart and others believe now, Smith lifted those handshakes and many other ceremonial elements from the Freemasons, the then-popular secret society that counted Smith as a member. Urquhart also believes, 100 percent seriously, that the LDS Church (the mainstream one he and Mitt Romney are from, not the fundamentalist offshoots depicted in Under the Banner of Heaven) is a cult. Specifically, he says, alluding to the church’s polygamist history and fact that some bishops still ask teens if they are masturbating, “a sex cult with really bad sex.”

Church or cult, Urquhart crashed out of it around 2008. In the park that Sunday, he is in good company. Although the Divine Assembly is not limited to former LDS members, or “post-Mormons” as they refer to themselves, the majority of the crowd by default is, and they’re aching for a new kind of spirituality to fill the void. One couple, Yesenia and Guillermo Ramos, tell me they left the LDS Church in 2012, after it began to feel like the opposite of what they thought it stood for. “God is love,” Yesenia says with conviction, but within the church, she says she felt judged for her decision to be both a mom and a nurse, rather than a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, Yesenia says, she was sick of the pressure to appear perfect all the time, a common complaint among LDS women that Dr. Curtis Canning, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association, has called “Mother of Zion Syndrome.”

Keep reading

How an NHL Enforcer Broke His Body — and Turned to Psychedelics to Heal His Brain

Riley Cote’s journey to enlightenment began in earnest when a hulking man punched him in the face. Cote, now 40 and retired from professional hockey, remembers the moment with a dark laugh. He’d gotten into this particular bust-up one night during the 2009 season with one of the NHL’s most vicious fighters, and took the worst of it, waking the next day with his left eye blackened shut.

“What,” he asked himself, “am I doing?”

He drove to the Philadelphia Flyers training facility and got into the shower. Feeling congested, he reached for a tissue. He didn’t realize he’d suffered a cracked sinus, so what happened next was physics. When he blew his nose, the air — rather than coming out of his nostrils — inflated his face. The pressure surged instantly behind his good eye and closed it tight.

Team trainer Derek Settlemyre heard Cote scream. “His whole face had swollen up,” Settlemyre recalls. “We tell them, if they think they have a fracture, ‘Don’t blow your nose’ — and he did.”

After eight years in pro hockey (four in the NHL, four hopping around its minor-league teams), Cote felt his retirement bearing down. As an NHL “enforcer” — a player whose main role is to get into fights — he’d taken countless hits on the ice. Off it, he self-medicated with booze and drugs. He’d brutalized his body inside and out by the tender age of 28. “I damaged my brain,” Cote says. “Punching it and dehydrating it and partying my ass off.”

Today, Cote is a new man, with a mane of long brown hair, a yoga-trimmed physique, and an aura of ease in his own skin. It is a transformation he credits largely to psychedelic drugs. Since retiring, Cote has emerged as one of the sports world’s most vocal advocates for what he calls “plant medicines” — from cannabis, itself a light psychedelic, to weightier hallucinogens including DMT and magic mushrooms — to treat post-concussion symptoms (think headaches, insomnia, depression, and possibly, the degenerative brain condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE). In 2017, Cote co-founded Athletes for Care, a group that promotes research into the physical and emotional health issues athletes face and novel paths for treatment. He regularly speaks at conferences on the benefits of psychedelics. And, perhaps most important, he reaches out to players who are known to be struggling post-career, even arranging magic-mushroom ceremonies where they can safely experiment with the drug.

Keep reading

Biden’s Cigarette Crackdown a Boon for Drug Dealers, Experts Warn

A new Biden administration effort to regulate cigarettes will bankroll street gangs and bankrupt U.S. tobacco farmers, experts say.

The Food and Drug Administration is preparing this month to require lower nicotine content in all cigarettes—a move critics argue will wreck the $75 billion U.S. tobacco industry amid a global economic crisis and boost a black market as crime spikes nationwide. The news comes weeks after the agency announced its plans to ban menthol cigarettes, which will cost federal and local governments an estimated $6.6 billion in the first year alone.

Richard Marianos, a 27-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, said these regulations will shift the demand for cigarettes toward unregulated tobacco grown internationally, which is then purchased and sold by drug dealers.

“The problem again with this administration is they do not take into consideration a totality of subject matter experts,” Marianos told the Washington Free Beacon. “I’ve never seen this much foolishness in my life.”

Marianos, who worked on gang violence at the ATF, said the black market for cigarettes is dominated by street gangs and would grow at least a hundredfold after the FDA implements its nicotine decision. He claims one of his former informants discovered some dealers make $5,000 selling cigarettes in a single afternoon. The FDA’s “uneducated and silly” cigarette plan, he said, would require law enforcement to focus on tobacco sales rather than drugs and violent crime.

The FDA’s cigarette regulations are a part of the Biden administration’s larger “harm reduction” strategy that enables illicit drug use while criminalizing tobacco. The Free Beacon reported in February that the Department of Health and Human Services was set to fund the distribution of crack pipes through a $30 million harm reduction program, which according to the New York Times sparked an “uproar” that “derailed” the agency’s entire drug policy.

Keep reading