Tag: the war on (some) drugs

After failing to ban kratom domestically, the FDA is now pushing the UN and the WHO to ban it globally

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is on a mission to eliminate all consumer access to the herb mitragyna speciosa, also known as kratom – and your help is needed to stop it.

Back in 2016, the FDA tried, and was almost successful, at getting kratom banned here in the United States. The agency has long argued that kratom is a “dangerous drug” with no benefits that belongs on the Drug Enforcement Agency‘s (DEA) Schedule I list of prohibited substances.

Thanks to the diligent efforts of freedom fighters, the FDA was stopped in its tracks. Now, however, the agency is trying once again to eradicate the natural painkiller from existence – this time globally.

In a notice published in the Federal Register, the FDA is asking for feedback concerning its latest push to have the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) add kratom and its constituents to the international schedule, which would prohibit kratom from being consumed anywhere in the world.

Until Aug. 9, 2021, the FDA is accepting public comments on the matter, which means your help is needed to let the agency know that it has no right trying to prohibit nature from being accessible to the people.

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BIDEN HAS SAID POT PRISONERS SHOULD BE FREE. NOW HE’S POISED TO SEND SOME BACK TO PRISON.

DIANA MARQUEZ HAS spent the last 14 months going on long walks, hitting the treadmill, and cooking with her daughter. She’s gotten to know her grandson, a fourth grader, helping him with his math homework. She has also lived with a weight hanging over her head — and an ankle bracelet strapped to her leg.

Marquez is one of roughly 4,400 people who were released from federal prison to home confinement starting in April 2020 as part of a Department of Justice directive aimed at preventing the transmission of Covid-19 in prison. Normally, the federal government allows people convicted of nonviolent crimes to serve out the last 10 percent or the last six months — whichever is less — of their sentences from home. Their time at home requires strict state scrutiny, including ankle bracelets and daily call-ins. The Department of Justice memorandum, issued under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, asked the Bureau of Prisons to relax the eligibility standards for home confinement so that people convicted of nonviolent crimes could leave prison despite having served less of their sentences.

The status of these people has been in limbo since December, when Justice Department officials from the outgoing Trump administration issued a memo stating that people whose sentences would outlast the Covid-19 emergency order would be returned to prison.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Biden administration lawyers had concluded that the Trump administration memo correctly interpreted the law — and that thousands of people in home confinement must be returned to prison after the yet-to-be-determined end of the “pandemic emergency period.” About 2,000 people stand to be impacted, with the rest having now completed enough of their sentences to qualify for early release under the standard guidance.

The Biden Justice Department’s position is especially shocking for people like Marquez who are doing time for marijuana-related offenses. President Joe Biden, after all, campaigned on loosening drug laws and said that people with marijuana records — who comprise a relatively small percentage of the federal prison population — should be freed.

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U.S. Intelligence Coverup? Newly Declassified FBI File on Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain Compounds Evidence Implicating his Wife’s Role in his Murder

The grisly death of mega rock star Kurt Cobain in 1994 (by a shotgun blast to his head) was officially ruled a suicide by the Seattle police, but evidence quickly came to light that Cobain had actually been murdered.

However, despite serious holes in the official narrative about Cobain’s death, the verdict of suicide has held firm for 27 years.

On May 7, the FBI quietly and without fanfare declassified 10 pages of never-before-seen documents relating to Cobain’s death, which alongside a mass of accumulated evidence suggest that the agency had purposely avoided looking into the radical activist musician’s death. One potential explanation for this failure could be due to the CIA’s involvement in the murder.

The latter seems plausible given the connections to the CIA of Courtney Love, Cobain’s former wife, who is the top suspect in the murder. Love happened to be a drug distributor during the same time that the CIA was heavily involved in trafficking opium and using drugs as political weapons. The latter links call for deeper scrutiny.

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Here Are The Full Details Of The New Federal Marijuana Legalization Bill From Chuck Schumer And Senate Colleagues

The first draft of a long-anticipated Senate bill to federally legalize marijuana has been released—and its sponsors are asking for public input to further improve the legislation before it is formally introduced.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) are unveiling the draft at a press conference on Wednesday. It’s an extensive bill, titled the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, that weighs in at 163 pages.

The main features of the legislation largely align with what advocates and stakeholders expected. It would federally deschedule cannabis, expunge prior convictions, allow people to petition for resentencing, maintain the authority of states to set their own marijuana policies and remove collateral consequences like immigration-related penalties for people who’ve been criminalized over the plant.

“Cannabis prohibition, a key pillar of the failed war on drugs, has caused substantial harm to our communities and small businesses, and especially for communities of color,” Wyden said. “It’s as simple as this: Senators Booker, Schumer and I want to bring common sense to the federal government, end prohibition and restore the lives of those hurt most and set them up for opportunity.”

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New Study Puts the Nail in the Coffin of the Myth that ‘Marijuana is a Gateway Drug’

Politicians defending the criminalization of recreational marijuana use have long riled up voters with dire warnings that the substance acts as a “gateway drug.” They insist that even if deaths directly caused by marijuana usage are virtually nonexistent, pot will eventually lead many users to more dangerous drugs.

President Biden himself has long made this claim, stating in 2010 that “I still believe [marijuana] is a gateway drug.” Only in 2019, while campaigning for president, did Biden begin to walk back this position. Yet he still does not fully support federal marijuana legalization. And the “gateway” position is still held by many other politicians clinging to their opposition to a widely popular legalization movement. For example, Republican Congressman Andy Harris recently referred to marijuana as “a known gateway drug to opioid addiction” while arguing against legalization.

However, a new study suggests that the notion that marijuana is a “gateway drug” is little more than political fiction.

Economists examined the impact that recreational marijuana laws passed in 18 states and the District of Columbia have had on metrics key to the “gateway” narrative. The analysis is the first to “comprehensively examine the broader impacts of state recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) on a wide set of outcomes related to hard drug use, including illicit nonmarijuana related consumption, drug-related arrests, arrests for property and violent offenses, mortality due to drug-related overdoses, suicides, and admissions for drug addiction-related treatment.”

Across four different nationwide databases, the researchers “find little consistent evidence” that recreational marijuana laws have gateway effects to hard drugs. The study finds “little compelling evidence to suggest” that marijuana legalization leads to more increases in drug use, arrests for hard drug offenses, drug overdoses, or admissions for drug addiction treatment.

They say there is even “suggestive evidence that legalizing recreational marijuana reduces heroin- and other opioid-related mortality.” Ultimately, the authors conclude that critics’ fear of marijuana’s supposed “gateway” effect appears “unfounded.”

Unfounded, indeed. But don’t expect critics to change their tune.

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Drugs In The White House

May 12-13: sowed hemp at muddy hole by swamp.
August 7: began to separate the male from the female hemp—rather too late.

While it is unlikely that George Washington, who penned these diary notes 200 years ago. smoked any of the scraggly rope-dope he was growing on his Mount Vernon plantation, he certainly dreamed of hemp as a cash crop. After all, it had a solid foreign market and was perfect for cottage industry, basket-making and such. He won over Thomas Jefferson, who began importing hemp seeds to Monticello, but failed to win the support of early American farmers, who favored tobacco cultivation. If, by some historical quirk, they had instead followed Washington’s advice, early U.S. history might have been considerably headier.

As it turned out not until the 19th century did Americans—including presidents—really turn on. The patent-medicine boom in the mid 1800s was largely responsible: Virtually everyone sampled various opium-, cannabis- and cocaine-based remedies and elixirs. If the president had the flu, a stomach ache, piles or a hangover, the prescribed remedy was tincture of opium: laudanum. Also prescribed for all manner of “female complaints,” laudanum found its way into first ladies’ medicine chests too. A century before Betty Ford got strung out on Valium and vodka, Mary Todd Lincoln was portrayed by presidential biographer William H. Herdon as a virtual patent-medicine junkie.

On the whole, however, records of bummers on these 19th-century elixirs are far outweighed by the good trips. Ulysses S. Grant, burned out by years of boozing, was miraculously revitalized near the end of his life by daily doses of Mariani tea, one of chemist Angelo Mariani’s delightful cocaine-based products. It so bolstered the aging ex-president that he was able to put in hours of work a day on his memoirs, valued as one of the finest accounts of the Civil War.

During the 1880s, coca wine, another Mariani tonic, enjoyed unsurpassed popularity on the patent-medicine market. The enterprising Mariani eventually rounded up glowing endorsements from the prince of Wales, the czar and czarina of Russia, the kings of Norway and Sweden, and Pope Leo XIII. In the United States, Pres. William McKinley’s secretary noted that a case of Vin Mariani had received an enthusiastic reception from the president.

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