Tag: the war on (some) drugs

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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Republican Lawmakers Want Biden to Reclassify Cannabis

Republican lawmakers are asking President Joe Biden to keep his promise and reschedule cannabis under the Controlled Substances Act. 

Yes, you read the lede right. Republicans are asking Biden, a Democrat, to reschedule weed once and for all. 

Representatives Dave Joyce (R-OH) and Don Young (R-AK) both serve as co-chairs of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus. They recently sent a letter to Biden asking for rescheduling and claiming the issue is “a matter of public health.”

Despite all the work that has been happening at the state level to legalize medical and recreational cannabis, it is still classified federally as a Schedule I drug in the U.S., as most cannabis enthusiasts well know. This puts it in the same category with drugs like heroin that are known to be much more harmful. The classification means that cannabis has no medical value and a high potential for abuse in the country’s eyes. 

“As a Schedule I substance, cannabis is not accepted for medical use on the federal level, which has caused significant research restrictions and continues to thwart the treatment of a wide range of patients, including those suffering from cancer as well as veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and people living with Multiple Sclerosis and seizure disorders,” the letter explains regarding the status of cannabis. 

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Police Are Lying About “No-Knock” Warrants

Police claim they need “no-knock” warrants to pursue murderers and violent criminals. But, this rarely seems to be the case. In reality, no-knock warrants are a tool that law enforcement used to beef up the war on drugs in the 1980s, and cops have continued to use them mainly for that purpose ever since.

No-knock warrants allow police to enter a building without knocking or announcing themselves. This creates an element of surprise. Law enforcement apologists claim boosts officer safety and keeps criminals from destroying evidence. But oftentimes, the reaction of surprised occupants, often awakened from a dead sleep, leads to a violent police response.

That’s what happened to Breonna Taylor.

The 26-year-old woman was in bed with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker in the early-morning hours of March 13 when Louisville police broke into her home executing a no-knock warrant issued earlier that day. Walker claims he heard banging on the door but never hear anybody say “police.” When the officers broke down the door, Walker fired a shot, hitting an officer in the leg. Police returned fire, killing Taylor. She suffered at least eight gunshot wounds.

Taylors death sparked a movement to do away with no-knock warrants. Police insist they need them to catch dangerous criminals. But more often than not, they are employed in run-of-the-mill drug raids, not in pursuit of murders and rapists as police claim.

Let’s take for example the case of Lexington, Kentucky. Currently, the City Council is embroiled in a legal battle with a police union after passing a ban on “no-knock” warrants earlier this year. Fraternal Order of Police attorney Scott Crosbie said police believe the no-knock warrants will keep them safe and that they should remain on the table as a bargaining tool. According to the FOP, Lexington is experiencing a 67 percent increase in homicides, combined with staffing shortages. But what does this have to do with “no-knock” warrants?

The implication seems to be that without the “no-knock” warrants, police will be put in danger as they try to apprehend violent and dangerous criminals such as murderers and rapists. But the Lexington Herald-Leader obtained copies of past no-knock warrants in 2020.  All of the cases were drug-related – no murderers were apprehended.

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A Record Number of Drug-Related Deaths Illustrates the Lethal Consequences of Prohibition

The United States saw a record number of drug-related deaths in 2020. The total exceeded 93,000, which was up 29 percent from 2019, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 2020 spike—the largest ever recorded—was largely attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic and the legal restrictions it provoked. But drug-related deaths already were rising before anyone had heard of the coronavirus, not just despite but also because of the government’s efforts to prevent people from using psychoactive substances.

The new CDC numbers confirm the folly of relying on supply control measures to reduce drug fatalities. Those policies are based on the premise that drug availability by itself causes drug-related deaths, which is clearly not true in light of the social, economic, and psychological factors that plausibly explain last year’s surge. In any case, attacking production and distribution through legal restrictions, interdiction, seizures, and arrests rarely has a significant or lasting impact on prices or availability. Worse, those interventions drive substitutions that make drug use deadlier, as illustrated by the rise of illicit fentanyl and the crackdown on prescription pain medication, which accelerated the upward trend in opioid-related deaths.

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