Tag: the war on (some) drugs

US Southern Command Says US and Ecuadorian Forces Have Launched Operations Against Narco-Terrorist Organization in Ecuador, Releases Footage

As war rages on in the Middle East, Trump’s war on the designated terrorist drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere continues, with the US Southern Command announcing a joint operation with Ecuadorian military forces in Ecuador. 

The operations began on Tuesday against narco-terrorists “who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere,” SOUTHCOM said in a statement.

US SOUTHCOM also released footage that appeared to tease the operation.

SOUTHCOM said in a statement:

On March 3, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations in Ecuador. The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism.

Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere.

“We commend the men and women of the Ecuadorian armed forces for their unwavering commitment to this fight, demonstrating courage and resolve through continued actions against narco-terrorists in their country.” – #SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan.

This comes as US forces continue drug boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific.

US forces conducted several strikes last month on vessels “operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” Southern Command said.

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Was It a Coincidental Traffic Stop or AI-Powered Surveillance?

Seth Ferranti was driving his Ford pickup on a southeastern Nebraska stretch of the interstate in November 2024 when law enforcement pulled him over, claiming that he had wobbled onto the hard shoulder.

As the Seward County sheriff’s deputies questioned Ferranti, a filmmaker who had spent 21 years in prison for distributing LSD, they allegedly smelled cannabis. Declaring this probable cause for a search, they searched the vehicle and discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana.

But were those the actual reasons for the stop and search? When Ferranti went on trial, his attorneys presented a license plate reader report produced by the security communications company Motorola Solutions. It revealed Ferranti had been consistently monitored prior to his arrest, including by the local sheriff on the day he was apprehended. (Neither the sheriff’s office nor Motorola responded to Reason‘s requests for comment.)

Ferranti’s legal team argued that it was unconstitutional to surveil somebody based on his previous crimes. The argument did not carry the day: Last month their client was sentenced to up to two and a half years for possession of cannabis with intent to distribute. But the case still raises substantial moral and constitutional questions about both the scale of these public-private surveillance partnerships and the ways they’re being used.

Ferranti had long been a celebrity in the drug-reform world, going back to that LSD arrest in the early ’90s. After that first bust, he jumped bail, went on the lam, landed on the U.S. Marshals’ 15 Most Wanted Fugitives list, and even staged his own drowning to evade the authorities. After he started serving his sentence in 1993, he became a prolific prison journalist, writing the “I’m Busted” column for Vice. The New Jersey native always insisted that his crimes were nonviolent and that the drugs he sold, LSD and cannabis, had medicinal or therapeutic benefits.

After Ferranti came out of prison, his 2017 documentary White Boy—the true story of a teenage FBI informant who became a major cocaine trafficker—was a success on Netflix. He produced a number of further films, including 2023’s Secret History of the LSD Trade. And apparently, the government kept watching him.

It’s been watching a lot of people—and Motorola isn’t the only company helping it. Flock Safety was founded in 2017, and within five years it had tens of thousands of cameras operational. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has warned, Flock’s AI-assisted automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system has been undergoing an “insidious expansion” beyond its supposed purposes of identifying vehicles of interest, such as stolen cars and hit-and-run suspects. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used it to locate illegal migrants, and law enforcement in Texas used it to investigate a self-administered abortion, foreshadowing its potential use as a predictive policing tool for all Americans. Lee Schmidt, a veteran in Virginia, recently learned that the system logged him more than 500 times in four months. 

“I don’t know whether law enforcement officers are using [ALPRs] to do predictive policing,” says Joshua Windham of the Institute of Justice, a public interest law firm that is campaigning to stop the warrantless use of license plate reader cameras. “We know that [Customs and Border Patrol] is using ALPRs generally to stop cars with what they deem ‘suspicious’ travel patterns.”

After reviewing the document cataloguing the Ferranti’s vehicle monitoring, Windham adds: “The records are consistent with an officer either looking up a car in his system to see where else that car was captured by ALPRs, or that car showing up as a ‘hot list’ alert in the Motorola system. But it’s hard to tell, from the records alone, whether the stop was a ‘predictive policing’ stop.”

Ferranti is convinced it was. “There were no warrants, investigations, informants, state police, DEA, or FBI involvement, just Seward County Sheriff’s office [and an] AI-assisted license plate tracking service to perpetuate their outdated War on Drugs mission,” he said in an Instagram post published by his family following his sentencing. “Traveling the highways as a person with a record is now considered [suspicious] activity by the AI.”

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Arizona Senators Take Up Bills To Criminalize ‘Excessive’ Marijuana Smoke, Even On Private Property

Arizona lawmakers are considering at a pair of measures that would make the act of creating “excessive” amounts of marijuana smoke a nuisance crime punishable by jail time, even if the person is using cannabis in compliance with state law in their own homes.

Sen. J.D. Mesnard (R) is sponsoring the two proposals—one that would amend state statute legislatively that would put the issue before voters at the ballot. Members of the Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee are set to consider the proposals this week.

The lawmaker said he decided to push the issue due to the smell of marijuana in his own neighborhood.

Both versions of Mesnard’s legislation stipulate that “it is presumed that a person who creates excessive marijuana smoke and odor causes a condition that endangers the safety or health of others.”

The reason behind having both a proposed bill and resolution is related to the potential legal challenges of lawmakers changing the voter-approved marijuana legalization law.

The legislation would establish “a presumption that the creation of excessive marijuana smoke and odor is injurious to health, indecent, offensive to the senses and an obstruction to the free use of property that interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property,” a summary of the proposal says.

If enacted, the loosely defined offense of creating “excessive” marijuana smoke under the bill and resolution would be considered a class 3 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a maximum $500 fine and up to one year of probation.

“I’m hearing from some people that, depending on their neighbor situation, they may not be able to have their kids go outside because the marijuana smoke is so potent,” Mesnard, the sponsor, said. “It can even creep into your own house or, in my case, into my garage.”

“But experiencing now what’s happened, even in my own neighborhood, is a pretty frustrating situation,” he told The Arizona Daily Star. “You should be responsible neighbors if you’re going to smoke pot… It can be a real issue for families, especially with kids.”

Asked about the seeming double standard given that no such nuisance offenses exist for smoking cigarettes or cigars on a private property, the senator said, “I’ll concede I hadn’t thought about it.”

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Legalizing Cannabis: Implications for Child Maltreatment

Cannabis is the most used illicit drug in the United States. Though cannabis possession and consumption are prohibited federally, states are increasingly implementing laws that legalize this substance, initially for medical and, more recently, for recreational use. We study the impact of recreational cannabis laws on child maltreatment reports. To do so, we employ difference-in-differences and event-study methods to analyze administrative data on child maltreatment reports as well as child injury-related deaths 2010-2022. We find that recent efforts to legalize cannabis for recreational consumption have not led to an increase in child maltreatment reports and may reduce particularly severe maltreatment.

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Florida Marijuana Campaign Asks Supreme Court To Restore 71,000 Legalization Ballot Signatures State Officials Tossed

The attorney general of Florida and several business and anti-marijuana groups are telling the state Supreme Court to block a cannabis legalization initiative, calling it “fatally flawed” and unconstitutional as advocates work against the clock to qualify the measure for the November ballot.

In a series of briefs submitted to the court on Friday, Attorney General James Uthmeier (R), Drug Free America Foundation, Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Legal Foundation, Associated Industries of Florida and a former judge made similar arguments contesting the initiative from Smart and Safe Florida.

The parties generally contend that the proposal is written in a way that’s affirmatively misleading, runs counter to federal law prohibiting cannabis and violates the state’s single subject rule for ballot initiatives.

The attorney general called the measure “fatally flawed,” arguing that it “misleads voters in a way designed to garner greater approval, is flatly invalid under the federal Constitution, and violates the single-subject requirement. The Court should therefore strike the proposed amendment from the ballot.”

Each of those reasons alone, the brief said, “warrants removal from the ballot.”

The attorney general’s office last month asked the state Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the legalization initiative. The court accepted the request and set a schedule for state officials and the cannabis campaign to file briefs this month. Proponents of the measure have until January 12 to submit response briefs, then the opposition has until January 20 to reply.

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Justice Department ‘Should Take About 20 Years’ To Reschedule Marijuana, GOP Congressman Says

The Justice Department should “take about 20 years” to finish the marijuana rescheduling process, a GOP congressman who staunchly opposes cannabis reform tells Marijuana Moment.

With the proposal to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) still pending, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) is in no rush to have DOJ see the process through—despite President Donald Trump’s December executive order directing the attorney general to quickly finalize the rule.

“Last I looked, it hasn’t been rescheduled. The president said to look into it,” Harris said in an interview on Thursday, adding that he hasn’t directly communicated with the Justice Department about the issue but that “everybody understands what I want it to look like.”

“I don’t think I’ve been subtle about it,” Harris said. “All I know is every day that goes by and it’s not rescheduled is another good day.”

The prohibitionist congressman said he isn’t sure if internal disagreements within DOJ are to blame for the delayed rescheduling action, but “the wheels grind a little slowly around here sometimes.”

“On this one, they should take about 20 years to grind,” he said.

In December, Harris separately said Trump doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally reschedule marijuana via executive order. But while lawmakers could overrule any administrative move to enact the reform, it would be a “heavy lift” in the Republican-controlled Congress, he acknowledged.

For what it’s worth, the congressman may be at risk of being unseated in November due to redistricting in his state.

The Maryland House of Delegates earlier this month approved a congressional redistricting proposal that would leave anti-cannabis Harris especially vulnerable in the next election, according to analysts, giving Democrats an advantage in the state’s first congressional district for the first time since the last map was drawn in 2011. It remains to be seen whether the Senate will follow the House’s lead to pass the legislation, however.

Meanwhile, another GOP lawmaker on the other side of the debate, Congressional Cannabis Caucus co-chair Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), recently told Marijuana Moment that while marijuana rescheduling might not be at the top of the agenda for the Justice Department or White House amid competing interests, he and bipartisan colleagues will be ready when “opportunity does present itself.”

Joyce separately said last month that he doesn’t think the attorney general would seek to undermine the president’s executive order to move marijuana to Schedule III despite any personal reservations she may have about the policy change.

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CA Pot Tax Heist: $370 Million Stolen from Kids’ Drug Prevention to Fund Dem Voter Registration Scam

Steve Hilton announced the first findings from the newly formed California Department of Government Efficiency, led by Jenny Ray LaRue, alleging large-scale fraud involving state funds.

Speaking outside the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, Hilton said the new department had begun examining financial activity within state agencies and tracking alleged misuse of taxpayer money.

“Welcome everyone. We are here outside the California Department of tax defeat administration. This is where your money goes. This building is where your money goes into the Democrats bottomless money pit,” Hilton said.

Hilton referenced a prior estimate released weeks earlier, which he said projected at least $250 billion in fraud statewide.

“Our estimate, as you may remember, that we put out a few weeks ago, at least $250 billion of fraud in California,” Hilton said.

“And today, we’re announcing our first findings since we got to work in Cal DOGE just a few weeks ago, just a couple of weeks ago, and here it is. It’s a classic.”

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