Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Justice Department Nominee Lisa Monaco Prosecuted Black Man Sentenced To 27 Years In Prison For Selling $20 Worth Of Drugs

President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as deputy attorney general helped prosecute a black man who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for selling $20 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer. The government dropped charges against the man’s co-defendant as part of a plea deal, court records show.

Lisa Monaco, who Biden tapped for the Justice Department position, was one of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted a case in 2003 against Reginald C. Steward, a Washington, D.C. man who was charged following an undercover drug bust.

Steward was arrested in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 20, 2002 and was charged with unlawful distribution of heroin, according to court records.

He was convicted at a jury trial on April 16, 2003, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison. An appeals court in 2007 upheld Steward’s conviction, but noted that the evidence presented against him at trial wasn’t “overwhelming.”

But Steward’s co-defendant, who physically conducted the drug exchange with the undercover police officer, had his charges dropped after he pleaded guilty to drug possession in another case. Court records for the man, Bobby Praylow, show that he received a 12-month jail sentence.

Monaco, whose most recent government position was as homeland security adviser to then-President Barack Obama, disclosed her work on Steward’s case in her written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of her confirmation process to the Justice Department position.

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Constitutional ban on legal cannabis advances in Idaho

As legal marijuana becomes a reality in every corner of the U.S., Idaho is putting up a fight.

State lawmakers on Friday moved forward with a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar the legalization of marijuana in Idaho in an attempt to keep the growing nationwide acceptance of the drug from seeping across its borders.

Idaho is one of only three states without some sort of policy allowing residents to possess products with even low amounts of THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. Residents can cross the state border in nearly every direction and find themselves in a place where marijuana can be bought for recreational or medicinal purposes. Support for medicinal marijuana use is growing among some residents — with legalization activists trying to get an initiative on the state ballot in 2022.

It’s made some lawmakers in the deep-red state nervous, particularly after voters in the neighboring state of Oregon decriminalized the personal possession of drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine last November.

The joint resolution to ban all psychoactive drugs not already legal in Idaho won approval along a 6-2 party-line vote in the Senate State Affairs Committee. The list of substances would change for drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

But the primary target over the two days of testimony on Monday and Friday was marijuana as Idaho finds itself surrounded by states that have legalized cannabis.

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Hunter S. Thompson once spread a rumor of a presidential candidate’s drug addiction and it was taken seriously

After spending a few tedious months on the 1972 campaign trail, Ed Muskie—the Democrat favored to win the party’s nomination—had been putting his entire press corps to sleep with hopelessly repetitive stump speeches.

“I didn’t get a quote worth filing out of the whole goddamn trip,” a New York reporter told Hunter S Thompson about the senator’s tour of Florida.

So on May 11, 1972, Thompson gave the campaign a jolt, filing a speculative story through a primitive version of a fax machine he called the Mojo Wire. Describing Muskie as a competitive political animal who would never back away from a challenge, Thompson couldn’t understand why the senator had suddenly become rigid and unresponsive—seeming to read directly from a script—but he took one hilarious shot at figuring it out.

“Not much has been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the presidential campaign,” Thompson wrote in an article he later claimed was never meant to be taken at face value. In it, he declares, “word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisers called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with ‘some kind of strange drug.”

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