Tag: the war on (some) drugs

“Watch the Show Folks”: Cop Poses on Livestream as He Savagely Beats Man Over Traffic Stop

As the video shows, Thompson is not resisting in anyway, has both of his hands up, and is simply not willing to get out of the vehicle over an allegation that a cop smelled a plant.

“Sir, my hands are up, and we are on camera,” Thompson says as the Trooper becomes more enraged.

Hewitt then responds by telling Thompson that “you are gonna get your ass whooped in front of f*cking lord and all creation.”

Thompson says again and again that his hands are up and he’s not resisting. However, the enraged Hewitt doesn’t seem to care. He looks to the camera, poses with his soon-to-be victim and says “Watch the show folks” as he attacks Thompson.

Though the camera goes blank, you can still hear Thompson pleading with his attackers to “please get off my neck” as Hewitt continues to beat him.

Instead of listening and getting off of his neck, Hewitt starts shouting, “how do you like that motherf**ker?” as he continues his attack on Thompson.

Thankfully, Derrick survived. Other people have not been so lucky.

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How a McDonald’s Stirring Spoon Became a Target in the War on Drugs

The McDonald’s stirring spoon was a fixture of the popular fast food chain in the 1970s — a long, plastic utensil with a small scoop on one end and the signature golden arches on the other. It was a simple tool, designed to stir cream and sugar into coffee and nothing more. But that wasn’t all it was used for.

Indeed, the innocent stirring spoon, colloquially called the McSpoon, soon became an unlikely scapegoat in the War on Drugs.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared the drug epidemic public enemy number one, kicking off the “war on drugs” that’s still being waged today. Despite the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and efforts to shut down the Colombian drug trade, drug use only spiked in subsequent years. Cocaine use, in particular, was at its peak in those years, with a whopping 11 percent of the adult population using it.

To help curb the problem, anti-drug folks created a big push against the sale and use of drug paraphernalia — pipes, rolling papers, coke spoons and the like — leading to the DEA’s Model Drug Paraphernalia Act in 1979.

The law, adopted by almost every state government, contained a vague definition of paraphernalia that could include just about everything. A silly straw and a plastic sandwich bag could be paraphernalia under the right circumstances.

Angry about the proposed law, one member of the Paraphernalia Trade Association (PTA, representing smoke shop vendors) mocked the law’s vague wording with, that’s right, a McDonald’s stirring spoon.

“This,” he said, “is the best cocaine spoon in town and it’s free with every cup of coffee at McDonalds.”

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If weed is legal, why are so many people still being arrested and locked up for it?

While Michigan dispensaries collectively bring in millions of dollars every month, Michael Thompson is serving a de facto life sentence in the same state for the very same reason — selling cannabis. 

As the country grapples with both a global pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, cannabis remains at the forefront of the cultural and political conversation. Cannabis was deemed an essential business by nearly all states with a medical or adult-use market during COVID-19, yet its criminalization has resulted in the arrests of millions of Americans, with Black individuals arrested at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. 

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Ibogaine May Help Us Better Understand Substance Use Disorders, but Will it Solve the Opioid Crisis?

Among the drugs used in withdrawal treatments, ibogaine is unique. Most substances administered to patients in rehab are intended to temporarily allay withdrawal pains. The name of the practice, “substitution therapy,” already implies its flaws (ones with which Juliana was well acquainted). Ibogaine treatment, in contrast, goes after the addiction itself. It puts people into what’s often described as a “waking dream” state, with effects lasting for more than 10 hours.

“It’s not a hallucinogen like LSD. It’s not like you’re sitting there awake watching the trails on the wall,” describes Dana Beal, one of the world’s leading ibogaine activists who has experienced the effects of ibogaine firsthand. “You close your eyes and go into a waking dream. You’re paralyzed because you can’t summon the will to move. You just want to lie in a quiet room, left alone to review your lifetime of memories.”

In one small study, published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse in 2018, 50 percent of patients reported not using opioids in the previous 30 days at the three-month check-up following their ibogaine treatment. In comparison, says Ken Alper, associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at NYU School of Medicine, one-third to half of patients fail to even complete detoxification treatment using methadone, buprenorphine, and klonopin, today’s three most common drugs for opioid withdrawal symptoms. Among the people who do complete detoxification with these drugs, roughly half are still sober after four to five months.

“[Ibogaine] is the anti-drug,” says Beal, who along with researchers Howard Lotsof and Norma Alexander, studied ibogaine’s therapeutic effects. “You come out and you don’t want to do any more ibogaine, and you don’t want to do a lot of drugs after taking ibogaine.”

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