Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Bipartisan senators to force vote blocking ‘unauthorized war’ in Venezuela

A group of bipartisan senators will force a vote on a War Powers Resolution to block the use of force by American troops within or against Venezuela after President Trump raised the possibility of attacks against Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

The measure is being led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) are co-sponsors. 

Trump said Wednesday he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela, saying he was focused on “land” operations and raising the specter the president is looking to remove Maduro from power.  

“The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote. We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war,” Paul said in a statement. 

The effort marks the second time senators have sought to block Trump’s buildup of force in the Caribbean Sea. A vote on a War Powers Resolution last week failed 48-51, although it garnered support from Paul and one other Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).

“Americans don’t want to send their sons and daughters into more wars—especially wars that carry a serious risk of significant destabilization and massive new waves of migration in our hemisphere,” Kaine said in a statement. 

“If my colleagues disagree and think a war with Venezuela is a good idea, they need to meet their constitutional obligations by making their case to the American people and passing an Authorization for Use of Military Force. I urge every senator to join us in stopping this Administration from dragging our country into an unauthorized and escalating military conflict.”

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Maryland Police Get ‘Overwhelming’ Number Of Volunteers To Smoke Marijuana And Eat Free Lunch At DUI Training For Officers

Police in Ocean City, Maryland say they received an “overwhelming” number people who want to volunteer to smoke marijuana and drive a vehicle in a controlled setting for DUI recognition training purposes—with the added promise of a free lunch for participants.

Just seven hours after the Ocean City Police Department (OCPD) posted on Facebook that they were soliciting volunteers for the cannabis-impaired driving exercise, the agency on Tuesday followed up by advising the public that they had more than enough sign-ups and would not be accepting additional applications.

The department’s original post said they would be partnering with Cannabis Green Lab for the annual Maryland Highway Safety Office (MHSO) Zero Deaths DUI Conference. OCPD said it was looking to recruit 12-14 volunteers “to smoke cannabis for educational purposes while officers learn to recognize cannabis impairment.”

“The Green Lab helps both officers and participants better understand the effects and levels of impairment caused by cannabis, all in a safe, controlled setting,” it said.

Participants who are ultimately selected will need to bring their own cannabis to smoke prior to the driving exercise—but OCPD said the department will be providing free lunch to volunteers courtesy of MHSO.

Of course, driving while impaired is illegal in states that have legalized cannabis and in those that still maintain criminalization, so OCPD advised that a shuttle service will be available for participants when the exercise (and lunch time) is over.

“We’ll have about 40 student officers participating, so it’s a great way to help train the next generation of law enforcement safely and responsibly,” the department said.

Marijuana Moment reached out to OCPD for an estimate of how many sign-ups it received prior to closing the application window, but a representative was not immediately available.

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Three In Four American Voters Want Hemp To Stay Legal, With Enhanced Regulations, Poll Finds

American voters across the political spectrum are broadly supportive of keeping consumable hemp products legal and implementing certain regulations to ensure public safety and prevent youth access, according to a new poll.

The survey from McLaughlin & Associates, which was commissioned by the Hemp Industry & Farmers of America (HIFA), comes amid increased debate in Congress and state legislatures around the country about how to navigate laws around consumable hemp products, which were federally legalized under the 2018 Farm Bill that President Donald Trump signed in his first term.

Overall, 72 percent of respondents said they want to see hemp maintain its legal status under federal law, along with “new safety and licensing regulations.” Notably, Republicans were most supportive at 77 percent, compared to Democrats (71 percent) and independents (68 percent).

The question posed to voters didn’t simply ask about keeping hemp legal, however, so it’s unclear what percentage back the status quo or are swayed by the possible addition of new regulations. It asked: “Would you support or oppose a federal law continuing to allow the sale and possession of consumable hemp-based products with new safety and licensing regulations to protect children and adult consumers, including age restrictions for adult use only, school free zones, and increased transparency like clear health and warning labels.”

Given that those are generally popular regulatory policies, it’s less surprising that such strong bipartisan majorities would voice support for a legal framework for the cannabis crop.

Asked about the specific regulatory proposals individually, 87 percent said they want child-proof packaging, 86 percent want to limit sales to adults 21 and older, 81 percent said there should be marketing restrictions to prevent appealing to youth and 71 percent said hemp products shouldn’t contain any “unnatural psychoactive substances.

The survey “illustrates big support to pass federal legislation to continue to allow the sale and possession of consumable hemp-based products with new, commonsense safety regulations,” a polling memo says.

Further, the poll found that 55 percent of respondents would be more likely to support a political candidate who voted in favor of maintaining the legal status of hemp with enhanced regulations. That includes 62 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of independents.

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Florida Officials Are Revoking Medical Marijuana IDs From Patients And Caregivers With Drug Convictions Under Law Signed By DeSantis

Florida medical marijuana officials are actively revoking the registrations of patients and caregivers with drug-related criminal records.

The policy is part of broad budget legislation signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). The provisions in question direct the state Department of Health (DOH) to cancel registrations of medical marijuana patients and caregivers if they’re convicted of—or plead guilty or no contest to—criminal drug charges.

The measure says a patient or caregiver will have their registration immediately suspended upon being charged with a covered state drug crime, and the suspension will remain in place until the criminal case reaches a final disposition. DOH officials have authority to reinstate the registration, revoke it entirely or extend the suspension if needed.

Bobbie Smith, director of the Florida Office of Medical Marijuana Use (OMMU), told lawmakers on Wednesday that regulators are already banning people from the medical cannabis program under the new policy.

OMMU has “identified 20 individuals that meet the new requirement for revocation, and there’s roughly 140 that we’re still monitoring as they wait make their way through the criminal justice system,” she said at a hearing of the House Health Professions & Programs Subcommittee in comments first reported by Florida Politics.

Under the law, authorities are required to revoke a person’s registration if the patient or caregiver “was convicted of, or pled guilty or nolo contendre to, regardless of adjudication, a violation [of state drug law] if such violation was for trafficking in, the sale, manufacture, or delivery of, or possession with intent to sell, manufacture, or deliver a controlled substance.”

The enacted version of the legislation focuses specifically on production and distribution. It does not contain an earlier restriction from prior versions that would have also revoked registrations for people who merely purchased illegal drugs, including more than 10 grams of marijuana for their own use.

It also clarifies that patients and caregivers have a process to request their registrations be reinstated. That involves submitting a new application “accompanied by a notarized attestation by the applicant that he or she has completed all the terms of incarceration, probation, community control, or supervision related to the offense.”

It’s not clear from the plain language of the revised bill whether it will impact only future criminal cases involving medical marijuana patients and caregivers or whether DOH would need to review the records of existing program registrants and revoke registrations of an untold number of Floridians with past drug convictions.

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Ohio Senate Passes Marijuana DUI Bill Aimed At Protecting Drivers Who Aren’t High Behind The Wheel From Prosecution

The Ohio Senate unanimously passed legislation last week to overhaul the way that prosecutors must prove whether a person was driving under the influence of marijuana.

Ohio, like most the rest of the nation, has liberalized its marijuana laws over the past decade, now allowing recreational and medical use of the drug in a variety of forms.

This has posed a tricky challenge of setting a legal standard that prohibits driving while under the influence of marijuana, while not ensnaring people who are sober on the road but have used the drug in the past few days.

And unlike with alcohol’s well established limit of .08 percent of blood alcohol content as the legal threshold for impaired driving, the science around cannabis concentration in the blood is far murkier. Some people with high concentrations wouldn’t exhibit behavioral signs of impairment, while some people with low concentrations would, studies show.

“The current law allows for the conviction of innocent people, 100 percent straight out,” said Tim Huey in an interview, who lobbied for the bill on behalf of fellow DUI defense attorneys.

What the bill would do for drivers of accused of being high

Senate Bill 55, if agreed to by the Ohio House and the governor, would bring two big changes for people accused of driving while high. For one, it ends prosecutors’ current ability to convict drivers for driving under the influence based solely on the presence of marijuana “metabolites” in a person’s system.

Metabolites are the non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana produced as the body breaks down (metabolizes) marijuana. Those metabolites can linger in a person’s system as long as 30 days after use, according to researchers and defense attorneys who support the bill.

Instead, police and prosecutors must show the presence of Delta 9-THC, the active ingredient that produces the high sensation.

The legislation also gives people accused of driving while high an opportunity to rebut the evidence against them if a comparatively lower concentration of marijuana is detected in their systems. That’s opposed to the “per se” system in current law, where a positive drug test almost guarantees a conviction.

“Basically right now we’re testing inactive metabolites, mostly through urine, and it’s really not accurate,” said Sen. Nathan Manning, a Lorain County Republican and former prosecutor who has pushed the legal change for years. “The inactive metabolites don’t show impairment, it just shows whether or not you used it [in the past].”

Several sources described the legal thresholds set in the legislation as the product of more art than science, and a compromise between prosecutors and defense attorneys who lobbied the bill.

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Report: At Least One US Strike on Boat in The Caribbean Targeted Colombians

At least one of the US military strikes on boats in the Caribbean over the past month and a half targeted Colombian nationals, CNN reported on Wednesday, citing two people briefed by the Pentagon.

The report said that a US strike in the region on September 19 targeted a boat that left Colombia. In a statement on the bombing, which marked the third on a vessel in the region, Trump claimed without evidence that the boat was carrying drugs and that it killed three “narcoterrorists.” He said the attack was carried out in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility, which includes the Caribbean and most of South America.

Notably, the September 19 strike was the only time Trump announced the bombing of a boat in the region and didn’t mention Venezuela. The CNN report said the boat was “suspected of carrying Colombians affiliated with Colombian terrorist organizations,” but the Pentagon was “unable to determine the individual identities of each person on the boats before they struck them.”

The lack of identification suggests that the US War Department doesn’t have the evidence to back up its claims about who it is targeting in the Caribbean. According to a report from The Associated Press, the Pentagon hasn’t provided Congress with any hard evidence to support its allegations about the vessels it has been bombing.

After the September 19 strike, Colombian President Gustavo Petro suggested that the strike may have targeted Colombians. “If the boat was sunk in the Dominican Republic, then it is possible that they were Colombians. This means that officials from the US and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens,” he said.

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Siege of Venezuela Escalates With Strategic Bombers Over the Caribbean, as Trump Administration Reportedly Unleashes CIA Covert Operations on Venezuela, Including Lethal Action

The conflict is in the air, in the sea, and in the shadows.

Today (15) was an eventful day in the Caribbean Sea, where the Naval siege on Venezuela keeps a steady pressure on the Socialist country.

During the morning, three United States Air Force B-52H Strategic Bombers were spotted over International Waters off the coast of Venezuela.

U.S. BOMBERS FLEX NUCLEAR MUSCLE NEAR VENEZUELA

In a sky-shattering flex that screams regime-crushing thunder, 2 USAF B-52H Stratofortress behemoths blitzed the southern Caribbean just 100~240 miles from Caracas.

“In a sky-shattering flex that screams regime-crushing thunder, 2 USAF B-52H Stratofortress behemoths blitzed the southern Caribbean just 100~240 miles from Caracas. They orbited for hours in a blatant missile drill that has Maduro’s dictatorship sweating apocalypse. Venezuelan F-16s scrambled like cornered rats, echoes of Trump’s anti-narco hammer.

Launched from Barksdale AFB with a shadowy tagalong, the 60-year-old nuclear titans, modded for cruise-missile hellfire, ghosted over Cuba and Mexico before locking onto Venezuela’s coast. They vanished in transponder blackouts that screamed stealth strike simulations, only to resurface gunning south in loops off La Orchila military isle.

The flight drew 5,000 trackers and ignited global panic as Caracas screamed ‘provocation!’ The Pentagon stonewalls it as ‘routine training’, but insiders whisper Trump’s lethal boat strikes, 5 dead last week, 6 this month, are escalating the shadow war.

The B-52s’ 1,600-mile AGM-86 Armageddon range puts Maduro’s palace squarely in the crosshairs.”

That led Caracas to scramble F-16s from El Libertador Air Base to respond to US B-52 bombers’ presence.

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Slain Journalist Was on Threshold of Exposing Large-Scale CIA-Mafia Drug-Smuggling Operation Using Australian Bank Founded by Special Forces Veteran

n August 10, 1991, Danny Casolaro was found lying dead in a tub of bloody water in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

The cause of death was ruled a suicide, the view presented in a recent Emmy winning Netflix series. However, the crime scene evidence makes clear that Casolaro was murdered.

Prior to his death, Casolaro had been investigating the nefarious activities of a corrupt cabal in the CIA linked to then-President George H.W. Bush and was planning to publish a tell-all book called “The Octopus.”

One of the key chapters was going to focus on a drug and arms-smuggling operation using the Australian-based Nugan Hand Bank, which was founded in 1973 and staffed by people with military backgrounds and who had links at a high level with American intelligence operations.[1]

Nugan Hand made its money by charging high fees for performing illegal and shady services (including moving money overseas, flouting Australia’s and other countries’ laws, and tax avoidance schemes) and from the fraudulent procurement and subsequent misappropriation of investments from the public.[2]

CIA whistleblower Victor Marchetti wrote that Nugan Hand’s favors for the CIA included providing cover for operators, laundering money, and establishing cutouts for clandestine activity the Agency did not want to be publicly identified with—including gun running to apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in violation of arms embargos.[3]

Casolaro had been planning a trip to Australia to interview key figures associated with the bank, including Bernie Houghton, a top CIA man from Texas who joined Nugan Hand’s staff in 1978 and established its Saudi Arabian branch.[4]

An Air Force cadet in World War II who flew opium out of the Golden Triangle in C-47 cargo planes during the Vietnam War, Houghton had established the Bourbon & Beefsteak, a gathering place for U.S. soldiers on R&R from Vietnam, whose private guests included Sydney mob boss Abe Saffron and John D. Walker, the CIA’s Australian Station Chief from 1973 to 1975.[5]

Besides Houghton, Casolaro hoped to interview members of an Australian parliamentary commission that had investigated the Nugan Hand Bank and helped expose its criminal activities. Casolaro further intended to interview Nugan Hand Bank co-founder Michael Jon Hand, a decorated Green Beret in Vietnam and CIA contract agent who trained hill tribesmen in Vietnam and Laos and fled Australia after the Nugan Hand Bank’s collapse in January 1980.[6]

Already, Casolaro had amassed significant evidence of Nugan Hand’s function as a beachhead for drug and money-laundering operations run by Mafia-connected CIA operatives who were part of President George H.W. Bush’s “secret team.”

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President Trump Authorizes CIA To Conduct Lethal Covert Action in Venezuela

The Trump administration has authorized the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela, including lethal operations, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, as the administration’s push toward regime change heats up.

President Trump later confirmed that he authorized the covert action and said the US was considering attacks on Venezuelan territory. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said.

US officials told the Times that the authority allows the CIA to take action against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with the US military. The report said it is not known whether the CIA is currently planning operations inside Venezuela or if the authority will be used for future plans.

The US military has been drawing up plans to launch strikes on Venezuelan territory and potentially capture strategic ports and airfields, actions that would almost certainly lead to a full-blown war. The US military campaign in the region has so far involved a buildup of warships and about 10,000 US troops in the Caribbean and strikes on five boats that the US has claimed, without providing evidence, were running drugs.

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FBI Data Shows Marijuana Possession Arrests Make Up Over 20% of All Drug-Related Arrests

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer reports at least 204,036 marijuana-related arrests last year, though the figure is likely an undercount due to gaps in reporting by some law enforcement agencies. The total also excludes cannabis cases that may be included in the tens of thousands of “unspecified drug abuse violations” reported by the bureau.

Of the 204,036 arrests, 92% — or 187,792 — were for simple possession. The remaining 16,244 arrests were tied to “sales/manufacturing.” In total, police reported 831,446 drug-related arrests nationwide in 2024.

Although the numbers remain high, marijuana arrests have declined significantly over the past decade. The drop coincides with the legalization of adult-use marijuana in 24 states and Washington, D.C. since 2012. At their peak in 2007, marijuana arrests surpassed 870,000, making up nearly half of all drug-related arrests at the time. Since 2000, police have made more than 16 million marijuana-related arrests.

“While the total number of marijuana-related arrests have fallen nationwide in recent years, it is clear that marijuana-related prosecutions still remain a primary driver of drug war enforcement in the United States,” said NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to be arrested annually for low-level cannabis-related violations even though a majority of voters no longer believe that the responsible use of marijuana by adults should be a crime.”

Armentano added that these arrests often carry life-long consequences for those charged. “Low-level marijuana offenders, many of them younger, poor, and people of color, should not be saddled with an arrest, a criminal record, and with the lifelong penalties and stigma associated with it for engaging in behavior that is now legally regulated for adults in nearly half the states in this country.”

While the FBI adjusted its crime data collection methods in 2021, making exact comparisons more difficult, the long-term trend is clear: marijuana-related arrests, though down substantially, continue to account for a large share of U.S. drug enforcement.

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