Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Combining Marijuana And Music Enhances Medical Benefits, Reduces Prescription Drug Use And Boosts Emotions, Government-Funded Study Shows

A new government-funded study is putting quantifiable evidence behind the idea that marijuana use enhances the experience of listening to music. But the new research also suggests that the combination can bolster the therapeutic benefits of cannabis.

The study, published in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research and conducted by researchers at Dalhousie University and other schools in Canada, examined self-reported data from 122 marijuana consumers who completed an exhaustive, 176-question survey.

The findings support one of most anecdotally well-established effects of marijuana use: That is, “most participants viewed the combination of cannabis and music favorably, reporting enhanced relaxation, improved mood, and increased feelings of connection,” the paper says.

Marijuana use was further linked to “altered responses to imposed music in various settings and a heightened likelihood of using music during routine activities,” the research, which was partially funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, determined.

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ICE Arrests Illegal Alien Whose Criminal Record Dates Back 35 Years

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested an illegal alien in Miami-Dade County, Florida, whose criminal record dates back to 1991, Breitbart News has learned.

On June 11, ICE agents in Miami arrested 58-year-old illegal alien Elias Cardoza-Torres of Cuba, who has been convicted of selling heroin, burglary, and vehicle theft, among other crimes.

“ICE works closely with our law enforcement partners to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities,” Acting ICE Director David Venturella said in a statement.

According to Venturella, Cardoza-Torres entered the United States in 1989 as a parolee and never adjusted his status to secure a green card. In November 1991, he was convicted of felony cocaine possession and in August 1997, he was convicted of burglary.

In October 1999, Cardoza-Torres was convicted of selling heroin. The following year, in April 2000, a federal immigration judge ordered him deported from the United States but he remained in the country for more than 26 years.

“We’re talking about an individual who completely disregarded our immigration laws and went on to ignore our criminal laws, as well,” Venturella said. “Fortunately, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office has turned him over to ICE custody, where he’ll remain pending removal.”

In more recent years, Cardoza-Torres was convicted of vehicle theft, drug possession, cocaine possession, and felony weapons offenses.

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Saturday in the Park in Portland: Naked Man, Snatched Child, Angry Tourists — No Cops

After the details sunk in and the revulsion wore off a bit, what happened in Portland, Ore., over the weekend settled into a low, droning case of the sads. Here we were at the new normal. The  communist DSA city councilors, the woke mayor, his protester-loving police chief, and their kindred have virtue-signaled my hometown into the slovenly, low-expectations, burnished turd of a place that it is today.

And I have incontrovertible proof. 

First, the cop shop usually sends out press releases on only the crimes most Portland people agree are, you know, bad or of high priority to Portlanders. So you know that limits things quite a bit.

For example, Portland has decided that teens who conduct street takeovers are bad actors. They’re obviously a pain in the ass, block traffic, scare the children, and someone usually ends up hurt.

Official Portland really hates street takeovers, and everyone can get behind police efforts to stop them.

These episodes are usually followed by a Portland Police press release recounting how many cars were towed. Sometimes there are photos of crunched-up Nissans. 

Everyone’s a hero. Got it. 

Drug dealers: bad. Unless they’re homeless, but that’s another story for another paragraph. So stay with me. 

One time not long ago, the Portland Police Bureau sent out a press release about a bad guy caught on Skid Row for selling drugs he shouldn’t have had. Drug dealers are anti-social. Everyone agrees. 

We got a look at the photo that came along with the press release. No, not a photo of the bad guy we should be watching out for when they invariably let him out of jail without bail. Ever since Antifa members started getting caught, mugshotted, released — and Andy Ngo started showing their faces — Portland has stopped releasing mugshots to the public.

Mug shots: bad.

But we did get a photo. We got a look at the bad guy’s booty. The drug dealer may have had, say, eight $1 bills in the photo. He was a high roller.

Meanwhile, Antifa and drug addicts who populate the streets with impunity and make everyone afraid are left to turn the city into the festering boil that it is.

Fun fact: The arrest of female Portland drive-by shooter Isis Symone Irving, in a politically and possibly racially motivated hate crime committed against a group of conservatives last February, has resulted in zero charges.

It was only after the gun was readied, aimed, and fired at the Donald Trump supporters that they realized it was a pellet gun. Pull a gun and not shoot it to ward off an onslaught of Antifa members coming to attack you for a second time? That’ll get you thrown in jail in Portland.

Hey, is there a bomb in that dumpster being rolled by Antifa protesters in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Southwest Portland over last weekend? Why, yes, there is.

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Prohibitionists Just Argued Themselves Into a Corner: To Stop Weed Reform, They Told a Court How Much Money They’d Lose

One of the loudest arguments against cannabis reform has always been about money. Legalizers are in it for the cash, prohibitionists have argued, and the science is just the wrapping paper. On July 2, in a filing before the D.C. Circuit, the Justice Department argued that the challengers’ alleged harms were commercial interests the CSA was never written to protect. Two of the groups trying to freeze marijuana rescheduling asked the court to hit pause on the reform, and the government told the judges that those two were guarding their own revenue.

The two groups behind the request are a drug-testing trade association and a pharmaceutical company that has never brought a product to market. The DOJ told the court that both of them “invoke pocketbook interests served by keeping all marijuana in Schedule I.” Their own sworn declarations, the government argued, undercut their request for a stay.

Here is the shape of it. In April, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche moved FDA-approved cannabis medicines and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. A coalition of prohibition and drug-testing groups, two state attorneys general and a pharmaceutical developer is suing to undo that order, Kevin Sabet’s Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the attorneys general of Nebraska and Indiana among them. But the request to freeze the order while the case plays out came from just two of those parties, the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, or NDASA, and MMJ International Holdings. The government’s answer was blunt. The petitioners, it wrote, “come nowhere near satisfying the demanding standard for that extraordinary relief.”

The Accusation, Turned Around

For over a year, the case against reform has run on a single accusation. Sabet has made it repeatedly, including in a video posted as the DEA hearing opened: the government moved on marijuana because of industry money and campaign donations from cannabis executives, not because the science changed. The July 2 brief never answers Sabet directly. But read against that year of messaging, it lands as an inversion. If this is about money, it is worth asking whose.

Their Own Declarations

The answer is in the challengers’ own paperwork. NDASA told the court that its members would lose money if employers stopped screening for marijuana. In a sworn declaration, the group’s executive director estimated that marijuana-positive results are the largest source of revenue at the medical review offices that read drug tests, and projected a revenue decline of “at least 35%” over the next 6 to 12 months if the order stands. NDASA also attached a number to what compliance would cost its members: about $700,000, spread across 700 employers. Do the arithmetic and it comes to a thousand dollars each. That is the figure the group called irreparable harm, the kind of injury that is supposed to justify a court freezing federal drug policy. A thousand dollars per employer. One cannabis attorney who reviewed the motion did the same math and called the argument “ridiculous.”

MMJ’s claim is stranger. The company says it spent eight years and $10 million developing cannabinoid drugs the proper way, through the FDA, and that rescheduling rewards state-licensed competitors who skipped that path. The problem, as the DOJ pointed out, is that MMJ has no product on the market. It has applications pending, not medicine on shelves. You cannot lose your share of a market you have not entered. Its complaint, the government argued, describes a policy it dislikes, not an injury a court can fix.

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Ex-Obama press secretary fired after allegedly swiping credit cards from colleagues to fund kratom habit

A former Barack Obama press secretary was fired from his chief communications role in Minneapolis after allegedly stealing cash and credit cards from city employees to fuel his habit for kratom — a natural drug used to treat opioid withdrawal.

Adam Fetcher, 42, was canned from his role as Chief Communications Officer (CCO) for the City of Minneapolis after just a year on the job amid a police investigation into internal workplace theft and fraud, as well as claims of substance abuse, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

Fetcher, who made nearly $200,000 a year, is accused of stealing cash and credit cards out of the desks and purses of three fellow city hall employees, racking up hundreds of dollars in fraudulent charges at tobacco stores, reported the Star Tribune, citing sources familiar with the investigation.

Security surveillance footage reportedly shows Fetcher using one of the stolen cards to buy $481 of kratom — a herbal supplement often used to manage opioid withdrawal symptoms — at a south Minneapolis smoke shop, reported the outlet.

Under state law, card fraud of that amount would qualify as a felony-level offense if prosecutors decide to charge Fetcher.

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Medical Marijuana Is ‘Effective’ In Providing Relief To Patients With Restless Legs Syndrome, Study Shows

People with restless legs syndrome (RLS) could find “significant” long-term relief with cannabis treatment, according to a new study.

Researchers said that while dopamine agonists have traditionally served as the “first-line treatment” of RLS, recent studies have signaled that gabapentinoids are now being recommended. Because cannabinoids, like gabapentinoids, inhibit a certain type of amino acid associated with the disorder, the scientists decided to test their therapeutic efficacy.

The exploratory open-label study, conducted by researchers at Universidad Europea de Madrid and published in the Journal of Neurology, found that a cannabis product containing 2.7mg THC and 2.5mg CBD “was effective in reducing RLS severity” among patients with multiple sclerosis and “associated idiopathic RLS.”

“Improvements were observed after 1 and 3 months of treatment and were maintained after 1 year among patients who continued therapy,” the study of 18 patients with RLS showed. For those that remained on treatment after one year, 67 percent “continued to show sustained improvement.”

The findings might not be especially surprising given that cannabis is well-known to reduce the severity of muscular spasms and related conditions, but its efficacy for RLS is notable considering that no states appear to explicitly list it as a qualifying condition for medical cannabis.

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Using Marijuana Will Make You ‘A Loser In Life,’ GOP Congressman Says

A Republican congressman claims that using marijuana “hurts your DNA,” will “make you a loser in life” and leads to young women being “taken advantage of.”

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), one of the most outspoken opponents of cannabis legalization in Congress, made the comments in an  appearance on “High Stakes,” a podcast produced by the prohibitionist organization Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM).

“If you want to become a loser in life—if you want, as a young woman, to be around areas where the knowledge that you have of being assaulted, taken advantage of, and harming your life—just go forth and be around marijuana,” he said.

“I became very aware in college about people who used marijuana, who ended up literally dropping out—dropping out of life—who just chose that way of life,” he said. “I saw it from a personal perspective of a danger to someone’s future in their life.”

“There is not one positive effect of this marijuana,” Sessions claimed, despite the fact that nearly every state in the country has legalized cannabis for medical uses and the Trump administration has partially federally rescheduled it, officially recognizing its therapeutic value.

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Former Democratic Florida Gubernatorial Nominee Andrew Gillum Arrested With Meth, Cut Straws, Bong

Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum was arrested last week in Alabama on drug charges following a traffic stop. 

The former rising star in the Democratic Party, who served as Tallahassee Mayor from 2014 to 2018, narrowly lost his gubernatorial bid to Ron DeSantis by just 0.4% in 2018.

Police say they pulled him over for driving erratically on the night of July 2 and found methamphetamine, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia.

He now faces multiple charges, including unlawful possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of marijuana.

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U.N. Drug Report Highlights How Ineffective Cannabis Prohibition Is

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) recently released its World Drug Report 2026, finding that an estimated 256 million people have consumed cannabis within the last year, and that “cannabis remains the most widely used drug by far.” It is worth noting that alcohol and tobacco were not included in the analysis.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 2.3 billion people are alcohol consumers globally, more than 3 million people die annually due to alcohol, and “alcohol causes more than 5% of the global disease burden.” Additionally, WHO estimates that 1.2 billion people are tobacco consumers, and that tobacco use is “responsible for over 7 million deaths annually as well as disability and long-term suffering from tobacco-related diseases.” Both substances are legal and readily available across the globe, while cannabis commerce is still largely prohibited across the world.

“Cannabis production, trafficking and use are all evolving, likely in part due to the ongoing changes in perception towards the drug around the time when many jurisdictions, notably in North America, adopted legalization and/or decriminalization policies.” the UNODC wrote in a press release announcing the publication of its World Drug Report 2026. “The number of people using cannabis has grown by 40 per cent over the past decade, while the prevalence of its use increased from 3.8 per cent of the population aged 15-64 in 2014 to 4.8 per cent in 2024. Cannabis seizures also reached historically high levels in 2024.”

“Historically, most cannabis trafficking has been within regions, largely because cannabis can be grown virtually anywhere. Yet inter-regional trade, with supply coming from North America, is growing: over 2015–2024, 57 countries or territories outside North America identified it as a source region for cannabis seizures, up from just 11 in the preceding decade.” UNODC added.

If there is one major cannabis-focused takeaway from the World Drug Report, it is that cannabis prohibition does not work. Hundreds of millions of people around the world consume cannabis, whether it is legal or not. Cannabis prohibition does not eliminate use. Rather, it shifts the market profits toward organized crime and results in consumers and patients using untested cannabis products.

Furthermore, cannabis prohibition results in limited public resources being diverted away from more worthy efforts toward investigating, arresting, and incarcerating people for cannabis activity. Nearly every morning, people can read headlines about ‘major cannabis busts’ around the world involving large amounts of cannabis being seized. Every one of those headlines should serve as a reminder that there is a better, more sensible approach to cannabis commerce.

Thankfully, an increasing number of jurisdictions are modernizing their cannabis policies and regulations to permit medical and adult-use cannabis commerce. Those policy modernizations don’t just benefit people who consume cannabis; they also provide benefits to all members of society in direct and indirect ways.

For starters, legalized cannabis commerce creates jobs, generates taxes and fees, and boosts local economies. Also, cannabis legalization results in direct savings to national and local governments when they no longer waste money enforcing failed cannabis prohibition. For example, France spends an estimated €570m annually on cannabis prohibition enforcement. That money could either be returned to taxpayers or spent on other things that benefit society as a whole.

Another major benefit of modernized cannabis laws and regulations is affording patients and consumers the ability to acquire and use tested cannabis products. That, in turn, boosts public health outcomes. Allowing legalized cannabis commerce to boost public health outcomes is a major premise behind recent adult-use policy modernizations in Europe. Legalization works, and prohibition does not. Anyone who claims otherwise is likely benefiting in some way from prohibition, including politically and/or economically.

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Vermont Governor Signs Bill To Double Legal Marijuana Possession Limit And Allow Interstate Commerce

Vermont’s governor has signed legislation that will allow adults over the age of 21 to legally possess twice as much marijuana as they could previously, enable interstate cannabis commerce and make other changes to rules for licensed businesses.

Gov. Phil Scott (R) on Friday announced that he approved the large-scale cannabis regulatory reform bill, S. 278, which passed both chambers of the legislature last month.

One of the main impacts of the new law for consumers is that it doubles the prior legal possession limit to up to two ounces of marijuana or 10 grams of hashish.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D), also allows the governor to enter into compacts with other states for cross-border cannabis trade.

The legislative text notes that there is a “shifting federal posture on regulated cannabis markets” and says it is “the intent of the General Assembly to prepare for the possibility of regional or interstate cannabis markets.”

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