Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Trump expected to commute Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence

President Trump is expected to commute the lifetime prison sentence of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the notorious dark web site Silk Road, The Post has learned.

A source close to the White House said at midday Tuesday that the Ulbricht pardon was “incoming.”

Brandon Sample, Ulbricht’s clemency lawyer, told The Post in an email Tuesday: “We do expect President Trump to grant clemency.”

In response to a follow-up asking when he expected the order to come through, Sample responded: “The president, when a candidate, said that he would release Ross on his first day in office. We have no doubt the president will follow through on his commitment to release Ross. Ross, his family, and all his supporters are forever grateful to President Trump for his willingness to show mercy to Ross.”

Trump, 78, had vowed in May to reduce Ulbricht’s life sentence on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering “down to time served” if he won the 2024 election.

Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013 in San Francisco and accused of running the notorious website — which sold drugs and other illegal products while accepting bitcoin as payment — under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

Now 40, Ulbricht was convicted in February 2015 on charges including drug trafficking and conspiracies to commit money laundering and computer hacking. He was sentenced that May to two life terms in prison, plus 40 years.

Ulbricht has unsuccessfully appealed his conviction and sentence up to the Supreme Court, leaving him to serve out his time at a maximum security prison in Arizona.

On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sent a letter to Trump asking him to show mercy. “I write to urge you to follow through on your stated intention to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht. Mr. Ulbricht is serving two life sentences plus forty years without parole for nonviolent offenses related to the website he launched in early 2011,” Paul’s letter read. 

“Like so many others, I am shocked by the harsh sentence imposed on this first-time offender.”

Paul argued that Ulbricht’s sentence is “vastly disproportionate to his crimes,” since “the worst drug sellers on the site received significantly more lenient sentences.”

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Trump’s New DEA Head Blamed Marijuana For School Shootings And Claimed Rescheduling Push Was Politically Motivated

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has a new interim leader—and he’s no fan of marijuana, previously linking cannabis use to school shootings and repeatedly insisting that the Biden administration”hijacked” the rescheduling process from the agency for political purposes.

DEA announced on Monday that Derek Maltz, who retired from the agency in 2014 after 28 years of service, will be serving as acting administrator. With President Donald Trump still having yet to name his choice to run DEA as administrator, it’s unclear if Maltz is positioned to receive that nomination or if he will ultimately be replaced.

But for cannabis advocates and stakeholders, Maltz’s return to DEA for now—especially as anxieties around the fate of the ongoing marijuana rescheduling process grow—represents a troubling development.

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‘I break the law to buy my child’s life-saving cannabis drug’

Until recently, Jane would have described her family as normal, law-abiding citizens. But that changed last summer, when the full-time mum started illegally buying cannabis oil online for her daughter, Annie.

The 10-year-old has a severe, rare type of epilepsy, resistant to conventional treatments.

At her worst, Annie was admitted to hospital 22 times in 22 months. Doctors warned Jane there was a very real prospect of her daughter dying from a seizure.

Jane says she doesn’t want to break the law – but the severity of Annie’s condition is such that she doesn’t care. We have changed their names to protect their identities.

“[Annie] deserves to be happy. She deserves to have this quality of life,” Jane explains. “And if I’m breaking the law by giving her this quality of life, am I wrong or is the law wrong?”

The family cannot afford a private prescription, which costs approximately £2,000 each month from one of the many clinics that have been established since the legalisation of so-called full-spectrum medical cannabis – which includes the psychoactive ingredient THC.

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The FDA Proposes a De Facto Cigarette Ban, Which Would Expand the Disastrous War on Drugs

On its way out the door, the Biden administration has proposed a rule that would effectively ban cigarettes by requiring a drastic reduction in nicotine content. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which unveiled the proposed rule on Wednesday, says the aim is to make cigarettes unappealing by eliminating their “psychoactive and reinforcing effects.”

In addition to cigarettes, the FDA’s proposed rule covers cigarette tobacco, pipe tobacco (except shisha for waterpipes), and cigars (except for “premium” cigars). All of those products would be limited to 0.7 milligrams of nicotine per gram of tobacco. That cap technically complies with a federal law that bars the FDA from banning tobacco products or “requiring the reduction of nicotine yields of a tobacco product to zero.” But the negligible amount of nicotine allowed under the rule would amount to both in practice.

The FDA, which first considered this policy under Scott Gottlieb during the first Trump administration, has abandoned the idea of gradually phasing in the nicotine reduction because that would initially result in “compensatory smoking.” That is, current smokers would be apt to inhale more deeply, take more or bigger puffs, or consume more cigarettes to get the nicotine dose to which they are accustomed, which would increase their exposure to the toxins and carcinogens in tobacco smoke. But avoiding that pitfall by mandating an immediate cut to a negligible nicotine level would magnify the black-market effects of de facto cigarette prohibition.

Given the disastrous results of the war on drugs, it is hard to fathom why a government agency in 2025 would think it is a good idea to expand that crusade to include products that are regularly consumed by nearly 30 million American adults. The proposed nicotine cap “would effectively outlaw almost all cigarettes currently being sold,” which would “benefit organized crime by igniting a robust illicit market for cigarettes and other tobacco products,” the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) notes in an emailed press release.

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People Are More Physically Active On Days They Use Marijuana, New Federally Funded Study Shows, Smashing ‘Lazy Stoner’ Stereotype

A new federally funded study examining the associations between cannabis use and other health-related behaviors finds that adults are more physically active on days they used marijuana—evidence that contradicts the “lazy stoner” stereotype—although they also drank alcohol more heavily and smoked more cigarettes.

The paper, by a team of ten researchers from across the U.S., was published by the journal Addictive Behaviors late last month. It used data from a four-week nationwide study of 98 adults over the age of 18 that tracked behaviors such as moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) as well as consumption of controlled substances.

Only people who reported marijuana use on at least one of the 28 days were included, allowing the team to assess how past-month cannabis consumers’ use on a particular day was associated with other health behaviors that same day. Participants were asked questions via smartphone-based surveys such as, “In the past 24 h, which of the following have you used?” with regard to substances, and “How many minutes of VIGOROUS leisure time physical activity did you get yesterday?” with examples including running, aerobics and heavy yard work.

Authors—from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences, University of Texas School of Public Health, University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M-Commerce, Louisiana State University Health Science Center, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Colorado Boulder—said the study of is “among the first” to use the real-time tracking data, called ecological momentary assessment (EMA), “to examine associations between cannabis use and same-day MVPA, alcohol consumption, and cigarettes smoked.”

Though the analysis didn’t compare marijuana users to non-users, the team said their findings supported earlier research that found cannabis consumers were more active.

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Despite Sweeping Updates To Facebook Policies In Favor Of ‘Free Expression,’ Restrictions On Marijuana-Related Accounts Remain

Despite new changes to content moderation announced earlier this week, Meta—the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads—appears not to be changing its practices around marijuana, continuing to block search results on the social media platform for terms such as “marijuana” and “cannabis” and instead displaying a notice encouraging users to report “the sale of drugs.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of changes to content policies and moderation on Tuesday, such as stepping away from practices like third-party fact checking in favor of a community notes model, in which users are responsible for flagging questionable content. The company said it’s also “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate.”

“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse,” the company said as part of the announcement, “and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”

“Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been,” the company added.

To many in the cannabis space—including some medical marijuana patients, cannabis content creators, news outlets and even government agencies—that feels like an apt description of how they’ve have been treated by the company, which has historically removed or limited the visibility of marijuana-related accounts.

But the new changes—touted under the banner of “free expression”—don’t appear to affect the handling of cannabis on Meta’s platforms.

Neither Facebook nor Meta replied to Marijuana Moment’s request for clarifications on the new policies this week, but the only mention of drugs in the new announcement is the company’s stated intent to “continue to focus” its content moderation systems “on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.”

“For less severe policy violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” it says.

It’s unclear exactly when all the changes will be deployed. Facebook said it would implement the use of community notes “over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year.” It didn’t provide a timeframe for changes to content moderation policies.

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DEA Judge Cancels Marijuana Rescheduling Hearings Amid Legal Challenges, Pushing Back Reform For At Least Three Months

The first hearings on the Biden administration’s marijuana rescheduling proposal that were set for next week have now been canceled following a legal challenge from pro-reform witnesses, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) judge has ruled.

While DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) John Mulrooney rejected key arguments from rescheduling proponents about how alleged improper communications and witness selection decisions by DEA Administrator Anne Milgram warranted the agency’s removal from the process altogether, he ultimately granted a request for leave to file an interlocutory appeal—canceling the scheduled January 21 merit-based hearing and staying the proceedings for at least three months.

And although Mulrooney cited statutory restrictions on his office’s ability to take actions such as removing DEA as the “proponent” of the proposal to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), he sharply criticized the agency over various procedural missteps that he argued contributed to a delay of the rulemaking, potentially indefinitely as a new administration is set to come into office next week.

Central to the movants’ motion to remove DEA are allegations that certain agency officials conspired with anti-rescheduling witnesses who were selected for the hearing. The judge didn’t outright deny those claims and, in fact, noted a “disturbing and embarrassing revelation” about such communications. However, he said even if those claims were substantiated, they wouldn’t on their own constitute an “‘irrevocable taint’” that will affect the ultimate outcome of the proceedings.” Therefore, he said, it wouldn’t affect his office’s authority to relegate DEA in the hearings.

“I can no more remove or re-designate the Administrator than I can hold parties in contempt and fine them,” Mulrooney said. “The strangeness of this unsupported approach is amplified by the fact that the appointment of a new DEA Administrator by a different political party is imminent.”

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DEA Judge Blasts Agency For ‘Unprecedented And Astonishing’ Defiance Of Ruling On Marijuana Rescheduling Evidence Procedures

A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) judge is condemning the agency over its “unprecedented and astonishing” defiance of a key directive related to evidence it is seeking to use in upcoming hearings on the Biden administration’s marijuana rescheduling proposal.

At issue is DEA’s insistence on digitally submitting tens of thousands of public comments it received in response to the proposed rule to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) as evidence in the hearings.

At multiple points, DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) John Mulrooney advised the agency that hard copies of all evidence needed to be entered by January 3, and he rejected DEA’s request for an exception to the rule. Nevertheless, DEA moved to submit the comments in compact disc form despite the “clear (and repeated) directives,” the judge said in an order on Monday.

“The Government has not supplied the tribunal with a hard copy of the lengthy proposed exhibit… which it represents as containing the Comments,” Mulrooney said. “In view of the fact that Government’s request for leave for an exception to the rules applicable to the rest of the Designated Participants was specifically denied, this action is clearly not a mistake borne of misunderstanding or inadvertence, but an action taken in deliberate defiance of specific direction.”

“Even among the numerous extraordinary and puzzling actions taken thus far by the Government during the course of this litigation, this disobedience of an unequivocal directive from the tribunal is unprecedented and astonishing,” he said.

To that end, he rejected the evidentiary exhibit and further noted that, in light of DEA’s “deliberate failure to comply with the unequivocal and repeated directive of the tribunal, the issue of sanction is herein RESERVED for a determination to be made at such time during the hearing on the merits that the proposed exhibit is offered into the record.”

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Virginia GOP Governor Claims Legalizing Marijuana Sales Would Harm Children And Increase Crime

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) emphasized during his State of the Commonwealth address that he’s not interested in cooperating with lawmakers to legalize marijuana sales in the state, claiming that doing so would hurt children, worsen mental health and increase violent crime.

“Strong communities work to prevent harmful drug use,” the governor said during the speech on Monday.

Use, possession and limited cultivation of cannabis by adults are already legal in Virginia, the result of a Democrat-led proposal approved by lawmakers in 2021. But Republicans, after winning control of the House and governor’s office later that year, subsequently blocked the required reenactment of a regulatory framework for retail sales. Since then, illicit stores have sprung up to meet consumer demand.

Supporters of regulating commercial sales in the state say the move would not create a cannabis market in Virginia but instead regulate the state’s existing illicit market, which some estimates value at nearly $3 billion. But Youngkin has rejected the idea, issuing a veto of a legal sales measure passed by lawmakers after Democrats retook control of the legislature last year.

“Everyone knows where I stand on establishing a retail marijuana market,” Youngkin said in his speech. “Let’s work together on other issues where we can find common ground.”

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Dallas police now instructed to not arrest, give citations for marijuana possession of 4 ounces or less

Dallas police officers have new marching orders when it comes to enforcement of arrests and citations for marijuana possession with the implementation of Proposition R.

According to an internal DPD memo obtained by WFAA, Dallas officers are now prohibited from making arrests or issuing citations for marijuana possession – four ounces or less – nor can they “consider the odor of marijuana as probable cause for search and seizure, except as part of a violent felony or high priority narcotics felony investigations.”

The previous policy regarding possession of marijuana prompted officers to confiscate, but not cite nor arrest people who had less than two ounces of marijuana. Per the memo sent out Friday, that policy is now “obsolete.”

Proposition R, also dubbed the “Dallas Freedom Act” by supporters, passed with 66% of the vote in the November election.

Last year, former Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia warned that the proposition could have a negative impact on public safety.

“In my 32 years in law enforcement, in my opinion, it could lead to increased illegal sales and deterioration of quality of life in certain areas of our city,” Garcia told the city council in August 2023.

“Regardless of your thoughts and/or opinions regarding the passing of this amendment, we must remain focused on our dutites and obligations to the Dallas Police Department and the residents of the City of Dallas,” Dallas Interim Police Chief Michael Igo wrote in the memo. “It is crucial to maintain professionalism and composure, as you always represent this exceptional Police Department.”

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