Tag: utah

Utah Governor Lets Psychedelics Pilot Program Bill Become Law Without His Signature, Citing ‘Overwhelming Support’

The Republican governor of Utah has allowed a bill to become law without his signature that authorizes a pilot program for hospitals to administer psilocybin and MDMA as an alternative treatment option.

Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said in a letter to legislative leaders last week that he was letting the psychedelics legislation become enacted despite his reservations due to the “overwhelming support” it received, with both chambers unanimously approving the measure.

“I am generally supportive of scientific efforts to discover the benefits of new substances that can relieve suffering,” Cox said. “However, we have a task force that was set up specifically to advise the Legislature on the best ways to study Psilocybin and I’m disappointed that their input was ignored.”

The governor didn’t specify which specific task force recommendations he wanted to see incorporated, but the panel did advise against authorizing the regulated use of psychedelics before they’re approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Lawmakers have cited the panel’s findings to support advancing the pilot program legislation from Senate Majority Whip Kirk Cullimore (R) and House Speaker Pro Tempore James Dunnigan (R).

The newly enacted measure provides for that regulated access at two types of health care systems in the state. Psychedelics can be administered by a privately owned, non-profit health care system with at least 15 licensed hospitals or within medical programs operated by institutions of higher education.

“A healthcare system may develop a behavioral health treatment program that includes a treatment” with psilocybin and MDMA that it “determines is supported by a broad collection of scientific and medical research,” the bill says.

By July 1, 2026, any hospital that establishes a psychedelics therapy pilot program will need to submit a report to the legislature that details which drugs are being utilized, healthcare outcomes of patients and any reported side effects.

The legislation Cox allowed to become enacted will take effect on May 1, 2024 and sunset after three years.

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Utah corrections department discriminated against transgender woman, DOJ says

The Utah Department of Corrections violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when it failed to provide a transgender woman with her hormone therapy, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

The state corrections department discriminated against the woman, who is not named in court documents, by denying her equal access to health care services, imposing “unnecessary barriers” to treatment for gender dysphoria and failing to grant her requests for reasonable accommodations, including allowing her to purchase female clothing and makeup at the commissary, a federal investigation found.

Utah’s corrections department also “unnecessarily delayed” the woman’s treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition with which she had “for many years” before entering the department’s custody in 2021, according to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) findings.

The woman’s psychological distress worsened while she was incarcerated in a men’s prison, federal investigators said, and a health care provider contracted by the state corrections department formally diagnosed her with gender dysphoria — a state of severe distress that stems from a mismatch between a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth.

Unlike other requests for medical care, which are typically directed to the state corrections department’s medical staff, a request for treatment for gender dysphoria is sent to the department’s gender dysphoria committee, which federal investigators described as the “gatekeeper” of care.

The committee during the woman’s incarceration included members who demonstrated “overt bias” against transgender individuals seeking care and expressed reluctance to prescribe treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone therapy, the Justice Department said.

“Complainant’s access to medically necessary care for her disability was unnecessarily delayed due to [the Utah Corrections Department’s] biased and prolonged approval process,” DOJ Disability Rights Chief Rebecca Bond wrote Tuesday in a letter to Brian Redd, executive director of Utah’s corrections department.

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Utah May Soon Ban Non-Existent ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’

Let me tell you a terrifying fact: 72 percent of the Amazon reviews of the book Satan’s Underground give it 5 stars. If you’re not familiar, the book is the “memoir” of a woman named Lauren Stratford, aka Laurel Rose Wilson, who claimed to have been a victim of Satanic ritual abuse. This is despite the fact that Stratford was outed as a fake decades ago, and that after her claims were thoroughly debunked by the evangelical magazine Cornerstone, she embarked upon a career as fake Holocaust survivor Lauren Grabowski until she was outed by Cornerstone again, along with another fake Holocaust survivor whom she claimed to remember.

This is very easily available information. So easily available that even some of the positive reviewers acknowledge it. They even say that they know that this particular account of Satanic ritual abuse might be nonsense, but that they appreciate the book because they know it for sure happens to other people. Somewhere. This isn’t the kind of thing I should be shocked by, having covered conspiracy theories and Satanic panic and Q-Anonsense for the last million years, and I’m not. I do, however, remain profoundly creeped the fuck out.

Last week, also decades after anyone could even almost reasonably believe that “Satanic ritual abuse” is a real thing outside of their own fevered imaginations, legislators in the state of Utah advanced a bill outlawing “ritual abuse.” This feels pretty deeply ironic given that we have many, many proven instances of actual abuse within the Mormon church and literally zero proven incidents of “Satanic ritual abuse” … anywhere.

The bill has already received a “favorable recommendation” from the House Judiciary committee and a large majority of the Legislature are on board.

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Utah Would Rather Repeal Social Media Age Check Law Than Defend It In Court

Rather than defend a clearly unconstitutional measure passed to “protect” kids from social media, the government of Utah intends to repeal the law.

Last year, Utah became the first state to pass a law limiting minors’ social media use to those who had parental consent and requiring platforms to provide a way for parents to access their kids’ accounts. It kicked off a wave of similar measures in statehouses across the country—laws that would require anyone using social media to prove their age through such methods as submitting biometric data or a government-issued ID.

Now that it faces a pair of challenges in federal court, the state has a new stance: “Psych! We didn’t actually mean it!”

“They know it’s unconstitutional. They know it’s pure grandstanding and culture warrioring,” writes Techdirt editor Mike Masnick. “And they don’t want to face the music for abusing the rights of the citizens who elected them to support the Constitution, not undermine it.”

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Chilling moment cops find missing girls on Doomsday cult compound where kids as young as four were ‘married’ to their fathers and sexually abused

New video has been released of the moment police found missing girls on a remote compound in Utah. 

The incredible footage shows how police rescued two young Utah sisters on a dark December evening in the wilderness of a polygamist compound after being kidnapped by their father.

Dinah Coltharp, who was eight, and Hattie Coltharp, four at the time, were rescued by police in Lund, southwest of Salt Lake City in December 2017 after a highly publicized amber alert search.

The girls were taken by their father, John Coltharp, and had been handed over to his friend Samuel Shaffer who hid them on the compound when the amber alert was issued. It is believed they were to be married off to cult leader Shaffer.

When police raided the site, they also discovered Shaffer’s two young daughters, Lily, seven, and Samantha, then five, who had not been reported missing. 

Samantha and Hattie, the two youngest, were being kept in a 50-gallon blue water barrels to hide them from authorities, where they had been for more than 24 hours in below-freezing temperatures. 

Dramatic images shows two of the girls being rescued. They were barefoot and wearing what looked like thin leggings. 

The two older girls were found in an abandoned trailer. All were dehydrated.

When questioned, Shaffer said the girls were being hidden from police. 

Police fear the men planned to marry Coltharp’s daughters off to Shaffer who was described as the ‘prophet’ of the cult. 

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Petroglyph Discoveries Offer Breakthrough in Understanding Pueblo Culture

In a significant archaeological development, a team from the Jagiellonian University (JU) has made groundbreaking discoveries regarding the ancient Pueblo culture along the Colorado-Utah border. This Polish team, one of the few European groups active in this region, has been exploring the area for over a decade, unraveling the mysteries of the 3000-year-old Pueblo culture.

The team’s research is focused on the Castle Rock Pueblo settlement complex, located on the Mesa Verde plateau, a region renowned for its Pre-Columbian settlements and rock art. The Pueblo communities, known for their advanced building techniques and artistic creations, developed multi-story stone houses, intricate jewelry, and ceramics with distinctive black-on-white motifs.

These artistic expressions, alongside their advanced architectural and agricultural practices, reflect a rich and complex society that has left a lasting imprint on the region’s cultural heritage.

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Mysterious cosmic ray observed in Utah came from beyond our galaxy, scientists say

Space scientists seeking to understand the enigmatic origins of powerful cosmic rays have detected an extremely rare, ultra-high-energy particle that they believe traveled to Earth from beyond the Milky Way galaxy.

The energy of this subatomic particle, invisible to the naked eye, is equivalent to dropping a brick on your toe from waist height, according to the authors of new research published Thursday in the journal Science. It rivals the single most energetic cosmic ray ever observed, the “Oh-My-God” particle that was detected in 1991, the study found.

Cosmic rays are charged particles that travel through space and rain down on Earth constantly. Low-energy cosmic rays can emanate from the sun, but extremely high-energy ones are exceptional. They are thought to travel to Earth from other galaxies and extragalactic sources.

“If you hold out your hand, one (cosmic ray) goes through the palm of your hand every second, but those are really low-energy things,” said study coauthor John Matthews, a research professor at the University of Utah.

“When you get out to these really high-energy (cosmic rays), it’s more like one per square kilometer per century. It’s never going through your hand.”

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Woman raised in an incestuous polygamous cult lays bare the horrific abuse she faced – revealing how she was forced to marry her own COUSIN at 18

A woman who was raised in an incestuous polygamous cult has candidly laid bare the horrific abuse she endured at the hands of her own husband.

Shanell Snow Derieux appeared on a recent episode of the Cults To Consciousness podcast alongside host Shelise Ann Sola.

She revealed how she grew up in Utah as a member of The Order – a cult that decided to branch off from the original Mormon church when the mainstream religion ceased practicing polygamy.

Shanell said she was coerced into marrying her own cousin at just 18 who became verbally, physically and sexually abusive before she ultimately broke away.

In the podcast, Shanell revealed that she could have up to 200 siblings after losing count at 163.

The cult promotes incest in a bid to keep bloodlines ‘pure’ with the aim being to have as many children as possible.

Shanell said that they forced members to marry early to ‘lock you in as young as they possibly can to make it harder for you in the future if you did try to leave.’

Her father John Daniel Kingston – known as Daniel – married 14 women, four of which were his half-sisters, with others being his cousins.

Asked why The Order continues to be incestuous, even with the latest generations, Shanell said: ‘I honestly don’t know why they believe this but they believe that they are direct descendants from Jesus Christ and that’s why they want to keep the blood pure or clean.’

Elaborating further about her own experience with relationships in the cult, she explained: ‘They’ve ingrained it into us so hardcore from when we were two or three years old.

‘But I want to say that they started pressuring me to start making my list or have an idea of certain [boys] that might be my marital choices when I was 10 – maybe younger.

‘I remember being 12 or 13 when we were in one of our marriage preparation classes and I remember [Daniel] telling all of us that some of his own kids would marry each other.’

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Is the truth about aliens in this SLC archive? A Utah group is putting UFO docs online

“The truth,” as the tagline from “The X-Files” goes, “is out there.”

But part of the truth — or at least the search for it — is coming to your fingertips.

The Salt Lake City-based Expanding Frontiers Research has launched a UFO archive, making accessible a trove of documents — from Air Force and CIA reports to interviews with researchers and reports of paranormal sightings — spanning more than seven decades.

The entire archive is a sort of passion project for Erica Lukes, a Pilates instructor and executive director of Expanding Frontiers Research, and Jack Brewer, who is on the nonprofit’s board of directors.

Like most of us, Lukes grew up on a diet of “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and reading books about little green men. One night in 2013, she said, sitting with a friend on her patio in Millcreek overlooking the valley, she spotted something.

“I could see this bright object that appeared to hover in place for several minutes and then, it appeared to me, another one came out of that object and started moving around in a circle,” Lukes told me. She got her binoculars for a closer look and was convinced she had spotted a UFO.

So she dug in and started researching, checking airline flight paths, interviewing pilots, and studying how the eye processes reflected light. She also became, she said, an investigator and state director for the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, which investigates reported UFO sightings.

The result of that work was that Lukes is now convinced that what she saw back in 2013 was not a UFO.

In fact, she said, she has seen no convincing evidence that aliens have visited Earth. She became disenchanted with the lack of scientific rigor in the field of UFO studies. Still, she said she remains fascinated with them as historical and cultural phenomena.

Over the years, Lukes also acquired a mountain of records on the subject.

“I have 140,000 pages in the archive and maybe a handful of people have seen them,” she said. “You’d be surprised by the dynamics behind the scenes and the attempts to steer a specific narrative. I totally love it, as nerdy as it sounds.”

Books, magazines and documents have piled up in her Pilates studio. There are letters and memos sent by government officials, like the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a believer in aliens, and case files containing drawings of reported sightings obtained through public records requests. Lukes also has collected and curated the work and notes of other prominent UFO researchers. UFO researcher Barry Greenwood, for example, sent Lukes’ group a terabyte of information.

“Even if I’ve changed my opinion on this, to me it’s one of the most fascinating subjects I’ve ever looked into,” she said.

Lukes is convinced that curiosity about UFOs has been used — by governments, or people looking to make a buck — to manipulate people.

“You can go into the archive and see how the government can use the UFO narrative to obfuscate things or push people in a different direction,” she said. “And also you have the cultural impact of how things like ‘The X-Files’ impact a generation.”

The timing of the archive launch couldn’t be much better, with interest in space visitors piqued by a U.S. House of Representatives hearing in July on the unexplained phenomenon and, just last week, a bizarre legislative hearing in Mexico where the purported mummified remains of two alien bodies were put on display.

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FBI Refuses To Release Body Cam Footage From Utah Raid That Left An Elderly Trump Supporter Dead

The FBI is refusing to release DOJ-mandated body camera footage from agents who participated in a raid that killed Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old disabled Trump supporter who allegedly threatened President Biden on Facebook, according to a report from Daily Wire reporter Gregg Re.

“The fbi is refusing to release the doj-mandated body camera footage in the shooting death of Utah man Craig Robertson. They say it could “interfere” with “enforcement proceedings.” (??)” Re wrote in an X post on Tuesday. “This is an elderly guy that the salt lake field office decided to surprise and swarm at 6 am.”

Re included a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that sought to obtain the footage. “The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure,” the response states.

“The records responsive to your request are law enforcement records: there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records, and release of the information could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” the letter continued. “Therefore, your request is being administratively closed.”

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