A family is desperately seeking answers after FBI agents busted down the door and killed their relative in a pre-dawn raid last week.
The FBI is refusing to tell a grieving mother why they showed up in armored vehicles at 6 am last Wednesday and fatally shot her son.
According to WBBJ, FBI agents showed up at a residence in Henderson, Tennessee to serve a man named Theodore Deschler an arrest warrant when things turned deadly.
A neighbor told WBBJ he woke up at 6 am after he heard a loud bang.
Four Dallas police officers are under investigation after they were caught on video laughing about a disabled military veteran who urinated on himself when he was prohibited from using a restaurant bathroom.
US Army vet Dynell Lane told the Dallas Police Department’s oversight board that two off-duty cops working security at Serious Pizza refused to let him use the bathroom around 2:15 a.m. on June 10 — despite his efforts to show them his medical paperwork documenting his medical issues, The Dallas Morning News reported.
Lane, who was disabled on deployment in the Middle East, said he called 911 but responders did not arrive before he wet himself.
“The Dallas Police Department failed me,” Lane told the board at its monthly meeting on Aug. 8.
“Two Dallas police officers discriminated against me and declined to assist me in bridging the gap between myself and the Serious Pizza manager.”
Body camera footage from one of the two off-duty cops shows two other uniformed officers arrive at the pizza joint and ask about a report of someone who “pissed themselves,” according to the paper.
“So you guys made a guy pee himself?” one of the on-duty officers says in the shocking exchange, holding her fist to her mouth as she laughs.
“Yeah,” one of the off-duty officers responds, smiling. He looks at the other off-duty officer, who appears to ask, “He called 911?”
A New York judge has halted new cannabis licenses under a program that favors people with previous drug conviction charges following a legal challenge by a group of veterans.
The ruling by Supreme Court Justice Kevin Bryant blocks the Office of Cannabis Management from granting new conditional adult-use recreational dispensary licenses, or processing existing ones, while the legal challenge plays out.
It comes in response to a lawsuit filed by a group of disabled military veterans who argue the system of awarding and issuing licenses to certain social equity applicants violates the state Constitution.
Under the state’s cannabis licensing program, entrepreneurs with past cannabis convictions or immediate family members with past convictions are prioritized for the first dispensary licenses. Nonprofit groups that work with former prisoners are also eligible to apply for cannabis licenses.
But the veterans argue in court filings that regulators are usurping the state legislature’s authority by changing the rules that required “the initial adult-use cannabis retail dispensary license application period shall be opened for all applicants at the same time.”
They say regulators failed to adhere to New York’s Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act by not issuing licenses to disabled service veterans and other minority groups, whom they argue should qualify.
“Individuals like service-disabled veterans, who are also social equity applicants, who should be prioritized under the MRTA—the marijuana regulation taxation act—the plaintiffs are arguing that they’ve been harmed by being left out of this first mover’s advantage,” said Fatima Afia, an attorney at Rudick Law Group.
The lawsuit is the latest blow to the state’s rollout of a recreational cannabis market, which has been delayed, in part, by a lawsuit alleging that state regulations illegally gave preference to New York residents for pot licenses.
A ruling by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in May allowed New York to begin issuing operating licenses to qualifying pot businesses in most regions of the state.
March 20 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties putting the number at over 1 million. More than 4,600 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during and after the invasion, and thousands more have died by suicide.
[Related, How Team Bush Escaped Justice Over Iraq and IRAQ 20 YEARS: Joe Lauria — Covering the ‘Vial Display’]
Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to slightly cut back on its ranks, but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push.
Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.
We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up.
“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.
“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans.
“They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DOD) are strongly against the use of marijuana for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—but they’re taking a neutral position on psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, simply saying that more research should be done.
In an update to their joint clinical practice guidelines, the departments provided recommendations on a variety of therapeutics used to treat PTSD and acute stress disorder that commonly afflict military veterans. And while many veterans use marijuana, often to treat symptoms of the conditions, the VA/DOD Management of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Acute Stress Disorder Work Group said it is fully against the alternative treatment option.
“The Work Group recommends against the use of cannabis or cannabis derivatives in treating patients with PTSD because of the lack of well-designed [randomized control trials] evaluating the efficacy of cannabis derivatives in large samples of individuals with PTSD and the serious side effects associated with their use,” it says.
“Evidence from the 2017 VA/DoD PTSD [clinical practice guidelines] indicates significant harm associated with cannabis use,” it said, arguing that research suggests that marijuana is linked to issues with attention, memory, IQ and driving.
While medical marijuana came with a “strong against” recommendation from the departments, they said that the work group’s confidence in the existing evidence is “very low” due to a “lack of randomized, controlled, methodologically sound clinical trials; small sample sizes, and selection bias.”
“The benefits of cannabis were outweighed by the potential serious adverse effects,” the document, published last month, says. “Patient values and preferences varied largely because some patients seek new, novel treatments although others might be unwilling to use cannabis or cannabis derivatives. Thus, the Work Group made the following recommendation: We recommend against cannabis or cannabis derivatives for the treatment of PTSD.”
Over 90 percent of U.S. military veterans who use medical marijuana say that it improves their quality of life, with many using cannabis as an alternative to over-the-counter and prescription medications, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, University of Utah and cannabis research institutes looked at self-reported survey data from 510 veterans who said that they consume marijuana, seeking to better understand the purpose and experiences of their usage.
A majority of the respondents (67 percent) said that they use cannabis daily. And about one-third (30 percent) said that they consume marijuana to reduce the use of other medications, including anti-depressants (25 percent) and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (17 percent). Another 21 percent said that cannabis has allowed them to reduce their use of opioid-based medications.
Overall, 91 percent of the veterans said that cannabis improved their quality of life.
“Veterans who were Black, who were female, who served in active combat, and who were living with chronic pain were more likely to report a desire to reduce the number of prescription medications they were taking,” the study says. “Women and individuals who used cannabis daily were more likely to report active use of cannabis to reduce prescription medication use.”
“Medicinal cannabis use was reported to improve quality of life and reduce unwanted medication use by many of the study participants. The present findings indicate that medicinal cannabis can potentially play a harm-reduction role, helping veterans to use fewer pharmaceutical medications and other substances.”
The observational study, which was published last month in the journal Clinical Therapeutics, has several limitations—including the fact that data was self-reported and several cannabis friendly media outlets and companies promoted recruitment or provided funding for the research initiative. But the findings are generally consistent with other studies that have focused on marijuana as a potential alternative to prescription drugs.
There’s particular interest in studying the possibility of cannabis as a treatment option for veterans, as the population disproportionately suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and high rates of suicide.
A GOP congresswoman is touting recently released Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance on psychedelics research and calling for additional work to study the therapeutic benefits of marijuana for military veterans.
In a speech on the House floor on Wednesday, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) talked about the need to support “novel forms of research” to unlock the potential of psychedelics and cannabis for the treatment of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that commonly afflict veterans.
“As a doctor, former director of the Iowa Department of Public Health and 24-year U.S. Army veteran, the mental, emotional and physical health of my constituents and fellow veterans is one of my top priorities in Congress,” she said. “For too long, PTSD and other mental or physical ailments have had devastating effects and far too often go untreated.”
Canada has the world’s most permissive assisted suicide program. The country is on track to record some 13,500 state-sanctioned suicides in 2022, a 34 percent rise on the 10,064 in 2021, according to Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s analysis of official data.
Canada’s politicians are currently weighing whether to expand access to include children and the mentally ill.
Critics have argued the approach is a ‘slippery slope’ in a country where red tape makes it easier to access doctor-assisted suicide than it is to access benefits and help.
Sheren is enraged by the ‘unacceptable’ and ‘infuriating’ law. She says she personally knows almost a dozen veterans who have been offered euthanasia by authorities, a ‘disgusting’ approach to ‘people who were willing to put their lives on the line… then you have the audacity to tell them it’s better if you just die’.
Forty lawmakers, 36 Democrats and 4 Republicans, have co-sponsored a bill aiming to allow for the medical use of psilocybin and a psilocybin therapy grant program, which is currently sitting at the committee level of the Assembly, with its Senate version also in committee. The Assembly bill, A03581, was introduced by Democrat Pat Burke in February. There has been other legislation introduced regarding the hallucinogen as well, with Linda Rosenthal’s version legalizing the adult possession and use of hallucinogens like it.
Research has shown that psilocybin, an organic psychedelic compound, can benefit people with cluster headaches, depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, ADHD and obsessive compulsive disorder, but it’s getting the most universal traction because of its impact on those suffering from PTSD.
“Psilocybin doesn’t have the huge appeal that marijuana had,” Democrat Assemblyman Phil Steck, who is the Assembly’s Chairman of the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Committee, says. “But, there are definitely people who make a strong case for the proposition that it helps with PTSD. Certainly we want to do everything that we can to help people that are coming back from war, and if psilocybin has proven to do that, then it should be legal for that purpose.”
Johns Hopkins University has conducted several studies on psilocybin, saying it has substantial antidepressant effects, but needs to be administered under carefully controlled conditions through trained clinicians and therapists.
Military veterans across the country are scrambling after more than a dozen clinics that had been providing them with free ketamine treatments for severe depression, chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder suddenly closed.
Patients and employees of the Ketamine Wellness Centers, or KWC, said they were blindsided when the company, one of the nation’s largest operators of ketamine clinics, announced on its website on March 10 that it had shuttered all 13 of its locations in nine states.
“I cried for days,” said Travis Zubick, a U.S. Navy veteran, who was a patient at the company’s Minnesota location. “They packed up and left town, and that’s over.”
Zubick and about 50 other former service members had been relying on KWC’s partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for free ketamine treatments.
Now, many are rushing to find another facility that takes their VA insurance before the effects of their last treatment wear off.
Hellbound and Down 
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