Free Republic

A commission composed mostly of former world leaders will recommend Tuesday that governments move beyond legalizing marijuana and decriminalize and regulate the use of most other illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The international drug-control system is broken, says a report to be released Tuesday in New York by the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Governments should be allowed wide latitude to experiment with the regulation of drugs, except for the most lethal, says the commission, whose 21 members include former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, and former presidents such as Brazil´s...

The FBI is accusing Texas Democrats of using cocaine to buy votes and it’s all coming out in court. Political chicanery and vote-buying in Texas are as old as the state itself, and the latest episode to come to light features purchasing votes with cocaine, marijuana, money, cigarettes and beer, an on-going FBI investigationhas uncovered. Two political operatives of a Hidalgo County Commissioner’s campaign manager were charged on Thursday with vote-buying before U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter Ormsby, The Monitor reported. The arrests are the latest twist in an 18-month investigation focusing on the 2012 primary election for County Commissioner.

**SNIP** “A politiquera is a person who works for a candidate to encourage people to vote, to bring voters to the polls, to ensure that voters select the appropriate candidate, to pay voters for their votes”, according to court documents. Veronica Saldivar was allegedly given part of an “eight ball” of cocaine to bribe voters to cast their ballot for a Hidalgo County Commissioner. Court documents reveal a campaign manager distributed the cocaine in baggies to campaign workers. A voter told FBI agents Saldivar promised to pay $10 in exchange for their vote.

LOS ANGELES – They earn their living by making the masses laugh, but experts say comedians are all too often masking intense sadness behind those smiles.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - A Daytona Beach woman was arrested Wednesday morning on allegations of breastfeeding her infant daughter while smoking crack cocaine. Bobbre Williams, 37, was arrested on charges of aggravated child abuse, battery on a law enforcement officer, cocaine possession and child neglect.

It's an open secret in DC that Obama still snorts cocaine.

Former D.C. Mayor and now Councilman Marion Barry was being treated at Howard University Hospital after being involved in a head-on car crash on Saturday night. ... he was driving the wrong direction along a one-way stretch when he hit another car.

Former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was hospitalized Saturday night after he drove a vehicle into an oncoming lane of traffic and was involved in a wrong-way car crash on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast. Mr. Barry’s spokeswoman Latoya Foster said the 78-year-old, now a D.C. Council member representing Ward 8, “had a hypoglycemic attack, became disoriented and had a minor fender bender.” Ms. Foster said both the diabetic former mayor and his passenger, who she did not identify, were being checked out for injuries. “He’s OK,” she said of Mr. Barry.

The PGA Tour has suspended Dustin Johnson for six months after he tested positive for cocaine, according to a report on Golf.com. Citing a source, Golf.com reported that Johnson has failed three drug tests -- two for cocaine (in 2014 and 2012) and one for marijuana (2009). Johnson, 30, was suspended for the 2012 failed test, Golf.com reported, but that suspension was never made public. Under its guidelines, the PGA Tour is not required to announce any disciplinary actions against players who test positive for recreational drugs. Johnson announced Thursday that he was taking a leave of absence from competition,...

Translated: A search was conducted tonight at the drug squad of the Paris police, at 36 quai Goldsmiths, after the disappearance of some 50 kilograms of cocaine. The men of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN, "police the police"), assisted by specialized dogs, investigating the disappearance. The drug was, according to our information, seizure early July after the dismantling of a network of traffickers Senegalese gang. It was found in the 18th and 19th districts of the capital in cars, hidden through highly sophisticated systems. A flight of a value of € 3.5 million Police sources, this is...

RADNOR, Pa. (CBS) — A worker at a McDonald’s on the Main Line was serving up more than a happy meal, police say. Investigators say what he is accused of doing in the parking lot was illegal and now he is facing serious charges. According to investigators, the worker, identified by Radnor Police as 29-year-old Allen Trammell, at the Lancaster Avenue McDonald’s in Strafford was selling crack cocaine in the parking lot of the restaurant while he was on the job. Investigators say Trammell was a street level dealer who through word of mouth may have been making upwards of...

In 1981, a lawyer tried to subpoena Ron Paul to testify in the trial of Don Black, a Grand Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan who would later go on to found the white supremacist, neo-Nazi website, Stormfront. Black was charged along with two other Klansmen with planning to violently overthrow the small Caribbean country of Dominica in what they called “Operation Red Dog.” While a judge refused to subpoena Paul, Don Black would come back to haunt him many years later. In 1981 a group of American and Canadian white supremacists lead by Klansman and mercenary, Michael (Mike) Perdue...

Portuguese police have seized 237 kilograms of cocaine inside shipments of bananas from Colombia. Portuguese media reported that the police were alerted by a customer who found packages of drugs inside a box of bananas on a supermarket shelf. Portuguese police said they would work with other countries to find the “criminal organisation” responsible for the illegal shipment.

A herd of hippopotamuses once owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has been taking over the countryside near his former ranch - and no-one quite knows what to do with them. It was in 2007, 14 years after Escobar's death, that people in rural Antioquia, 200 miles north-west of Bogota, began phoning the Ministry of Environment to report sightings of a peculiar animal. "They found a creature in a river that they had never seen before, with small ears and a really big mouth," recalls Carlos Valderrama, from the charity Webconserva. He went to look, and found...

After a trip to Jamaica, a pair of local women landed at Midway International Airport on Friday with about $36,000 worth of cocaine wrapped in condoms and stored in body cavities, authorities said. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection canine alerted to Denisha White when she landed at Midway after an AirTran Airways flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica, police said.

The biggest problem facing Jeb Bush as he contemplates whether to become a Republican presidential contender is how will it affect his beloved family, especially his wife, Columba. The former Florida governor’s devoted Mexican-born wife intensely dislikes being in the public eye, while his daughter Noelle has struggled with drugs in the past, The Washington Post reported. Earlier this year, Bush was criticized by conservatives for his comments about illegal immigrants coming to America as an "act of love" for their families. Ironically, Bush has some strong misgivings about running for the highest office out of an "act of love"...

**SNIP** Leo Sharp was hauling 104 bricks of cocaine (over 200 pounds) on a highway near Chelsea, Mich., when he was pulled over in 2011 for an illegal lane change. **SNIP** Sharp received numerous decorations for valor for his service with the Army's 88th Infantry during its nearly year-long march through Italy to Austria in 1944 and 1945, military records show.

The Sacramento Bee asked legislative officials about court records showing the officer had cocaine in his system when he was involved in a December 2012 gunfight that left three people injured and one man dead. Lopez’s mother, Dina Hidalgo, is a high-ranking official in charge of Senate human resources. His wife, Jennifer Delao, is a secretary in Steinberg’s policy unit. The missing $100 bill, he said, was what they were using in the endeavor. When it was eventually discovered, Brace said, the bill was rolled up like a straw.

Attorney General Eric Holder criticized drug sentences doled out under “the old regime” in a video Monday announcing the Obama administration’s “Clemency Project 2014.” “In 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act reducing unfair disparities in sentences imposed on people for offenses involving different forms of cocaine. But there’s still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime. This is simply not right,” Holder says in the video....

<p>If the Rev. Al Sharpton, the bigoted, anti-Semitic, non-tax paying race-hustling poverty pimp, had any credibility left, it just vanished.</p> <p>The beneficiary of a lifetime of passes from our race-conscious mainscream media, Sharpton ran into an outlet not afraid of him -- The Smoking Gun. They obtained material that exposed Sharpton as an FBI "informant." Sharpton, of course, denies that this constitutes "snitching." No, he says he "volunteered" to "cooperate" with the FBI -- and for the most honorable of motives.</p>