Free Republic

A jury sentenced a Lakeview man to 10 years in prison for growing nearly 7,500 marijuana plants. Andrew Stever, 40, was sentenced on Monday after a three-day trial in the Federal District Court in Medford.Ten years is the mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted of growing 1,000 or more pot plants. In July 2007, officers from several local, state and federal agencies found 7,459 plants growing on Stever's Lakeview property, which bordered Forest Service land. Two men fled the scene, leaving behind personal property and three firearms, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Portland. Physical evidence and testimony linked...

More than 5,000 people have been killed in Mexico's out of control drug cartel wars this year, so why is our government opening even more border crossings at this time with Mexico. Many elected officials are ignoring Mexico's raging war against the drug cartels and instead of focusing on safety and public security, trying to widen the openings in our border with Mexico strictly for commerce purposes. DOBBS: Disturbing new details emerging tonight from Mexico proving that the raging drug cartel wars there are far more deadly than the government of Mexico has previously admitted. The U.S. response, however, is...

Over 40 Murders Reported this Week CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - New details on a deadly discovery across the border from El Paso. This morning police in Ciudad Juarez say at least 12 masked gun men opened fire inside an upscale seafood restaurant and killed at least eight people. The attack comes a day after seven men were found executed in a school soccer field in an upper class neighborhood in Juarez. In all, 40 murders were reported over the holiday week along the border near El Paso. Police say the men were armed with AK-47 and fired off more than...

Murders and kidnappings on both sides of the border have significantly increased in recent years. The violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has increased so dramatically that the Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz asked Mexican President Felipe Calderón to send more help as reported in the El Paso Journal. Only thirty federal officers had been sent at that time to Juárez despite repeated requests for more help. It's necessary and urgent to have agents from the federal preventive police to patrol the streets the way that we need to confront this situation," Reyes Ferriz said in a news conference. The Mexican...

One of the predictable characteristics of the drug war is how we lurch from danger to danger -- with each substance at some point being described as the most ominous threat to the republic. From marijuana to heroin, from LSD to cocaine, from crack to ecstasy, from methampetemine to steroids -- each over the past eight decades has taken its trendy turn as the threat du jour. All the better to justify the billions of dollars this country spends each year on the drug war. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court took a small step toward sanity by ruling...

For the past few months, the federal government has been celebrating the fact that U.S. cities are experiencing "an unprecedented cocaine shortage" due to increased law enforcement in the southwestern United States and Mexico. But fact-checking by NPR reveals that while there are indeed spot shortages of cocaine, they are neither nationwide nor unprecedented. And the scarcity may have unintended consequences. The price of cocaine is one of the main ways the government tallies the score in its war on drugs. The reasoning is that if prices go up, it means that agents are winning — they're squeezing the supply....

If you don’t believe that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is dangerous to American national security, “Crisis in the Americas”, a new film produced by the American Security Council Foundation, will convince you. ASCF drew from their 1980's video series about similarly threatening countries during the Cold War, called "Peace through Strength." The new series, called "Defending Freedom", educates the public about the dangers America faces via Venezuela’s oil-rich dictator. “Crisis in the Americas” documents the close alliance Chavez shares with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Chavez’s eerily parallel ideologies and close coalition with Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

(Medford, Or) - Much of the day Friday, a helicopter brought out load after load of marijuana plants from hillsides in the Applegate... more than 10,000 plants, according to Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters. Winters says marijuana retails for about 5-thousand dollars a pound, street value. He says last year his department confiscated 27.6 tons of marijuana. The grows are not just valuable. They're also dangerous. Law enforcement officers say the grow is most likely part of a Mexican drug cartel. Winters says members of the cartel will fight in a gun battle to protect their crop... and to try...

Corporation tells Kirchenwitz dismissal unrelated to shooting incident. Bruno Kirchenwitz was fired Monday from his job at the Basalt 7-Eleven. The firing came nearly two weeks after Kirchenwitz may have been the target of a person or persons who fired five shots from a rifle into the store. Kirchenwitz said a 7-Eleven official who called to inform him of his dismissal claimed it was unrelated to the shooting incident. He isn't buying it. Kirchenwitz believes he was fired because his presence as a clerk at the store could be bad for business. He is an outspoken critic of illegal immigration....

NOGALES, Ariz. -- U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agents executing simultaneous raids discovered a recently completed smuggling tunnel linking the two countries, officials said Friday. The entrances to the tunnel, described as a passageway its builders planned to use to smuggle drugs, were discovered in a home in Nogales, Ariz., and an apartment in Nogales, Mexico, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Five people were arrested during the raid on the Mexican location. No arrests had yet been made on the U.S. side of the border. Investigators tipped to the tunnel's existence during its construction have had it...

DALLAS -- At least 18 Dallas County teenagers have died from using cheese, a mixture of black tar heroin and powderized Tylenol PM tablets. The deaths have been reported throughout the county. Most of the victims are male, and involve equal numbers of white and Hispanic youth. One girl who died was found with the phase "Cheese Please" scrawled on her body with a marker. The spread of cheese in schools has parents and law enforcement officials worried. Children as young as 11 have been caught with the concoction. Right now, cheese heroin seems to be a Dallas phenomenon. But...

The first sign of trouble for Cudahy City Council candidate Tony Mendoza was a pair of thong panties mailed to his wife, with a note telling her to watch her husband’s back. Then came the phone calls — and the death threats. A political novice in a tiny city of Mexican immigrants that hasn’t had an election since 1999, Mendoza had expected dirty tricks. But to his dismay, the caller, who spoke poor English and called every day for three days, said Mendoza would be killed if he did not leave Cudahy, a 1.2-square-mile city 10 miles southeast of downtown...

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Here in the poorest corner of the poorest Indian reservation in the country, Geraldine Blue Bird’s household was one of the worst off. Then President Bill Clinton stopped by her home during his 1999 tour of the nation’s most impoverished places. Ms. Blue Bird, who lived on a disability check, was squeezing 28 adults and children, most of whom she had taken in from the streets, into a four-room shack with no plumbing and a pop-up camper out back. When word got out, donations poured in, and continued for years. Ms. Blue Bird even received a...

Roger Clemens, one of professional baseball's most durable and successful pitchers, is among six players allegedly linked to performance-enhancing drugs by a former teammate, The Times has learned. The names had been blacked out in an affidavit filed in federal court. Others whose identities had been concealed include Clemens' fellow Houston Astros pitcher Andy Pettitte and former American League most valuable player Miguel Tejada of the Baltimore Orioles. The discovery ends four months of speculation surrounding the possible identities of Major League Baseball figures whose names were redacted from the search warrant affidavit filed in Phoenix on May 31. The...

Illegal marijuana production is surging on the North Coast and across the state as a result of rising dominance of Mexican crime families over the state's underground pot economy. Scores of Mexican nationals are being sneaked across the border to grow, guard and harvest marijuana gardens inside California because tightened border security has crimped smuggling of Mexican-grown pot into the state, according to local, state and federal drug agents. Mexican-controlled operations now account for as much as 70 percent of all the marijuana cultivated in the state's rural regions, including the North Coast, the agents said. Agents say tightened U.S.-Mexican...

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Family and friends of Veronica Guerin, the investigative reporter whose slaying shocked Ireland and triggered a government crackdown on organized crime, laid flowers and prayed Monday near the spot where she was shot to death a decade ago.

MODEL Michelle Leslie wore a burqa during her stay in a Balinese prison on drugs charges to avoid being raped... Leslie said she awoke in the Kerobokan prison one night to find a man sitting on the end of her mattress, laughing and singing: "Jiggyjig Missa Leslie. Bali holiday. Jiggyjig". "I knew jiggyjig translated into having sex," Leslie told the magazine. "He was saying Australian model and stroking my leg. I screamed: `Get out of here!'." Leslie said she was aware another woman was being taken from her cell regularly for sex, and realised her fate would be the same...

MEXICAN authorities yesterday began investigations into the involvement of Colombian guerrillas in the shipment of 5.5 tons of cocaine seized from a commercial aircraft. The high-purity cocaine, the biggest seizure in recent years, was found amid 128 pieces of luggage on a US passenger airline, Aero Flight, which left Caracas in Venezuela and made an unregistered stop in Ciudad de Carmen, Mexico, where soldiers found the drugs. The cocaine is valued at £70 million. Santiago Vasconcelos, of the Mexican attorney general's office, said there was evidence that the drugs came from guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),...

MEXICO CITY – Mexico's foreign secretary suggested Thursday that uniformed men using a military-style Humvee to help drug traffickers on the border could have been U.S. soldiers or criminals disguised as Mexican troops.

Uniformed Mexicans with guns, bulldozer seize drug-bust truck from Border Patrol U.S. Border Patrol agents were backed down this week by armed men, dressed in what appeared to be Mexican military uniforms and carrying military weapons, who seized a captured dump truck filled with marijuana from the U.S. agents and dragged it across the border into Mexico with a bulldozer. The border incident occurred Thursday evening when Border Patrol agents attempted to pull over a dump truck on Interstate 10 in Hudspeth County, Texas. The driver fled from the agents, exiting the freeway and driving toward the Rio Grande which...