Free Republic

Nearly two week ago, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell suggested hard-line Communist Raul Castro really did have a soft spot for capitalism. “Raul has been in charge of the military and the economy,” Mitchell explained to the August 2 “Today” show audience, calling Fidel’s younger brother “politically hard-line but more open than his brother to free enterprise, including foreign investment.” She might be on to something, after all. “Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them, current and former Justice Department...

Reefer is Worth Getting Mad About Vienna -- Supporters of the legalization of cannabis would have us believe that it is a gentle, harmless substance that gives you little more than a sense of mellow euphoria. Sellers of the world's most popular illicit drug know better. Trawl through websites offering cannabis seeds for sale and you will find brand names such as Armageddon, AK-47 and White Widow. "This will put you in pieces, then reduce you to rubble -- maybe quicksand if you go too far," one seller boasts. This is much closer to the truth. In Canada, as in...

Cops slip up on medical marijuana Not many people go to the Denver Police Department to pick up bags of marijuana, but Thursday a police officer handed Larisa Lawrence about 2 ounces of the drug. "It's squished," she said, scrunching her nose and pressing down on the red evidence bags. "It's just not the same." Late Tuesday, Lawrence's marijuana was seized by Denver police during a traffic stop even though she produced proof that she was allowed to carry it under the state's medical marijuana law. Lawrence, 30, and her husband, Thomas, are caregivers who run a medical-marijuana support center...

Drug agents have raided one of the largest marijuana operations ever discovered in Gila County. The garden, located east of Payson and about a half mile east of the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery, contained about 30,000 plants spread out over a half-mile area. The raid on the illegal operation occurred July 29 but law enforcement officers didn't begin eradication of the plants, some of which were seven feet tall, until Aug. 3. The garden was kept intact to allow other law enforcement officers, state officials and the media an opportunity to visit the site and see the garden firsthand. Also,...

Journalists have turned the radar up so high in their coverage of illicit drug use that a pair of migrating Blackburnian warblers would look like a squadron of B-52s if they applied the same scrutiny to the skies. This week's example of journalistic overkill in the pursuit of a drug story owes its origin to a 400-word letter in the July 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Twin Girls With Neurocutaneous Symptoms Caused by Mothball Intoxication," in which three physicians in France solve a medical mystery posed by an 18-year-old patient. The woman had developed a...

ABC News: At San Francisco's Wharf, a Fight for Medical Marijuana Ensues July 25, 2006 — San Francisco has more cannibus clubs — the dispensaries of marijuana for the medical treatment of the nasty side effects of chemotherapy, glaucoma or AIDS — than any other city in the nation. Yet, that doesn't mean cannabis clubs make welcome neighbors, even in bluest of the blue San Francisco, a city that prides itself on being tolerant of almost every lifestyle. (snip) But the reality of the program is apparently harsher than the notion. However accepting San Francisco may consider itself to be,...

Feds Warn Of Marijuana-Filled Gumballs Gumballs Called 'Greenades'POSTED: 8:00 am EDT July 27, 2006 ELLICOTT CITY, Md. -- Authorities aren't happy about yellow, smiley face gumballs. The federal Drug Enforcement Agency is warning about so-called "Greenades," which are marijuana-containing gumballs. Survey: Used Drugs? The DEA is issuing an intelligence bulletin about the pot candies to police departments across the country. The smiley face gumballs were first discovered at a Howard County, Md., high school in January. Police charged three 17-year-old students after a teacher alerted a school resource officer. She told the officer that she saw a student give a...

Hunter knows how to mellow out on marijuana. It's something he does all the time. But the first time he smoked the leaves of a plant dubbed the "magic mint," he felt as if he'd been slammed into another dimension. As drug trips go, this one was more terror than pleasure. "The first time I did it was with a lot of people," recalls Hunter, a Toronto university student who asked that his real name not be used. "That was probably a bad idea because I did it and before I even knew what was happening, I was just like...

One of the first Shelbyville confiscations of the African drug khat occurred early Sunday morning. "Approximately 11.26 grams of a green leafy substance believed to be khat" were found in a coat pocket of Mustaf Shire Abdi, 21, Anthony Lane, Officer Tracey Nelson said. Abdi tried to pull away as Officer Benjamin Burris was checking the pocket and was immediately handcuffed, Nelson said. "Khat use is most prevalent among immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen," a May 2003 National Drug Intelligence Center bulletin said. "These individuals use the drug in casual settings or as part of religious ceremonies. "The use...

Excuse me for a moment while I vent about the mind-boggling stupidity of the autocratic, bureaucratic, right-wing, Neanderthal numskulls who keep pushing an insane, inane, and inhumane holy war against marijuana – which is, after all, a weed. The most embarrassing thing for these holy warriors is that the weed is winning! They've been at this war since 1937, spending billions and billions of our tax dollars, militarizing our borders, and stomping on our Bill of Rights. They've used phone taps, garbage searches, jackbooted raids, and draconian prison terms to ... well, to do what? To nab peaceful, mellow tokers...

LAREDO - The deputy commander of a narcotics task force who accepted tens of thousands of dollars to protect drug dealers pleaded guilty to extortion charges Friday. Julio Alfonso Lopez, 45, pleaded guilty to conspiring to extort money from drug traffickers, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said. An accomplice, 32-year-old Meliton Valadez, was convicted Friday for his role as Lopez's middleman with the traffickers. Federal investigators accused Lopez of using his position to ensure safe passage of drugs through sparsely populated Zapata County along the Mexican border. They said that beginning in 2005 at least four payments totaling $44,500 were made...

Messing With Our Heads A "tobacco accessories" merchant fights a proposed ordinance prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia. By Alex Pickett Published 07.12.2006 http://tampa.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=73642 Weekly Planet Tampa It's 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I'm inside the Home Depot at 22nd Street N. in St. Petersburg so Leo Calzadilla can prove a point. He strolls through the plumbing aisle and stops at the brass fittings. He picks up a five-inch brass nipple, screws on an elbow tube, adds a round connector on top and holds it up to a man next to him. "What does this look like to...

Drug War Police Tactics Endanger Innocent Citizens Winston Churchill is commonly credited with having said, "Democracy means that when there's a knock in the door at 3 am, it's probably the milkman." One wonders what Churchill would make of modern-day, drug war America. For the last year, I've been researching a study on SWAT teams, "no-knock" raids, and the rise of paramilitary tactics in domestic policing (the study was released this week). The trends I've found are troubling, and some of the individual stories are absolutely heartbreaking. Each day in America, police SWAT teams raid more than 100 private homes,...

A backpacker has been jailed for 10 years in India despite claiming she was tricked into becoming a drugs mule. Daisy Angus, 26, received the sentence from a Mumbai court for possessing and attempting to smuggle 10kg of cannabis out of the country. Angus from Bournemouth, Dorset, was asked to carry a case by a companion, but later confessed to her father she thought it may have held drugs. She has spent four years in Mumbai's Byculla prison awaiting sentencing. Angus will now have to serve the remaining six years of the ten year sentence but this could be served...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teens who experiment with marijuana may be making themselves more vulnerable to heroin addiction later in life, if the findings from experiments with rats are any indication. "Cannabis has very long-term, enduring effects on the brain," Dr. Yasmin Hurd of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health in an interview. Whether or not trying marijuana is a 'gateway' to use of so-called harder drugs like heroin and cocaine has been hotly debated, she and her colleagues note in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. To investigate whether pot smoking...

Judge rules against Alaska marijuana law JUNEAU, Alaska – A judge on Monday struck down part of a new Alaska law criminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, saying it conflicts with past constitutional decisions made by the Alaska Supreme Court. That means the police won't be able charge people with a misdemeanor under the new law for possessing less than 1 ounce of marijuana in their homes. The state Department of Law was expected to quickly file an appeal with the high court. Superior Court Judge Patricia Collins said a lower court can't reverse the state Supreme Court's 1975...

In the eyes of the federal agents who secretly watched him, Alberto Zatarain was a drug dealer who made all the right moves. He had at least three aliases. He switched cell phones every month and drove ugly old cars to avoid notice. After dark, he holed up and watched TV inside a rented matchbox house in Richfield that rattled from low-flying jets. No clubs, no parties, no women. And every few months, when another runner came up from Mexico, Zatarain handed off suitcases of cash -- profits from a booming business that stretched from metro suburbs to farm towns...

PIMA — The Church of Cognizance, which has quietly operated here since 1991, has an unusual tenet — its worshippers deify and use marijuana as part of their faith. Until federal authorities charged them with possessing 172 pounds of their leafy green sacrament earlier this year, church founders Dan and Mary Quaintance say they smoked, ate or drank marijuana daily as a way of becoming more spiritually enlightened. But now, with added conspiracy charges, the Quaintances face up to 40 years each in prison in a case they call religious persecution. Federal prosecutors say religious freedom does not exempt the...

TORONTO - When Sean Erez was found crumpled and bleeding in the elevator of the Westin Harbour Castle hotel this week, shot when an alleged drug deal went awry, he could well have still been inside an American prison for his international drug trafficking enterprise. That a decade was shaved off his 15-year sentence imposed in a Brooklyn courthouse in November, 2001 -- after he applied to serve his sentence in Canada rather than in the United States -- is angering victims-of-crime advocates and police officers on both sides of the border. "He won the lottery when he was transferred...

Former Drug Czars Believe Their War Has Been Won USA -- The United States has won the war against illegal drugs. That was the conclusion of a unique gathering on June 17, which marked the 35 th anniversary of the war’s beginning in 1971 with the appointment of Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatrist, as the first White House drug czar. Jaffe was joined at the the anniversary gatheing in by six other former czars, Dr. Robert L. Du Pont, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, Lee I. Dogoloff, Dr. Donald Ian Mac-Donald, Lee Brown and retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey....