Free Republic

James Triplett had his customers lined up around the corner in broad daylight, the feds say. Not for concert tickets. Not for iPhones. For heroin. Now 42 people are facing state or federal drug charges for their alleged roles in supplying and distributing heroin around West Grenshaw and Independence in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. Among them is the 33-year-old Triplett, also known as “Trell,” who authorities said controlled the drug market in the area. Investigators even included a photo in a federal criminal complaint spanning more than 200 pages. They said the photo depicts a line...

The death toll from India's latest incident of mass alcohol poisoning following the consumption of toxic homemade liquor has risen to 90, Mumbai police say. Dhananjay Kulkarni, deputy police commissioner in the western Indian city, said it was possible the number of dead from drinking the illicit moonshine could reach three figures. "Ninety people have now died," he said. "More than 40 are being treated in hospital and the death toll may reach 100." Victims first started to fall ill on Wednesday morning after consuming the illegal booze and new patients were still being admitted to hospital on Saturday, Mr...

About three weeks before Freddie Gray was chased from a West Baltimore corner by three Baltimore police officers — the start of a fatal encounter — the office of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby asked police to target the intersection with "enhanced" drug enforcement efforts, court documents show. "State's Attorney Mosby asked me to look into community concerns regarding drug dealing in the area of North Ave and Mount St," Joshua Rosenblatt, division chief of Mosby's Crime Strategies Unit, wrote in a March 17 email to a Western District police commander. The email was disclosed for the first time Tuesday in a...

The convicted mastermind behind the world's largest online narcotics emporium has been sentenced by a federal judge to two terms of life in prison and three lesser sentences, USA Today reports. The judge also ordered Ross Ulbricht, 31, to forfeit $184 million dollars. The website made over $187 million before it was shut down in 2013. The government estimated that roughly $1.2 billion in illegal drug transactions took place on Silk Road. The judge said it was a "demand expanding operation" and that what Ulbricht did was thoughtful, as opposed to just being an economic experiment. She added that he...

A proposal to reduce marijuana penalties for those convicted multiple times of possessing pot cleared the House floor Wednesday (May 13) in the Louisiana Legislature. Current law allows for someone to be sentenced up to 20 years in prison for getting convicted three or more times with as little as one joint. Among the changes proposed in the legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Austin Badon, D-New Orleans, is a reduction of the maximum penalty from 20 years to eight. "It starts chipping away at Louisiana being the incarceration capital of the world," Badon said from the House floor, after his...

M. Simon of Classical Values responded to a recent posting concerning Obamacare by linking to a piece by Milton Friedman "The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise". I confess to being so intrigued by the title that I read it to see where this came from. Socialism has a meaning: government ownership of the means of production. If Friedman's point was that there are two choices: free markets or command and control, this is true. But prohibiting something is not socialism. Many libertarian ideologues believe that drug prohibition is a net loss for the society emphasizing the substantial crime and...

Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs...

The Supreme Court told the police Tuesday they may not turn routine traffic stops into drug searches using trained dogs. The 6-3 decision ends the increasingly common practice whereby officers stop a car for a traffic violation and then call for a drug-sniffing dog to inspect the vehicle. The justices, both liberal and conservative, agreed that it was an unconstitutional "search and seizure" to hold a motorist in such cases. "Police may not prolong detention of a car and driver beyond the time reasonably required to address the traffic violation," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking for the court. [snip]...

Definition of Forbes family This article is about the Forbes family related to US Senator John Kerry. For information about the Forbes family associated with Forbes magazine, see Forbes family (publishers). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Forbes family of China and Boston, of which US Senator John Forbes Kerry and John Murray Forbes are members, amassed a huge fortune in the China trade, initially trading North American furs and manufactured goods for tea and other goods from China. Forbes also made a considerable fortune smuggling opium during the Opium Wars. The British wanted to keep a monopoly on supplying the Chinese with opium...

With the Secret Service still smarting from its 2012 prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, another federal law agency is in hot water over an even more salacious sex scandal—in the same country. The Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Michelle Leonhart, Tuesday faced a grueling three-hour inquisition from the House Oversight Committee over an Inspector General’s report that found DEA agents in Bogota, Colombia engaged in “sex parties” with prostitutes and that the parties were paid for by the very drug cartels the DEA was sent to fight. “This behavior is not acceptable,” Leonhart said in her opening statement. “It...

Fueled by an addiction to prescription painkillers, an FBI agent abused heroin from his own drug investigations and in the process botched dozens of cases involving suspected drug traffickers in multiple states, according to details that emerged Friday. Matthew Lowry, formerly a special agent with the agency's Washington field office, tampered with hundreds of grams of heroin seized during drug investigations in 2013 and 2014, keeping it in his car for weeks or months, and periodically using it, according to charging documents filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

The recent signing of a medical marijuana bill by GOP Sens. Rand Paul and Dean Heller hasn’t gone unnoticed. Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise has introduced a poll on his website, asking people to vote on whether marijuana should be legalized on the federal level. Scalise in the past has voted down marijuana reform legislation, Marijuana.com reports. On May 30, 2014, Scalise voted against an amendment in the House to prevent the Department of Justice from using funds from its budget to crack down on states that have enacted medical marijuana programs. Later, in July, Scalise voted against legislation to...

Republican Sen. Rand Paul joined Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand Tuesday to propose legislation to legalize medical marijuana on the federal level. The bill, termed the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States Act, would move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II, allow access for veterans and put a final stop to federal raids on dispensaries, among other things. This is the first time a medical marijuana bill has been introduced in the Senate, whereas the House has seen 15 pieces of legislation on marijuana reform in the last session of Congress, according to Marijuana.com. The move...

The federal government is looking for doctors to help monitor suspected smugglers’ bowel movements at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, in a solicitation that sounds like it could be something out of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” program. In reality it’s all a very sanitary process and even includes a special high-tech toilet to recover the drugs or other contraband from the other waste passing from the suspected smuggler’s system. But the details, described in a new solicitation for doctors to assist U.S. Customs and Border Protection, underscore the efforts smugglers will go to in trying to...

DENVER — Colorado already is being sued by two neighboring states for legalizing marijuana. Now, the state faces groundbreaking lawsuits from its own residents, who are asking a federal judge to order the new recreational industry to close. The owners of a mountain hotel and a southern Colorado horse farm argue in a pair of lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver that the 2012 marijuana-legalization measure has hurt their property and that the marijuana industry is stinky and attracts unsavory visitors.

DENVER — Nobody in the Colorado marijuana industry is panicking, but those involved are sweating a little over the hard line taken by Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to be the next attorney general, on legalization during this week’s Senate confirmation hearing. “Quite a few of my members were expressing concern and nervousness,” said Michael Elliott, executive director of the Colorado Marijuana Industry Group. “But I’m not sure we could have expected much more than we just heard. Even the president, who came out saying that marijuana is no more dangerous as alcohol, is also on the record as being...

Critics of marijuana legalization love to argue about its repercussions for “the children”—paging Nancy Grace—but the American Academy of Pediatrics seems to disagree. The group has now appealed to the Drug Enforcement Agency to reclassify marijuana and allow them to research its medical benefits for children, the Wall Street Journal reports. They have also asked the federal government to permit marijuana use by children with serious conditions. Marijuana is currently listed as a Schedule 1 drug by the federal government, classifying it with drugs like heroin. This scheduling prohibits research by ranking marijuana as having no acceptable medical use. “A...

Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana was a bad idea, the state’s governor said Friday. Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the 2012 decision by voters to make pot legal, said the state still doesn’t fully know what the unintended consequences of the move will be. If I could've waved a wand the day after the election, I would've reversed the election and said, 'This was a bad idea,’” Hickenlooper said Friday on CNBC's “Squawk Box.” “You don't want to be the first person to do something like this,” he said. He said that he tells other governors to “wait...

President Obama believes more states are likely to legalize marijuana following efforts in Colorado and Washington state. "My suspicion is that you're going to see other states look at this," the president told YouTube blogger Hank Green. Obama said that the federal government was "not going to spend a lot of resources" enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that had decided to legalize the drug. He also noted that the Department of Justice was examining how to shift policies for nonviolent drug offenders. In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Obama appeared to tacitly endorse a Colorado referendum...

Sen. Rand Paul is blaming politicians for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that the criminal justice system fuels racial tension by disproportionately targeting African-Americans. The so-called war on drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation," Paul said in an op-ed published for TIME. He acknowledged that the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer wasn't related to drugs, but argued that outsized penalties for nonviolent drug crimes creates a "tension in some communities that too often results in tragedy." The comments are another attempt by Paul, a Kentucky...