Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prohibition. Show all posts

California Town Goes Podunk; Seeks To Stymie Medical Pot

by Thaddeus Miller.    As state pot policy moves forward, one city goes backwards. Medical marijuana cardholders will not be allowed to grow cannabis for their own consumption after a vote Monday while the Merced City Council figures out what cultivation and dispensaries should be permitted in the city. The council unanimously passed the    ... MORE

The Federal Ban On Medical Marijuana Was Not Lifted

by Jacob Sullum.   Contrary to what you may have read or heard, Congress did not quietly lift the federal ban on medical marijuana. Nor did it lift the ban loudly. It did not lift the ban at all. Here is what actually happened. In December 2014, Congress approved an omnibus spending bill that included a rider prohibiting the Justice Department   ... MORE

Little-Told Story Of How The U.S. Government Poisoned Alcohol During Prohibition With Deadly Consequences

by Deborah Blum.   A reminder about public servants. It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.    ... MORE

What The War On Smoking Tells Us About The Drug War

by Danielle Allen.   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In January 1964, the Beatles first broke onto the Billboard chart with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; by June, Ringo Starr had collapsed from tonsillitis and pharyngitis. In January , the surgeon general announced that scientists had found conclusive evidence linking smoking to  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: The Puzzling Persistence Of Pee Tests

A favorite tactic of control freaks.   Slate columnist Daniel Engber, who was recently "shocked" to discover that workplace drug testing is still a thing, wonders: What's up with that? He finds, as I did back in 2002, that there's little evidence drug testing is a sound investment for employers: As was the case 30 years ago, testing has no solid base of evidence,  ... MORE

Michael Thomsen: Legalizing Weed Isn’t Enough

Permit marijuana use in public.    Recreational marijuana use has been legal in Seattle since 2012, but I still felt like I was getting away with something when I walked into a dispensary there this fall. There was a bouncer waiting behind a roped-off entryway on the otherwise quiet Capitol Hill side street. He passed my driver’s license through a  ... MORE

Justin Gardner: A Federal Judge Just Shamed The DEA For Fabricating Sham Cases Trying To Justify War On Drugs

Entrapment, law enforcement's favorite tool.  Since the War on Drugs began in earnest under Nixon and Reagan, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has ruined millions of lives for nonviolent, victimless behavior. The DEA’s drug crusade is not limited to the homeland either, as it also has sole responsibility for pursing international  ... MORE

VIDEO: Glenn Greenwald - Drug Policy In Portugal

Jeff Nesbit: We Have Lost The War On Drugs

Criminalizing drugs just destroys more people.     It's time, finally, to face the ugly truth. We've lost the war on drugs in America. We need a new playbook, now, before more lives are lost. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that fatal drug overdoses in America were the highest in recorded history in 2014. The news   ... MORE

NYT Columnist Wants A Minimum Drinking Age For Soda

by Guy Bentley.    Busybodies minding your own business. A New York Times columnist has proposed the government introduce a minimum age for buying soda and card kids who try to buy Coca-Cola at the local store. In wide-ranging discussion with Luckypeach.com, food journalist and New York Times opinion writer Mark Bittman attempted to equate    ... MORE

Christopher Ingraham: One Of The Biggest Arguments Against Marijuana Legalization Is Falling Apart

Drug use continues a decade-long drop.     America's high school students are using drugs and alcohol at or near the lowest levels on recordaccording to federal data released Wednesday. The 2015 Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)        ... MORE

Top White House Drug Official: War On Drugs Is A Failure

by Alex Mierjeski.   That makes it unanimous. The nation's top drug official went on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday night and proclaimed the old War on Drugs a failure. Michael Botticelli, who serves as the director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, also said he wants to reform and refocus U.S. drug policy. When asked by "60 Minutes"  ... MORE

Going To Pot? Canada Leads Way In Legalizing Marijuana

by Michel Comte. Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows when he admitted to having dabbled in marijuana while a member of parliament, but his pledge as prime minister to legalize pot has been broadly cheered. He said in a policy speech on Friday that his Liberal government would introduce legislation as early as 2016 to legalize marijuana, making Canada  ... MORE

Heroin And Prohibition Are A Lethal Combination

by Jacob Sullum.     After the esteemed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February 2014, press coverage of the "heroin epidemic" exploded. Mentions of that phrase in the newspaper and wire service articles cataloged by Nexis rose from 681 in 2013 to 3,222 in 2014, an increase of almost 400 percent. Yet Hoffman—who by his own account used ... MORE

Phillip Schneider: Government May Be Too Tyrannical When It Seeks To Criminalize The Collection Of Rainwater

A war on self-sufficiency.   Collecting rainwater is classically seen as a safe and sustainable way of supplying your household with an off-the-grid water supply. Some people collect rainwater only for a backup reservoir, while others prefer to go all the way and maintain their household with pure off-the-grid rainwater collection. This method ensures  ... MORE

VIDEO: Andrew Napolitano - High Cost Of The War On Drugs

Some Members Of Congress Want To Stop Squandering Tax Money On The DEA's Failed Marijuana Eradication Program

by Christopher Ingraham.    The Drug Enforcement Administration is not having a great year. The chief of the agency stepped down in April under a cloud of scandal. The acting administrator since then has courted ridicule for saying pot is "probably not" as dangerous as heroin, and more recently he provoked 100,000 petition-signers and seven       ... MORE

In The Public Service - Heroic Cops Protect Community By Raiding A Group Of 90-Year-Old Women Playing MahJong

by Matt Agorist.   As hundreds of thousands of rape kits collect dust and remain untested, cops are quick to jump to action to raid a group of elderly women playing mahjong. A concerned citizen, with a knack for blindly following all decrees handed down from the establishment on high, conducted their patriotic duty of ‘seeing something’ and then    ... MORE

J.D. Tuccille: If Prohibitions Cannot Work Within The Prison System, How Can They Work In The Outside World?

Answer: they can't.   Last week, Karl Jensen and Lisa Mary Hutchinson were sent to the lockup for smuggling a knife, drugs, and a McMuffin into the UK's Wormwood Scrubs prison. Maybe somebody still on the outside will toss a sandwich over the wall to help them pass the time. In a related story, at about the same time Larry Michael Webb and Holly    ... MORE