Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts

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

Jason Snead: Why Police In Many States Can Seize Your Property Without Proving You’re Guilty Of A Crime

Politicians use cops to legally hold up citizens.      Civil asset forfeiture is a growing problem throughout the nation, driven by a profit incentive that encourages property seizures by law enforcement authorities even under dubious circumstances. That is the inescapable conclusion of the second iteration of Policing for Profit:        ... 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

Charles Seeburger: 10 Facts About The Economics Of Weed

From black market to free market. From the legal markets thriving in states like Colorado and Washington, to the underground trade that generates billions of Mexican cartels, the economics of weed are crazy. Ganja. Smoke. Dro. Chronic. Spliffage. The names are as varied as the opinions about it: from rather innocuous plant, to cure all, to   ... MORE

Flawed Ohio Marijuana Legalization Initiative Defeated

by Ilya Somin.   An anti-marijuana or anti-monopoly vote? Ohio Issue 3 – the seriously flawed marijuana legalization referendum initiative that I nonetheless defended because of its superiority to the status quo, has gone down to defeat. While not all of the votes have yet been counted, it is likely that it will lose by a large margin (currently 65-35,       ... MORE

Prescribing Patients The Drugs They Want Is Not Murder

by Jacob Sullum.     Last Friday a California jury convicted Hsiu-Ying Tseng, a Rowland Heights physician, of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of three patients who overdosed on drugs she prescribed. Local prosecutors say this is the first time a doctor has been convicted of murder in the United States based on allegations of  ... MORE

A Prosecutor's Guide To Not Prosecuting A Killer Cop

'Public servants' protect each other. Lt. Mark Tiller did not violate the law when he fired two shots into a moving vehicle in July, killing Zachary Hammond as the unarmed 19-year-old attempted to flee, a state prosecutor announced Tuesday. Tiller, a Seneca, South Carolina, officer, has maintained that he fired his gun because he feared for his  ... MORE

Hell's Angels Say Canada’s Plans To Legalize Marijuana Will Deal Massive Blow To Their Organized Crime Operations

by Emily Gray Brosious.  Canada’s newly elected Liberal government has promised to legalize marijuana “right away,” and that’s not sitting well with thousands of Hells Angels members who say the move would cost the organized crime outfit hundreds of thousands of jobs, as reported by World News Daily. Thousands of members of the organized   ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Pot Pleasure, Pot Problems

As prohibition collapses, abuse is less likely.  It stands to reason that legalizing marijuana, by making it easier, cheaper, and less risky to obtain, would encourage consumption. That is mostly a positive development, since it implies greater consumer satisfaction as more people enjoy a product that prohibition made harder to get.     ... MORE

VIDEO: Rand Paul - Domestic Policies

Poll Says Marijuana Legalization Support Nears 60%

by Trevor Hughes.   More Americans than ever are smoking, eating and drinking marijuana, and they now overwhelmingly support full legalization of the long-banned plant, a new study and poll show. A Gallup poll released Wednesday shows 58% of American adults think marijuana should be legal, up from 51% a year ago, with just 40% believing it     ... MORE

Federal Court Orders The DEA To Stop Harassing Medical Marijuana Providers And Instead Start Obeying The Law

Enforcement zealots must learn to obey the law. In a scathing decision, a federal court in California has ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration's interpretation of a recent medical marijuana bill "defies language and logic," "tortures the plain meaning of the statute" and is "at odds with fundamental notions of the rule of law." The ruling     ... MORE

Richard Juman: Why A Man Who Fought The Drug War For 30 Years Is Now Spearheading The Project To Stop It

Understanding Portugal's model.     When it comes to the War on Drugs, there are few people in a better position to comment on the futility, brutality and tragedy of the endeavor than retired Major Neill Franklin. He spent over 30 years participating in, and directing, state and local police anti-drug efforts before retiring to become the    ... MORE

VIDEO: Where Can You Smoke Legal Pot In Colorado?

Nullification In Effect: Oregonians Defy Feds, Spend Millions On Marijuana In First Week Of Legal Sales

$3.5 million of sales on first day.        In the first week of limited marijuana sales in Oregon, dispensaries sold a staggering $11 million of weed – more than double the numbers from Colorado’s first week – proving state laws legalizing cannabis truly do nullify federal prohibition in practice. The Free Thought Project reported on the first week  ... MORE

Civil Asset Forfeiture Is Oklahoma's New Stop And Frisk; 2/3 Of Cash Seizures By Police Come From Minorities

by David Lowe. People of color are being fleeced by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. The public began to pay more attention to the practice in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, where the courts and police preyed upon Black residents through court fines and fees. The exploitative system became a substantial revenue generator for  ... MORE