Free Republic

SAN DIEGO, California — Authorities have discovered a 415-yard tunnel used to smuggle drugs from Mexico into the U.S., and the traffickers reportedly bought land and built a home in order to conceal the American side. ABC News reports the tunnel ran from a restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico, to the living room of a three-bedroom home in Calexico, California, a city located just east of San Diego. Four people have been arrested and more than a ton of marijuana was seized, the Los Angeles Times reports. The drugs are valued at more than $1 million. Investigators with U.S. Homeland Security...

Supreme Court rejects suit against Colorado over marijuana law The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a lawsuit filed by the states of Nebraska and Oklahoma against their neighbor Colorado over a law approved as a ballot initiative by Colorado voters in 2012 that allows the recreational use of marijuana. The court declined to hear the case filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma, which said that marijuana is being smuggled across their borders and noted that federal law still prohibits the drug. Two conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, said they would have heard the case. Nebraska and Oklahoma contended...

Is this a great country or what? Oh, sure, as Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump puts it, “We are led by very, very stupid people,” but still — the ingenuity of the populace shines through. Sometimes the inhabitants of America find a path around their political potholes. Case in point: the amazing progress being made in the War on Drugs. “Legal marijuana may be doing at least one thing that a decades-long drug war couldn’t,” explains Christopher Ingraham at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, “taking a bite out of Mexican drug cartels’ profits.” Oh, wait a second. “Legal marijuana” hardly qualifies...

Denver has just released its crime statistics for February of this year, and the city's post-marijuana crime explosion continues. In the first two months of 2016, total reported offenses using the NIBRS definitions are up a further 10.5% over this time last year. Crimes against persons have increased 14.1%, property crimes are up 13.8%, and crimes against society are up 18.4% compared to the same time frame in 2015. For comparison, in January and February of 2013 – the last year for these two months before marijuana legalization – there were just 6,791 crimes in the city. During January and...

In February of 2015, it became legal to grow and consume marijuana in Alaska. And, as has happened in Denver and Seattle, crime immediately began to increase after being stable or declining in the pre-legal pot era. According to the FBI's Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report for the first six months of 2015, the number of violent crimes in Anchorage (the only city reporting for Alaska) increased 34% compared to the same period in 2014. Murders were up 167%, and aggravated assaults increased 32% versus the first six months of 2014.

Comprised of a lone hexagonal honeycomb lattice layer of tightly packed carbon atoms, graphene is one of the strongest, lightest, and most conductive compounds ever discovered. Bottom line, it's an extraordinary composite. However, a scientist from New York's Clarkson University says he's found a way to manufacture hemp waste into a material "better than graphene." Moreover, the scientist -- known to his peers as Dr. David Mitlin -- says creating this graphene-like hemp material costs but a minuscule fraction of what it takes to produce graphene. Presented at an American Chemical Society Meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Mitlin described how...

Utah’s staunchly conservative legislature came close to eliminating the death penalty and gave serious consideration to setting up a system to grow and distribute medical marijuana — making the 2016 session a surprising one that may foreshadow future traction for progressive issues. […] The lean toward progressive issues was led by a pair of outgoing GOP lawmakers who went all in on their bills. Sen. Mark Madsen led the medical marijuana push, while Sen. Steve Urquhart pushed the death penalty abolishment. Urquhart also backed a failed measure that would have added discrimination protections for gay and transgender people. A year...

Abstract OBJECTIVES: The objective this prospective, open-label study was to determine the long-term effect of medicinal cannabis treatment on pain and functional outcomes in subjects with treatment-resistant chronic pain. METHODS: The primary outcome was change in pain symptom score on the S-TOPS (Treatment Outcomes in Pain Survey - Short Form) questionnaire at 6 months follow-up in intent-to-treat (ITT) population. The secondary outcomes included change in S-TOPS physical, social and emotional disability scales, pain severity and pain interference on brief pain inventory (BPI), sleep problems, and change in opioid consumption. RESULTS: 274 subjects were approved for treatment; complete baseline data were...

A cannabis company in Portland, Oregon is the latest marijuana business to raise money for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Sanders has been the most outspoken in terms of marijuana reform, drawing support from all corners of the industry. Dispensaries Foster Buds and Glisan Buds, which are owned by the same parent company, are partnering with marijuana grower Farmer 12 for its "Burn One for Bernie" campaign. They're selling special one-gram joints for $10 apiece and will donate 10% of sales to the Sanders campaign. Other businesses in the pot industry have also been championing the candidate. Just last week, a...

"Duane Stone is a veteran Seattle mental health specialist. He's seeing a surprising increase in patients experiencing psychotic episodes as well. Many have never had any mental health problems before. "I get lots of first break kind where this person doesn't have an experience with mental illness, they don't have a diagnosis, they're 30 or 40-years-old. And the only thing they've been doing has been smoking marijuana for the last year or two," Stone said. It's not just your stereotypical stoner. They're family people working at places such as Microsoft and Amazon."

Legal marijuana may be doing at least one thing that a decades-long drug war couldn't: taking a bite out of Mexican drug cartels' profits. The latest data from the U.S. Border Patrol shows that last year, marijuana seizures along the southwest border tumbled to their lowest level in at least a decade. Agents snagged roughly 1.5 million pounds of marijuana at the border, down from a peak of nearly 4 million pounds in 2009. The data supports the many stories about the difficulties marijuana growers in Mexico face in light of increased competition from the north. As domestic marijuana production...

An 8-year-old boy said he helped his mother's boyfriend grow "special medicine that can cure anything at all," The Times-Argus reportsA second-grader's story about helping a farmer grow "special medicine" plants led to the bust of an indoor marijuana growing operation in Vermont, authorities said. According to an affidavit, an 8-year-old boy told school officials and Windsor police detective Jennifer Frank that he helped his mother's boyfriend, 54-year-old Steven Mann, grow "special medicine that can cure anything at all," The Times-Argus reports. Police said they found 50 marijuana plants worth $75,000, along with two "grow rooms" next to the...

PORTLAND, Ore., Feb. 24 (UPI) -- An Oregon woman is supporting Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign by selling ceramic pipes featuring his campaign logo. Ariel Zimman, a 29-year-old artist from Portland, is selling the pipes through her company Stonedware and promising a portion of the sales towards donations to Sanders' campaign."It was really just a way to show my support for him as a candidate," Zimman told the Center for Public Integrity. "People love [the pipes], and once they hear they are contributing in some way to the campaign they are all about that too." Zimman offers both short and long...

A Federal Court judge has struck down federal regulations restricting the rights of medical marijuana patients to grow their own cannabis

On my way to a voodoo ceremony with a Ghanian tour guide, I reflected on my career path, admitting to him that I'd lost focus and felt unfulfilled. What he told me changed the course of my life: "You either work on something you love, or work because it supports the people you love." That's when I quit Google. For years, I had structured my life around achieving work-related success: Work hard, get promoted, make more money. Lather, rinse, repeat. I craved the validation of corporate success. I wanted badly to be recognized for my intelligence, for my parents to...

I am unfamiliar with this website. Here's the excerpt: Though the Court of Appeals initially ruled the search and seizure unconstitutional, the Supreme Court “found that the police were not investigating a crime but exercising their ‘community caretaker’ function." In a 4-3 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court just killed the rights of citizens outlined in the Fourth Amendment by stating that police officers may enter a home, or parts of the home, without a warrant and can seize evidence to use in the arrest and prosecution of citizens. The Fourth Amendment states that unreasonable searches and seizures are not allowed...

In October of 2014, Steven Pratt was supposed to begin his life anew. He had served out a 30-year prison sentence and gone home to Atlantic City, N.J., where his family held a party to welcome him. But a violent history would repeat itself all too soon. Pratt was 15 when he got into an argument with his next-door neighbour, Michael Anderson. Court records show that Anderson was a father figure of sorts to Pratt. On Oct. 11, 1984, he asked Pratt and his friends to vacate a hallway in their apartment building where they were noisily hanging out and...

Legal marijuana sales in Colorado and Washington State have grossed billions, but legal dealers will see little of that thanks to a draconian federal law meant to punish street pushers. In one of the first years of legal sales, 2015, Colorado moved nearly $1 billion worth of marijuana and is estimated to take in $135 million in taxes on it. Meanwhile, Washington is expected to pull in around $1 billion in revenue from sales taxes between 2015 and 2019. Despite technically being illegal on the federal level, these businesses must file taxes to the Internal Revenue Service—and they may pay...

An 8-year-old Klamath Falls boy became ill last Saturday after eating a marijuana-infused cookie that he found on the ground. The child's mother, Jessica Hart, 30, said her son, Jackson, came home from an afternoon outing at a local rock quarry complaining he was sick. He pulled at his chest and made motions that suggested he was choking. He had trouble keeping his eyes open.

The Sacramento branch of the California tax collection agency reeks of marijuana. That's because it's cash day at the collection center - when marijuana dispensary owners are allowed to bring in paper money to pay their quarterly sales tax bill - and the smell of their inventory clings to everything. California, like all states with any form of legalized marijuana, faces a growing problem over the federal government's position that cannabis remains a Schedule 1 illegal drug, classified the same way as meth or cocaine, with no legal uses - and therefore no legal access to traditional banks. That means...