Free Republic

According to court documents, Noel G. Moor, 28, placed the dog in the oven "because she thought an ex-boyfriend was inside the dog." ... Moor is being held at the Clatsop County Jail on the charge of first degree aggravated animal abuse. The county mental health organization will review her case and decide whether to continue in criminal court.      

Trump also criticized Democrats for opposing his proposed wall on the Southern border. “Eventually the Democrats will agree with us to build the wall and keep the damn drugs out,” he said, prompting chants of “build that wall” in the room. The president criticized sanctuary city policies for allowing illegal immigrants and drug dealers to remain in the country. He called on Congress to end funding for sanctuary cities. “If we are not going to get tough on the drug dealers who kill thousands of people and destroy so many people’s lives, we are just doing the wrong thing,” he...

A lawsuit filed last year by West Virginia's Republican attorney general Patrick Morrisey has resulted in a new Trump administration directive to evaluate the opioid production quota system, which Morrissey says is "responsible for many deaths across the country." Morrisey, who has been attorney general since 2013 and is now running for U.S. Senate, has long viewed the Drug Enforcement Agency's quota system on controlled substances as broken, believing it was setting limits based on sales numbers instead of true medical needs of Americans. He told the Washington Free Beacon he has been digging for information on the system for...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — Police responded to a disturbance call Thursday morning at a San Fernando Valley home reportedly belonging to the family of actress Tori Spelling. Officers arrived at the home on the 21200 block of Mullholland Drive in Woodland Hills just after 7 a.m., according to LAPD Media Relations. Dispatch audio described a “female mental illness” call, according to Entertainment Tonight, which was awaiting a response to a request for comment. While police wouldn’t confirm any details, sources told TMZ the call came after Spelling became “very aggressive” in her home.

While President Donald Trump and his cabinet are consistently winning on the issues they care about, it’s going to take a lot of time and patience to clean up most of the mess Barack Obama left in his wake. One such issue is the war on drugs -- something that was virtually nonexistent during the previous presidency. At the end of the Obama presidency, statistics and reports showed that drug-induced deaths were on the rise, as was the use of drugs among American youth. As David W. Murray of the Weekly Standard suggested in December 2016, this is anything but...

Cannabis users are more likely to experience negative emotions, particularly feeling alienated from others, new research reveals. People who use marijuana are significantly more likely to feel that others wish them harm or are deceiving them, a US study found. Brain scans also reveal the class-B drug increases signal connectivity in regions of the brain that have previously been linked to psychosis, the research adds, which is associated with severe depression.

Users of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are victims of discrimination and should no longer be called druggies or junkies, an international drug legalisation pressure group declared yesterday. It called for an end to negative language for drug users and their habits in order to ensure their human rights are respected. As part of the drive to persuade people to think differently about drugs, the words addict and even drug user must be thrown out, a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy said. It urged newspapers and broadcasters to encourage more positive attitudes by calling a drug user a...

We are supposedly a nation of laws, not men, but our lawmakers have ensured over the years that we are increasingly at the whim of men, elected or appointed, instead of the law. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declared that he will reverse an Obama Administration position allowing states to decide on marijuana legalization. Now, local United States Attorneys will be empowered to decide. But neither the Obama Administration nor Jeff Sessions should do anything other than enforce the law, and federal law criminalizes marijuana. The solution here is not to ignore the federal law, but to repeal it. To...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding the Obama-era policy that had paved the way for legalized marijuana to flourish in states across the country, two people with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press. Sessions will instead let federal prosecutors where pot is legal decide how aggressively to enforce federal marijuana law, the people said. The people familiar with the plan spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it before an announcement expected Thursday. The move by President Donald Trump's attorney general likely will add to confusion about whether it's OK...

A strong rally in cannabis-related stocks this week to mark the start of sales of recreational marijuana in California came to a screeching halt Thursday, on a report that the Justice Department is about to throw a spanner in the works for the nascent weed industry. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime marijuana opponent, is expected to rescind an Obama-era policy that gave protections to states that have legalized marijuana as long as they abide by a series of guidelines, the Associated Press reported, citing unnamed sources. An announcement that will scrap what is known as the Cole Memo...

It was six hours past midnight, but the crowd inside the Berkeley Patients Group counted down the seconds. “Happy New Year,” they yelled at precisely 6 a.m. as a cashier rang up the cost of three joints, a $45.37 purchase representing one of the first recreational marijuana sales in the state. The moment marked the launch of a new industry in California, one that’s heavily regulated and taxed, with revenue reaching several billion dollars per year. The day has been long anticipated by cannabis advocates who pushed for voters to pass Proposition 64 in November 2016, largely decriminalizing marijuana and...

The new year in California brings broad legalization of recreational marijuana – a much-anticipated move two decades after the state was the first to allow the use of the drug for medicinal purposes. California joins states such as Colorado -- as well as Washington, D.C. -- where pot is permitted for recreational purposes even as the federal government continues to regard the drug as a controlled dangerous substance, like LSD and heroin.

A gunman shot and killed a deputy, and wounded four other deputies and two civilians at an apartment complex during a domestic violence call early Sunday morning, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said. About 5:15 a.m., deputies responded the Copper Canyon Apartments complex at 3404 E. County Line Road in Highlands Ranch, between Colorado and University boulevards. A gunman opened fire, hitting five deputies and two civilians. One deputy was confirmed dead and the six others were taken to hospitals, the sheriff’s office said. The gunman was shot, is believed to be dead and is “no longer a threat,” the...

A 60 Minutes/Washington Post joint investigation into the DEA's response to the opioid epidemic again finds investigators who hit a brick wall in Washington In October, we joined forces with the Washington Post and reported a disturbing story of Washington at its worst - about an act of Congress that crippled the DEA's ability to fight the worst drug crisis in American history - the opioid addiction crisis. Now, a new front of that joint investigation. It is also disturbing. It's the inside story of the biggest case the DEA ever built against a drug company: the McKesson Corporation, the...

The Honolulu Police Department has sent letters to local medical marijuana patients ordering them to “voluntarily surrender” their firearms because of their MMJ status.

The White House says the true cost of the opioid drug epidemic in 2015 was $504 billion, or roughly half a trillion dollars. In an analysis to be released Monday, the Council of Economic Advisers says the figure is more than six times larger than the most recent estimate. The council said a 2016 private study estimated that prescription opioid overdoes, abuse and dependence in the U.S. in 2013 cost $78.5 billion. Most of that was attributed to health care and criminal justice spending, along with lost productivity.

Mass shootings in America are getting deadlier. Of the 30 deadliest shootings in the US dating back to 1949, 18 have occurred in the last 10 years. Two of the five deadliest took place in just the last 35 days.

It seems that many states, my home state of New Jersey included, are hell-bent on legalizing recreational use of cannabis. The arguments in favor of this, though loud and dominant in the media, are not particularly convincing. Most of the advocates tout the desire to legalize the drug so that the state can raise additional tax revenue off of the sales. Enhancing the ability of an over-bearing confiscatory high-tax state like New Jersey to extract even more revenue from its citizens is never going to be a compelling argument for me. Slightly better is the argument that legalizing the drug...

Cannabis users are more likely to commit violent crime, pioneering research has shown. It warned those who smoke the drug regularly run an increased risk of using violence against others. The project is the first to demonstrate that cannabis is not only linked with violent crime but is the cause...Researchers said that cannabis causes violence and they found no evidence that the link is the other way round – ie that violent people are more likely to use cannabis...The academics said the effect of cannabis use was clear and not diminished by other factors such as patients who were heavy...

Two other men from Los Angeles — 22-year-old German Michel-Arreola and 19-year-old Irene Michel-Arreola — were also inside the vehicle, the station reported, citing authorities. All three face felony drug charges of including manufacturing/possession/distribution of a Schedule I/II Substance, according to KDVR. The 13-year-old driver is facing additional charges for driving without a license and failing to drive in a designated lane, authorities said