Free Republic

Nevada is known for gambling, 24-hour liquor sales and legal prostitution. Yet the main group opposing Question 7, an initiative on the state's ballot next month that would allow the sale and possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by adults 21 or older, is called the Committee to Keep Nevada Respectable. In Colorado, opponents of Amendment 44, which would eliminate penalties for adults possessing an ounce or less of marijuana, are equally certain of their own rectitude. "Those who want to legalize drugs weaken our collective struggle against this scourge," declares the Colorado Drug Investigators Association. "Like a...

Music taste 'linked to drug use' Club music fans are more likely to take drugs, the study says More than a quarter of classical music fans have tried cannabis, says a study from the University of Leicester. Researchers were trying to find out what people's taste in music revealed about their lifestyles. They discovered that fans of every style of music had taken drugs, with those who preferred DJ-based club music topping the list. The study also revealed that blues buffs are the most likely to have received a driving penalty. Mild-mannered fans More than 2,500 people were interviewed for...

Today in north Georgia, DEA agents swept down on a house after learning that the suspects who had been growing pot in a nearby field were staying in the house. What they found inside the home turned out to be the "mother load". Inside the home they found the largest stash of Methamphetamine in US history. Agents estimate the street value of the meth at $50 million. This bust comes only a few weeks after another meth bust in Georgia which ranked in the top ten in US history. The suspects in both drug busts have been apprehended. Much to...

It turns out that alcohol is legal for the simplest, most nostalgic, and most American reason of all. Despite its risks and harmful side-effects, adults are reserved right to drink because they are independent adults in a free country. For all of the empty rhetoric about economics and black markets, the end of Prohibition was due to a single principle: even if drinking may be bad for society, government has no right to keep the people from doing it. The ability to get drunk is an inalienable right that we have forever confirmed with the 18th Amendment.

The reporters made their way through the dim lights and small huts of Virginia City's Chinatown. In the huts, one of the reporters later wrote, "A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke--and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the...

In a large raid preceding the harvest season, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department has seized 2,500 marijuana plants with a street value estimated at up to $12.5 million. Two men found at the scattered gardens near Hyatt Lake on Monday remain in Jackson County Jail on immigration holds and the investigation is continuing, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said. Officials had watched the growing operation, believed to be linked to a Mexican drug cartel, and swept in Monday to destroy it just before harvest time, sheriff's Lt. Pat Rowland said. SWAT teams from Jackson and Douglas counties and Oregon State...

CHARDON, Ohio (AP) -- Though she's only a 6-pound Chihuahua-rat terrier mix who looks like she belongs in Paris Hilton's purse, Midge has the will, skill and nose of a 100-pound German shepherd.

Excerpt - LITTLE ROCK - Gov. Mike Huckabee, who successfully pushed for a statewide workplace smoking ban earlier this year, predicted Wednesday that cigarettes eventually won't be sold because of their health risks. "I think the day will come when we probably won't" sell cigarettes, Huckabee said on his monthly call-in radio show. "If cigarettes were introduced to the marketplace today, they wouldn't be sold. They'd never make it because what we didn't know when they were first created, sold and marketed is just how deadly harmful they were." Huckabee was responding to a caller's question of why cigarettes are...

The use of injected drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine and steroids is at an all-time high for high school seniors statewide, according to a survey released Monday by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center. The number of students injecting drugs has increased from 1.8 percent in 2001 to 2.2 percent in 2006. Statistics for the northeast part of Indiana, which includes Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wells and Whitley counties, mirrored the statewide average. “I was surprised by the injected drug use that was elevated by 12th-graders,” said Ruth Gassman, executive director of the center. Rich Beck, chief of...

Gateway to Nowhere? The evidence that pot doesn't lead to heroin. Earlier this month, professor Yasmin Hurd of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine released a study showing that rats exposed to the main ingredient in marijuana during their adolescence showed a greater sensitivity to heroin as adults. The wire lit up with articles announcing confirmation for the "gateway theory"—the claim that marijuana use leads to harder drugs. It's a theory that has long seemed to make intuitive sense, but remained unproven. The federal government's last National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted in 2004, counted about 97 million...

One of the first Shelbyville confiscations of the African drug khat occurred early Sunday morning. "Approximately 11.26 grams of a green leafy substance believed to be khat" were found in a coat pocket of Mustaf Shire Abdi, 21, Anthony Lane, Officer Tracey Nelson said. Abdi tried to pull away as Officer Benjamin Burris was checking the pocket and was immediately handcuffed, Nelson said. "Khat use is most prevalent among immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia and Yemen," a May 2003 National Drug Intelligence Center bulletin said. "These individuals use the drug in casual settings or as part of religious ceremonies. "The use...

Excuse me for a moment while I vent about the mind-boggling stupidity of the autocratic, bureaucratic, right-wing, Neanderthal numskulls who keep pushing an insane, inane, and inhumane holy war against marijuana – which is, after all, a weed. The most embarrassing thing for these holy warriors is that the weed is winning! They've been at this war since 1937, spending billions and billions of our tax dollars, militarizing our borders, and stomping on our Bill of Rights. They've used phone taps, garbage searches, jackbooted raids, and draconian prison terms to ... well, to do what? To nab peaceful, mellow tokers...

Police in France said they had thwarted an attempt by a group of marijuana smokers to roll the world's longest joint by seizing a work-in-progress measuring 80 centimetres (32 inches) in length. "At some point, these young people had wanted to craft a joint of 1.12 metres to beat the world record in the discipline and get it officially registered," said a police officer in eastern France. "We don't know who had the idea. Sometimes ideas are created in an astonishing way," he said. During an investigation targeting a group of four smokers in the eastern Vosges area of France,...

Paper on America's love affair with the SWAT team and "dynamic entry" raids. See scary accompanying map of botched no-knocks and other SWAT-style raids.

NEWARK, N.J. -- Six police officers from northern New Jersey were indicted Tuesday, accused of protecting targets of a drug ring by tipping them off about imminent raids in return for some of the drugs. What began as a "social relationship" between the officers and their young contemporaries, who would use small amount of drugs together, soon spiraled out of control, authorities said. "Several of the officers were engaging in some partying," said Passaic County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Jay McCann. "It wasn't really a drug distribution for profit. It was more of a social relationship between the officers and the...

Video news story about a young woman who faces a 25 year mandatory minimum sentence for drug trafficking. The drugs were prescription drugs (the prescription was for her mother, who had recently passed away) and none were sold. Note: I couldn't get the video to play in a Firefox tab, but it played fine using the IE Tab extension.

Close window Published online: 5 July 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060703-9 Rats taking cannabis get taste for heroinStudy suggests cannabis-users may be vulnerable to harder drugs.Michael HopkinNeuroscientists have found that rats are more likely to get hooked on heroin if they have previously been given cannabis. The studies suggest a biological mechanism — at least in rats — for the much-publicized effect of cannabis as a 'gateway' to harder drugs. The discovery hints that the brain system that produces pleasurable sensations when exposed to heroin may be 'primed' by earlier exposure to cannabis, say researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm,...

In what could be a coup for antimarijuana forces, new research shows that rats exposed to pot's active ingredient at an early age devour more heroin as adults than rats without early exposure. Some experts, though, say the jury is still out on whether the finding is enough to officially label marijuana a "gateway" drug. According to statistics from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, most adults who take illicit drugs start doing so in their early teens. In addition, the earlier kids start smoking dope, the more likely they are to use harder drugs later on. For example, of...

DILLON — The owner of a gun parts company that was raided last week by federal agents is proclaiming his innocence after numerous parts and records were seized from his home. Richard Celata said agents with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms went through his home and workshop near Argenta for hours on Wednesday, June 7, but didn’t find anything illegal. “We haven’t been charged with any crimes, and obviously what they found here didn’t violate any laws because I would have been arrested on the spot,” Celata, 45, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “They confiscated...

If ever a piece of legislation should pass readily through the U.S. House of Representatives, it is a measure sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., that would prevent the Department of Justice from using tax dollars to prosecute medical-marijuana patients in states that have legalized medical marijuana. Because it is a good bill, expect it to fail. Polls show that some three out of four Americans support allowing doctors to prescribe medical marijuana for patients who need it. Members must know that constituents within their districts use marijuana to control pain and nausea -- their families...