Free Republic

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL—Governor Ron DeSantis is worried that if marijuana (pot) is legalized in Florida, the whole Sunshine State will smell like pot. “It’s basically a license to have it anywhere you want. No time, place, and manner restrictions. This state will start to smell like marijuana in our cities and towns, it will reduce the quality of life,” DeSantis said at a Thursday press conference in Fort Lauderdale. The Florida Supreme Court voted Monday in a 5-2 decision to allow recreational marijuana on the November general election ballot. The measure—Amendment 3—would legalize recreational use for adults 21 and over...

A study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association and funded by the National Institutes of Health found that those who smoke weed daily are at a significantly higher risk of suffering heart attack and stroke than those who don’t. “We know that toxins are released when cannabis is burned, similar to those found in tobacco smoke,” said Abra Jeffers, a data analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and former researcher at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, where the study was based. “We’ve known for a long...

Mike Tyson calls out Joe Biden.Legendary boxer Mike Tyson has long been an advocate for cannabis and now owns a cannabis company called “Tyson 2.0.” As a result, he’s now calling out United States President Joe Biden for failing to uphold his campaign promise to release incarcerated marijuana offenders. In a recent letter to Joe Bide and the White House, Mike Tyson called on the president to offer clemency to all those incarcerated on charges related to marijuana. “I write in support of granting clemency to marijuana offenders still incarcerated in federal prison and restoring civil rights to those haunted...

A California woman who stabbed a man she was dating 100 times and killed him, before turning the knife on herself and her dog, has been handed 100 hours of community service. Bryn Spejcher, 32, was given the astonishingly low sentence following psychiatrists' ruling that the tragedy was '100 percent' caused by cannabis-induced psychosis, which she suffered after taking two hits of the victim's bong. The judge ruled that Spejcher 'experienced a psychotic break from reality' and 'had no control over her actions' when she killed Chad O'Melia, then 26, on Memorial Day weekend 2018. She will spend the 100...

President Joe Biden took major action ahead of the holiday and pardoned all Americans arrested, prosecuted, or convicted on federal charges for marijuana use, following through on his 2020 campaign promise to expunge cannabis use offenses. Biden signed a proclamation Friday that forgives U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents caught by law enforcement for possessing the drug and charged, going far beyond the sweeping actions he took last year for thousands of people convicted of possession. The new action includes "additional offenses of simple possession and use of marijuana under federal and D.C. law," the White House said in a...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Voters in Ohio have approved an initiative to become the 24th state in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana, the Associated Press has projected. Issue 2 passed on Tuesday’s ballot to allow adult-use sale, purchase and possession of cannabis for Ohioans who are 21 and older. The measure, effective 30 days after the election, permits adults to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana, up to 15 grams of marijuana concentrate and grow up to six plants at home. Those in Ohio who purchase cannabis will pay a 10% excise tax, the same rate as Michigan...

Marijuana, cannabis, pot, weed—call it what you will, the psychoactive drug is incredibly popular. This is especially true in the United States, where weed is big business. A staggering 16 percent of Americans—roughly 54 million—admit to smoking weed. In 2021, 13 percent said they smoked the drug.According to a recent Brightfield Group report, the annual revenue of the U.S. weed industry is estimated to reach $31.8 billion by the end of the year. By 2028, the industry is expected to be worth $50.7 billion. In New York City alone, legal marijuana appears set to become a $1.2 billion-a-year industryIn recent...

A nationwide social experiment launched by a wave of marijuana legalizations is finally bearing results in the form of higher depression rates and addiction. It started in 2012 in Colorado and Washington, setting off a domino effect that has seen restrictions lifted across nearly 40 states, including 23 where it's legal to use marijuana recreationally. The Biden administration now aims to demote the drug from its schedule I status, which lumped it in with heroin and LSD, to schedule III, the first step toward total decriminalization at a federal level. Marijuana has been lauded for its purported benefits for pain...

The White House is promoting President Joe Biden’s mass marijuana pardon and scheduling review directive as part of a “Fight for Our Freedom” campaign meant to “mobilize young people” as next year’s election approaches. A factsheet about the campaign that the administration published on Thursday contains a section dedicated to the president’s cannabis reform actions from late last year titled, “Addressing a Failed Approach to Marijuana.” “The criminalization of marijuana possession has upended too many lives—for conduct that is now legal in many states,” it says. “While white, Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown...

An infectious pathogen inside California’s pot farms is attacking cannabis plants and growing invisibly for months only to spoil a crop just as a farmer is ready to harvest. Scientists believe that it’s in nearly every pot farm in the state and could be causing billions of dollars in damages to the national weed economy. Hop-latent viroid, or HLVd, shrivels pot plants and reduce how much weight they produce by as much as 30%. It also destroys the amount of THC, pot’s most common active compound, that a plant produces, greatly reducing the value of affected plants. HLVd was first...

A doctor said kids think they are just smoking marijuana, but tests show fentanyl Marijuana laced with fentanyl is rising across the US, a Washington doctor has warned, after cases of the drug cocktail were found in New York, Alabama, Illinois and Louisiana. Fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid that's 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, is increasingly being mixed with other substances to make them more potent at a cheap price. Just two milligrams of fentanyl – imagine 10 to 15 grains of table salt – can prove fatal, and staggering figures showed it...

The French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau published a book called Hashish and Mental Illness in 1845, the same year that Scientific American brought out its first issue. In it, he explored his own experiences with the drug cannabis at the Paris-based Club des Hachichins—some of which took place alongside the likes of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire. Two years earlier Moreau described the “undescribable delights” of a “marvelous substance.” But in his 1845 book, he noted in great clinical detail the similarities to psychosis when ingesting high doses. Nearly two centuries later the possible link between cannabis use...

Hollywood legend Woody Harrelson said that fellow actor Matthew McConaughey is his biological half-brother. Harrelson made the claim during an interview with Esquire to promote his new HBO show, “White House Plumbers.” The statement is a follow-up to comments previously made by McConaughey last month. In a new interview with Esquire, Harrelson claims that when McConaughey was born in 1969, McConaughey’s dad told his mom, “That ain’t my son” and refused to go to the hospital with her. Harrelson said that he “knew that detail” years before Mary Kathleen McCabe insinuated she may have had an intimate relationship with Harrelson’s...

Republicans, in their unending quest to quash the tide of marijuana legalization, have latched onto the peculiar notion of canine unemployment as a rallying cry. The stage for this bizarre spectacle was Minnesota's House of Representatives, where a bill legalizing non-medical cannabis for those 21 and older recently passed by a vote of 71-59. During the pre-vote debate, Republican state Rep. Brian Johnson, who stood firmly against the bill, raised the alarm over the cost of retiring K-9s. "I did not see anything reading through the bill dealing with our K-9 units," Johnson declared. "Can you tell me how much...

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (AP) -- The father of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing claims that his son who is still on the loose is a smart and accomplished young man. Anzor Tsarnaev spoke with The Associated Press by telephone from the Russian city of Makhachkala on Friday after police said one of his sons, 26-year-old Tamerlan, had been killed in a shootout and the other, Dzhokhar, was being intensely pursued. "My son is a true angel," the elder Tsarnaev said. "Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the U.S. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to...

The Big Apple is now the Big Blunt. Not just because decriminalized marijuana led to proliferating mayhem in the five boroughs. Not just because stinky smoke hangs everywhere, seeping into subway cars and even Broadway theaters — the acrid odor I detected in the crowded men’s room of the Majestic Theatre a few weeks ago was not from “The Phantom of the Opera” smoke machine. It’s also because of a forbidden-to-utter truth, in an age where raising the minimum wage ever higher has become mantra — namely, a license to get high has turned service employees into zombies.

Figures from the National Poison Data System (NPDS) show adolescent cannabis use spiked by 245 percent between 2000 and 2020. Research findings were published on Monday in the journal Clinical Toxicology, and detail a decline in the rate of alcohol abuse over the same period. “Ethanol abuse cases exceeded the number of marijuana cases every year from 2000 until 2013,” explained study author Adrienne Hughes, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, in a release. However, “since 2014, marijuana exposure cases have exceeded ethanol cases every year, and by a greater amount each year than...

At a Nov. 15 hearing on cannabis reform at the federal level, House Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said President Joe Biden’s pardon of people convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law was “a good first step,” and added that the next step is that “cannabis must be decriminalized at the federal level as a matter of basic justice in the country.” Under current federal law, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 illegal drug, which means it has a “high potential for abuse” and is not a “currently accepted medical treatment in the U.S.,” according to Drugs.com. Other...

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Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new researchIs there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine. Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries. Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material. A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner...