Free Republic

EDITOR’S NOTE: This past Sunday, the editorial board of the New York Times endorsed the federal legalization of marijuana. In the February 12, 1996, issue of National Review, this publication’s editors endorsed the same concept in an introduction to a symposium on the question. The editorial and WFB’s contribution to the symposium follow: National Review has attempted during its tenure as, so to speak, keeper of the conservative tablets to analyze public problems and to recommend intelligent thought. The magazine has acknowledged a variety of positions by right-minded thinkers and analysts who sometimes reach conflicting conclusions about public policy. As...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Sen. Rand Paul yesterday introduced S. 2644, the FAIR (Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration) Act, which would protect the rights of citizens and restore the Fifth Amendment's role in seizing property without due process of law. Under current law, law enforcement agencies may take property suspected of involvement in crime without ever charging, let alone convicting, the property owner. In addition, state agencies routinely use federal asset forfeiture laws; ignoring state regulations to confiscate and receive financial proceeds from forfeited property. The FAIR Act would change federal law and protect the rights of property owners by requiring that...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Honduran President Juan Hernandez blamed U.S. drug policy for sparking violence in Central American countries and driving a surge of migration to the United States, according to an interview published on Monday. Hernandez, who took office in January after winning on a pledge to be tough on crime, said only a drop in violence would curb the wave of families and unaccompanied minors fleeing Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras who have overwhelmed temporary detention facilities on the U.S. border. "Honduras has been living in an emergency for a decade," Hernandez told Mexican daily newspaper Excelsior. "The...

Wage war on everything? Expect casualties everywhere. And refugees from all over the place. Continue the wars we admit to be un-winnable and never-ending? Then expect, also, to find new victims cropping up all the time, and in unpredictable corners. New enemies, too. The lesson is: choose your wars carefully. The result of not doing that? The current border crisis: Refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Under-age refugees. Children. Unaccompanied minors from the most recent high impact area of America’s insane “War on Drugs.” Can this really be relevant? Yes. For most of us in America, the War on...

Drug charges against a prominent Leesburg businessman were dropped today prior to a preliminary hearing in Loudoun County General District Court due to a lack of evidence. Thomas C. Watson, 41, was arrested March 19 on charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession with intent to distribute after police said a package with oxycodone and MDMA was delivered to his Leesburg home. ... “He did not accept the packages - in fact he rejected them. He wrote on the packages 'Return to Sender' and 'Wrong Recipient.' They were placed in his car to take to the post office...

Here’s a question for the proud Americans demanding that the unaccompanied foreign children showing up at our borders be deported: Suppose that one of these “illegal” minors was your neighbor, living with his aunt and uncle, going to school during the day, kicking ball with friends in the evening, trying hard to put the traumatic journey from his native, violence-ridden country to America behind him. Would you, with a clear conscience, pick up the phone and turn him in? If the answer is “no,” then it is time for you to throw out your “Return to Sender” signs. Why? Because...

An officer believed they were acting in an aggressive manner," said Sgt. Paul Paulos, a St. Paul police spokesman. "He thought he'd be bit or the dogs would bite one of the team members." Perry and her fiance, Larry L. Arman, said the dogs had been sleeping by the front door and did nothing more than bark when police used a ram to break down the door of their home to execute a search warrant. The warrant wasn't publicly available in court as of Thursday. Perry and Arman said it indicated police were looking for marijuana, drug packaging, weighing equipment,...

Police in Maryland have charged three people in connection with manufacturing MDMA, commonly referred to as Molly or the drug ecstasy, including a doctor who has a long-standing history of drug problems. Baltimore County cops said a drug investigation led to a search warrant and the arrest of Dr. Priscilla Sheldon-Cost, 51, at a house in Towson. Detectives found chemicals that can be used to manufacture MDMA and ecstasy were being created in a lab in the basement. Some of the substances that were found had even been labelled with MDMA written on it. 'They found chemicals that, when mixed,...

After our house burned down in Wisconsin a few months ago, my husband and I packed our four young kids and all our belongings into a gold minivan and drove to my sister-in-law’s place, just outside of Atlanta. On the back windshield, we pasted six stick figures: a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy. That minivan was sitting in the front driveway of my sister-in-law’s place the night a SWAT team broke in, looking for a small amount of drugs they thought my husband’s nephew had. Some of my kids’ toys were in the front yard,...

On Friday, Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Corey Booker (D-NJ) offered a medical marijuana amendment on the floor of the Senate. The bill is a massive win for states’ rights, as it outlaws the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency from undermining state marijuana laws and prohibits the DEA from interfering with the production of hemp in states where it is legal. There is simply no reason the federal government should be trampling over state laws to perform armed SWAT-team raids on state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries. Destroying property and hauling entrepreneurs off to jail is not the proper...

Two people have been arrested in connection with the seizure of 19 marijuana plants, growing equipment and prescription pills at their Mandeville home, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office said. Members of the St. Tammany Parish Narcotics Task Force executed a search warrant May 21 on the home at 543 Cedarwood Drive after receiving information about a man named "Scooby'' selling marijuana at a Mandeville area car wash, the sheriff's office said.Scooby was later identified as Deshun Jones, 25. Detectives observed him at the car wash, then followed him home and arrested him. Jones initially provided authorities with a fake...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said asking whether a politician has ever tried marijuana is a "worthless question" in American politics.Rubio, a potential 2016 candidate for president, has consistently dodged the question about if he experimented with the drug as a younger man. In an interview that aired Monday from ABC News-Yahoo News, Rubio reiterated that answering the question honestly is a lose-lose."Here is the problem with that question in American politics," he said. "If you say that you did, suddenly there are people out there saying it is not a big deal, look at all these successful people who did...

Obama’s military contracting with Taliban Heroin smugglers in Afghanistan By Randall Stevens TCS NEWS Qatar, NATO, and the NLC Given the Qatari connections to al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, terrorism, and the Arab Spring (which was a deliberate program to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda), it is disturbing enough that the American military presence in the Gulf has been adopted by the ruling al-Thanis. But the clear line from Qatar to al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the incredible manifestation of corruption within the US military and NATO is even more glaring. The NLC, the same Taliban heroin...

In Huntsville, Alabama police are facing no charges whatsoever after allegedly killing a 17 year old boy while trying to find drugs in his throat with a sharp object. Mainstream media won’t touch the story, and of course, independent media fueled by citizen journalists broke this to the public, releasing the 16 page wrongful death suit filed by the teen’s mother, Nancy Smith. According to the autopsy: “Because of the circumstances of this event, it is difficult to discern if the decedent died from a drug overdose or an asphyxia event exacerbated by either the occlusion of the airway by...

Alleged enforcers for a Mexican cartel were reportedly involved in the kidnapping and torture of U.S. teenagers over methamphetamine in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. The U.S. Attorney’s office omitted Mexican cartel involvement in their official press release on the case. The official press release was titled, "Four Indicted for Drug Trafficking Crimes Involving a Violent Kidnapping in St. Paul" and only identified the perpetrators as being from U.S. cities. There were no mentions of Mexico, cartels, or even a transnational criminal organization—the DOJ agency simply omitted the vital information amid national discussions of...

**SNIP** Leo Sharp was hauling 104 bricks of cocaine (over 200 pounds) on a highway near Chelsea, Mich., when he was pulled over in 2011 for an illegal lane change. **SNIP** Sharp received numerous decorations for valor for his service with the Army's 88th Infantry during its nearly year-long march through Italy to Austria in 1944 and 1945, military records show.

The Justice Department is broadening the criteria it will use in evaluating clemency petitions from certain federal prisoners and expects the changes to result in thousands of new applications, Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday. The new criteria, which will be detailed later this week and are aimed at inmates serving time for nonviolent drug offenses, are intended to lead to a reduction in the nation’s federal prison population and also “ensure that those who have paid their debts have a chance to become productive citizens,” Holder said in a video message. The announcement is part of an ongoing Obama...

Casual marijuana use may come with some not-so-casual side effects. For the first time ever, researchers at Northwestern University have analyzed the relationship between casual use of marijuana and brain changes—and found that young adults who used cannabis just once or twice a week showed significant abnormalities in two important brain structures. The study’s findings, to be published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, are similar to those of past research linking chronic, long-term marijuana use with mental illness and changes in brain development. …

DENVER (MainStreet) — It's something Colorado's legalized marijuana industry did not want to see: a college student tried a cannabis edible product and inexplicably jumped to his death. ... "There is a groundswell building to repeal it," he said. "It's going to continue to lose support because there are going to be more harms coming from it, large and small." ... "Increasingly, we are contacted by parents, desperate to learn more," he writes on his blog. "Their typical and tragic messages go something like this: "We never knew. We thought marijuana wasn't even addictive and that it was less harmful...

MOSCOW, March 26. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian and US anti-drug agencies will continue their usual cooperation, the head of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN) Viktor Ivanov said. “This is the first meeting that I’ve chaired under the sanctions regime,” he said on Wednesday. At the same time, he said, “We are not planning to curtail cooperation. Our US colleagues share our view.” “I hope that these are temporary problems,” Ivanov said.