Free Republic

Like a cocaine-fueled Homeric epic, Colombia’s long tragic battle with the drug cartels has produced countless heroes and villains. But one figure cutting across the country’s current narco battlefield, a name drawing praise and hate alike, is actually a 6-year-old German shepherd you can find trotting through the country’s airports. Sombra — “shadow” in English — is a drug-detection dog with the Colombian National Police. Over the past few years, her radar nose has led to more than 200 arrests and the seizure of at least nine tons of illicit drugs. That success has turned the dog into something of...

Christ came to me emblazoned on the upper arm of my beloved cousin Marc. The blue-black ink danced between the bullet scars and stretch marks that graced my cousin’s upper body. Atop this crown-of-thorns depiction was a tattooed banner with the phrase “Only God Can Judge Me.” Marc—like several men in my family—had been caught in the webbed threads of poverty, geography and lack of opportunity during the fever pitch of 1990s mass incarceration. Baggy-pant boys like him fit the descriptions of “super-predators” and “thugs” that dominated our national discourse at the time. Marc served his time, and has been...

President Trump said he likely will support a congressional effort to end the federal ban on marijuana, a major step that would reshape the pot industry and end the threat of a Justice Department crackdown. Trump’s remarks put him sharply at odds with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on the issue. The bill in question, pushed by a bipartisan coalition, would allow states to go forward with legalization unencumbered by threats of federal prosecution. Trump made his comments to a gaggle of reporters Friday morning just before he boarded a helicopter on his way to the G-7 summit in Canada. His...

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. (CBS12) — A man and woman from central Florida are facing charges after their 8-month-old baby overdosed on drugs, the Brevard County Sheriff's Office said. Authorities arrested 29-year-old David Williams Chappele Jr. and 27-year-old Jessica Marie Strickland of Cocoa on charges of aggravated manslaughter of a child. The investigation began in September when deputies responded to a call about an unresponsive baby at a home in Cocoa. The baby died later at the hospital. The medical examiner, according to the sheriff's office, said the baby died from an overdose of cocaine and fentanyl.

Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and AG Jeff Sessions are working hand-in-hand on dismantling the Deep State. Deep State corruption is deep and embedded. No normal investigation is going to cut it. Enter The Donald. Critics of Sessions need to understand that Sessions is a prosecutor in the traditional, Wyatt Earp sense. He doesn't camera hog He rarely gives press releases, media interviews, or conferences. He does the work diligently behind the scenes. Why (Nicolas Cage from the movie "The Rock" here) IN ZEUS' BUTTHOLE! is Sessions all of a sudden a Deep State mole, when for years he's been a...

ROCK HILL, S.C. - A Rock Hill woman walked up to meet her mail carrier thinking the yoga mat she ordered from Walmart had arrived. Instead, the postal worker handed her a heavy box, and a bag of pills, that had spilled from it. In all, there were more than 20,000 oxycodone pills, worth roughly $400,000. The woman who received the package lives in a neighborhood off Ebinport Road. She didn't want to go on camera, but told Channel 9 there were so many pills, they were spilling from the packaging. She immediately called police. York County drug agents gave...

The major problem is federal law, so change itHaving abandoned much of the Reagan way — the sunny disposition, free trade, the unshakeable commitment to America’s global leadership — the Trump administration has now embraced the worst of the Reagan legacy: deficits, for one thing, and the so-called war on drugs, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions means to fight with atavistic rigor. In the 22 years since the editors of this magazine declared “The War on Drugs Is Lost,” the United States has lurched, spasmodically, toward a new settlement on drugs, especially on marijuana. Republicans, ranging from libertarian-leaning figures such...

A Buffalo Township couple is suing the township police and the Nationwide Insurance Co. after, their lawsuit says, hibiscus plants growing in their backyard were mistaken for marijuana plants. In a lawsuit, Edward Cramer, 69, and his wife, Audrey Cramer, 66, claim that Buffalo Township police handcuffed them both and made them sit in the back of a police car for hours last month as police ransacked their house looking for marijuana. But rather than running a pot-growing operation, the Cramers say they grow flowering hibiscus in their backyard. The Cramers were not charged. They filed a civil lawsuit Thursday...

Disturbing news has emerged that Lil Peep has passed away at age 21. According to early reports, the rapper overdosed on xanax and fentanyl pills before his concert in Tuscon, Arizona on Wednesday night. A Reddit user has compiled a timeline of the night’s events, claiming that Bexxey, one of Peep’s best friends, was seen outside the show venue in a state of shock. The likes of Lil Yachty, Post Malone, Father and Lil Pump have posted their condolences via Twitter. Lil Peep, whose music blends rap with rock samples and features dark lyrical content, was active on Instagram just...

When Maximo Garcia heard that he was on a list of local drug suspects in Mayombo, he tried to clear his name with the police chief, explaining that he no longer used drugs and had never sold them. Four days later, the Philippine news site Rappler reports, a masked gunman shot up Garcia's house as he and his family were eating lunch, wounding him and killing his 5-year-old granddaughter. So it goes in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, which has claimed somewhere between 7,000 and 13,000 lives since he took office in June 2016. Although Duterte's bloody crusade...

Last weekend got downright bizarre in the eastern Missouri town of Sullivan, and police say they know why. Four people went on a rampage, barking and yelling, breaking into buildings, even stripping off their clothes and showering in soda water, police say. They suspect the synthetic drug flakka is behind the behavior. “We had multiple incidents this past weekend of people on some kind of substance acting out of their minds,” Sullivan Police Lt. Patrick Johnson told the Sullivan Independent News. “Barking like dogs, running up and down the street, or other farm animals, entering people’s homes, breaking into a...

The US government has created a business out of putting people in jail, a quite lucrative one at that. Privately run prisons thrive due to those minimum sentencing practices, while taxpayers pay for often disproportionately long prison times for people that are no immediate harm to anyone but themselves. And as a reaction those individuals are persecuted to the fullest extent, lives are being destroyed, and the nation’s workforce is diminished while the costs are paid by society. Instead of a helping hand, the U.S. has introduced the tradition of handing out handcuffs to those related to drugs. And that...

Mexican police discovered four men carting a kamikaze drone equipped with an IED and a remote detonator last week, in what analysts say is an example of cartels figuring out how to weaponizing UAVs. The disturbing development is a manifestation of something top American security chiefs warned Congress about earlier this year, when they said they feared terrorists would begin to use drones to attack targets within the U.S.

The war on drugs has been going on since 1971, and we have a winner: marijuana. Back then, possession of pot carried heavy penalties in many states -- even life imprisonment. Today, 29 states sanction medical use of cannabis, and eight allow recreational use. Legal weed has become about as controversial as Powerball. One sign of the shift came in Wednesday's debate among the Democrats running for governor of Illinois. The state didn't get its first medical marijuana dispensary until 2015, and it decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot only last year. But most of the candidates endorsed legalization...

Police say a Florida woman invited the father of her 4-year-old daughter to join her for "one last drug binge" before she entered a rehab program. But 29-year-old Joseph Beavins overdosed sometime Sunday night and now 23-year-old Taylor Cheyenne Perry is facing a child neglect charge. The child found Beavins unresponsive early Monday. Perry and the girl left, but she called for an ambulance for Beavins. It's not known whether she has a lawyer. The Department of Children and Families took the child.

The police report would claim it all kicked off at 7:38 a.m., but Bob Harte later thought it had to be earlier. His 7:20 a.m. alarm had just yanked him awake. Got to get the kids — a boy in seventh grade, a girl in kindergarten — ready for school. Then he heard, like a starter's pistol setting everything into motion, the first pounding on the front door of his home in Leawood, Kansas, a bedroom suburb south of Kansas City. It was thunderous. It didn't stop. Should I get up? Bob thought. Should I not? Sounded like the house...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Latest on Nevada becoming the fifth state in the U.S. with stores selling marijuana for recreational purposes (all times local): Minnesota resident Edgar Rosas Lorenzo on Saturday flew with his family to Sin City for a wedding. But even before he checked in to his hotel, he stopped at a pot dispensary on the Las Vegas Strip. The 21-year-old says he learned of the legalization of recreational marijuana in Nevada while he was at the airport waiting for his flight to depart. He waited in line about 40 minutes before he could buy one-eighth of...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asking congressional leaders to undo federal medical marijuana protections that have been in place since 2014, according to a May letter that became public Monday. The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, prohibit the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent certain states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana." In his letter, first obtained by Tom Angell of Massroots.com and verified independently by The Washington Post, Sessions argued that the amendment would "inhibit [the Justice Department's] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act."...

U.S. Border Patrol agents are once again sounding the alarm about miles of border being left wide open and unsecured. Breitbart Texas exclusively obtained a document showing a Havre Sector Border Patrol manager knowingly issuing orders to leave 40 miles of border open and unpatrolled. Obama holdovers in the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency are continuing with the same careless disregard in the Trump Administration that they did under former resident Obama, according to Border Patrol agents. Breitbart Texas has the specific order that was given to the agents signed by the Obama-holdover manager. The order demands that agents...

Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Sunday that marijuana is "not a factor" in the war on drugs and that solving the nation's drug problem does not involve "arresting a lot of users." Kelly, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," was discussing his work to stop the flow of drugs into the United States from Central America and Mexico when host Chuck Todd asked whether legalizing marijuana would help or hurt his work. "Yeah, marijuana is not a factor in the drug war," Kelly responded, adding later: "It's three things. Methamphetamine. Almost all produced in Mexico. Heroin. Virtually...