Free Republic

The DUI arrests,increase in college users, youth consumption, marijuana-related hospitalizations, and increasing emergency room visits of Washington and Colorado will only be amplified in California. Voters legalized pot several years ago in Colorado and Washington State. They were promised increased tax revenue increases and better-educated children for their vote. For the love of money and claims of liberty, disasters are now unfolding in both states. Now California is embarking on likely the same disastrous path, if not worse, despite copious amounts of destructive evidence.

CNN reporter Randi Kaye, sporting large marijuana leaf styled earrings, lit a bong for a pot smoker during a live report from Denver broadcast on CNN’s New Year’s Eve show Sunday night that was hosted from Times Square by Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. Kaye was also seen several times holding lit joints on air.

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.

Celebrating a major shift in cultural attitudes about cannabis — or just looking to enjoy the right to get high without legal entanglements — Californians lined up at dispensaries up and down the state Monday morning to be among the first to purchase recreational cannabis, more than a year after voters passed Prop. 64. In the pre-dawn darkness at KindPeoples collective in Santa Cruz, a line of 80 people snaked around the building before doors opened. The first sale – a eighth of a gram of indica flower called ‘Nine Pound Hammer’ – was made, to resounding applause, to UC-Santa...

California - A new study has found that smoking marijuana is increasing among pregnant women in California, which leads to health concerns about the unborn child. The study was published on Dec. 26 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, according to Fox News, and used the medical records of 279,000 women residing in California who were on Kaiser Permanente, a health care service. Women who agreed to participate were asked to answer a questionnaire when they were about eight weeks pregnant, and take a drug test to see if they tested positive for marijuana use. In the study,...

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” Asher helped establish and...

Chalfonte LeNee Queen of San Diego grappled with violent vomiting episodes for 17 years until she found out her illness was related to her marijuana use. For 17 years, Chalfonte LeNee Queen suffered periodic episodes of violent retching and abdominal pain that would knock her off her feet for days, sometimes leaving her writhing on the floor in pain. "I've screamed out for death," says Queen, 48, who lives in San Diego. "I've cried out for my mom, who's been dead for 20 years, mentally not realizing she can't come to me." Queen lost a modeling job after being...

CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) - According to court documents, a man is facing charges after striking his girlfriend, who was 37 weeks pregnant, with a baseball bat. Court documents also say he injected her with methamphetamine. 21-year-old Kyle Wilson Stowers, is now facing charges of malicious wounding.

That represents nearly 80 percent of the commutations the president has given since August. Commutations are a form of clemency, which reduces the sentences of federal prisoners. President Obama has given more commutations then the past 11 presidents combined, and The New York Times reports he plans to give more before his final day in office. Many of these cocaine dealers who have received clemency from Obama were not low-level criminals. Darryl Reed was sentenced to 35 years in 1990 and will now be released from federal prison on Dec. 28, 2016. Reed used to be known as the “crack...

Sheriff's deputies in York County, Neb., stopped a pickup truck on Tuesday when they noticed it driving over the center line and the driver failing to signal. During the traffic stop, deputies noticed a strong smell of raw marijuana, the sheriff's department says. Patrick Jiron, 80, and Barbara Jiron, 83, said they were from northern California and were en route to Boston and Vermont. Deputies asked the driver, Patrick Jiron, about the odor, and he admitted to having contraband in the truck and consented to a search of the vehicle. With the help of the county's canine unit, deputies searched...

At first glance, it looked like Greg Perdue was stretching. The 58-year-old sat cross-legged on the matted wall-to-wall carpet in his Aberdeen, Maryland, apartment, a head of shaggy, graying hair bent toward his knees. But when medical examiners gingerly turned him over, they found his bloated face was a deep purple, his nose and mustache covered with crusted blood. Next to a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table were three clear pill capsules: two empty, one containing an off-white powder that was later identified as heroin. After being prescribed painkillers to treat a work injury, he started snorting heroin...

Albanian-American roofer Florin Krasniqi has been living in Brooklyn and smuggling American guns into Kosovo to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army--this time for war against its erstwhile saviors, NATO and the UN. The KLA are the bin Laden-trained, Iran-backed narco-terrorists whose 1999 jihad against the Christian Serbs we helped fight, abetting secession and creating a mono-ethnic terror haven and future Islamic republic in Europe. Krasniqi, who raised $30 million from fellow Albanian-Americans to help finance the KLA's war, is the subject of a documentary by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns, titled "The Brooklyn Connection," which will air Tuesday night at 10...

It took Abigail Bautista less than a month of living in Langley Park to learn that her new neighborhood in Maryland had its own set of laws, written not in statutes but in gang graffiti and blood. The Guatemalan mother of five was pushing a cart of merchandise along University Boulevard one winter morning in late 2012 when three young men approached. “Do you know who we are?” one asked her in Spanish. Bautista shook her head. “We are La Mara Salvatrucha,” he said. “And here, there are rules.”

A new Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) office on the front lines of the opioid crisis will aim to tackle exploding drug overdose death rates and Mexican drug trafficking, according to its chief-in-waiting, DEA agent D. Christopher Evans. Evans, who currently serves as Associate Special Agent in Charge of the Detroit field office, will move up to the role of Special Agent in Charge of the DEA's new Louisville division. That office, which was announced earlier this month, will be the 22nd field office in the DEA's network. It will combine DEA operations in the states of Kentucky, West Virginia, and...

<p>LANCASTER — Los Angeles County authorities say two parents have been arrested on suspicion of trying to sell their two sons for drugs.</p> <p>Sheriff's officials said Monday that deputies responded last week to a home in the Mojave Desert city of Lancaster following reports of possible child abuse.</p>

Eric Hargan is about to get a demotion, and he is just fine with that. The acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is more than thrilled to go back to the position he originally held. President Trump tapped him to lead the agency after Tom Price resigned when scrutiny of his travel habits revealed a taste for the excess. "I was confirmed for my job as deputy secretary, and four days later, I was appointed to be the acting secretary," he said of the agency that oversees drug development, public health efforts, Obamacare and food safety....

Congress is ending the year with battles over tax reform and how to fund the government into next year. Another battle being fought is over the future of medical marijuana in America.The Justice Department is working overtime to remove a restriction in current law that prevents the federal government from prosecuting medical marijuana businesses in states where it has been made legal. The problem is that if the Department of Justice is successful, it would undermine a number of promises that President Donald J. Trump made on the campaign trail.A coalition of federalist-minded conservatives and libertarians have voiced strong support...

Jury selection is underway in the trial of Darien Allen, the former Passaic housing authority chairman and city school district employee who is charged with dealing cocaine and possession of an illegal handgun. Allen, 47, is due back in Superior Court on Tuesday morning for a second day of jury selection with Judge Sohail Mohammed presiding. More than three years after his arrest, Allen will get the chance to defend himself against drug-dealing and weapons charges that could send him to prison for 10 years or more. "He maintains he is innocent of all the charges," said his attorney, Miles...

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — A Middletown mother of nine has died of a heroin overdose, and police want to give her young children a better Christmas. Police were called to a house on Yankee Road on Wednesday and found Jimeta Sanders, 31, unresponsive on the kitchen floor. Authorities said she was shooting heroin with her “supposed ‘friends,’ who then in turn left her to die in front of her nine kids.” Police said the “friends” – described as two males -- then stole her money and left the home, telling the children they were leaving to buy a 2-liter of soda....