Free Republic

In a comment I just laid down in another thread, I had a scary thought. The violence in the country right now is boiling over. There is a civil war now in effect (By it's definition) and we're exploring a new territory for today's cultures. Philando's girlfriend has a young child. That young child will.. WILL grow up to hate cops and white people. That's now that little boy's path. Crips, cop killing and crime. That's his path now. The youth that is striking out were raised by parents who were exposed to laughable black anti-culture like Diff'rent strokes and...

A famously-rude Kiwi politician has proposed a new solution to the country's dire child abuse problem - sterilise the "underclass". Michael Laws - who stirred up contempt by calling the late Tongan King a "bloated brown slug" - has again hit headlines for the wrong reasons. The regional mayor claimed that the children of social security beneficiaries, drug addicts and criminals had little chance in life and were prime targets for child abuse. Sterilising their parents was the best solution, he brazenly suggested. "If we gave $10,000 to certain people and said 'we'll voluntarily sterilise you' then all of society...

WASHINGTON — For decades, health experts have tried to determine why African-American babies are twice as likely to die as white infants. A new series of studies from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Health Policy Institute, along with a small but growing number of neonatalogists nationwide, suggests that the stressful effects of racism play a role. "That's the elephant in the room," said Michael Lu, an obstetrician-gynecologist and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies disparities in infant health. "When we're studying racial disparities, for decades people have looked at stress and infant...

As a member of the baby boomer generation, I, like many of my cohorts, experimented with marijuana in my youth. Many people, like me, even inhaled it and found it quite enjoyable. But these days we are warned that marijuana is "more dangerous" than ever, and that our youth is in grave danger because today's weed is up to 30 times more powerful than weed in the '60s and '70s. We're being told that we must protect the children and that we should join the chorus of voices pounding it into our children's heads that drugs are bad. First, I...

Illicit drugs are in the news again, with talk of creating safe injection sites in major metropolitan centres, and the potential decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. These discussions cause me a certain amount of personal turmoil. I have written in this space before about my own negative experiences with substance abuse, as well as my belief that all drugs should be decriminalized and regulated. I continue to struggle to reconcile these apparently opposing views on illicit drugs. I'm not a believer of the 'harmless' theory of marijuana use. I'm one of those guys whose...

<p>HOLYOKE, Mass. (AP) -- The Department of Social Services is looking into a possible case of child abuse after a 4-year-old girl brought her teacher a small bag of marijuana as a gift.</p> <p>When Head Start Early Childhood Center teacher Iris Galvez asked where she got the gift Monday, the girl said she got it "from her mommy," according to a police report obtained by the Union-News of Springfield.</p>

The parents of a Grade 6 student have pulled their daughter out of a "Substance Use and Abuse" class at a Hamilton school after a teacher gave a step-by-step lesson on how to snort cocaine. Linda Harley, mother of Caitlin, an 11-year-old girl who attended Chedoke Middle School, said the teacher used white chalk to first draw a circle on the blackboard to represent a mirror or piece of glass, a surface from which cocaine is often inhaled. The teacher then drew dots on the circle to represent the white powder and students were shown how the dots are pushed...

A Traverse City judge who admitted smoking marijuana at a Rolling Stones concert is scheduled to begin hearing cases Monday. District Judge Thomas Gilbert has been on voluntary leave since November sixth. He was in a 28 day alcohol rehabilitation program. Gilbert will hear only civil cases such as small claims and landlord-tenant disputes in his first week back. After a two week vacation, he'll begin hearing criminal cases but not those involving drunken driving or marijuana. Gilbert has called the incident at the October 12th concert in Detroit the stupidest thing he's ever done. Both the local bar association...

Eugene, Oregon's, Whiteaker neighborhood sounded like a war zone around dawn on October 17, and residents are fighting mad. It wasn't a terrorist attack, though, just another example of a drug war run amok. Police serving a search warrant for an alleged marijuana grow enlisted an armored personnel carrier and 45 SWAT team officers armed with shotguns and automatic rifles to raid a cluster of houses in Whiteaker. But after throwing flash-bang grenades, kicking in doors, and handcuffing four people -- including one nude woman and one woman dressed only in underpants and a t-shirt -- for hours in a...

e interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban — helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws. Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full...