Free Republic

Some good news this morning from the UK ... The ludicrous outright smoking ban and vaping restrictions (on flavors) will likely be defeated by Parliament.

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...

Angry progressive activists screeched and wailed at lawmakers during a Seattle City Council meeting in protest at a vote to recriminalize drug abuse in the crime-ridden city.In video taken at the meeting, proponents of the city's laissez-faire laws shared their anger over the 6-3 vote which they call the 'War on Drugs 2.0.' 'You have blood on your hands,' crowd members can be heard shouting at the council members following the vote in a video posted by journalist Jon Choe.

Bennie Koffa stood out in the small but growing world of Seattle homelessness. For one thing, the immigrant from West Africa always wore a suit, even in the encampments. But when he died, in a makeshift camp on the side of an industrial road near the Starbucks headquarters in Sodo, he attracted notice for a different reason. Koffa was 71. The medical examiner listed the cause of his death as “acute combined drug intoxication including fentanyl and methamphetamine.” Koffa is the oldest homeless person to die on the streets so far this year in Seattle. That even senior citizens are...

US residents are spending more money to purchase legal cannabis than they are on chocolate, craft beer and topical pain relief. A report from MJBizDaily showed Americans spent roughly $30 billion on legal marijuana in 2022 while only spending around $20 billion on chocolate. The cannabis purchases eclipsed sales of “feel-good” products, including beer, opioid medications and topical pain relief, the report stated. Though the legal purchase of marijuana is becoming increasingly popular, sales still fell behind the tobacco industry, which made around $53 billion last year despite a steady decline.

Whole Foods on Monday shut down its ritzy new flagship store in San Francisco, after just a year in operation, citing crime and safety concerns.I wrote about that astonishing event yesterday, brought on by the city's failure to enforce its own laws, noting that the company had a good customer base and had shelled out big to make the place attractive, but that was no match for the chaos the one-party government had allowed the area to fall into. Whole Foods may have had a punchbowl for themselves and its customers, but with the city's coddling of bums and criminals,...

A mysterious object in our solar system could be an alien mothership sending smaller probes to monitor the Earth, according to a new draft report co-authored by the head of the Pentagon’s UFO research office.Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, put forward the theory in a recently released, but still-unfinalized paper he wrote with a long-serving head of Harvard University’s astronomy department, Abraham Loeb.AF vets testify that UFOs shut down 10 nukes, shot missile out of skyThe paper explores the idea that extraterrestrial life is already visiting us in the form of ʻOumuamua, which in...

Walmart is closing its stores in North and Southeast Portland, saying the two locations have not met financial expectations. The retail giant said it plans to shutter the stores at the Delta Park and Eastport Plaza shopping centers, including their pharmacies, on March 24. The company said it would work with its staff to instruct customers on how to transfer prescriptions to pharmacies of their choice. “There is no single cause for why a store closes – we do a thorough review of how a store performs and weigh many factors before making the difficult decision to close a facility,”...

The fact that San Francisco tolerates people shooting up illegal drugs in areas where schoolchildren have to walk through every day is an absolute abomination. The government even gives free needles to these drug addicts!The city of San Francisco gives 4.5 million free needles to illegal drug addicts every year. Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Why-San-Francisco-is-stuck-with-a-deluge-of-12952111.php The city also employs 10 people whose “sole job” is to clean up those needles from the sidewalks and other public areas. Source: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-s-new-needle-cleanup-team-to-get-van-and-branded-jackets/article_2bfad05e-f553-53f0-ae08-571d48d93221.html Here’s a video about these free needles, and the city employees who clean them up, from the San Francisco affiliate of CBS News:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZCC4bY33iMAnd most...

Portland's open-air drug market is laid bare as people smoke heroin on the streets and needles litter the sidewalks as city officials start homeless sweeps while a nearby city's mayoral candidate 'wants to round them up and use 'Japanese-style pods' to house them. New photos taken by DailyMail.com show the current situation in Portland, a city that has been plagued with homelessness and addicts openly using drugs in broad daylight. Users were seen injecting themselves, slumping over in a semi-comatose state. Discarded needles, human waste and the smell of urine adds another layer of tarnish to city's progressive policies -...

New St. Louis Hiking Club 'Fat Stoner Babes' Welcomes the UnathleticOn May 11, Amber Strautkalns put out a call on Reddit. As a mom of three, Strautkalns sought an inclusive group of like-minded introverts she could enjoy the outdoors with. The only groups she could find were helmed by fitness junkies with washboard abs. “Fat stoner babes hiking club??” She wrote. “Where do I find them? Or do I need to create?!?!” Strautkalns answered her own question two days later after an outpouring of people said they wanted the same thing. She designed a graphic and posted it on social...

Video PhiladelphiaThis video depicts the depravation currently taking place in Philadelphia. The government has almost lost control. Note the closed shops and the laughable "No Tents" signs Video Los AngelesThis video depicts mile after mile of squatters encamped on public lands. Shops are closed and shuttered. What was once a city is now dead

South Philadelphia residents are outraged after a federal judge cleared the way for a safe injection site in the city. The planned site is not where it was originally proposed and some of the neighbors from the new location are not happy. Councilman Mark Squilla says the site will be at Constitution Health Plaza, near Broad and McKean Streets, in South Philadelphia. During Wednesday’s contentious press conference, promised facts about the forthcoming opening of the city’s first injection site were overshadowed by a lot of back and forth between angry community members and the heads of nonprofit agency Safehouse, which...

... Skid Row is the epicenter of L.A.’s addiction crisis. More than 12,000 homeless meth and heroin addicts pass through here each year, with thousands living in the vast network of tent encampments that line the sidewalks. For decades, L.A. has centralized public services in this tiny city-within-a-city. The result: it’s become an iron cage of the social state, with the highest concentration of homelessness, addiction, and overdose deaths in Los Angeles County. Fire Station 9, which covers Skid Row, is now the busiest firehouse in America, responding to 35,518 calls for service last year, including a record-high number of...

Students on the Auraria campus in Denver say they are concerned about their safety due to a large number of homeless people camping out in buildings on campus, defecating in public areas and sleeping in elevators. The campus -- located immediately southwest of downtown -- is home to the Community College of Denver, the University of Colorado Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver. Cameron Malby is a senior at CU Denver. He says he's seen arrests and confrontations involving homeless people on campus. "He was just looking for a place to sleep. Everyday you go in the Tivoli (Student...

On January 1, 2014, Colorado legalized the medical and recreational use of Marijuana. They claimed that it would add millions of dollars to the state’s revenue via state taxes which includes a 2.9% sales tax, 10% special sales tax and 15% excise tax, meaning the state would collect $27.90 for every $100 of recreational marijuana sold in the Rocky Mountain state. In April 2014, 19 year old foreign exchange student Levy Thamba plunged off a hotel balcony and died after eating legally purchased marijuana laced cookies. After eating just one cookie, Thamba became agitated and ran out onto the balcony...

Users of cannabis, cocaine and heroin are victims of discrimination and should no longer be called druggies or junkies, an international drug legalisation pressure group declared yesterday. It called for an end to negative language for drug users and their habits in order to ensure their human rights are respected. As part of the drive to persuade people to think differently about drugs, the words addict and even drug user must be thrown out, a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy said. It urged newspapers and broadcasters to encourage more positive attitudes by calling a drug user a...

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...

As canna-business strategist Elise McRoberts walked across an animal skin rug and into the living room of a Pacific Heights home for the recent San Francisco launch of Beboe, an upscale cannabis brand from Los Angeles, she assumed she would see the usual faces on the marijuana circuit — growers, dispensary owners and cannabis chefs. Instead, the party was a cross-pollination of the worlds of high society, Silicon Valley, politics, fashion and design: industrial designer Yves Béhar, former Mayor Willie Brown, who carried decriminalization bills in the state assembly in the 1970s, philanthropists Katie and Todd Traina, boutique owner Emily...

For many, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is The Beatles at their best. When it came out on 1 June 1967 it was unlike anything that had come before it. Experimental and immersive, it pushed musical boundaries. Half a century on, it remains one of the most influential albums of all time, as Beatles author Steve Turner explains: "It was artistically aspirational at a time when most of their contemporaries were still playing beat music of some kind or another. "They had these great ambitions. Paul was starting to go to the theatre, George was listening to Indian music,...