Free Republic

A late-night raid in the southern Philippines left 15 people dead, including the mayor of Ozamiz City — the latest high-profile casualty of the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs. President Rodrigo Duterte is waging a bloody war on drugs in the Philippines. Last year, Duterte published a list of more than 150 government officials he accused of having ties to the drug trade. Ozamiz Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog Sr., and his daughter, Vice Mayor Nova Echaves, were on that list. Now Parojinog and his wife are dead, and Echaves is under arrest. Police raided the mayor's house overnight...

DENVER (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul courted donors from the new marijuana industry Tuesday, making the Kentucky senator the first major-party presidential candidate to publicly seek support from the legal weed business. Paul's fundraiser at the Cannabis Business Summit - tickets started at $2,700, the maximum donation allowed for the primary contest - came as the marijuana industry approached its first presidential campaign as a legal enterprise....

Sen. Rand Paul is blaming politicians for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that the criminal justice system fuels racial tension by disproportionately targeting African-Americans. The so-called war on drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation," Paul said in an op-ed published for TIME. He acknowledged that the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer wasn't related to drugs, but argued that outsized penalties for nonviolent drug crimes creates a "tension in some communities that too often results in tragedy." The comments are another attempt by Paul, a Kentucky...

A chief drugs tsar was sacked last night for claiming cannabis, Ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes. Professor David Nutt was fired after Home Secretary Alan Johnson decided he had 'no confidence' in him following his controversial remarks...

Here is what the open-borders culture of entitlement has wrought: After expressing remorse to a jury that later spared his life, a Mexican citizen who hired hit men to kill two local men did an about face during last week’s sentencing hearing by professing his innocence and railing against the American criminal justice system.In May, a Multnomah County jury found Joel Sanchez-Jacobo, 31, guilty of two counts of aggravated murder and one count of murder for soliciting two murders in 2006.But on Friday, July 18, when he appeared before Judge Michael J. McShane to hear his sentence, the man claimed...

The Drug Policy Alliance is releasing a powerful flash movie that highlights the plight of 18-year-old Mitchell Lawrence, the teen now spending two years in jail for selling one joint’s worth of marijuana to an undercover cop in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The two-minute movie introduces people to Mitchell Lawrence and the details of his case. The flash asks and then explains how an 18-year-old (he was 17 when arrested) who has never been in trouble before could be sentenced to two years in jail for selling such a minuscule amount of marijuana. The movie states: "It takes two things: A...