Free Republic

It seems that many states, my home state of New Jersey included, are hell-bent on legalizing recreational use of cannabis. The arguments in favor of this, though loud and dominant in the media, are not particularly convincing. Most of the advocates tout the desire to legalize the drug so that the state can raise additional tax revenue off of the sales. Enhancing the ability of an over-bearing confiscatory high-tax state like New Jersey to extract even more revenue from its citizens is never going to be a compelling argument for me. Slightly better is the argument that legalizing the drug...

Quitting finance to focus on marijuana sounds like it’s something that involves finding yourself by surfing and living in a beach hut in California. But with momentum building for the legalization of cannabis in the U.S. – 29 states and the District of Columbia have laws legalized marijuana in some form – finance professionals are increasingly viewing it as a big business opportunity. The number of jobs that the cannabis industry is creating continues to increase. New Frontier Data, a research and analytics firm, projects that the legal cannabis market will create more than 250m jobs by 2020 – more...

Republican Sen. Rand Paul joined Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand Tuesday to propose legislation to legalize medical marijuana on the federal level. The bill, termed the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States Act, would move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II, allow access for veterans and put a final stop to federal raids on dispensaries, among other things. This is the first time a medical marijuana bill has been introduced in the Senate, whereas the House has seen 15 pieces of legislation on marijuana reform in the last session of Congress, according to Marijuana.com. The move...

Marijuana is much safer than alcohol or tobacco, according to a new study Marijuana is roughly 114 times less deadly than alcohol, according to recent findings published in the journal Scientific Reports. Of the seven drugs included in the study, alcohol was the deadliest at an individual level, followed by heroin, cocaine, tobacco, ecstasy, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Previous studies consistently ranked marijuana as the safest recreational drug, but it was not known that the discrepancy was this large. The researchers determined the mortality risk by comparing a lethal dose of each substance with the amount typically used. Not only was...

Wage war on everything? Expect casualties everywhere. And refugees from all over the place. Continue the wars we admit to be un-winnable and never-ending? Then expect, also, to find new victims cropping up all the time, and in unpredictable corners. New enemies, too. The lesson is: choose your wars carefully. The result of not doing that? The current border crisis: Refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Under-age refugees. Children. Unaccompanied minors from the most recent high impact area of America’s insane “War on Drugs.” Can this really be relevant? Yes. For most of us in America, the War on...

(Reuters) - Genes that increase the risk of a person developing schizophrenia may also increase the chance they will use cannabis, researchers said on Tuesday after studying more than 1,000 users of the drug. The results chime with previous studies linking schizophrenia and cannabis, but suggest the association may be due to common genes and might not be a causal relationship where cannabis use leads to increased schizophrenia risk. Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use is higher among people with schizophrenia than in the general population. "We know that cannabis increases the...

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — The green-cross storefronts of medical marijuana dispensaries are common in much of Washington, and the state is plowing ahead with licensing people to grow and sell recreational pot to adults. But a federal trial scheduled to begin in the coming weeks for five people in Spokane suggests not all is OK with weed in the state. Larry Harvey, a 70-year-old medical marijuana patient with no criminal history, three of his relatives and a family friend each face mandatory minimum sentences of at least 10 years in prison after they were caught growing about 70 pot plants...

SOUTHWEST MIAMI-DADE, Fla. (WSVN) -- The parents of a teenager and a young girl have been arrested and charged after a marijuana lab was found under a covered, drained swimming pool. The discovery was made late Monday night, at around 11:55, at a home located 21964 S.W. 125th Place. "This is one of the more challenging grow houses we have seen," said Miami-Dade Police Detective Roy Rutland. "This is challenging because you're not going to smell it; more than likely you're certainly not going to see it." After police received a tip, they obtained a warrant and arrested Luis Ramirez-Gonzalez...

A gunbattle inside a North Park marijuana dispensary midday Friday left a robber dead and a security guard wounded, police said. Two men with handguns held up the shop to steal marijuana San Diego police homicide Lt. Manual del Toro said. Del Toro described the fleeing robber as a black man in his 20s, about 6 feet tall, 190 pounds, and wearing a blue hoodie. Around the corner, at Holistic Health Gurus, office worker Michael Adams arrived after the shooting and was surprised to hear what happened. "Ray Street is very artsy," Adams said. "It's very surprising to have any...

WASHINGTON – Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says he thinks the federal government should legalize marijuana. The 94-year-old retired justice tells NPR that public opinion has changed on the issue. Stevens also says that there isn't much distinction between marijuana and alcoholic beverages.

FRIDAY, April 25, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- American teens' use of marijuana doesn't increase when states approve the drug for medical use, a new study finds. "Any time a state considers legalizing medical marijuana, there are concerns from the public about an increase in drug use among teens," principal investigator Dr. Esther Choo, an attending physician in the department of emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, said in a hospital news release. Choo's team examined 20 years of data from states that do and don't permit medical marijuana use. They found that legalizing medical marijuana did not lead to increased...

School officials in northern Colorado are asking parents to take care with their newly legal recreational marijuana, after fourth graders were caught dealing the drug on an elementary school campus. John Gates, director of safety for Weld County School District 6, said Wednesday that the students involved, three 10-year-old boys and a 10-year-old girl at Greeley’s Monfort Elementary School, faced tough discipline but not suspension or expulsion. He would not elaborate on their punishment. […] The marijuana appears to have been legally purchased by adults—grandparents in two families—and no charges were expected to be filed, Gates said. He said the...

While Americans of all ages in Colorado happily celebrate the legalization of marijuana in various forms on April 20, 2014 as a “smoking holiday” the mental health and safety risks are being ignored by the media.

It's a sunny afternoon at Kelly's Collective, a medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles, and Nikki Esquibel is getting stoned. But you wouldn't know it. Nikki Esquibel, 19, has a medical prescription for marijuana. She uses a vaporizer pen around her neighborhood in Los Angeles. The 19-year-old, who has a medical prescription for marijuana, is "smoking" pot with a handheld vaporizer, or a vape pen. It's sleek, black, and virtually indistinguishable from a high-end e-cigarette. That's the point, says Esquibel. "I use it mostly around my neighborhood. It's easy to hide." The vapor coming from the device doesn't even have...

DENVER (MainStreet) — It's something Colorado's legalized marijuana industry did not want to see: a college student tried a cannabis edible product and inexplicably jumped to his death. ... "There is a groundswell building to repeal it," he said. "It's going to continue to lose support because there are going to be more harms coming from it, large and small." ... "Increasingly, we are contacted by parents, desperate to learn more," he writes on his blog. "Their typical and tragic messages go something like this: "We never knew. We thought marijuana wasn't even addictive and that it was less harmful...

70 minute VIDEO- Former President of Mexico Vincente Fox speaks on ending the drug war.

So I'm coming out of the supermarket about an hour ago and am approached by this snot-nosed, rotten teethed, pony-tailed looking liberal (he looked like a meth tweaker) with a clipboard in his hand. He asks me, "are you a registered voter here in San Jose?" I answer him, "yes!" He then proceeds to tell me, "did you know the San Jose City Council just approved and closed down 10 dispensaries?" (Like I really cared) I then answered him with a "SO WHAT...as far as I'm concerned, they can close every goddamn one of them in San Jose!" He then...

Kathryn, there’s no need to go through the drug debate all over again, but I did read what Bill Bennett and the others had to say, and I am afraid I was left shaking my head. After the destruction that the drug warriors have caused in this country and others (not to speak of their disastrous contribution to the war in Afghanistan), a little more humility on their part would go a long, long way. We’ve yet to see it. No matter. I had a look at the report cited by Mr. Bennett and, having done so, I can only...

JACKSONVILLE, FL -- Jacksonville Narcotics officers shot and killed a man during an undercover operation on the Southside. The shooting happened in the 2300 block of Westmont Street, just off Philips Highway Saturday night. "An individual approached from between two houses brandishing a handgun. The officers gave several commands to drop the gun, he did not, so they exchanged gunfire," says Chief Dwain Senterfitt. Witnesses told First Coast News it appeared the man mistook the officers for drug dealers and was trying to scare them away.

Biodiesel can be made from domestically produced, renewable oilseed crops such as hemp. With over 30 million successful U.S. road miles hemp boidiesel could be the answer to our cry for cheaper fuel. We have spent the last century polluting our beautiful country with our petroleum based fuels that could have easily been replaced with fuels derived from hemp. It would only take 6% of our U.S. land to produce enough hemp, for hemp fuel, to make us energy independent from the rest of the world. Help us teach America the truth. Make yourself a human billboard that speaks only...