Free Republic

Horrific footage shows the devastating toll the “tranq” drug epidemic has had on addicts in Philadelphia. The Kensington neighborhood — made infamous by its open-air drug market — is seen completely packed with the slumped-over and passed-out drug users in the video posted to TikTok by urbanvisuals2.0. The harrowing clip comes as the “City of Brother Love” struggles with the rising use of the drug Xylazine, or “tranq,” which is a deadly sedative used to enhance the effects of heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. The drug is so potent the White House recently declared it an “emerging threat.”Dr. Rahul Gupta, Director...

The wife of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman has been arrested at Washington DC's Dulles Airport and charged with drug trafficking, with an informant accusing her of masterminding a $3 million plan to break him out of Mexico's jails. Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen with both U.S. and Mexican citizenship, was detained on Monday in the first major cartel detention of Joe Biden's administration. She will appear in court on Tuesday before Judge Harvey G. Michael, charged with participating in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana for importation into the U.S.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Mexico has passed a sweeping bill legalizing the possession of small quantities of almost all illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The regime, likely to be one of the most liberal in the world, is designed to avoid clogging prisons with drug addicts, allowing police to go after big-time dealers. Under the bill, it would be legal to possess 25 milligrams of heroin, five grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, as well as small amounts of LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, and a hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. All that remains is for President Fox to sign the...

A Florida man was arrested after deputies discovered a large quantity of crack cocaine and trafficking amounts of fentanyl and heroin following a vehicle pursuit. “Holley Delton Jones, 46, of Lehigh Acres, Florida, is charged with 15 felonies, most of them narcotics related. At the time of his arrest Jones was on parole for trafficking ecstasy,” said Collier County Sheriff’s Office. According to deputies, Jones was driving a bronze GMC Yukon on Wiggins Pass Road near U.S. 41 N. around midnight when deputies tried to pull him over for a traffic violation. Jones decided to accelerate and drove recklessly through...

Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly said $5.7M worth of illegal drugs were taken off the street in Operation ‘Santa's Naughty Lil Sellers'A massive undercover operation focusing on locking up drug dealers in Flagler County, Fla., successfully came to a close after nearly a year in action. The Flagler County Sheriff's Office said $5.7 million worth of illegal drugs are off the streets thanks to the department's ‘Santa's Naughty Lil Sellers' operation. During the investigation, which began in January 2022, FCSO said its Special Investigations Unit seized enough heroin and fentanyl to "potentially kill over 2.3 million people."

The devastated father of murdered University of Idaho student Kaylee Goncalves revealed during a candlelight vigil Wednesday night that she died in the same bed as her longtime best friend, Madison Mogen.“These girls were absolutely beautiful. They’ve been friends since sixth grade … Every day they did homework together, they came to our house together, they shared everything,” Steve Goncalves told a crowd of about 1,000 people at the campus.“They went to high school together, then they started looking at colleges and they came here together, they eventually get into the same apartment together,” he said inside the school’s Kibbie...

Police on Thursday reaffirmed that the grisly killings of four University of Idaho students were part of a "targeted attack" the day after authorities appeared to suggest the opposite. “We remain consistent in our belief that this was indeed a targeted attack but have not concluded if the target was the residence or its occupants,” a spokesperson for the Moscow Police Department told NBC News. Authorities have released conflicting statements since Madison Mogen, 21; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and her boyfriend, Ethan Chapin, 20, were found fatally stabbed at an off-campus home in Moscow on Nov. 13. The...

Manson, she warned. SNIP One such tidbit takes us back to the Hollywood Hills of the 1960s, when Charles Manson was recruiting kids of the famous and well-to-do into what would become his infamous murder cult. Manson wooed, or attempted to woo, the likes of Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, Deana Martin, daughter of Dean Martin, and Lansbury's kids, Anthony and Deidre Shaw. Dame Lansbury recounted how Diedre in particular fell under Manson's sway and how she plucked both her kids out of Hollywood and absconded to Ireland in a 2014 interview with Mail Online. "It started with...

Will McDuffie , Covering the Midterms in Pennsylvania for @ABC Fetterman continues to hit back on soft-on-crime allegations while tying in his work on criminal justice."Two things I'm most proud of...stopping the gun violence as a mayor and fighting for the innocent and other individuals for a second chance. That is my record on crime." https://t.co/dKLlGVYIRa— Will McDuffie (@wrmcduff) October 10, 2022----------------------------------------------------------The "other individuals" that Fetterman has voted to release include:John Brookins, who stabbed a woman to death with scissors. Wayne Covington, who shot and killed a teenager for money to buy heroin. https://t.co/Ug66ugIUBK— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) October 10,...

@RepThomasMassie speaks out on the cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on Ross Ulbricht by the criminal justice system. Join Rep. Massie and more than 370,000 people demanding clemency from @realDonaldTrum at http://freeross.org. Watch this Video...

An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday, announcing a rare success in U.S.-Taliban talks since the militant group took power a little more than a year ago Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban associate convicted...

It's estimated that more than 107,000 people in the United States died due to opioid overdoses in 2021. Washington Post journalist Scott Higham notes it's "the equivalent of a 737 Boeing crashing and burning and killing everybody on board every single day." In the new book, American Cartel, Higham and co-author Sari Horwitz make the case that the pharmaceutical industry operated like a drug cartel, with manufacturers at the top; wholesalers in the middle; and pharmacies at the level of "street dealers." What's more, Higham says, the companies collaborated with each other — and with lawyers and lobbyists — to...

One of the deadliest street drugs, illicit fentanyl, has transitioned from a hidden killer that people often hope to avoid to one that many drug users now seek out on its own. The shift to intentional use of fentanyl underscores a worrying trend in the country's ongoing opioid epidemic, experts say: That a growing number of people have become so tolerant to opioids like heroin, that they're turning to the synthetic compound, which is up to 50 times stronger. Until recently, intentional use of fentanyl was mostly limited to the West Coast, but in the past few years, addiction specialists...

Drug overdoses in Colorado are seemingly spiking just a few years after the state’s elected Democrats decriminalized the possession of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and meth. This week, five Americans — three women and two men — were found dead inside a Commerce City, Colorado, apartment after having overdosed on fentanyl. In 2019, Democrats in the state legislature decriminalized possession of deadly drugs like fentanyl — making possession of four milligrams of fentanyl a misdemeanor rather than a felony. The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) notes that two milligrams of fentanyl can be deadly while one kilogram of fentanyl can...

A top Chicago police official’s car was stopped on the West Side during a drug arrest earlier this month, a police spokesman confirmed Wednesday. A Lexus registered to Yolanda Talley, chief of internal affairs, was pulled over Feb. 1 in the 500 block of North St. Louis Avenue and officers arrested Kenneth Miles, 34, on drug charges, according to an arrest report and police sources. Talley wasn’t in the car. Her niece was driving the Lexus, said Don Terry, a spokesman for the police department. According to a police report, officers in a gang investigations squad were targeting drug sales...

It’s one of the strongest opioids in circulation, so deadly an amount smaller than a poppy seed can kill a person. Until July, when drug users in the United States started overdosing on carfentanil, the substance was best known for knocking out moose and elephants — or as a chemical weapon. Despite the dangers, Chinese vendors offer to sell carfentanil openly online, for worldwide export, no questions asked, an Associated Press investigation has found. The AP identified 12 Chinese businesses that said they would export carfentanil to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia for...

Actor Michael K. Williams died of acute drug intoxication in what New York City’s medical examiner said Friday was an accidental death. Williams, known for playing Omar Little on “The Wire” and an Emmy Award nominee this year, had fentanyl, parafluorofentanyl, heroin and cocaine in his system when he died Sept. 6 in Brooklyn. Williams, 54, was found dead by family members in his penthouse apartment. Police said at the time that they suspected a drug overdose. The city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner said it would not comment further. A message seeking comment was left with Williams’ representative. Williams...

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asked President Biden to issue an emergency declaration for his state due to the increasingly difficult border crisis. In a letter to the president, Abbott specifically pointed to Val Verde County, where Haitian migrants have set up an encampment in Del Rio under the International Bridge. The governor said that as of Saturday there were nearly 16,000 migrants in Del Rio.

<p>In recent days, Taliban representatives began telling gatherings of villagers in the southern province of Kandahar, one of the country’s main opium-producing regions, that the crop—a crucial part of the local economy—would now be banned.</p><p>This followed a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid at an Aug. 18 news conference in Kabul that the country’s new rulers won’t permit the drug trade. Mr. Mujahid at the time didn’t offer details of how the Islamist group intends to enforce the ban.</p>

Advocates for a safe supply of drugs handed out heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine outside the Vancouver Police Department Wednesday (July 14) afternoon. City Councillor Jean Swanson, along with members of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), distributed the free drugs outside the Vancouver Police Department. The collective action demonstrates the "life-saving potential of a community-led response to the crisis of prohibition in Canada" as a necessary alternative to Vancouver's proposed model of decriminalization, explains a news release. The drugs that were handed out were tested via "FTIR spectrometry and immunoassay, and...