Free Republic

Alex Berenson .. people who think marijuana is medicine and a safe alternative to alcohol are fooling themselves... The industry’s money and political influence, along with the media’s acquiescence, have obscured the scientific links between marijuana and mental illness... “The problems are real and right in front of people,” he told a crowd at the History Colorado Center in Denver on Wednesday. It was his third Colorado talk in two days to discuss his new book, “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.” “It’s like we all need glasses. ... The connection to psychosis is real.”...

They thought it was Armageddon and wanted to save their neighbours. They believed police were monsters. They showed super strength after being pepper sprayed and Tasered. And all but one of them were naked because, with the end of the world, they didn’t have time to get dressed. A court document has provided more details in a bizarre naked kidnapping case that happened last year south of Edmonton, but some questions remain. Two women and one man, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban, each pleaded guilty in Leduc provincial court last week to a charge of unlawful...

A billionaire Guatemalan playboy was sentenced to 20 years in a hell-hole jail yesterday for the horrific murder and desecration of an American woman...Novella – born into one of Guatemala’s richest families – killed his long-term lover Alban, 39, in a crime so ferocious it shocked detectives...cocktail of cannabis, cannabis oil and over-the-counter drug sceletium...

(Javonnie McCoy and Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard after his acquittal) Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a...

Canadians will soon be able to order marijuana through the mail as part of the nation’s new legalization of recreational pot. Lawmakers in the country passed the Cannabis Act earlier this week, setting the country up to regulate the market in the coming months. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday that legalization will begin on Oct. 17. The country is the second to legalize the substance nationwide, after Uruguay. The federal minimum age for marijuana use in Canada will be 18, but some provinces are setting their own minimum age at 19, which is the drinking age in most areas....

Cannabis is responsible for 91 per cent of cases where teenagers end up being treated for drug addiction, shocking new figures reveal...The findings also back up academic research, revealed in The Mail on Sunday over the past three years, that skunk is having a serious detrimental impact on the mental health of the young. At least two studies have shown repeated use triples the risk of psychosis, with sufferers repeatedly experiencing delusional thoughts. Some victims end up taking their own lives.

Johns Hopkins studies effects of DMT, including encounters with ‘autonomous beings’ WASHINGTON – It’s one of the most popular new hallucinogenic drugs being smoked by young people around the world, with many users reporting “spiritual encounters” with entities that sound a lot like demons. And now, Johns Hopkins University is studying the alarming effects of DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine, asking volunteers who have taken the drug about encounters they may have had with “seemingly autonomous beings or entities.” One researcher characterized DMT as a “spirit molecule.” So bizarre are the effects that users have described crossing into another world and seeing...

Had I never left the Obama White House to be part of the campaign, I am sure I would have asked the same question. I probably would have printed out the transcript of her remarks, and pored over them, trying to isolate the essence of what she had said that made this speech so much more appealing than anything she had said during the campaign. And I wouldn’t have found it. Because I needed to have the experience of working for a female presidential candidate to understand that why we liked “this Hillary” so much better than “candidate Hillary.” Fundamentally...

Nearly all cannabis on Britain’s streets is now super-strength skunk that could be fueling the rise in mental health problems, scientists have warned. Researchers at King’s College London tested almost 1,000 police seizures from Kent, Derbyshire, Merseyside, Sussex and the capital in 2016, and found 94 percent were of a dangerously high potency. In 2005, just 51 percent of cannabis sold on the street was sinsemilla, also known as skunk. Dr. Marta Di Forti, Medical Research Council Clinician Scientist at King’s College warned that the powerful drug placed Britain’s 2.1 million cannabis users at risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression,...

Cannabis users are more likely to experience negative emotions, particularly feeling alienated from others, new research reveals. People who use marijuana are significantly more likely to feel that others wish them harm or are deceiving them, a US study found. Brain scans also reveal the class-B drug increases signal connectivity in regions of the brain that have previously been linked to psychosis, the research adds, which is associated with severe depression.

Weeks before he started shooting, the Colorado gunman who killed one deputy and wounded four more unleashed a verbal barrage against Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock and his department. Matthew Riehl, who was killed in the deadly New Year’s Eve shootout, went on a profane rant against the sheriff and other officers in a YouTube video entitled “Fire Sheriff Spurlock” that was posted on Dec. 13, The Associated Press reported.

Police in Ontario, California, said on Saturday they received information "regarding the abuse of a kitten by a young man," and had identified a 16-year-old suspect, but would not be disclosing his name, due to his age. The cat, which police described as a "small kitten" in a press release posted to Twitter, suffered a fractured leg. "The kitten and its owner have been located," police said. "The kitten survived the incident but did suffer an injured leg. The Inland Valley Humane Society is assisting with the investigating and care of the injured animal." In a statement Monday, the Ontario...

Hillary Clinton said she’s “convinced” that Trump campaign associates cooperated with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, according to a report. “There certainly was communication and there certainly was an understanding of some sort,” Clinton told USA Today in an interview released late Monday. “Because there’s no doubt in my mind that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win. And there’s no doubt in my mind that there are a tangle of financial relationships between Trump and his operation with Russian money. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the Trump...

As The Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers." On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas. Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon. A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war torn country's black market economy each year, likely giving militias access to...

Governments around the world consider mushrooms and LSD to be among the most dangerous illicit substances, but a new survey of drug users suggests that these psychedelics are actually some of the safest.

Watching several minutes of CNN’s punditry coverage of President Trump’s Harrisburg rally is exceptionally interesting from the perspective of watching what happens when full-throated liberal media ideology is confronted by a political opponent inoculated from battered politician syndrome. The media cries foul. Many intellectually honest people throughout the political era have noted that liberalism -in its modern presentation- is similar to a psychological condition. That’s true. However, the actual condition displayed is more aptly described as Borderline Personality . The advancement of modern liberalism is contingent upon their abused recipient cowering to the demands of the progressive abuser. Modern democrats,...

Is this the most outrageous Trump-related Tweet to come out of Hollywood so far? The #resistance has no greater friend than Joss Whedon. The director of The Avengers is one of Hollywood’s most vocal critics of the Trump administration. He did all he could to stop the real estate mogul from becoming president. He directed the infamous “Save the Day” voter PSAs from 2016. Whedon leaned on his celebrity rolodex to caution voters against Trump. The star-studded ad featured Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and other A-list actors.Now, he uses Twitter to warn the masses about...

Today Brain publishes a new study indicating that antiepileptic drugs designed to reduce seizures, may also induce psychotic disorders in some patients. Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders. People with epilepsy have increased vulnerability to psychiatric problems. However, it is also possible that the drugs used by patients to control their seizures may increase the risk of psychotic symptoms in certain people.

Turns out liberals are the real authoritarians. A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong. The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction. “The descriptive analyses...

The call for action from scientists in the UK, US, Europe and Australia reflects a growing consensus among experts that frequent cannabis use can increase the risk of psychosis...In the UK, cannabis is the most popular illegal drug, and according to Public Health England data, more young people enter treatment centres for help with cannabis than any other drug, alcohol included.