Free Republic

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump’s administration said on Thursday for the first time that it will crack down on marijuana sales in states that have approved recreational pot use. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the Department of Justice will pursue enforcement of federal law against recreational use, but not medical use. The statement marked a major break with the Obama administration’s hands-off approach to the growing marijuana legalization movement. “I do believe that you’ll see greater enforcement,” Spicer told reporters at his daily briefing. “Because again there’s a big difference between the medical use … that’s very different than...

Phil Maymin, the Libertarian candidate in the Fourth Congressional District, doesn’t want voters to flush away their ballots this November, calling a vote for a Democrat or a Republican a “waste.” “If you’re unhappy with the course the country has been taking for the past 10 years, you have to realize that the Democrats and Republicans have made this mess,” he said at a meeting with reporters and editors from Hersam Acorn Newspapers Thursday, September 7. Mr. Maymin, a Greenwich hedge fund manager, is running against Republican incumbent Rep. Christopher Shays, and Diane Farrell, the Democratic challenger. Just added to...

High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy. The word "democracy" appears in neither of our founding documents – the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution. Our nation's founders had disdain for democracy and majority rule. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said that "in tracing these evils to their origin every man...

WASHINGTON — Pot. Cannabis. Hemp. Weed. Grass. The herb takes many names. But in the nation’s capital, where the marijuana lobby (search) was once the recreational diversion of Playboy Magazine's Hugh Hefner, pro-pot special interest groups have crystallized the divergent issues behind the plant and gained a seemingly unified voice. ________________ Puff, Cough, Puff, Cough________________ "It’s a no-brainer. It makes no sense putting old and sick folks in jail for an herb that makes them feel better," said Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project (search), which was established in 1995 by Rob Kampia, a former mainstay at the...