Free Republic

Today the United States is launching enhanced counter narcotics operations in the western hemisphere to protect the American people from the deadly scourge of illegal narcotics,” Trump said. “We are deploying additional Navy destroyers, combat ships, aircraft and helicopters, Coast Guard cutters and Air Force surveillance aircraft, doubling the capabilities in the region.” After Trump’s remarks, Milley said, “There’s thousands of sailors, coast guardsmen, soldiers, airman, Marines, involved in this operation. We came across some intelligence some time ago that the drug cartels as a result of covid-19 were going to try to take advantage of the situation and try...

In an interview posted online Tuesday, President Trump said he would designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, marking a major shift in U.S. policy toward Mexico, where cartels now exercise effective control of much of the country.In the interview, with former Fox News has Bill O’Reilly, Trump said his administration has been working on the designation for the last 90 days, well before the massacre of nine American women and children on November 4 by cartel gunmen in the Mexican state of Sonora, not far from the U.S. border. The victims, some as young as eight months old,...

The Mexican ambassador to the United States responded to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s call to sanction Mexico for the recent escalation of violence from the nation’s ruling drug cartels by blaming the American public’s demand for black-market drugs.“My government categorically rejects your recent mischaracterization on Mexico not actively combating transnational organized crime and suggesting to impose sanctions on Mexican officials,” Ambassador Martha Barcena wrote to Hawley, adding in a handwritten note at the end of the letter that she hopes to address the matter with the senator personally to discuss how to “reduce drug demand in the U.S.” In...

Six people have been arrested after federal agents seized more than 1.7 tons of drugs stashed inside audio speakers that were being shipped from Long Beach to Australia. The shipment included 3,810 pounds of methamphetamine, along with 56 pounds of cocaine and 11.5 pounds of heroin, federal authorities said. Officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized three shipping containers containing the drugs on Jan. 11 at the Los Angeles/Long Beach seaport.

The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on an amendment that would federally legalize marijuana by allowing states to regulate their own medical and recreational pot markets. But even one senator can block a vote on the amendment, which would address a longstanding conflict between federal and state law. Sen. Cory Gardner, D-Colo., is seeking to attach the measure to the First Step Act, a bundle of prison, prisoner re-entry, and sentencing reforms that senators voted 81-12 to advance Monday.

Jurors in drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s trial Thursday watched footage of the first-ever US Coast Guard interception of a cocaine-packed submarine. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Todd Bagetis, who took part in the September 2008 seizure, said his crew had been patrolling international waters when they came across the semi-submersible, some 350 miles east of Guatemala. Using night-vision goggles, his team boarded the submarine — where an irate crew immediately tried to sink the boat and toss off the lawmen. “They put the vessel in [reverse] and tried to throw my crew off. My crew were hanging onto the...

Call it a buzzkiller from BuzzFeed. On Wednesday, online news site BuzzFeed reported that the Trump Administration is engaged in a "secret war on weed." BuzzFeed stated that the Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee told multiple federal agencies to submit "data demonstrating the most significant negative trends" about marijuana use. The goal appears to be to try to prevent further support for relaxing federal anti-marijuana laws. If the committee is successful in its efforts, companies with U.S. marijuana operations such as Scotts Miracle-Gro (NYSE:SMG), CannaRoyalty (NASDAQOTH:CNNRF), and Kush Bottles (NASDAQOTH:KSHB) could see their hopes of operating in a fully legal environment...

Drug trafficking is now the most murderous criminal activity in American history. Overdose deaths from illegal drugs passed 50,000 in 2015 — many times the number of Americans killed by all Islamic terrorists over almost 20 years. Yet stopping the skyrocketing body count will require overcoming a pervasive misunderstanding of how drug abuse and addiction are caused.

The Ohio Attorney General's office said that enough fentanyl to kill more than 4 million people was seized in a Clark County bust Monday night. The Miami Valley Bulk Smuggling Task Force seized about 20 pounds of fentanyl as part of an ongoing investigation, and four people were arrested. A large amount of marijuana and more than $100,000 in cash were also seized. Aguilar Reyes-Espinosa of New Carlisle, Omar Cantu-Garcia of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, David Cantu-Garcia of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and Pedro Medina of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, are currently being held in the Montgomery County Jail on drug trafficking charges....

President Trump said he likely will support a congressional effort to end the federal ban on marijuana, a major step that would reshape the pot industry and end the threat of a Justice Department crackdown. Trump’s remarks put him sharply at odds with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on the issue. The bill in question, pushed by a bipartisan coalition, would allow states to go forward with legalization unencumbered by threats of federal prosecution. Trump made his comments to a gaggle of reporters Friday morning just before he boarded a helicopter on his way to the G-7 summit in Canada. His...

<p>The Nebraska State Patrol says the nearly 120 pounds of suspected cocaine and fentanyl that troopers seized last month turned out to be all fentanyl, a deadly opioid that federal officials blame for thousands of deaths nationwide.</p> <p>The patrol says the stash was a record fentanyl seizure in Nebraska and estimates the drugs may have been worth up to $20 million on the street. The Drug Enforcement Administration says just 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. The fentanyl seized was enough to kill 26 million people, according to DEA estimates.</p>

Trump also criticized Democrats for opposing his proposed wall on the Southern border. “Eventually the Democrats will agree with us to build the wall and keep the damn drugs out,” he said, prompting chants of “build that wall” in the room. The president criticized sanctuary city policies for allowing illegal immigrants and drug dealers to remain in the country. He called on Congress to end funding for sanctuary cities. “If we are not going to get tough on the drug dealers who kill thousands of people and destroy so many people’s lives, we are just doing the wrong thing,” he...

MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — President Trump on Saturday again called for enacting the death penalty for drug dealers during a rally meant to bolster a struggling GOP candidate for a U.S. House seat here. During the campaign event in this conservative western Pennsylvania district, the president also veered off into a list of other topics, including North Korea, his distaste for the news media and his own election victory 16 months ago. Trump said that allowing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for drug dealers — an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping — is “a...

16-years after the Bush administration began military operations in Afghanistan, President Trump has just launched a military campaign of his own using high-tech stealth fighters to bomb drug labs in the country....On Monday, the Defense Department said it unleashed F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to bomb narcotic production facilities in southern Afghanistan targeting the revenue streams of the Taliban... .....Every since the U.S. started occupying the country in the early 2000s, OPIUM PRODUCTION SOARED. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said without drugs, the war in Afghanistan “would have been long over.”....."In 2017, Afghanistan’s opium crop and production both HIT A RECORD HIGH.....The strikes Sunday hit...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is advocating to reinstate the D.A.R.E. program, an anti-drug curriculum launched in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been criticized for being ineffective. "D.A.R.E. is, I think, as I indicated, the best remembered anti-drug program today," Sessions said while speaking at the Drug Abuse Resistance Education International Training Conference in Texas on Tuesday, via NY Daily News. "In recent years, people have not paid much attention to that message, but they are ready to hear it again." "We know it worked before and we can make it work again," he continued.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asking congressional leaders to undo federal medical marijuana protections that have been in place since 2014, according to a May letter that became public Monday. The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, prohibit the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent certain states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana." In his letter, first obtained by Tom Angell of Massroots.com and verified independently by The Washington Post, Sessions argued that the amendment would "inhibit [the Justice Department's] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act."...

Led by an outspoken legalization opponent, Jeff Sessions' Justice Department is reviewing federal marijuana policy, with significant changes possible soon. Almost nothing about the review process is publicly known and key players in the policy debate have not been contacted. The outcome of the review could devastate a multibillion-dollar industry and countermand the will of voters in eight states if the Obama administration's permissive stance on non-medical sales is reversed.

Drug smugglers are being helped by the Democratic leaders in Congress who are trying to block funding for a border wall, says President Donald Trump. He is using Twitter to hit the Democrats as enablers for the criminal gangs that are smuggling deadly drugs into American cities and towns around the nation, and which are sending murderous MS-13 gang members into Americans’ neighborhoods. The strategy makes sense because it is true, and because many of the Americans who will vote in 2018 are increasingly concerned about the rising death toll from Mexican-supplied heroin and other drugs. In July 2016, Breitbart...

Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Sunday that marijuana is "not a factor" in the war on drugs and that solving the nation's drug problem does not involve "arresting a lot of users." Kelly, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," was discussing his work to stop the flow of drugs into the United States from Central America and Mexico when host Chuck Todd asked whether legalizing marijuana would help or hurt his work. "Yeah, marijuana is not a factor in the drug war," Kelly responded, adding later: "It's three things. Methamphetamine. Almost all produced in Mexico. Heroin. Virtually...