Free Republic

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Kenyell Wilson, an outreach worker with the Safe Streets program, was shot and killed Thursday in Baltimore, police said. Wilson walked into Harbor Hospital with gunshot wounds at 4:41 p.m. and died a short time later, police said. Police have not determined where in the city the shooting occurred.Mayor Brandon Scott released a statement on Thursday evening following the news: “Safe Streets has a special place in my heart and I consider the Violence Interrupters who bravely serve this program as a part of my family. Tonight, our brother Kenyell Wilson became a victim of the gun...

  Smoking cannabis can lead to manic behaviour: Hyperactivity, aggression and delusion are all strongly linked with the drug, researchers warn  

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention made headlines this month after reporting that from 1999 to 2012, the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States more than doubled. That is a sobering statistic, but it doesn’t reveal the true scope of the rising number of drug deaths or the true extent of America’s failure in the war on drugs...

Sen. Rand Paul is blaming politicians for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that the criminal justice system fuels racial tension by disproportionately targeting African-Americans. The so-called war on drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation," Paul said in an op-ed published for TIME. He acknowledged that the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer wasn't related to drugs, but argued that outsized penalties for nonviolent drug crimes creates a "tension in some communities that too often results in tragedy." The comments are another attempt by Paul, a Kentucky...

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network. More ambiguously, in regular pot smokers, that region is better connected than it is in non-users:The flow of signal traffic is speedier to other parts of that motivation and decision-making network, including across the superhighway of "white matter"...