Tony Perkins and Jennifer Bauwens of the Family Research Council (FRC)–a think tank and organization of churches accused of wanting to end democracy in the U.S. and replace it with a theocracy–are warning Americans that psychedelics open people up to demonic activities:

…when you’re reading the Bible and you see the word “witchcraft”… for example … Moses’ encounter with magicians in Egypt … those magicians weren’t just partaking in witchcraft to access the evil realm … they were also doing it with drugs … that now we would know as psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs….

Ritualized medical applications gave Egypt’s witches and magicians a professional edge over the many competing religious practitioners who rejected drugs and particularly psilocybin mushrooms for use in treating serious disorders like major depression and PTSD. The devil is in the details. One detail includes a threat to the Family Research Council of a happy, healthy, well-adjusted and highly informed public engaging in critical thinking and exposure of demonic FRC schemes that perpetuate fallacies, anti-intellectualism and human misery in ways that obstruct medical science.

Public consumption of marijuana terrifies prohibitionists. In practice they appear to view cannabis users in groups as the moral equivalent of demonic rituals. Maybe it’s because for thousands of years heaps of smoldering marijuana and psychedelic herbs have been publicly consumed during mystic ceremonies, usually attended by all types of pagans, witches, heretics and ancient Romans participating in orgies. Whatever the reasons, the Las Vegas hotel industry is progressively challenging Nevada’s laws prohibiting public use of weed. According to Nevada attorney David Edelblute:

…the distinguishing legal factor of the … approach to cannabis consumption is that [a hotel] does not intend to sell cannabis products, or allow consumption in public areas. […]

Solutions lie in who considers what to be public. Pushing the legal boundaries, rooms on some hotel floors offer special air filtration systems where people can smoke their weed in private without offending others. Other types of spaces not deemed totally public make up the flexible boundary attracting the industry’s focus. As one hotel owner noted:

You don’t come to our hotel just to get stoned — it’s not the goal, Rizk said … You come for the experience, the events, the parties, the pool parties … and the fact that we allow (cannabis) consumption in certain areas, where permissible by law, is just an additional perk.

If failure can be defined as something that creates the very crisis it’s intended to prevent, then a recent Brown University study of close-proximity opioid overdoses in Indianapolis confirms suspicions that little else fails like the drug war when it comes to saving lives.

The [researchers] found that within seven, 14 and 21 days, opioid-related seizures of drugs by police were significantly associated with increased overdoses within 100, 250 and 500 meters of the seizure location. Most notably, the number of fatal overdoses was two-fold higher than expected within seven days and 500 meters following an opioid-related incident in which police seized drugs.

The researchers hypothesized that the increase in overdose events was because people who use opioids will generally seek out a new supply after losing access to their previous drug supply, and that new supply will have unknown potency. In addition, in the time period between losing the familiar supply and finding a new one, people using opioids can experience diminished tolerance to drugs. Accidentally ingesting a dose beyond one’s tolerance can be fatal. […]

Congratulations are due the Brown University research team for making ‘drug war’ another definition of failure and enabling it to appear next to synonyms like breakdown, malfunction, cataclysm, crash, defeat, ruin, collapse, catastrophe, miscarriage, tragedy, frustration, and disappointment.

Remember John P. Walters?

Sigh…

We know marijuana is linked to mental illness — so what are we doing? by John P. Walters in the New York Post.

Yep. The same nonsense that he was promoting years ago. It’s the old “link” to schizophrenia story. And our own Servetus debunked the whole scare earlier this year: Alleged cannabis links to psychosis busted

Of course, Walters buries the important part… “The skeptical will note the study establishes no specific cause-and-effect process, which is more of a caution than a flashing red light.”

In fact, as you continue to read, you understand that he’s simply using the usual scare tactics in the headline in the hopes that people won’t really comprehend the lack of any real… substance in what he writes. He says:

Use your experience.

Almost everyone has family members and friends who have become victims of addiction.

Sometimes it is marijuana, sometimes it is booze, marijuana and other drugs.

Look at the addicted you walk past on downtown streets and the violent mental illness you observe or see reported in the news almost every day.

Yes, some of that mental illness is probably fueled by other addictive drugs such as meth.

But ask yourself how pervasive marijuana use can possibly be harmless to families and communities.

Marijuana’s connection to serious mental-health problems has been reported and studied for more than 100 years.

Yep. It has. And there’s still nothing there to justify not legalizing marijuana.

A Senator talking about marijuana… “Two ounces. Just two ounces is equivalent to three joints.”

“Just two ounces is equivalent to three joints” — the Republican arguments against legal cannabis are going well. #mnleg pic.twitter.com/PYxftaaMtq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 28, 2023

The US Office of Inspector General has identified questionable funding practices by DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, a former NYU law professor, federal prosecutor, and New Jersey attorney general.

Milgram is accused of diverting no-bid DEA contracts into the hands of friends or former colleagues in violations of federal regulations. These included a $400,000 data analysis contract to Jose Cordero, a $257-per-hour consulting contract to Lena Hackett, and a $1.4 million contract to a Washington, DC law firm to “review the DEA’s scandal-plagued foreign operations, a report widely criticized for giving short shrift to repeat instances of agent misconduct.”

“This report is stunningly vague in its actual evaluation of known problems at the DEA and remedies to fix them,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This speaks to the agency’s broader effort to evade oversight. The agency has attempted to dodge my oversight inquiries but I intend to push forward.”

The external probe was announced in 2021 following reporting by The Associated Press on the crimes of José Irizarry, a disgraced former DEA agent now serving a 12-year federal prison sentence after confessing to laundering money for Colombian drug cartels and skimming millions from seizures and informants to fund an international joyride of fine dining, parties and prostitutes.

Irizarry told the AP last year that DEA agents have come to accept that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 overdose deaths a year.

“The drug war is a game,” Irizarry said. “It was a very fun game that we were playing.”

Irizarry’s case got one paragraph in the external review. An ongoing federal grand jury inquiry into some of his jet-setting former DEA colleagues was mentioned in a footnote. Also, Irizarry’s lawyer told AP he offered to make his client available for an interview for the review but was never contacted. […]

A June deadline from the Biden Administration demanding that medical doctors who prescribe opioids qualify for a DEA license to do so by taking 8 hours of training has drawn critical comments from the many doctors affected:

So if I understand this correctly, the new requirement applies to DEA registrants who did not obtain the “X” waiver (as I did more than 15 years ago) or are not certified in addiction medicine. – William F Cox MD

I have to have a DEA license for my telehealth job, in which I’m not even allowed to prescribe Sudafed or Phenergan. Yet I have to spend 8 hours on this BS. – L Knight MD

Big Pharma, organized Medicine calling pain the fifth vital sign, quality measures being introduced threatening docs for not prescribing for controlling pain, local law enforcement moonlighting as security at pill mills and politicians ignoring complaints of citizens about out of state vehicles driving through their communities to pill mills the same time each week to stock up and it’s doctors’ fault we have an opioid crisis? – Steve Reznick

Incredible. Of note, 11 of the 28 “free” courses on the AMA website are actually free. – Sunset MD

Another waste of time and money. Most of the drugs that are being abused and causing fatal overdoses are illegal and are not being prescribed by anyone. – Dr. Whatnow

Makes a lot of sense for a dermatologist wasting their time taking a class on substance abuse. – BMS

State licensure has required courses for renewals. Now the MBAs and legislative committees who have no experience in the real world are making new rules. – SRB

More uncompensated time. – Dan Smith

Let’s see how many hours we can suck out of a caring MD…THE financial guys already have them on a mandatory treadmill of x patients per x minutes … God help the cancer patients, postsurgical patients, fibro patients … why is it that I feel somehow street drugs will become your grandmother’s recourse…better stock up on narcan…. – kat sheetz rn bsn

How about physicians demanding President Biden and the politicians take courses on Laws and the Constitution (just a refresher and update) to make sure they’re current with the laws and current events? This way the constituents will know they can pass laws effectively and put the dollars for these “required” courses back into the coffers of the homeless and un-and underinsured. – BarbW38

Shows you how out of touch the edict makers are. So we have to do 20-25 modules of garbage every year on Healthstream. Then more garbage to renew licenses. Now the DEA. Have to pay friends of these people to take the modules. They need to be offered “free” which means our licensing fees go to “friends and family” who get the contracts to provide this learning. Meanwhile in the trenches I dread to renew narcotics every month for cancer patients because it is so onerous and time consuming. Care is fractured and everyone and every state operates in a silo. That is the dangerous problem. – D shields

FDA Approves First Over-the-Counter Naloxone Nasal Spray

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Narcan, 4 milligram (mg) naloxone hydrochloride nasal spray for over-the-counter (OTC), nonprescription, use – the first naloxone product approved for use without a prescription. Naloxone is a medication that rapidly reverses the effects of opioid overdose and is the standard treatment for opioid overdose. Today’s action paves the way for the life-saving medication to reverse an opioid overdose to be sold directly to consumers in places like drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores and gas stations, as well as online.

About time.

Viagra and not opioids is the winner of the unpopular drug contest when it comes to international drug smuggling, according to Kaiser Health News (KHN).

Despite evidence to the contrary, the FDA has long defended its efforts to prevent opioids from entering the country by intercepting prescription drug packages delivered through international mail….

…the agency’s own data revealed that confiscated packages did not contain significant amounts of opioids. The FDA said that just 33 packages of opioids and no fentanyl were found in the 53,000 drug shipments its investigators examined in 2022, which amounts to roughly 0.06% of the total packages searched, KHN reported.

Because the FDA has claimed that confiscating these international packages was preventing the import of opioids, pharmaceutical companies have used this claim to lobby against proposals in Washington, D.C., to allow Americans to buy their prescription drugs from countries where those drugs are cheaper, such as Canada.

The FDA often stops prescription drug shipments, even when no opioids are found, because of improper U.S. drug labeling and packaging.

The report noted that of the drugs confiscated by the FDA in 2020, the number one most common item was sildenafil, a generic form of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. Other common medications seized included those for asthma, diabetes, cancer, and HIV.

According to KHN, the FDA has been given millions of dollars to fight the shipment of opioids into the U.S., despite the limited evidence that these drugs are entering the country this way. […]

For decades, millions of Americans seeking to save money have bought drugs from foreign pharmacies, with most sales done online. Although the FDA says people are not allowed to bring prescription drugs into the United States except in rare cases, dozens of cities, county governments, and school districts help their employees buy drugs from abroad. […]

Neurologist Holly Elser, MD, PhD; and Keith Humphreys, PhD; Mathew V. Kiang, ScD; Swapnil Mehta, MD; Jong H. Yoon, MD; William O. Faustman, PhD; at the Department of Neurology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, have debunked prohibitionist propositions familiar to many readers here at Drug WarRant which implied that smoking marijuana leads to or causes schizophrenia:

Question: Is state cannabis legalization or commercialization associated with increased rates of psychosis-related health care claims?

Exposure: State cannabis legalization policies were measured for each state and month based on law type (medical or recreational) and degree of commercialization (presence or absence of retail outlets). […]

Main Outcomes and Measures: Outcomes were rates of psychosis-related diagnoses and prescribed antipsychotics. […]

Conclusions and Relevance: In this retrospective cohort study of commercial and Medicare Advantage claims data, state medical and recreational cannabis policies were not associated with a statistically significant increase in rates of psychosis-related health outcomes. […]

Findings: In this cohort study of claims data from 63,680,589 beneficiaries from 2003 to 2017, there was no statistically significant difference in the rates of psychosis-related diagnoses or prescribed antipsychotics in states with medical or recreational cannabis policies compared with states with no such policy. […]

Meaning: The findings of this study do not support an association between state policies legalizing cannabis and psychosis-related outcomes […]

A few California police officers are undergoing withdrawal-like symptoms from the drug war due to being denied any opportunity to enforce a failed crusade against cannabis:

…a grand jury added four new criminal counts against Joseph Huffaker, including impersonating a federal officer and falsifying records in a federal investigation.

Prosecutors say Huffaker and at least one other officer posed as ATF agents during traffic stops where they illegally seized weed from drivers on the side of the highway and later falsified records to cover up the corruption.

“It’s been a long time, five years ago this month,” said Zeke Flatten [a former Texas cop], who says Huffaker and a yet unidentified second individual robbed him of three pounds of marijuana in December 2017 while impersonating ATF agents during a traffic stop along Highway 101. “I’m satisfied. I’m satisfied that they’re being held accountable.” […]

Prior to legalization, the police could steal part or all of a suspect’s marijuana supply simply by seizing it and making certain it never reached an evidence storage locker. No complaints about lost or misplaced evidence were likely to emerge from the accused. Times change, and in this case, drug enforcement crooks need to accept that weed is legal in California.

Remember John Walters? Yeah. We talked about him a lot here back in the day when he was the drug czar.

Well, he resurfaced on my Twitter with this response to cannabis legalization in New York.

Woke killers–If you have been to NYC, you know it does not need more substance abuse– https://t.co/eG3Qzwk500

— John Walters (@john_walters_) December 30, 2022

The excellent Steve Rolles hit back and drew out even more nonsense from the old czar.

The days of taking this kind of talk seriously are over–over because it is killing 100K of our brothers and sisters a year, over because addiction and OD's are out of control, but most of all it is over because walking the streets of our cities and towns make it contemptible. https://t.co/oPQIG6cXDm

— John Walters (@john_walters_) December 30, 2022

Still the same old John Walters.

The City of Berkeley wants to decriminalize tripping:

A project to decriminalize natural psychedelics that lingered for three years in the Berkeley City Council will come back to life in a few weeks. But unlike other jurisdictions that have taken steps to chip away at the national and state ban on psychedelics, Berkeley is about to consider an even broader proposal: one that could make it the first in the U.S. to decriminalize LSD.

Of the 15 U.S. cities that have softened restrictions on psychedelics, none has included this synthetic hallucinogen. Berkeley Community Health Commissioners Joseph Holcomb Adams and Karma Smart explained that the logic for decriminalizing LSD is that it meets the technical definition of psychedelics. And in their view, said Smart, “nobody deserves to go to jail for having a psychedelic experience.” […]

A new study coming out of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health confirms Pink Floyd’s iconic suggestion from Another Brick in the Wall that inflicting totalitarianism onto kids will have an equal and opposite social reaction:

In new research in the journal Addictive Behaviors, public health researchers find that the prevalence of school discipline and school policing—core elements of the school-to-prison pipeline—predict subsequent school-average levels of substance use and developmental risk.

First author Seth Prins, PhD, a researcher at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and co-authors analyzed 11 years of data from 4,800 schools and more than 4,950,000 students in California. They found that the prevalence of exclusionary school discipline (suspension and expulsion) and school-based police contact predicted higher school levels of binge drinking, drinking, smoking, using cannabis, using other drugs, and violence/harassment. They found also that the prevalence of school discipline also predicted lower levels of reported community support, feeling safe in school, and school support.

“Our findings are surprising to nobody who has been on the front lines of the fight against the mass criminalization of kids, especially in communities that have faced systematic disinvestment in social infrastructure and enormous investments in policing,” says Prins, an assistant professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences. […]

Did anyone else suspect kids would use drugs in rebellious retaliation to the repressive antics of crazed morality police? Many public school systems apparently didn’t.

The White House:

Today, President Biden pardoned all prior federal and D.C. offenses of simple marijuana possession.

@POTUS also called on governors to pardon simple state marijuana possession offenses.

Additionally, @POTUS asked @SecBecerra and the Attorney General to initiate the process of reviewing how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. Marijuana is currently classified at the same level as heroin – and above fentanyl.

It’s no secret that this site has been a big fan of the exceptionally important work done by investigative journalist Radley Balko.

It’s very sad to hear this:

So after nine years, I’m being let go by the Washington Post. This is disappointing but not surprising. In recent years, the Opinion leadership has made it increasingly difficult to do the reporting & in-depth analysis I was hired to do — in favor of short, hot takes.

Over the last year, it’s become clear that my short, hot takes aren’t particularly welcome either. My last day is Dec 1.

It’s a deflating way to end a dream job. But I’m proud of the journalism I’ve published in the last decade, including reporting that has brought real change.

So today, I’m launching my Substack, The Watch. For now, this will be my primary source of income and the primary way I fund my journalism.

If you support my work, I hope you’ll subscribe, and I hope you’ll spread the word. Thanks!

One more thing:

My first big story will post in a few days. It’s a two-year investigation into a horrific wrongful conviction in Arkansas.

Stay tuned.

The Watch, by Radley Balko

Over the years, I’ve seen some real atrocities in the news regarding the damage done by law enforcement in the course of a raid — a flashbang thrown into a crib with a baby in it, doors ripped off and furniture destroyed, dogs killed, and even entire houses burned down.

But none of that prepared me for this latest outrage…

They didn’t even remove their shoes!

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants his state to control the quantities of medicinal marijuana sold to individual consumers.

With the high cost of cannabis, patients usually titrate their dosages to adjust for the various potencies of the product and their own health requirements. However, a new emergency rule implements Florida’s statute section 381.986(4)(f) and sets a 35-day, 2.5-ounce possession limit on smokable marijuana, while a 70-day limit of 24,500 milligrams (0.864212 ounce) of THC was set on vapor or edible products. Patients must find a doctor to apply for an exemption if they need more than the legal maximums.

Delays in processing the applications are inevitable. The rule also poses many problems for elderly retirees who will not be covered for medicinal marijuana by Medicare or their health insurance and who might wish to save money on healthcare costs by growing their own. No actual, arbitrary or capricious explanation appears to have been offered for how or why the stipulated quantities of cannabis were chosen. Floridians should know by now that what’s easy for their state doesn’t always make it convenient for the individual. Why not just round up the 70-day limit on processed THC from 0.864212 ounce to 1.0 ounce to make it easier to remember?

Unfortunately, Governor DeSantis is known for treading heavily in medical fields where he doesn’t belong. Like in 2021 when he resisted imposing face mask mandates or vaccination requirements such as providing proof of vaccinations to businesses, restaurants, schools, colleges, cruise ships, government and healthcare facilities. His professional career began as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) in the Navy (2004 – 2010), where as a commissioned officer, he conducted prosecutions at Guantanamo. It will be interesting to see how Ron DeSantis’s Guantanamo-style doctoring plays out should he end up running for president in 2024 or beyond.

This made me laugh…

Donald Trump posted:

A major motion pertaining to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal Break-In of my home, Mar-a-Lago, right before the ever important Mid-Term Elections. My rights, together with the rights of all Americans, have been violated at a level rarely seen before in our Country. Remember, they even spied on my campaign. The greatest Witch Hunt in USA history has been going on for six years, with no consequences to the scammers. It should not be allowed to continue!

I’m sorry, did the FBI break down your door in the middle of the night, shoot you and your dog in bed, and burn down your house with flashbangs, all based on a falsely-procured warrant that was for a house two blocks away?

Of course, no such motion will be filed. It’s just another attention-getter.