TRENTON - Two charges filed by a city police officer against Edward Forchion, aka NJ Weedman, may go up in smoke. The criminal activity allegedly occurred when Forchion appeared in a video that was shot outside his restaurant on May 10 and was subsequently posted to social media. In the clip, Trenton cops are at his restaurant when the weed advocate repeatedly calls officer Herbert Flowers a "pedophile" and a "big boy who (expletive) with little girls." In the video, Flowers appears to laugh off the verbal assault and at one point puts his arms in the arm with a smile, responding "Yep, you said it." [continues 952 words]
Clay Bearnson Believed to Be the First City Councilor in the State to Own Pot Shop A member of the Medford City Council, known for its tough stance on legalized marijuana, has opened his own dispensary. Clay Bearnson is believed to be the first city councilor in Oregon to own a cannabis dispensary, though that could not be immediately confirmed by the Oregon Health Authority. "That feels pretty cool," Bearnson said. Bearnson and five partners opened Oregon Farmacy at 1 W. Sixth St., Suite 104, in the Acme Building facing Evergreen Way, about two weeks ago. A grand opening is planned later. [continues 446 words]
Department Investigates Alleged False Testimony That Could Derail Cases Chicago police have begun an internal investigation into allegations that as many as six officers lied in their court testimony and are prepared to take at least one of the officers off the street because of a judge's determination he had testified falsely in a narcotics case. The inquiry, confirmed by a police spokesman, comes in response to a Tribune investigation that documented more than a dozen examples over the past few years in which judges concluded officers gave false or questionable testimony in court. [continues 946 words]
Feds Quit Assault on Harborside, Oakland Passes (Contentious) New Pot Rules, and It'll Be Marijuana and Trump Together on California's November Ballot. Oaklanders are in the middle of one of their biggest marijuana moments in city history. Last week, its city council approved a vast, but controversial, expansion of Oakland's medical-pot industry. The vote came the same day as Mayor Libby Schaaf's announcement that Oakland's biggest dispensary, Harborside Health Center, had prevailed in its federal-forfeiture court case. Also last week, a coalition of activists dubbed Let's Get It Right, California announced all of the Golden State would be voting on legalization of adult-use marijuana in the November 8 election. [continues 1441 words]
The former drug-addicted chemist who got high at work nearly every day for eight years handled more than 500 cases in Suffolk County alone - and up to 1,500 total were processed at the Amherst lab during her time there - according to officials sorting through the fallout of the state's latest drug lab scandal. The case count in Suffolk likely represents only a fraction of those district attorneys across the state are now scrambling to identify in the wake of a damning attorney general's report on the misconduct of ex-chemist Sonja Farak. [continues 361 words]
When I think about the prospect of legalizing marijuana in Massachusetts, I surprise myself by sounding like my father. Cannabis tourism? THC-infused lip balm? "Budz and sudz" crawls? What is the world coming to? The combination of vice and capitalism is a powerful one, so it might be expected that entrepreneurs are rushing to market these artisanal highs. In Colorado, one of the first states to legalize recreational marijuana, cannabis concierge services are thriving, from ganja yoga retreats to weed weddings. Sales nearly hit $1 billion last year, with the state raking in tax and licensing fees of $135 million. [continues 554 words]
FOR THE first time in 20 years, the UN has convened a special session on "the world drug problem" amid fierce international debate about whether drug users should primarily be punished or rehabilitated. The UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs, which started yesterday and is scheduled to run until tomorrow, was called after Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala appealed to the body to revise the global approach to illegal drugs. After two decades - and a trillion or so dollars later - the "war-on-drugs" approach of criminalising drug users has dismally failed to prevent the distribution and use of illegal drugs. [continues 824 words]
The global war on drugs has proved "disastrous" and "humankind cannot afford a 21st century drug policy as ineffective and counter-productive as the last century's." So say more than 1,000 world leaders, including 27 members of the House of Representatives and six U.S. senators, in a letter to the United Nations ahead of a major international drug summit happening this week. The letter's signatories also include 24 current and former law enforcement officials, 37 members of the clergy, more than 230 health and medical professionals and a colorful slate of celebrities, athletes and business leaders, including DJ Khaled, Michael Douglas, Tom Brady and Warren Buffett. [continues 156 words]
A U. N. Special Session Will Examine the Effects of the Hard- Line Approach and Will Study Alternatives. At what is being billed as the most significant high-level gathering on global drug policy in two decades, the stage will be set for world leaders to discuss what would have once been unthinkable - reversing course in the war on drugs. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, which begins Tuesday in New York, will bring together government, human rights and health leaders to discuss whether the hard-line tactics of combating drug trafficking and money laundering have failed. [continues 800 words]
A Year Ago, Then-Deputy Chief Keith Foster, Six Others Were Arrested on Drug Trafficking Charges Lawyer Says Plea Deal Involves Prison for Foster Foster Likely Won't Accept It, Lawyer Says Federal prosecutors are offering plea deals to former Fresno police Deputy Chief Keith Foster and five others indicted on drug-trafficking charges, a document filed in U.S. District Court reveals. So far, plea offers have been made to defendants Ricky Reynolds, Randy Flowers and Rafael Guzman. Plea offers to Keith Foster, Dennis Foster and Jennifer Donabedian will be finalized by Friday, the document says. [continues 1153 words]
Kingpin's Plea With U.S. Triggered Years of Bloodshed Reaching All the Way to Southlake Zetas Saw Gulf Cartel Leader As Traitor, Declared a War That Has Killed Thousands of People A plea agreement between a Mexican drug kingpin and the U.S. government helped generate a violent split between two drug cartels that led to the deaths of thousands of people in Mexico and along the Texas border, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found. A masked gunman fired multiple times at Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa with a 9 mm handgun through the passenger window of his Range Rover at Southlake Town Square in May 2013. Three Mexican citizens were arrested more than a year later and charged with stalking, and aiding and abetting in the hit. [continues 4074 words]
Sometimes the curtain is pulled aside, allowing us to see what's going on in the often-opaque worlds of government and finance. Such an occasion has been happening with what's being called the Panama Papers, released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It's going to take not months, but years, to wade through the estimated 11 million documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm that specializes in crafting tax shelters. But initial disclosures are both troubling and offer insight. "The documents reference 12 current or former world leaders, as well as 128 other politicians and public officials," CNN reported. Implicated, in particular, are associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin; FIFA, the global soccer governing body, 40 of whose officials were indicted in 2015 by the U.S. Justice Department on corruption charges; and Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson. [continues 219 words]
A former corrections officer was sentenced to one year plus one day in prison and an inmate was sentenced to 30 months in prison for a scheme to smuggle marijuana into the Federal Correctional Institution in Memphis, the office of U.S. Attorney Edward L. Stanton III said Monday. The corrections officer, Keair Kemp, 33, of Horn Lake, and inmate Travonte Johnson, 34, of Millington, planned last year to smuggle the drug into the prison, according to a news release. "In exchange for cash, Kemp agreed to unlawfully carry marijuana into the prison and deliver it to Johnson, thus violating his official duties as a correctional officer," Stanton's spokesman, Louis Goggans, said in the release. Kemp pleaded guilty in December 2015 to one count of accepting a bribe, and Johnson pleaded guilty in January to one count of offering a bribe to a public official, Goggans said. [end]
How to Win the War on Drugs In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco's anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman's boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first "war on drugs" and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. [continues 6943 words]
A Harper's Magazine writer recently reiterated a stomach-turning admission of racist societal control concocted by the Nixon Administration. That scandal plagued presidency was the first to declare war on drugs, and did so squarely in the midst of social and racial upheaval, as well as a foreign war. In a recent article arguing in favor of the legalization of drugs, writer Dan Baum recounted how he'd tracked down former Nixon advisor John Erlichman in 1994 for a book Baum was working on. [continues 534 words]
As two of our forward-thinking state legislators have noted, it's high time we considered legalizing marijuana in Connecticut. State Rep. Roland Lemar and state Rep. Juan Candelaria, both New Haven-based Democrats, are co-sponsoring a bill that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. Although a Quinnipiac University poll last year found that 63 percent of Connecticut voters support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational purposes, the bill's chance of passage is not deemed likely this time around. This is still, after all, the "Land of Steady Habits." [continues 805 words]
Harrisburg, Pa. - A federal grand jury has indicted four Butte County residents - including former Yuba County deputy sheriff Christopher Mark Heath - in a drug trafficking conspiracy, it was announced Thursday. The defendants, Heath, 37, Tyler Neil Long, 32, Ryan Jay Falsone, 27, and Ramona Marcel Long, 56, all of whom reside in the Oroville area, were charged in a 19-count indictment with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana, and conspiracy to launder drug proceeds, according to U.S. Attorney Peter Smith. [continues 326 words]
PRESIDENT Richard Nixon's former White House counsel John Dean says he's shocked by the claim that his boss' motivation for declaring "War on Drugs" was to lock up hippies and black people but admitted "it's certainly possible." Dean, 77, addressed the decades-old allegation by former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman a day after it surfaced in a new magazine article. "I was surprised by the statements," Dean told the Daily News Wednesday. "If this was indeed true, it would have been the Nixon-Ehrlichman private agenda. I can't believe (Nixon administration official Egil) Bud Krogh would run the program with that agenda knowingly." [continues 227 words]
THE "WAR ON DRUGS" was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday. John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss' controversial policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a new article for Harper's magazine. "You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon's harsh antidrug policies. [continues 563 words]
