An Oct. 28 letter to the Daily Herald advocated greater access to marijuana for people suffering chronic pain, citing a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). But if you visit the JAMA website and enter the search word "marijuana," you'll also see dozens of articles showing that marijuana can kill more than just pain: it can negatively impact things like cognitive function, moral clarity and the general health and well-being of users and their children and grandchildren.

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Johnsie Gooslin spent Jan. 16, 2015, tending his babies -- that's what he called his marijuana plants.

More than 70 of them were growing in a hydroponic system of his own design.

Sometimes, he'd stay in his barn for 16 hours straight, perfecting his technique.

That night, he left around 8 o'clock to head home. The moon was waning, down to a sliver, which left the sky as dark as the ridges that lined it. As he pulled away, the lights from his late-model Kia swept across his childhood hollow and his parents' trailer, which stood just up the road from the barn. He turned onto West Virginia Route 65. Crossing Mingo County, he passed the Delbarton Mine, where he had worked on and off for 14 years before his back gave out. Though Johnsie was built like a linebacker, falling once from a coal truck and twice from end loaders had taken a toll. At 36, his disks were a mess, and sciatica sometimes shot pain to his knees.

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Thirty people were shot, three fatally, during a violent 18-hour period from Saturday to Sunday in Chicago, which included a police-involved shooting and an attack outside Mount Sinai Hospital.

In the Lawndale neighborhood, a woman's voice echoed as she voiced her frustration at the scene of a double shooting that left a 31-year-old man dead and another man wounded.

"They know it's a drug house," she yelled out at the police and crowd that had gathered. "They don't give a (expletive). I do. I'm tired of this (expletive)."

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Chicago, I'm told, has a morality problem.

That's what White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the other day when asked if violence in our city is related to easy access to guns.

"I think that the problem there is pretty clear that it's a crime problem," she said. "I think crime is probably driven more by morality than anything else."

That's an interesting statement, given the reason the question was posed: The administration had just announced that 20 federal gun agents were being dispatched to Chicago to help with a task force focused on the flow of illegal guns into the city.

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Two Elgin men were arrested after police said they tried to sell pancake mix in a drug deal with undercover officers.

[Name redacted], 18, of the 600 block of Hampton Circle, was charged with four counts of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance, and one count of unlawful possession of a look-alike substance with intent to deliver, police said in a Facebook post Friday.

[Name redacted], 19, of the 300 block of Ann Street, was charged with one count each of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance and possession of a look-alike substance with intent to deliver, police said.

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[Name redacted], is charged with selling about a kilogram of heroin mixed with carfentanil -- the elephant tranquilizer -- and another potent opioid, fentanyl.

A grand jury has indicted a Cincinnati man on charges of selling an elephant tranquilizer in Chicago, the first time someone has been charged here with selling the drug -- which is used by narcotics dealers to boost the potency of heroin, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

[Name redacted] is accused of selling the mixture of drugs to the informant on Sept. 9 in a vehicle near 93rd and Stony Island on the South Side. An audio recording was made of the deal, authorities say. [Name redacted] allegedly offered to sell the informant a kilogram of the mixture for $65,000.

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I am writing to you in regard to the article "New pitch made for alcohol, drug treatment center near Campton Hills."

The opioid epidemic is a rather common in the U.S., but the opioid overdose statistics in Illinois have risen dramatically over a very short period of time, nearly 1,700 people in our state died from overdoses in 2014. This is a multifaceted problem, but our first step is destigmatization.

The recent opioid overdoses are directly related to an overall decrease of prescribing large amounts of pain killers. This crack down, which is absolutely necessary, causes people with narcotic addiction to seek it through heroin, rather than narcotic pain killers. Many reports all over the U.S. are pointing to heroin laced with fentanyl, a super potent narcotic, most likely from China, as the culprit to the heroin overdoses. This problem is not going away any time soon.

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[photo] Partygoers smoke marijuana during a Prohibition-era themed New Year's Eve party at a bar in Denver, celebrating the start of retail pot sales. Denver is starting work on becoming the first city in the nation to allow marijuana clubs and public pot use in places like restaurants, yoga studios and art galleries. Voters narrowly approved the "social use" measure last November. (Brennan Linsley / AP)

Denver has started work on the nation's first law allowing marijuana clubs and use in public places such as coffee shops or art galleries. But the details about what those pot clubs would look like are very much in the air. Here's what we know, and don't know, about the looming pot clubs headed to Denver:

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Depressed, withdrawn and coping with a death in the family, Joseph thought getting high would help him feel better.

Instead, he said, his marijuana smoking grew into a daily habit that made him paranoid and constantly question how others saw him. He went days without going home, showering or eating much besides potato chips.

"I always thought (marijuana) would bring down my anxiety, but it just made it that much worse," the Rockford-area man said.

One day, after getting so high that he was pacing around, alarmed by his own gaunt appearance and generally "freaking out," Joseph was taken by his brother to a Rosecrance drug treatment center in Rockford, where he entered an inpatient program.

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[photo] A medical marijuana dispensary is proposed for 1154 N. Main St. in Algonquin.

Algonquin officials are considering a medical marijuana company's proposal to open a dispensary in a medical office complex.

ILDISP III LLC, represented by Ross Morreale, is seeking a special-use permit for a free-standing building at 1154 N. Main St., out of which the company would sell marijuana to patients with a prescription.

An attached garage would also be added onto the building, which formerly housed an MRI center, as a secure area for deliveries and waste removal, according to the proposal.

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- -- and says he's done it before

In his latest controversial statement, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his bloody anti-drug war that has killed thousands, threatened to throw corrupt officials out of a helicopter, saying he has done it before, to a kidnapper, and won't hesitate to do it again.

"I will pick you up in a helicopter to Manila, and I will throw you out on the way," Duterte said in Tagalog in front of a crowd in the Camarines Sur province Tuesday, according to GMA News. "I've done it before. Why would I not do it again?"

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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs

Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs faces criticism for its brutal efforts that have left more than 3,000 drug users and dealers dead.

Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs faces criticism for its brutal efforts that have left more than 3,000 drug users and dealers dead.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte affirmed on Friday that he shot dead three people as mayor, dismissing any uncertainty and displaying no remorse.

"I don't really know how many bullets from my gun went inside their bodies," he said. "It happened. I cannot lie about it."

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With fewer than 4,000 approved patients, the nascent medical marijuana business in Illinois is off to a slow start. Yet it hasn't kept away a cadre of cannabis entrepreneurs who once relied on guns, badges, tough drug laws and lengthy prison sentences to fight the drug.

While neither state regulators nor the medical marijuana industry track the number of employees who were former law enforcement officials, The Associated Press has identified no fewer than 17 in Illinois, many of whom have outsized influence -- from a trustee of the state's chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police to one-time undercover narcotics officers.

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WICHITA, Kan. (AP) -- A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a western Kansas woman against the state and several agencies after her son was removed from her home in 2015 when he told school officials she used marijuana.

Shona Banda, of Garden City, alleged in the lawsuit filed in March that the defendants denied her civil rights by refusing to allow her to use medical marijuana to treat her Crohn's disease, interfered with her parenting and questioned her son without her permission. Medical marijuana is not legal in Kansas.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten dismissed the lawsuit Tuesday, agreeing with the defendants' contention that Banda had no right to use marijuana and the agencies had some immunity.

Banda says she intends to pursue the case after she recovers from a recent surgery.

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[photo] Hydrocodone at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. (Toby Talbot / AP)

Drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on these two painkillers, according to an investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

That amounts to 433 of the frequently abused opioid pills for every man, woman and child in the state of 1.84 million people.

The Gazette-Mail obtained previously confidential records sent by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to the office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. They disclose the number of pills sold to every pharmacy and drug shipments to all 55 counties in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

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Imagine this: Upon taking his oath of office, President Donald Trump instructs his new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to ignore civil rights laws. How would that go over? Before you yell, "But we are a nation of laws!" you can thank President Barack Obama and his prior Attorney General Eric Holder for magnifying this issue.

Basically, the Obama administration made it standard operating procedure to ignore laws they thought unfashionable or unworthy.

The best example of this is marijuana.

To be clear at the outset, I am neither pro-pot nor anti-pot. And, in fact, marijuana is not even the issue - rather, the Constitution is. Marijuana is just the symptom that exposes the problem.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about marijuana.

No, it's not what you suspect, I don't smoke the stuff.

Nor do I need it to alleviate pain. Rather, it's our country's schizophrenic way of dealing with "weed." Here in Stephenson County is In Grown Farms, which is perfectly legal and is growing marijuana plants to be harvested, packaged and sold at marijuana dispensaries as medicine.

You need a doctor's prescription to get it. There hasn't been much controversy about it. Indeed, folks are happy that a new business decided to locate in the Freeport area. There's even talk -- perhaps far-out talk, but still -- of mixing marijuana, legally, with snack foods like pretzels or potato chips. Meanwhile, next door in Winnebago County, the county sheriff's police raided two fields, one near Durand, the other between Rockford and Winnebago, and found what they said was $1 million worth of marijuana plants. These plants were growing illegally.

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The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday announced it has created new rules for the state's cannabis decriminalization law - including setting a $ 120 fine for those caught with up to 10 grams of cannabis or drug paraphernalia.

The law, which Gov. Bruce Rauner signed on July 29, gave the state Supreme Court the authority to further clarify the newly defined "civil law violation" of possessing up to 10 grams of cannabis or drug paraphernalia.

Under the law, the violation is punishable by a fine between $ 100 and $ 200. In one of six newly created rules, the fine was set at $ 120 per violation.

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African-Americans Ticketed, Arrested for Pot Offenses in Chicago Far More Than Any Racial Group

Four years after the Chicago City Council decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, African-American neighborhoods continue to bear the brunt of enforcement, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

As anticipated, the Chicago Police Department is making a fraction of the arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession it made in 2011 - the last full year before cops were given the option of ticketing, rather than locking up, people caught with about half an ounce or less.

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She recently turned 18, and if Malia Obama did not know that she had become a legitimate target for sections of the American media, she does now.

The "First Daughter" was videoed smoking what a witness claimed was a joint in a video clip released yesterday.

The footage was taken at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago last month. It is unclear from the images whether what Obama can be seen puffing on is a regular cigarette or one rolled with cannabis.

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