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baltimoresun.com (US) Howard jury convicts teen of murdering Laurel youth in drug deal gone awry - Howard County Times Howard jury convicts teen of murdering Laurel youth in drug deal gone awry A Hyattsville teen who is said to have shot a Laurel teen during a drug deal last October was found guilty of first-degree murder and other charges by a county jury late Friday. (Tue Oct 09 14:07:35 2018 PDT)

akronlegalnews.com Visitors are immediately struck by a slightly musty. Ohio is among 30 states that now have some form of legalized marijuana. (Tue Oct 09 18:07:53 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(100%), $propaganda_theme1(100%), $propaganda_theme2(60%), $propaganda_theme7(100%), $illegal_drugs(100%), $drugs(90%), $legalization(100%), $plants(100%), $intoxicant(100%), $opioid(100%), $medical_cannabis(100%), $narcotic(100%), $cannabis(100%), $cannabis_industry(85%), $various_drugs(90%), $various_illegal_drugs(70%), $aggrandizement(100%), $msm(100%), $mockingbird(100%), $assoc_press(100%)]

eptrail.com (US) Of Estes Park was charged with unlawful possession of controlled substance. (Tue Oct 09 16:05:14 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(75%), $propaganda_theme2(70%), $propaganda_theme3(50%), $propaganda_theme5(70%), $propaganda_theme6(75%), $illegal_drugs(80%), $drugs(95%), $drug_law(80%), $paraphernalia(100%), $various_drugs(95%), $various_illegal_drugs(80%), $incarceration(100%), $youth(70%)]

(US) [ ...] ... (Tue Oct 09 01:01:21 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(75%), $explicit_propaganda(70%), $propaganda_theme2(75%), $propaganda_theme3(65%), $propaganda_theme5(60%), $propaganda_theme6(75%), $protest(50%), $illegal_drugs(100%), $drugs(90%), $hallucinogen(100%), $chemicals(100%), $plants(100%), $psychedelic(100%), $depressant_intoxicant(85%), $alcohol(85%), $LSD(100%), $tobacco(100%), $various_drugs(90%), $youth(60%), $school(100%), $aggrandizement(100%), $meeting(50%)]

CBC.ca
Investors could help Canada's cannabis industry improve its social and environmental record, experts say
CBC.ca
Investors who've shied away from cannabis out of concern about whether legalization will be good for Canada should consider buying in to help shape the industry and how it operates, say experts in so-called impact investing. While there's been no ...

BBC News
Medical cannabis: 'False hope' after Home Office decision
BBC News
Parents of a boy with epilepsy who want him to be prescribed medical cannabis say they have been given "false hope" by the system to apply for it. Rachel Rankmore and Craig Williams, from Cardiff, believe it may help control their son Bailey's seizures.

Macleans.ca
As Canada makes marijuana legal, the US resorts to Prohibition-inspired tactics
Macleans.ca
But recent reports have suggested that U.S. border services might also deny entry to Canadians who tell them they've ever consumed marijuana, worked in the Canadian marijuana industry, or even have investments in pot stocks. Perhaps the most alarming ...

Ottawa Citizen
Growing pains: Tale of a Smiths Falls marijuana startup
Ottawa Citizen
On June 6, 2013, the day the new marijuana regime was established, the two had little money to invest, no production facility ready, and their firm had no licence from Health Canada to either grow or transport cannabis products. Yet, over the next 12 ...

The Globe and Mail
Quebec set to become the most restrictive province in Canada for cannabis use
The Globe and Mail
Quebec plans to control sales of legal marijuana through state-run outlets, starting with 20 and moving up to 150. The CAQ, which is opposed to the legalization of cannabis, criticized that number: “There will be even more [outlets] than there are St ...

and more »

Calgary Herald
High wholesale pot prices will hobble retailers, fuel black market, says prospective cannabis retailer
Calgary Herald
An entrepreneur, whose company hopes to open stores throughout the province, said government and marijuana producers will claim so much of the revenue it'll squeeze all but the largest operators, giving illicit dealers freer reign. “There's no pie left ...

and more »

CNBC
Florida's largest medical cannabis producer seeing 'huge transition' from opioids to marijuana treatment: CEO
CNBC
Florida patients with serious conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder are increasingly opting for medical cannabis over opioids, the CEO of the state's first and largest fully licensed medical marijuana company told CNBC on Monday. "We're seeing ...

and more »

Forbes
Science Tells Us Marijuana Doesn't Kill Cancer, So Does Real Life
Forbes
I spent a great deal of time on the phone with Mark discussing this supposed miracle brought on through the use of cannabis, and by the time I submitted the article to my editor, I was convinced that marijuana could cure cancer. After the piece was ...
What research says about marijuana and cancerMyDaytonDailyNews

all 3 news articles »

The city by the bay has been a hotbed of illegal race-based policing. This is just the latest example.

San Francisco's Tenderloin is a heavily populated, racially mixed neighborhood in the heart of one of America's iconic progressive cities. Yet when the San Francisco Police Department and the DEA targeted the neighborhood to crack down on drug dealing between 2013 and 2015 as part of "Operation Safe Schools," the only people they managed to roll up were black.

When 37 black defendants—and no defendants of any other race—got hauled away, nobody noticed. That is until the defendants started showing up looking for federal public defenders. The federal public defenders noticed, and they began making noise about racial disparities and selective enforcement of the drug laws.

Their charges only grew louder with the posting in 2015 of undercover police surveillance video to YouTube revealing a police officer muttering "fucking BMs," police code for black males, as he monitored a group of young men on the street. The video also apparently showed an undercover informant turning down drugs being offered by an Asian woman to instead buy drugs from a black woman.

In January 2017, 12 of those charged in the operation won a discovery motion from a judge who found there was "substantial evidence suggestive of racially selective enforcement" in their arrests. Instead of allowing the proceedings to continue so a full accounting of police conduct could occur, prosecutors instead dropped the charges.

At the time, the presiding judge, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen, made clear that while he was granting the dismissals because they were in the best interest of the defendants, he was concerned that doing so would prevent the allegations of police bias from being aired.

"These are serious issues, serious allegations regarding claims of discriminatory enforcement patterns," Chen said. "I think the defendants in this case have raised a very substantial prima facie case that, at the very least, raises some serious questions that would warrant a response and a full airing of the issues."

Now, a year and a half later, the ACLU of Northern California on Thursday filed a federal civil lawsuit on behalf of six of those rolled up in the busts. The lawsuit alleges the plaintiffs were targeted because of their race and cites a survey of Tenderloin drug users to bolster its case. That survey found racial diversity among Tenderloin drug sellers. About half were black, but 20 percent were Latino and 17 percent were white.

The lawsuit is "an opportunity to hold the actors in the San Francisco Police Department and the city itself accountable for the police department’s longstanding practices of engaging in racially discriminatory law enforcement," said ACLU attorney Novella Coleman, who is representing the plaintiffs.

It's also about financial relief for the plaintiffs, Coleman allowed. "The court will determine how to monetize that," she said.

Not an Anomaly

Racially biased policing is nothing new in San Francisco. In fact, as Ezekiel Edwards, director of the national ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project, pointed out in a post announcing the lawsuit, the city has the dubious honor of setting precedent for the idea that law enforcement targeting people based on their race is unconstitutional. In an 1886 case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the city attempted to deny laundry permits to Chinese people while granting them to non-Chinese. Such an action could only be explained by the city's "hostility to the race and nationality" of the applicants, a violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and the evidence that the city's penchant for targeting non-whites for harsher treatment remains intact just keeps piling up. Numerous studies in the past few years have documented racially biased policing practices, including a 2002 ACLU report on SFPD racial profiling and a city-commissioned study by a national expert on biased policing.

Those studies uncovered a range of bias-related problems and made concrete recommendations for reform. Those were ignored. As the rotten policing practices festered, more reports detailing racial and ethnic disparities across the criminal justice system came out in 2013 and 2015.

Then, in 2015, as "Operation Safe Schools" was winding down, SFPD was hit by a new scandal when officers were caught exchanging racist text messages. Some used the N-word, others referenced cross burnings. Officers were caught calling black residents "savages," "wild animals," and "barbarians," and one officer told his sergeant "All n------ must fucking hang." Another officer sent a text with an image of a white man spraying a black child with a hose above the caption "Go be a n----- somewhere else."

That finally got the attention of city fathers—as well as the Obama-era Justice Department. The city district attorney convened a Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency, Accountability, and Fairness in Law Enforcement that documented SFPD's history of racially disparate enforcement and concluded that it was "in urgent need of important reforms." In 2016, the Justice Department weighed in with its own report finding that the department still engaged in racially biased policing, especially around traffic stops and police use of deadly force.

It's Not Just San Francisco

The ACLU's Edwards concisely makes the case that San Francisco is no exception when it comes to racially biased policing:

“Unequal treatment by race is commonplace among police departments large and small in cities across a range of ideological leanings. This is the reason for the racial profiling lawsuits filed in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Maricopa County, Arizona. This is the motivation, prior to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for Justice Department consent decrees seeking to end racially discriminatory police practices in Seattle; Los Angeles County; New Orleans; Baltimore; Newark; East Haven, Connecticut; and Ferguson, Missouri. This is why the ACLU has found racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests across the country, in drug possession arrests more broadly, in stops and frisks in Boston, in seatbelt enforcement in Florida, and in arrests for low-level offenses in Minneapolis.”

When will things ever change?

This article was produced by Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 Related Stories

• Oh, Canada! Marijuana Is Now Legal in Great White North
• How This Red State's Cruel Meth Laws Are Putting Women Behind Bars in Record Numbers
• Here Are 10 Economic Sectors Impacted by Legal Marijuana

Forbes
Cannabis In Space Is Just Around The Corner
Forbes
As legal marijuana profits continue to reach stratospheric heights, it appears so too may the cannabis plant itself expand into space — soaring 250 miles above Earth within NASA's International Space Station (ISS). With plans to test how hemp plants ...

CBC.ca
OMA president's comments, apology raise questions about stigma around medical marijuana
CBC.ca
Jodie Emery, long-time marijuana activist, holds up a joint while speaking before the House of Commons health committee on the government's legal pot legislation last year. (CBC). "When doctors spread this kind of fear about cannabis being a gateway ...
OMA president apologizes after calling cannabis a 'gateway drug'Toronto Star

all 50 news articles »

ijpr.org (US) Philadelphia is getting closer to opening what may be the country's first facility where people can use illegal opioids and other drugs all under medical supervision. (Mon Oct 08 21:55:06 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(100%), $propaganda_theme1(100%), $addiction(60%), $propaganda_theme2(70%), $propaganda_theme3(65%), $use_is_abuse(100%), $propaganda_theme4(100%), $moral_imperative(100%), $illegal_drugs(100%), $drugs(95%), $harm_reduction(100%), $injection_center(100%), $syringe_exchange(100%), $opioid(100%), $narcotic(100%), $various_drugs(95%), $various_illegal_drugs(100%), $legalism(65%), $aggrandizement(100%)]

kmed.com (US) THAT WAS INGESTED BY A GROUP OF PEOPLE DURING A SHOW AT THE BRITT FESTIVAL WAS MDA. (Mon Oct 08 21:53:05 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(70%), $propaganda_theme2(70%), $illegal_drugs(100%), $drug_law(80%), $hallucinogen(100%), $chemicals(100%), $phenethylamine(100%), $euphoric_empathogen(100%), $stimulant(100%), $mda(100%), $various_illegal_drugs(80%)]

wftw.com Walter Armstrong, president of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, called the skit "deplorable, disgusting, and outrageous." Walter Armstrong, president of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, called the skit "deplorable... (Mon Oct 08 19:51:48 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(75%), $propaganda_theme1(55%), $propaganda_theme2(70%), $propaganda_theme3(55%), $propaganda_theme5(75%), $propaganda_theme6(55%), $dehumanization(55%), $moral_imperative(100%), $drug_ngo(100%), $govt_prohib_other(50%), $prohibitionist_ngo(100%), $youth(75%), $school(100%), $aggrandizement(100%)]

wflx.com (US) (AP) b Authorities say a police officer from a small town in the Florida Panhandle faces charges he sold opioids out of his squad car while in uniform. (AP) b Authorities say a police officer from a small town in the Florida Panhandle faces charges he sold opioids out of his squad car whil... (Mon Oct 08 19:49:15 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(100%), $drugwar_propaganda(70%), $propaganda_theme2(70%), $propaganda_theme5(50%), $illegal_drugs(100%), $drugs(95%), $drug_law(80%), $opioid(100%), $narcotic(100%), $various_drugs(95%), $various_illegal_drugs(80%), $incarceration(100%), $youth(50%), $aggrandizement(85%), $msm(100%), $mockingbird(100%), $assoc_press(100%)]

kldr.com (US) An impaired driving investigation was performed and Talkington was charged with Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, Driving Under the Influence of Controlled Substances and Reckless Driving. (Mon Oct 08 21:49:31 2018 PDT) [$drug_related(80%), $drugwar_propaganda(75%), $propaganda_theme2(75%), $propaganda_theme3(50%), $illegal_drugs(80%), $drug_law(80%), $chemicals(50%), $depressant_intoxicant(50%), $alcohol(50%), $various_illegal_drugs(80%), $police_related_news(70%)]