The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has agreed to pay $12 million to the family of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American nurse, who was fatally shot eight times by Louisville Kentucky Metro Police Department officers who entered her apartment, while serving a “no-knock warrant” on March 13. She was in her bed sleeping and no “drugs” were found.

And Louisville has agreed to “institute sweeping police reforms.”

CNN reports that “as part of the settlement, the city agreed to establish a housing credit program as an incentive for officers to live in the areas they serve; use social workers to provide support on certain police runs; and require commanders to review and approve search warrants before seeking judicial approval, among other changes.”

Unfortunately, these reforms are limited to the city of Louisville, and will do nothing to stop similar tragedies in the rest of the country, resulting from similar raids that have become “Standard Operating Procedure” in the Drug War.

In fact, even in Louisville, that is still a problem because it makes it difficult to prosecute the police officers involved in the shooting. The Louisville raid was probably illegal, but which of the officers involved were responsible?

I have not been able to find an accurate count of the number of raids but it would appear that there were at least 20,000 “No Knock” raids last year, and perhaps far more.

Full here:

I turned 80 in June, and my father died of prostate cancer at the age of 81, so I have more than a casual interest in the subject. Of course, when he died 29 years ago, we did not know what we know now, because the federal government has done everything possible to block research on marijuana.

According to a study published by the U.S. National Institutes for Health:

“Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men (aside from non-melanoma skin cancer) and the second most common cause of cancer death in the United States. Even with widespread screening with prostate-specific antigen (PSA), still 5% of cases present with metastatic lesions at the time of diagnosis. Because of all this, there is a fundamental necessity to search for and find new and novel treatments to this common pathology. Cannabis and cannabinoids have often been an issue of much polemics in the realm of science, but since the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in rat brain in the late 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the research of these compounds and our knowledge continues to expand. There has been experimental evidence that cannabinoids possess anti-androgenic proprieties.”

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The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is one of the smallest (998.6 sq miles, pop. 626,108) and richest ($112,045 per capita) countries in Europe. (It is actually the third richest in the world.)

Its location on the border of Belgium, France and Germany has given it an outsized importance in the European Union, so its moves to legalize cannabis will have a significant impact on other EU countries. It was also a part of the Benelux free trade group that ultimately became the European Union.

From August of 2019, see Luxembourg to be first European country to legalise cannabis.

SEE: Health minister confirms plans and calls on neighbouring countries to relax their laws.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has delayed legalization, but it also seems to have increased demand for medical cannabis.

Full here:

I love Spain, but I feel sorry for anyone who tries to govern it. In addition to the usual Left/Right political divisions, several of Spain’s “autonomous” regions, most notably Catalonia (Barcelona), have strong independence movements that resent the Madrid government.

However, Spain has been hit very hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is more dependent on tourism than any other major European country. Consequently, it is going to need a major bailout from the European Central Bank, but that will not solve its terrible unemployment problem, especially for its younger citizens.

While Spain needs to diversify its economy, that will take time, and the problems in its devastated tourism sector have to be addressed now, because it is a major source of employment, especially for the young, and the pandemic is still keeping it closed.

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Recently, the excellent website, MarijuanaMoment.com, carried two articles by Kyle Jaeger, their Los Angeles-based associate editor, Trump Voices Concern That Putting Marijuana On The Ballot Makes Republicans Lose and Biden’s Marijuana Decriminalization Plan Is ‘Meaningless,’ Democratic Congressman Says that really make me wonder if Trump is willing to lose the election to maintain marijuana prohibition. (Or is Biden?)

Jaeger reported that on a campaign visit to Wisconsin, Trump “urged Republicans not to place marijuana legalization initiatives on state ballots out of concern that it will increase Democratic turnout in elections … and that he blames marijuana legalization efforts on former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) defeat in the 2018 election.”

“The next time you run please don’t put marijuana on the ballot at the same time you’re running,” Trump said, directing his advice to Walker, who was in the crowd. “You brought out like a million people that nobody ever knew were coming out.”

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The great thing about voting machines is that you can vote with one hand and hold your nose with the other one. Believe me, I have had a lot of practice with that, and I will do it again this year.

After Biden cinched the Democratic nomination, his campaign focused on getting the support of Bernie Sanders’ young supporters. Biden was greatly relieved that Sanders was willing to help, so they launched what they called a “Unity Task Force,” and one of the major topics was Federal marijuana prohibition.

Politico reported the result as: “The left gets rolled on legalizing pot.”

Frankly, I absolutely reject that formulation. Marijuana legalization has been supported by the Libertarian right far longer than by the Left. The late Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. and many other conservatives have long opposed prohibition. Obama, Holder, Biden, Shalala, Clinton, Feinstein and Schumer all supported arresting millions of Americans. Until they opposed it…

However, in a meeting with Biden, Sanders is definitely on the Left. Given Biden’s long support for the Drug War, even coining the term “Drug Czar,” the real world results were not too terrible.

The key points:

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Have I “jumped the shark” polemically? It is true that 95% of the American people are in favor of medical marijuana, and we know that cannabis can help with a variety of medical problems.

1. The extreme nausea caused by cancer chemotherapy
2. Epilepsy in children
3. Crohn’s Disease and other autoimmune problems
4. Wasting syndrome for people with AIDS, and many more

See: COVID-19, AIDS and the Suppression of Medical Cannabis

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Race being inherent in the topic, I should begin by explaining that I am an 80-year-old white guy, which means that I am not in BLM’s target demographic. On the other hand, I am not the target demographic for trigger-happy police either.

Nonetheless, I can readily understand why black Americans would rightly expect “equal justice.” Do we whites think that Black Americans are deaf and don’t hear the words “Liberty and Justice for All” and all that good stuff? They bleed on our battlefields in our endless wars, so why should they bleed on our streets?

Enter Black Lives Matter.

It was actually founded seven years ago, but it did not seem to get much attention by whites until this year, after two particularly outrageous killings: George Floyd by suffocation in Minneapolis, and Breonna Taylor, shot in a “no-knock” drug raid as she slept, in Louisville, Kentucky.

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