By Alice Salles

The National Institute on Drug Abuse is a U.S. federal research institute focused on “[advancing] science on the causes and consequences of drug use and addiction … to apply that knowledge to improve individual and public health. ” Though it admits “the majority of people who use marijuana do not go on to use other, ‘harder’ substances,” it still describes marijuana as a gateway drug.

But U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently told a group of Kentucky high school students the role of marijuana in the national drug abuse debate has been overstated.

While discussing heroin abuse and how individuals often develop an addiction, Lynch argued:

[I]ndividuals [start out] with a prescription drug problem, and then because they need more and more, they turn to heroin. It isn’t so much that marijuana is the step right before using prescription drugs or opioids —  it is true that if you tend to experiment with a lot of things in life, you may be inclined to experiment with drugs, as well. But it’s not like we’re seeing that marijuana as a specific gateway.

Attorney General Lynch added that instead of trafficking rings, what “introduce[s] a person to opioids … [is] the household medicine cabinet.”

The event she attended was part of the Prescription Opioid Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week, a campaign designed by the White House that includes “250 different events highlighting the importance of prevention, enforcement, and treatment.” As expected, the campaign focused on advertising the official approach to drug abuse, encouraging the public to support the Obama administration’s approach to the opioid crisis.

By Alice Salles

The pursuit of justice in the United States has never been never easy — or cheap.

In 2014, Texan Ross Ulbricht was convicted of founding and running the black market site known for drug sales, the “Silk Road,” under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” Due to his alleged involvement with the site, Ulbricht was convicted of drug trafficking and other charges in February 2015. Following a trial riddled with inconsistencies and likely corruption, he was sentenced to two life sentences.

While charges associated with an alleged murder-for-hire scheme were eventually removed from the indictment, a separate charge of “procuring murder” is still pending trial in Maryland. However, Ulbricht and his lawyers have always dismissed these charges, arguing there were multiple individuals who used the “Dread Pirate Roberts” name and that, regardless, no murders ever took place.

In order to help the Ulbricht family raise the $14,000 required to appeal Ross’s double-life sentence for nonviolent charges, a group of free-thinking and libertarian-leaning economists, policy researchers, artists, authors, journalists, politicians, and entrepreneurs held a “Free Ross-a-thon” on Sunday, December 4th.

While the main goal of the event was to pool enough money to ensure the “printing and binding” of the “appeal documents for the court,” the event also sought to bring awareness to Ulbricht’s case and its context, which is deeply entrenched in the drug war.

During the event, many of the participants touched on drug prohibition — the ongoing federal and state governments’ effort to target all drug use and commerce. But one of the most compelling arguments linking Ulbricht’s case and the drug war came from Roger Ver, a Bitcoin angel investor who supports him.

“The question isn’t: should drugs be legal or illegal,” Ver told viewers. “The question should be: Does each individual human being own their own body?”

Op-Ed by Alice Salles

The month of April is a nightmare for anyone with a conscience, as we only have until “tax day” — which usually falls on April 15 — to give the taxman what he says he deserves. So if you pay taxes to Uncle Sam and you’re also aware you’re paying for mass murder in the Middle East and in U.S. streets due to the drug war, you should also feel sick to your stomach as you write that check.

To a restaurant customer, this may have served as enough incentive to remind his server that taxation is always immoral — but he didn’t stop there.

Last week, a customer at a Missouri restaurant gave the waitress a “personal gift” instead of a tip, writing the now popular line “Taxation is theft” in the tip section of the receipt.

In a second note, the fiscally conscious customer added:

This is not a tip. This is a personal gift and not subject to federal or state income taxes.

With major progressive news outlets like ATTN: reporting on this story, left-leaning reporters started to debate wages in the food and service industries, discussing the fact that tips end up being factored as wages, meaning they are always taxable.

But as that discussion developed, reporters were quick to realize that when personal gifts are in the mix, the taxman can’t take part of those earnings away. After all, a gift would have to exceed $13,000 to be subject to taxation, meaning that even if the customer had spent hundreds, the “personal gift” would not amount to anything close to the requirements stipulated by the IRS.