The Ohio House of Representatives recently passed the Saving Ohio Communities Act which would work to combat the drug and human trafficking crises in the Buckeye State through a number of measures.
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A Chattanooga man received 21 years in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to distributing para-fluorofentanyl, a fentanyl analogue, that resulted in the overdose death of 19-year-old Charlotte Gallant.
Jonathan Bash, 25, sold a fentanyl analogue to the boyfriend of Gallant, misrepresenting the drug as ketamine, according to Bash’s plea agreement cited by the Eastern District of Tennessee U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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Mark Elrod, who is currently serving as interim sheriff of Williamson County amid former Sheriff Dusty Rhoades’ retirement, said the biggest issues affecting the county in regards to crime are drugs and fentanyl.
“I would say that probably one of our biggest issues is drugs, narcotics, fentanyl. We’ve had an uptick in that as well as heroin over the last several years. With Williamson County, we’re a transient community where a lot of the drugs and other crimes come in from other areas into Williamson County. It’s not so much your next door neighbor or the people down the street, although there is some of that, but most of it is coming from other places…Davidson County, out of Nashville, out of the city of Columbia. We have four interstates that come through the county, so it could be, you know, really coming from anywhere, everywhere,” Elrod said on Tuesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
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A Nashville man has been sentenced to nearly 14 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to a four-count Indictment charging him with distributing and possessing with the intent to distribute, fentanyl, methamphetamine, and heroin, according to the Middle District of Tennessee U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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Three individuals have been arrested for conspiring to distribute over 13 pounds of fentanyl-mixed pills in Nashville, according to the Middle District of Tennessee U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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A new bill has been filed in the Florida Legislature that would increase penalties for criminal migrants who reenter the United States illegally.
Senate Bill 1036 was introduced by state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, ahead of Florida’s legislative session which begins on Jan. 9.
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Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.
First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.
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Eleven Georgia men have been sentenced to federal prison for their roles as members of a drug trafficking organization in the metro-Atlanta area, according to the Northern District of Georgia U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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A law legalizing recreational marijuana will take effect in Ohio beginning Thursday, meaning adults over 21 will be allowed to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and up to 15 grams of marijuana concentrate.
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The number of migrants caught by the Coast Guard trying to illegally enter the U.S has doubled in recent years. That’s according to a witness who testified Tuesday at a U.S. House hearing on the rise of small vessels sneaking drugs and illegal immigrants into the country.
“The Coast Guard interdicted more than 12,000 migrants in both fiscal year 2022 and 2023 – more than double the fiscal year 2021 total, according to Coast Guard data,” Heather MacLeod, director of Homeland Security and Justice at the Government Accountability Office, said in prepared testimony.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is urging Ohioans to take caution as Carfentanil, a lethal synthetic opioid, has reemerged in several drug cases across the state.
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U.S. Representative Glenn Grothman (R-WI-06) will hear from real Americans impacted by President Joe Biden’s border policies at a congressional field hearing on Tuesday in Arizona.
Grothman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, is teaming up with U.S. Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05), chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, in holding the joint-committee hearing in Sierra Vista, AZ.
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An inmate who was in charge of coordinating a shipment of methamphetamine from Atlanta into Western North Carolina and the leader of a Savannah-area drug trafficking conspiracy were both sentenced to federal prison this week
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City officials asked a Maricopa County judge for more time to finish clearing “The Zone,” and revealed that its plan to clear the homeless camp will conclude in another 9 months, even as the majority of the camp’s residents remain.
Phoenix officials were in court again this week as attorneys representing local business owners and residents claimed the city was taking too long to clear the homeless encampment, which has reportedly decreased in population by about 300 residents since the city was ordered to clear it in March. About 1,000 people were reported to reside in “The Zone” at its peak, and so far about 300 people have been relocated.
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More than 580 arrests were made during a recent five-day, multi-agency operation organized by the Phoenix Police Department.
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After employing an elaborate scheme to smuggle drugs into a Tennessee correctional facility, a man faces over seven years in prison after one of the recipients of his smuggled narcotics overdosed and died.
“On June 8, 2023, Michael Wayne Lee, 45 of Blaine, Tennessee, was sentenced to 87 months in prison by the Honorable Clifton Corker, United States District Judge, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Greeneville,” according to a news release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee. “Following his imprisonment, Lee will be on supervised release for three years.”
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Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives this week approved a bipartisan expansion of the commonwealth’s “clean slate” policy affecting those with low-level, drug-related felony convictions.
The measure, which passed 189-14, builds on a 2019 policy that made the Keystone State the first in the nation to enact automatic record-sealing for summary offenses as well as certain nonviolent misdemeanors and arrests that didn’t lead to convictions. That reform benefited 1.2 million commonwealth residents. The bill that now awaits consideration by the state Senate would seal records of those who were convicted of minor drug felonies but thereafter stayed crime-free for 10 years.
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Pennsylvania’s GOP-run state Senate this week passed legislation banning supervised injection sites, sending the bill to the state House.
Such locations — also called “safe injection sites,” “safe consumption spaces” or “overdose prevention sites” — permit addicts to take illicit substances, mainly opioids, without fear of prosecution. Advocates of the injection centers say they are an important means of avoiding overdoses and drug-related disease transmission. The nonprofit Safehouse has been working to open such a location in Philadelphia.
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The America Project (TAP) held a conference on border security Saturday in Phoenix at the Hershberger Theater. The Border 911 event featured leading experts on human trafficking, cartels, and drugs coming over the border, including former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, who also served as a Border Patrol agent in Phoenix.
Homan said, “Under President Trump, we had the most secure border in my lifetime.” He discussed all the progress Trump made, such as getting countries to accept illegal immigrants back, Title 42 restrictions, and implementing the Remain in Mexico program.
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A lawsuit filed last August challenging “the largest homeless encampment in Arizona” is going ahead after a judge denied the City of Phoenix’s motion to dismiss. Residents who live near “the Zone,” which has grown to over 1,500 people, allege that the city has failed or refused to enforce criminal, health, or quality of life statutes to improve the Zone.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Stephen Tully said in his January 16 ruling that dismissal wasn’t warranted because the city didn’t meet the standard where “as a matter of law plaintiffs would not be entitled to relief under any interpretation of the facts susceptible of proof.” He found that the plaintiffs properly pleaded their case and supported a private cause of action for public nuisance.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is recommending more aggressive treatment of childhood obesity, including the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions for those as young as 12 or 13.
In its new guidance released Monday in the organization’s journal Pediatrics, AAP dismisses the sole approach of monitoring still-growing children to see if independent changes families and children can make on their own leads to success. Such a wait-and-see method is largely useless, the authors of the guidance say, given that “14.4 million children and adolescents” are now affected by obesity and its long-term health consequences.
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Antwon Brown, a convicted felon and known Unknown Vice Lords street gang member, was recently sentenced to 138 months in federal prison for drug and firearm charges.
Members of the Vice Lords street gang distribute cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and some heroin in Illinois, Tennessee, and other states, according to the Department of Justice. Vice Lords gangs in the Volunteer State are located predominantly in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) announced on Tuesday that he and 15 other state attorneys general have negotiated a preliminary deal with the multinational retailer Walmart, from which Ohio would get $114 million for opioid recovery programs.
The $3.1 billion national agreement comes after Yost and other prosecutors sought accountability for what they characterize as the superstore’s failure to safely and securely dispense high-strength prescription pain relievers through its more than 5,100 pharmacies across America. Other state prosecutor’s offices who worked alongside him include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee and Texas.
The agreement comes after Yost and other prosecutors sought accountability for what they characterize as the superstore’s failure to safely and securely dispense high-strength prescription pain relievers through its more than 5,100 pharmacies across America. Other state prosecutor’s offices who worked alongside him include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee and Texas.
Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Rep. Tim Ryan (D-13) claims that he wants to label fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” although he previously made a pledge to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2019 to decriminalize all drug possession.
The long time Democrat has consistently opposed efforts to limit the flood of the deadly opioid into the United States and Ohio.
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Drug raids in Detroit have fallen 95% since a peak in 2012, largely as a result of voters’ decision to legalize recreational marijuana and shifting other police priorities.
Detroit police conducted 3,462 drug raids in fiscal year 2012. Nearly every year since then, that number has declined. Last year, police conducted 186 drug raids, according to the city’s annual financial report.
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A four-month-long operation led by federal prosecutors and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) resulted in the seizure of 4,766,788 deadly doses of fentanyl in northern Ohio.
The agencies announced on Tuesday that the operation was part of the nationwide initiative “One Pill Can Kill.”
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A Pennsylvania Senate panel this week passed a measure sponsored by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) to strengthen the commonwealth’s tracking of overdoses.
All Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee supported the bill. It awaits consideration of the state House of Representatives.
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Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) on Thursday announced he will soon introduce legislation to strengthen penalties for fentanyl pushers whose sales result in deadly overdoses.
The senator is naming his measure “Tyler’s Law” after Tyler Shanafelter, an 18-year-old constituent who bought what he believed was Percocet but turned out to have acquired a fentanyl-laced product. The young man fatally overdosed.
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Metro Nashville Police recovered a large haul of illegal drugs and a loaded weapon Thursday evening at a Donelson apartment while following up on a routine service call.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed TN-5 Republican candidate Beth Harwell to the newsmaker line to discuss her support of completing the southern border wall, opinion on $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, and next stops on the campaign trail.
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Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations interdicted 62 tons (124,000 pounds) of illicit drugs in the first three months of this year, CBP reports, working with international, federal, state and local partners.
“Collaboration keeps us all safer,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said of their efforts. “CBP AMO works with U.S. and international partners to stem the flow of illicit narcotics. Through the end of March, AMO has contributed to the seizure of over 124,000 lbs of narcotics by partner agencies.”
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A Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee hearing on crime and public safety dwelled on two issues: the need for more funding and officers to address crime, and the lack of mental health support for struggling people.
Two panels spoke to a number of Republican senators; one comprised local law enforcement officers and the other a state judge, public defender, and district attorney.
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In what has been an ongoing theme, a division of the United States Postal Service (USPS) has been working to crack down on crimes committed by mail.
This time, their focus has been on Connecticut.
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On Friday, officers with the Athens Police Department responded to a residence on Sweetfield Valley Road “in reference to a subject with a firearm threatening to harm people at the residence,” according to a press release by the department.
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Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel joined local leaders to announce the next steps of Michigan’s anticipated receipt of $800 million opioid settlements over the next 18 years.
The settlement includes the nation’s three major pharmaceutical distributors – Cardinal, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen – and opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson.
“I took legal action once I took office to try to recoup money for the devastating impact that the opioid epidemic has had on the communities across our state,” Nessel said in a statement. “I am pleased to see our work pay off with this historic settlement that will bring Michigan communities millions of dollars to support abatement efforts. I know that no amount of money will make whole the thousands of Michigan families impacted by opioids, but this is an important victory in a hard-fought battle.”
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A joint federal and local law enforcement operation in Portland, Oregon, recently led to the largest single seizure of fentanyl in the state’s history, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The March 1 seizure included around 150,000 counterfeit prescription pills containing fentanyl and 20 pounds of suspected bulk fentanyl, the DOJ said in a press release. The contraband reportedly had an estimated street value of around $4 million.
The drugs were confiscated as a result of the arrest of four drug traffickers, the DOJ said. The ringleader of the group, Ufrano Orozco Munoz, 27, was allegedly involved in a conspiracy to traffic fentanyl from Mexico and other areas for distribution and sale in Oregon.
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An Eastern Ohio man was sentenced in U.S. District Court Friday to 168 months (14 years) in prison for discharging a firearm during a drug-trafficking robbery and for cyberstalking a victim for a year, according to a press release by the Southern District of Ohio U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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Acting U.S. Attorney Michelle M. Baeppler announced that a federal grand jury returned an eighteen-count superseding indictment charging 13 individuals as part of a drug trafficking conspiracy that sought to distribute illegal drugs in the Akron area.
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Many people have experienced reductions in stress, pain and anxiety and sometimes even euphoria after exercise. What’s behind this so-called “runner’s high”? New research on the neuroscience of exercise may surprise you.
The “runner’s high” has long been attributed to endorphins. These are chemicals produced naturally in the body of humans and other animals after exercise and in response to pain or stress.
However, new research from my lab summarizes nearly two decades of work on this topic. We found that exercise reliably increases levels of the body’s endocannabinoids – which are molecules that work to maintain balance in the brain and body – a process called “homeostasis.” This natural chemical boost may better explain some of the beneficial effects of exercise on brain and body.
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The Nashville Metro Health Department (NMHD) released a statement last week regarding an increase in drug-related overdoses. The statement, posted on the Health Department’s Twitter, said there had been an increase in drug-related overdoses, and that overnight there were three overdoses in Hermitage that involved a white powder substance.
Trevor Henderson, director of the overdose response program, told Fox17 in an interview that while it’s too early to determine what drug was involved with the overdoses, that 75 percent of fatal drug overdoses have involved fentanyl. “It is heartbreaking,” he said, “and to be frank, it’s heartbreaking every single time.”
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The directive for Drug Enforcement Administration officials to not use the term “Mexican cartel” came directly from the Biden administration to ease relations with the Mexican government, two recently retired DEA officials told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The DCNF exclusively obtained an email in August that instructed DEA officials to “now avoid saying ‘Mexican cartel’” when speaking with the media. The email was sent as drugs continued to surge across the U.S.-Mexico border.
One recently-retired DEA official told the DCNF that when the new administration came in, the Department of Justice (DOJ) required DEA to submit news interview requests for approval. The retired official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the DOJ declined many of the national news requests on top of the language guidance, but eventually eased up and allowed some to do local interviews where he used the term “Mexican drug cartel” and called each by its name.
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The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) met Monday morning to discuss the dangers of drug addiction and counterfeit medication. Director David Rausch said in the meeting, “let me be clear, if you’re buying pills on the street, in our state, you’re gambling.” Rausch gave a presentation showing examples of drugs like oxycodone, and compared them to the fake pills that people have been dying from. Most fake prescription pills contain fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. In 2017, fentanyl had attributed to 59 percent of drug overdose deaths. In 2019, Tennessee lost over two thousand people to drug overdoses, and of those over a thousand were fentanyl related.
Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Commissioner Marie Williams said, “Our state doesn’t just have a counterfeit pill problem, or an opioid problem, or a methamphetamine problem, we have an addiction problem. Just like every other state in this country.”
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The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a Public Safety Alert Monday warning of the surge in illegal fake painkillers combined with illicit fentanyl or methamphetamine.
The Public Safety Alert, the first warning in six years, highlighted the surge in fentanyl and methamphetamine-laced pills mass produced by criminal drug groups, which are killing Americans at a historic rate, according to a DEA press release.
“The United States is facing an unprecedented crisis of overdose deaths fueled by illegally manufactured fentanyl and methamphetamine,” Anne Milgram, administrator of the DEA, said in the press release.
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Video sharing platform TikTok promotes sexual content to underage users through its suggestion algorithm, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
Investigators for The Wall Street Journal set up 31 fake TikTok accounts registered to users between the ages of 13 and 15 and studied their “For You” feeds, which consist of videos recommended to users by TikTok’s suggestion algorithm.
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The drugs flowing over the border are leading to an uptick in fentanyl deaths, and experts are split about how to solve it.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has called fentanyl the “primary driver” of the record 92,183 drug overdose deaths in 2020. Many drug dealers use fentanyl to make money and smuggle it through the southern border mixed with other drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine to make them more potent — and more deadly — according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
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Michigan could receive $800 million under a proposed multibillion-dollar national opioid settlement, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said.
The settlement would involve Johnson & Johnson and the three largest pharmaceutical distributors in the country: Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen.
The historic agreement would resolve the claims of state and local governments nationwide and require industry changes.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is asking for an internal review of its own approval process that gave a greenlight to a drug to treat Alzhiemer’s, a move that could shed more light on the controversial chain of decision-making that led to the drug’s being okayed for use.
The FDA last month approved drug company BioGen’s product Aduhelm, the first medicine greenlit in the U.S. to slow the cognitive decline of those living with Alzhiemer’s.
Yet that decision was shrouded in controversy: The approval went against the advice of an outside panel of FDA experts and even led to the resignation of several of those experts in protest.
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Federal authorities have seized significantly more fentanyl along the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona and California since October than they did in the entire 2020 fiscal year.
Since October, authorities have seized 7.000 pounds of the drug, compared to just 4,500 pounds in the entire last fiscal year, according to data from Customs and Boarder Protection. The reasoning, according to authorities, is simply supply and demand.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Senator Bill Hagerty to the newsmakers line to answer questions about S1, new evidence of Georgia election irregularities, and the border crisis.
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Around $14.3 million worth of narcotics and several weapons have been seized since the start of February at an Arizona port where officials also arrested a man wanted for murder, Customs and Border Protection announced Tuesday.
Officials seized 440 pounds of methamphetamine, 385,000 tablets of fentanyl, 84 pounds of heroin and almost 13 pounds of cocaine in around 25 instances since Feb. 1, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A 28-year-old man wanted for murder in Las Vegas was arrested while in possession of an AR-15 assault rifle, a handgun and over 300 rounds of ammunition.
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