Drugs

You may have forgotten about the White House’s resident coke fiend after weeks of headlines about Hunter Biden’s various court battles, but now the story of drugs in the Executive Mansion is back in the news. A publication is claiming that Joe Biden knows whose dime-bag it was — and it’s not Hunty.  “The Secret Service told President Joe Biden the name of the person who brought a packet of cocaine into the White House last month, according to three security sources with direct knowledge of the incident," Susan Katz Keating of the relatively forgotten Soldier of Fortune magazine wrote Monday. "All three sources independently told Soldier of Fortune the same name, which arose from an investigation into the incident.

Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and has struck a deal with federal prosecutors over a felony gun charge. According to a court filing released by US Attorney David Weiss on Tuesday, Biden was charged with two counts of “willful failure to pay federal income tax” and for “possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.”  Weiss, who has overseen the federal probe into Biden’s taxes since 2018, has agreed to recommend probation for Biden’s tax violations and it is unlikely he will serve jail time for either his tax and gun charges, according to the Washington Post. If Biden complies with the terms of his pretrial diversion, he could have the gun charge removed from his record in two years.

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Sure, he hasn’t announced it and has claimed he’s “all in” for Biden, but he’s increasingly taking time off from personally disrupting the nation’s Dapper Dan supply chain in order to weigh in on national issues, measure the drapes, and attempt to troll Republican governors. His latest salvo, directed toward Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sworn in as Arkansas’ governor about 15 minutes ago, claims that “While [Sanders] touts public safety, here is what she skips over: Arkansas has the one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” This is, of course, true. In 2020, the last year for which CDC stats are available, Arkansans have a much greater chance of being murdered than Californians.

Last week, British Columbia became the first province in Canada and the second jurisdiction in North America to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs for personal use. Those drugs include heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and even fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. British Columbia follows Oregon, which decriminalized all drugs in 2020, taking a more proactive — if controversial — approach to address the alarming number of overdose deaths across the region. Under the state's new guidelines, adults 18 years and older caught with less than 2.5 grams of an illicit substance will not be arrested or charged with a criminal offense.

After years of neglect, it seems federal and city officials are finally removing the homeless encampments littered across Washington, DC. Earlier this year, homeless people were cleared from areas outside of Union Station ahead of President Joe Biden's address to the nation from the historic train hall and bus depot. Within the past month, the National Park Service also cleared encampments from Scott Circle. The removals are part of a longer-term plan by the National Park Service. The NPS will be enforcing its "no-camping regulation" across the nation's capital, with the goal of having all encampments on national park land cleared by the end of 2023.

As 2022 comes to a close, the United States finds itself confronting myriad threats. But there is perhaps no more immediate threat to Americans’ safety and security than illicit drugs. The numbers are staggering. Illicit drugs have killed more than 1 million Americans since the turn of the century, with over 108,000 dying in last 12 months alone. One drug in particular, fentanyl, is now the leading cause of accidental death for adults between the ages of 18 and 45 — more than car accidents, violent crime, and suicide. And the flood of fentanyl into the US shows no signs of abating. In view of this rising ride, the Biden administration has embraced a range of new policies focused on harm reduction and treatment, two historically overlooked areas of American drug control efforts.