Drugs Destroy the Mind. Well Duh!

By Rich Kozlovich

On July 10, 2023 The Ohio Star published this Laurel Duggan article, Large Study Links Heavy Marijuana Use to Psychotic Symptoms, Bipolar Disorder, Depression saying:

Cannabis use disorder, also known as marijuana addiction, was strongly tied to psychiatric problems, including psychotic symptoms and bipolar disorder, in a population-based study of Danish citizens’ medical records from 1995 to 2021.........Individuals with prior diagnoses of cannabis use disorder were up to four times as likely to be diagnosed later on with bipolar disorder and psychotic symptoms..........two times as likely to later be diagnosed with clinical depression, according to the study.............Nearly half of U.S. states have legalized recreational marijuana use, and widespread access to the drug has resulted in more prevalent use across the board, including among schoolchildren.

Almost ten years ago I had both my knees replaced, and was in surgery for some hours, and naturally, under anesthetic for all of that time.  I spent three months recovering before going back to work.  I've written a lot of articles over the last 20 years on every issue that's impacted humanity, and that's the source material for two books I've been working on....forever it seems.   At the rate I'm going, I may never get either of them done.   However, I scheduled my surgery in December of that year.  Since I was an exterminator that carried me through the slow season for my work.  

During that three months I finish five chapters of one of my books, and was really proud of myself.  Then I finished my recover time, spring was emerging, and I went back to work, and didn't have time to continue working on the book until September.   I decided I had better review what I'd written, and here's what I discovered.  What I'd written was really crapola.  Yet at the time it all made perfect sense to me.  What happened?

I realized all those hours under anesthetic had an impact on my mind.  Whether this is true or not, I don't know, but I was told for every hour you're under impacts you for weeks before your mind returns to normal.  Well, based on my experience, I believe that.  Anesthetics are in reality mind altering drugs, and so too are all these illegal, or formally illegal drugs.   If one surgery lasting for a few hours can impact one's mind for many weeks and even months, what impact does daily, or regular use of mind altering drugs do to the mind?  

This study actually confirms what was understood back in the 1960's when so many claimed that marijuana didn't impact humanity negatively, but as one expert testified before Congress testified, if that's true, then it's only true in America, because in the rest of the world that's a proven lie.  

Nothing has changed, except we're suffering from rampant stupidity at higher levels of leadership in all of the nation's structural institutions, and I consider much of the decision making socially suicidal.

• Update, 6/23/25:  Marijuana is proven again to be more dangerous than the left says June 18, 2025 by Andrea Widburg The left’s push to legalize marijuana isn’t about improving American life.  I despise marijuana. For that reason, I’m very glad when seemingly reputable studies back up my visceral sense that marijuana is a terrible drug that destroys people’s lives and, along the way, destroys American society. First, I went to ChatGPT for it to sum up the obvious, which is that a drug that alters people’s temporal and spatial perception makes them lousy drivers........In addition, a new study establishes that pot use dramatically increases heart disease in regular users:.....Again, if this were a burden only the users, so be it. But in a country in which everyone is insured, whether by private companies or the government, it is a burden on the nation, and I resent that.............

 

The Myth of the Nonviolent Drug Offender

Criminal-justice reformers should stop deluding themselves and the public that “mass decarceration” will be anything other than a bloodbath.  

Devon Kurtz October 20, 2022

After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison, and drug crimes account for only a small portion of America’s prison population.

The extreme reactions on both sides are consistent with the public’s warped perceptions of the effects of drug enforcement on our criminal-justice system, which activists and the media have propagated through books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and documentaries like 13th. This component of the prison-reform narrative is disingenuous and distracts from the more pressing work of finding solutions to violent crime.

Of the approximately 145,000 people in federal prisons and 1,040,000 people in state prisons, less than 3.5 percent are incarcerated for a conviction related to drug possession. Even when one expands the scope beyond mere possession to all other types of drug offenses (many of which are associated with violent cartels and gangs), the proportion rises only to 18 percent.

The hard truth for criminal-justice reformers is that violent offenses are far more prevalent among America’s prisoners. At the state level—where nine in ten prisoners are incarcerated—almost 60 percent of inmates committed violent crimes. Roughly 143,000 people are imprisoned for convictions related to sexual assault and 155,000 for homicide, compared with 146,000 for all drug crimes combined. The idea that America’s “mass” incarceration is a result of drug crimes is absurd..........To Read More...

Drug Legalization Is A Disaster, And Your Leaders Don't Care About You

Normalizing drug use is no longer an idea, it's a reality. And if you want to see what that reality looks like, take a walk through once-thriving downtown Denver.

 

By Christopher Bedford

Come back next week to catch more of “Culture War with The Federalist’s Chris Bedford.”

America has been fighting a war on drugs for decades now, and for almost as long we’ve been told by the left and many libertarians on the right that the best way to end the war is to surrender. Legalizing drugs, they say, would solve a bunch of our country’s problems, including high rates of imprisonment, fatherlessness, crime, cartel activity, excess overdose deaths, budget deficits. The list goes on.

Over the past few years, a strange alliance has formed to push the legalization agenda. It includes committed left-wingers eager to better society by freeing all its criminals, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Democratic Machiavellis looking to rev up the youth vote, like foreign billionaire George Soros, and big tobacco lobbyists looking to take advantage of all their arable land and industrial rolling machines, like former Speaker of the House John Boehner.

This alliance’s biggest focus has been marijuana, but it’s not the only target. In Washington, D.C., where I live, a ballot measure just essentially legalized hallucinogenic drugs by ordering the police to make that law’s enforcement their lowest priority.

Across the United States in the other Washington, the city of Seattle has opened a government center where junkies and the insane can walk in off the street and get their heroin safely.

In between the coasts, in towns and cities both large and small, left-wing activist mayors, attorneys general, city councils, and the rest have moved to suspend enforcement and refuse to press charges for drug crimes that elected legislatures have explicitly banned. They’re working to defund, demoralize, undercut and even prosecute their policemen to such a degree that the police know to stop enforcing laws on the books against drug dealing, drug use, public intoxication, and all the nudity, defecation, petty crime, and many of the sexual and violent crimes that go with it.

In Nashville, the DA says he won’t enforce marijuana laws. In Baltimore, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced she’ll no longer prosecute drug possession, or other “low-level” crimes like prostitution. She justified it as a coronavirus measure, but do you really think she’ll change back later if she can get away with not doing so?................ To Read More....

 

How an Islamic Terror Sheikh Ended Up Selling Meth in Orange County

Daniel Greenfield - September 08, 2020 @  Sultan Knish Blog
 

The end of what law enforcement had called the most imminent Islamic terrorist plot since September 11 came when Gregory Vernon Patterson left his cell phone behind at a gas station.

Patterson and his roommate, Levar Haley Washington, had joined Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, a prison Islamic terror group, and had been conducting a robbery spree to finance terror plots against the LAX airport, the National Guard, and local synagogues during the High Holy days.

The shotgun robberies by the organization, whose name meant the Association of True Islam, were going well. The gang of criminal Jihadis had pulled off eleven gas station robberies in LA and Orange County to raise funds for their terror spree until Patterson dropped his phone during a robbery at a gas station in Torrance. The phone led authorities to the South Central apartment being used by Patterson and Washington where they found Bin Laden posters and a target list.

The target list included LAX which was convenient because Patterson already worked there.

Washington and Patterson were busted while trying to rob another gas station in Fullerton.

Patterson told cops that robbing gas stations was “part of a jihad against the U.S., particularly against American oil companies who are stealing from our countries” and that he wanted to die for Allah. The gas station robberies had been meant to raise money to buy weapons and to provide training to Patterson, who had no criminal record, in how to be a terrorist.

Patterson and Hammad Riaz Samana, a Pakistani, had all attended the Jamaat-E-Masijudal mosque where Washington had recruited the black convert and the Pakistani Muslim. The two terrorists swore allegiance to Washington and the shotgun robberies of gas stations began.

Washington, a former Crip, had done time in Folsom State Prison where he found a copy of the Koran, began calling himself Abdur Rahman, and was recruited by a terror mastermind.

There were two unique things about the 2005 terror plot. As Daniel Pipes pointed out at the time, it was the first “large-scale” terror plot organized by Americans, not Muslim immigrants.

But it was also the first Islamic terror plot in America that was organized from prison.

Kevin Lamarr James, a Crips gang member, had been sent away for a decade for a robbery in 1996. A member of the Nation of Islam, James made the same journey as Malcolm X and many other black Muslims, away from the racist black nationalist UFO cult, and to mainstream Islam.

On one hand, he had gotten a tattoo of Allah and on the other, the star and crescent of Islam.

The charismaic James created Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh or JIS to spread true Islam, recruit prisoners, and set off a wave of Islamic terrorist atrocities against American targets in California.

Members were told to swear an oath of secrecy, to wage war on infidels, especially Jews. In prison, they practiced Arabic, studied Islamic theology, and trained in martial arts. Out of prison, they were told to blend into society and build the Caliphate in America through Jihad.

By the time the robberies began, a Jihadist group had been secretly operating in Folsom Prison for nearly a decade, and was about to make the leap to carrying out attacks on the outside.

One of their target dates for a terror attack was the fourth anniversary of September 11.

“This incident is the first in a series of incidents to come in a plight to defend and propagate traditional Islam in its purity,” James, who had changed his name to Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri, allegedly declared in a press release for the attacks.

“We are not extremists, radicals, or terrorists. We are only servants of Allah.”

But James hadn’t picked the best servants for his deity. When Patterson left behind his phone, the authorities followed the trail right back to Folsom Prison and JIS’ mastermind.

The four-man cell was charged with levying war against the United States.

But James was the one with the brains. While Washington, his patsy, was slapped with a twenty-two year prison sentence, his ‘Sheikh’ who had built an entire terror group in prison, denied everything and then claimed that he suffered from a really bad childhood.

"Your honor, I'm thoroughly embarrassed and appalled by my actions. I don't even recognize who I was three years ago. Never before in my life before meeting these people, did I believe in violence or targeting innocent civilians,” the terror sheikh gushed.

Judge Cormac Carney, who would later illegally declare the death penalty to be unconstitutional, called James' missive “the most powerful letter I’ve ever received.”

The naive judge was also impressed by all of James' prison college classes and his evolution and repentance, and described him as a victim from a disadvantaged background.

In the portion of James’ letter that Judge Carney read out loud in court, the terror mastermind vowed that, “My country need never fear from me again.”

That was in 2009.

He was freed in September 2019. And in August 2020, he was busted selling meth.

James, now living in Orange County and officially being called Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri, had been selling nearly pure methamphetamine for thousands of dollars.

And all of this was going on while James was on supervised release.

The FBI had called the terror plot by Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, "probably the one that operationally was closest to actually occurring".

"Americans watched so-called 'home grown' terrorists unleash multiple bombings in the city of London. Some in this country may have mistakenly believed that it could not happen here. Today we have chilling evidence that it is possible,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said.

The terror plot had been aimed at military targets, as well as a number of Los Angeles congregations, including, allegedly, the ultra-progressive B’nai David-Judea, which would have been struck by armed gunmen pushing their way inside and opening fire on Yom Kippur.

The heavy security presence at Los Angeles synagogues, which includes heavily armed guards and bulletproof vests, is part of the legacy that James and his True Islam terror group left there.

James had built up a terrorist operation in prison backed by manifestos and operational documents making him the closest counterpart to the Blind Sheikh. Instead he was given a lighter sentence because the same charismatic gang member turned preacher, who had convinced hardened criminals from rival gangs to believe in him, had turned a judge.

Selling meth may have been the alleged hobby of a newly freed criminal, or something more. Traffic in certain drugs, including methamphetamines, has been used by Islamic terrorist groups to finance their operations. It’s unknown whether this is the case here, but the FBI, after Obama, is less likely to be looking for it or to even know what to be on the lookout for.

When Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh fell afoul of the FBI in 2005, law enforcement was acquainted with the methodology, infrastructure and strategies of Islamic terrorists. During the Obama administration, a cultural revolution was waged against counterterrorism from the inside.

If James is up to anything these days, the FBI is unprepared and unready to find out.

Fifteen years later, the terror plot, once a major event, has been largely forgotten. And the same is true of most Islamic terrorist attacks except for September 11. As the country enters another September and begins a countdown to 9/11, everything afterward is being forgotten.

During the Black Lives Matter riots, a white Muslim illegal alien stabbed a New York cop, grabbed his gun, and opened fire on other officers while shouting, “Allahu Akbar”. Despite wounding three cops and claiming, “my religion made me do it,” there’s been little coverage.

In the midst of a pandemic and nationwide race riots, we should not forget that there is more than one threat vector. Islamic terrorists don’t go away just because no one is paying attention. And the same prison system that helped produce the wave of BLM violence has also incubated Islamic prison terror cells like the one that plotted to kill Americans on another September 11.

The Nation of Islam has been a feeder for both Islamic terrorism and Black Lives Matter violence. All three are deeply violent, bigoted, and possessed of a feverish hatred of America.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.