[DM] A Canadian province's experiment decriminalizing fentanyl in an effort to drive down overdose fatalities has failed, with the death toll unchanged by the pilot scheme.
Politicians in British Columbia (BC) believed that legalizing the synthetic opioid, along with other hard drugs including heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine, would be a 'critical step' towards allowing users to seek help without fear of being detained.
Addicts concentrate on financing and getting their next fix, not nearly so much on the problem of getting caught — that’s the point.
Under the program, which launched January 2023, people found carrying drugs below the 2.5-gram threshold would be guided by police to social support services instead of being arrested or charged.
However, a new study published in this week's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that the initiative did not appear to impact drug overdoses in the southwestern province, which is home to Vancouver.
'Drug decriminalization and recriminalization in BC were associated with substantial changes in police-reported drug possession incidents, but no corresponding changes in drug toxicity deaths or hospitalizations when compared to other regions in Canada,' the report reads.
'The findings suggest decriminalization is effective at reducing drug possession incidents but is insufficient in isolation to affect health outcomes.'
[Reuter] Republican Senator Mitch McConnell returned to the U.S. Capitol on Monday after a three-month absence spent recuperating from a fall in his Washington home that had raised questions about his fitness to serve in Congress.
Looking frail and speaking in a voice that sometimes faltered, McConnell said he was determined to work to pass new farm legislation, aid U.S. relations with NATO and counter Russian aggression in Ukraine. He ignored a reporter who asked if he intended to serve out the remainder of his Senate term, which ends in January. He then entered the chamber to vote for a Republican judicial nominee.
A longtime Republican Party leader who in 2025 announced his plan to retire from the Senate after the 2026 midterms, McConnell had been out of public view since mid-June, when he was taken from his home to a hospital in the Washington area for reasons that went undisclosed for weeks.
McConnell later said he suffered a fall that left him briefly unconscious. While hospitalized, he developed pneumonia and was treated with antibiotics, according to a separate statement that McConnell's office attributed to the attending physician. He was released from a rehabilitation center in early August.
#2
So instead of hot Chinese fembots, they're now producing damn good replicants of elderly senators. Being in wheel chairs solves give away of a funky robot walk.
[Breitbart] Former President Barack Obama, nearly a decade after his departure from the White House, has reemerged yet again as the face of the Democratic Party — this time with a focus on weaponizing rising trends in the nation skeptical of Artificial Intelligence’s arrival to help Democrats win politically and help eventually install a form of global governance to harness AI’s power and potential.
The New York Times over the weekend reported this headline: “Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda.”
The Times’s Evan Gorelick revealed that Obama made the push at a “private fundraiser” with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — the would-be Speaker of the House should Democrats win the majority in the chamber in the midterms and then he wins a speakership election on the floor — where the former president and party leader pushed the aspiring speaker to “assemble a clear framework for a public conversation about A.I. policy.”
“Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation,” Obama told Jeffries, per the Times which cited Obama’s office providing a partial transcript of the former president’s comments.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama added. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial. I genuinely think it’s going to accelerate, for example, drug development in ways that can help us cure diseases. I do think that this can help us figure out pathways for a clean energy future.”
Obama’s comments come as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a massive blog post last week calling for a slowdown in AI development. Under the headline, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argues specifically for slowing the development of AI models and technology.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Interestingly, Amodei also wrote that he agreed with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser who is also overseeing much of the AI front for the current White House — who told Breitbart News at an event last week that if the United States does not win the arms race on AI with China that everything is lost.
“There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said at the Breitbart News event. “If they were to pull away from us on AI, then nothing else would matter.”
Amodei linked to a Bloomberg News story on the Breitbart News event with Bessent, writing: “I agree with Secretary Bessent that a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.”
“The CCP-associated projects will run the alignment risks that U.S. companies are carefully preventing, and even if they avoid those risks, they will be in a position to militarily dominate democracies (for example with AI-driven drones),” Amodei added.
Obama’s push for Democrats to weaponize fears and concerns — some real, some imagined — over the rise of AI tracks with warnings that Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall made on this front months ago when he published the bestselling book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.
[HotAir] What we are seeing is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for.
#3
Israeli AI expert shatters scariest doomsday scenarios Dr. Uzi Haddad of the Jerusalem College of Technology speaks to Arutz Sheva and warns that the real AI danger may not be machines turning against humanity, but humans becoming so dependent on them that they lose the ability to think for themselves.
#5
They'd love to control AI, wouldn't they? Just like they control the TV and newspapers. So anybody with a computer and the ability to program it will be subject to "global governance"? Yeah, you know damn well that's what Baraq wants.
And who, besides Baraq, do they have?
While fly fishing with Jake Tapper, Newsom admits he’d bow out of 2028 if Harris runs
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/15/2026 13:10 Comments ||
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#8
Chris Matthews said in 2008: "I Felt This Thrill Going Up My Leg" As Obama Spoke." Obummer doesn't seem to have that kind of currency today. The Dem Party has also changed since 2008.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
