Why the Secret Service closed its investigation of cocaine found at the White House without conducting interviews

Table Of Content

• Secret Service ends White House cocaine investigation with no leads
• In a bid to stop overdose deaths, California could allow drug use at supervised sites
• Abcarian: MAGA Republicans pushing to impeach President Biden don’t seem to notice the egg on their faces
• Purdue Pharma sought to divert online readers from critical L.A. Times series on opioid crisis, records show
• More From the Los Angeles Times

A year after winning a major court battle against the opening of so-called safe injection sites — safe havens for people to use heroin and other narcotics with protections against fatal overdoses — the Justice Department is signaling it might be open to allowing them. But they can at least serve as a brake on overincarceration and force lawmakers to acknowledge when their drug policies do more harm than good. In 2021, Hunter Biden released his memoir, "Beautiful Things." In it, he shared his decades-long struggle against addiction — and that it was an addiction that only strengthened its hold on him after the 2015 loss of his brother, Beau. Anyone who has dealt with addiction in their own family knows how important support is — and Hunter always stressed just how much his father's support meant. When reporters asked about what had happened, he replied, "The man went there and sold drugs in front of the White House, didn't he? I can't feel sorry for this fellow."

Secret Service ends White House cocaine investigation with no leads

Going After Drug Trafficking and Illicit Drug ProfitsLaw enforcement agencies at all levels—federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial—work to reduce domestic and international cultivated and synthetic drug production and trafficking with the goal of protecting Americans. However, drug producers continue to produce entirely new synthetic drugs, and drug traffickers continue to refine their methods and techniques for distributing them throughout our communities. “It was surprising to me that on this momentous day in American history, Roosevelt takes time in the middle of the day to have this treatment,” Gillon says. But if Roosevelt was indeed receiving cocaine at the time, he says, we don’t know “whether it had any impact on his personality or the decisions he made that day”.

In a bid to stop overdose deaths, California could allow drug use at supervised sites

One reason for this gap is that people with addiction and those who care for them face too many barriers to treatment. Similarly, key tools like naloxone and syringe services programs are often restricted or underfunded at the community level, which limits access for people who use drugs. For example, some states still have legal barriers that limit access to naloxone, and even in states where those barriers don’t exist, naloxone does not always make it to those most at-risk of an overdose. The President’s National Drug Control Strategy is the first-ever to champion harm reduction to meet people where they are and engage them in care and services.

Abcarian: MAGA Republicans pushing to impeach President Biden don’t seem to notice the egg on their faces

Each time a journalist dies or is injured, we lose a fragment of that truth,” CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in a statement. One organizer complained that the White House Correspondents’ Association — which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president — largely has been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. Criticism of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s six-month-old military offensive in Gaza has spread through American college campuses, with students pitching encampments in an effort to force their universities to divest from Israel. The 56-year-old also opened up about her own mental health struggles and successes. She experienced childhood depression after being molested at age 7, she said, and, because of that she knew well the feeling of “not wanting to be here.” However, she started treatment in for her unresolved childhood grief and sexual trauma. The 76-year-old country star died in April 2022, a day before mother-daughter duo the Judds — made up of Naomi and eldest daughter Wynnona — was inducted into Country Music Hall of Fame.

White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose - The White House

White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose.

Posted: Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:42:30 GMT [source]

ONDCP leads and coordinates the nation’s drug policy so that it improves the health and lives of the American people. ONDCP is responsible for the development and implementation of the National Drug Control Strategy and Budget. ONDCP coordinates across 19 federal agencies and oversees a $41 billion budget as part of a whole-of-government approach to addressing addiction and the overdose epidemic. ONDCP also provides hundreds of millions of dollars to help communities stay healthy and safe through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program and the Drug-Free Communities Program. The Biden-Harris Administration also has taken historic action to expand access to life-saving public health services and remove decades-long barriers to treatment for substance use disorder.

Back then, some chest-beaters were vowing to impeach President Biden as well as members of his Cabinet, starting with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the administration’s border security czar, and sweeping up Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray (a Donald Trump holdover, by the way), Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Lord knows who else. Unlike Biden, Trump often skirted the traditional processes run by the Justice Department when considering presidential pardons and clemency actions, instead impulsively acting on recommendations from friends or celebrities, as well as conservative media.

More testing was done to review the chemical composition of the powder, the statement continued. WASHINGTON — The mystery of who brought cocaine into the White House remains unsolved. The Secret Service investigation has concluded with no usable forensic or video evidence identifying the person responsible, three Secret Service officials familiar with the investigation said. The lobby is open to staff-led tours of the West Wing, which are scheduled for nonworking hours on the weekends and evenings.

For decades, addiction was something seen as taboo, but in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof put forward the idea that the Biden family was on the verge of doing some serious good by going public with their private struggles. It was wildly controversial, with Newt Gingrich going public with statements that accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of being "counterculture McGoverniks" who had largely staffed the White House with people who shared their beliefs. The Clinton administration held fast, though, with some people coming forward to out themselves — including press spokesman Mike McCurry.

The agency, along with the FBI, tested the packet to determine it was cocaine and looked for any fingerprints or DNA evidence. Video footage of the area where the baggie was found also provided no evidence to narrow the possible suspects beyond a list of roughly 500 staff members and visitors who passed through during a weekend earlier this month. “Since the Israel-Gaza war began, journalists have been paying the highest price— their lives—to defend our right to the truth.

President Biden and his family were away at Camp David when a uniformed Secret Service agent found the substance during a patrol of the West Wing around 6 p.m. On Sunday, the person said, prompting a brief shutdown of some of the White House campus as response workers assessed whether the substance was hazardous. A small amount of a white powdery substance was found in the White House on Sunday evening, according to a person familiar with the episode, and an initial test by emergency response workers determined that it was cocaine.

Donald Trump Jr. Says Cocaine Found At White House Wasn't His: 'It's Not My Thing' - Yahoo Singapore News

Donald Trump Jr. Says Cocaine Found At White House Wasn't His: 'It's Not My Thing'.

Posted: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 02:13:53 GMT [source]

The decision had been made to grant access to those individuals with a history of drug use, but require stricter-than-normal drug testing in some cases. The Biden administration on Tuesday released a national plan targeting the spread of xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that’s increasingly laced with fentanyl and is rapidly spreading through the illegal drug trade. The Biden administration has introduced a new plan to combat overdose deaths from xylazine, a powerful veterinary sedative that has increasingly shown up in such deaths across the country, exacerbating the opioid overdose epidemic in the United States.