Kansas raids dozens of hemp shops while considering legalization bills that could generate $20-50 million annually. The state arrests nearly 5,000 people yearly for cannabis possession at a cost of $7-54 million in criminal justice expenses—money that could fund schools, roads, or treatment programs instead. Meanwhile, legislators debate three competing approaches: medical cannabis (SB 294), adult-use regulation (HB 2405), or tighter hemp restrictions (SB 292). The math is clear: prohibition costs Kansas taxpayers millions while generating zero revenue and saddling thousands with criminal records that reduce lifetime earnings. The question isn't whether Kansas can afford to reform—it's whether Kansas can afford not to.
Author: plicabl (plicabl )
Americans Are All Too Eager to Pay a Premium Only to Be Poisoned by Their Favorite Brands
In June 2022, a premium meal from Daily Harvest—backed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Serena Williams—sent hundreds to hospitals with liver damage. The culprit? An ingredient that entered America's food supply without FDA oversight. This wasn't a discount brand cutting corners. This was expensive, aspirational wellness food. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth: the price you pay has nothing to do with safety. From Burt's Bees lipstick testing positive for lead to Fenty Beauty containing "forever chemicals," from the FDA allowing 10,000 food additives it's never reviewed to cosmetics companies hiding toxins behind the word "fragrance"—Americans are paying premiums to be poisoned by the brands they trust most. As regulatory loopholes swallow consumer protection and corporate greenwashing reaches epidemic levels (52% of consumers now recognize it), this investigation exposes how the illusion of "premium equals pure" has become America's most dangerous—and profitable—lie.
From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America
The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror. The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.
How Cotton, Gold, and Greed Fueled a Continental Crime
In 1830 the United States signed away its own credibility with the Indian Removal Act, a feel‑good promise of “humanity and justice” that devolved into bayonets, disease‑ridden stockades, and death marches stretching from the Smokies to the Oklahoma prairie. The article you’re about to read punches through the textbook euphemisms—“westward expansion,” “voluntary exchange”—to expose the real machinery of expulsion: Andrew Jackson’s political street‑fight in Congress, forged treaties written in languages the signers could not read, and private contractors who made fortunes feeding tribes rancid bacon on thousand‑mile treks. From Osceola’s guerrilla war in the Everglades to the frozen sandbars where Choctaw children died waiting for ferries that never came, the piece follows each “civilized” tribe’s road into exile and tracks the fallout right up to modern flashpoints like McGirt v. Oklahoma and the Standing Rock pipeline standoff. It is a hard look at how a republic can celebrate liberty with one hand while erasing whole nations with the other—and why the ghosts under Highway 62 still keep the receipts.
Betting Culture Created a Business Empire
From colonial footraces to modern mobile betting apps, American sports have always existed primarily as vehicles for gambling. This comprehensive history traces how betting culture didn't just influence professional sports—it created them. Through horse racing's 19th-century boom, baseball's Black Sox scandal, basketball's point-shaving crisis, and the explosive growth of DraftKings and FanDuel, the throughline is unmistakable: organized sports in America serve wagering, and wagering funds sports.