Anti-drug, law enforcement, and religious groups seek to block marijuana rescheduling, a Massachusetts permanent resident was detained over a 22-year-old pot possession conviction, and more.

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Marijuana Policy

Anti-Drug, Law Enforcement, and Religious Groups Urge Trump to Oppose Marijuana Rescheduling. Led by the anti-legalization lobbying group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a coalition of anti-pot, law enforcement, and religious groups sent a letter Monday to President Trump calling on him to oppose the ongoing effort to reschedule marijuana.

We "strongly urge that you reject reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug" under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the signatories wrote.

While the letter admitted that the argument against placing marijuana in the same schedule as heroin is "politically salient and easy to understand," it claimed that reformers "fundamentally misunderstand how drug scheduling works."

"Contrary to popular belief, drug scheduling is not a harm index," the letter said. "Rather, it balances the accepted medical use of a substance with its potential for abuse."

Under the Biden administration, which initiated the review, the Department of Health and Human Services weighed accepted medical use and potential for abuse and recommended moving marijuana to Schedule III.

Those signatories included the Drug Enforcement Association of Federal Narcotics Agents, which represents Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) personnel. The DEA is the agency currently considering the proposed reform. Other signatories included the Family Research Council, National Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition, NAADAC the Association for Addiction Professionals, CADCA and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

ICE Detained Massachusetts Mom of Four Over Pardoned Marijuana Charge From 22 Years Ago. Horror stories from the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign are coming fast and furious these days, but here is one that demonstrates the lengths to which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going to round up foreigners -- even lawful, long-term residents.

Jemmy Jiminez Rosa, born in Peru but a legal permanent resident of the US for 33 years, was detained at Boston's Logan Airport as she returned from a trip to Peru on August 11. ICE took her into custody as her husband and three children watched. The only justification for her detention was a misdemeanor marijuana conviction from two decades ago, for which she had been pardoned.

Jimenez Rosa was held in ICE detention for ten days before a judge vacated that old pot charge, and she was released. But during her involuntary stay with ICE, she was hospitalized twice after not receiving prescribed medications, moved to multiple locations, and denied access to her legal team.

To add insult to injury, when ICE agents released her, they did not allow her to wait inside the detention facility to be picked up, nor did they notify her husband and attorney she was being released. She was forced to instead walk a half mile in a rainstorm to a mall, where she borrowed a phone from a stranger to let her husband know where she was.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that its mass deportation campaign is aimed at "dangerous criminals" and "the worst of the worst," but Jimenez Rosa hardly seems to qualify. She has no criminal record other than that now-erased possession conviction.

She is hardly unique among those immigrants swept up so far in not being a "dangerous criminal." More than 70 percent of those detained through August 10 have no criminal record, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research organization tracking immigration data.

Her husband, Marcel Rosa, said he felt "ambushed" when the couple and their three young daughters got off the plane after their vacation.

"You would have to be in that room while things were transpiring to really understand how I felt. I came from going on vacation, had a great time with my family, had the greatest vacation that you can ask for," he said. "When you look at my daughters, how they was, when you looked at my wife, how she was sunk into the chair. Her whole soul was gone. And I just looked at the Customs Border Patrol agent that was making the decisions, and he was acting as if this was a nothingburger, and he was literally destroying my family for no reason."

His wife has been traumatized, he said.

"My wife just consistently keeps crying. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. She's paranoid. I mean, everyone's paranoid, to be honest. I think she's permanently damaged," he said.

"We went through a lot in 10 days -- a lot of unnecessary things that happened. And right now is my main concern is just the mental health of my family, my kids. You know everything happened right in front of them," Rosa said. "I really don't know the amount of damage that was done to them."

Harm Reduction

Big Cities Back Away from Harm Reduction. With city governments stung by criticisms that they were enabling drug use and contributing to the spectacle of public drug use, harm reduction programs are in retreat in several cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco.

A hostile Trump administration is also contributing to the chill.

Public health officials and politicians across the country embraced harm reduction in a bid to save lives during the opioid overdose crisis. More states moved to allow needle exchanges, fentanyl test strips were legalized in states across the land, and authorities flooded the country with the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone -- all harm reduction strategies. The country even saw its first legal safe consumption spaces, in Rhode Island and New York City.

And harm reduction efforts helped slow and then reverse the fatal drug overdose epidemic of recent years. There were 80,391 fatal ODs last year, down dramatically from the 110,037 in 2023, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But now, President Trump has issued an executive order to "end crime and disorder on America's streets" that explicitly targets harm reduction programs, which, the order claims, "only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm."

And the mood seems similar at the municipal level. New San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie (D) announced earlier this year that the city would shift from harm reduction to "recovery first" and banned city-funded distribution of safe smoking supplies in public places.

On the East Coast, Philadelphia has quit funding needle exchange programs and restricted mobile medical teams that distribute overdose reversal kits. It has also resorted to increased police sweeps on Kensington, home to the largest open air drug market on the Atlantic seaboard.

It's not just big cities. Santa Ana, California, has ended its needle exchange program, and Pueblo, Colorado, moved to do the same, only to be thwarted by a judge's ruling.

But public health practitioners say some nuance is needed.

"Harm reduction is neither the singular solution to the overdose crisis nor a primary cause of public drug use and disorder," said Dr. Aaron Fox, president of the New York Society of Addiction Medicine. "It's one component of a spectrum of services necessary to prevent overdose deaths and improve the health of people who use drugs. But if communities want long-term solutions to homelessness, they need to work on expanding access to housing."

"I don't think the availability of sterile supplies really makes a difference about whether someone is going to start or continue using drugs," said Chelsea L. Shover, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who oversees Drug Checking Los Angeles, which tests the contents of drugs for individuals and public health agencies. "But I do think it will make a difference in terms of whether that person is going to be alive in a week or a month or a year, during which time they might get into recovery, whatever that may mean for them."