Psychoactive Drugs

The Legislative Push to Make Texas More Marijuana-Friendly is Officially Dead

Marijuana advocates were abuzz last month -- and by "abuzz" we mean excited, of course -- when a bill to reduce penalties for marijuana possession was passed out the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. The bill had been watered down to apply only to people younger than 21, but the Texas ch ... More >>

The Feds Say a Dallas Clothing Store Was Actually a Front for Jet-setting Drug Dealer

There was just something that didn't add up about Debonaire Bros, the retail menswear business Kristian Fitz had registered with the Texas Secretary of State. For one, there didn't seem to be any clothes. Federal agents staked out the store's supposed address, a Red Bird home belonging to Fitz's par ... More >>

If Freakin' Oklahoma Can Go Soft on Pot, Surely Texas Can, Too

Every week, managing editor Patrick Williams disappears into his office and reemerges a cranky, nicotine-addicted, third-person-referring superhero we like to call Buzz. The message that rolled into our inbox earlier this week was upbeat. A "juggernaut of marijuana bills" is rolling its way through ... More >>

Two Texas Lawmakers Have Filed Bills to Decriminalize Marijuana

If you don't know anything about Elliott Naishtat, you can go here, where you'll learn that he likes to color with crayons, wears the same shirt every July 4, is pretty sure he'd make a fantastic president and loves buffets. He's also a Democratic state representative from Austin who, though it's n ... More >>

Sylvespa "Paw" Adams: Once Accused of Beating a Kid Over Drug Money, Now Popped for Running a Large Dallas Weed Operation

Agents of nearly a dozen federal and local law enforcement agencies busted a large drug ring this week, arresting a dozen people and seizing 600 marijuana plants and 25 pounds of hydroponic weed. The sweep -- conducted by Dallas PD, the Dallas County Sheriff's Office, Homeland Security and the IRS, ... More >>

The DEA Seized 269 Pounds of Leafy Greens En Route to a Dallas Produce House Last Week

Last Thursday, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency received a tip from someone in Brownsville, Texas: A Dallas-bound freight shipment described on shipping manifests as a collection of scales and metal plates actually seemed to contain something else entirely. The shipment was picked up that ... More >>

Colorado Bound? It'll Be a Bit Before the State's New Marijuana Law Takes Effect.

Let's just cut to the chase: At least 14 months. That's how long it will be before the first retail non-medical marijuana store in Colorado, our friendly neighbor to the northwest, might open. Not that anyone is counting. Looks like the nearest big town to Texas on an interstate in Colorado is Tri ... More >>

Medical Panel Suspends Carrollton Physician Assistant With History of Cocaine-Induced Psychosis

Mark Henry Kett's troubles with the Texas Medical Board began on Feb. 23, 2008, when Carrollton police received a disturbance call at his home. They found Kett armed with a semi-automatic pistol and ranting about assassins who had come to his house to kill his wife. He had fired off a single shot at ... More >>

Dwaine Caraway on Dixon Circle Killing: Fix the Big Picture or See It Get Worse

We're all holed up behind our verbal barricades on this Dixon Circle deal, me among the worst of them, surprise surprise. So maybe it's worth remembering that Dallas city councilman Dwaine Caraway was out there Tuesday night. He was urging calm among the hundreds of people angry about the fatal shoo ... More >>

Preview: Plants and Animals at Dada

Sunday, May 27, at Dada

Pot Addiction Study Tracks the Brains of People Who Really Enjoy Weed, Maybe Too Much

If you're high right now, you may want to tune in. Try not to giggle. A University Texas at Dallas professor was awarded nearly $2 million dollars to study marijuana addiction for the next five years. We're talking pot, the addiction suffered in silence -- or in inappropriate laughter at anything th ... More >>

This Cinco de Mayo -- OK, Fine, Cinco de Mota -- NORML Takes its Cause to Dallas City Hall

With Cinco de Mayo fast approaching, the Dallas/Fort Worth chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, is scrambling to remind Americans that if you're going to undermine a holiday designed to celebrate a culture's heritage, you don't have to just do it by getting h ... More >>

Art Ball, Erykah Badu and Rio Room Converged For a Weekend Worth the Hangover

This past weekend in Dallas, you couldn't turn a corner without hitting a valet stand or a liquor sponsor. Between the Dallas Art Fair, the Dallas International Film Festival, and the ongoing calendar of concerts, weeklies and openings, I hope you found yourself at the open bar of at least one of th ... More >>

Don't Panic, But There's Probably Meth in Your Ecstasy and De-Wormer In Your Cocaine

What's in your drugs? Well, not your drugs, obviously, or ours, because we're law-abiding, tax-paying, speed-limit-driving good citizens, one and all. But as anyone who may have a purely academic interest in this sort of thing might like to know, street drugs are often very, very impure (shocker), a ... More >>

Welcome to the Human Brain: Erykah Badu at The Granada

Erykah Badu & the Cannabinoids Granada Theater Friday, January 20 First of all, props to Erykah Badu for putting on close to a two-hour show while wearing those boots. Those amazing white boots with a stiletto heel that looked like modified ice skates and haunted my dreams. Just after midnight, fol ... More >>

Erykah Badu & The Cannabinoids

Friday, January 20, at the Granada Theater

Innocuous Pepper Turned Capsicum Criminal: Jalapeños Busted at the Border

A truckload of jalapeño peppers was seized in Pharr, Texas, this Thursday, according to a Customs and Border Patrol news release. The alleged marijuana from this seizure has an estimated street value of approximately $3,162,530. CBP officers seized the narcotics and the tractor-trailer. The peppe ... More >>

Mothers, Drugs and Need

Dallas Federal Grand Jury Indicts Sam Hurd, Co-Conspirator For Cocaine Distribution

​Seems like only three weeks ago Sam Hurd was just another former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys who was on his road to journeyman status, which, in his case, ran through Soldier Field. Then it was revealed: Even before his acquisition by the Chicago Bears, the San Antonio native fancied him ... More >>

A 420 for 2012

According to Feds' Complaint, Sam Hurd's Drug Bust in Chicago Started With Deal in Dallas

​No doubt you've heard by now that former Dallas Cowboy Sam Hurd's in federal custody, having been popped by authorities in Chicago last night for trying to buy "five to 10 kilograms of cocaine, at $25,000 per kilogram, and 1,000 pounds of marijuana, at $450 per pound, per week for distribution in ... More >>

Rave On? Not Likely as City Appeal Board Puts Afterlife to Death Following Riveting Hearing.

In mid-October we predicted that the hearing before the Permit and License Appeal Board over whether the club Afterlife should have its dancehall license revoked  would probably be the most exciting thing that's come before the board in a very long time. In hindsight, that was probably an under ... More >>

Postcard from Texas Meth Country

In one East Texas town, a new brand of meth lab has business -- and the occasional house -- booming.

Obama's War on Weed

In a strange about-face, the President tries to hack medical marijuana off at the knees

The War on Drugs Reach a Higher Place

Arrest Made In Case of August Death at Afterlife As City Officials Serve Club Its Walking Papers

​Robert breaks the news: An arrest has been made in connection with the August 13 death of 19-year-old Matthew Allen of Grandview. Police have arrested 19-year-old Skylar Brandt on felony charges alleging that she supplied Allen the drugs he took and eventually overdosed on.And that's just the sta ... More >>

The War on Film

Another Death In The EDM Scene: Ecstasy Use Blamed For Teen's Death at After-Hours Club

Matthew Allen was 19.​We've spent much of the morning today trying to track down more information on what happened to Matthew Allen, the 19-year-old who died in an Irving hospital on Saturday morning after apparently using ecstasy while attending at Club Afterlife on Northwest Highway on late Frid ... More >>

In Suburban Dallas, Loosening "Cheese" Heroin's Deadly Grip

Another round of deaths have another round of North Texas parents trying to wipe out a deadly combination of heroin and cold medicine.

FedEx is the Way to Go and Other Shipping Lessons From the Big North Texas Drug Bust

Don't trust him. He might be a drug mule.​Late yesterday, our local feds got to brag up a good half-decade's worth of sleuthing when they announced charges against more than a dozen people in connection with a multi-state cocaine- and heroin-trafficking syndicate based in Forth Worth. The acc ... More >>

Following Arrests, Feds Outline Vast Cocaine, Heroin Ring Operating Out of Dallas, Fort Worth

​The U.S. Attorney's Office sends word: Federal authorities have rounded up dozens suspected of trafficking heroin and cocaine from Dallas to Atlanta to Baltimore to Philadelphia to Nashville and all points in between. Those arrested yesterday come from all over, including Dallas and Fort Worth an ... More >>

That's Just a NORML Squad Car

Via.​Just couldn't hold this till item till 4:20, so sorry. But I'd meant to mention last week that the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (or NORML) was staging its part of the World Wide Marijuana March on May 7 on the Dallas City Hall Plaza. ... More >>

A Party for Your Buds

Over The Weekend: Destroyer, The War on Drugs at The Loft

Destroyer, The War on DrugsThe LoftMarch 26, 2011Better than: listening to karaoke Wham!, I guess.Destroyer's Dan Bejar​The bottom line: I wish I had thought to bring a Kindle to read at The Loft on Saturday night -- not unlike the guy helping me hold up the column in the middle of the floor at th ... More >>

Head of Pot Distribution "Conspiracy" That Included Ex-Cowboy Gets 24 Years in Prison

University of Notre DameBob Davie, then coach at Notre Dame, with a freshman Kurt Vollers back in '97 ​In April 2009, John Patrick Newton was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents for growing, storing and selling marijuana out of an apartment on N. MacArthur Boulevard inIrving. Said t ... More >>

A hallucinogen called ibogaine has helped addicts kick heroin, meth and everything in between. Is it the trip that does the trick?

Once, He Ran West Dallas Drug Houses. For the Next 30 Years, He'll Be in State, Federal Prison.

Click to embiggen to see where some of the West Dallas Gator Boys' drug houses were​Back in August Sam told you all about Tyrone Weatherall, a leader of the West Side Gator Boys -- and an exotic animal collector -- who pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess with the intent to distrib ... More >>

Dallas Gang Leader, Drug Dealer and Apparent Exotic Animal Lover Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy

We're thinking the kiddos at Pinkston High School weren't having a tough time getting high last year. (The markers are streets where drug houses were located.)​Tyrone Weatherall, the 35-year-old leader of the "West Side Gator Boys," pleaded guilty today to one count of conspiracy to possess wi ... More >>

Five Plead Guilty to Running "Elaborate," Expensive Pot-Growing Op in Northwest Dallas

​This just in from the U.S. Attorney General's Office: From the summer of '05 till December '08, five locals were running out of three Northwest Dallas houses an "elaborate marijuana growing operation" that was eventually busted up by the Drug Enforcement Agency. They had three houses -- one each ... More >>

Six Months After La Familia Bust, Dallas Boss Pleads Guilty to Meth Trafficking

Kimberly ThorpeSome of the drugs and money seized by law-enforcement officials in the fall of 2009​We were there in October of last year, when the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the I.R.S., the U.S. Secret Service and Texas Air National Guard -- and every other law-enforcing acronym -- ... More >>

Dallas-Born Encycloweedia—Exactly What It Sounds Like—Is Trying a New Way to Turn Pot into Dough

With Shifting Attitudes and a Burgeoning Medical Marijuana Movement, the Future Looks Rosy for Legalized Weed

Kurt Vile Adds A Lo-Fi Spin To American Music Classics

Pot for Pain? Not in Dallas County, No Sir.

​Will the feds' new stance on medicinal marijuana have any impact on local users, even though, sadly, Texas isn't among the states that permit the practice? Craig Watkins's office says no way, no how. Local Libertarians, not surprisingly, are crossing their fingers. (As opposed to ...) "The federa ... More >>

Erykah Badu, The Cannabinoids and Shiny Toy Guns Ready Sets For Tonight's Red Bull Soundclash Event. (And: A Giveaway!)

Pete FreedmanErykah Badu andThe Cannabinoids rehearse in front of television cameras. Footage from last night's rehearsal and tonight's performance are expected to be used for a TV show down the line.​A funny scene from last night's Universal Rehearsal Studios-housed run-through for tonight's Red ... More >>

Smokey dare: Maybe it's time to regulate marijuana like cigarettes

Coffee Boy

David Sheff signs at Satrbucks

Zoot Suit Riot

Get down with a pachuco at the LCC

Pot-bellied Cowboy

Finally catching up with the late, great Nate