[photo] Hydrocodone at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. (Toby Talbot / AP)

Drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia in just six years, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on these two painkillers, according to an investigation by the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

That amounts to 433 of the frequently abused opioid pills for every man, woman and child in the state of 1.84 million people.

The Gazette-Mail obtained previously confidential records sent by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to the office of West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. They disclose the number of pills sold to every pharmacy and drug shipments to all 55 counties in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

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Imagine this: Upon taking his oath of office, President Donald Trump instructs his new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to ignore civil rights laws. How would that go over? Before you yell, "But we are a nation of laws!" you can thank President Barack Obama and his prior Attorney General Eric Holder for magnifying this issue.

Basically, the Obama administration made it standard operating procedure to ignore laws they thought unfashionable or unworthy.

The best example of this is marijuana.

To be clear at the outset, I am neither pro-pot nor anti-pot. And, in fact, marijuana is not even the issue - rather, the Constitution is. Marijuana is just the symptom that exposes the problem.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about marijuana.

No, it's not what you suspect, I don't smoke the stuff.

Nor do I need it to alleviate pain. Rather, it's our country's schizophrenic way of dealing with "weed." Here in Stephenson County is In Grown Farms, which is perfectly legal and is growing marijuana plants to be harvested, packaged and sold at marijuana dispensaries as medicine.

You need a doctor's prescription to get it. There hasn't been much controversy about it. Indeed, folks are happy that a new business decided to locate in the Freeport area. There's even talk -- perhaps far-out talk, but still -- of mixing marijuana, legally, with snack foods like pretzels or potato chips. Meanwhile, next door in Winnebago County, the county sheriff's police raided two fields, one near Durand, the other between Rockford and Winnebago, and found what they said was $1 million worth of marijuana plants. These plants were growing illegally.

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The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday announced it has created new rules for the state's cannabis decriminalization law - including setting a $ 120 fine for those caught with up to 10 grams of cannabis or drug paraphernalia.

The law, which Gov. Bruce Rauner signed on July 29, gave the state Supreme Court the authority to further clarify the newly defined "civil law violation" of possessing up to 10 grams of cannabis or drug paraphernalia.

Under the law, the violation is punishable by a fine between $ 100 and $ 200. In one of six newly created rules, the fine was set at $ 120 per violation.

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African-Americans Ticketed, Arrested for Pot Offenses in Chicago Far More Than Any Racial Group

Four years after the Chicago City Council decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, African-American neighborhoods continue to bear the brunt of enforcement, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

As anticipated, the Chicago Police Department is making a fraction of the arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession it made in 2011 - the last full year before cops were given the option of ticketing, rather than locking up, people caught with about half an ounce or less.

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She recently turned 18, and if Malia Obama did not know that she had become a legitimate target for sections of the American media, she does now.

The "First Daughter" was videoed smoking what a witness claimed was a joint in a video clip released yesterday.

The footage was taken at the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago last month. It is unclear from the images whether what Obama can be seen puffing on is a regular cigarette or one rolled with cannabis.

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Illinois Medical Marijuana Use Has Increased Under Strict Regulation As Business Expands

In a warehouse in Joliet, hundreds of marijuana plants sway under high-intensity lights, taking in carbon dioxide-rich air, sucking up a constant feed of nutrients and bristling with buds.

Like Olympic athletes, the plants are rigorously trained and intensively pampered. Tiny predator bugs patrol the surface of the vegetation, hunting down any pests. Workers prune stems and leaves to put all the plants' energy into buds that produce the drug's euphoric and medicinal effects. The process churns out 200 pounds of high-grade pot every month.

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Last week, Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law reductions in the criminal penalties for minor marijuana possession in Illinois. Previously, those convicted of marijuana possession faced possible jail time; now, just a citation and a fine.

This reminds us of an age-old admonition: "Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you necessarily should."

Critics of this more liberal (or libertarian, depending upon your political persuasion) policy toward marijuana have reason to worry.

As reported by the New England Journal of Medicine, there is an inverse correlation between the perceived risk of marijuana and the incidence of people's use of it. Simply put, the less risky people view marijuana, the more likely they are to use - and abuse - it.

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Governor Signs Legislation to Issue Citations Instead of Time in Jail

SPRINGFIELD - Getting caught with small amounts of marijuana will result in citations akin to a traffic ticket instead of the possibility of jail time under legislation Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law Friday.

Rauner's approval of the decriminalization measure comes after he used his amendatory veto powers last year to rewrite similar legislation he argued would have allowed people to carry too much pot and fine violators too little.

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(AP) - Illinois' experiment with medical marijuana has earned a boost thanks to Gov. Bruce Rauner's approval of legislation extending the state pilot program for 2 1/2 years and including two more medical conditions.

On Friday, medical marijuana advocates and experts called it a turning point that gives patients guaranteed access to the drug and provides confidence to those selling and cultivating it in the state. Rauner signed the measure Thursday night.

"It's a very good thing for us," said Charles Bachtell, founder and CEO of Cresco Labs, which holds cultivation permits in Illinois. "It's somewhat of an endorsement of the state saying, 'You're doing the right thing. We like what we're seeing from the pilot program and let's make some reasonable modifications.'"

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Illinois must add post-traumatic stress disorder to the list of diseases eligible for medical marijuana treatment, a Cook County judge ordered Tuesday in a sternly worded ruling that also said the state's public health director engaged in a "private investigation" that was "constitutionally inappropriate."

In a lawsuit filed by an Iraq war veteran, Judge Neil Cohen ordered Illinois Department of Public Health Director Nirav Shah to add PTSD within 30 days. It's the first decision among eight lawsuits filed by patients disappointed with across-the-board rejections by Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration of recommendations from an advisory board on medical marijuana.

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Terminal Illness Also Covered Under Bill for Rauner

Advocates for medical marijuana hope Illinois' plan to expand its program will give the industry the boost it needs to sustain itself - but some doctors warn that, despite changes made to protect them, they still have legal and medical concerns about the product.

After previously rejecting efforts to make medical marijuana available to more people, Gov. Bruce Rauner's office has indicated he will sign into law a bill to lengthen the pilot program by more than two years, to July 1, 2020. The legislation also adds two new qualifying conditions: post-traumatic stress disorder and terminal illness.

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As someone who writes about marijuana for a living, it recently started to seem a little strange I hadn't actually been to the promised land of legal cannabis that Colorado has become over the past couple of years.

So on Memorial Day weekend, I flew to Denver on a mission to buy weed legally.

I already knew the rules. Dispensaries close promptly at 7 p.m. You must be 21 or older to buy recreational cannabis; public consumption is a no-no. And so forth.

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Editor's note: This is day three of a four-day series that examines the impact heroin is having on the community through the eyes of the addicts, their families, law enforcement and the groups that provide treatment.

MOUNT ZION - Hearing a 35-year-old addict say things her son might have said made Kathy Burkham apprehensive.

That's because Tyler Yount's decision to use heroin "one more time" after staying clean 11 months and two weeks was the last one he ever made. He overdosed on June 14, 2009, dying at age 23.

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Editor's note: This is day two of a four-day series that examines the impact heroin is having on the community through the eyes of the addicts, their families, law enforcement and the groups that provide treatment.

DECATUR The scars on Lori Caldwell's arms are still there, though they've begun to lighten.

Caldwell wishes she could say the same for her mental and emotional scars.

Caldwell's voice becomes a whisper as she tries to talk through her tears while recounting her plunge into addictions to heroin and crack cocaine.

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Editor's note: This is day one of a four-day series that examines the impact heroin is having on the community through the eyes of the addicts, their families, law enforcement and the groups that provide treatment.

DECATUR Eric Buntain described the feeling of injecting heroin into his vein as "warm, euphoric, comfortable and relaxing: It feels great."

About 30 seconds after injecting heroin, there's a surge of warmth coming from the low spinal area, a rush of sensation and an overriding sense of well-being.

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For months, Illinois' fledgling medical cannabis industry had been limping along - dogged by uncertainties over its future and hurt by disappointingly low numbers of patients whose medical conditions qualified them for state certification cards.

But in the last few days, the clouds of gloom have lifted thanks to a compromise bill now awaiting Gov. Bruce Rauner's signature. The measure would extend the state medical cannabis pilot program by 2 1/2 years, to July 1, 2020. It would also expand the list of qualifying conditions, to include post-traumatic stress disorder and terminal illnesses, potentially adding hundreds of thousands of new patients to the state registry.

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The days of "reefer madness" are long ago and far away.

Illinois legislators have sent to Gov. Bruce Rauner a bill decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, a measure taken in recognition of its widespread use and the futility of imposing more serious penalties on violators. The bill incorporates changes suggested by Gov. Bruce Rauner in an amendatory veto of similar legislation passed last year.

Because the 2016 bill meets the objections he outlined in the 2015 bill, Rauner said he expects to sign it into law.

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Recent data from the CDC noted over 25,000 deaths in 2015 from prescription opiate overdose with an estimated 1.9 million people dependent on these medications. CDC Director Thomas Frieden said "we know of no other medication routinely used for nonfatal conditions that kills patients so frequently."

Since 1999, OxyContin and other opiate painkillers have been implicated in 190,000 lives lost from overdose. Furthermore, a study published in 2014 JAMA analyzed the association between medical cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality rates. This study concludes that states with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8 percent lower annual opioid overdose mortality rate in comparison to states without medical cannabis laws, and these reductions in overdose mortality rates generally strengthen each year after implementation of such laws.

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Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control noted over 25,000 deaths in 2015 from prescription opiate overdose with an estimated 1.9 million people dependent on these medications. CDC director Thomas Frieden said, "We know of no other medication routinely used for nonfatal conditions that kills patients so frequently." And despite research showing that the higher the dose of an opioid the greater the risk of overdose and death, an investigation reveals that the opiate manufacturers urged doctors to prescribe stronger doses.

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