NEWS OF THE DAY
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Medical pot: A Marine veteran struggling with PTSD and a woman fighting cancer became some of the first people to purchase medical marijuana in Louisiana on Tuesday, as the state became the first in the Deep South to dispense therapeutic cannabis, four years after state lawmakers agreed to give patients access to it. Nine pharmacies are licensed to dispense medical marijuana across the state. Louisiana joins more than 30 other states that allow medical marijuana in some form.
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Overdose antidote: Prescriptions of the overdosereversing drug naloxone are soaring, and experts say that could be a reason overdose deaths have stopped rising for the first time in nearly three decades. The number of naloxone prescriptions dispensed by pharmacies doubled from 2017 to last year, rising from 271,000 to 557,000, health officials reported Tuesday in New York. About 68,000 people died of overdoses last year, according to government statistics, a drop from the more than 70,000 in 2017. About twothirds of U.S. overdose deaths involve some kind of opioid. Naloxonecan reverse opioid overdoses, restoring breathing and bringing someone back to consciousness.
3
Deportation lawsuit: The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Trump administration’s broad expansion of deportation powers, alleging in a federal lawsuit Tuesday that it violates constitutional rights and could lead to errors, including deporting U.S. citizens. The lawsuit called the policy to deport migrants without requiring them to appear before judges as “dramatic” and “illegal.”
4
Palin lawsuit: An appeals court has revived a defamation lawsuit Sarah Palin brought against the New York Times. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals restored the lawsuit on Tuesday, saying Palin must be allowed to collect evidence to support her claims. Still, it said Palin’s burden of proof was high to show the Times acted with actual malice when it published an editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics” in 2017. The onetime Republican vice presidential nominee sued over the editorial published after a gunman opened fire on Republican lawmakers in Virginia, wounding U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise. The Times’ editorial was corrected twice when readers complained it appeared to blame a political action committee belonging to Palin for “political incitement.”
5
Confederate name: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is praising the state’s removal of Confederate president Jefferson Davis’ name from an archway at the site where the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia 400 years ago. Northam said Tuesday that removing the letters from a 1950sera archway reading “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” at Fort Monroe will make the state more “welcoming and reflective of our values.” They will be placed in a museum at the former military base, which overlooks Chesapeake Bay and was the site of the 1619 arrival of the state’s first Africans.