The man in the Mickey Mouse shirt was clinging to a light pole on H Street NE when police showed up, and then he dropped his pants. Another man near Eastern Market was laughing so hard that paramedics had trouble keeping him on a stretcher. A third, whom police found prancing through Capitol Hill, started kicking and screaming when eight police and fire officials tried to restrain him.

Paramedics rushed all three men to hospitals in separate incidents Thursday night, and all three said they had taken ­synthetic drugs — a set of substances so alarming to District authorities that Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier recently likened them to crack cocaine in their propensity to induce violence and death.

His 1975 autobiography raised eyebrows, and 40 years later, it still shocks. Now, baseball's all-time partier reflects on a life lived to the limit

Joe Pepitone is in an upbeat mood today. "Everything's good, and that's honest," he confides over the phone to Rolling Stone. "Next time you talk to me, and I'm screaming and yelling at you and don't want to talk to you, you'll know everything's horseshit."

Amid a rise in the use of increasingly potent forms of synthetic marijuana, state officials Friday announced updated regulations intended to curb its dissemination.

Marketed as legal products such as incense, herbal mixtures, or potpourri, synthetic cannabinoids typically consist of plant material coated by chemicals intended to mimic THC, the mood-altering ingredient in marijuana. Producers have skirted state regulations by using chemicals that are not specifically prohibited.

Denver is scheduled to air its first marijuana commercial on Monday, July 20, and the nation’s budding pot industry couldn’t be happier, despite recent high-profile drug busts.

With recreational marijuana use legalized in four states and the District of Columbia, and ten other states considering it, the newly minted industry is slowly being accepted by the general public.

A new study from the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Social Work identified an interesting trend in marijuana usage and disapproval of the drug among young adults.

REGINA — Amid the flowers in a downtown Swift Current planter this week were buds of another kind.

On Monday, RCMP weeded a suspected marijuana plant from a flower pot in the 300 block of Central Avenue North.

Suspected, said City RCMP Staff Sgt. Gary Hodges, because “we didn’t send it away for analysis, nor are we going to.” But “it looked like it based on our experience.”

RCMP seized and disposed of the plant.

Hodges has “no clue” how it got there.

“There’s all kinds of speculation: Did somebody plant it there as a joke? I don’t know where the city gets their plants from — did somebody at the greenhouse nursery put it (there)? There’s numerous, millions of ways it could have got there.”

DENVER — A Denver woman has been acquitted of driving stoned, even though she tested nearly four times above the state’s legal limit for marijuana.

Melanie Brinegar’s blood came back at 19 nanograms, the state’s legal limit is 5 nanograms. “5 nanograms is not logical, it`s not fair to medical patients,” said Brinegar.

The 29-year-old was pulled over in June of 2014 for an expired license plate tag. “He (police officer) smelled marijuana, I told him I`m a medical marijuana patient,” said Brinegar.

In fact, Brinegar moved to Colorado two years ago from Indiana so that she could legally access medical marijuana.

“I’m constantly in pain if I don’t use cannabis,” said Brinegar.

Over 250,000 people in the Netherlands have used the party drug ecstasy at least once in the past year, according to new figures published on Friday. The research, by the national statistics office CBS and drugs research group Trimbos Institute, involved questioning a representative group of 6,000 people. The figures show that 2.5% of the Dutch population take ecstasy, compared with a European average of 0.6%. The Dutch are also more likely to take amphetamines than any other Europeans. In terms of cannabis use, around 8% of the Dutch have used it in the past year, which is above the 5.7% EU average but well below France (11%), Spain (9%) and the Czech Republic (9%).

If you're an emoji-illiterate old person, like me, that string of pictograms above probably reads something like "Hi sleep F beer NG peace bicep box." But the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, the anti-drug group behind the anti-drug ads of your childhood, hopes that it means something completely different to today's teens: they've recently launched the world's first emoji-only anti-drug PSA campaign.

High-school stoner looking to score weed or undercover agent? 

As Heidi mentioned in Morning News, minors in Washington State seem about as likely to get away with buying legal weed as buying beer from a supermarket.

Yesterday, the Washington State Liquor Control Board announced that 19 of the state's 157 recreational marijuana stores had sold to underage, undercover buyers—an 87.9 percent compliance rate, which is roughly the same as the state's rate of underage alcohol sales. (Underage sales of illegal drugs, of course, have a zero percent compliance rate.)