Washington:

Maryland’s governor will issue a mass pardon of drug offenses, US media reported Sunday, in a far-reaching move forgiving 175,000 low-level marijuana convictions across multiple decades.

The Washington Post, which reported the story, called it one of the country’s most sweeping acts of clemency involving a drug that is now in broad recreational use, and noted the action is aimed at addressing social and economic injustice disproportionately impacting Black people.

Democrat Wes Moore, the eastern US state’s first Black governor, told the Post he intends to “right a lot of historical wrongs” by signing the pardon order, set to be implemented early Monday.

He said the scope of the pardons — affecting some 100,000 people — amounted to “the most far-reaching and aggressive” executive action nationwide by officials looking to erase criminal justice inequities as more states ease marijuana laws.

After a state-wide referendum, Maryland legalized cannabis for adults and retail sales of the drug in 2023.

“If you want to be able to create inclusive economic growth, it means you have to start removing these barriers that continue to disproportionately sit on communities of color,” Moore told the Post.

He added that criminal records have been used to deny people employment, education and housing long after they have served their sentences.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said the pardons will extend to anyone with a misdemeanor conviction for possession of marijuana or paraphernalia, telling the Post it “disproportionately impacts — in a good way — Black and Brown Marylanders.”

While the state’s population of six million is 33 percent Black, more than 70 percent of Maryland’s male incarcerated population is Black, the Post reported, citing state data.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people are more than three times more likely than white people to be arrested for possessing marijuana.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

In this photo provided by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, surgeons prepare for a pig heart transplant into Lawrence Faucette at the school’s hospital in Baltimore, Md., in September 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

Surgeons have transplanted a pig’s heart into a dying man in a bid to prolong his life – only the second patient to ever undergo such an experimental feat. Two days later, the man was cracking jokes and able to sit in a chair, Maryland doctors said Friday.

The 58-year-old Navy veteran was facing near-certain death from heart failure but other health problems meant he wasn’t eligible for a traditional heart transplant, according to doctors at University of Maryland Medicine.

“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”

While the next few weeks will be critical, doctors were thrilled at Faucette’s early response to the pig organ.

“You know, I just keep shaking my head – how am I talking to someone who has a pig heart?” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, told The Associated Press. He said doctors are feeling “a great privilege but, you know, a lot of pressure.”

The same Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into another dying man, David Bennett, who survived just two months.

There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant. Last year, there were just over 4,100 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number but the supply is so tight that only patients with the best chance of long-term survival get offered one.

Animal-to-human organ transplants have failed for decades

Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.

Recently, scientists at other hospitals have tested pig kidneys and hearts in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough to begin formal studies of what are called xenotransplants.

To make this new attempt in a living patient outside of a rigorous trial, the Maryland researchers required special permission from the Food and Drug Administration, under a process reserved for certain emergency cases with no other options.

It took over 300 pages of documents filed with FDA, but the Maryland researchers made their case that they’d learned enough from their first attempt last year – even though that patient died for reasons that aren’t fully understood – that it made sense to try again.

And Faucette, who retired as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health, had to agree that he understood the procedure’s risks.

In a statement his wife, Ann Faucette, said: “We have no expectations other than hoping for more time together. That could be as simple as sitting on the front porch and having coffee together.”

What’s different this time:

Only after last year’s transplant did scientists discover signs of a pig virus lurking inside the heart – and they now have better tests to look for hidden viruses. They also made some medication changes.

Possibly more important, while Faucette has end-stage heart failure and was out of other options, he wasn’t as near death as the prior patient.

By Friday, his new heart was functioning well without any supportive machinery, the hospital said.

“It’s just an amazing feeling to see this pig heart work in a human,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, the Maryland team’s xenotransplantation expert. But, he cautioned, “we don’t want to predict anything. We will take every day as a victory and move forward.”

This kind of single-patient “compassionate use” can provide some information about how the pig organ works but not nearly as much as more formal testing, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials. That FDA allowed this second case “suggests that the agency is not ready to permit a pig heart clinical trial to start,” Mashke added.

The pig heart, provided by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor, has 10 genetic modifications – knocking out some pig genes and adding some human ones to make it more acceptable to the human immune system.