War on drugs

Colombian President Gustavo Petro Calls for an End to the War on Drugs in Historic UN Address

Posted by Lou on September 27, 2022

Posted in: Capitalism, Columbia, Decriminalization, Energy, Environment, Greed, Oil, United Nations, USA, War, War on drugs, World. Leave a comment

In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment

“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”

They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/colombian-president-gustavo-petro-calls-end-war-drugs-historic-un-address/5794572

By Peoples Dispatch

Global Research, September 26, 2022

Peoples Dispatch 20 September 2022

Region: Latin America & Caribbean

Theme: History, United Nations

***

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused

“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”

This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support for his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.

Así recibieron los colombianos y colombianas que residen en el sector neoyorquino de Queens al Presidente @petrogustavo. #ColombiaEnLaONU🇨🇴🇺🇳 pic.twitter.com/ccdqJQdD6F
— Presidencia Colombia 🇨🇴 (@infopresidencia) September 19, 2022

Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly.

I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.

My country is not only beautiful, but it is also violent.

How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?

My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocóWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.

The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.

For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.

The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be extinguished.

The Poison Peddlers: Doping the World for Fun and Profit

Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.

We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them the problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.

What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal, or oil? The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of humanity.

These are the things of world power, things of injustice, and things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful on the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed humanity.

The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed] on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame.

The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, and the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed.

The fight against the climate crisis has failed. There has been an increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones, genocide has taken place in my continent, and in my country, millions of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this, we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.

Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models, they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer of millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing and we stopped listening to it.

The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.

The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed.

What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species? What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital.

The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.

From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war and to stop the climate disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity.

Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit, and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.

I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be allocated worldwide to life.

If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.

Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.

From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace without social, economic, and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.

Featured image: Gustavo Petro addressed the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2022. Photo: UN

The original source of this article is Peoples Dispatch

Atlanta Police Make Monumental Move, Disband Entire Drug Unit to Focus on Actual Crime

Posted by Lou on January 10, 2020

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Crime, Criminology, Police, USA, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Source

TheFreeThoughtProject.com By Matt Agorist

Jan 9, 2020

The Atlanta police department just made a revolutionary move. Let’s hope other cities follow suit!

According to a report from WSB-TV Atlanta, the massive change was confirmed on Tuesday. The department confirmed with WSB-TV reporter, Mark Winne, noting that all the officers in the drug unit will be assigned to other areas.

In a statement, the department told Winne (emphasis added):

“We know that the illegal narcotics trade is often at the center of criminal activity fueled by guns and gangs. The Department is de-centralizing its Narcotics Unit in recognition that the violence that surrounds this trade should be the focus of the entire Department, not just one team. We have had tremendous success at targeting the sale of illegal narcotics by tracking violent criminals and getting illegally-possessed guns off the streets.

“Violent crime and gang activity must be the Department’s primary focus and where we will have a greater impact on the crimes affecting those most often victimized in our communities.”

Imagine that! Instead of focusing their efforts on kicking in doors in the middle of the night over people possessing a plant, Atlanta cops will focus on stopping actual violence against the citizens. This is huge.

Naturally, the cops who make a living kicking in doors and confiscating money, drugs and property from drug dealers with all their expensive militarized gear, are not happy.

“Absolutely, it’s a risky move,” a veteran APD narcotics officer told Winne, asking not to be identified. “I’m sure there was a lot of thought put into it. I don’t have all the numbers that the higher-ups in APD have, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

“I hope in the long run that this move is successful. I wish Atlanta the best. I hope it was well calculated,” the officer told Winne.

Although they still acknowledge the perpetuation of the drug war in no uncertain terms, the fact that officers will now focus on preventing harm rather than attacking people for drugs is monumental. Hopefully, this move catches on and departments across the country follow suit

As TFTP has reported before, in the land of the free, those tasked with ‘protecting’ society — often and with extreme prejudice — fall far short of providing anything resembling actual safety. Instead, law enforcement in America often chooses profit over people. One particularly egregious example of this choice is the fact that tens of thousands of raids on people for suspected illegal substances take place every year, while hundreds of thousands of rape kits collect dust in police departments across the country and murders continue to go unsolved.

If you were murdered today, there’s only a 60% chance of police catching the person who did it. That number drops to 3% if you’re raped. 50 years ago, that number was much higher. What happened?

The answer to that question can be found by looking at where police — everywhere except Atlanta — allocate much of their time and resources.

Civil asset forfeiture pays. Busting low-level drug dealers by the dozen and confiscating their drugs, guns, cars, houses, and money pays. Writing tickets for victimless crime pays. Pulling you over for window tint, seat belts, arbitrary traveling speeds, and expired license plates to go on fishing expeditions for drugs; these are the things that pay—not solving crimes.

In criminal justice, clearance rates are used as a measure of crimes solved by the police. The clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of crimes that are “cleared” (a charge being laid) by the total number of crimes recorded.

In the United States, the murder clearance rate in 1965 was more than 90 percent. Since the inception of the war on drugs, the murder clearance rate has plummeted to an average of less than 60 percent per year.

This decline is in spite of there being far fewer murders. It is also in spite of new technological developments to help police solve crimes, like DNA testing, advanced forensic labs, and unethical spying devices like the stingray.

Despite the near-complete erosion of the constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure, the clearance rate for murder and violent crimes continued to free fall. This highlights the fact that no matter how many rights are given up or freedoms diminished, police cannot guarantee your safety.

For now, it appears that the Atlanta Police Department is moving in the right direction. Other departments would do well to pay attention.

A Century of Prohibition

Posted by Lou on November 17, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Culture, History, Hypocrisy, Marijuana, Morality, Prohibition, USA, War on drugs. Leave a comment

A Century of Prohibition

Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock, two academic analysts, estimate that legalizing currently illegal drugs would save Americans approximately $41 billion a year in federal and state government expenditures relating to drug enforcement. In the three decades since Mrs. Reagan uttered her dubious words of warning, the total costs of the war on drugs is estimated at $1 trillion.

http://www.counterpunch.org

by DAVID ROSEN

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

Photograph Source: Removal of liquor during Prohibition – Public Domain

We live in the shadow of the past; it haunts the present like the memory of a dead relative who can’t be forgotten or forgiven. Prohibition is a dead historically moment that can’t be forgotten.

Prohibition was established with the adoption of the 18^th Amendment on January 16, 1919, and was implemented through the National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act. It was first implemented when the so-called “Wartime Prohibition” took effect in May 1919 and took effect nationally with the adoption of the National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act. It went into effect on January 16, 1920 and remained the law-of-the-land until it was repealed 13 years with the adoption of the 21st Amendment – the only Amendment to be overturned.

Prohibition grew out of a century-long campaign to contain the forces that were perceived as threats to the nation’s moral order. It railed against vice in every form, be it alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, birth control or obscenity in the arts. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), among others, championed this movement. The Prohibition Party was founded in 1869 and was the first political party to accept women as members; the male-only Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was established in 1898. Anti-immigration proponents assailed Irish and German immigrants due to their alleged abuse of alcohol.

The temperance campaign gained legitimacy during World War I and in its aftermath. It was one aspect of a deeper social crisis that culminated in not only the establishment of Prohibition but the adoption of the 19^th Amendment giving women the vote. Often forgotten, the period witnessed social disruption amidst a wave of strikes, political bombings and what became known as the first Red Scare, one marked by the Palmer Raids and the deportation of nearly 300 “aliens,” including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

Prohibition was in force from 1920 to 1933 and evolved through three overlapping phases. The first ran from 1920 to 1923, from the imposition of the 18^th Amendment until New York State repealed the Mullan-Gage Act, the state’s concurrent legislation. The second phase was Prohibition’s glory days and lasted from 1923 to 1928, with innumerable swank speaks, celebrity culture and the wide-scale flaunting of the temperance law. On the night of June 28, 1928, the third phase of Prohibition commenced and lasted until it was repealed on December 5, 1933. Each phase was characterized by a distinct speakeasy scene, attendant popular culture, gangster activities and the failed enforcement practices. Taken together, speakeasies defined American nightlife during the Roaring ‘20s and speaks were the place to be.

There were two fundamental developments that resulted from Prohibition and its repeal. First, the old-fashioned gangs of the 1920s morphed into organized crime syndicates that rule today’s underworld. Anyone whose seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy or Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire can glimpse the structural changes that came to redefine organized crime. Second, four years after the 18^th Amendment was repealed and Prohibition ended, Congress adopted the Marihuana Tax Act on August 2, 1937; in the 1930s, marijuana was spelled “marihuana.” It made the possession and sale of marijuana illegal.

A half-century later, Nancy Reagan launched the postmodern prohibition movement. In 1982, she gave her infamous “Just Say No” speech at the Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, CA. In a 1986 speech, she declared: “Today there’s a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country, and no one is safe from it – not you, not me, and certainly not our children, because this epidemic has their names written on it.”

Mrs. Reagan’s original campaign sought to address an assortment of alleged youthful vices, including alcohol and drug abuse, peer violence and premarital sex. Seeing an opportunity, a cabal of shrewd moralists, clever politicians and innovative entrepreneurs used the speech to formally launch the nation’s war on drugs. They forged the new the police-corporate repression system, the domestic corollary to Pres. Dwight Eisenhower’s identified military-industrial complex.

Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock, two academic analysts, estimate that legalizing currently illegal drugs would save Americans approximately $41 billion a year in federal and state government expenditures relating to drug enforcement. In the three decades since Mrs. Reagan uttered her dubious words of warning, the total costs of the war on drugs is estimated at $1 trillion.

The war on drugs proved as successful as the original campaign against alcohol. Both were failures. In similar fashion, comparable “wars” to suppress still other transgressive activities — including gambling, pornography and adult “consensual” sex work — proved far less then successful. Still other battles against race mixing, erotic music and dance, abortion and homosexuality have been fought. These diverse issues have defined the culture wars that, over the last half-century, deeply influenced American politics … and still do.

***

In the 80 years since the passage of the 21^st Amendment repealed Prohibition lives on and has taken new forms. U.S. federal, state and local regulators have embraced a mixed program of prohibition and/or regulation of what was consider unacceptable practices. Such practices range from who — and how — people can drink alcoholic beverages to how and where one can gamble, which drugs one can imbibe and if one can engage in commercial sex.

During the ‘30s, hemp was popular and profitable, used for a variety of commercial purposes, including the smoking kind. The Act sought to garner the federal government much-needed tax revenues without outlawing marihuana production or consumption. In 1970, President Richard Nixon championed the Controlled Substances Act that superseded the Marihuana Act and launched the war on drugs — a decade before Mrs. Reagan’s speech. In the decades since the adoption of the Marihuana Act and the Pres. Nixon and Mrs. Reagan, the war on drugs has dragged on and on and on. Today, marijuana for medical purposes is legal in 33 states and for recreational purposes in 14 states.

As marijuana consumption has been normalized, gambling and commercial sex have been mainstreamed. Gambling, one of the well-established rackets of Prohibition-era gangsters, has become a major commercial enterprise. In 1976, the federal Commission on the Review of National Policy toward Gambling recognized that gaming, like alcohol consumption, “is inevitable. No matter what is said or done by advocates or opponents of gambling in all its various forms, it is an activity that is practiced, or tacitly endorsed, by a substantial majority of Americans.” Such activities include state lotteries for every conceivable hustle; pari-mutuel betting on horses, greyhounds and jai-alai; sports bookmaking for every sport, from ping-pong to the Olympics; card games, keno and bingo; slot machines; and video poker, keno, blackjack and roulette machines. Casinos revenues were nearly $42 billion in 2018. The rackets are big business; Al Capone and Owner Madden must be spinning in their graves.

Gambling might be a victimless crime; commercial sex is not. As the old adage states, prostitution is the oldest profession and, sadly, it is still alive and well in the 21^st century. Sex work is contradiction: morally, sex work is a sin because no one should sell their sexual being; socially, under capitalism, sex – the human body – is a commodity and people sell their sexual selves to survive

Since the nation’s founding, females (and sometimes males) have been selling their sexual labor for what is perceived to have value, be it money, food, trinkets or social opportunities. Today, commercial sex is regulated in only one state, Nevada, and restricted to mostly rural areas. Not surprising, prostitution takes place throughout the country and operates under various names. Streetwalkers persist but are relegated to the poorest exchanges. Ever innovative, prostitution has long adopted to the latest technology. In the ‘20s, the telephone refashioned the bordello into the call house. In the 21^st century, the digital revolution is helping to mainstream commercial sex work. In addition, commercial sex is also facilitated through massage parlors and “gentlemen’s” or strip clubs. The dark side of prostitution is the recruitment of young girls (and some boys) and the forced sex slavery of foreign women that characterizes much of the commercial sex throughout the world.

Ongoing battles over “obscene” or indecent materials continue, promoted by the widespread availability risqué materials available through cable television and the Internet. Efforts to limit “porn” through the 1996 Communications Decency Act have been repeatedly rejected by the courts. Recent federal court decisions against the FCC relating to Janet Jackson’s “costume malfunction” and speaking the “F” word by Cher and Nicole Richie put such regulation in question. However, one area of content suppression that continues to find widespread legal and popular support is the restriction of child pornography and the arrest of those caught either distributing or receiving such material.

Abortion and homosexuality, along with interracial sex and erotic music and dance, are very different kinds of “transgressions.” They have each long been areas of bitter contestation, pitting moral conservatives and religious traditionalists against cultural secularist and political progressives. A combination of personal valor (i.e., a willingness to challenge accepted moral or social conventions) and market forces (i.e., amoral cultural innovation) has redefined modern America cultural values. In essence, these “wars,” whether fought over alcohol consumption or the latest sexy fashion, mark the shifting boundaries of acceptable individual conduct.

***

A century ago, Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption from an immoral practice into an illegal act, fostering the speakeasy and the reconfiguration of American moral values. With the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption became a regulated adult indulgence, illegal if it violated a local convention but nonetheless an all-American pleasure. The original Roaring ‘20’s speak was a unique, unprecedented innovation of American entrepreneurialism, an iconic expression of popular culture. During its short 13-year existence, it cultivated the full gamut of personal and social expressions that would come to define post-WW-II life, let alone 21^st century post-modernity.

America in 2019 is not what it was in 1919. The new woman of old is the every-woman of today; the New Negro is today’s every American of color; the “pansy” of yesterday is just another person; the gangster persists along with the underground economy; and the cocktail continues to represent the radical sense of sensual pleasure that defines post-modern America.

Since the country’s founding four centuries ago, Americans have fought over what is acceptable moral conduct. Some have battled to preserve traditional, to repress notions of radical erotic experience and expression; others have pushed the boundaries of acceptable pleasure. This battle continues, continually reshaped by history and changes in moral values. Today, the meaning of transgression is in flux, buffeted by differences between the legal and the popular notions of what is acceptable behavior.

How to End the Drug Cartel Violence In Mexico

Posted by Lou on November 7, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Criminology, Legalization, Mexico, War on drugs. 1 Comment

How To End the Drug Cartel Violence in Mexico

http://www.lewrockwell.com

By John J. Baeza

November 7, 2019

Nine Americans-including three women and six children-were gunned down by drug cartel members in Mexico’s northern state of Sonora. Eight young children survived the gunmen’s attack. Although violence of this type occurs in Mexico on a regular basis this attack caught the attention of the American news media due to the citizenship of those killed. They were U.S. citizens with dual Mexican citizenship. And it was a horrible attack.

Both President Trump and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) have come up with solutions to stop the cartel violence.

President Trump made his solution very clear in the following tweet:

“If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively,” Trump tweeted. “The great new President of Mexico has made this a big issue, but the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador refused the offer and proposed his own solution-“hugs not bullets.” Obrador also thinks that helping the poor is in some way going to affect the way the drug cartels operate.

Both leaders are dead wrong. There is only one way to end the drug cartel violence in Mexico and that is to end the drug war by legalizing all drugs immediately. This would also end the drug violence we see in cities across the United States. When alcohol prohibition was ended we didn’t see Coors and Budweiser shooting it out on the street for territory. They had courts to take care of business. They no longer needed mobsters. And when drugs are legalized we will see the same peaceful transition.

The drug war industrial complex is very big and very powerful. There are only a few politicians who would dare to propose legalization of all drugs. But this is what is needed if we want to end the cartel violence in Mexico and here in the United States.

The cartel violence we have seen take thousands upon thousands of lives in Mexico is blowback from our failed domestic policy on drugs. It is the U.S. demand for drugs that drives the market and the violence. We are at least partially responsible for the failed Mexican state. A state where every politician and every policeman are corrupt.

As a former frontline drug warrior, I know ending the drug war is the only way out of this mess. All the task forces, narcotics courts, and military cooperation will not stop it.

End the drug war now!

The Best of John J. Baeza

Drug Laws are the Problem not the Solution – Legalise All Drugs

Posted by Lou on November 5, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Criminology, Decriminalization, Legalization, Politics, War on drugs. 1 Comment

Drugs

When you have been involved in politics as long as I, you become almost immune from the stench of hypocrisy which attaches itself to political debate and mainstream media coverage of those debates.

With mixed emotions, I read the two-page spread and leading opinion piece in yesterday’s Scottish Daily Record newspaper concerning the Westminster Scottish Affairs Committee Report which has called for the decriminalisation of illegal drug use and several other progressive measures designed to tackle problem drug use as a health problem, not a criminal problem.

On the one hand, I am pleased that the sane, evidence-based and expert research-informed opinions on tackling illegal drug use are at long last being taken seriously.

Far too many lives have been blighted and/or lost on the back of a stupid and counterproductive “war on drugs” approach which has always been an insane waste of resources and energy.

Too many politicians have shamelessly thumped tables during public meetings and debates and demanded tougher police action and longer sentences for illegal drug users and suppliers while snorting white powder regularly in private and consuming copious amounts of the most dangerous drug in society, namely alcohol.

Alcohol

Politicians and their newspaper editor friends have long been known for their private cocaine habits and love affair with expensive brandies and other spirits while they lambasted working-class users of cannabis and heroin as low lives who require the full force of the law mobilised against them. Working-class adherents to hash are no-good layabouts while the middle-class offspring are merely curious rebels harmlessly dabbling with mummy and daddy’s generous allowances paying for quality pot.

The nonsense and hypocrisy at the heart of the “war on drugs” policy and philosophy pursued by the likes of the UK and US Governments was and is unsustainable. After serving my six months sentence in Edinburgh’s Saughton prison in early 1992 for trying to stop a poll tax warrant sale, I became even more acutely convinced about the futility of existing drugs laws than I already was before being incarcerated.

Most of the prisoners were decent working-class guys from similar housing scheme backgrounds to my own. Those convicted of crimes of dishonesty were often trying to provide for a family through shoplifting or bank robberies. Those convicted of violent crimes almost without fail had one thing in common – alcohol.

I remember one day sitting with a group of six or seven prisoners in one guy’s cell and they were discussing their charge sheets in preparation of appearance at court on other charges. These were decent individuals who I had shared laughs with and played football in the exercise yard with.

Yet when I read the charge sheets I was taken aback. They all had convictions for violent assaults and one involved the use of a stolen car to run over a victim several times.

“What on earth were you thinking of?” I said to the perpetrator of that heinous crime. “I don’t know Tommy, I can hardly remember anything I was absolutely steaming (very drunk), mate”, was the response.

All of the other guys then relayed their tales of being so drunk on alcohol that they could hardly recall what they did or why.

Throughout my upbringing in the working-class housing scheme of Pollok in the Southside of Glasgow, I became acutely aware of the violence, inducing qualities of alcohol. Whether in house parties or on street corners alcohol was always at the root of fights, stabbings, slashings and sometimes murders.

Alcohol also played a part in turning some of the adult parents I knew from likeable individuals into monsters who mistreated their wives and children. I wanted to be a professional footballer as a kid so my dad always advised me to stay away from alcohol and try and stay fit.

Rehab residents (back L) sleep in their quarters damaged by drug addicts who escaped from a compulsory rehabilitation centre the night before, in the southern Vietnamese province of Dong Nai on October 24, 2016

I never made it into the professional ranks but that sound advice has informed my life and approach to alcohol. It is not a harmless substance but an addictive and personality changing drug which often spawns violence in particular circumstances.

Yet not only was alcohol legal it was actually promoted widely and effectively through expensive advertising campaigns which made it appear cool and normal to consume. Cannabis, on the other hand, was demonised and frowned upon by the great and the good in society.

Yet in Saughton Prison cannabis was easily accessible with the right contacts and currency. It was consumed by a large section of prisoners. The truth is most prison officers turned a blind eye as the guys having a toke at night in their cells were likely to be relaxed and chilled out. No bother for the night shift.

That experience of mine in Saughton Prison for my part in organising the prevention of a poll tax warrant sale almost thirty years ago can be generalised and extrapolated to illustrate the futility of drugs laws. If cannabis can be supplied in the strict closed conditions of a prison how the hell can you hope to prevent it being available in open society?

A war on drugs really means a war on ordinary people and communities. Nowadays with the introduction of mandatory blood tests for the prison population, it is heroin and Valium which is more prevalent as cannabis stays in the bloodstream for days compared the quick exit of the other drugs. It was a stupid measure in my opinion.

Many occasional cannabis users have entered Scottish prisons without serious addictions but exited with dangerous heroin habits. Use of drugs is rife in prisons to help counter the boredom and pain of isolation from families and loved ones.

My position in relation to the futility and counterproductive nature of drug laws has been consistent throughout my adult life. Not so the tabloids like the Daily Record and many politicians.

Here’s what I had to say in the Scottish Parliament about illegal drugs eighteen years ago on March 22nd 2001 during a debate on a Committee Report that confirmed more and more Scots were addicted to and dying from the use of illegal drugs, mostly heroin.

“We have major problems in our society with problem drug misuse, but they are not all related to heroin. Last year in Scotland, there were 13,000 premature tobacco-related deaths, 1,000 premature alcohol-related deaths and, tragically, 163 premature heroin-related deaths, according to the Registrar General for Scotland… in 1994 there were 52 deaths from heroin and in 1999 there were 163 deaths from heroin.

CC0

Drug user

That is a 200 per cent increase in premature deaths… We must shift towards a change in our drugs laws. We must break the link between heroin supply and cannabis supply. Let us stop criminalising one in four of the Scottish population for using a drug that is no more harmful than tobacco or alcohol. Let us promote no drugs; let us promote alternative lifestyles.

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Cannabis

Finally, we should investigate what happens in Switzerland and the Netherlands, where addicts are now supplied with pharmaceutical heroin, in recognition of the fact that methadone is more addictive, more toxic and can be more damaging than pharmaceutical heroin. We must investigate other maintenance programmes”.

Here’s what the tabloid Daily Record had to say about my contribution eighteen years ago when it had a considerably bigger circulation than it has now. Under the front-page headline “Working Class Zero” they wrote on March 23rd 2001:

“Sheridan cut a lonely, isolated figure on the parliament’s crossbenches. He even launched a vain bid to have the parliament endorse legalising pot. But the move was thrown out”.

The Daily Record editorial that day was markedly different from their editorial line yesterday. Under the strident headline ‘RECORD VIEW You’re such a bam-pot, Sheridan’ they said:

“In a bizarre display, which provoked the fury and disgust of his fellow-members, Tommy Sheridan destroyed what little credibility he had left. The difference is that Sheridan spouts about the link between drugs and deprivation, while others are prepared to tackle the hard issues head-on. Scotland is marching with the Record against drugs. Only the shameless Sheridan is out of step”.

The reason I was daubed “shameless” was because I refused to sign up to that newspaper’s hypocritical “Scotland Against Drugs” campaign and march in April that year as it was nauseatingly hypocritical. It was giving out free lager tokens to those who purchased the paper while pressurising everyone else to endorse their campaign.

Marijuana

It wasn’t me who was “shameless”, it was them. They were trying to boost dwindling sales by pretending to care about Scotland’s drug abuse problem while giving away free alcoholic lager tokens at the same time. It was an absolutely pathetic strategy that many more MSPs should have had the courage to expose and resist.

Earlier that month that newspaper was angry that I organised an event to promote legalisation of cannabis to coincide with their hypocritical march against drugs.

In another front-page tirade on 7th March 2001 under the headline “THE WIT AND WISDOM OF DOPEY TOMMY” they wrote:

“Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan lamely tried to defend his attempt to hold a pro-pot march as ‘a protest against drug abuse in a different way’… And the dopey MSP even claimed that his protest is just another approach in the fight against the evils of the drugs trade destroying a generation”.

Therein sits the hypocrisy of tabloids like the Daily Record and many politicians. They have changed their tunes now on the need to change the drugs laws to tackle the problems of illegal drug use but without an apology to the many people who have been arguing for such an approach for years and facing ridicule and scurrilous headlines as a result.

When I was arguing for the drug laws to be changed as part of a multi-faceted strategy of increased rehabilitation and treatment services and the change from a criminal to a public health approach the number of heroin-related deaths was 163. That was eighteen years ago. The number of drug-related deaths in Scotland last year soared to 1,187, according to official statistics.

The figure is 27% higher than the previous year, and the highest since records began in 1996.

It means there were more drug-related deaths in Scotland last year than the 1,136 alcohol-specific deaths.

And the country’s drug death rate is now nearly three times that of the UK as a whole and is higher than that reported for any other EU country.

Tackling the scourge of problem drug use requires more than one response. Recognition that it is a health problem and not a criminal one is essential but must be tied to increased resources for drug addiction treatment and support as well as wider measures to eradicate poverty and the hopelessness it brings in its wake.

Head of Advocacy and Policy with the leading children’s rights organisation said that the problem of children being trafficked and then forced into working in the illegal drugs trade is not new to the UK.

A golfer would win nothing if he or she carried only one club in their bag. Drivers, putters and several irons are prerequisites for success. So in the approach to problem drug use, we have to deploy several policies and legalisation, not decriminalisation, of cannabis and other drugs is a vital start.

All drugs currently illegal should be legalised, regulated, licenced and taxed. Advertising should be prohibited but the state not criminal and violent gangs should be responsible for the sale of drugs. The millions in tax revenues generated should be dedicated to the treatment of drug addiction.

The current provision of such services is woefully inadequate. Even the leading candidate in the Democratic Presidential nomination race, Bernie Sanders, endorses this approach with his clear and forthright commitment to legalise marijuana in America.

Alcohol is legal but not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. Tobacco is legal but less and less people are smoking. Cannabis, heroin, cocaine being legally available under strict licenced conditions will not lead to more addicts but it will lead to safer use. Education and investment in healthier living and lifestyles are central to qualitative life improvements but the drugs laws are part of the problem not part of the solution. They have to be changed fundamentally as soon as possible.

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

The End of a Cocaine-Fueled Presidency? Juan Orlando Hernandez Faces Regime Change in Honduras

Posted by Lou on August 10, 2019

Posted in: Cocaine, Criminology, Death squads, Honduras, Hypocrisy, IMF, Politics, USA, War on drugs. Leave a comment

The End of a Cocaine-Fueled Presidency? Juan Orlando Hernandez Faces Regime Change in Honduras

http://www.mintpressnews.com

By Adrienne Pine @adriennepine

August 05th, 2019

Honduras has been the epicenter of the Central American exodus and northward migration since the U.S.-backed coup 10 years ago and the ultra-violent repression by President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s regime, as well as its ultra-neoliberal policies.

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — Flanked by ministers and military and police leadership, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez — embattled after being slapped with new drug trafficking allegations in the U.S. — held a press conference on the night of Saturday, August 3rd to declare his innocence. The accusations against him include funneling cocaine profits into his re-election campaign and shielding his brother and other drug kingpins from prosecution.

While Hernandez’s presidency is infamous for its categorical illegality under the constitution, his time in office has also seen Honduras turn into the hemisphere’s largest throughway for drugs. Meanwhile, the damage to society done by neoliberal austerity measures backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and violent repression by police and death squads has brought about steady flows of migrants out of the country and to the southern border of the U.S.

But Juan Orlando’s enemies — he said on Saturday — are really just angry at the phenomenal success of his anti-drug policies and have made false charges against him. Among those complicit in this sinister attempt at revenge were his political rivals, former president Mel Zelaya (ousted in the U.S.-supported 2009 coup) and Salvador Nasralla. Nasralla, the candidate of the Opposition Alliance, was the rightful winner of the 2017 Honduran presidential election, but Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) was able to snatch it from him in a re-election for a second term that was unconstitutional in Honduras but backed nonetheless by the United States. Fraud by JOH’s National Party is also widely recognized.

In response to the accusations against him, JOH promised to crack down harder than ever before on organized crime:

I call on all good Hondurans…to join together…to continue in the struggle to recuperate our country as we have been doing…and finally finish off all these criminal organizations that have caused so much suffering and pain for the Honduran people. We continue to fully collaborate with national and international authorities…so that anyone who has broken the law will face justice…because no one is above the law.”

🔴📡| EN VIVO: Comparecencia de prensa a toda la comunidad nacional e internacional. https://t.co/tLV9JPMz6D

— Juan Orlando H. (@JuanOrlandoH) August 4, 2019

That Juan Orlando Hernandez and his brother Tony Hernandez — who flamboyantly branded his cocaine blocks with his initials “TH” — are drug traffickers comes as a surprise to exactly no one in Honduras. In a 47-page document filed in U.S. District Court on Friday, JOH is referred to simply as “CC [co-conspirator] 4.”

Signs that JOH’s time is running out are slowly beginning to reveal themselves. The release of the document comes on the heels of a request last week by the anti-corruption body, MACCIH — a government watchdog that receives significant U.S. support and funding — to the Honduran judiciary to seize the assets of individuals in JOH’s inner circle. Among them is Ana Rosalinda Garcia Carías, Hernandez’s wife, who is implicated in the theft of more than $1.7 million from government coffers in what is known here as the “Pandora Case.”

While the drug trade has transformed the nation’s financial sector into a giant washing machine for the crisp $20 bills preferred by traffickers, it would be an understatement to say that Hernandez’s illegal two-term presidency has been an unmitigated disaster for Hondurans.

A Honduran exodus

Over the past two years, massive caravans of migrants have come together to brave routes designed by the U.S. to be dangerous and even deadly to cross, in order to curb successful migration. Migrants do so knowing that what they face on the other side may very well include concentration camps and separation from their loved ones because those odds still beat the ones they have staying home.

But while the media clings to the spectacle of the migrant caravans, they do not constitute a statistically significant increase in the crisis that has been raging since JOH took power in 2014.

A Honduran flag hangs in a makeshift migrant camp in Escuintla, Chiapas State, Mexico, April 19, 2019. Moises Castillo | AP

Honduras has been the epicenter of the exodus since the U.S.-backed coup 10 years ago and the ultra-violent repression by JOH’s regime, as well as its ultra-neoliberal policies.

These factors — shocking in the scale of upheaval to Honduran society as they have been — have motivated Hondurans to flee towards a less certain misery, even with the possibility of dying on the way or in the custody of ICE.

Today, those conditions include:

The systematic criminalization and targeting for assassination of individuals and groups opposing the Hernandez administration (the so-called “criminal organizations” he vowed to “finish off”);

Total impunity for death squads run out of state security agencies, and for perpetrators of human rights violations;

Similar levels of impunity for gangs colluding with police in large-scale, violent extortion schemes known here as “war taxes,” principally targeting renters, homeowners, small business owners and transportation service providers;

Abysmal conditions and lack of access to public hospitals and clinics — a result of the privatization of healthcare and the wholesale theft of funds by Hernandez and his allies for personal enrichment and to finance their electoral campaigns;

The worst outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue Honduras has ever seen, closely related to the gutting of the healthcare system;

The reduction of educational programs in public schools throughout the country as part and parcel of a broader ongoing attempt to privatize the educational sector;
An unprecedented dearth of jobs;

The highest poverty rate — 65.7 percent — in the continental Americas, with 42.5 percent of the population living in extreme poverty.

Protests against the Hernandez dictatorship have been steadily increasing since the 2017 electoral crisis, during which over 40 Hondurans protesting the U.S.-supported fraud were killed by state security forces. In addition to lethal force, protests have been met with counterinsurgency and false-flag tactics, resulting in the imprisonment of protesters — including human rights activists Edwin Espinal, Raúl Álvarez, and Rommel Herrera, political prisoners detained in life-threatening conditions in a military-run, maximum-security prison modeled after U.S. detention facilities. Since April, healthcare workers, teachers and students have led near-daily mass mobilizations against IMF-driven privatization policies negotiated with Hernandez.

At the same time, Hernandez has refused to engage in honest dialogue with the opposition or acknowledge the legitimate demands of the Honduran people, instead doubling down on efforts to gut the public sector and ramping up militarization and repression.

In light of developments in the Pandora Case and his newly documented role as a co-conspirator, Hondurans hypothesize that the real power in the country — the U.S. Embassy — has finally withdrawn its support. The change in guard at the U.S. Embassy, with longtime Chargé d’Affaires and close JOH ally Heide Fulton being replaced by Lawrence J. Gumbiner, has reinforced these theories.

For Hondurans, these developments appear as harbingers of a changing tide, but also raise the question: Whose regime change will this be?

Escalating the struggle

Leaders of the Platform for the Defense of Health and Education called Sunday night for local protests throughout the country at 6 a.m. on Monday morning, and for a single, national protest at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in Tegucigalpa on Tuesday, demanding the immediate resignation of the drug trafficker-in-chief.

Organizations across the country immediately followed up on the call to action, sending out communiques informing community members of meeting places for the Monday morning protests. These protests come on top of an already-planned week of action in support of political prisoners, including a hunger strike in which Mel Zelaya and Salvador Nasralla have committed to participate, along with many other prominent national figures and movement leaders.

I will be providing regular dispatches from Tegucigalpa throughout the week, as social movements increase pressure for Juan Orlando Hernandez to leave power and seek to take the reins of their country back from U.S.-backed drug traffickers and international financial institutions like the IMF.

Adrienne Pine is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University. She is the author of the book Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras.

Additional editing by Alex Rubinstein

Drug companies poured 76 billion opioid pills into US neighborhoods in just six years

Posted by Lou on July 19, 2019

Posted in: Big pharma, DEA, Opioids, Opioids crisis, USA, War on drugs. Leave a comment

“…it confirms in the most concrete terms the criminal role played by drug companies in creating the deadly opioid epidemic that now kills 70,000 people a year in the US. The prescription opioid epidemic alone resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.”

“…The solution to the opioid crisis lies in the mobilization of the working class to take ownership of the for-profit pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and the entire healthcare industry in order to provide medical care in the interest of human need, not private profit.”

Source

http://www.wsws.org

By Genevieve Leigh
19 July 2019

Previously undisclosed drug company data released by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has provided the most comprehensive look to date at the nation’s opioid crisis. The database, which traces the path of every single narcotic sold in America—from manufacturer to distributor to pharmacy from 2006 to 2012—has been analyzed in a report by the Washington Post.

The data, along with the history of its delayed release, is remarkable in many ways. First, it confirms in the most concrete terms the criminal role played by drug companies in creating the deadly opioid epidemic that now kills 70,000 people a year in the US. The prescription opioid epidemic alone resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.

According to the database, throughout the documented six-year period in which the drug epidemic was beginning to spin out of control, drug companies poured 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills into US neighborhoods.

This almost incomprehensible number meant that during these years, the companies distributed enough pills to supply every adult and child in the country with 36 pills each per year.

However, the distribution of the pills was not uniform from state to state or from city to city. The state of Kentucky, for example, was flooded with enough pills to give every person 63.3 pills each per year; South Carolina, 58; and Tennessee, 57.7.

West Virginia, the state with the highest opioid death rate during this period, received enough pills to give every person 66.5 pills each year.

Rural areas hard hit

Rural areas were among the hardest hit. In Norton, Virginia, there were enough pills to provide 306 pills per person a year; Martinsville, Virginia, 242; Mingo County, West Virginia, 203.

During the years covered by the database, 2006 to 2012, annual opioid deaths rose from under 18,000 a year to more than 23,000, with prescription drugs cited as factors in almost half the deaths. The volume of the pills handled by the companies also skyrocketed as the epidemic surged, increasing about 51 percent from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012.

Since then, overall opioid deaths in the US have skyrocketed. The flooding of markets with prescription drugs, especially in economically depressed areas, spawned increased heroin use and ultimately, along with a number of other factors, led to the current fentanyl crisis that added more than 67,000 to the death toll from 2013 to 2017.

There is no doubt that the top drug manufacturers and distributors are guilty a thousand times over for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people; for the incalculable pain and suffering on the part of those addicted, their children, and their families; for the economic and social devastation the crisis has brought to large swaths of rural America. It has placed an immense strain on healthcare systems, social services, and the foster care system. These companies made billions of dollars off of human suffering.

Complicity of the political establishment

However, the insidious character of this massive operation extends well beyond the drug manufacturers and drug distributors. The drug manufacturers and distributors were able to carry out this operation only because of critical structural support they received from the highest level of the political establishment.

The data revealed Monday comes from an exclusive database controlled and viewable only by the DEA, a government-controlled body supposedly meant to oversee and police these companies. The information to which this body had access is highly detailed, including the name, DEA registration number, address and business activity of every seller and buyer of a controlled substance in the United States. The database also includes drug codes, transaction dates, and total dosage units and grams of narcotics sold.

It is not only the drug companies who have been fighting to keep this database secret, but the DEA along with the US Department of Justice. The database was only unveiled after a yearlong battle for access to the documents waged by the Washington Post and HD Media. What accounts for this secrecy?

The truth is, as with every major industry, the drug corporations routinely buy off politicians to secure ideal business conditions. The DEA exemplifies the fact that the federal agencies supposedly tasked with policing big business—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—are under the thumb of the corporations and run political interference for them.

Innumerable facts support this claim. First, despite access to this overwhelming data, over the course of this entire crisis the DEA has taken only the most limited action against these companies, which has resulted in many of them paying a pittance in fees for their crimes.

The Obama administration’s role

However, even this minimal oversight was too much for the companies and their counterparts in Washington. As the opioid crisis was erupting, the US Congress was working to eviscerate the oversight powers of the DEA, starting in 2014 and culminating in the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, which passed by overwhelming votes in Congress and was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama.

The main purpose of the legislation was to stop the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control from halting drug shipments for unusually large and unexplained sales. For example, when several Walgreens pharmacies in Florida sold more than 1 million opioid pills in a year, compared to a nationwide average of 74,000, the Office of Diversion Control could impose fines and suspend distribution, preventing the drugs from reaching the streets pending the results of an investigation.

The 2016 law effectively ended the ability of the DEA to suspend such orders. Political action committees representing the pharmaceutical industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill. Overall, the drug industry spent $102 million lobbying Congress on the bill and related legislation between 2014 and 2016.

At least 46 investigators and attorneys from the DEA, including 32 directly from the Office of Diversion Control, were hired by the pharmaceutical companies after scrutiny of the drug distributors began in 2014.

The intimate connection between these gigantic corporate monopolies and the institutions of state power revealed in the case of opioid drug distributors is the relationship that prevails across-the-board throughout the capitalist system internationally.

Over the course of the last three years, various lawsuits have been brought against different drug companies. Some have been successful in bringing attention to the issues involved and in securing some monetary retribution from the companies. There are currently dozens of drug companies being sued in federal court in Cleveland by nearly 2,000 cities, towns and counties alleging that they conspired to flood the nation with opioids.

While these efforts rightfully target many of the guilty parties involved in the creation of this crisis, the results of the lawsuits, however “successful,” will ultimately do little to repair the damage done by the drug epidemic over the course of the last decade, let alone make whole the families who have suffered the trauma of losing loved ones.

More fundamental than the individuals involved in these crimes is the social system that produces them. The subordination of the political establishment to the private interests of corporations is not a feature of life that will be changed through lawsuits. Rather, the solution to the opioid crisis lies in the mobilization of the working class to take ownership of the for-profit pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and the entire healthcare industry in order to provide medical care in the interest of human need, not private profit.

Duterte ‘Will Not Answer’ To White People Amid UN Human Rights Investigation

Posted by Lou on July 19, 2019

Posted in: Criminology, Duterte, Human rights, Philippines, Police, Political science, United Nations, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Source

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte says he won’t answer to white people over alleged human rights violations – insisting that he will “only face, be tried or face a trial in a Philippine court, presided by a Filipino judge, [and] prosecuted by a Filipino,” adding “maybe they can reimpose the death penalty, [so I can] die in Filipino land.”

“I will not answer a Caucasian… You must be stupid. Who are you? I am a Filipino,” said Duterte. “We have our courts here. You have to bring me somewhere else? I would not like that. I have my country. It’s working, I know it’s working, justice is working here.”

Duterte comments follow a vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council on a resolution brought by Iceland to investigate alleged abuses. He is accused of overseeing thousands of extrajudicial killings, according to Newsweek. His administration is also accused of arbitrary arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and other measures amid an anti-drug crackdown.

Duterte had already suggested he could cut diplomatic ties with Iceland over its resolution, which passed the U.N. Human Rights Council by 18 to 14 votes, with 15 countries abstaining.

Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office, told Newsweek: “The HRC resolution on the human rights situation in the Philippines and its request for a comprehensive written report is an opportunity for all stakeholders, including the government to assess the current state of human rights in the country and in particular to get clarity around the contested facts, figures and circumstances.” –Newsweek

The ‘formerly gay‘ Duterte, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, has claimed everything from throwing drug dealers out of helicopters to molesting his maid as a teenager.

The Human Rights Council expressed “concern at the allegations of human rights violations in the Philippines, particularly those involving killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, the intimidation and persecution of or violence against members of civil society, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, journalists, lawyers and members of the political opposition, and restrictions on the freedoms of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association.”

Recently, Philippines Senator Ronald dela Rosa, the former police chief responsible for running Duterte’s war on drugs and an ally of the president, downplayed the death of a toddler during a police raid, saying “s*** happens.”

Myka Ulpina, 3, died in crossfire during a drugs raid by armed police in Rodriguez, Rizal. Ulpina’s father Renato also died in the shootout. Police reportedly accused him of using the girl as a shield, which her mother denied. An undercover officer was killed too. –Newsweek

“We are living in an imperfect world,” said former police chief Dela Rosa during a news conference, adding “Would a police officer want to shoot a child? Never, because they have children as well. But shit happens during operations.”

War on Drugs Has Done Far More Harm Than Illegal Drugs, Major Report Finds

Posted by Lou on July 9, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Hypocrisy, Medicine, Politics, Prohibition, United Nations, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Many illegal drugs are less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet seen as more dangerous due to biases.

“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.

It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”

https://themindunleashed.com/2019/06/war-on-drugs-more-harm-illegal-drugs.html

TheMindUnleashed.com

ELIAS MARAT

June 27, 2019

(TMU) — Illegal drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and opiates can potentially be less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet are seen as dangerous narcotics due to cultural biases and politics rather than actual science, according to a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

Calling for a comprehensive review of the international system that classifies drugs, the commission—comprised of 14 former heads of states from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Portugal and New Zealand—blasted the “incoherence and inconsistencies” of laws that cherry-pick the harmful effects of certain substances using “unreliable and scientifically dubious” methods.

The group also described how the scheduling system has propped up a global drug control regime that imposes major costs on society in the form of “collateral damage,” with some substances facing strict controls and others allowed for medical purposes. This has entailed patients in low-to-middle income countries facing surgery without anesthetics, a lack of crucial medicines, and excruciating and painful deaths that were wholly unnecessary and a result of a ban on opioid pain treatment.

In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 83 percent of the global population resides in countries where access to opioid pain relief is either inadequate or nonexistent.

Michel Kazatchkine, a French physician and former head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said that 75 to 80 percent of the global population lacks access to medicines and “all of the reasons are linked to repression and prohibition-based control systems,” according to the Guardian.

Other consequences include the spread of infectious diseases, higher mortality rates and prisons around the globe that are filled to the brim with drug users.

The group wrote:

“Such drug control policies have resulted in social and economic problems not only for people who use drugs but also for the general population, including health epidemics, prison overcrowding and arbitrary enforcement of drug laws.”

Continuing to criticize the arbitrary and biased application of drug laws, the group wrote:

“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.

It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”

Ruth Dreifuss, former president of Switzerland and commission chair, blasted the classification while calling for a “critical review” that centers the WHO, modern scientific research and a criteria that sufficiently takes into account the harm and benefit of substances. Dreifuss said:

“The international system to classify drugs is at the core of the drug control regime – and unfortunately the core is rotten.”

Dreifuss also noted how some illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, cannabis and hashish haven’t been seriously evaluated in 30 years or weren’t evaluated at all, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of prohibitionist approaches.

Former president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos similarly affirmed that drugs should be reclassified. Speaking to journalists in an online briefing on the report, Santos noted that “the scientific basis [of classification] is non-existent.”

Continuing, the former president explained:

“It was a political decision. According to the studies we’ve seen over past years, substances like cannabis are less harmful than alcohol … I come from Colombia, probably the country that has paid the highest price for the war on drugs.”

Instead, the country has been saddled for over 50 years with an unwinnable drug war that causes “more damage, more harm” to the world than practical approaches to regulating the sale and consumption of drugs in a “good way,” he added.

The Global Commission added the “only responsible answer to this complex topic is to regulate the market of illegal drugs, starting by establishing regulations and a new scheduling system adapted to the dangerousness of each drug and based on solid scientific assessments,” in line with the same criteria used for food, medications, and other products that could potentially pose risks to consumer health.

The group added:

“While the international community continues to struggle to find a new consensus, countries should move forward with designing and implementing a more rational policy of scheduling, controlling and regulating psychoactive drugs.”

The group also recommended that milder and less harmful drugs should have restrictions loosened, especially to include “other legitimate uses” such as traditional, religious or social use.

Anand Grover, the former special U.N. rapporteur for health, India, said:

“We need to think of these things with a fresh outlook. We can’t go with the cultural biases of the west.”

War on Drugs Has Done Far More Harm Than Illegal Drugs, Major Report Finds

Posted by Lou on June 28, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Opioids, Opioids crisis, Politics, United Nations, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Many illegal drugs are less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet seen as more dangerous due to biases.

War on Drugs Has Done Far More Harm Than Illegal Drugs, Major Report Finds

TheMindUnleashed.com

ELIAS MARAT

June 29, 2019

In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 83 percent of the global population resides in countries where access to opioid pain relief is either inadequate or nonexistent.

Michel Kazatchkine, a French physician and former head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, said that 75 to 80 percent of the global population lacks access to medicines and “all of the reasons are linked to repression and prohibition-based control systems,”according to the Guardian.

Other consequences include the spread of infectious diseases, higher mortality rates and prisons around the globe that are filled to the brim with drug users.

The group wrote:

“Such drug control policies have resulted in social and economic problems not only for people who use drugs but also for the general population, including health epidemics, prison overcrowding and arbitrary enforcement of drug laws.”

Continuing to criticize the arbitrary and biased application of drug laws, the group wrote:

“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.

It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”

“The international system to classify drugs is at the core of the drug control regime – and unfortunately the core is rotten.”

Dreifuss also noted how some illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and hashish haven’t been seriously evaluated in 30 years or weren’t evaluated at all, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of prohibitionist approaches.

Continuing, the former president explained:

“It was a political decision. According to the studies we’ve seen over past years, substances like cannabis are less harmful than alcohol … I come from Colombia, probably the country that has paid the highest price for the war on drugs.”

The group added:

“While the international community continues to struggle to find a new consensus, countries should move forward with designing and implementing a more rational policy of scheduling, controlling and regulating psychoactive drugs.”

The group also recommended that milder and less harmful drugs should have restrictions loosened, especially to include “other legitimate uses” such as traditional, religious or social use.

Anand Grover, the former special U.N. rapporteur for health, India, said:

“We need to think of these things with a fresh outlook. We can’t go with the cultural biases of the west.”

Mexico Wants to Decriminalize All Drugs and Get the US to Do the Same

Posted by Lou on May 11, 2019

Posted in: Alcohol and drugs, Criminology, Decriminalization, Marijuana, Mexico, USA, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Source

themindunleashed.com

Elias Marat

May 10, 2019

In a bold move, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador—commonly referred to by his initials AMLO—has issued a proposal that would see nearly all drugs decriminalized in the country and calls for negotiating with the United States to take similar steps.The move would be a drastic turnaround for a country that has been plunged into violence, corruption, and organized crime thanks to the war on drugs and raging battles between cartels vying for control of the illicit drug trade. Mexican experts believe that the decriminalization of narcotics—such as marijuana, cocaine, and opium poppies—would lead to a drastic reduction in the violence that has racked the North American country over the past years.

Funds typically used in the never-ending battle with cartels would instead be transferred toward the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, addressing the root causes of addiction. In the meantime, Mexican diplomacy would be geared toward ensuring the success of the new strategy with international partners—and especially the U.S., which is the key consumer of drugs produced in, or trafficked through, Mexican territory.

Santiago Roel Garcia, the founder of Mexican public safety group Semáforo Delictivo, believes that the legalization of some narcotics could see murders plunge by up to 80 percent, given the significant blow to the power of organized crime that an end to prohibition would entail.

The plan would make good on AMLO’s pledges to drastically change the manner in which Mexico has been governed for decades. In the policy proposal, included in AMLO’s National Development Plan for 2019-2024, the government argues that the current “prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable,” adding that “the ‘war on drugs’ has escalated the public health problem posed by currently banned substances to a public safety crisis.”

Philippines’ Duterte launches new tirade against Catholic Church

Posted by Lou on January 11, 2019

Posted in: Pedophilia, Philippines, Religion, Roman Catholic church, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Controversial president says his country’s bishops are ‘sons of bitches’ and ‘most of them are gay’.

Source: Philippines’ Duterte launches new tirade against Catholic Church | Philippines News | Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com

Jan 11, 2019

About 80 percent of the more than 100 million people of the Philippinesare Roman Catholic. [Erik De Castro/Reuters]

President Rodrigo Duterte has denounced bishops in the Catholic-majority country as “sons of b*****s”, renewing his attacks on the church that has criticised him over his bloody war on drugs.

Duterte, who launched his campaign against drugs when he took office in mid-2016, remains hugely popular but doubts about the campaign, in which thousands of people have been killed, have been growing.

“Only I can say bishops are sons of b*****s, damn you. That is true,” Duterte said in a speech during a groundbreaking ceremony for a school north of the capital, Manila.

Duterte did not mention any particular reason for his criticism of the church on Thursday, which included a suggestion that most bishops are homosexual.

“Most of them are gay,” he said. “They should come out in the open, cancel celibacy and allow them to have boyfriends.”

Duterte, who is not a regular church-goer, said early in his presidency that he was sexually abused by a priest when he was a boy.

https://players.brightcove.net/665003303001/BkyLdqdhZ_default/index.html?videoId=5860355825001&usrPersonaAds=false

Fear and killings on the rise in Duterte’s war on drugs (2:41)

The Roman Catholic Church is facing clerical sexual abuse scandals in various parts of the world, although there have been no major cases reported in the Philippines.

In previous speeches, Duterte called God “stupid” and described as “silly” the doctrine of Holy Trinity.

Francis Lucas, an official with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, played down the president’s criticism, saying all should show restraint.

“We have to be more sensitive to the sensitivities and sensibilities of others out of respect,” Lucas told Reuters news agency.

The president’s crackdown on drugs retains much support but some sectors of the Church have become increasingly vocal about the killings, with calls for justice and offers of sanctuary to drug users.

Some 5,000 people have been killed in police anti-drugs operations in Duterte’s anti-drug drive.

Police reject accusations that the killings were executions, saying drug peddlers and users were killed in shootouts, and police acted in self-defence.

About 80 percent of the more than 100 million people of the Philippines are Roman Catholic.

https://players.brightcove.net/665003303001/SJg0bzqkZ_default/index.html?videoId=5978014235001&usrPersonaAds=false

101 EAST: The Philippines: Locked Up (26:00)

More Americans Died From Drug Overdoses In 2017 Than Guns, Car Crashes, and Suicide Together

Posted by Lou on November 16, 2018

Posted in: Mortality, Opioid Addiction, Opioids crisis, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Source: More Americans Died From Drug Overdoses In 2017 Than Guns, Car Crashes, & Suicide Together | Zero Hedge

Drug overdoses led to more deaths in the U.S. in 2017 than any year on record and were the leading cause of death in the country, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report issued Friday.

More than 72,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2017, according to the NIH — about 200 per day. That number is more than four times the number who died in 1999 from drug abuse: 16,849.

The figures are up about 15 percent from 63,632 drug-related deaths in 2016.

Since 2011, more people have died from drug overdoses than by gun violence, car accidents, suicide, or homicide, the DEA report stated.

In 2017, 40,100 people died in vehicle incidents; 15,549 were fatally shot, not including suicide; 17,284were homicide victims, though an unspecified portion of this number includes gunshot victims; and nearly 45,000 committed suicide.

The DEA attributed last year’s uptick in deaths to a spike in opioid-related fatalities. The agency said 49,060 people died as a result of abusing opioids, up from 42,249 in 2016.

Of those opioid deaths, synthetic opioids were responsible for nearly 20,000. More people died from them than heroin. The DEA report said synthetic fentanyl and comparable types of drugs are cheaper than heroin, making them more attractive to buyers.

The DEA also found heroin-related drug overdoses had doubled from 2013 to 2016 because manufacturers illegally producing synthetic fentanyl have laced the heroin with opioids.

President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a “national emergency” in October 2017. Last month, he signed a comprehensive bill that included $8.5 billion in funding for related projects to reduce addiction and deaths.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions noted one positive trend in the study.

“Preliminary data from the CDC shows that drug overdose deaths actually began to decline in late 2017 and opioid prescriptions fell significantly,” Sessions said in a statement.

The Drug Catastrophe in Afghanistan

Posted by Lou on November 10, 2018

Posted in: Afghanistan, Corruption, Criminology, Heroin, USA, War, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Brian CLOUGHLEY: Time after time the US-NATO and Afghan authorities “initially deny” that there have been civilian deaths or casualties caused by airstrikes and are then found to be disguising the truth.

Source link

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Brian CLOUGHLEY

Nov 8, 2018

The Drug Catastrophe in Afghanistan

On November 5 yet another US soldier was killed by a member of Afghanistan’s military forces, as the country continues to be wracked by violence in its seventeenth year of war.

Donald Rumsfeld was US Secretary for Defence from 2001 to 2006 under President George W Bush. They, along with other psychotic figures such as Vice-President Dick Cheney, were responsible for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their legacy is apparent in many spheres, one of which is the drug production bonanza in Afghanistan. s

In August 2004 NBC News reported Secretary Rumsfeld as declaring “The danger a large drug trade poses in Afghanistan is too serious to ignore. The inevitable result is to corrupt the government and way of life, and that would be most unfortunate.” He issued the warning that “It is increasingly clear to the international community that to address the drug problem here is important for the people of Afghanistan.”

Rumsfeld, for once during his catastrophic years as chief war-maker, was absolutely right, and his pronouncement about likely danger and impending corruption was spot on. The US invasion and subsequent operations led to Afghanistan becoming the fourth most dangerous and fourth most corrupt country in the world.

The “drug problem” to which he referred has expanded rapidly over the years. It is destroying Afghanistan. It is a main reason for the place being ungovernable.

It’s all very well to blame Afghans for growing poppies and producing opium and heroin, but what they are doing is meeting international demand. After all, there would be no drug industry in Afghanistan if there wasn’t a welcoming market in the drug-loving prosperous West — although it has to be noted that only about four per cent of its massive narcotics production ends up in the US, which gets most of its heroin from South America.

Mr John Sopko, the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), has just produced his latest quarterly report for the US Congress in which he observes that “From 2002 through September 2018, the United States has committed an average of more than $1.5 million a day to help the Afghan government combat narcotics. Despite this, 2017 poppy cultivation is more than four times that reported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2002, the first full year of US intervention in Afghanistan,” so there is small wonder that the country is “the largest source of street heroin in Europe and Canada.”

Mr Sopko observed that efforts to combat drugs “have cost US taxpayers more than $8 billion since 2002, yet Afghanistan’s opium crisis is worse than ever,” and the increase in the area and quantity of poppy cultivation has been impressive and depressing.

Washington is well aware of the shattering effects of Afghan drug production, but the SIGAR writes that “counternarcotics seems to have fallen completely off the US agenda. The State Department’s new ‘Integrated Country Strategy’ for Afghanistan no longer includes counternarcotics as a priority, but instead subsumes the issue into general operations. Meanwhile, the US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan, and USAID says it will not plan, design, or implement new programs to address opium-poppy cultivation.”

It is amazing that “The US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.”

What happened to the campaign against drug processing that began in November 2017 when “US and Afghan forces launched a series of attacks on narcotics laboratories in southern Afghanistan”?

The massive aerial bombardment of ten drug-processing laboratories included strikes by some Afghan air force Tucano aircraft, but the main assault was by the US Air Force which for the first time in Afghanistan used its F-22 Raptor aircraft, flown from the United Arab Emirates. B-52 strategic nuclear bombers based in Qatar attacked targets, and F-16s joined in from the Bagram base near Kabul. The operation also involved KC-10 and KC-135 refuellers, every surveillance means that could be deployed, and command and control aircraft. This was a major — and very expensive — operation.

The commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, US General John Nicholson, told a news conference “We hit the labs where they turned poppy into heroin. We hit their storage facilities where they kept their final products, where they stockpiled their money and their command and control.” Not only that, but “The strikes that were prosecuted last night will continue… This is going to be steady pressure that’s going to stay up and we are not going to let up.” He said “the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates there are 400 to 500 opium laboratories across Afghanistan”. So after that first attack in November 2017 there were ten down and about 400 to go.

But SIGAR tells us in October 2018 that “the US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.” Why?

There is nobody better placed to explain this than Mr Sopko, who had already observed that the Pentagon’s airstrike campaign against drug laboratories might not have the intended effect, as its “longer-term impact on narcotics remains uncertain.” Not only this, but “there is also the risk that air strikes could result in civilian deaths, alienate rural populations, and strengthen the insurgency.”

He was right on the button, because, as reported by The Washington Post, in January to June 2018 the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan “documented 353 civilian casualties, including 149 deaths, from airstrikes, a 52 percent increase from the same period in 2017.”

There is no doubt that these casualties alienate the rural population, given the example of one strike in July 2018 when the New York Times wrote that “Fourteen members of a family, including three small children, were killed when an American airstrike destroyed their home, several Afghan officials confirmed on [July 20]. In what has become a familiar litany, particularly in Taliban-dominated Kunduz Province, Afghan and American officials had initially denied that any civilians had been killed in the strike . . . claiming the victims were Taliban fighters. Then 11 bodies belonging to women and children appeared at the hospital in Kunduz City, about four miles from the site of the attack in Chardara District. The Taliban do not have women fighters and the children were very young.”

Time after time the US-NATO and Afghan authorities “initially deny” that there have been civilian deaths or casualties caused by airstrikes and are then found to be disguising the truth because there can be no denial of facts when shrapnel-ridden bodies of little children are laid out on the ground. Such absurd statements play right into the hands of the militants and, in the predictive words of the SIGAR, “strengthen the insurgency.”

This might explain why the massive and much-publicised air campaign against opium-processing facilities has been abandoned. But what happens now?

The US State Department and the Pentagon were told by experts that the narcotics problem was immense. For example, in a speech at Georgetown University in 2014 the SIGAR said: “By every conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”

Nothing has changed since then. The 2017 aerial blitz failed utterly, as have so many plans and operations to attempt to reduce narcotics production, and the US-NATO military alliance in Afghanistan continues to flounder in a quagmire of insurgency. The drug catastrophe is plain for all to see, and after seventeen years of war and expenditure of eight billion dollars the illegal narcotics industry is thriving.

Can this be indicative of the general level of competence of the US Department of State and the Pentagon? Can they get anything right?

Canada: Starting Down the Path to Marijuana Legalization

Posted by Lou on October 26, 2018

Posted in: Canada, Cannabis, Government, History, Legalization, Marijuana, Politics, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Source link

http://www.globalresearch.ca

By Bryant Brown

Global Research, October 26, 2018

An Insiders Memoir

In the late 1960’s my wife and I shared an eclectic circle of friends in London Ontario that included business colleagues, social workers, artists, university professors, hippies and students. We were starting a family and I was on the fringe of politics having volunteered to do fundraising and served on the public Library and Art Gallery Boards.

The hippie era was at its peak. Throughout North America, there was an active drug subculture that was at odds with the law. The enforcement tactics of the police in both the United States and Canada at the time were crude and unnecessarily alienating young people. Police were infiltrating hippie groups to search out drug use and this created paranoia.

Our friends who worked at the Addiction Research Foundation told us of the negative effect this was having on kids who were becoming fearful of police because the police were using spies and entrapment. A mantra at the time was, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”.

Pierre Trudeau personified the period, as had John F. Kennedy a decade earlier, and he was elected Prime Minister in 1968. Trudeau’s charisma encouraged change, and this encouraged us.

In 1969, I established The Legalize Marijuana Committee with the sole purpose of lobbying the federal government for saner laws and became its spokesperson. We assumed that the government wanted feedback – probably even needed it – to discuss changing the law. We were right, and the government confirmed that in several ways.

First, they confirmed it by inviting us to meet with the federal Minister of Health and Welfare. Off we went to Ottawa. Only our immediate family knew where we were going or where we were staying.

We booked the cheapest room in the Chateau Laurier Hotel. When we checked in, the bellhop took us to the penthouse suite! It was a corner on the top floor of the hotel with outstanding views on two sides, four king size beds, a living room with several sofas and a kitchen area. Someone, it seems, had upgraded the room and paid the difference – this was the second bit of feedback that someone appreciated our efforts. (When we checked out, we paid the economy rate. Again, nothing was said.)

Within a few minutes, a reporter called the hotel room telling us that someone had released our itinerary to the press as the reporters started calling – the government was leaving nothing to chance, they wanted the publicity.

The Minister’s office was on the top floor of an office building in Ottawa, a short walk from both the hotel and the Parliament buildings. We arrived a few minutes early to a modest reception area with about six others waiting. They didn’t hear us introduce ourselves. As we listened, it was clear from the conversations that they were journalists who were there because of us. “I wonder who these guys are” … “I see nothing wrong with it … I smoke the occasional joint” … “good luck to them!”

Soon we were asked to go in, and reporters fidgeted as they realized they had missed a chance to scoop a first interview. We were taken to a more private waiting room before John Munro, an energetic, chain-smoking Minister of Health and Welfare, welcomed us into his inner office. Several sofas circled a large coffee table and on the table was a file folder about eight inches thick, too deep to close. When Munro noticed it was sitting open he immediately closed it and put an ash tray on top.

We had sent him one letter and a small brochure, yet he had a file on us eight inches thick. Later, as I thought about the file, our hotel upgrade, and our schedule being released, I recalled that we had a break-in in our home a few weeks earlier. The break-in was a non-event; it would have been unnoticed except someone had broken the cheap lock on the only file cabinet in the house. Nothing was taken but in hindsight, I believe it must have been the Royal Canadian Mounted Police doing a routine report on someone about to meet a government minister on a contentious topic.

The government was using our group to float a trial balloon alerting the world that they were thinking of changing drug laws. After a few minutes, the press was invited in. About twenty journalists filled the office for about half an hour of Q and A. Then one of the journalists asked if we would agree to go to the Press Club on Parliament Hill where we met another thirty or so print journalists. An hour or so later we were taken to the media studio for TV and radio interviews by another dozen journalists.

Later the same year the Trudeau government took a step towards changing drug laws by establishing a Royal Commission (Royal Commissions are a big deal in Canada, like a Presidential Commission in the United States); The Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs which stated in its title that the Government saw this as a civil rights and medical issue, not a criminal one.

The government appointed Gerald LeDain, a lawyer and Dean of Canada’s prestigious Osgoode Hall law school to head the commission which began with a public hearing on Oct. 26, 1969. For their opening day, they invited two organizations to appear: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and our group, the Legalize Marijuana Committee. Each group presented a brief and the next day’s newspaper had a lead story on the hearing including two photos: one of the Commissionaire of the RCMP, and the other, me. (My mother wrote to the paper to get a copy of the photo, “… before my son goes to jail” as she stated!)

The official report recommended the repeal of laws against possession of cannabis and the prohibition of cultivation for personal use. One of the commissionaires went further, recommending a policy of legal distribution. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government ignored the report; I suspect it was because the government to our south opposed it.

Now, 48 years later, we have legalized marijuana in Canada.

The Economics of marijuana

At the heart of illegal drug distribution is pyramid selling. Mary Kay thrives on it but whether to sell cosmetics or illegal drugs, anyone can be hired and hire any number of sub-dealers. Everyone gets a cut, and the profit margins are high enough in cosmetic sales to award the occasional pink Cadillac. Profit margins for drugs are higher because they are illegal and the market more dangerous. The vehicles tend to be bigger, and black, and usually with tinted windows.

In 2003, I was a member of a Social Action Committee that was studying the ‘War On Drugs’ and supported a progressive resolution on Alternatives. I was invited to attend a national conference, and to prepare for it I updated myself on some 30 years of changes. I learned how much larger and more dangerous the illegal drug market had become.

At the conference I met Judge Jim Gray from the Superior Court in Southern California, who told me about how teenagers in his California town could get crack cocaine easier than beer, because, as he said, beer was legal and controlled. Privately, he told me how much he respected Judge Le Dain and the work he had done with the Canadian Commission.

How big is the illegal drug market? One answer can be found in the Caribbean.

The Cayman Islands: swimming in money

Grand Cayman Island is the largest of three Cayman Islands miles just south of Cuba. It’s a tropical paradise, where you can swim with stingrays in North Sound or take a submarine ride along the coral reef cliff on the south.

It’s about an hour or so by plane south of Miami, about two hours north of Columbia and two hours east of Mexico – therefore, central to two drug producing nations and the huge drug consuming market of the United States. Politically the islands are British Overseas Territories. They are not independent, not a country, and not truly British. They occupy a small area, one-quarter the size of New York City (102 vs. 468 sq. miles) with a small population of 57,000 people.

Over half of those people live in George Town, on Grand Cayman, and this tiny town is the fifth-largest banking center^[1] in the world. There are 279 banks and 260 of them do no banking in the Caymans. With the Caymans’ unusual political structure, laws get strange and enforcement stranger. Drug lords can take a day trip to the Caymans, do some banking, avoid all taxes and be home for dinner. Money laundering and tax avoidance are reasons the Caymans have become one of the world’s largest banking centers.

Those who think that the war on drugs has been a failure have misunderstood its purpose. It has made illegal drugs more profitable making billions of dollars for those in the market; it has fueled a private prison industry in the U.S., made money for the banks and has been used to politically control nations. Was it intended to control drugs? Or, was it to make them more profitable? Follow the money!

Now under Trudeau the second, Canada is making some progress as it fumbles towards making an unregulated distribution system meet some standards of the corporate marketplace. I’m proud to have played a small part.

This article is based on part of chapter 3 in the book An Insider’s Memoir which is available at www.aninsidersmemoir.com or on Amazon.

Note

[1] The Economist, Feb. 2007 http://www.economist.com/node/8695139?story_id=8695139

End the Injustices of Mandatory Sentencing: Pardon those unjustly punished, end the Drug War

The original source of this article is An Insiders Memoir

Global ‘War on Drugs’ Terrible at Eradicating Drugs, But Great at Upending Societies: Report

Posted by Lou on October 25, 2018

Posted in: Criminology, Politics, War on drugs, World. Leave a comment

Source link

Common Dreams

by Jon Queally, staff writer

October 22, 2018

International group calls for a major rethink of global policy on narcotics and an end to the failed efforts that governments refuse to relinquish

The report—titled “Taking stock: A decade of drug policy”—evaluates the impacts of drug policies implemented across the world over the past decade, using data from the United Nations, peer-reviewed academic research, and a collection of grey literature from civil society. (Credit: Report cover / LSE)

Another major study designed to assess how national governments wage their so-called “war on drugs” shows that the last ten years of such policies have not only failed to put a dent in the illegal drug trade, the tactics have had serious negative impacts for global health, human rights, public safety and economic progress.

“This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs. The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising.” —Ann Fordham, IDPC

As a result, the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), the international group behind the report, is calling for a major rethinking of global policy on narcotics and an end to the failed efforts that governments refuse to relinquish.

“This report is another nail in the coffin for the war on drugs,” said Ann Fordham, IDPC’s executive director of IDPC, in a statement. “The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising.”

The report—titled “Taking stock: A decade of drug policy“—evaluates the impacts of drug policies implemented across the world over the past decade, using data from the United Nations, peer-reviewed academic research, and a collection of grey literature from civil society.

What did it find? It found that the last decade’s efforts to eliminate the world’s illicit drug market via a militarized “war on drugs” approach has had almost zero effect on global supply while creating widespread and negative effects on global health, human rights, security and development.

“Instead of reducing the overall scale of the illegal drug market,” notes the executive summary (pdf), “overly punitive drug policies have often exacerbated violence, instability and corruption.”

Meanwhile, over the last tens years in which decreasing crop production of opium poppy, coca, and cannabis was a key goal of governments, the report found that crop yields for all three went up. Poppy production, according the report’s estimate is up by 130%, while coca production is up 34% over the last decade. Cannabis figures are harder to estimate, the report found no evidence that crops are down.

“What we learn from the IDPC shadow report is compelling. Since governments started collecting data on drugs in the 1990s, the cultivation, consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,” wrote Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, in the report’s foreword.

“Moreover,” she added, “current drug policies are a serious obstacle to other social and economic objectives and the ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in millions of people murdered, disappeared, or internally displaced.”

Cuz it’s worked so well in the past: Canada signs on to US-led renewal of war on drugs

Posted by Lou on September 30, 2018

Posted in: Canada, Cannabis, Legalization, Marijuana, Politics, War on drugs. 1 Comment

“Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of Britain, called the Canadian endorsement a diplomatic decision rather than a policy one.

“I guess there was a judgment to be made, which from my days in government I can understand, why they did it – if you’re fighting lots of battles at once, you probably decide which battles to choose,” he said.”

Source link

http://www.sott.net

Carlo Allegri
The Globe and Mail
Tue, 25 Sep 2018

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit during the 73rd United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S., Sept. 24, 2018.

Canada was rebuked on Monday by a group of world leaders and experts on drug policy for endorsing a Trump-led declaration renewing the “war on drugs” and for passing up a critical moment to provide global leadership on drug regulation.

The Trudeau government’s decision to sign on to the declaration, released by the White House on the sidelines of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first attendance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, contradicts Ottawa’s previous skepticism of Washington’s drugs war at home and abroad, and comes just weeks before cannabis legalization in Canada.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark said she believed that both Canada and Mexico − which also signed the declaration even though president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has repeatedly said that the “war on drugs” has failed and he will pursue new policy − likely have signed on reluctantly, held hostage by the North American free-trade agreement talks in Washington, over which a critical deadline looms.

Countries that signed the “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem” were promised an invitation for their leader to attend a kick-off event with Mr. Trump in New York. The statement was not drafted in the usual multilateral process of a declaration from the UN and the wording was presented as non-negotiable. One hundred and thirty countries signed but 63 did not; the dissenters include major U.S. allies such as Germany, Norway and Spain.

The statement reiterates the primacy of international “narcotics control” efforts, with an emphasis on criminalization and the role of law enforcement. It does not contain the word “human rights”; advocates for harm reduction and against mass incarceration have been trying to inject a rights-focused approach into international drug policy.

Early on, the United States enlisted Russia and the Philippines − where President Rodrigo Duterte has declared a “drug war” that has resulted in more than 20,000 extrajudicial killings of suspected drug users − as “co-hosts” of the statement.

A panel of the former heads of government who lead the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a respected, non-partisan body, said here that they had expected Canada not to sign.

“It’s clear that a good third of the signatories have already moved along the path [to regulation] – they’re being hypocritical and sucking up to Trump – it’s pathetic and painful,” said Maria Cattaui, a commission member from Switzerland.

Ms. Clark added, “It’s giving in to bullying and extortion and it’s outrageous.”

She speculated that it was the state of NAFTA talks that got Canada and Mexico to sign. “Knowing the New York environment very well – I suspect that many countries have come under great pressure to sign for a range of reasons – they may, for example, be involved in delicate negotiations with the U.S. at the present time.”

However Alex Lawrence, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Canada’s approach to addressing drug issues is consistent with the UN treaties the Trump statement endorses, cannabis regulation notwithstanding. “Canada participated in and signed the Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem [because] Canada remains a strong supporter of the international drug-control framework and will continue working with our international partners to advance the objectives of the UN drug conventions,” he said. “The legalization of cannabis does not change our commitment to meeting the overarching goal of these conventions – protecting the health and safety of people.”

Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of Britain, called the Canadian endorsement a diplomatic decision rather than a policy one.

But he said that Canada’s actions speak louder than the statement endorsed in New York. “[Canada] clearly also thinks that a new approach needs to be tried out.”

Mr. Clegg, Ms. Clark and others were in Mexico City for the launch of a commission report entitled Regulation: the Responsible Control of Drugs, released here in recognition of the brutal toll the drug war has taken on this country, where at least 100,000 people have died in the militarized response to narco-trafficking. Mr. Lopez Obrador has said that he will take a different tack from his predecessors. “It’s been absurd what they have done to try to extinguish fire with fire, to use only brute force, coercive measures, police, the navy, soldiers, prisons, tough threats and harsher laws,” he said on the campaign trail late last year. “No, that does not work, it’s been proven.”

Commission members emphasized this point on Monday. “The international drug control system … has to evolve to meet the needs of the reform-minded states and there are such states – Canada is the latest example,” Ms. Clark said.

“Canada has moved to legal regulation of cannabis knowing that a strict interpretation of the current international drug compliance system would see it non-compliant.”

Reuters

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Empire of Lies: Are ‘We the People’ Useful Idiots in the Digital Age?

Posted by Lou on September 28, 2018

Posted in: Censorship, Fascism, Freedom, Hypocrisy, Ideology, Idiocracy, Militarization of the police, Privacy, Surveillance society, War, War on drugs, War on terror. Leave a comment

Opinion

While we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

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http://www.mintpressnews.com

by John Whitehead

Source | The RutherFord Institute

September 27th, 2018

Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.”—John Naughton, The Guardian

“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”

In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.

Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

This contradiction is backed up by a Pew Research Center study, which finds that “Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.”

Let me get this straight: the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, and we keep going back for more?

Sure we do.

After all, the alternative—taking a stand, raising a ruckus, demanding change, refusing to cooperate, engaging in civil disobedience—is not only a lot of work but can be downright dangerous.

What we fail to realize, however, is that by tacitly allowing these violations to continue, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

In this way, what starts off as small, occasional encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, becomes routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

We saw this happen with the police and their build-up of military arsenal, ostensibly to fight the war on drugs. The result: a transformation of America’s law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, populated with battle-hardened soldiers who view “we the people” as enemy combatants.

The same thing happened with the government’s so-called efforts to get tough on crime by passing endless laws outlawing all manner of activities. The result: an explosion of laws criminalizing everything from parenting decisions and fishing to gardening and living off the grid.

And then there were the private prisons, marketed as a way to lower the government’s cost of locking up criminals. Only it turns out that private prisons actually cost the taxpayer more money and place profit incentives on jailing more Americans, resulting in the largest prison population in the world.

Are you starting to notice a pattern yet?

The government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we buy into it, they slam the trap closed.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about red light cameras, DNA databases, surveillance cameras, or zero tolerance policies: they all result in “we the people” being turned into Enemy Number One.

In this way, the government campaign to spy on our phone calls, letters and emails was sold to the American people as a necessary tool in the war on terror.

Instead of targeting terrorists, however, the government has turned usinto potential terrorists, so that if we dare say the wrong thing in a phone call, letter, email or on the internet, especially social media, we end up investigated, charged and possibly jailed.

If you happen to be one of the 1.31 billion individuals who use Facebook or one of the 255 million who tweet their personal and political views on Twitter, you might want to pay close attention.

This criminalization of free speech, which is exactly what the government’s prosecution of those who say the “wrong” thing using an electronic medium amounts to, was at the heart of Elonis v. United States, a case that wrestled with where the government can draw the line when it comes to expressive speech that is protected and permissible versus speech that could be interpreted as connoting a criminal intent.

The case arose after Anthony Elonis, an aspiring rap artist, used personal material from his life as source material and inspiration for rap lyrics which he then shared on Facebook.

For instance, shortly after Elonis’ wife left him and he was fired from his job, his lyrics included references to killing his ex-wife, shooting a classroom of kindergarten children, and blowing up an FBI agent who had opened an investigation into his postings.

Despite the fact that Elonis routinely accompanied his Facebook posts with disclaimers that his lyrics were fictitious, and that he was using such writings as an outlet for his frustrations, he was charged with making unlawful threats (although it was never proven that he intended to threaten anyone) and sentenced to 44 months in jail.

Elonis is not the only Facebook user to be targeted for prosecution based on the content of his posts.

In a similar case that made its way through the courts only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court, Brandon Raub, a decorated Marine, was arrested by a swarm of FBI, Secret Service agents and local police and forcibly detained in a psychiatric ward because of controversial song lyrics and political views posted on his Facebook page. He was eventually released after a circuit court judge dismissed the charges against him as unfounded.

Rapper Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley were sentenced to jail terms of up to six years for a YouTube video calling on listeners to “kill these cops ‘cause they don’t do us no good.” Although the rapper contended that he had no intention of bringing harm to the police, he was convicted of making terroristic threats and intimidation of witnesses.

And then there was Franklin Delano Jeffries II, an Iraq war veteran, who, in the midst of a contentious custody battle for his daughter,shared a music video on YouTube and Facebook in which he sings about the judge in his case, “Take my child and I’ll take your life.” Despite his insistence that the lyrics were just a way for him to vent his frustrations with the legal battle, Jeffries was convicted of communicating threats and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

The common thread running through all of these cases is the use of social media to voice frustration, grievances, and anger, sometimes using language that is overtly violent.

The question the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to decide in Elonis is whether this activity, in the absence of any overt intention of committing a crime, rises to the level of a “true threat” or whether it is, as I would contend, protected First Amendment activity. (The Supreme Court has defined a “true threat” as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”)

In an 8-1 decision that concerned itself more with “criminal-law principles concerning intent rather than the First Amendment’s protection of free speech,” the Court ruled that prosecutors had not proven that Elonis intended to harm anyone beyond the words he used and context.

That was three years ago.

Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Elonis, Corporate America has now taken the lead in policing expressive activity online, with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube using their formidable dominance in the field to censor, penalize and regulate speech and behavior online by suspending and/or banning users whose content violated the companies’ so-called community standards for obscenity, violence, hate speech, discrimination, etc.

Make no mistake: this is fascism.

This is fascism with a smile.

As Bertram Gross, former presidential advisor, noted in his chilling book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. . . . In America, it would be super modern and multi-ethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.”

The subtle appeal of this particular brand of fascism is its self-righteous claim to fighting the evils of our day (intolerance, hatred, violence) using the weapons of Corporate America.

Be warned, however: it is only a matter of time before these weapons are used more broadly, taking aim at anything that stands in its quest for greater profit, control and power.

This is what fascism looks like in a modern context, with corporations flexing their muscles to censor and silence expressive activity under the pretext that it is taking place within a private environment subject to corporate rules as opposed to activity that takes place within a public or government forum that might be subject to the First Amendment’s protection of “controversial” and/or politically incorrect speech.

Alex Jones was just the beginning.

Jones, the majordomo of conspiracy theorists who spawned an empire built on alternative news, was banned from Facebook for posting content that violates the social media site’s “Community Standards,”which prohibit posts that can be construed as bullying or hateful.

According to The Washington Post, Twitter suspended over 70 million accounts over the course of two months to “reduce the flow of misinformation on the platform.” Among those temporarily suspended was Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute.

Rightly contending that tech companies are just extensions of the government, former Texas congressman Ron Paul believes that social media networks under the control of Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook are working with the U.S. government to silence dissent. “You get accused of treasonous activity and treasonous speech because in an empire of lies the truth is treason,” Paul declared. “Challenging the status quo is what they can’t stand and it unnerves them, so they have to silence people.”

Curiously enough, you know who has yet to be suspended? President Trump.

Twitter’s rationale for not suspending world leaders such as Trump, whom critics claim routinely violate the social media giant’s rules, is because “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Frankly, all individuals, whether or not they are world leaders, should be entitled to have their thoughts and ideas aired openly, pitted against those who might disagree with them, and debated widely, especially in a forum like the internet.

Why does this matter?

The internet and social media have taken the place of the historic public square, which has slowly been crowded out by shopping malls and parking lots.

As such, these cyber “public squares” may be the only forum left for citizens to freely speak their minds and exercise their First Amendment rights, especially in the wake of legislation that limits access to our elected representatives.

Unfortunately, the internet has become a tool for the government—and its corporate partners—to monitor, control and punish the populace for behavior and speech that may be controversial but are far from criminal.

Indeed, the government, a master in the art of violence, intrusion, surveillance and criminalizing harmless activities, has repeatedly attempted to clamp down on First Amendment activity on the web and in social media under the various guises of fighting terrorism, discouraging cyberbullying, and combatting violence.

Police and prosecutors have also targeted “anonymous” postings and messages on forums and websites, arguing that such anonymity encourages everything from cyber-bullying to terrorism, and have attempted to prosecute those who use anonymity for commercial or personal purposes.

We would do well to tread cautiously in how much authority we give the Corporate Police State to criminalize free speech activities and chill what has become a vital free speech forum.

Not only are social media and the Internet critical forums for individuals to freely share information and express their ideas, but they also serve as release valves to those who may be angry, seething, alienated or otherwise discontented.

Without an outlet for their pent-up anger and frustration, these thoughts and emotions fester in secret, which is where most violent acts are born.

In the same way, free speech in the public square—whether it’s the internet, the plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court or a college campus—brings people together to express their grievances and challenge oppressive government regimes.

Without it, democracy becomes stagnant and atrophied.

Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if free speech is not vigilantly protected, democracy is more likely to drift toward fear, repression, and violence. In such a scenario, we will find ourselves threatened with an even more pernicious injury than violence itself: the loss of liberty.

More speech, not less, is the remedy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

Trump Gets 100 Countries to Sign On to His U.N. Drug War Plan, Ignoring Changing Thinking on Human Rights and Legalization

Posted by Lou on September 27, 2018

Posted in: Politics, Trumpf, United Nations, USA, War on drugs, World. Leave a comment

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theintercept.com

Samuel Oakford

September 25 2018

The Trump administration announced last week that it would kick off the United Nations General Assembly with an event inviting member states to join a revamped U.S. war on drugs. On Monday, Donald Trump got his drug meeting — but not quite everyone signed on. Billed as a “Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem,” the State Department said that 130 countries had agreed to a nonnegotiable text, but missing from that list were a number of key U.S. allies.

For the U.N. member countries, some realpolitik over dealing with the U.S. was involved, but analysts of international affairs and drug policy said that many governments chafed at the way the document and meeting were proposed — even if the U.S.’s powerful position at the world body meant that more than 100 countries signed up anyway.

“The U.S. is trying to lead us backwards now to the failed policies that led us here.”

“I think a lot of delegations, including a lot of delegations that ended up signing, found it entirely offensive that one country would take it upon itself with a few others, pronounce a text as nonnegotiable, and then pressure countries to sign up because they said so,” said John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America. Advocates like Walsh expressed concern at the substance of the U.S. program, as well. “The U.S. is trying to lead us backwards now to the failed policies that led us here,” he said.

Some U.S.-allied governments echoed those concerns, albeit in softer terms. Speaking to Norwegian TV, the country’s Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide said the call had “too little focus on the health side of drug policy,” explaining why Norway had turned it down like all the other Nordic countries. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made similar remarks. Nigeria and Brazil were the largest countries to refrain, and Germany was the biggest in Europe to decline. Others who kept away included Uruguay, which has legal marijuana market, and South Africa, which days ago legalized private use of the drug. (Tens of millions of Americans live in states where marijuana is legal.)

As The Intercept reported last week, the Trump administration assembled a number of hard-line countries, including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia, as partners before sending out the action plan to all member states. The Philippines — where President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has drawn international criticism for its extrajudicial killings and brutality — and Myanmar, whose government stands accused of genocide, were both included on the final list. Israel signed on, but its U.N. delegation did not attend, presumably to make it easier for other countries, such as those Arab nations who eschew formal relations with Israel, to appear.

“I’m thrilled that every country in the room today has agreed to answer our call, and I want to thank each and every one of you for your commitment to this important initiative,” said Trump.

The call, a departure from consensus drug policymaking at the U.N., was crafted around a “four-pronged” strategy — demand and supply reduction, treatment, and international cooperation. A Western diplomat whose government refused to sign on, and who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter involving relations with the U.S., told The Intercept that their delegation resented the lack of consultations over language. The wording, the diplomat said, was reminiscent of that used prior to the General Assembly’s last special session on drugs, in 2016.

The outcome document of that special session, known as UNGASS, was split into seven thematic chapters that addressed some of the same concepts — international cooperation, as well as supply and demand reduction — as those found in Trump’s four prongs. But Trump’s approach does not contain specific progressive measures found in the 2016 document, for instance, a pillar on human rights or alternative development options for those who grow illicit crops, as well as a nod to access to controlled substances. (In many developing countries, the problem for millions suffering from terminal illness is not a surfeit of drugs, but a complete lack of affordable painkillers.) Advocates and U.N. member states who want to change drug policies lamented the absence of these elements in both UNGASS and the new Trump plan.

“Drugs are [being] seen in this as an illegal thing — a problem thing, a crime thing — and in our country we see it as a health thing.”

“Drugs are [being] seen in this as an illegal thing — a problem thing, a crime thing — and in our country we see it as a health thing,” a Dutch official, who asked for anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters, told The Intercept, explaining their country’s decision to forgo Trump’s meeting. “In our country we try to prevent it, and we don’t believe in the way it’s being proposed by this text. We don’t want to criminalize it as it is done in this text.”

Others were more diplomatic. “Sweden shares the concern on the importance of the fight against narcotics, but on this occasion we were unfortunately unable to attend,” said a spokesperson at the country’s U.N. Mission.

Though easier for wealthier countries to spurn, Trump’s call was signed by dozens of smaller countries, ranging from the Comoros and Togo, to the recently renamed eSwatini. Policy advocates had held out hope that Mexico and Canada — in the process of legalizing marijuana nationally — would hold off, but they too were additions to the State Department list.

The practical result for countries that signed on to the U.S. plan still isn’t entirely clear — nor what awaits those that didn’t. Over the last two years, member states have consistently been threatened by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley if they don’t act in the U.S.’s perceived interests. “I’m taking names,” she said last year. Last week, previewing Trump’s General Assembly speech, Haley said, “While the U.S. is generous, we are going to be generous to those that share our values, generous to those who want to work with us, and not those that try to stop the United States or say they hate America or are counterproductive to what we’re doing.”

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Legalising medical marijuana shows no effect on crime rates in US states

Posted by Lou on September 26, 2018

Posted in: Canada, Cannabis, Crime, Criminology, Legalization, Marijuana, Medical marijuana, Opioids crisis, Politics, Science, UK, War on drugs. Leave a comment

Legalising medical marijuana shows no effect on crime rates in US states

“Our findings show that we can safely rule out that medical marijuana laws and the associated marijuana use cause increased crime. The strong correlation between marijuana use and criminal activity is mostly spurious.”

“Our study provides robust evidence that medical marijuana legislation does not contribute to crime, and possibly helps to reduce it. This conclusion may relieve a major concern for countries considering to legalise medical marijuana, including New Zealand and Canada.”

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theconversation.com

Author Yu-Wei Luke Chu

Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington

September 18, 2018

Those who oppose medical marijuana legislation often cite the strong association between marijuana use and criminal activity. This includes the US federal government, which continues to classify marijuana as a schedule one drug.

We analysed city-level data from states across the US and found that medical marijuana laws have little effect on violent or property crime in nearly all medical marijuana states. In the case of California, the crime rates actually show a substantial decrease of around 20%.

A natural experiment

Medical marijuana laws represent a major change in marijuana policy in the US. Since California passed the first medical marijuana law in 1996, 30 US states and the District of Columbia have legalised medical marijuana.

Several recent studies have found that marijuana use has increased among the general population (including non-patients) in medical marijuana states. It is difficult to disentangle causal effects of marijuana use from spurious correlations because of individual heterogeneity. Individuals who choose to use marijuana are likely different from those who don’t.

The passage of medical marijuana laws offers researchers a good natural experiment to study the causal effects of marijuana use on a variety of health outcomes, including drunk driving, hard drug use and opioid painkiller use.

Users and crime

The perception that marijuana use leads to crime can be traced back to the 1930s. In an effort to gain public support for marijuana prohibition, the Narcotics Bureau chief Harry Anslinger collected dubious anecdotes of marijuana causing crime and violence in his infamous Gore Files.

There is indeed a strong correlation between marijuana use and criminal activity. For example, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program shows that more than half of adult male arrestees tested positive for marijuana use. Financial needs can lead to property crime for some heavy users.

Research also shows that long-term neuropsychological effects of marijuana can harm the brain, causing violent behaviours. Some studies have identified brain abnormalities in MRI images among casual and abstinent users.

Nevertheless, such correlation could be entirely spurious because marijuana users have a higher propensity to commit crimes. Only people who are willing to break laws would use marijuana under prohibition.

Effects of medical marijuana laws on crime

In our paper, we used data on criminal offence, spanning more than 25 years (1988–2013). We analysed relatively large cities with at least 50,000 residents. In addition to traditional regression analysis, we adopted the state-of-the-art synthetic control method that allows us to estimate the effects of medical marijuana laws in each city.

To make cities with and without medical marijuana laws comparable, we created a synthetic city from a pool of cities without medical marijuana laws. That way the pre-law crime rates in the synthetic city and the city of interest are as close as possible.

We then used the post-law crime rate in the synthetic city as an estimate for the medical marijuana city’s counterfactual crime rate – the rate you would expect if the medical marijuana law had not been passed. The difference in post-law crime rates between the synthetic city and the medical marijuana city is the causal effect of medical marijuana law on crime.

We found that the actual crime rates in medical marijuana cities generally move closely with the synthetic cities. This suggests no substantial effect on both violent and property crime. The results remain similar when we look at specific crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and theft.

Our findings show that we can safely rule out that medical marijuana laws and the associated marijuana use cause increased crime. The strong correlation between marijuana use and criminal activity is mostly spurious.

Californian experience

Violent and property crime rates dropped by 20% since California passed medical marijuana legislation more than two decades ago. It was reported that there are more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks or McDonalds in cities like Los Angeles.

California’s medical marijuana law may have shrunk the marijuana black market and its associated violence. It may have helped to reallocate police resources towards deterring crime instead of enforcing drug laws. The presence of dispensaries may also deter crime. They are required to deal in cash and thus invest heavily in security.

Another study found a similar decrease in violent crime in states bordering Mexico, including California. It argues that medical marijuana legislation reduced crime associated with drug trafficking through Mexican cartels.

The US experience suggests that most stigmas associated with marijuana use are not supported by empirical evidence. Although medical marijuana laws increase heavy marijuana use among non-patients, they do not lead to negative social outcomes.

Our study provides robust evidence that medical marijuana legislation does not contribute to crime, and possibly helps to reduce it. This conclusion may relieve a major concern for countries considering to legalise medical marijuana, including New Zealand and Canada. The US experience is unique, especially because of its war on drugs. But the main conclusion that increased marijuana use does not cause more crime likely applies in other countries.

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In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment

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A Honduran exodus

Escalating the struggle

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By Genevieve Leigh 19 July 2019

Rural areas hard hit

Complicity of the political establishment

The Obama administration’s role

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Author Yu-Wei Luke Chu

Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington

A natural experiment

Users and crime

Effects of medical marijuana laws on crime

Californian experience

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“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone

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By Genevieve Leigh
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