4000 People Killed This Year in Mexico War on Drugs Plan Merida

from the New York Times
November 2, 2008
In Mexico Drug War, Sorting Good Guys From Bad
By MARC LACEY
MEXICO CITY — Many of the mug shots of drug traffickers that appear in the Mexican press show surly looking roughnecks glaring menacingly at the camera. An anticorruption investigation unveiled last week in the Mexican capital, however, made it clear that not everybody enmeshed in the narcotics trade looks the part.
There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to jail, wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.
Among the greatest challenges in Mexico’s drug war is the fact that the traffickers fit no type. Their ranks include men and women, the young and the old. And they can work anywhere: in remote drug labs, as part of roving assassination squads, even within the upper reaches of the government.
It has long been known that drug gangs have infiltrated local police forces. Now it is becoming ever more clear that the problem does not stop there. The alarming reality is that many public servants in Mexico are serving both the taxpayers and the traffickers.
The men in suits, it turns out, were both bureaucrats and bad guys, officials say, corrupt employees high up in an elite unit of the federal attorney general’s office who were feeding secret information to the feared Beltrán Leyva cartel in exchange for suitcases full of cash.
Their arrest, and the firing of 35 other suspect law enforcement officials, represents the most extensive corruption case that this country, which knows corruption all too well, has ever seen. And it raises a question that is on the lips of many Mexicans: how does one know who is dirty and who is clean?
“I’m convinced that to stop the crime, we first have to get it out of our own house,” President Felipe Calderón, who has made fighting trafficking a crucial part of his presidency, said in a speech on Tuesday, after the arrests were announced.
That house is clearly dirty. There is ample evidence that Mexicans of all walks of life are willing to join the drug gangs in exchange for cash, including farmers who abandon traditional crops and turn to growing marijuana and accountants who hide the narco-traffickers’ profits.
There was sporadic evidence in the past that such corruption extended into high-level government offices. An army general who commanded Mexico’s anti-drug unit was arrested and convicted in 1997 after the discovery that he was working for a drug lord on the side. In 2005, a spy working for a drug cartel was discovered working in the president’s office and accused of feeding traffickers information on the movements of Vicente Fox, then the president.
But the abundance of law enforcement officials now believed to be on the take has made Mr. Calderón’s drug war all the more difficult to execute. Traffickers often know beforehand when raids are going to occur. Sometimes dealers plant their people on the teams that carry out the raids to act as saboteurs.
The traffickers’ networks are not foolproof. Mr. Calderón’s government did manage to capture Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, a cartel leader, in January even though the group was receiving inside information. What appears to have happened, officials say, is that the army carried out the raid without involving the attorney general’s office, inadvertently keeping the corrupt officials out of the loop.
The cartel’s leaders, who operate out of Sinaloa State and have been implicated in the killing of a top police commander in Mexico City, were described in local press accounts as being furious that their government moles had not informed them of the raid.
Still, the reach of the drug networks is so extensive that even winning a court conviction against a kingpin is not always enough to claim victory.
Many prison wardens and guards have shown themselves to be corrupt, allowing prominent detainees not only to operate their crime networks from their cells, but also to use their illicit drug proceeds to be as comfortable as possible behind bars, paying for everything from pizza to prostitutes. The cartel leaders sometimes even use their money to escape. The most notorious case was in 2001, when Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the country’s most wanted drug lord, managed to slip out of a maximum security prison in a laundry cart.
The porous nature of Mexican penitentiaries has prompted Mr. Calderón to increase the number of transfers of drug lords to the United States prison system. The United States has already filed the paperwork to extradite one of the officials accused last week of corruption. The official, Miguel Colorado González, 68, was a top manager in the government organized-crime office known by the Spanish acronym Siedo.
Mr. Calderón is not the first president to try to root out corruption. President Ernesto Zedillo reorganized the nation’s federal police at least twice; each time traffickers quickly infiltrated the force and bought off leading officials. His successor, Mr. Fox, tried and failed to clean up law enforcement as well.
Mr. Calderón’s efforts have been sustained enough that the traffickers have begun a vicious counterattack; so far this year, about 4,000 people — including police officers, soldiers, criminals and civilians — have been killed in an extraordinary wave of violence linked to organized crime.
The latest corruption scandal has prompted President Calderón’s attorney general to order a restructuring and purging of his office, and specifically of Siedo, which was formed from another agency that was shut down after being infiltrated by drug spies.
The government has ordered more lie detector tests for officials in delicate posts, beefed-up background checks and better salaries for underpaid police officers. But the amount of cash that the traffickers throw around — which Jorge Chabat, a security analyst, calls “enough money to buy part of the state” — makes government salaries seem laughable. Clearly, the government cannot compete peso for peso.
In some cases, finding out who has strayed from the straight and narrow should be a simple matter of following the money. Mr. Colorado González is reported to have bought four luxury vehicles in one year. Expensive jewelry was found in his home. His bank account was bulging.
In Tuesday’s speech, a clearly frustrated Mr. Calderón said that the fight to clean up Mexico depended on citizens putting their country first and respecting the law above all else. He suggested that the small bribes so often demanded by the officer on the beat, and accepted by the public as normal, for infractions real and imagined, were not disconnected from the government official receiving millions of dollars in drug profits.
“We need a stronger society, a society that lives the principle of legality with conviction, that encourages, promotes, spreads and educates its children with values,” Mr. Calderón said. In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.
Back to Top Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1,000 killed in border city of Ciudad Juarez so far this year.

Tue Oct 14, 7:38 PM ET
MEXICO CITY (AFP) - Eleven died in various attacks in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua, an official said Tuesday, as the United States warned its citizens to increase vigilance when travelling south of the border.
Border areas where rival drug cartels are battling over key routes into the United States are among the worst hit in escalating violence across Mexico this year in which almost 3,500 have died, including civilians.
"Increased levels of violence make it imperative that travellers understand the risks of travel to Mexico," said a new six-monthly State Department travel alert.
Eleven died in attacks in Chihuahua State in the past 24 hours, including a former police commander, said Alejandro Pariente, spokesman for the state attorney general's office, on Tuesday.
Chihuahua is a flashpoint in an increasingly bloody turf war between drug cartels, with more than 1,000 killed in the state's border city of Ciudad Juarez alone so far this year.
"The situation in Ciudad Juarez is of special concern," the State Department said of the city across the border from the US city of El Paso.
"A recent series of muggings near the US Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez has targeted applicants for US visas," it added, as an increasing number of civilians flee the city's violence.
It underlined the use of automatic weapons and grenades by drug cartels, as well as public shootings which have taken place during daylight hours in border cities including Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Nogales.
Criminals have followed and harassed US citizens travelling in border areas, sometimes wearing full or partial police or military uniforms, it said.
Dozens of US citizens have been kidnapped across Mexico in recent years, it added, also calling for vigilance during public rallies after an Independence Day grenade attack last month in central Mexico in which eight died.
A government crackdown on drug-related violence, initiated by President Felipe Calderon almost two years ago and including the deployment of 36,000 troops, has showed no sign of stopping the killings.

How many people are actually killed by drugs?

How many people are actually killed by drugs?
The number of drug deaths in the US in a typical year is as follows:
Tobacco kills about 390,000.
Alcohol kills about 80,000.
Sidestream smoke from tobacco kills about 50,000.
Cocaine kills about 2,200.
Heroin kills about 2,000.
Aspirin kills about 2,000.
Marijuana kills 0. There has never been a recorded death due to marijuana at any time in US history.
All illegal drugs combined kill about 4,500 people per year, or about one percent of the number killed by alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco kills more people each year than all of the people killed by all of the illegal drugs in the last century.
Source: NIDA Research Monographs

Rethinking Our Drug Laws by Joy Strickland MATV

Rethinking Our Drug Laws
By Joy Strickland, CEO
Mothers Against Teen Violence
As a violence preveniton advocate, I believe that every child deserves a safe and supportive home, school and community. My organization is one among many across America doing all that we can with limited resources, to prevent violence in our communities. Prevention strategies such as mentoring and conflict resolution are effective and necessary, but they are only part of the solution. Personal responsibility must be balanced and supported by a rational and effective national drug policy.
Enacted during the Nixon administration nearly forty years ago, the so-called War on Drugs was designed to reduce supply and diminish demand for certain illegal drugs deemed harmful or undesirable by the United States government. While the motivation may be laudable, the drug war has never worked as intended and it can be argued that it has had unintended consequences, undermining the health and safety of our citizens, especially our children.
Federal spending on the drug war totalled $1.65 billion in 1982. According to the U.S. government, the combined cost of drug war execution plus adjudication and incarceration totaled $57.5 billion in 2005. Since the drug war began, we have not only seen an increase in supply and demand for illegal drugs, but we have also witnessed an increase in related crime and incarceration rates. And innocent victims—law abiding citizens—have been the collatoral damage of turf wars waged by rival gangs in many urban communities.
In 1973, there were 328,670 arrests logged in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for drug law violations. In 2006, that number rose to 1,889,810 of which 82.5% (1,559,093) were for possession of a controlled substance. Only 17.5% (330,717) were for the sale or manufacture of a drug, 43.9 per cent were for marijuana, and 39% were for marijuana possession alone, shattering the myth that the drug war primarily targets drug smugglers and king pins. We cannot separate the rise of the prison industrial complex from our outdated an irrational drug laws.
In 2005 the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) reported that nationwide, over 800,000 adolescents ages 12–17 sold illegal drugs during the 12 months preceding the survey. In a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 25.4% of students had been offered, sold, or given an illegal drug by someone on school property.
Despite over $7 billion spent annually towards arresting and prosecuting nearly 800,000 people across the country for marijuana offenses, in 2005 the Monitoring the Future Survey reported that about 85% of high school seniors find marijuana "easy to obtain." That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1975, never dropping below 82.7% in three decades of national surveys.
By some estimates as many as 250,000 people die every year from the proper use of prescription drugs. I am not aware of one signle death directly caused by marijuana. Furthermore, we pay $25,000 per year to send a drug user to prison where he will likely have access to the same drugs for which he as been incarcerated.
If we can’t keep drugs out of prisons, it is irrational to expect that we can keep them off our streets. It is equally irrational to lock up an individual because of what he chooses to put in his own body.
Drug addiction is not a moral issue. It is a medical problem requiring medical intervention. But if news reports are any indication, it is easy to believe that the rich and famous go to rehab for illegal drug use while the poor go to jail. This disparity is the real moral issue, serving to undermine respect for our laws.
Judge James P. Gray asserts in his book How Our Drug Laws Have Failed, that in order for the war on drugs to be successful, the law of supply and demand would have to be repealed. People who want controlled substances will find a way to get them. And as long as there is sufficient demand, someone will find a way to meet the demand. The drug war keeps the prices for the targeted substances artificially high; assuring that drug trafficking remains an incredibly profitable venture. Due to the fantastic sums of money flowing from the illegal drug trade, elected officials, police officers and prison guards (to name a few) have been known to fall prey to drug abuse and trafficking.
I have never used illegal drugs, nor do I advocate their use. But I believe the time has come to change these laws and policies because the evidence supports the fact that our drug laws have failed us. These laws have not reduced demand and cannot reduce supply enough to make a dent in drug trafficking. The substances targeted by the drug war need to be decriminalized and controlled. We need to spend our resources on prevention, education, and treatment—strategies that actually work.
Parents are right to be concerned about the message decriminalization would send to our children. I would say that a multimedia campaign, unprecedented in scope and based on fact, not fiction, would be a necessary component of legalization. But what message are we sending by continuing the status quo? Decriminalizing and controlling illegal drugs would send a very strong and positive message to our children: We don’t want our children faced with the same powerful temptations that many adults in authority have been powerless to resist. Instead, we want to remove the incredible financial incentives to sell these drugs to our children or recruit them into drug trafficking. We don’t want our children to die as innocent victims of gang violence. We want all nonviolent drug abusers, regardless of class or race, to have equal access to rehabilitation programs. And finally, we don’t want our tax dollars spent enforcing ineffectual policies that undermine our faith in our nation’s laws.
18 Comments
Posted in Public Policy, War on Drugs Tags: decriminalize, gangs, Joy Strickland, legalize, marijuana laws, MATV Blog, Mothers Against Teen Violence, prevention, War on Drugs
Posted by: mothersagainstteenviolence April 22, 2008

From Time/CNN Ed Burns talks about failed War on Drugs affect on society

Viewpoint
The Wire's War on the Drug War
Wednesday, Mar. 05, 2008 By ED BURNS, DENNIS LEHANE, GEORGE PELECANOS, RICHARD PRICE, DAVID SIMON

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?
And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.
Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9

time:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1719872,00.html
Copyright © 2008 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

No Drugs In Cookies Taken To Cops

Lab Results Show No Drugs In Cookies Taken To Cops
Reporting
Mark Johnson FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News/AP) ―

A teenager accused of delivering drug-laced cookies to a dozen police stations was the victim of overzealous officers who had very little evidence indicating drugs were inside the treats, his attorney said Thursday.

And lab results released late Thursday afternoon confirm that no drugs were present in any of the cookies.


L. Patrick Davis said initial tests found no traces of LSD inside the cookies taken to police in Lake Worth, where Christian V. Phillips remained jailed on $75,000 bond on a charge of tampering with a consumer product. In the wake of the test results, Lake Worth Police dropped the charges against Phillips.


Phillips, 18, was arrested Tuesday after Lake Worth officers smelled marijuana in the basket and their preliminary tests detected LSD, Chief Brett McGuire said.

Watauga police released video Thursday of Christian Phillips delivering cookies to the police station on June 27. The tape shows the teen delivering cookies to the dispatcher, as part of his community service program. Four officers there ate the treats, but none got sick and all tested negative for drugs in their systems.

The cookies in question were delivered to the Lake Worth Police Department on Tuesday.


A similar batch was also delivered to the Blue Mound Police Department on Monday. The medical examiner's results came back negative for drugs in those cookies.


Phillips' father told CBS 11 News the entire case may have been the result of a 'huge rush to judgment'. "People just need to keep rationale here in perspective and not jump the gun and accuse people of stuff before we know the full facts," Glenn Phillips said.

Phillips told detectives his friend may have been smoking marijuana while he was baking, and he denied contaminating the goodies or trying to harm anyone, McGuire has said.

Davis said Phillips was delivering the cookies for Mothers Against Drunk Driving as part of community service work after he was arrested last year at a party in Watauga. MADD also has confirmed that he was doing work for the organization.

Last year Phillips was charged with assault of a public servant, a felony, but it was reduced to assault with bodily injury, a misdemeanor. He did not plead guilty but was sentenced to an anger management class and about 80 hours of community service, Davis said. He was not put on probation.

If Phillips had completed the terms of his pretrial memorandum agreement, something for first-time offenders, the case would have been removed from his record -- which would have been Wednesday, Davis said.

He graduated from high school in May and was planning to attend college this fall.

(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Drug War Cost Clock courtesy of actionamerica.org/drugs

Drug War Cost Clock released
as Macintosh Dashboard Widget

January Snapshot of
Drug War Cost Clock Widget
(See links down the page on the left to download the tool)
If you use a Macintosh, running OS-X 10.4 "Tiger" and are concerned about the the government's continuation of the failed War on Drugs and its cost to taxpayers, you might want to download our Drug War Cost Clock widget (v06.1.0). It is the widget form of the clock that appears at the top of this page, just below the menu. The major version number (the first two digits) represents the budget year upon which calculations are based. The rest of the version number represents the actual software version.

Using data from the two most authoritative sources available, on the the monetary cost of the Drug War, it displays the amount of money that the government has spent, since the beginning of this year, in the bogus name of fighting the Drug War. Unfortunately, there is no way to calculate the devastating social costs of the government abuses that the Drug War has spawned, like making the United States the nation that imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other nation on Earth.

Based upon budget data for the year 2006, this widget ticks over $1,620.37 each and every second of every day, as a visual reminder of just how much of our money the government is wasting on a Drug War that has only resulted in an increase in the availability of drugs to our children, a significant increase in drug related violence and a severe reduction in our rights, under the color of fighting the War on Drugs. The back side of the widget has a scrollable window that details where the data for these calculations originated. The widget expands, when flipped over, to make it easier to read the details and returns to normal size, when flipped back to the front.

The number that we use for our calculations is slightly lower than other cost numbers that you may find cited by various sources, because it is our policy at Action America to only use the most conservative numbers that we can positively stand behind, in such cases. When two equally authoritative sources disagree by a small number, as often happens, we will always use the lower number. It's not that we want to help the government look any less incompetent. We just don't want to inject our bias into the numbers. We want you to know where the numbers come from, so you can make up your own mind on how bad the situation really is.

This widget will automatically reset every January. However, that will not update the new budget numbers that climb ever higher each year. For that, we plan to release a new version, in the coming months, which will update the Drug War budget numbers, from a file on our web site, with each years's changing budget.

The federal part of that number comes directly from the Whitehouse Office of National Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy Budgets (2003-2006), which indicates that the federal government will spend at least $20.4 billion on the Drug War this in 2006.

The state portion comes from a report titled, "Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets", authored by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, in 2001, which on page 3, shows that states spent $30.7 billion in 1998 on "the burden of substance abuse on the justice system -- for incarceration, probation and parole, juvenile justice and criminal and family court costs of substance involved offenders". Simply due to inflation, that number has probably gone up since that 1998 report was published, but because we want to stick with only solid numbers and stay conservative in any assumptions, we use only that $30.7 billion number for our calculations in this widget. Should more recent information become available, it will be included in a future release of this widget.

It's important to note that after a federal budget calling for more than $19.2 billion dollars for the War on Drugs in FY 2003, the Whitehouse decided that they had to down-play how much the government was wasting on the failed War on Drugs. So, in February of 2002, the same month that the Whitehouse issued the FY 2003 Drug War budget, they revised the drug budget structure, effectively hiding a significant portion of future Drug War costs in other areas of the budget. The result was as follows.

The FY 2003 federal budget called for $19.2 Billion for drug control. The FY 2004 drug control budget called for only $11.7 billion, yet called it an increase of $440.3 million over the President's FY 2003 request of $11.2 billion. This is interesting, since the President's FY 2003 budget actually requested $19.2 billion, not $11.2 billion, as the FY 2004 budget suggests. By just "saying" that they requested less money for the Drug War, than they really spent in the previous year, they magically make $8 billion disappear into other areas of the budget. Can you say, "spin"?

Since the budget items that were moved off of the drug control budget were costs that were definately related to the War on Drugs, we had to come up with a reasonable means to get those numbers back into the total. So you will understand the validity of our numbers, here is what we have done. We started with the $19.2 billion in the FY 2003 budget and added the amount of the increase in drug control spending, as stated in each successive year's budget. A study of each of those budgets reveals that in 2004 and 2005, federal Drug War (actual) spending increased by $900 million and $100 million respectively. The 2006 budget requests $200 million over the prior year, to prosecute the War on Drugs. Adding the "stated" increase for each successive year to the FY 2003 Drug War budget, shows that the federal government expects to spend $20.4 billion in taxpayer money, to prosecute the failed War on Drugs, in 2006.

Add that to the $30.7 billion that the states will spend and it means that the War on Drugs will cost American taxpayers $1,620.37 each and every second of 2006.

The Drug War Cost Clock widget is designed to be CPU friendly. In order to maximize functionality and minimize overhead, the widget recalculates every time you open Dashboard and continues only for as long as Dashboard is open. Even though the calculations use a trivial amount of CPU time, as a courtesy, this widget stops calculating, when the Dashboard is hidden.

If you have a Mac and you are running Tiger, just download the zip file here (592kb), unzip it and drag the widget to your widgets folder. That's all there is to it. It will be instantly available on your Dashboard. As you move the cursor over the widget, you will see an italic " i " appear in the upper right corner. Click on the " i " to flip it over and see information about the widget.

Also, if you don't have a Mac, but just happen to know someone who does and is concerned about the terrible turn that the War on Drugs has taken, direct him to this page.

For more information on the failed War on Drugs and what can be done to improve matters, read our article The War on Drugs - Solution or Problem?

You might also want to check out the other widgets that Action America has produced. Visit our Downloads page.

Plan Merida Border Drug War Claims 4,200 in 18 Months

Mexico's death toll from Plan Merida, the Drug war crackdown, reached 4,200 over the Memorial Day weekend, 450 of them law enforcement and judiciary personnel. President Felipe Calderon seems proud of his success, suggesting that the remainder of the dead are all drug traffic gangsters. No one in the media is asking how many of the dead are collateral casualties, innocent bystanders or innocent family members and neighbors of the "evil doers." Nor is anyone bothering to ask whether toppling drug cartels is a good thing. Calderon claims the gigantic numbers of dead have resulted from a process of the cartels trying to realign themselves after cash seizures and the killing of top drug lords by Mexico. Has anyone wondered whether it is desirable to destabilize the cartels? After all, the demand for cocaine and marijuana and heroin lies across the border in the US. Demand isn't going to go away. The cartels or their successors will still provide the drugs to meet the demand - we call it Capitalism here - so they are just throwing more lives into the meat grinder of the War on Drugs. Then when this body of cartel leaders is destabilized a few years from now we can expect another similar round of killings. It makes you wonder what was it they were trying to prevent in the first place. Left alone what is the worst that would have happened? Maybe a few people would OD. Maybe some local drug deals would go bad, exacerbated by DEA and local law enforcement heavy handedness. Once again we see that the War on Drugs kills more people than drugs. And for this Calderon is being praised. What kind of monsters gauge progress by boasting of thousands killed? The same people who want to put a teenage kid smoking a joint in prison where his or her life will be ruined by violence, corruption, sexual abuse and disenfranchisement after release. Also, out of sympathy with law enforcement, do you believe the 450 Mexican cops and judges and prosecutors willingly gave their lives for anti-drug ideology? Do you think they believed drugs were worse than rape and murder as priorities for cops on the streets? This recent bloodshed shows the role police and government have in drug violence. They create the violence through their ignorance of the drug issue, and then blame the deaths on drugs. 30,000 Mexican troops on the border will never solve the problems of addiction, social injustice and poverty that fuel the demand for drugs in the US. It is telling they will spend 1.4 Billion dollars to kill people, but they won't spend a fraction of that for drug education, rehab, poverty programs and legal reform that would fix this problem. Drugs will never go away, ever. The problem right now isn't kids doing dope - it's 4,200 dead in Mexico. The problem is the War on Drugs.
read more: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/534/plan_merida_sinaloa_drug_forum

Amount Harris County Spends on Drug War

Harris County's 2006-07 Budget allocates $257,901,137 to law enforcement (Sheriffs Department), and prosecutions (DA's office). Multiplied x 40% (the percentage of drug cases as a portion of all arrests and convictions) = $103,160,454. Way to go Harris County, you're all IDIOTS!

a reader writes...

Apropos de Rien
one of our readers wrote in...
D. Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, was called: PEDRO DE ALCÂNTARA FRANCISCO ANTÔNIO JOÃO CARLOS XAVIER DE PAULA MIGUEL RAFAEL JOAQUIM JOSÉ GONZAGA PASCOAL CIPRIANO SERAFIM DE BRAGANÇA E BOURBON and we were supposed to know that in school!

prison expenditures for drug offenders

E-mail Letter from TDCJ

In response to your emailed inquiry dated April 19, 2008, I am providing the following information.
As shown in the General Appropriations Act of the 80th Legislature Regular Session, the TDCJ was appropriated $3,099,849,907. Of that amount, $2,237,184,547 was appropriated to Goal C, Incarcerate Felons. Therefore, the percentage of the TDCJ budget associated with incarcerating offenders is 72%. Information specific to incarcerating drug offenders would be a subset of that amount.

Pamela Jacobs
Texas Department of Criminal Justice Business and Finance
Division
861B I-45 North P.O. Box 4015
Huntsville, TX 77342
(936) 437-6588

Kristi Rushing/Business _Finance/TDCJ To Pamela 04/25/2008 03:42 Jacobs/Business_Finance/TDCJ@TDCJ PM cc Subject Fw: info on prison expenditures for drug offenders compared with other felons

Texas Prison Unit Directory - 116 Prisons!!!

ALLRED
JA
2101 FM 369 North, Iowa Park, Texas 76367 / (940) 855-7477
BARTLETT
BL
P. O. Box 650, Bartlett, Texas 76511 / (254) 527-3300
BATEN ISF
NJ
1995 Hilton Road, Pampa, Texas 79065 / (806) 665-7070
BETO
B
P. O. Box 128, Tennessee Colony, Texas 75880 / (903) 928-2217
BOYD
BY
Route 2 Box 500, Teague, Texas 75860 / (254) 739-5555
BRADSHAW
BH
P. O. Box 9000, Henderson, Texas 75653-9000 / (903) 655-0880
BRIDGEPORT
BR
4000 North Tenth Street, Bridgeport, Texas 76426 / (940) 683-3010
BRIDGEPORT
TC
222 Lake Road, Bridgeport, Texas 76426 / (940) 683-2162
BRISCOE
DB
1459 West Hwy 85, Dilley, Texas 78017 / (830) 965-4444
BYRD
DU
P. O. Box 100, Huntsville, Texas 77342-0100 / (936) 295-5768
CENTRAL
C
One Circle Drive, Sugar Land, Texas 77478 / (281) 491-2146
CENTRAL TEXAS
XK
218 South Laredo Street, San Antonio, Texas 78207 / (210) 227-5600
CLEMENS
CN
11034 Hwy 36, Brazoria, Texas 77422 / (979) 798-2188
CLEMENTS
BC
9601 Spur 591, Amarillo, Texas 79107-9606 / (806) 381-7080
CLEVELAND
CV
P. O. Box 1678, Cleveland, Texas 77328 / (281) 592-9559
COFFIELD
CO
Route 1 Box 150, Tennessee Colony, Texas 75884 / (903) 928-2211
COLE
CL
3801 Silo Road, Bonham, Texas 75418 / (903) 583-1100
CONNALLY
CY
899 FM 632, Kenedy, Texas 78119 / (830) 583-4003
COTULLA
N4
HC 62 Box 100, Cotulla, Texas 78014 / (830) 879-3077
DALHART
DH
11950 FM 998 Dalhart, Texas 79022 / (806) 249-8655
DANIEL
DL
938 South FM 1673, Snyder, Texas 79549 / (325) 573-1114
DARRINGTON
DA
59 Darrington Road, Rosharon, Texas 77583 / (281) 595-3465
DAWSON
JD
P. O. Box 650675, Dallas, Texas 75265 / (214) 744-4422
DIBOLL
DO
1604 South First Street, Diboll, Texas 75941 / (936) 829-2295
DOMINGUEZ
BX
6535 Cagnon Road, San Antonio, Texas 78252-2202 / (210) 675-6620
DUNCAN
N6
1502 South First Street, Diboll, Texas 75941 / (936) 829-2616
EAST TEXAS
XQ
101 B. West Whaley, Longview, Texas 75606 / (903) 238-8132
EASTHAM
EA
P. O. Box 16, Lovelady, Texas 75851 / (936) 636-7321
EL PASO MULTI
XO
1700 Horizon Blvd, El Paso, Texas 79928 / (915) 852-1505
ELLIS
E
Ellis Unit, Huntsville, Texas 77343 / (936) 295-5756
ESTELLE
E2
264 FM 3478, Huntsville, Texas 77320-3320 / (936) 291-4200
ESTES
VS
1100 Hwy 1807, Venus, Texas 76084 / (972) 366-3334
FERGUSON
FE
12120 Savage Drive, Midway, Texas 75852 / (936) 348-3751
FORMBY
FB
970 County Road AA, Plainview, Texas 79072 / (806) 296-2448
FT. STOCKTON
N5
1536 IH-10 East, Fort Stockton, Texas 79735 / (432) 336-7676
GARZA EAST
NI
4304 Hwy. 202, Beeville, Texas 78102 / (361) 358-9880
GARZA WEST
NH
4250 Hwy. 202, Beeville, Texas 78102 / (361) 358-9890
GATESVILLE
GV
1401 State School Road, Gatesville, Texas 76599-2999 / (254) 865-8431
GIST
BJ
3295 FM 3514, Beaumont, Texas 77705 / (409) 727-8400
GLOSSBRENNER
SO
5100 South FM 1329, San Diego, Texas 78384 / (361) 279-2705
GOODMAN
GG
Route 1 Box 273, Jasper, Texas 75951 / (409) 383-0012
GOREE
GR
7405 Hwy 75 South, Huntsville, Texas 77344 / (936) 295-6331
GURNEY
ND
P. O. Box 6400, Tennessee Colony, Texas 75861 / (903) 928-3118
HALBERT
BB
P. O. Box 923, Burnet, Texas 78611 / (512) 756-6171
HAMILTON
JH
200 Lee Morrison Lane, Bryant, TX 77807 / (979) 779-1633
HAVINS
TH
P. O. Box 90401, Brownwood, Texas 76801-4401 / (325) 643-5575
HENLEY
LT
7581 Hwy 321, Dayton, Texas 77535 / (936) 258-2476
HIGHTOWER
HI
902 FM 686, Dayton, Texas 77535 / (936) 258-8013
HILLTOP
HT
1500 State School Road, Gatesville, Texas 76598-2996 / (254) 865-8901
HOBBY
HB
742 FM 712, Marlin, Texas 76661 / (254) 883-5561
HODGE
HD
P. O. Box 999, Rusk, Texas 75785 / (903) 683-5781
HOLLIDAY
NF
295 IH-45 North, Huntsville, Texas 77320-8443 / (936) 295-8200
HOSPITALGALVESTON
HG
P. O. Box 48, Substation #1, Galveston, Texas 77555 / (409) 772-2875
HUGHES
AH
Route 2, Box 4400, Gatesville, Texas 76597 / (254) 865-6663
HUNTSVILLE
HV
P. O. Box 99, Huntsville, Texas 77342-0099 / (936) 437-1975
HUTCHINS
HJ
1500 East Langdon Road, Dallas, Texas 75241 / (972) 225-1304
JESTER I
J1
Jester I, Richmond, Texas 77469 / (281) 277-3030
JESTER III
J3
Jester III, Richmond, Texas 77469 / (281) 277-7000
JESTER IV
J4
Jester IV, Richmond, Texas 77469-8549 / (281) 277-3700
JOHNSTON
JT
703 Airport Road, Winnsboro, Texas 75494 / (903) 342-6166
JORDAN
JN
1992 Hilton Road, Pampa, Texas 79065 / (806) 665-7070
KEGANS
HM
707 Top Street, Houston, Texas 77002 / (713) 224-6584
KYLE
KY
23001 IH-35 Kyle, Texas 76640 / (512) 268-0079
LEBLANC
BA
3695 FM 3514, Beaumont, Texas 77705 / (409) 724-1515
LEWIS
GL
P. O. Box 9000, Woodville, Texas 75990 / (409) 283-8181
LINDSEY
LN
1620 Old Post Oak Road, Jacksboro, Texas 76458 / (940) 567-2272
LOCKHART
LC
P. O. Box 1170, Lockhart, Texas 78644 / (512) 398-3480
LOCKHART
TC
P. O. Box 1170, Lockhart, Texas 78644 / (512) 398-3480 (**109)
LOPEZ
RL
1203 El Cibolo Road, Edinburg, Texas 78541-9334 / (956) 316-3810
LUTHER
P2
1800 Luther Drive, Navasota, Texas 77869 / (936) 825-7547
LYCHNER
AJ
2350 Atascocita Road, Humble, Texas 77396 / (281) 454-5036
LYNAUGH
LH
1098 S. Hwy 2037, Fort Stockton, Texas 79735 / (432) 395-2938
MAC STRINGFELLOW
R2
1200 FM 655, Rosharon, Texas 77583 / (281) 595-3413
MCCONNELL
ML
3001 South Emily Drive, Beeville, Texas 78102 / (361) 362-2300
MICHAEL
MI
P. O. Box 4500, Tennessee Colony, Texas 75886 / (903) 928-2311
MIDDLETON
NE
13055 FM 3522, Abilene, Texas 79601 / (325) 548-9075
MINERAL WELLS
TC
759 Heintzelman Road, Mineral Wells, Texas 76067 / (940) 325-6933
MONTFORD
JM
8602 Peach Street, Lubbock, Texas 79404 / (806) 745-1021
MOORE, B.
BM
8500 North FM 3053, Overton, Texas 75684 / (903) 834-6186
MOORE, C.
CM
1700 North FM 87, Bonham, Texas 75418 / (903) 583-4464
MT. VIEW
MV
2305 Ransom Road, Gatesville, Texas 76528 / (254) 865-7226
MURRAY
LM
1916 North Hwy 36 Bypass, Gatesville, Texas 76596 / (254) 865-2000
NEAL
KN
9055 Spur 591, Amarillo, Texas 79107-9696 / (806) 383-1175
NEY
HF
114 Private Road 4303, Hondo, Texas 78861-3812 / (830) 426-8030
NORTH TEXAS
XL
4700 Blue Mound Road, Fort Worth, Texas 76106 / (817) 740-0180
PACK
P1
2400 Wallace Pack Road, Navasota, Texas 77869 / (936) 825-3728
PLANE
LJ
904 FM 686, Dayton, Texas 77535 / (936) 258-2476
POLUNSKY
TL
3872 FM 350 South, Livingston, Texas 77351 / (936) 967-8082
POWLEDGE
B2
Route 2 Box 2250, Palestine, Texas 75882 / (903) 723-5074
RAMSEY
R1
1100 FM 655, Rosharon, Texas 77583 / (281) 595-3491
ROACH
RH
15845 FM 164, Childress, Texas 79201 / (940) 937-6364
ROBERTSON
RB
12071 FM 3522, Abilene, Texas 79601 / (325) 548-9035
RUDD
RD
2004 Lamesa Highway, Brownfield, Texas 79316 / (806) 637-4470
SANCHEZ
RZ
3901 State Jail Road, El Paso, Texas 79938-8456 / (915) 856-0046
SAYLE
SY
4176 FM 1800, Breckenridge, Texas 76424-7301 / (254) 559-1581
SCOTT
RV
6999 Retrieve, CR 290 Angleton, Texas 77515 / (979) 849-9306
SEGOVIA
EN
1201 E. El Cibolo Road, Edinburg, Texas 78541 / (956) 316-2400
SKYVIEW
SV
P. O. Box 999, Rusk, Texas 75785 / (903) 683-5781
SMITH
SM
1313 CR 19, Lamesa, Texas 79331-1898 / (806) 872-6741
SOUTH TEXAS
XM
1511 Preston Road, Houston, Texas 77002 / (713) 223-0601
STEVENSON
SB
1525 FM 766, Cuero, Texas 77954 / (361) 275-2075
STILES
ST
3060 FM 3514, Beaumont, Texas 77705 / (409) 722-5255
TELFORD
TO
P. O. Box 9200, New Boston, Texas 75570 / (903) 628-3171
TERRELL
R3
1300 FM 655, Rosharon, Texas 77583 / (281) 595-3481
TORRES
TE
125 Private Road 4303, Hondo, Texas 78861 / (830) 426-5325
TRAVIS CO
TI
8101 FM 969, Austin, Texas 78724 / (512) 926-4482
TULIA
N3
4000 Hwy 86 West, Tulia, Texas 79088 / (806) 995-4109
VANCE
J2
Carol Vance Unit, Richmond, Texas 77469 / (281) 277-3030
WALLACE
WL
P. O. Box 2000, Colorado City, Texas 79512 / (325) 728-2162
WARE
DW
P. O. Box 2500, Colorado City, Texas 79512 / (325) 728-2162
WEST TEXAS
XN
P. O. Box 1359/2002 Lamesa Highway, Brownfield, Texas 79316 / (806) 637-4032
WHEELER
WR
986 County Road AA, Plainview, Texas 79072 / (806) 293-1081
WILLACY CO
WI
1695 South Buffalo Drive, Raymondville, Texas 78580 / (956) 689-4900
WOODMAN
WM
1210 Coryell City Road, Gatesville, Texas 76528 / (254) 865-9398
WYNNE
WY
Wynne Unit, Huntsville, Texas 77349 / (936) 295-9126
YOUNG MEDICAL FACILITY COMPLEX
GC
Route 4 Box 1174, Dickinson, Texas 77539 / (409) 948-0024

TEXAS TOUGH!

This is from the website of Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice
The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system.11 Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.12
In this report, we examine to what extent the criminal justice population of Texas has grown in recent years, as well as what specific communities have been most impacted by this growth. This brief will also examine the effectiveness of such growth in decreasing the rate of victimization experienced by Texans by comparing changes in crime in Texas to other U.S. states.
Texas: The Toughest and the BiggestAs of August 2000, BJS reported that Texas pulled slightly ahead of California to earn the distinction of having the largest population of inmates under the jurisdiction of its prison system. But even before Texas became first in prisoners, the state held the questionable honor of having the largest criminal justice system in the United States, with an astonishing proportion of its population under criminal justice control.
As of year end 1999, there were 706,60013 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:
There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.14
The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population,15 the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).16
If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.17
The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.18

Coming Next Week!

Learn the secret Bush-Cheney strategy that will MAKE YOU A WINNER at Rock/Paper/Scissors 33.3% of the time GUARANTEED.

You know it's a bad day when you're stripped naked, covered with shit, made to dance and Charles Graner is staring at your batch.

Read the Government's Own Sorry Excuse for Itself!

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#inmates this is the governments own account of drug offender statistics. While it is possibly reliable (skewed no doubt to minimize government barbarity), it is notable that the last study of drug felons as a percentage of all inmates goes back to 1994. Even the little info here contained says drug offenders, "up 37%, represented the largest source of jail population growth between 1996 and 2002. " These old numbers say only 21% of the federal prison population are dope felons (and it's more now, they just won't say how much more). For jail inmates they don't even bother to break it down stating simply, "Half of jail inmates in 2002 were held for a violent or drug offense, almost unchanged from 1996. " You will notice the bias created by associating drug possession with violent crime. This trick has always worked to sell the drug war to the public. When you read it a few times you begin to see drug possession as VIOLENT CRIME. In fact arrest records will state whether the inmate was brought in for violent crime or possession. Linking them in this way is pure propaganda. Don't they sell it real good with that last bit? "almost unchanged from 1996." Of course going up 37% is a slight change.

USA Evil Empire: Bar Graph for World Incarceration Rates

More people locked up; 30-40% for simple possession

Apropos de Rien

Pablo Picasso, born in Malaga, Spain, had the surprising name of Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santissima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.
Had he lived, he would have been grateful for the auto fill feature on the Google toolbar when signing up for things like eHarmony or free credit report dot com.

Jumping off a Cliff