Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
False Positive Drug Tests from Police Field Kits
Citing Startling Research on False Positive Drug Tests, Researchers Call for Moratorium on Field Drug Test Kit Testing
from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #575, 3/6/09
As a lab-coated and rubber glove wearing researcher from the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology dumped a sample of oregano into a field test kit, Mintwood Media's Adam Eidinger produced a positive test result for cocaine with another kit simply by exposing it to the atmosphere. "This is just air," Eidinger said, opening up a test and waving it as the reagent turned orange, indicating a positive result. (See the YouTube video here.)
The testing done at the press conference replicated that done earlier by the researchers, who found that a surprisingly large number of common substances generated false positive results for the presence of drugs. "While testing the specificity of the KN Reagent test kits with 42 non-marijuana substances, I observed that 70% of these tests rendered a false positive," said Dr. Omar Bagasra, director of the Center for Biotechnology, who conducted the experiments.
field test generating false positive from mere air""That's just outrageous," exclaimed Eidinger.
That research came as part of new report, False Positives Equal False Justice, by forensics expert John Kelly in collaboration with former FBI chief scientist and narcotics officer Dr. Frederick Whitehurst. In the report, the pair uncovered "a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges which abrogates every American's constitutional rights," as Kelly wrote in the executive summary.
"Law enforcement officials, forensic drug analysts, and prosecutors knowingly employ the flawed Duquenois-Levine and KN Reagent tests as well as mere conclusory police reports to wrongfully prosecute and convict millions of individuals for anti-marijuana law violations," Kelly wrote. "These wrongful prosecutions and convictions violate Supreme Court rulings which prohibit the use of inaccurate, nonspecific tests and/or conclusory reports because they do not prove the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. In other words, millions of people have been, and continue to be, prosecuted and convicted of marijuana charges without proof that they possessed marijuana."
Dr. Bagasra testing the field test on chocolateBoth Kelly and MPP executive director Rob Kampia used the report's findings to call for a moratorium on the use of field drug testing kits. "It is imperative that law enforcement agencies take notice and voluntarily end the use of these flawed drug tests. The essential need of protecting the innocent must outweigh the convenience of a field drug test that only gives accurate information some of the time," wrote Kelly.
"In terms of policy recommendations, it's real simple, no one should be using these faulty field tests, they should be thrown out and the company that's making them should probably be put out of business," Kampia told the press conference. "Natural soap, chocolate and newspaper, among other household items, all will test positive for marijuana and other drugs such as GHB, yet these kits continue to be used in both arrests and prosecutions nationwide. In our society we have the principle that you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. These tests turn that on its head."
ODV, a subsidiary of Forensic Source, manufactures the NIK Narco Pouch 908 and 909 tested by the researchers. The company did not respond to requests for comment by day's end on Thursday. The tests' packaging warns that they can produce false positives, but does not mention that most of their positives are false.
common items that generate false positives (Katie Schuler, bellvisuals.com)False positive field drug tests can ruin your day. Ask Don Bolles, drummer for the punk band The Germs. He was arrested and jailed for three days in April 2007 because a field test said the Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap he had with him tested positive for GHB. That field test was done with the NarcoPouch 928, another in the ODV line. Later testing revealed the 928 would generate false positives with a wide variety of natural soaps, as well as soy milk.
Bryn Mawr honor student Janet Lee was another victim of inaccurate field drug test kits. As she prepared to fly home for Christmas break in 2003, she was arrested at the Philadelphia airport after three condoms filled with flour (she said she squeezed them for stress relief) came up as cocaine on a cobalt thiocyanate (C-T) field test. She spent three weeks in jail facing charges that could net her 20 years in prison before an attorney demanded the drug be retested. Lee collected $180,000 from the city two years later to settle a lawsuit, but still suffered the Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed.
Lee was lucky. A jail guard recognized her as a volunteer and beat the bushes for a good attorney. It is unknown how many others like her there are who, lacking such resources, either were found guilty or plea bargained to crimes of which they were innocent because of deceptive field drug tests.
the fraudulent field test packetsAnother widely publicized incident of bad field drug tests occurred in August, when Ron Obadia and Nadine Artemis were arrested, handcuffed to a chair, and interrogated for hours at the Toronto Airport after their raw chocolate tested positive for hashish with the Duquenois-Levine color chemical test. They were placed in separate rooms and were told that they faced "life in prison" unless they confessed. Each of them was also told that the other already had confessed.
Later lab testing proved it was indeed chocolate, not hash, and the pair were sent on their way. They also accumulated a $20,000 legal bill. To add insult to injury, when the couple tried again to fly to the US three weeks later with their raw chocolate, it again tested positive on the field test kit. This time, Obadia was arrested and charged with hash possession.
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from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #575, 3/6/09
As a lab-coated and rubber glove wearing researcher from the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology dumped a sample of oregano into a field test kit, Mintwood Media's Adam Eidinger produced a positive test result for cocaine with another kit simply by exposing it to the atmosphere. "This is just air," Eidinger said, opening up a test and waving it as the reagent turned orange, indicating a positive result. (See the YouTube video here.)
The testing done at the press conference replicated that done earlier by the researchers, who found that a surprisingly large number of common substances generated false positive results for the presence of drugs. "While testing the specificity of the KN Reagent test kits with 42 non-marijuana substances, I observed that 70% of these tests rendered a false positive," said Dr. Omar Bagasra, director of the Center for Biotechnology, who conducted the experiments.
field test generating false positive from mere air""That's just outrageous," exclaimed Eidinger.
That research came as part of new report, False Positives Equal False Justice, by forensics expert John Kelly in collaboration with former FBI chief scientist and narcotics officer Dr. Frederick Whitehurst. In the report, the pair uncovered "a drug testing regime of fraudulent forensics used by police, prosecutors, and judges which abrogates every American's constitutional rights," as Kelly wrote in the executive summary.
"Law enforcement officials, forensic drug analysts, and prosecutors knowingly employ the flawed Duquenois-Levine and KN Reagent tests as well as mere conclusory police reports to wrongfully prosecute and convict millions of individuals for anti-marijuana law violations," Kelly wrote. "These wrongful prosecutions and convictions violate Supreme Court rulings which prohibit the use of inaccurate, nonspecific tests and/or conclusory reports because they do not prove the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. In other words, millions of people have been, and continue to be, prosecuted and convicted of marijuana charges without proof that they possessed marijuana."
Dr. Bagasra testing the field test on chocolateBoth Kelly and MPP executive director Rob Kampia used the report's findings to call for a moratorium on the use of field drug testing kits. "It is imperative that law enforcement agencies take notice and voluntarily end the use of these flawed drug tests. The essential need of protecting the innocent must outweigh the convenience of a field drug test that only gives accurate information some of the time," wrote Kelly.
"In terms of policy recommendations, it's real simple, no one should be using these faulty field tests, they should be thrown out and the company that's making them should probably be put out of business," Kampia told the press conference. "Natural soap, chocolate and newspaper, among other household items, all will test positive for marijuana and other drugs such as GHB, yet these kits continue to be used in both arrests and prosecutions nationwide. In our society we have the principle that you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. These tests turn that on its head."
ODV, a subsidiary of Forensic Source, manufactures the NIK Narco Pouch 908 and 909 tested by the researchers. The company did not respond to requests for comment by day's end on Thursday. The tests' packaging warns that they can produce false positives, but does not mention that most of their positives are false.
common items that generate false positives (Katie Schuler, bellvisuals.com)False positive field drug tests can ruin your day. Ask Don Bolles, drummer for the punk band The Germs. He was arrested and jailed for three days in April 2007 because a field test said the Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap he had with him tested positive for GHB. That field test was done with the NarcoPouch 928, another in the ODV line. Later testing revealed the 928 would generate false positives with a wide variety of natural soaps, as well as soy milk.
Bryn Mawr honor student Janet Lee was another victim of inaccurate field drug test kits. As she prepared to fly home for Christmas break in 2003, she was arrested at the Philadelphia airport after three condoms filled with flour (she said she squeezed them for stress relief) came up as cocaine on a cobalt thiocyanate (C-T) field test. She spent three weeks in jail facing charges that could net her 20 years in prison before an attorney demanded the drug be retested. Lee collected $180,000 from the city two years later to settle a lawsuit, but still suffered the Kafkaesque nightmare of being jailed.
Lee was lucky. A jail guard recognized her as a volunteer and beat the bushes for a good attorney. It is unknown how many others like her there are who, lacking such resources, either were found guilty or plea bargained to crimes of which they were innocent because of deceptive field drug tests.
the fraudulent field test packetsAnother widely publicized incident of bad field drug tests occurred in August, when Ron Obadia and Nadine Artemis were arrested, handcuffed to a chair, and interrogated for hours at the Toronto Airport after their raw chocolate tested positive for hashish with the Duquenois-Levine color chemical test. They were placed in separate rooms and were told that they faced "life in prison" unless they confessed. Each of them was also told that the other already had confessed.
Later lab testing proved it was indeed chocolate, not hash, and the pair were sent on their way. They also accumulated a $20,000 legal bill. To add insult to injury, when the couple tried again to fly to the US three weeks later with their raw chocolate, it again tested positive on the field test kit. This time, Obadia was arrested and charged with hash possession.
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Monday, March 2, 2009
Police State Under Bush
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Obama releases secret Bush anti-terror memos
By DEVLIN BARRETT and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writers Devlin Barrett And Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press Writers 1 hr 38 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Monday, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects.
The Justice Department released nine legal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not apply during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants.
The Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions, but the documents themselves had been closely held. By releasing them, President Barack Obama continued a house-cleaning of the previous administration's most contentious policies.
"Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech a few hours before the documents were released. "Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."
The Obama administration also acknowledged in court documents Monday that the CIA destroyed 92 videos involving terror suspects, including interrogations — far more than had been known. Congressional Democrats and other critics have charged that some of the harsh interrogation techniques amounted to torture, a contention President George W. Bush and other Bush officials rejected.
The new administration pledged on Monday to begin turning over documents related to the videos to a federal judge and to make as much information public as possible.
The legal memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel show a government grappling with how to wage war on terrorism in a fast-changing world. The conclusion, reiterated in page after page of documents, was that the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights.
Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for instance, did not apply in the United States as long as the president was combatting terrorism, the Justice Department said in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo.
"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, adding later: "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."
On Sept. 25, 2001, Yoo discussed possible changes to the laws governing wiretaps for intelligence gathering. In that memo, he said the government's interest in keeping the nation safe following the terrorist attacks might justify warrantless searches.
That memo did not specifically attempt to justify the government's warrantless wiretapping program, but it provided part of the foundation.
Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, did not return messages seeking comment.
The memos reflected a belief within the Bush administration that the president had broad powers that could not be checked by Congress or the courts. That stance, in one form or another, became the foundation for many policies: holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without warrants, using tough new CIA interrogation tactics and locking U.S. citizens in military brigs without charges.
Obama has pledged to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. He halted the CIA's intensive interrogation program. And last week, prosecutors moved the terrorism case against U.S. resident Ali Al-Marri, a suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent held in a military brig, to a civilian courthouse.
A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up an investigation of the destruction of the tapes of interrogations.
Monday's acknowledgment of videotape destruction, however, involved a civil lawsuit filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter submitted in that case by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."
It is not clear what exactly was on the recordings. The government's letter cites interrogation videos, but the lawsuit against the Defense Department also seeks records related to treatment of detainees, any deaths of detainees and the CIA's sending of suspects overseas, known as "extraordinary rendition."
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn't spoken to the president about the report, but he called the news about the videotapes "sad" and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.
"The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court's order," Singh said.
CIA spokesman George Little said the agency "has certainly cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation. If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."
The details of interrogations of terror suspects, and the existence of tapes documenting those sessions, have become the subject of long fights in a number of different court cases. In the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged after the trial was over that two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
The Dassin letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.
But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel who viewed the tapes.
The separate criminal investigation includes interrogations of al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and another top al-Qaida leader. Tapes of those interrogations were destroyed, in part, the Bush administration said, to protect the identities of the government questioners at a time the Justice Department was debating whether or not the tactics used during the interrogations were legal.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that waterboarding — simulated drowning — was used on three suspects, including the two whose interrogations were recorded.
John Durham, a senior career prosecutor in Connecticut, is leading the criminal investigation, out of Virginia, and had asked that he be given until the end of February to wrap up his work before requests for information in the civil lawsuit were dealt with.
___
Associated Press Writers Pamela Hess and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Back to story
Obama releases secret Bush anti-terror memos
By DEVLIN BARRETT and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writers Devlin Barrett And Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press Writers 1 hr 38 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration threw open the curtain on years of Bush-era secrets Monday, revealing anti-terror memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terror suspects.
The Justice Department released nine legal opinions showing that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration determined that certain constitutional rights would not apply during the coming fight. Within two weeks, government lawyers were already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants.
The Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions, but the documents themselves had been closely held. By releasing them, President Barack Obama continued a house-cleaning of the previous administration's most contentious policies.
"Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech a few hours before the documents were released. "Not only is that school of thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."
The Obama administration also acknowledged in court documents Monday that the CIA destroyed 92 videos involving terror suspects, including interrogations — far more than had been known. Congressional Democrats and other critics have charged that some of the harsh interrogation techniques amounted to torture, a contention President George W. Bush and other Bush officials rejected.
The new administration pledged on Monday to begin turning over documents related to the videos to a federal judge and to make as much information public as possible.
The legal memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel show a government grappling with how to wage war on terrorism in a fast-changing world. The conclusion, reiterated in page after page of documents, was that the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights.
Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for instance, did not apply in the United States as long as the president was combatting terrorism, the Justice Department said in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo.
"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, adding later: "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."
On Sept. 25, 2001, Yoo discussed possible changes to the laws governing wiretaps for intelligence gathering. In that memo, he said the government's interest in keeping the nation safe following the terrorist attacks might justify warrantless searches.
That memo did not specifically attempt to justify the government's warrantless wiretapping program, but it provided part of the foundation.
Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, did not return messages seeking comment.
The memos reflected a belief within the Bush administration that the president had broad powers that could not be checked by Congress or the courts. That stance, in one form or another, became the foundation for many policies: holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without warrants, using tough new CIA interrogation tactics and locking U.S. citizens in military brigs without charges.
Obama has pledged to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. He halted the CIA's intensive interrogation program. And last week, prosecutors moved the terrorism case against U.S. resident Ali Al-Marri, a suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent held in a military brig, to a civilian courthouse.
A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up an investigation of the destruction of the tapes of interrogations.
Monday's acknowledgment of videotape destruction, however, involved a civil lawsuit filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter submitted in that case by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."
It is not clear what exactly was on the recordings. The government's letter cites interrogation videos, but the lawsuit against the Defense Department also seeks records related to treatment of detainees, any deaths of detainees and the CIA's sending of suspects overseas, known as "extraordinary rendition."
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn't spoken to the president about the report, but he called the news about the videotapes "sad" and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.
"The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court's order," Singh said.
CIA spokesman George Little said the agency "has certainly cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation. If anyone thinks it's agency policy to impede the enforcement of American law, they simply don't know the facts."
The details of interrogations of terror suspects, and the existence of tapes documenting those sessions, have become the subject of long fights in a number of different court cases. In the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged after the trial was over that two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
The Dassin letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.
But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel who viewed the tapes.
The separate criminal investigation includes interrogations of al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Zubaydah and another top al-Qaida leader. Tapes of those interrogations were destroyed, in part, the Bush administration said, to protect the identities of the government questioners at a time the Justice Department was debating whether or not the tactics used during the interrogations were legal.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that waterboarding — simulated drowning — was used on three suspects, including the two whose interrogations were recorded.
John Durham, a senior career prosecutor in Connecticut, is leading the criminal investigation, out of Virginia, and had asked that he be given until the end of February to wrap up his work before requests for information in the civil lawsuit were dealt with.
___
Associated Press Writers Pamela Hess and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Questions or Comments
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Copyright/IP Policy
Sunday, March 1, 2009
California Assemblyman Announces Bill to Tax Marijuana
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano Introduces Bill that Would Decriminalize and Tax Marijuana for Adults
By Mechanic
California Assemblyman introduces bill to decriminalize and tax marijuana.
Assemblyman Ammiano says AB 390 will help state's economic downturn.
California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has recently introduced Assembly Bill 390: The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, the first bill of its kind in the state of California that would decriminalize recreational marijuana use and set up the framework to regulate the sale and taxation of marijuana.
Under the bill, wholesalers of marijuana would pay an initial $5,000 licensing fee with a $2,500 annual renewal fee. Wholesalers are then able to sell marijuana to licensed retailers who would pay a "Marijuana Supplemental Fee" of $50 per ounce of marijuana sold to the public. This fee, officially the Marijuana Supplemental Fee Law, would be used to fund drug education and awareness programs but would not be applied to medical marijuana patients. The proposed bill would also restrict persons under 21 years of age from having "access to marijuana during receiving, processing, packing, storage, and delivery or at any other time," and restricts the consumption of marijuana on the property of wholesalers.
Financial Benefit
The announcement of the bill comes in the midst of tough economic times, both at the state and national level. Assemblyman Ammiano argues, "With the state in the midst of an historic economic crisis, the move toward regulating and taxing marijuana is simply common sense," he added, "This legislation would generate much needed revenue for the state, restrict access to only those over 21, end the environmental damage to our public lands from illicit crops, and improve public safety by redirecting law enforcement efforts to more serious crimes. California has the opportunity to be the first state in the nation to enact a smart, responsible public policy for the control and regulation of marijuana."
A study by the California State Board of Equalization estimated that taxing marijuana could generate 1.3 billion annually and a separate study conducted by California NORML estimated that the California cannabis industry to be worth between 12-18 billion dollars. A 2006 study conducted by Jon Gettman found that between 2003 and 2006, marijuana was America's #1 cash crop, marijuana production is California outpaced both vegetables and grapes, and estimated it's worth in the billions of dollars. Ammiano said, "I think the outcome would be very healthy for California and California's economy." A study by Harvard in 2005 estimated that by legalizing marijuana the federal government would save 7.7 billion dollars in prohibition enforcement and could generate taxes in between 2.4 and 6.2 billion dollars annually.
Medical Marijuana Vs. The Federal Government
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 215, making California the first state in the United States to allow marijuana use for medical purposes. This put the state of California at odds with the Federal government's stance that marijuana is illegal to use, even for medical use, and would often make California's medical marijuana providers the subject of DEA raids. Under the 1970 Controlled Substance Act, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic (no medical benefit) despite numerous medical studies outlining marijuana's medical potential. Since the 1996 passing of Prop. 215, fifteen additional states have approved state medical marijuana legislation.
Proponents of the bill, including Assemblyman Ammiano, admit that one obstacle for the success of the bill is the federal ban on marijuana. However, recent polls suggest that Americans are growing more in favor of decriminalizing marijuana and even the federal government hinted that it may stop DEA raids on medical marijuana providers. Ammiano is hopeful, "We could in fact have the political will to do something, and certainly in the meantime this is a public policy call and I think it's worth the discussion."
Mixed Reactions
Marijuana activist groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), have received the announcement of the bill with open arms, but opponents are not receiving the bill so well. In the few days since the announcement of the bill, a fierce debate has already developed. In what be a surprise to some, Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has spoken out against the measure. The LA Times published an editorial calling the bill an "ill advised tax scheme," on one hand but urges the government to review it's policies on marijuana because "it's the right thing to do". With advocates citing financial and practical benefits and opponents citing health concerns, only time will determine the outcome.
Sources:Assemblyman Ammiano's WebsiteAB 390 Text; Feb. 2009NORML; Feb. 2009CA NORML; Feb. 2009Marijuana Production in US, Jon Gettman, Drug Science, 2006About Jon Gettman, Drug Science, 200640% Say Marijuana Should Be Legalized, Rasmussen Reports, Feb. 2009State by State Laws(CA), NORML, 2008WAMM.org, 2002Therapeutic Effects, Medboardwatch.com, 2002US to yield marijuana jurisdiction to states, SF Chrnoicle, Feb. 2009Legal pot is not mayor's cup of tea, SF Chronicle, Feb. 2009Reefer Tax Madness, LA TImes, Feb. 2009
2009 © Associated Content, All rights reserved. Privacy Policy Terms of Use
By Mechanic
California Assemblyman introduces bill to decriminalize and tax marijuana.
Assemblyman Ammiano says AB 390 will help state's economic downturn.
California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) has recently introduced Assembly Bill 390: The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, the first bill of its kind in the state of California that would decriminalize recreational marijuana use and set up the framework to regulate the sale and taxation of marijuana.
Under the bill, wholesalers of marijuana would pay an initial $5,000 licensing fee with a $2,500 annual renewal fee. Wholesalers are then able to sell marijuana to licensed retailers who would pay a "Marijuana Supplemental Fee" of $50 per ounce of marijuana sold to the public. This fee, officially the Marijuana Supplemental Fee Law, would be used to fund drug education and awareness programs but would not be applied to medical marijuana patients. The proposed bill would also restrict persons under 21 years of age from having "access to marijuana during receiving, processing, packing, storage, and delivery or at any other time," and restricts the consumption of marijuana on the property of wholesalers.
Financial Benefit
The announcement of the bill comes in the midst of tough economic times, both at the state and national level. Assemblyman Ammiano argues, "With the state in the midst of an historic economic crisis, the move toward regulating and taxing marijuana is simply common sense," he added, "This legislation would generate much needed revenue for the state, restrict access to only those over 21, end the environmental damage to our public lands from illicit crops, and improve public safety by redirecting law enforcement efforts to more serious crimes. California has the opportunity to be the first state in the nation to enact a smart, responsible public policy for the control and regulation of marijuana."
A study by the California State Board of Equalization estimated that taxing marijuana could generate 1.3 billion annually and a separate study conducted by California NORML estimated that the California cannabis industry to be worth between 12-18 billion dollars. A 2006 study conducted by Jon Gettman found that between 2003 and 2006, marijuana was America's #1 cash crop, marijuana production is California outpaced both vegetables and grapes, and estimated it's worth in the billions of dollars. Ammiano said, "I think the outcome would be very healthy for California and California's economy." A study by Harvard in 2005 estimated that by legalizing marijuana the federal government would save 7.7 billion dollars in prohibition enforcement and could generate taxes in between 2.4 and 6.2 billion dollars annually.
Medical Marijuana Vs. The Federal Government
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 215, making California the first state in the United States to allow marijuana use for medical purposes. This put the state of California at odds with the Federal government's stance that marijuana is illegal to use, even for medical use, and would often make California's medical marijuana providers the subject of DEA raids. Under the 1970 Controlled Substance Act, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic (no medical benefit) despite numerous medical studies outlining marijuana's medical potential. Since the 1996 passing of Prop. 215, fifteen additional states have approved state medical marijuana legislation.
Proponents of the bill, including Assemblyman Ammiano, admit that one obstacle for the success of the bill is the federal ban on marijuana. However, recent polls suggest that Americans are growing more in favor of decriminalizing marijuana and even the federal government hinted that it may stop DEA raids on medical marijuana providers. Ammiano is hopeful, "We could in fact have the political will to do something, and certainly in the meantime this is a public policy call and I think it's worth the discussion."
Mixed Reactions
Marijuana activist groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), have received the announcement of the bill with open arms, but opponents are not receiving the bill so well. In the few days since the announcement of the bill, a fierce debate has already developed. In what be a surprise to some, Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, has spoken out against the measure. The LA Times published an editorial calling the bill an "ill advised tax scheme," on one hand but urges the government to review it's policies on marijuana because "it's the right thing to do". With advocates citing financial and practical benefits and opponents citing health concerns, only time will determine the outcome.
Sources:Assemblyman Ammiano's WebsiteAB 390 Text; Feb. 2009NORML; Feb. 2009CA NORML; Feb. 2009Marijuana Production in US, Jon Gettman, Drug Science, 2006About Jon Gettman, Drug Science, 200640% Say Marijuana Should Be Legalized, Rasmussen Reports, Feb. 2009State by State Laws(CA), NORML, 2008WAMM.org, 2002Therapeutic Effects, Medboardwatch.com, 2002US to yield marijuana jurisdiction to states, SF Chrnoicle, Feb. 2009Legal pot is not mayor's cup of tea, SF Chronicle, Feb. 2009Reefer Tax Madness, LA TImes, Feb. 2009
2009 © Associated Content, All rights reserved. Privacy Policy Terms of Use
Thursday, February 26, 2009
California: Legalize, Tax Marijuana
California Bill to Tax, Regulate Marijuana from the Drug Policy Alliance News Letter
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
California could become the first state to tax and regulate marijuana.
With the state facing the worst budget deficit in generations, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano introduced a bill earlier this week to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. Marijuana is California's number one cash crop worth multiple billions each year. Assemblyman Ammiano's bill would regulate that market like beer, wine and liquor while barring access to those under 21.
Hundreds of drug policy reformers in California are supporting his commonsense plan by writing letters to their local papers.
Annual revenues from fees and excise taxes could be in the billions, and Californians could save another billion a year that they now spend on marijuana prohibition. Plus, this bill will put an end to tens of thousands of marijuana arrests made each year statewide.
Marijuana reform has a new champion in Sacramento. Supporters can help by telling their local paper that they support Tom Ammiano's landmark bill to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol.
Last November, DPA put Proposition 5 on the California state ballot, a proposition that would have rehabilitated California's broken prisons and cut spending by at least $2.5 billion. While we didn't win, with the help of hundreds of supporters we educated California on the need for real prison reform.
As the state now faces an imminent federal takeover of the entire prison system, California elected officials know that we were right in calling for real reform, and that the solutions we fought for last year are the same ones the state needs now.
DPA will continue working in Sacramento to keep the pressure on, promoting real prison reform and working for the taxation and regulation of marijuana.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
California could become the first state to tax and regulate marijuana.
With the state facing the worst budget deficit in generations, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano introduced a bill earlier this week to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol. Marijuana is California's number one cash crop worth multiple billions each year. Assemblyman Ammiano's bill would regulate that market like beer, wine and liquor while barring access to those under 21.
Hundreds of drug policy reformers in California are supporting his commonsense plan by writing letters to their local papers.
Annual revenues from fees and excise taxes could be in the billions, and Californians could save another billion a year that they now spend on marijuana prohibition. Plus, this bill will put an end to tens of thousands of marijuana arrests made each year statewide.
Marijuana reform has a new champion in Sacramento. Supporters can help by telling their local paper that they support Tom Ammiano's landmark bill to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol.
Last November, DPA put Proposition 5 on the California state ballot, a proposition that would have rehabilitated California's broken prisons and cut spending by at least $2.5 billion. While we didn't win, with the help of hundreds of supporters we educated California on the need for real prison reform.
As the state now faces an imminent federal takeover of the entire prison system, California elected officials know that we were right in calling for real reform, and that the solutions we fought for last year are the same ones the state needs now.
DPA will continue working in Sacramento to keep the pressure on, promoting real prison reform and working for the taxation and regulation of marijuana.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Phelps Weed Hype from The L.A. Times
The Olympic champion's use of pot is far from a novelty in the sports world and leads to a discussion of whether it is much ado about nothing.
By Chuck Culpepper February 8, 2009
And so suddenly here's marijuana -- yep, marijuana -- hogging itself another heyday, bolting into the spotlight, all but sashaying back into dialogue and shouting, "Hey, I'm still here."Shadowed in cycles through recent decades while other legal or illegal or performance-enhancing stimulants took turns getting all the hype, marijuana has just hollered in the case of merely the most-decorated Olympian in history, Michael Phelps. It has tried to yell from the recent past of the Super Bowl most valuable player, who alighted at Disney World only four months after a forgotten arrest.
It has appeared this week in the suitcase of an arrested college basketball point guard at an airport, and this winter in the possession of a former Dallas receiver, and a Seattle linebacker, and a Florida State receiver, and a retired NBA forward/center, and amid a Japanese sumo wrestling scandal if you can believe such, and in November with a New York Jets defensive end, and last spring in that bellwether moment on talk radio, when Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard readily said he enjoyed an inhale.Marijuana? Who knew? Yeah, well, OK, pretty much everybody did."It has been constant in terms of it being the most popular of the illicit drugs," said Roger Roffman, a professor at the University of Washington, whose study of marijuana in culture dates clear back to the Vietnam War as a social worker for the Army. Even if its relative usage doesn't match its peak from the late 1970s, Roffman said its No. 1 ranking has remained impenetrable.
It's just that news coverage and human discourse run in cycles, as Roffman reminded, and seldom has any cycle known a louder clash than a 14-time gold medalist heralded as classic Americana ramming into a photo at a party with a bong. Such a noise far occludes even the fact that Santonio Holmes, NFL superhero and honored Disney guest, logged a one-game suspension in October after Pittsburgh police pulled him over, got a whiff of his SUV and asked if he'd been smoking, whereupon, according to their report, he said, "No, but yesterday I was."Because sports permeates everything, those keen on the marijuana issue all along have seen the case of Phelps and his multitudinous corporate sponsors as a gauge of the American mood circa 2009.Quiet ruled for days. Then Thursday, Kellogg's halted its sponsorship of Phelps, finding his behavior "not consistent with the image of Kellogg's," the 103-year-old Michigan cereal titan. Subway, another sponsor, opted for censure but not discontinuance. From a far different culture, the Swiss watchmaker Omega deemed it "a non-issue.""I think there would have been a much stronger and larger fallout" for an American gold medalist 10 or 20 years ago, said Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. In the Phelps brouhaha, Armentano has sensed a profound shift in national dialogue and in media questions, even if he does still chafe when incorrigible headline writers find double-entendres irresistible. In his view, a swift, toned, dominant athlete who "more than the average American is cognizant of what he puts in his body" simply "blows to smithereens" marijuana's images of slackerdom."Kellogg's is playing by the rules of 20 years ago," Armentano said. "Subway is playing by the rules of 1986 and the 'War on Drugs.' Those rules have changed."This time around, in fact, some High Times website readers have called for a boycott of Kellogg's, while Roffman surmises that could lead to opponents calling for a boycott of the boycott of Kellogg's.That's because as the debate has roiled on and Roffman has followed it, he has detected four sides, all of which, he said, don "blinders" when regarding the other three.Group 1 emphasizes that most adults who smoke marijuana do so occasionally and "without really any harm," Roffman said, "and that's a very hard thing for us to publicly acknowledge." Group 2 stresses that "a substantial number of marijuana smokers get into real trouble" and "derail" from functionality.Group 3 considers marijuana central to life on Earth and tends to live alternatively both culturally and politically, yet manages to function. And Group 4 entails medical users, whose approval in various states -- California in 1996 -- has helped soften the stigma over time.The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, trains on Group 2 and maintains in its policy statements, "Smoked marijuana has not withstood the rigors of science -- it is not medicine and it is not safe," and, "Legalization of marijuana, no matter how it begins, will come at the expense of our children and public safety." More personally, a Colorado mother of a 12-year-old swimmer said of Phelps on ABC News, "I am absolutely appalled. Honestly, absolutely appalled, sickened and saddened." Epitomizing the dichotomy of views, 12 states have decriminalized certain amounts of marijuana possession but, Roffman said, "Would the rest of the states pass that? I have substantial doubts about that." In the athletic realm, there have been 1994 Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam, who said on the record that marijuana made him lazy and impeded his progress, and five-time Pro Bowl NFL lineman Mark Stepnoski, who said on the record it helped him sleep and alleviate pain without enduring painkillers or hangovers.Had Roffman run Kellogg's, he said, he might have opted for a commodity rare in America: nuance. He might have suspended Phelps but said something akin to: We realize he's a role model. We don't believe children and adolescents should smoke marijuana. We also realize Phelps is an adult. We recognize that adults often smoke marijuana without being harmed. We also recognize that because he's a role model, we support his attempt not to repeat this.That's too shaded for a zippy sound bite, of course, but that's hemp in 2009, when a 47-year-old statesman can admit he smoked during youth and become a decisively elected president, and a 23-year-old athlete can succumb to a South Carolina party photographer and a British tabloid and a ruckus, but with his sponsors reacting variously.It's a marijuana era clearly new but still perplexing."There aren't many places Joe and Mary Public can turn for a balanced, up-to-date, accurate, rational debate about marijuana and all of its glitter and all of its warts," Roffman said. So even though the professor lacks a title just yet for his forthcoming memoir about 40 years following the bouncing dialogue, he does know that the title, for diverse reasons, will include the word "myth."chuck.culpepper@yahoo.com
By Chuck Culpepper February 8, 2009
And so suddenly here's marijuana -- yep, marijuana -- hogging itself another heyday, bolting into the spotlight, all but sashaying back into dialogue and shouting, "Hey, I'm still here."Shadowed in cycles through recent decades while other legal or illegal or performance-enhancing stimulants took turns getting all the hype, marijuana has just hollered in the case of merely the most-decorated Olympian in history, Michael Phelps. It has tried to yell from the recent past of the Super Bowl most valuable player, who alighted at Disney World only four months after a forgotten arrest.
It has appeared this week in the suitcase of an arrested college basketball point guard at an airport, and this winter in the possession of a former Dallas receiver, and a Seattle linebacker, and a Florida State receiver, and a retired NBA forward/center, and amid a Japanese sumo wrestling scandal if you can believe such, and in November with a New York Jets defensive end, and last spring in that bellwether moment on talk radio, when Dallas Mavericks forward Josh Howard readily said he enjoyed an inhale.Marijuana? Who knew? Yeah, well, OK, pretty much everybody did."It has been constant in terms of it being the most popular of the illicit drugs," said Roger Roffman, a professor at the University of Washington, whose study of marijuana in culture dates clear back to the Vietnam War as a social worker for the Army. Even if its relative usage doesn't match its peak from the late 1970s, Roffman said its No. 1 ranking has remained impenetrable.
It's just that news coverage and human discourse run in cycles, as Roffman reminded, and seldom has any cycle known a louder clash than a 14-time gold medalist heralded as classic Americana ramming into a photo at a party with a bong. Such a noise far occludes even the fact that Santonio Holmes, NFL superhero and honored Disney guest, logged a one-game suspension in October after Pittsburgh police pulled him over, got a whiff of his SUV and asked if he'd been smoking, whereupon, according to their report, he said, "No, but yesterday I was."Because sports permeates everything, those keen on the marijuana issue all along have seen the case of Phelps and his multitudinous corporate sponsors as a gauge of the American mood circa 2009.Quiet ruled for days. Then Thursday, Kellogg's halted its sponsorship of Phelps, finding his behavior "not consistent with the image of Kellogg's," the 103-year-old Michigan cereal titan. Subway, another sponsor, opted for censure but not discontinuance. From a far different culture, the Swiss watchmaker Omega deemed it "a non-issue.""I think there would have been a much stronger and larger fallout" for an American gold medalist 10 or 20 years ago, said Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. In the Phelps brouhaha, Armentano has sensed a profound shift in national dialogue and in media questions, even if he does still chafe when incorrigible headline writers find double-entendres irresistible. In his view, a swift, toned, dominant athlete who "more than the average American is cognizant of what he puts in his body" simply "blows to smithereens" marijuana's images of slackerdom."Kellogg's is playing by the rules of 20 years ago," Armentano said. "Subway is playing by the rules of 1986 and the 'War on Drugs.' Those rules have changed."This time around, in fact, some High Times website readers have called for a boycott of Kellogg's, while Roffman surmises that could lead to opponents calling for a boycott of the boycott of Kellogg's.That's because as the debate has roiled on and Roffman has followed it, he has detected four sides, all of which, he said, don "blinders" when regarding the other three.Group 1 emphasizes that most adults who smoke marijuana do so occasionally and "without really any harm," Roffman said, "and that's a very hard thing for us to publicly acknowledge." Group 2 stresses that "a substantial number of marijuana smokers get into real trouble" and "derail" from functionality.Group 3 considers marijuana central to life on Earth and tends to live alternatively both culturally and politically, yet manages to function. And Group 4 entails medical users, whose approval in various states -- California in 1996 -- has helped soften the stigma over time.The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, trains on Group 2 and maintains in its policy statements, "Smoked marijuana has not withstood the rigors of science -- it is not medicine and it is not safe," and, "Legalization of marijuana, no matter how it begins, will come at the expense of our children and public safety." More personally, a Colorado mother of a 12-year-old swimmer said of Phelps on ABC News, "I am absolutely appalled. Honestly, absolutely appalled, sickened and saddened." Epitomizing the dichotomy of views, 12 states have decriminalized certain amounts of marijuana possession but, Roffman said, "Would the rest of the states pass that? I have substantial doubts about that." In the athletic realm, there have been 1994 Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam, who said on the record that marijuana made him lazy and impeded his progress, and five-time Pro Bowl NFL lineman Mark Stepnoski, who said on the record it helped him sleep and alleviate pain without enduring painkillers or hangovers.Had Roffman run Kellogg's, he said, he might have opted for a commodity rare in America: nuance. He might have suspended Phelps but said something akin to: We realize he's a role model. We don't believe children and adolescents should smoke marijuana. We also realize Phelps is an adult. We recognize that adults often smoke marijuana without being harmed. We also recognize that because he's a role model, we support his attempt not to repeat this.That's too shaded for a zippy sound bite, of course, but that's hemp in 2009, when a 47-year-old statesman can admit he smoked during youth and become a decisively elected president, and a 23-year-old athlete can succumb to a South Carolina party photographer and a British tabloid and a ruckus, but with his sponsors reacting variously.It's a marijuana era clearly new but still perplexing."There aren't many places Joe and Mary Public can turn for a balanced, up-to-date, accurate, rational debate about marijuana and all of its glitter and all of its warts," Roffman said. So even though the professor lacks a title just yet for his forthcoming memoir about 40 years following the bouncing dialogue, he does know that the title, for diverse reasons, will include the word "myth."chuck.culpepper@yahoo.com
Monday, February 2, 2009
Michael Phelps smokes weed too!
IOC accepts Phelps' apology for marijuana photo
Mon Feb 2, 7:21 am ET
LAUSANNE, Switzerland – The International Olympic Committee expressed confidence Monday that Michael Phelps will learn from his "inappropriate behavior" and continue to serve as a role model after a British newspaper published a photo of him inhaling from a marijuana pipe.
Phelps, who won a record eight gold medals at last year's Beijing Olympics, apologized and acknowledged "regrettable behavior" after the picture was published Sunday by the tabloid News of the World.
"Michael Phelps is a great Olympic champion," the IOC said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press on Monday. "He apologized for his inappropriate behavior. We have no reason to doubt his sincerity and his commitment to continue to act as a role model."
During the Beijing Olympics, IOC president Jacques Rogge called Phelps "the icon of the games."
Marijuana is viewed differently from performance-enhancing drugs under World Anti-Doping Agency rules. An athlete is subject to WADA sanctions only for a positive test that occurs during competition periods.
The News of the World said the picture was taken during a November house party while Phelps was visiting the University of South Carolina.
The party occurred nearly three months after the Olympics while Phelps was taking a long break from training, and his actions should have no impact on the medals he won in. Beijing.
He has never tested positive for banned substances and the case is unlikely to fall under any doping rules.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Obama's False Start - More Drug War as Usual
January 31, 2009 from The New York Times
Editorial
Time Lag in Vienna?
Programs that give drug addicts access to clean needles have been shown the world over to slow the spread of deadly diseases including H.I.V./AIDS and hepatitis. Public health experts were relieved when President Obama announced his support for ending a ban on federal funding for such programs.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s message seems not to have reached the American delegation to a United Nations drug policy summit in Vienna, where progress is stalled on a plan that would guide global drug control and AIDS prevention efforts for years to come. The delegation has angered allies, especially the European Union, by blocking efforts to incorporate references to the concept of “harm reduction” — of which needle exchange is a prime example — into the plan.
State Department officials said that they were resisting the harm-reduction language because it could also be interpreted as endorsing legalized drugs or providing addicts with a place to inject drugs. But the Vienna plan does not require any country to adopt policies it finds inappropriate. And by resisting the harm-reduction language, the American delegation is alienating allies and sending precisely the wrong message to developing nations, which must do a lot more to control AIDS and other addiction-related diseases.
Some members of Congress are rightly angry about the impasse in Vienna. On Wednesday, three members fired off a letter to Susan Rice, the new American ambassador to the United Nations, urging that the United States’ delegation in Vienna be given new marching orders on the harm-reduction language. If that doesn’t happen, the letter warns, “we risk crafting a U.N. declaration that is at odds with our own national policies and interests, even as we needlessly alienate our nation’s allies in Europe.”
Editorial
Time Lag in Vienna?
Programs that give drug addicts access to clean needles have been shown the world over to slow the spread of deadly diseases including H.I.V./AIDS and hepatitis. Public health experts were relieved when President Obama announced his support for ending a ban on federal funding for such programs.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s message seems not to have reached the American delegation to a United Nations drug policy summit in Vienna, where progress is stalled on a plan that would guide global drug control and AIDS prevention efforts for years to come. The delegation has angered allies, especially the European Union, by blocking efforts to incorporate references to the concept of “harm reduction” — of which needle exchange is a prime example — into the plan.
State Department officials said that they were resisting the harm-reduction language because it could also be interpreted as endorsing legalized drugs or providing addicts with a place to inject drugs. But the Vienna plan does not require any country to adopt policies it finds inappropriate. And by resisting the harm-reduction language, the American delegation is alienating allies and sending precisely the wrong message to developing nations, which must do a lot more to control AIDS and other addiction-related diseases.
Some members of Congress are rightly angry about the impasse in Vienna. On Wednesday, three members fired off a letter to Susan Rice, the new American ambassador to the United Nations, urging that the United States’ delegation in Vienna be given new marching orders on the harm-reduction language. If that doesn’t happen, the letter warns, “we risk crafting a U.N. declaration that is at odds with our own national policies and interests, even as we needlessly alienate our nation’s allies in Europe.”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Plan Merida Kills from Agence France Presse
22 killed in surging wave of violence in Mexico
Tue Jan 27, 9:06 pm ET
MONTERREY, Mexico (AFP) – Twenty-two people were found shot dead late Monday and Tuesday in northern Mexico, including four found on property belonging to the state-run oil giant Pemex, police said.
The killings are likely the result of the ongoing war between powerful drug cartels for control of lucrative access corridors to the United States, officials said.
Petroleos de Mexico workers found the bodies of the four men, some half-dressed and with tape over their eyes, piled up in a well on company property some 150 kilometers (93 miles) northeast of Monterrey, on the US-Mexican border.
The men had all been shot in the head, police in this prosperous and heavily industrialized city told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile to the west in the state of Chihuahua, a state also bordering the United States, police found 18 bodies.
Among the dead were three men were found Tuesday afternoon in the state capital Chihuahua with their hands and feet tied. Police said that witnesses saw how the victims were forced out of a vehicle and riddled with bullets on the spot.
Other bodies were found in different state cities, including five in Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of a war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. Already 116 people have been killed in drug violence in Juarez in 2009.
In 2008 some 2,400 people were murdered in Chihuahua state, 1,600 of them in Ciudad Juarez, according to government figures.
The Mexican government has deployed some 36,000 soldiers across the country to battle organized crime.
Across the country, 5,300 people were murdered in 2008, the government said.
Copyright © 2009 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.
Tue Jan 27, 9:06 pm ET
MONTERREY, Mexico (AFP) – Twenty-two people were found shot dead late Monday and Tuesday in northern Mexico, including four found on property belonging to the state-run oil giant Pemex, police said.
The killings are likely the result of the ongoing war between powerful drug cartels for control of lucrative access corridors to the United States, officials said.
Petroleos de Mexico workers found the bodies of the four men, some half-dressed and with tape over their eyes, piled up in a well on company property some 150 kilometers (93 miles) northeast of Monterrey, on the US-Mexican border.
The men had all been shot in the head, police in this prosperous and heavily industrialized city told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile to the west in the state of Chihuahua, a state also bordering the United States, police found 18 bodies.
Among the dead were three men were found Tuesday afternoon in the state capital Chihuahua with their hands and feet tied. Police said that witnesses saw how the victims were forced out of a vehicle and riddled with bullets on the spot.
Other bodies were found in different state cities, including five in Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of a war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. Already 116 people have been killed in drug violence in Juarez in 2009.
In 2008 some 2,400 people were murdered in Chihuahua state, 1,600 of them in Ciudad Juarez, according to government figures.
The Mexican government has deployed some 36,000 soldiers across the country to battle organized crime.
Across the country, 5,300 people were murdered in 2008, the government said.
Copyright © 2009 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.
The Epidemic That Wasn’t from the New York Times
January 27, 2009
The Epidemic That Wasn’t
By SUSAN OKIE
BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.
There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”
When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”
But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.
“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb. “Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”
Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.
Surveys by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006 and 2007 found that 5.2 percent of pregnant women reported using any illicit drug, compared with 11.6 percent for alcohol and 16.4 percent for tobacco.
“The argument is not that it’s O.K. to use cocaine in pregnancy, any more than it’s O.K. to smoke cigarettes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University. “Neither drug is good for anybody.”
But cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem, Dr. Frank said. Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed.
Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.
At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children — 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.
In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” — the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.
Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.
But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.
And Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said that in a doctor’s office or a classroom, “you cannot tell” which children were exposed to cocaine before birth.
He added that factors like poor parenting, poverty and stresses like exposure to violence were far more likely to damage a child’s intellectual and emotional development — and by the same token, growing up in a stable household, with parents who do not abuse alcohol or drugs, can do much to ease any harmful effects of prenatal drug exposure.
Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological effects.
Dr. Frank, the pediatrician in Boston, says cocaine-exposed children are often teased or stigmatized if others are aware of their exposure. If they develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.
“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.
Research on the health effects of illegal drugs, especially on unborn children, is politically loaded. Researchers studying children exposed to cocaine say they struggle to interpret their findings for the public without exaggerating their significance — or minimizing it, either.
Dr. Lester, the leader of the Maternal Lifestyle Study, noted that the evidence for behavioral problems strengthened as the children in his study and others approached adolescence. Researchers in the study are collecting data on 14-year-olds, he said, adding: “Absolutely, we need to continue to follow these kids. For the M.L.S., the main thing we’re interested in is whether or not prenatal cocaine exposure predisposes you to early-onset drug use in adolescence” or other mental health problems.
Researchers have long theorized that prenatal exposure to a drug may make it more likely that the child will go on to use it. But so far, such a link has been scientifically reported only in the case of tobacco exposure.
Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated by the fact that like Yvette H., almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine while pregnant were also using other substances.
Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior — inadequate health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to high levels of lead. Dr. Lester said his group’s study was large enough to take such factors into account.
Ms. H., who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her last name and her children’s first names not be used, said she entered a drug and alcohol treatment program about six years ago, after losing custody of her children.
Another daughter, born after Ms. H. recovered from drug and alcohol abuse, is thriving now at 3. Her oldest, a 17-year-old boy, is the only one with developmental problems: he is autistic. But Ms. H. said she did not use cocaine, alcohol or other substances while pregnant with him.
After 15 months without using drugs or alcohol, Ms. H. regained custody and moved into Dayspring House, a residential program in Baltimore for women recovering from drug abuse, and their children.
There she received psychological counseling, parenting classes, job training and coaching on how to manage her finances. Her youngest attended Head Start, the older children went to local schools and were assigned household chores, and the family learned how to talk about their problems.
Now Ms. H. works at a local grocery, has paid off her debts, has her own house and is actively involved in her children’s schooling and health care. She said regaining her children’s trust took a long time. “It’s something you have to constantly keep working on,” she said.
Dr. Belcher, who is president of Dayspring’s board of directors, said such programs offered evidence-based interventions for the children of drug abusers that can help minimize the chances of harm from past exposure to cocaine or other drugs.
“I think we can say this is an at-risk group,” Dr. Belcher said. “But they have great potential to do well if we can mobilize resources around the family.”
The Epidemic That Wasn’t
By SUSAN OKIE
BALTIMORE — One sister is 14; the other is 9. They are a vibrant pair: the older girl is high-spirited but responsible, a solid student and a devoted helper at home; her sister loves to read and watch cooking shows, and she recently scored well above average on citywide standardized tests.
There would be nothing remarkable about these two happy, normal girls if it were not for their mother’s history. Yvette H., now 38, admits that she used cocaine (along with heroin and alcohol) while she was pregnant with each girl. “A drug addict,” she now says ruefully, “isn’t really concerned about the baby she’s carrying.”
When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”
But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth, and their findings suggest that the encouraging stories of Ms. H.’s daughters are anything but unusual. So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.
“Are there differences? Yes,” said Barry M. Lester, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University who directs the Maternal Lifestyle Study, a large federally financed study of children exposed to cocaine in the womb. “Are they reliable and persistent? Yes. Are they big? No.”
Cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus. But experts say its effects are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco — two legal substances that are used much more often by pregnant women, despite health warnings.
Surveys by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006 and 2007 found that 5.2 percent of pregnant women reported using any illicit drug, compared with 11.6 percent for alcohol and 16.4 percent for tobacco.
“The argument is not that it’s O.K. to use cocaine in pregnancy, any more than it’s O.K. to smoke cigarettes in pregnancy,” said Dr. Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrician at Boston University. “Neither drug is good for anybody.”
But cocaine use in pregnancy has been treated as a moral issue rather than a health problem, Dr. Frank said. Pregnant women who use illegal drugs commonly lose custody of their children, and during the 1990s many were prosecuted and jailed.
Cocaine slows fetal growth, and exposed infants tend to be born smaller than unexposed ones, with smaller heads. But as these children grow, brain and body size catch up.
At a scientific conference in November, Dr. Lester presented an analysis of a pool of studies of 14 groups of cocaine-exposed children — 4,419 in all, ranging in age from 4 to 13. The analysis failed to show a statistically significant effect on I.Q. or language development. In the largest of the studies, I.Q. scores of exposed children averaged about 4 points lower at age 7 than those of unexposed children.
In tests that measure specific brain functions, there is evidence that cocaine-exposed children are more likely than others to have difficulty with tasks that require visual attention and “executive function” — the brain’s ability to set priorities and pay selective attention, enabling the child to focus on the task at hand.
Cocaine exposure may also increase the frequency of defiant behavior and poor conduct, according to Dr. Lester’s analysis. There is also some evidence that boys may be more vulnerable than girls to behavior problems.
But experts say these findings are quite subtle and hard to generalize. “Just because it is statistically significant doesn’t mean that it is a huge public health impact,” said Dr. Harolyn M. Belcher, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician who is director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Family Center in Baltimore.
And Michael Lewis, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., said that in a doctor’s office or a classroom, “you cannot tell” which children were exposed to cocaine before birth.
He added that factors like poor parenting, poverty and stresses like exposure to violence were far more likely to damage a child’s intellectual and emotional development — and by the same token, growing up in a stable household, with parents who do not abuse alcohol or drugs, can do much to ease any harmful effects of prenatal drug exposure.
Possession of crack cocaine, the form of the drug that was widely sold in inner-city, predominantly black neighborhoods, has long been punished with tougher sentences than possession of powdered cocaine, although both forms are identically metabolized by the body and have the same pharmacological effects.
Dr. Frank, the pediatrician in Boston, says cocaine-exposed children are often teased or stigmatized if others are aware of their exposure. If they develop physical symptoms or behavioral problems, doctors or teachers are sometimes too quick to blame the drug exposure and miss the real cause, like illness or abuse.
“Society’s expectations of the children,” she said, “and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity, but by the social meaning” of the drug.
Research on the health effects of illegal drugs, especially on unborn children, is politically loaded. Researchers studying children exposed to cocaine say they struggle to interpret their findings for the public without exaggerating their significance — or minimizing it, either.
Dr. Lester, the leader of the Maternal Lifestyle Study, noted that the evidence for behavioral problems strengthened as the children in his study and others approached adolescence. Researchers in the study are collecting data on 14-year-olds, he said, adding: “Absolutely, we need to continue to follow these kids. For the M.L.S., the main thing we’re interested in is whether or not prenatal cocaine exposure predisposes you to early-onset drug use in adolescence” or other mental health problems.
Researchers have long theorized that prenatal exposure to a drug may make it more likely that the child will go on to use it. But so far, such a link has been scientifically reported only in the case of tobacco exposure.
Teasing out the effects of cocaine exposure is complicated by the fact that like Yvette H., almost all of the women in the studies who used cocaine while pregnant were also using other substances.
Moreover, most of the children in the studies are poor, and many have other risk factors known to affect cognitive development and behavior — inadequate health care, substandard schools, unstable family situations and exposure to high levels of lead. Dr. Lester said his group’s study was large enough to take such factors into account.
Ms. H., who agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her last name and her children’s first names not be used, said she entered a drug and alcohol treatment program about six years ago, after losing custody of her children.
Another daughter, born after Ms. H. recovered from drug and alcohol abuse, is thriving now at 3. Her oldest, a 17-year-old boy, is the only one with developmental problems: he is autistic. But Ms. H. said she did not use cocaine, alcohol or other substances while pregnant with him.
After 15 months without using drugs or alcohol, Ms. H. regained custody and moved into Dayspring House, a residential program in Baltimore for women recovering from drug abuse, and their children.
There she received psychological counseling, parenting classes, job training and coaching on how to manage her finances. Her youngest attended Head Start, the older children went to local schools and were assigned household chores, and the family learned how to talk about their problems.
Now Ms. H. works at a local grocery, has paid off her debts, has her own house and is actively involved in her children’s schooling and health care. She said regaining her children’s trust took a long time. “It’s something you have to constantly keep working on,” she said.
Dr. Belcher, who is president of Dayspring’s board of directors, said such programs offered evidence-based interventions for the children of drug abusers that can help minimize the chances of harm from past exposure to cocaine or other drugs.
“I think we can say this is an at-risk group,” Dr. Belcher said. “But they have great potential to do well if we can mobilize resources around the family.”
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Cocaine Use Up Among White Youth - NY Times
January 10, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Cocaine and White Teens
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.
According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)
While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.
According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)
And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment puts it this way: “The decrease in perceived risk suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine, which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future.”
But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.
So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don’t think so. We need a real strategy, right now.
E-mail chblow@nytimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist
Cocaine and White Teens
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.
According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)
While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.
According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)
And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment puts it this way: “The decrease in perceived risk suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine, which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future.”
But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.
So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don’t think so. We need a real strategy, right now.
E-mail chblow@nytimes.com
Sunday, November 2, 2008
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 JoaquÃn 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
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 JoaquÃn 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
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
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
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
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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
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
Friday, August 15, 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.
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.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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.)
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.)
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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
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