The World Wide War on Drugs #7 - Uruguay is tegen, wie volgt?

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Marokkanen overwegen legaliseren wietteelt

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Ecuador Frees Thousands Of Drug Mules

LIMA, Peru — In Latin America’s latest challenge to Washington’s “war on drugs,” Ecuador has quietly begun releasing thousands of convicted cocaine smugglers.

The move is a result of the country’s new criminal law, which took effect Aug. 10. It treats “drug mules” who commit the low-profit, high-risk offense more as vulnerable people exploited by cartels than as hardened criminals.

The reform retroactively applies heavily reduced jail sentences to those already convicted of attempting to transport relatively small amounts of drugs — often hidden dangerously inside their own bodies — out of the Latin American country.

Around 500 mules have already been freed and at least another 2,000 are expected to follow, says Jorge Paladines, national coordinator of the Public Defender’s Office. The sentence reduction is not automatic and can only happen after a court hearing, which the prisoner has to request.

“There is a policy of seeing mules as victims of the drug trade,” Paladines told GlobalPost. “I don’t like using the term ‘sentence reduction,’ because was their sentence fair to start with? This is really about sentence proportionality.”

This is hardly the first time Ecuador’s populist leftist president, Rafael Correa, has defied the United States. In the past, he’s granted asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and booted the Drug Enforcement Administration out of the country.

But this time, Correa has an unusually personal reason for his stance: His father was imprisoned in the US for three years in the 1970s for being a drug courier.

Although he usually avoids the subject, Correa has revealed he had a “difficult childhood” as a result.

Ecuador actually produces virtually no cocaine. But it is a major stop-off point for much of the coca-derived powder produced by its Andean neighbors, especially Bolivia and Peru.

Under its previous Narcotic and Psychoactive Substances Law, anyone caught smuggling up to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of drugs received a mandatory sentence of between eight and 12 years — even if the actual amount was miniscule.

Under the new law, carrying less than 50 grams (1.8 ounces) gets you three to six months in jail, while the penalty for someone transporting up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) is between one and three years.

The harshest sentence of 10-13 years is reserved only for those moving more than 5 kilograms (11 pounds).

Most mules are caught with between 1 and 2 kilograms. They conceal it in their luggage or often in their own bodies, crammed into tiny capsules and then swallowed or, for women, stuffed into the vagina. If the capsules leak, the smuggler can die from a massive overdose.

Experts say the micro-traffickers tend to come from poor families, often with limited education, and are easily preyed upon by cartels, whose members mislead them about the risks. Payment for a single run is thought to vary from $5,000 to as little as $1,000.

“The objective [of this law] has been to decriminalize poverty,” says Gerardo Esteva Vallejo, a lawyer from Spain who has been visiting Ecuador since 2007 to provide legal support for Spanish prisoners there. “This is a crime that, of course, is only carried out by people of limited resources.”

There are currently 85 Spanish mules in Ecuadorean jails and another 24 convicted in the South American nation but now serving their sentences in their homeland, Esteva Vallejo says. Their numbers have swelled in recent years with Spain gripped by economic crisis, including a ruinous unemployment rate that nearly hit 27 percent last year.

Many return to Spain “mentally and physically broken” after their time in harsh prison conditions, he adds.

Yet experts say most low-level traffickers behind bars in Ecuador and other Latin American nations are locals. They’re often women, including sex workers, single mothers and drug addicts who are desperate for cash.

According to the International Drug Policy Consortium, the number of women behind bars in this region almost doubled from 40,000 in 2006 to 74,000 in 2011, with around 70 percent on drug charges.

Hannah Hetzer, Latin America expert at the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based group that advocates for looser anti-narcotics laws, welcomed Ecuador’s new “fairer sentencing” that would allow convicted mules to “rejoin their families.”

“This is an important step towards fixing a broken criminal justice system that often falls most unjustly on the most marginalized,” she added.

Ecuador’s jam-packed jails — estimated to hold double their intended capacity — can definitely use the relief.

Overcrowded penitentiaries are a serious problem in much of Latin America. That partly stems from the police’s hyper focus on drug arrests since countries here adopted United Nations treaties and succumbed to US pressure to lock up more narco-traffickers, according to Systems Overload, a report on the region’s prison crises. Washington is even accused of conditioning economic aid and trade benefits on governments’ willingness to play by its drug war rules, the report says.

Some of the region’s leaders have been trying to turn the situation around.

In 2008 and 2009, Correa pardoned more than 2,000 convicted drug smugglers. But the new criminal code enshrines reduced sentences in law rather than leaving them to the whim of the president.

Correa has called the previous law "barbaric" for conflating small time possession offenders with major traffickers.

“I know where that drug law came from: imposed by the gringos at the beginning of the 1990s and accepted submissively by [Ecuador’s] appeaser governments [concerned they would lose their] visa to the United States,” the president said in 2011.

America’s narco evolution

Ironically, Washington actually appears to be subtly backpedalling from the hard-line approach President Richard Nixon unveiled in 1971. US officials have called for an end to the term “war on drugs,” to treat the issue as a public health problem, and to reduce sentences for low-level drug dealers.

Outgoing US Attorney General Eric Holder has complained about America’s “overreliance on incarceration.” “It comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate,” he saidin March.

In an email to GlobalPost, the US Embassy in Quito said its officials are “aware” of the South American country’s legal reform but did not comment on it. Officials are informing the handful of US citizens in prisons there so they can apply to have their sentences reviewed, the embassy added.

Ecuador’s Interior Ministry did not answer requests for comment, and officials haven’t made public exactly how many prisoners could benefit from the reform.

Paladines, the Public Defender’s Office coordinator, says the country currently has 6,700 people in prison convicted of drug offenses, around 5,600 of whom have been convicted for possession. “Not many of them are drug lords,” Paladines adds.

But how could someone make such a bad judgment as to attempt to board an international flight with illegal drugs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Esteva Vallejo, the Spanish lawyer, responds: “I ask the same question. The truth is they [the mules] don’t really understand the potential repercussions of what they are doing.”

“They are typically people who have not traveled abroad before, and some may think that in developing nations, the police and officials in the airport may not be that well trained or equipped.”

“Of course, the gangsters encourage that and lie to them and tell them they won’t get caught.”

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Morocco considers legalising marijuana cultivation

bdul Khaleq Bin Abdullah strode among towering marijuana plants and checked the buds for the telltale spots of white, indicating they are ready for harvest.By September much of the crop has been picked and left to dry on the roofs of the stone-and-wood huts that dot the Rif valley, the heart of Morocco’s pot-growing region. Bin Abdullah openly grows the crop despite the risk: “We are regularly subject to blackmail by the gendarmes,” he said as he scythed through stalks and wrapped them into a bundle.

Morocco’s marijuana farmers live in a strange limbo in which the brilliant green fields are largely left alone, while the growers face constant police harassment. A new draft law may bring some reprieve: It aims to legalise marijuana growing for medical and industrial uses, in a radical step for an Arab nation that could alleviate poverty and social unrest. But it faces stiff opposition in this conservative country, as well as the suspicions of farmers themselves, who think politicians can do nothing to help them.

Morocco is joining many other countries, as well as some US states, in re-examining policies toward drugs and looking to some degree of legalisation. But Morocco has a strong taboo toward drugs, despite the centuries-old tradition of growing the plant in the north.

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Germany's biggest ever stash of heroin found by police - video

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German police have found 330kg of heroin hidden in jars in a truck in Essen, west Germany, they announced on Thursday. Two brothers have been arrested following the find, which adds up to more than the entire amount of heroin seized in the country in 2013. The drugs are believed to have a street value of around ¤50 million

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België: einde gedoogbeleid drugs

De nieuwe Belgische regering gaat het bezit en gebruik van softdrugs weer hard aanpakken. Volgens Belgische media maakt de regering van premier Michel een einde aan het gedoogbeleid.

Het bezit van alle drugs is in België verboden, maar justitie vervolgt meerderjarigen niet als ze voor eigen gebruik hooguit 3 gram in huis hebben. De processen-verbaal worden systematisch geseponeerd.

De nieuwe regering wil daar een eind aan maken; ook bezit van een paar gram voor eigen gebruik wordt binnenkort weer aangepakt.

In Antwerpen, waar de Vlaams-nationalist Bart De Wever burgemeester is, wordt bezit van softdrugs al niet meer gedoogd. De Wever voert een harde strijd tegen softdrugs in zijn stad.

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Lebanon cannabis trade thrives in shadow of Isis war – video report

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With war raging against Islamic State (Isis) in Syria and Iraq, illegal marijuana plantations are thriving in neighbouring Lebanon. In the past, the Lebanese government has routinely destroyed the crops, found in the east of the country, but it is now busy battling militants. Farmers say the government's lack of economic investment in the region has forced people to cultivate the drug

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Mexico violence flares as fury grows over fate of missing students

Demonstrators attack government building with rocks and Molotov cocktails in protest at alleged abduction by police


Hundreds of students and teachers smashed windows and set fires inside a state capital building in southern Mexico, as fury erupted over the disappearance of 43 young people believed abducted by local police linked to a drug cartel.

The protesters called for the safe return of the students from a rural teachers’ college in Guerrero state, missing since 26 September, even though fears have grown that 10 newly discovered mass graves could contain their bodies.

Associated Press photographs showed smoke billowing from the government building in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, and flames licking from office windows. Firefighters battled the blaze.

Government spokesman Jose Villanueva Manzanarez said the protesting members of a teachers’ union initially tried to get into the state congress in Chilpancingo but were repelled by anti-riot police. They then headed to the state government palace.

With the support of hundreds of students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college, the teachers blockaded the capital building, attacking it with iron bars, rocks and Molotov cocktails, he said.

The violence came more than two weeks after police in Iguala, also in Guerrero state, opened fire on the teacher’s college students, killing at least six. Witnesses have said that dozens of students were taken away by police and have not been seen since. Twenty-six local police officers have been detained, and officials are attempting to determine if any of the students are in the mass graves nearby.

The confrontation in Iguala shed light on a widespread problem with local police in Mexico: They are often linked to organised crime. In the case of Iguala, the police who attacked the students were working with the local cartel, Guerreros Unidos, according to testimony of those arrested.

Monday’s protests came after police in Guerrero shot and wounded a German university student in a reported case of mistaken identity, prosecutors said.

The victim, Kim Fritz Kaiser, is an exchange student at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico City campus, said the institute’s director, Pedro Grassa.

He told the Milenio TV station on Monday that Kaiser was in good condition and that that the injury was not grave, though Kaiser would remain under observation.

Kaiser was in a van with other students another German, two French and six Mexicans travelling back from Acapulco and passing through Chilpancingo just after a confrontation between police and kidnappers that killed one officer.

Police tried to stop the van, believing it was suspicious. Police said they opened fire when they heard something that sounded like a shot or detonation, said Victor Leon Maldonado of the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office. The students kept driving, fearing that armed men might be trying to kidnap them, the state prosecutor, Inaky Blanco, said.

Maldonado told reporters in a press conference that the officers shot at the bottom of the van, trying to hit the tyres to make it stop. Kaiser was shot in the buttocks. The police involved have been detained and their weapons are being tested, according to a statement from the state attorney general’s office.

A US state department travel warning issued last week said American citizens should avoid Chilpancingo along with all parts of Guerrero state outside of the Pacific resorts of Acapulco, Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo and the tourist attractions of Taxco and the Cacahuamilpa caves.

A previous warning in January already advised against travel in the north-western part of the state near the border with Mexico state, where Iguala is located.

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Principiële wietkwekers uit Bierum ontlopen werkstraf

Twee principiële wiettelers uit het Groningse Bierum zijn donderdag zonder straf weggekomen met het telen van hennep. Volgens de rechtbank in Groningen past hun teelt in het Nederlandse gedoogbeleid.

De twee zouden op verantwoorde wijze wiet hebben geteeld, vervoerd en verkocht.

Het Openbaar Ministerie (OM) had twee weken geleden nog werkstraffen geëist tegen het paar voor de illegale teelt van hennep. De twee kwekers telen al jaren uit principe en zijn al meerdere keren veroordeeld.

De rechtbank in Groningen zegt dat de twee zich wel schuldig hebben gemaakt aan hennepteelt, maar legt bewust geen straf op.

De afgelopen jaren zijn in Bellingwolde en later in Bierum plantages van het stel opgerold, waarbij 2.500 wietplanten, negenhonderd stekken en acht kilo henneptoppen in beslag zijn genomen.

De 49-jarige man en de 39-jarige vrouw kweken wiet sinds 2009. Ze telen biologisch zonder bestrijdingsmiddelen, knoeien niet met de elektriciteit en dragen belasting af. De kwekers zeggen geen bemoeienissen te hebben met het criminele circuit.

Ze betalen de hoge stroomrekening en de belastingen en houden een transparante administratie bij. Ook leveren ze alleen aan door de gemeente goedkeurde coffeeshops.

Gedoogbeleid

De verdachten menen dat het gedoogbeleid niet klopt en willen dat veranderen. Ook de rechtbank wijst erop dat het huidige gedoogbeleid op sommige punten niet duidelijk is.

"Nu de verkoop van softdrugs uit deze coffeeshops gedoogd wordt, impliceert dit ook dat de coffeeshops bevoorraad worden en mitsdien dat ten behoeve van die aanvoer, ook geteeld wordt. Over de vraag hoe die bevoorrading dan plaats moet vinden laat het beleid zich niet uit", staat in de uitspraak van de rechtbank.

Open

De rechtbank benadrukt dat de verdachten tegenover de politie, het OM en de Belastingdienst altijd open zijn geweest over de teelt. Ze ontvingen naast hun drugsinkomen geen uitkering.

Bovendien hebben ze de wiet op een veilige manier geteeld. De teelt zou geen overlast hebben veroorzaakt voor de omgeving.

De rechtbank vindt dat de verdachten hebben gehandeld naar de belangrijkste doelstellingen van het softdrugsbeleid, "te weten het belang van de volksgezondheid en het handhaven van de openbare orde".

Opstelten

Minister Opstelten van Veiligheid en Justitie zegt het een verrassende uitspraak te vinden van de rechter in Groningen. "Verder wil ik er niet te veel over zeggen, want ik wil het Openbaar Ministerie niet voor de voeten lopen."

De minister wees op een vergelijkbare zaak die eerder in Leeuwarden onder de rechter kwam. "Daar was de uitspraak anders. Het gaat hoe dan ook ons beleid niet veranderen, want we houden ons aan internationale verdragen."

Niet houdbaar

D66-Kamerlid Magda Berndsen zegt in een reactie dat de "de achterdeur van coffeeshops nu openstaat". Berndsen: "Het Opstelten om de teelt van cannabis illegaal te houden is niet langer houdbaar door deze uitspraak van de rechter."

D66 zet al langer in op regulering van wietteelt door Opstelten. "Het is de enige oplossing voor een groot deel van de problemen waar gemeenten nu mee kampen", zegt Berndsen.

"Hiermee kunnen we de gezondheidsrisico's beperken, politiecapaciteit voor andere prioriteiten inzetten en brandgevaarlijke situaties voorkomen. En in de tussentijd roep ik Opstelten op om de experimenten met wietteelt toe te staan."

"Dit is allerminst een steun in de rug voor Opstelten", reageert Michiel van Nispen van de SP. "Zelfs rechters vinden nu dat het huidige beleid niet meer kan. Hij zal donderdagmiddag tijdens een debat in de Tweede Kamer de minister aansporen om stappen te zetten in de richting van gereguleerde wietteelt."

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Tilburg mag kantoor coffeeshopketen Grass Company sluiten

REDA/TILBURG – Burgemeester Peter Noordanus van Tilburg mag het kantoor van de verdachte coffeeshopketen The Grass Company sluiten, maar niet meteen.

Het pand aan de Kooikerstraat moet op 17 november dicht zijn. De rechter in Breda heeft dat gisteren bepaald in een kort geding.

In de kelder onder het kantoor werd bij een inval in juli bijna 10 kilo softdrugs gevonden die was bedoeld voor de vier coffeeshops van het bedrijf. De rechter meent dat The Grass Company meer tijd moet krijgen om het pand te verlaten omdat de burgemeester wist dat de handelsvoorraad er werd verwerkt en hij eerder bewust niet heeft opgetreden.

Het was voor de derde keer in een paar jaar dat de voorraad van het bedrijf werd opgerold. De coffeeshopketen en de eigenaar worden onder andere verdacht van witwassen, corruptie en belastingfraude.

Tegen de sluiting van het kantoor loopt ook nog een bodemzaak.

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Op donderdag 16 oktober 2014 15:27 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op donderdag 16 oktober 2014 15:27 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

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"Het gaat hoe dan ook ons beleid niet veranderen, want we houden ons aan internationale verdragen."

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Op donderdag 16 oktober 2014 16:50 schreef Basp1 het volgende:
witwassen, corruptie en belastingfraude.

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Op donderdag 16 oktober 2014 17:18 schreef Deeltjesversneller het volgende:

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dan krijg je dat

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Op zondag 1 juni 2014 21:40 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Dagblad De Limburger gaat onderzoek doen naar de Limburgse wiet-economie.

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Op donderdag 16 oktober 2014 18:24 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

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Would Joe Biden Put His Son In Prison For Doing Coke?

So the son of our Vice President was booted from the military for doing coke. This must be an awkward situation for Joe Biden, given his role in cracking down on drug use over the last few decades. Joe Biden created the position of “drug czar,” a key step in the drug war. As the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, he played a major role in passing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. He was the main sponsor of the RAVE Act in 2003, meant to crack down on MDMA use, which would have held club owners liable for providing “paraphernalia” like glowsticks and water. He still vocally opposes marijuana legalization.

To be clear: Hunter Biden wasn’t caught with actual cocaine. He just failed a drug test. But what if he'd happened to be found with a little bag in his pocket? Would Joe Biden would find it fair for him to serve 87 months, which is the average federal sentence for drug possession?

Of course, were Hunter Biden to be caught with powder cocaine, he would likely fare better than someone caught with crack. To his credit, Joe Biden himself has pushed for reducing the longstanding sentencing disparity between crack and regular cocaine, but possession of 28 grams of crack still triggers a five-year minimum sentence. It takes 500 grams of regular cocaine to trigger the same sentence. That’s an 18-to-one difference. (African Americans make up 83 percent of people convicted for crack offenses, even though the number of white crack users is 40 percent greater than that of black users, according to a National Institute on Drug Abuse study).

America has more prisoners than any other country—a quarter of all people behind bars in the entire world are in US prisons or jails. Nearly half of all federal prisoners are serving sentences for drugs. Many of them won't have a chance to "regret" their mistakes and move on, as Hunter Biden has said he will.