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

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 17:27 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Ben je zelf een (nu nog) illegale drugsdealer? Dan gaat legalisatie je een hoop geld kosten en zou ik ook protesteren op alle mogelijke manieren.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 18:09 schreef heiden6 het volgende:

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Nee, ik ben geen drugsdealer, hoezo?

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 18:23 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Haha ik had niet verwacht dat je het zou toegeven hoor!

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US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report

• ACLU cites soaring use of war zone equipment and tactics
• Swat teams increasingly deployed in local police raids
• Seven civilians killed and 46 injured in incidents since 2010

At 3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was sleeping peacefully in his cot.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot. Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. “I kept asking the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit down,” she said.

As the pandemonium died down, it became clear that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and that the officers had taken him away.

“They told me that they had taken my baby to the hospital. They said he was fine he had only lost a tooth, but they wanted him in for observation,” Phonesavanh said.

When she got to the hospital she was horrified by what she saw. Bou Bou was in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit of Brady Memorial hospital. “His face was blown open. He had a hole in his chest that left his rib-cage visible.”

The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou’s cot and detonated in the baby’s face.

“My son is clinging to life. He’s hurting and there’s nothing I can do to help him,” Phonesavanh said. “It breaks you, it breaks your spirit.”

Bou Bou is not alone. A growing number of innocent people, many of them children and a high proportion African American, are becoming caught up in violent law enforcement raids that are part of an ongoing trend in America towards paramilitary policing.

The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its new survey into the use of Swat teams by police forces across the country. It concludes that policing has become dangerously and unnecessarily militarized, literally so with equipment and strategies being imported directly from the US army.

The findings set up a striking and troubling paradox. The Obama administration is completing its withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the US is on the verge of being free from war for the first time in more than a decade; yet at the same time the hardware and tactics of the war zone are quietly proliferating at home.

The ACLU’s report, War Comes Home, looks at 818 Swat incidents that were carried out by more than 20 law enforcement agencies in 11 states. The raids spanned the period from July 2010 to last October.

At the very least, the ACLU finds, the growing use of battering rams to smash down doors is causing property damage to the homes that are raided. At worst, people are dying or being injured by police teams deploying the techniques of the battlefield.

The survey, which covered only a small snapshot of what is going on around the country each year, found seven cases where civilians died in connection with the deployment of the Swat teams, two of which appeared to be suicides. A further 46 civilians were injured, often due to use of force by officers.

The victims include Aiyana Stanley-Jones, seven, who was killed in 2010 when a Swat team threw a flashbang grenade like the one that injured Bou Bou into the room where she was sleeping. The device set fire to Aiyana’s blanket and when officers burst into the room they shot at the flames and hit her.

Then there was Tarika Wilson who was shot dead by Swat officers as she was holding her 14-month-old son in Lima, Ohio; the baby was injured but survived. And Eurie Stamp, a grandfather of 12, who was sitting watching baseball on TV in his pajamas in Farmington, Massachusetts, in January 2011 when a Swat team battered down his door, threw a flashbang device into the room and forced him to lie facedown on the floor. One of the officers’ guns discharged and killed Stamp, who was not the man they had come to apprehend, as he lay there.

Also in 2011, Jose Guerena, a veteran of the Iraq war, was shot 22 times in his kitchen at home in Tucson, Arizona, by officers in a Swat team that was searching the neighbourhood for drugs. Nothing was found in the Guerena home.

Swat teams were a late 1960s invention that emerged out of the Los Angeles police department. Initially, they were designed to help officers react to perilous situations such as riots, hostage taking and where an active shooter was barricaded into a house.

But they have developed into something entirely different. The ACLU survey found that 62% of Swat team call-outs were for drug searches. Some 79% involved raids on private homes, and a similar proportion were done on the back of warrants authorizing searches. By contrast, only about 7% fell into those categories for which the technique was originally intended, such as hostage situations or barricades.


“Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using paramilitary squads to search people’s homes for drugs,” the ACLU writes. It adds: “Neighbourhoods are not war zones and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

Research by Peter Kraska, a professor at Kentucky University, has tracked the exponential growth in the use of paramilitary tactics in the US. In the 1980s there were as few as 3,000 Swat raids a year, but by around 2005 that number had leapt to 45,000.

Such a rapid proliferation has been actively encouraged by the federal government, particularly by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, and by the Defense Department. The Pentagon channels military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic police forces under its 1033 programme, which the ACLU found had transmitted 15,000 items of battle uniforms and personal protective gear during the survey period.

The amount of equipment handed over can be substantial. North Little Rock police force in Arkansas, for instance, was granted 34 automatic and semi-automatic rifles, two MARCbot robots from Afghanistan that can be weaponised, helmets for ground troops and a tactical armoured vehicle.

Armoured personnel carriers, or APCs, have proliferated dramatically under the 1033 programme. About 500 law enforcement agencies believed to have received military vehicles built specifically to resist roadside bombs. The local police for Ohio state university even has an APC for use on American football match days.

Once the equipment has been handed over, the temptation is to use it. That certainly was the case for the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, who in April sent a Swat team to search the house of someone who had poked fun at him in a satirical Twitter account.

As the ACLU notes: “if the federal government gives the police a huge cache of military-style weaponry, they are highly likely to use it, even if they do not really need to.”

As for the infant, Bou Bou Phonesavanh, he remains in intensive care after having been through a series of operations. “Everything is touch and go. Nothing is determined, nothing is decided,” Alecia Phonesavanh said.

The Phonesavanhs’ lawyer, Mawuli Davis, said the Swat team should have known that young children were present in the room they were raiding as there were clear tell-tale signs: a playpen outside the door and a van parked outside with four child seats in it. “We have to address the way that police in this country are armed as if they are invading a foreign land,” Mawuli said. “It’s disturbing, and innocent people are hurting.”

A few hours after the raid took place, police located the suspect they had been seeking at a different house in the neighbourhood. The officers knocked on the door, the suspect opened it, and agreed peacefully to come in for questioning.

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June 22, 2014 |
A piece in the Washington Post highlights the growing backlog of untested rape test kits that are sitting in police storage units while rapists run free and victims suffer. Missing from the story, however, is one of the biggest contributors to this backlog, the enormous amount of police and tax resources spent targeting drug crimes, particularly marijuana possession.

The backlog is a disgrace. The total number of rape test kits that have never been sent to laboratories for testing exceeds 100,000. In some cases, the kits have been sitting in storage for decades. From the Washington Post:

“In 2009, authorities found more than 11,000 unprocessed kits at the Detroit crime lab after it was closed for improperly handling weapons evidence. After testing the first 2,000 kits, authorities identified 127 serial rapists and made 473 matches overall to known convicts or arrestees, or to unknown people whose genetic material was found at crime scenes.”

The real question is why does this backlog exist at all? Cities and states claim they don’t have the money or other resources, but they sure do have plenty of time and money to arrest people for drugs.

About 1.5 million Americans are arrested for drugs annually - about 660,000 for nothing more than possession of marijuana for personal use. It takes up to three hours to process someone after an arrest. And since most arrests involve multiple officers in multiple police cars it’s potentially dozens of lost police hours just to arrest one person for marijuana.

It costs an estimated $10,000 to arrest, process, and convict someone for marijuana possession. Then there’s the cost of keeping thousands of drug task forces operational, most of which do nothing but bust people for marijuana or other low-level drug offenses. New York City claims to not have enough money to test all its rape test kits but spends millions each year randomly searching young people of color for marijuana.
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Grootste heroïnevangst ooit in Zuid-Afrika

De Zuid-Afrikaanse politie heeft bij een inval in de buurt van de stad Durban een drugsvangst gedaan die wordt gezien als de grootste ooit in Zuid-Afrika. In de plaats Kloof vonden agenten gisteravond een hoeveelheid heroïne aan die een straatwaarde vertegenwoordigt van zo'n 2 miljard rand (bijna 140 miljoen euro), meldden diverse Zuid-Afrikaanse media vandaag.

Behalve de heroïne, die in ruim 100 zakken van zo'n 40 kilo zou zijn verpakt, trof de politie ook laboratoriummateriaal en chemicaliën aan. Drie mannen zijn gearresteerd, van wie er twee de Chinese nationaliteit zouden hebben.

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'Softdrugsbeleid moet op de schop'

De PvdA-Eerste Kamerfractie wil niet meewerken aan het strenge softdrugsbeleid van minister Ivo Opstelten. Senator Guusje ter Horst vindt dat het totale softdrugsbeleid op de schop moet.

Het telen van softdrugs is niet meer in de hand te houden, onder- en bovenwereld zijn bijna niet meer van elkaar te onderscheiden en de nieuwe wet zal dat niet verbeteren, zegt Ter Horst tegen Nieuwsuur.

Ze wil de minister oproepen om binnen een half jaar een regio aan te wijzen voor een proef met gereguleerde en gecertificeerde hennepteelt ten behoeve van coffeeshops. De niet-gecertificeerde hennepteelt zou dan keihard worden aangepakt.

In een wetsvoorstel wil Opstelten het beleid juist aanscherpen. Het wordt na de zomer in de Eerste Kamer besproken.

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Op donderdag 26 juni 2014 17:59 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Worldwide Protests Erupt Over the Racist, Devastating, Failed War on Drugs

Today, over 100 cities in at least 46 countries will speak out.

Today, over 100 cities in at least 46 countries will speak out against the war on drugs.

It is difficult to overstate how much of a failure the War on Drugs has been. By any reasonable standard it has done much more harm than good. Drug trafficking-related violence has soared, our prisons are stuffed with drug offenders (many of them non-violent), with minorities disproportionately represented. It is a costly, global economic disaster with economic gains from cannabis and other drugs restricted to the black market.

Scientists are kept from studying cannabis, a plant that has proven to ease the suffering of countless medical patients—and those patients are forced break federal law if they want to obtain their medicine. Even by the drug war’s own misguided metrics, the project has failed. The US alone has invested $51 billion annually but drug use and availability have not decreased. Drug potency has steeply risen over the last several decades and the public is not safer for the drug war’s efforts.

Other countries, while not spending this absurd amount, have seen similar self-inflicted harm from their repressive drug policies. Criminalization has not done anything to stem the demand for mind-altering substances. Rather, it has created an ecosystem that fosters gang activity on a neighborhood level, and violent, politically connected cartels on a countrywide scale.

The final, and in a way, most tragic piece of this picture is that the drug war’s failures are common knowledge, yet politicians in the U.S. and worldwide (with parts of Latin America emerging as notable exceptions) seem almost entirely impotent when it comes to obvious reforms, namely ending cannabis prohibition.

The drug war’s colossal failure and near-global reach is inspiring an equally global movement pushing for reform. Protests, demonstrations, teachouts and other actions are being organized across the world in over 100 cities this week to protest senseless and harmful drug policies.

Support Don’t Punish, the campaign that unites these cities, seeks to change the narrative around drug users from criminals to people who may need social and medical assistance. The global day of action is timed to match the U.N. International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Political leaders have often used this day as a time for cruel demonstrations against drug users and the drug trade. Now, organizers across the world are working to reframe the debate on this internationally recognized drug day.

“To be honest, I don’t think we ever imagined it would be taken up on this scale,” lead organizer Jamie Bridge said.

Different countries are tailoring their message and actions to fit their specific situations. England, the U.S. and many other countries in the Americas are focused on pressuring legislators to consider alternatives to drug criminalization. Other countries are calling attention to the spread of HIV and other diseases through dirty needles. France and Australia are campaigning around “drug consumption rooms”—safe spaces where people may go to use drugs with clean equipment and receive social support. The French campaign notes that use of these rooms tends to lessen drug use and save public money through reduced crime and healthcare costs.

Still others are using the day of action to cultivate support through teach outs and citizen education movements. This tactic may prove especially necessary in Peru where many people support the repressive policies of the government despite its “tough on crime” stance having only a superficial effect, according to political science professor Juan Manuel Torres.

“There is complete ignorance of the dynamics of the phenomenon and the most convenient ways to fix it,” said Torres of the drug war and its social costs. (Prof. Torres’ quotes are translated from Spanish.) “One ton of cocaine impounded at the international airport is an achievement that will benefit the government in power politically, but it will not solve the underlying problem of drug trafficking in the long term.”

These politically popular but ultimately meaningless victories in the war on drugs are hardly restricted to Peru.

Niamh Eastwood, an organizer at Release, a London-based drug reform advocacy group, said in a press release: “In the UK…the two main parties – the Conservatives and Labour – are reluctant to engage in the debate preferring a ‘tough on crime, tough on drugs’ stance. That is why it is the job of civil society in the UK to highlight the damage the current criminal justice approach does and why, especially the Labour Party, needs to consider how our drug laws are interconnected with issues of social justice.”

Organizers in Mexico City found that the sheer number of street protests and demonstrations in Mexico makes people tune them out, so instead they are using the June 26 day to launch a microsite (a small, targeted website) packed with interviews, infographics and op-eds on why Mexico’s drug policies are detrimental to every one of its citizens.

“On July 28-31, the Congress is putting together a series of hearings on drug reform,” says Aram Barra, a drug reform organizer in Mexico City. “They want to have an open and very dynamic discussion. We talked to them, and we want the microsite to create the groundwork for the next month.”

The global campaign is spreading on social media via the hashtag #supportdontpunish. In Colombia, organizers are collecting pictures people have been posting with the Spanish translation, #apoyenocastigue, to use for a book and site launch planned for June 26. The day will culminate in an event featuring Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro, who advocates for progressive drug policies.

If each of these events is notable, the sheer number of them is staggering. The Americas and Europe are represented, but so are Kenya, Cambodia, Egypt, Macedonia and six cities in India, to name just a few.

“When we started last year, we set an ambitious target of enrolling seven cities,” Bridge said. “We ended up with 41, and have more than doubled that for 2014.”

The larger project at work here is to change the dominant paradigm around drug use and abuse from one of crime and punishment to one of public health and social support. Drug users ought to be seen on a continuum from people who have a harmless hobby to people who are putting themselves and others at risk. Millions of people around the world understand this, and are making themselves known. It is time for the politicians that represent them to start listening.

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Day of Action 2014

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Thursday June 26th 2014 will be the second “Global Day of Action”. This is the UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, but also the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

The “Global Day of Action” will highlight how people who use drugs continue to be abused, stigmatised, tortured, beaten and even killed in the name of the ‘war on drugs’. The video below summarises what was achieved in 2013, and how you can get involved.

Support. Don't Punish -- Lets Make 2014 Even Bigger

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Op donderdag 26 juni 2014 20:29 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
New York:

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Mauritius:

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GDPP:

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Maleisië:

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Op donderdag 26 juni 2014 19:02 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:

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Goede zaak.

In Noord-Korea is softdrugs legaal, in Uruguay ook. Nu Nederland nog.

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Op vrijdag 27 juni 2014 01:12 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

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In a 2006 raid in Sugarland, Texas, police deployed a grenade that set a room in the house on fire, causing $5,000 in damage. They also shot the family’s golden retriever. They found two joints.



In 1996, a SWAT team in Fitchburg, Massachusetts (population 39,102) burned down an entire apartment complex with a flashbang they used during a drug raid. Six police officers were injured and 24 people were left homeless. Several officers were cited for bravery.



When police in St. Paul, Minnesota, raided the home of Larelle Steward in 2010, they demanded that he and his mother drop to the ground. When Steward attempted to explain that his mother had just had surgery, and wasnt able to lay down, they repeatedly kicked him in the face, breaking his nose. Afterward, they put a pillowcase over his head. They then fired a flash grenade at Stewards mother, catching her on fire. She suffered third-degree burns on her legs. The police had received a tip that someone was selling cocaine in the house. They found 2.8 grams of marijuana. The city approved a $400,000 settlement in 2012.