The World Wide War on Drugs #8 - Demonstraties in Mexico

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Op een na grootste drugsvondst ooit in haven Rotterdam

De douane heeft in de Rotterdamse haven zeker drieduizend kilo cocaïne gevonden. Het is de op een na grootste vangst ooit in de Rotterdamse haven, zo meldt het Openbaar Ministerie zondag.

De smokkelwaar werd vrijdag ontdekt bij een Rotterdams havenbedrijf in een container met cassaves, eetbare wortelknollen, die uit Costa Rica kwam. De drugs zaten in 3.003 pakketten met een brutogewicht van in totaal 3.500 kilo.

De cocaïne heeft een straatwaarde van ruim 120 miljoen euro en is inmiddels vernietigd.

In de haven van Rotterdam is tot nu toe één keer een grotere drugsvangst gedaan. In 2005 werd ruim 4.200 kilo cocaïne verstopt in enorme haspels gevonden.

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State-run marijuana sales plan survives as left wins Uruguayan election

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Tabare Vazquez won Uruguay’s presidential election on Sunday in a show of support for the leftist coalition that has governed the country for the past decade and allows the government to proceed with its plan to create the world’s first state-run marijuana marketplace.

Vazquez, a 74-year-old oncologist who was president from 2005 to 2010, topped center-right rival Luis Lacalle Pou of the National Party 53% to 40%.

The runoff vote drew international attention after Lacalle Pou promised to undo much of the pioneering plan to put the government in charge of regulating the production, distribution and sale of marijuana on a nationwide scale.

Vazquez said he would proceed with it, unless it produced negative results.

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Mens consumeert al miljoenen jaren alcohol

Onze voorvaders consumeerden vermoedelijk al miljoenen jaren geleden alcohol. Dat blijkt uit Amerikaans onderzoek. De conclusie haalt eerdere aannames onderuit; er werd altijd gedacht dat mensen pas negenduizend jaar alcohol consumeerden.

De biologen van het Sante Fe College in Gainesville (Verenigde Staten) bekeken wanneer in de evolutie het enzym ADH4 opdook. Dat enzym is nodig om alcohol af te kunnen breken. Het blijkt dat de voorvaders van de mens al zeker tien miljoen jaar geleden het enzym in hun lichaam hadden.

Dat gaf een evolutionair voordeel. Zo'n 15 miljoen jaar geleden veranderde het klimaat drastisch, en daarmee ook de leefomgeving van onze voorvaders in Oost-Afrika. Als gevolg daarvan gingen zij meer fruit eten dat op de grond was gevallen, in plaats van fruit dat zij uit bomen plukten. Gevallen fruit bevat meer ethanol - een alcoholsoort - en dankzij het enzym kon dat worden afgebroken na consumptie. Andere diersoorten konden dat niet.

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Heroïnetesten te koop in Amsterdam

In zeker dertig smartshops in Amsterdam zijn vanaf vrijdag testen te koop die kunnen aantonen of gekochte drugs witte heroïne bevatten. Dit moet voorkomen dat er nog meer slachtoffers vallen door het gebruik van de harddrugs.

Dat zei burgemeester Eberhard van der Laan vandaag tegen de gemeenteraad. Ook zijn er speciale teams op straat die de testen - die 2 euro per stuk kosten - bij zich hebben. Via matrixborden, posters, flyers en social media worden bezoekers van de stad gewezen op de mogelijkheid de drugs te controleren.

Mocht er sprake zijn van heroïne, dan wordt verzocht contact op te nemen met de GGD. Op die manier hoopt de gemeente de dealer te kunnen opsporen.

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UN: parents of missing Mexican student teachers are at risk and need protection

High Commission for Human Rights says parents and protesters have been put at risk by a social media campaign to ‘vilify and insult’ their sons

The UN High Commission for Human Rights has warned that the parents of 43 Mexican students who disappeared after they were attacked by police have been put at risk by a campaign to demonise their missing sons.

Javier Hernández, the representative in Mexico for the UN High Commission, told the Guardian that the parents – and protesters calling for justice – needed protection amid a campaign to denigrate the trainee teachers who vanished 10 weeks ago.

“Some are starting to vilify and insult the disappeared students and demonise their parents and their demands,” said Hernández. “The vast wave of protest generated by the case of the 43 students needs to be protected.”

The disappearance of the students – apparently at the hands of corrupt local police in league with a criminal gang – has triggered a wave of demonstrations against violence and criminality enabled by the country’s deep-rooted political corruption. More protests are planned in the country’s capital on Saturday.

Several previous marches in the city ended with outbreaks of violence – fuelled by heavy handed police tactics and the alleged presence of agents provocateurs among the protesters.

The street fighting has partly drawn attention away from the collective disgust at the collusion between criminals and local authorities, which lay behind the attack on the students on 26 September in the southern city of Iguala. The students were set upon by police – allegedly acting on the orders of the local mayor – and then handed over to a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos.

Fernandez said he was particularly worried about jeers and insults directed at the missing students posted on social networks.

“Unfortunately, these attitudes are affecting the way demonstrations are being handled and the police response to the violence in some of the protests,” he said.

Hostile reaction to the students has often focused on the radical reputation of their teacher training college in the town of Ayotzinapa. Two of the country’s most famous guerrillas from the 1970s studied at the college, and the curriculum includes classes on “social struggle”. The disappeared students had gone to Iguala, two hours’ drive away, to commandeer buses to use in a later protest.

The anti-student tweets included dismissals of the missing as “bloody vandals”, alongside racist slurs and references to their poverty. Numerous jokes have used the government’s announcement that it believes the students were probably massacred in a rubbish dump and burned on a huge funeral pyre. One this week read: “The Hunger Games: Ayotzinapos in Flames”.

Hernandez visited Ayotzinapa earlier this week to support the families there, and he called upon other organizations to make similar gestures. He also warned that arbitrary arrests at protests threatened people’s right to protest.

The families and their supporters have called on the government to ensure that the students are returned alive, but the protests have tapped into anger over general violence and impunity.

Emiliano Navarrete, whose 17-year-old son José Angel is one of the missing, said: “People feel impotent and angry for good reason. The president has to take responsibility. The army was there and it did nothing. The federal government knew what kind of government there was in Iguala. It knew Iguala was a clandestine cemetery.”

Omar Garcia, one of several Ayotzinapa students who survived the attack, said the incident had crystalised the widespread sense that political corruption was driving Mexico’s descent into violence. Garcia has received death threats since the incident but played down the risk he faced. “We are all vulnerable before the alliance of organized crime and the state,” he said.

Fury at the government’s handling of the investigation has been further fueled by its failure to acknowledge the depth of its own crisis of credibility.

Leading the efforts to contain the damage to Mexico’s international image, the undersecretary for multilateral affairs and human rights, Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo, rejected accusations that the government has been too focused on its economic agenda to tackle violent crime and corruption.

“[The disappearance of the 43 students] is a big challenge but it does not mean we were not working on these issues before,” he told the Guardian. “It sounds a warning and tells the people, the government, and the private sector that economic reforms will never bear their fruit if rule of law does not prevail.”

Last week President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a 10-point package of measures he promised would strengthen the rule of law. Several were focused on corruption in local police forces. None addressed federal responsibility.

There has still been no serious explanation of why soldiers based in Iguala did not intervene to help the students during the attack, little more than a mile from their barracks.

Guillermo Valdez, a former head of the national intelligence agency, told the Guardian it was unlikely that the security services were not fully aware of longstanding accusations that the mayor of Iguala headed a kind of co-government in the city with Guerreros Unidos.

“It’s very likely they knew,” he said.

The president’s invocation of the chant “Todos Somos Ayotzinapa”, or “We Are All Ayotzinapa”, during his announcement also prompted derision during the last mass protest on Monday.

The president has yet to visit either Ayotzinapa or Iguala. On Thursday, he made his first visit to Guerrero since the disappearance of the students. While inaugurating a new bridge, he called for “a collective effort to move forward so that we can truly leave behind this painful movement”.

Some analysts suggest the government’s strategy centres on the hope that the movement has peaked and will begin to fade away.

“It seems they are trying to buy a little time with the measures, hoping that things will calm down a bit over the Christmas holidays,” said Valdez. “It is a serious error not to address the problem of credibility because [even if things do calm down] another event like Iguala will fire things up again.”

Saturday’s march will be headed by parents and students from Ayotzinapa, but the protest has also drawn mass support from independent trade unions and campesino groups – as well as students and human rights campaigners.

“[The parents’] presence is the constant reminder that the government is not fulfilling its most basic functions,” he said. “The government and the political class lacks moral standing, and the parents are overflowing with it.”

The movement is also mining Mexican history for symbols that reflect the tradition of the struggle for justice. Saturday’s march coincides with the 100th anniversary of the entrance into Mexico City of the most popular figures from the Mexican revolution, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.

“The date symbolizes a lot. It contains the message that people are looking for real change,” says student leader Garcia, who will head the protest in Mexico City.

Garcia says the movement is currently seeking to harness the anger in a common agenda of clear demands, a difficult task given the multiplicity of visions; it is not yet clear how much can be achieved.

“The 26th of September is already a historic date,” he said. “Everything goes out of fashion, but we are not going to go away.”

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Burgemeester Mexico had eigen politiekorps

De omstreden oud-burgemeester José Velázquez van de Mexicaanse plaats Iguala had een 'schaduwpolitie' met agenten die alleen verantwoording aan hem aflegden.

Het gaat om tussen de negentig en honderd agenten die niet op de loonlijst van de politie stonden, maar wel politietaken uitvoerden en mogelijk zelfs misdaden pleegden.

Dat zei Jorge Hurtado van het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken tegen de krant La Jornada.

Velázquez is beschuldigd van onder meer moord op 43 studenten die eind september verdwenen in de staat Guerrero. De studenten werden door de politie in Iguala meegenomen en overgeleverd aan een drugsbende, die ze heeft gedood. Mogelijk waren de agenten van de 'schaduwpolitie' daarbij betrokken.

Het privekorps bestond uit gewapende mannen die geen vertrouwenstest hadden ondergaan, wat in Mexico verplicht is. Volgens de regering heeft de politie-eenheid van Velázquez corruptie en geweld in het gebied in de hand gewerkt.

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B.C. Judge Gives Absolute Discharge for Man Caught Growing 414 Pot Plants

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A judge has given an absolute discharge to a man charged with trafficking marijuna after police raided his Lions Bay home and found 414 marijuana plants, although almost half most were seedlings.

Michael Santos, an audio engineer with no criminal record, pleaded guilty to possessing about three kilograms of marijuana for trafficking.

The police raid took place on Feb. 28, 2013, when a battering ram was used to break the front door when no one immediately answered at Santos’ rental home, where he lived with his wife and two children.

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But the judge granted Santos’ request for an absolute discharge, noting Santos was an otherwise law-abiding, respected member of the community and a good family man, so his crime was one of very low moral culpability, akin to violating a regulation.

“His conduct was not dangerous or antisocial and recent polls suggest that a majority of Canadians do not believe such conduct should be the subject of criminal sanctions,” the judge said.

The judge added that law makers should seriously consider amending or repealing Canada’s marijuana laws, to bring them in line with today’s values.

“When it becomes common for persons of good character to willingly and knowingly conduct themselves in violation of a law, which is widely seen to be unwarranted or unjust or unfair, this should cause those who enact our laws and who are tasked with enforcing or upholding the law to give serious consideration to the repeal or amendment of that law to bring it into accord with modern social values,” Challenger said.

_{- Read the entire article at Metro.}

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Houston Police Chief Calls Drug War A 'Miserable' Failure, Says Feds Need To Lead Reform

The drug war is a "miserable" failure and the federal government needs to take the lead on reforming marijuana policy, Houston Police Chief Charles McLelland said Friday in a radio interview.

"Most of us understand, we do believe, those of us that are law enforcement executives, that the war on drugs, the 1980 drug policies, was a miserable failure, there's no doubt about that," McLelland said to Dean Becker, host of "Cultural Baggage," a radio show focused on the war on drugs.

Law enforcement needs to find the "most efficient and effective" ways to keep communities safe, McLelland said, and in order to do that, "we have to think differently about crime, crime prevention, drug rehabilitation, substance abuse, mental illness -- there's a whole host of things that we need to treat differently than we did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago."

McClelland is the police chief of a city that's home to more than 2 million people, and is the fourth most populous city in the U.S., behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The drug war, he said, has "disproportionately criminalized a certain segment of our population," namely young minority men. "It has a trickle-down effect, that a lot of young men who are minorities, in their early 20s, have a felony conviction on their resume, and now they're unemployable. And we wonder why they don't have jobs, they're not working, they're not contributing to society in a productive way, but we've put them in a position to where the odds are stacked against them."

According to a recent study from the American Civil Liberties Union, while black and white Americans use marijuana at about the same rate, across the nation in 2010, blacks were nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession. In Texas that same year, blacks were about twice as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana, and Texas was second only to New York for the most arrests for marijuana in the U.S.

"Have we ... stopped the flow of drugs coming from other countries into the United States?" McLelland asked. "I would say we've done very little because of our appetite and consumption. If there was not a market here in the United States, people would not be bringing drugs and contraband into our country."

Indeed, while the U.S. government spent between $40 billion and $50 billion a year fighting the war on drugs between 2000 and 2010, American spending on illicit substances remained about the same at about $100 billion per year, according to a recent RAND report.

During the interview, McLelland also called for the federal government to take the lead on reforming marijuana policies and not simply leave it up to states to change their laws. To date, 23 states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and four states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana.

"In my opinion, the federal government must take the lead into setting our drug policies, otherwise you will have all of these different states or different local, state governments coming up with different policies when it comes to certain drugs such as marijuana," McLelland said.

Under the Controlled Substances Act, the federal government classifies marijuana as one of "the most dangerous" drugs available, "with no currently accepted medical use," alongside heroin and LSD. McLelland explained that law enforcement is part of the executive branch of government, and as long as the federal government continues ban marijuana, it puts police departments in a bind.

"The federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, and it's a federal crime; it's very difficult for states to do that in a way that it doesn't put law enforcement in conflict with enforcing their oath of office," McLelland said. "And that's why the federal government has to decide: Is marijuana just as dangerous as cocaine, heroin? I don't know, but they're going to have to do that. And if it's something that should be changed, then take it off the list [of banned substances]."

Several lawmakers have introduced legislation that would significantly decrease the federal government's ability to interfere with state-legal marijuana operations or that would fully legalize marijuana at the federal level. And while Congress has failed to pass any of those bills, attitudes are changing rapidly on marijuana policy.

While Texas has legalized neither medical nor recreational marijuana, marijuana prohibition in the state appears to be on shifting ground. Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson announced that beginning in October her office wouldn't pursue criminal charges against first-time offenders in possession of less than 2 ounces of marijuana. And Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) said earlier this year that while he doesn't support full legalization, he does support decriminalization of marijuana use.

Even in the historically conservative state of Texas, McLelland said, he believes marijuana policy could be changing soon, and a majority of state voters appear to agree with him. A 2013 survey from Marijuana Policy Project found 58 percent of state voters support making recreational marijuana legal for adults and regulating the substance like alcohol. An even higher percentage of voters supported removing criminal penalties for possession.

"I do think that you're going to see some movement, and even here in the state of Texas -- and we have been known to be a little conservative here just as a state -- but the support and growing interest in changing some of our marijuana laws, even from Gov. Perry, shows you that people are beginning to think about this issue differently, and they know that we've got to do something different than what we're doing."

_{Listen to the full interview here.}

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NWS / Hongaarse premier wil drugstest voor journalisten en politici

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"De drugsmaffia is in ons land een groeiende bedreiging", zei de Hongaarse premier tijdens een interview op de Hongaarse radio. "We moeten daartegen strijden met de meest draconische straffen en procedures."

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The Federal War on Medical Marijuana is Over

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Good news for medical pot smokers: The $1.1-trillion federal spending bill approved by the Senate on Saturday has effectively ended the longstanding federal war on medical marijuana. An amendment to the bill blocks the Department of Justice from spending money to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries or patients that abide by state laws.

"Patients will have access to the care legal in their state without fear of federal prosecution," Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), a supporter of the rider known as the Hinchey-Rohrbacher amendment, said in a statement. "And our federal dollars will be spent more wisely on fighting actual crimes and not wasted going after patients."

The Department of Justice last year pledged not to interfere with the implementation of state pot laws, but the agency's truce left it with plenty of room to change its mind. Earlier this year, for instance, the DOJ accused the Kettle Falls Five, a family in Washington State, of growing 68 marijuana plants on their farm in Eastern Washington, where pot is legal. Members of the family face up to 10 years in jail—or at least, they did; the amendment may now stop their prosecution.