The World Wide War on Drugs #9 - Legal Highs are Go!

MS-13 - Root Of All Evil

Reefer Madness (1936) Full Movie

Retired Police Captain demolishes the War on Drugs

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Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2013: Peter Hitchens - There is No War on Drugs

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Colombian troops kill drug lord with 45 arrest warrants and a $5m bounty

Víctor Navarro, better known by the alias ‘Megateo’, had long dominated the historically lawless Catatumbo region near Venezuela where he was killed

One of Colombia’s most-hunted drug traffickers has been killed in a military raid, according to the country’s president, Juan Manuel Santos.

Víctor Navarro, a 39-year-old better known by the alias “Megateo”, had long dominated the historically lawless Catatumbo region near Venezuela where he was killed.

With a $5m US bounty on his head, he had faced 45 different arrest warrants and was especially hunted for a 2006 ambush in which his men killed 17 soldiers and intelligence agents who had set out from Bogotá seeking to capture him.

“Air force intelligence confirms that Megateo was killed. Big hit, congratulations. Criminals either face justice or end in a grave,” President Juan Manuel Santos said on his Twitter account.

Santos gave no details about how or when Navarro was killed.

Navarro claimed to lead the last remaining faction of the Popular Liberation Army, a rebel movement that disbanded in 1991, but authorities said he was one of Colombia’s biggest cocaine traffickers.

A thickly built man of medium height, he was notorious for wearing flashy, weapons-themed jewelry and for branding underage lovers with a tattoo of his face. He wore a big gold ring on each hand – one encrusted with diamonds, the other emeralds. In one photo police obtained in a raid, a golden pistol hangs from a necklace.

His brazenness drew comparisons, although in miniature, to Pablo Escobar, the cocaine kingpin who terrorized Colombia for two decades until he was killed by police in 1993.

Born into a peasant family, he took to crime in the late 1990s after paramilitaries killed his mother and a sister, according to Colombian investigators. Navarro projected a Robin Hood image, sharing some wealth with local people while putting numerous public officials on his payroll, US and Colombian officials say.

Navarro long evaded capture while lording over the forbidding jungle region that hugs Venezuela’s border, bolstered by alliances with various parties in Colombia’s half century-old conflict. He cooperated with gangs of former far-right militiamen and with the two largest rebel groups – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, and the National Liberation Army.
Colombians dare to hope as end of decades-long civil war appears in sight
Read more

Law enforcement fixated on Navarro because of what he represented: the possible future of organized crime in Colombia if peace talks succeed between the government and the Farc. Negotiators hope to produce a final deal to end that armed conflict within six months, and the smaller National Liberation Army also wants to begin peace talks.

Authorities worry that ideology-free gangsters will fill a vacuum left by leftist rebels, taking control of remote fiefdoms that the government has always had trouble penetrating. They would oversee coca crops, the raw material of cocaine, while employing ex-combatants of all political stripes as enforcers.

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The Missing Story of the Drug War - The New Yorker

^{Dan Slater}
Matthew Heineman, a thirty-two-year-old American filmmaker, was at the airport in Michoacán, the war-torn Mexican state west of Mexico City, when he had second thoughts about returning home. His crew members were exhausted. For three weeks, they’d worked twenty-hour days, trying to capture footage of the Autodefensas. Said to be composed of bricklayers, fishermen, lumberjacks, and other working-class types, the Autodefensas, a citizen militia, were making progress in their efforts to free Michoacán from the control of the Knights Templar, the area’s operating cartel. In June, 2013, as Heineman was setting out to document citizen militias in Arizona, his father sent him an article about the leader of the Autodefensas, a charismatic doctor named José Manuel Mireles. “The minute I read that article, I knew I wanted to create a parallel story of vigilantes on both sides of the border,” Heineman told me. “I wanted to know what happens when government institutions fail and citizens feel like they have to take the law into their own hands.” He hoped to emancipate the drug-war story from the headlines, and avoid telling it, as so often happens, through talking-head interviews with experts and officials.

Early visits to the region yielded little: he scored a meeting with Mireles and followed the Autodefensas as they took over a town called Los Reyes, but nothing much seemed to happen cinematically. As Heineman and his crew boarded a plane home, he was struck by the feeling that they were missing something. He took a camera, called his fixer—a local journalist—and headed back to Los Reyes. When he arrived, the Autodefensas had tracked down two Knights Templar assassins, known as El Chaneque and Caballo, men allegedly responsible for the kinds of barbaric atrocities now standard in cartel culture. A woman told Heineman that she had seen the men kill her husband and other members of the Autodefensas: “First, they burned my husband with a blowtorch while he was alive. After that, they came in with four more people. And they killed them one by one. They cut their head, their hands, their legs—everything—into pieces. They were laughing like crazy people. It made them happy.” Heineman filmed the Autodefensas closing in on El Chaneque and Caballo in a shootout. The two men surrendered. An aggrieved member of the militia punched one of them repeatedly; through tears, he demanded to know what had been done with the remains of his uncles.

The footage, a stunning scene of societal retribution, set the standard for a yearlong shoot that became “Cartel Land,” a documentary that premièred at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won for best director and cinematography, and was released this summer in the United States and Mexico. The Mexican thread is told through the closely observed perspective of Mireles and the Autodefensas, touching on an aspect of the drug war that had not been addressed in American popular culture: How do citizen militias figure in the war? By focussing on upstart vigilantes as they accrue power, the film reveals a reality more troubling than has been depicted by other drug-war stories—an increasingly fractured system, with new organizations cropping up to compete violently in Mexico’s criminal economy. The enemy isn’t cartels, or even drugs, per se, but geography; a lucrative criminal economy has been created by the position of a wealthy nation next to a poor one. More than half of Mexico works in the informal sector—as taxi drivers, street venders, waste pickers, and domestic help—and many can’t meet basic needs. Living in a country where crime seems to steal every opportunity often means that crime appears to be the only option left. When that chance comes your way, you seize it, until someone hungrier, angrier, or more brutal seizes it from you.

Fact or fiction, onscreen or on the page, Mexican crime stories tend to go wide, attempting to show the whole panorama of the drug war, from Washington to Mexico City and every debauched suburb and torture cell in between. Think “Traffic,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 movie, which follows Benicio Del Toro as a Mexican cop turned informant, along with an American drug dealer’s embattled wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and the imploding family of Washington’s new drug czar (Michael Douglas). Del Toro, perhaps more than any other actor, has made a career of drug movies. His work of the past twenty-five years can be interpreted as reflecting the evolution of America’s drug-war consciousness, starting with his early roles as all-purpose Latin villains in “License to Kill” (1989) and “Drug Wars: The Camarena Story” (1990). In the latter, his character, a Mexican smuggler, says of Americans, “We send them our chiva, our sinsemilla, our coca. We take their money and we steal a little bit of their souls.” By the time Del Toro appeared in “Traffic,” for which he won an Oscar, more Americans had recognized their own complicity in the drug trade, but they still saw it in terms of good guys and bad guys.

Since then, other representations of the drug war in popular culture have risen from the headlines. Don Winslow’s epics—“The Power of the Dog” (2005) and its sequel, “The Cartel” (2015)—fictionalize just about every major player of the past forty years. “I don’t think Americans know the sheer level of violence and chaos that the War on Drugs has touched off, so I try to make the point by sheer repetition,” Winslow told Men’s Journal. TV shows like the American version of “The Bridge” and the 2013 film “The Counselor” also hinge on the violence of cartel villains and their ubiquitous lackeys. Several nonfiction books similarly steep their readers in death while attempting to portray the entire cartel landscape—“El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency” (2011); “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers” (2010); and, out this summer, “ZeroZeroZero.” Others, such as “The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord” (2010) and “In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico” (2014), suggest the dominance of a single cartel or drug lord. These are flyover books with little firsthand reporting. They tend to treat the rising and falling cartels and capos as historically important entities whose backgrounds, victories, defeats, escapes, murders, and betrayals must be catalogued in order to understand where the war is leading. This guy killed that guy, then that guy’s brother took revenge, and there’s no end in sight. Viridiana Rios, a scholar of Mexican organized crime who is based at Harvard, has written that “Our focus on grand events has blurred our ability to recognize real critical junctures.”

Del Toro has a new drug-war movie, “Sicario,” out this month, which plays with our overly simplistic “good guy” and “bad guy” assumptions, and, like “Cartel Land,” it leaves viewers wondering whom to root for. Heineman told me that, as he was working on his documentary, “at first I thought it was a simple hero-villain story, with guys in white shirts squaring off against guys in black hats. Over time, the line between good and evil blurred. I became obsessed with trying to figure out who the Autodefensas really were. Where did their bulletproof vests come from? Who was paying them?”

The drug war is typically depicted as a problem of hypocrisy and delusion in the United States, and of tumult in Mexico. It’s a matter of “corruption,” one hears. But corruption, as “Cartel Land” shows, fails to convey the extent of the problem: in a place like Michoacán, there is no accountable government; no public trust exists that can be broken. A couple of decades ago, it wouldn’t have been possible for an upstart group to wage war, take over a few cities, and develop a cartel without high-level federal government connections. Today, in a void of central authority, evil moves through the poor communities of a narco state with a cancerous gravity, making every cell sick.

Recent Mexican history is packed with anecdotes about sheriffs and prosecutors who, often with the backing of the United States, gain reputations as law-and-order men bent on eradicating cartels and then walk away with unexplained wealth. Two fully reported books about the early years of the trade—“Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win” (1988) and “Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin” (1990)—show how many of Mexico’s most notorious traffickers have come out of the country’s labyrinthine security and law-enforcement establishment: the police, Army, Navy, and special-force troops. In the seventies, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo—known as El Padrino, a godfather of the Mexican drug trade—was a policeman in Sinaloa, the country’s drug-growing heartland, and a bodyguard for the governor. During this period, and through the eighties, the war on drugs, despite all of Washington’s lip service, was a secondary concern. Foremost on Washington’s mind was fighting Communist insurgencies in Latin America. The C.I.A needed its base in Mexico City, which meant accommodating Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate, a criminal incubator. In 1995, Mexico’s Interior Ministry reported that current or former law-enforcement workers made up more than half of the estimated nine hundred armed criminal bands in the country.

In “Cartel Land,” the Autodefensas take a stand against not just the Knights Templar but also the police who try to disarm their vigilantism. To wage a “legitimate defense,” Mireles says, the militia must ward off all criminal elements, regardless of uniform. But, eventually, under pressure from the government, the group votes to “legitimize”—transforming the Autodefensas into the Rural Defense Corps, with new police vests and government-issued weapons. Mireles, worried about compromising their efforts, refuses to go along with the plan unless the leader of the Knights Templar is captured; he goes on the run and is later arrested with eighty-two other dissident militia members.

As filming continued, Heineman faced a problem common among documentarians: how to end the movie. The gang battles of the drug wars are ongoing. In a meth-cooking scene that bookends “Cartel Land,” a man wearing an Autodefensas uniform says, “We as the cooks gotta lay low, now that we’re part of the government.” He adds, “It’s just a never-ending story.” All along, the Autodefensas were enmeshed with people cooking meth in Michoacán. In creating the Rural Defense Corps—many of whose members, Heineman estimates, were former and current cartel members—the Mexican government funded the formation of yet another cartel.

Bron: www.newyorker.com

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Op zaterdag 3 oktober 2015 13:38 schreef Gerolsteiner het volgende:

[..]

Ja cannabis kan elk land makkelijk legaliseren. Harddrugs zijn een heel ander verhaal.

Ik weet dat alle pro-legalisering-wappies niet echt helder kunnen denken (goh), maar er zijn voldoende goede redenen om niet overal cocaine en heroine te kunnen kopen

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Parallel Universes Collide: Drug Control and Human Rights at the UN | Ann Fordham


On Monday 28th September 2015, a high-level panel debate on 'the impact of the world drug problem on the enjoyment of human rights' took place at the 30th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. This was a long-awaited, historic moment. The impact of drug control policies on the enjoyment of human rights has been extensively and irrefutably documented over many years but genuine, open discussion on these issues has been very limited at the UN.

At the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna, there has traditionally been great resistance to the idea that human rights should underpin the global drug control response. In that forum, many governments have argued that human rights are under the purview of UN bodies based in Geneva, the seat of the health and human rights entities, and do not have a place in Vienna, where crime, law enforcement and drugs are the focus. This has somewhat improved over the years and in 2008, the CND adopted its first human rights resolution, prior to this human rights-based language was frequently resisted and outright vetoed. Although, last year negotiations almost broke down over tensions regarding the continued use of the death penalty for drug offences.


Source: Ann Fordham

In parallel with a push for greater recognition of the human rights dimensions of drug policies at the CND, advocates have also called on the human rights mechanisms of the UN to weigh in on the drugs issue. Over the years, various UN human rights experts such as the Special rapporteurs on the right to health and on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention have all raised concerns regarding various aspects of punitive drug control policies. But high-level, visible political engagement on this matter within the forum of the Human Rights Council (HRC) itself has taken time to achieve.

The momentum created by the upcoming UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs (UNGASS) next April has encouraged some governments to look more closely at the incongruence between drug control and human rights. In March 2015, a resolution was passed at the HRC mandating the Office of the High Commissioner to undertake a study on the impact of the world drug problem on human rights and calling for a high-level panel on the issue at the Council.

The panel discussion was compelling and interactive. Flavia Pansieri, the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave comprehensive opening remarks and Ruth Dreifuss, former President of the Swiss Confederation and member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy moderated the discussion. Panelists included representatives from the Government of Colombia, the West African Commission on Drug Policy, the World Health Organisation and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. I was honoured invited to join the panel as the only civil society representative on behalf of the International Drug Policy Consortium, a global network of 140 NGOs collectively working to reform drug policies.

The use of the death penalty for drugs offences and the violation of the right to life was raised several times by panelists and member states. There was still disagreement between those governments arguing to retain the death penalty and those calling for its abolition, pointing out that under international law, the death penalty may only be applied for the most serious crimes, and drug offences did not fall into this category. The many, widespread and devastating human rights impacts of the 'war on drugs' were recounted during the discussion and it was noted that the burden of the overly punitive and repressive nature of drug control has been disproportionately borne by vulnerable and marginalised groups, many of whom are engaged at a low level in the drug trade driven by basic subsistence needs.

As the only civil society representative on the panel, I drew attention to the damaging lack of coherence between the parallel universes of UN bodies in Vienna and Geneva, and called on the HRC to ensure that there continues to be attention from the Council to the serious and widespread human rights violations caused by an overly punitive and repressive global response to drugs. Towards this end, the Council should consider appointing a Special Rapporteur on drug policy and human rights.

Next April's important UNGASS is an opportune moment to align these parallel universes and ensure that global drug policy genuinely has the promotion and protection of human rights at its centre. The devastating human rights violations committed in the name of drug control must end. We will be judged by history.

Bron: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

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Duizenden Amerikaanse gevangenen komen vrij

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Circa de helft van de Amerikaanse gevangenispopulatie bestaat uit drugsmisdadigers. Rechters gaan nu de zaken van iedere gevangene opnieuw onder de loep nemen. Als zij geen gevaar vormen voor de openbare veiligheid mogen zij gaan. De meeste gedetineerden die in aanmerking komen voor het programma zitten al tien jaar of langer vast.

Critici pleiten al langer voor minder zware straffen voor drugsgerelateerde misdaden. Volgens hen wortelt de cultuur van lange celstraffen in de jaren ’80, toen onder president Ronald Reagan streng beleid werd ingevoerd in de zogeheten “War on Drugs”. Die richtte zich toen voornamelijk op cocaïne en crack (een rookbare vorm van coke).

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Agent aangehouden die informatie verkocht aan onderwereld



De politie heeft tien dagen geleden een ervaren politieagent van de Nationale Recherche aangehouden, omdat hij ervan wordt verdacht op grote schaal geheime opsporingsinformatie te hebben verkocht aan de onderwereld. De man zou jarenlang zeer gevoelige inlichtingen aan internationale drugsorganisaties en criminele motorclubs hebben doorgespeeld.

Bij politie en Openbaar Ministerie wordt gesproken van “het grootste justitiële schandaal sinds de IRT-affaire” uit de jaren negentig. Toen bleek de politie zelf in drugs te handelen. In deze corruptiezaak heeft iemand uit het hart van de recherche stelselmatig de onderwereld geïnformeerd over lopende strafrechtelijke onderzoeken.

Volgens welingelichte justitiële bronnen opereerde de politieagent vooral in de regio Oost-Brabant. De agent heeft naar verluidt met grote frequentie vertrouwelijke inlichtingen verkocht aan grote drugsorganisaties die in Brabant actief zijn. De corrupte agent zou ook warme banden hebben onderhouden met voormannen van de motorclubs No Surrender en Satudarah.

Een woordvoerster van het Openbaar Ministerie in Den Bosch bevestigt dat op 29 september een agent is aangehouden. “De man zit vast op verdenking van corruptie, plichtsverzuim en witwassen van crimineel geld”, zegt de woordvoerster. Op
2 oktober is hij door de rechter-commissaris in bewaring gesteld. De aanhouding is tot nu toe strikt geheim gehouden “in het belang van het onderzoek”, zegt de woordvoerster. Ze zegt dat “deze zaak nogal gevoelig ligt”. Er is ook een verdachte aangehouden die criminele inlichtingen van de corrupte agent zou hebben gekocht.

Bij de politie en het OM is men erg geschrokken van deze corruptiezaak. De verdachte agent had namelijk de bevoegdheid zich inzage te verschaffen in álle grote landelijke rechercheonderzoeken. Juist bij drugsonderzoeken heeft de Nationale Recherche de laatste tijd regelmatig te kampen met het lekken van criminele inlichtingen. De Rijksrecherche en de politie bekijken nu uit welke onderzoeken precies informatie is gelekt. Dat kan, aldus een betrokkenen, “levensgevaarlijke consequenties hebben” voor bijvoorbeeld getuigen en infiltranten.

De computers van de agent zijn in beslag genomen. Bij de aanhouding en doorzoeking van de woning van de verdachte politieman zou naar verluidt ook een groot geldbedrag in beslag zijn genomen. De woordvoerster van het OM zegt “niks te kunnen zeggen” over inbeslagnames. De Nationale Politie weigert elk commentaar over deze kwestie. Het corruptieonderzoek staat onder leiding van het parket in Den Bosch.
Bron: Trouw

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Drugsbaas 'El Chapo' zet miljoenen op hoofd Donald Trump

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Hij is kwaad omdat Trump, die wil meedoen aan de Amerikaanse verkiezingen namens de Republikeinen, racistische opmerkingen heeft gemaakt over Mexicanen, zo meldden Zuid-Amerikaanse media vrijdag.

De beloning die Guzmán voor Trump (dood of levend) in het vooruitzicht stelt, is aanzienlijk hoger dan de beloningen die justitie in Mexico en de VS voor zíjn aanhouding hebben uitgetrokken, respectievelijk 3,5 en 5 miljoen dollar. De drugsbaron wist in juli op spectaculaire wijze uit de gevangenis te ontsnappen en is nog steeds spoorloos.

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Liberal Democrats set up expert panel on cannabis legalisation | Politics | The Guardian

Group including former government adviser and ex-chief constable will consider how a legal market for cannabis could work in Britain


The Liberal Democrats are to set up an expert panel to establish how a legal market for cannabis could work in Britain, paving the way for them to become the first major political party in the UK to back its legalisation.

The move is backed the party’s health spokesman, Norman Lamb, and by a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Brian Paddick. It is in line with a 2014 party conference resolution which called for a review of the effectiveness of a regulated market in relation to health and reduced criminal activity.

The review panel members will include Prof David Nutt, the founder of DrugScience and a former chairman of the government’s advisory committee on the misuse of drugs, Tom Lloyd a former Cambridgeshire chief constable and chair of the National Cannabis Coalition, and Niamh Eastwood, the executive director of Release, a drugs charity. The panel is to be chaired by Steve Rolles, of the drugs policy campaign group Transform.

Lamb wants the expert panel to look at evidence from Colorado and Washington State, in the US, where cannabis has been legalised since 2012, and from Uruguay, and to make recommendations for the party’s conference next spring. He says a move to a legal cannabis market in Britain must be based on international evidence and include effective regulation to minimise the harm that cannabis can cause to health.

He said: “I share people’s concerns about the health impacts of any drug – legal or illegal. But we can better manage that harm by taking the money that’s currently spent on policing the illegal cannabis market and spending it on public health education and restrictions at the point of sale.

“That’s the approach we have taken with cigarettes and it has led to dramatic reductions in smoking in recent years.”

Lamb said the recent emergence of successful legal cannabis markets in different parts of the world meant the onus was now on the supporters of prohibition to explain why it shouldn’t happen in the UK.

“We must end the hypocrisy of senior politicians admitting to using cannabis in younger years – and describing it as ‘youthful indiscretions’ – whilst condemning tens of thousands of their less fortunate fellow countrymen and women to criminal records for precisely the same thing, blighting their careers.”

Lord Paddick led a pilot scheme in Lambeth 10 years ago which effectively decriminalised cannabis for personal use for a 12-month period. It demonstrated that the police saved resources, enabling them to deal more effectively with serious crime, and crime fell significantly over the period.

On Monday, MPs are set to debate the legalisation of the production, sale and use of cannabis as a result of a petition to parliament which has attracted more than 221,000 signatures.

A briefing for the debate by Transform says four US states – Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington – and the capital, Washington DC, have legalised cannabis for non-medical adult use.

It says legalisation in Colorado, where retail shops opened for the first time last year, has not led to a spike in cannabis use among young people, but has led to a large reduction in the criminal market, with the state now controlling 60% of sales. The predicted tax take for 2015 is $125m (£81m), of which $40m is to be allocated to school building programmes.

The home secretary, Theresa May, has repeatedly ruled out any relaxation of the UK’s cannabis laws. The Home Office maintains that the long-term downward trend in drug misuse is evidence that the official drugs strategy is working.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Cannabis petition: MPs debate liberalisation of drug laws | Society | The Guardian

Paul Flynn and Peter Lilley among cross-party group of MPs urging relaxation of laws on cannabis in debate called after petition attracts 220,000 signatures


Cannabis is the oldest medicine in the world, the Labour MP Paul Flynn has said, calling on the government to legalise the use of the drug for medicinal purposes.

Flynn was one of a cross-party group of MPs to call for the liberalisation of cannabis laws during a Westminster Hall debate in parliament on Monday evening. The debate was called after a petition to legalise the production, sale and use of cannabis attracted more than 221,000 signatures.

The Newport West MP said: “[Cannabis has] been tried and tested by tens of millions of people for 5,000 years. If there were any problems with natural cannabis it would have been apparent a long time ago, but all we’ve got is this wall of denial by governments who are afraid of the subject.”

Flynn compared the attitudes in the UK towards cannabis legalisation to attitudes in the US towards gun control. “We’re getting near to a position where we look at the United States with incredulity because they don’t accept the evidence on the possession of guns,” he said.

Related: Cannabis petition forces MPs to consider debating legalisation

“We can all see the evidence says over and over again that the more guns that are in society the more deaths there are, the more murders that take place, they won’t accept it.

“And we’re in a similar mind denial set … in many places in the world now they’ve recognised that prohibition has been a continuing disaster, a disaster more serious than the prohibition of alcohol in the United States but they refuse to recognise it.”

MPs pointed to countries such as Portugal and Uruguay and US states such as Colorado that have legalised or decriminalised cannabis, arguing that the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the benefits of doing the same in the UK.

The former Conservative minister Peter Lilley said that Queen Victoria had allegedly used cannabis to relieve menstrual pain, adding: “If it’s a Victorian value then surely it can be made more widely available.”

“Lots of things are morally wrong which are not against the law,” said Lilley. “Adultery is wrong. I think you shouldn’t betray one’s spouse, but you shouldn’t be put in jail if you do.

“We’ve got to get used to the idea that in a free country there will be lots of moral decisions that people have to make themselves without being told by the law what to do.”

Related: Cannabis: healthy benefit or deadly threat?

Norman Lamb, a former Liberal Democrat health minister under the last coalition government, repeated his assertion that at least 50% of the government had smoked cannabis before.

“There’s is extraordinary hypocrisy on this issue,” he said. “Senior politicians [are] frequently challenged about their use of cannabis and other drugs in their teenage and early adult years and admit to such drug use and laugh it off as a youthful indiscretion.

“And apparently [they are] comfortable with thousands of their fellow countrymen and women ending up with a criminal record for doing precisely the same thing, usually people who are less fortunate than those politicians who reach the top of government.”

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Peru to investigate cocaine 'air bridge' where smuggler planes are ignored | World news | The Guardian

Defence minister announces inquiry into military corruption as huge quantities are flown to Bolivia with apparent connivance of security forces

Peru’s defence minister has announced an investigation into allegations of military corruption in the world’s biggest cocaine-producing valley after claims the armed forces turned a blind eye to the ferrying of cocaine abroad by small planes.

The official, Jakke Valakivi, said the military’s inspector general would handle the probe.

Related: Peru authorises military to shoot down cocaine-smuggling planes

Peru’s armed forces have failed to effectively impede an “air bridge” that has delivered more than tonne of cocaine a day to Bolivia in flights that stepped up in tempo in the past few years, according to prosecutors, drug police, former military officers and current and former US drug agents.

In part because of the nearly unimpeded “air bridge” from the Apurimac, Ene and Mantaro river valley, Peru surpassed Colombia in 2012 as the world’s biggest cocaine exporter.

Police say the airborne flow accounts for roughly half of its production, with each planeload worth at least $7.2m overseas.

The trafficking got so brazen that Congress voted unanimously in August to authorise shooting down the single-engine planes. But the government this year inexplicably scrapped plans to buy the required state-of-the-art radar, a $71m expenditure it announced last November.

President Ollanta Humala has eight months left in office and an approval rating below 15%.

The “narco planes” have touched down just minutes by air from military bases in the nearly road-less region known by its Spanish acronym as the VRAEM.

About four times a day they drop on to dirt airstrips, deliver cash and pick up more than 300kg (660lb) of partially refined cocaine, police have told the Associated Press.

Wilson Barrantes, a retired army general who has long complained about military drug corruption, said giving the armed forces control of the cocaine-producing valley was “like putting four street dogs to guard a plate of beefsteak”.

One accused narco-pilot interviewed by the AP said some local military commanders charged $10,000 per flight to let cocaine commerce go unhindered.

The Associated Press said it repeatedly requested interviews with Valakivi, armed forces commander and air force to discuss the issue but none responded. At a news conference with other ministers on Wednesday after a cabinet meeting, Valakivi tersely announced the opening of the investigation. Minutes earlier he called the AP’s report “tendentious” and said the military rejected corruption in its ranks.

“Corruption exists but we are always looking out for it,” deputy defence minister Ivan Vega, who runs counterinsurgency efforts in the VRAEM, had previously told the AP.

The board chairman of the anti-corruption nonprofit group Transparency International, Jose Ugaz, said military drug corruption was an open secret in the country. “It’s been going on for some time but unfortunately no one has done anything.”

The VRAEM region, which is the size of Ireland, has been under a state of emergency for nine years owing to the persistence of drug-running Shining Path rebels. They have killed more than 30 police and soldiers during Humala’s tenure but are now thought to be down to about 60 combatants.

The government says destroying coca in the region would cause a bloody backlash by fuelling Shining Path recruitment.

Some 6,000 soldiers are stationed at more than 30 bases in the valley, ostensibly to battle “narcoterrorism.” By law counter-narcotics is the job of the fewer than 1,000 narcotics police in Peru. But police rely on the military for airlift and many chafe at joint drug missions with soldiers.
Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Steep fall in cannabis offences points to silent relaxation of drugs policy | Politics | The Guardian

Exclusive Police cite shrinking budgets and reduced stop and search, as possession offences recorded in England and Wales drop by almost a third

The number of cannabis possession offences in England and Wales has plummeted since 2011 as forces divert shrinking budgets into tackling more serious crime and officers rein in stop and search.

Figures released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act reveal offences recorded by English and Welsh police forces – including penalty notices, cautions, charges and summons – fell by almost a third from a peak of 145,400 in 2011-12 to 101,905 in 2014-15.

Crucially, the figures include all cannabis possession offences, not just those that led to arrests or prosecutions. The fall in offences cannot therefore be explained by police opting for quick cautions over lengthy prosecutions.

What the figures reveal is a silent relaxation of drugs policy in the last five years – and will spark fresh debate about whether there is a case to decriminalise cannabis possession.

Only last week a cross-party group of MPs called for the liberalisation of cannabis laws during a Westminster Hall debate in parliament. The debate was called after a petition to legalise the production, sale and use of cannabis attracted more than 221,000 signatures.

The fall in offences cannot be explained by declining cannabis use. While illicit drug use has fallen markedly since the turn of the century, the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that the level of cannabis use since 2010 had barely changed. In 2015 6.7% of adults aged 16 to 59 used the drug. In 2010 the figure was 6.5%.

Instead senior police officials pinpointed shrinking budgets, shifting priorities and reduced use of stop and search as the main reasons for the decline. Of the 43 police forces in England and Wales, 42 provided full-year figures from 2009-10 to 2014-15, and 30 provided part-year data from 2009-10 to the latest quarter of 2015-16.

Merseyside police saw the biggest fall in England and Wales. The latest data shows there was nearly a two-thirds fall in offences between April-July 2010-11 and April-July 2015-16.

Supt Mark Harrison, Merseyside police lead for cannabis, said the fall in recorded offences was due to reduced use of stop and search. “Increased scrutiny of police stop-search practices has led to more efficient, effective and targeted stop-searches. Additionally, decreasing police officer numbers will continue to result in fewer stop-searches in the future,” he said.

Significant drops were recorded by England’s large urban police forces and smaller rural ones, and forces in Wales. London’s Metropolitan police, the biggest force in the country, recorded 40% fewer cannabis possession offences in 2014-15 than in 2009-10.

When contacted, however, a Metropolitan police spokesperson said there had been no change in policy towards drugs misuse.

But a spokesperson for Gloucestershire police, which saw a 50% drop in offences since 2010, was clear that money was a factor. “We prioritise different crime areas according to greatest need,” they said, “and our priorities at this time are safeguarding vulnerable people, tackling dwelling burglaries and violence committed with weapons. However, when resources permit, we do investigate cannabis cases and execute search warrants when opportunities present themselves.”

Temporary assistant chief constable Bill Jephson, lead on cannabis for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said: “The police are having to manage demand with decreasing resources and this requires tough decisions on priorities.

“Cannabis possession has never been treated as a top priority and law enforcement continues to focus their efforts on the basis of threat, harm and risk targeting the serious criminals involved in the supply chain.

“Over the period covered by this Freedom of Information request, police forces have been focusing on making the best use of stop and search. We want to ensure that these powers are only used in the appropriate circumstances. It is likely this will have resulted in fewer offences of simple possession being discovered by police.”

In some regions, the police are openly discussing liberalising drug sanctions. In July, Durham’s police and crime commissioner said he would effectively decriminalise people who grew small amounts of cannabis, a move welcomed by those who argue that Britain’s current drug laws are failing.

Many experts said that “the future must see a debate about the decriminalisation of drugs, certainly of cannabis”. Prof David Nutt, the founder of DrugScience and a former chairman of the government’s advisory committee on the misuse of drugs, welcomed the shift in police thinking but said it was largely down to cost savings.

“The police had been spending half a billion pounds a year giving convictions for cannabis possession. Criminalising young people on this [scale] was a tremendous waste of money.”

Nutt, who has joined a Liberal Democrat “expert panel” to establish how a legal market for cannabis could work in Britain said that it was not clear this government “would look at the evidence and act in terms of policy”.

He pointed out that a Treasury report, leaked last week, showed legalising cannabis could save £200m in court and police costs and raise hundreds of millions of pounds in tax each year. “It would be rational policy to allow access to medical cannabis when 250 million Americans have access,” he said. “But we don’t seem to be able to do even this.”

Kirstie Douse, head of legal services with Release, a drugs advice charity that supports law reform, said a combination of reduced use of stop and search – especially in London – and deprioritisation of cannabis possession by some police forces explained the fall in recorded offences.

“Release welcomes police recognition that possession of cannabis is a low-priority offence, despite the lack of political will to formally acknowledge this. The evidence shows that the use of criminal sanctions to deter drug use is ineffective.”

Mike Penning, the minister for policing, said: “We are clear that all crimes reported to the police should be taken seriously, investigated and, where appropriate, taken through the courts and met with tough sentences.

“Decisions on individual investigations are an operational matter for chief constables based on the evidence available to them and investigations can be reopened at any time should further evidence come to light.

“This government’s drug strategy is working. The proportion of adults aged 16-59 using cannabis in the last year in England and Wales has declined from 9.6% in 2004-05 to 6.7 % [2014-15], with cannabis use among young adults aged 16-24 and young people aged 11-15 following a similar pattern.”
Bron: www.theguardian.com

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'Er wordt altijd gezocht naar de invalshoek: gevaar!'

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Drugs tijdens Amsterdam Dance Event

RondvraagAmsterdam Dance Event trok de afgelopen week ruim 350 duizend bezoekers. Er werden 250 aanhoudingen verricht en er viel een dode, meldt de politie. Wordt er bij dance-events te veel nadruk gelegd op drugsgebruik?

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UN denies Richard Branson's claim it is poised to call for drug decriminalisation | Society | The Guardian

Businessman wrote on his blog that the UN office of drugs and crime was poised to embrace decriminalising personal possession and use


Richard Branson has been involved in a bruising clash with the United Nations following his claim that the organisation is poised to endorse a global policy of decriminalising drugs.

Branson, a member of the global commission on drugs policy, wrote on his personal blog on the Virgin website on Monday that the UN’s office of drugs and crime (UNODC), which has been a bastion of the “war on drugs”, was poised to publish a statement endorsing the decriminalisation of the personal possession and use of drugs.

The entrepreneur described the move as a refreshing shift from a “body that has shaped much of global drugs policy for decades”, and said he was breaking an embargo on an expected statement because he feared that political pressure would lead it to be withdrawn at the last minute.

Branson said he and his colleagues on the drugs policy commission could not be more delighted at the move, given that he had argued for years that drug use should be treated as a health issue rather than a crime.

Within hours of his claim, however, UNODC made it clear that no such change in policy was imminent and said it regretted an “unfortunate misunderstanding” over the nature of a two-page briefing paper written by one of its senior officials. The paper by its head of HIV/Aids was scheduled to be delivered at a international harm reduction conference in Malaysia.

“The briefing paper on decriminalisation mentioned in many of today’s media reports, and intended for dissemination and discussion at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, is neither a final nor formal document … and cannot be read as a statement of UNODC policy,” a spokesperson said.

“It remains under review and UNODC regrets that, on this occasion, there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding about the nature and intent of this briefing paper. UNODC emphatically denies reports that there has been pressure on UNODC to withdraw the document. But it is not possible to withdraw what is not yet ready.”

The paper, seen by the Guardian, says that it clarifies UNODC’s position and explains that decriminalising drug use and possession for personal consumption is consistent with international drug control conventions.

The paper also highlights the imprisonment of “millions of people” for minor, non-violent drug-related offences despite legal alternatives, and emphasises that the threat of arrest and criminal sanctions have been widely shown to obstruct access to lifesaving health services such as sterile needles and opioid substitution therapy.

It also makes clear, however, that it is asking states to consider decriminalising personal drug use and possession “as a key element of the HIV response among people who use drugs”.

United Nations sources stressed that the briefing paper did not mark a major change in UN policy. They pointed out that such a historic shift would not have been announced at another organisation’s conference and would have had to gone through its policymaking process first.

Branson appears to have anticipated that the UN body would not back a global decriminalisation call. “As I’m writing this I am hearing that at least one government is putting an inordinate amount of pressure on the UNODC. Let us hope the UNODC, a global organisation that is part of the UN and supposed to do what is right for the people of the world, does not do a remarkable volte-face at the last possible moment and bow to pressure by not going ahead with this important move,” he said.

Danny Kushlik of Transform, a drug legalisation campaign, claimed that UNODC had been blocked from announcing its support and at least one member state had prevented or delayed a planned announcement.

He said the leaked briefing paper showed that while UNODC had previously conceded that decriminalisation was allowed under international law, a senior UN official was now arguing it was essential, and may even “be required to meet obligations under international human rights law”.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Canada's newly elected Liberals may legalize marijuana. That could impact US drug policy. - Vox

With the Liberal Party's electoral victory in Canada, the US's northern neighbors could soon undertake an enormous change in drug policy: marijuana legalization.

The policy was a big part of the Liberals' campaign: "We will legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana. Canada's current system of marijuana prohibition does not work. It does not prevent young people from using marijuana and too many Canadians end up with criminal records for possessing small amounts of the drug."

If marijuana were legalized in Canada, it would be a first among developed nations. In the US, four states and Washington, DC, have legalized pot, but it's still illegal at the federal level. The only other country to fully legalize marijuana is the tiny developing nation of Uruguay. And although some countries — the Netherlands and Spain, in particular — have relaxed enforcement of their marijuana laws, none in the developed world have outright legalized it.

But this wouldn't just be an important milestone for Canada and the world; it could also send ripples across the international system of drug policy. That's because drug policy is tied not just to each country's individual laws, but to a network of treaties that effectively make the war on drugs a global effort. Marijuana legalization in Canada would act as the most high-profile rejection of these treaties, sending an important signal of the changing times as the international agreements come under a critical review in a special 2016 session of the United Nations.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, much of the world signed on to three major international drug policy treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961, the Convention on Psychotropic Drugs of 1971, and the UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. Combined, the treaties require participants to limit and even criminalize the possession, use, trade, and distribution of drugs outside of medical and scientific purposes, and work together to stop international drug trafficking.

There is some debate about whether these treaties stop marijuana decriminalization — when criminal penalties are repealed but civil ones remain in place — and medical marijuana legalization. But one thing the treaties are absolutely clear on is that illicit drugs aren't to be allowed for recreational use, and certainly not for recreational sales. Yet that's exactly what the Liberal Party has promised to allow.

(For those curious, the US has remained in accordance of these treaties despite four states' move to legalize with a clever argument: It's true four states have legalized pot, but the federal government still considers marijuana illegal, so the nation is still technically in obedience even if a few states are not.)

So Canada's decision to legalize pot — if it comes, and that's still unsure — would be the most high-profile rebuke of the international treaties since they were signed. Not only is Canada an internationally active, developed nation, but it's a relatively large country — larger than all the states to have legalized so far and Uruguay combined.

"Canada's decision to legalize pot would be the most high-profile rebuke of the international treaties since they were signed"

In theory, Canada could face diplomatic backlash if it legalizes pot. But who would lead that effort? The US has been the de facto enforcer of these treaties over the years. But it likely wouldn't tempt an important ally, and trying to criticize Canada for legalization would only expose America's hypocrisy for allowing four states and DC to legalize.

Chances are, then, that Canada will be able to legalize marijuana, and potentially do so without any global repercussion. That will send a big signal to other countries — that, at least when it comes to marijuana, these treaties no longer hold the weight they once held. It could, then, expose a huge hole in the treaties, making more nations comfortable with the idea of legalization.

Such a move would come at a very crucial time in international drug policy: In 2016, the UN will hold a special session on the global drug problem. Drug policy reformers have long planned to use the special 2016 session to call on world leaders to change the international drug treaties to allow decriminalization and legalization. Canadian legalization would give these reformers an opening by showing that if the treaties aren't changed, they will soon be effectively meaningless as countries move ahead with their own reforms, treaties be damned.

Now, it's possible Canada will ultimately decide not to legalize — the treaties, for instance, could cause the new Liberal government to fear an international backlash and back off. But if Canada does move forward, it will not just change Canadian drug policy, but potentially force a big shift in the international stage.

Bron: www.vox.com

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Gerrit G. 'zeer waarschijnlijk' niet de enige mol in Rotterdamse haven

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Gerrit G., de 54-jarige douanier die in april aangehouden werd na de vondst van een container met 400 kilo cocaïne, is volgens de NOS waarschijnlijk niet de enige mol binnen de douane in de Rotterdamse haven. Zo schrijft de nieuwszender na inzage van het dossier van de zaak. Uit het dossier blijkt dat er sterke aanwijzingen zijn dat drugscriminelen meer douaniers hebben omgekocht.

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Rotterdamse haven knooppunt in drugssmokkel

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Volgens bronnen in het criminele circuit zijn er in de eerste helft van dit jaar al tienduizenden kilo’s drugs het land in gesmokkeld. Er zou zelfs sprake zijn van een overschot op de markt met als gevolg dat de kiloprijs voor cocaïne flink is gedaald.

De marktwaarde van een kilo cocaïne ligt normaal rond de 30.000 euro maar recentelijk zou die gezakt zijn tot net onder de 20.000 euro. Ook gaat het verhaal dat er in opslagplaatsen van criminelen in de regio Rotterdam duizenden kilo's cocaïne liggen opgeslagen en dat die op de markt tegen dumpprijzen worden aangeboden.

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'Tientallen drugslabs in woonwijken opgerold'

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'Politici deinzen er niet voor terug onschuldige burgers bloot te stellen aan de gevaren die vast zitten aan de War on Drugs zoals MDMA en amfetamine', zegt Korpschef Heeres van Breda tegen RTL Nieuws. Burgemeester Paul Depla van Breda zegt: 'Het zijn tikkende tijdbommen in buurten en wijken. Het is onacceptabel'.

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Megaproces drugshandel haven Rotterdam van start

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In Rotterdam is vandaag een megaproces begonnen tegen negentien verdachten die betrokken zouden zijn bij drugssmokkel van Zuid-Amerika naar Nederland en België. De bende zou actief zijn geweest in de havens van Rotterdam en Antwerpen.

De groep wordt er onder meer van verdacht computerspecialisten te hebben ingehuurd om de systemen van havenbedrijven te hacken. Zo kon de bende zeecontainers onderscheppen waar drugs in zaten.

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'Rabobank onderzocht wegens witwassen Mexicaans drugsgeld'

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In januari werd al bekend dat de autoriteiten onderzoek doen naar de Californische filialen van de Rabobank. Toen besloot de bank de vestiging in Calexico te sluiten. Volgens Bloomberg stapelen de bewijzen zich inmiddels op. Zo was er bij dat filiaal opvallend veel cash in omloop en reden de geldwagens af en aan. Mogelijk konden drugskartels via de Rabobank jarenlang hun geld witwassen. De autoriteiten onderzoeken nog of de Rabobank de signalen wel voldoende heeft opgepikt.

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Twee ton drugs ontdekt in privévliegtuig Saoedische prins

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De pillen zijn van het 'merk' Captagon, een van de meest gebruikte drugs in het Midden-Oosten. Sinds de oorlog uitbrak in Syrië wordt het middel volop geproduceerd (vaak met ingrediënten afkomstig uit Europa) en geconsumeerd in de regio. Het middel wordt, berichtte persbureau Reuters vorig jaar, gebruikt om lange, hevige gevechten te kunnen doorstaan. De verkoop van de drugs levert weer geld op om wapens te kunnen kopen.

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Cannabis cafes set to open all around Britain | UK news | The Guardian

Less than a week after the Government's top drugs advisory committee called for cannabis to be downgraded from Class B to Class C - severely reducing penalties for possession - campaigners are setting up coffee shops confident that such a move is now all but inevitable. Last week the Liberal Democrats became the first mainstream party to adopt a policy of legalising the drug.

The cannabis entrepreneurs setting up the coffee shops include an affluent retired businessman, an internet pioneer and a wheelchair-bound victim of multiple sclerosis living on disability benefits. Many have been attending a special course in the Netherlands to teach British people how to run a coffee shop, including how to tell the difference between types of weed and the best tactics for dealing with police and local authorities.

The movement has taken its cue from the Dutch Experience, Britain's first cannabis coffee shop in Stockport, which has been raided by police three times since opening last September. However, repeated mass protests made the police back off, and the coffee shop still attracts around 200 people a day. In the next fortnight, Dutch Experience 2, which is in the process of being decorated, is to open its doors in Bournemouth.

Other coffee shops are set to follow in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cumbria, Liverpool, Rhyl, Anglesey, Milton Keynes, Braintree, Brighton, Taunton, Worthing, and Lambeth and Hoxton in London. Britain is on course to follow the Netherlands in having a public cannabis café culture.

The campaigners have been encouraged by rapidly changing attitudes to the illegal drug, and the prospect of the Government downgrading it from Class B to Class C. All say they would like to co-operate with police and local authorities, but are prepared to go to prison if necessary.

Jimmy Ward, who went on the coffee-shop course in January, is currently working 16 hours a day with eight friends to prepare the Dutch Experience 2 for its opening in the next fortnight. Ward, who used to run a haulage business, was unable to persuade any landlord in Bournemouth to rent a café to him, so he is converting a storage unit he owns.

'We're studding the walls, putting in water, and a false ceiling,' he said. 'Ever since my girlfriend and I met 14 years ago we wanted to run a coffee shop. We thought we'd have to go to Holland, but with everything happening here, we thought we could open one in the UK.

'Everyone locally loves it - I've had so much support from the public. But no matter what the authorities do, I am determined to open this. I am not worried about going to jail, so long as when I come out it is still open.'

Ward has recruited pensioners to grow cannabis for him, supplying them with seeds and growlights, and has had expressions of interest from dozens more. 'It helps them to pay the winter fuel bills. They are angry about being lied to all these years about how dangerous cannabis is,' he said. A report last week from the Government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs concluded cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.

Jeff Ditchfield, who went on the coffee-shop course with Ward, spent last week looking for a property to buy in Rhyl, north Wales, to convert to a coffee shop. 'I don't want it in a residential area or near a school or McDonalds, because the kids will try to come in,' said Ditchfield, who retired two years ago. His café will stick to the strict Dutch coffee-shop rules of banning all alcohol, hard drugs and anyone under 18.

The Deputy Mayor of Rhyl, Glyn Williams, said the plan 'beggars belief', prompting Ditchfield to name his coffee shop 'The Beggars Belief'.

Williams said: 'We are not in the process of helping people break the law. I firmly believe that, if you downgrade cannabis, then there'll be so many more parents who'll come forward with tragic stories about their children.' However, the Chief Constable of North Wales, Richard Brunstrom, has publicly called for drugs to be legalised.

David Crane, the director of an internet company for seven years, is in the process of raising £250,000 for an upmarket coffee shop in Hoxton, London. 'We've been speaking to a number of different people in the music business and media, and they are very keen, largely because they smoke dope themselves. I absolutely believe that coffee shops are a benefit to society,' he said.

Many of the cannabis entrepreneurs are veterans of protests at the Dutch Experience in Stockport. Almost 100 people, including the local MEP, went to Stockport police station holding cannabis and demanding to be arrested. After arresting 28 people, the police gave up, prompting protesters to declare cannabis had been legalised in Stockport.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Drugslaboratorium in Hoornsterzwaag opgerold

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De politie is een paar dagen geleden begonnen met een onderzoek naar de productie van drugs in dit gebied. Er kwam een tip binnen dat er in het gebouw drugs zouden worden gemaakt en dat er mensen binnen waren. Vanmiddag heeft de politie het laboratorium ontruimd.

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Overheidscampagne wijst op gevaren drugs

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De overheid komt in het voorjaar met een campagne om jongeren en hun ouders te wijzen op de gevaren van drugs. Volgens staatssecretaris Van Rijn weten ouders veel te weinig over het drugsgebruik van hun kinderen.

Uit het laatste onderzoek van het Trimbos-instituut blijkt dat 60 procent van de mensen die regelmatig stappen weleens xtc gebruikt.

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Staatssecretaris Van Rijn zegt dat het Nederlandse drugsbeleid goed werkt, maar hij maakt zich wel zorgen over de recente ontwikkelingen. "De normalisering van drugsgebruik tijdens het uitgaan wil ik ter discussie stellen", schrijft hij aan de Tweede Kamer.

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Chemsex rise prompts public health warning | Society | The Guardian

Some sexual health services setting up special clinics in response to growing use of illegal psychoactive substances during sex

The growth in use of illegal psychoactive substances during sex could pose an increasing risk to public health, experts say.

The popularity of “chemsex” – mostly but not exclusively among gay men – is leading some sexual health services to set up special clinics to treat the consequences of drugs such as GHB, GBL and crystal meth.

Users are turning to such sources to lower inhibitions and increase pleasure, according to an editorial in the BMJ by experts in sexual health and drug misuse.

Its authors warn of a “small but important” increase in the use of mental health services by chemsex drug users. Psychological and physiological dependence on the drugs can become permanent, they say.

“Chemsex drug users often describe losing days – not sleeping or eating for up to 72 hours – and this may harm their general health. Users may present too late to be eligible for post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV transmission.” say the authors.

“An increased number of sexual partners may also increase the risk of acquiring other sexually transmitted infections. Data from service users suggest an average of five sexual partners per session and that unprotected sex is the norm.”

The editorial says: “Many barriers exist to chemsex drug users accessing services, including the shame and stigma often associated with drug use and ignorance of available drug services.”

It points to a 2014 report by Antidote, a London drugs service for lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual people, which suggested that nearly two-thirds of people seeking help from it reported using chemsex drugs.

The authors say: “Addressing chemsex-related morbidities should be a public health priority. However, in England funding for specialist sexual health and drugs services is waning and commissioning for these services is complex.”

The Royal College of GPs agreed with the warning. Dr Richard Ma, of its sexual health and blood-borne virus group, said: “Chemsex is a rapidly emerging pattern of drug use, not just amongst men who have sex with men as often assumed, but heterosexual patients as well.

“Taking recreational drugs during sex can lead to a number of potentially harmful side-effects including facilitating the spread of common STIs and HIV, but also serious mental health problems such as anxiety, psychoses and suicidal tendencies. It is essential that both patients and healthcare professionals – including GPs and primary healthcare teams – are aware of these and take the issue seriously.”
Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Mexico opent deur naar legalisering marihuana

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Mexico heeft de eerste stap gezet op weg naar het legaliseren van marihuana. Het Hooggerechtshof heeft bepaald dat elke burger het recht heeft marihuana te consumeren. Ook mag iedereen het kweken voor persoonlijk gebruik zonder winstoogmerk.

De uitspraak van het hof is opzienbarend. Mexico heeft een uiterst conservatieve drugswetgeving, die geen onderscheid maakt tussen soft- en harddrugs. Sinds 2006 is het land verwikkeld in een bijzonder gewelddadige drugsoorlog. Die heeft al meer dan 100.000 levens gekost. Meer dan 25.000 Mexicanen zijn spoorloos verdwenen.

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Indonesia plans to use crocodiles to guard death row drug convicts | World news | The Guardian

In echoes of the Bond film Live and Let Die, the country’s anti-drugs chief is backing the plan because ‘you can’t convince them to let criminals escape’


Indonesia’s anti-drugs agency has proposed building a prison on an island guarded by crocodiles to hold death row drug convicts, an official has said, an idea seemingly taken from a James Bond film.

The proposal is the pet project of anti-drugs chief Budi Waseso, who plans to visit various parts of the archipelago in his search for reptiles to guard the jail.

Related: In the end, Chan and Sukumaran's executions stung Indonesia's economy. In the end, Chan and Sukumaran's executions stung Indonesia's economy, not its conscience | Brigid Delaney

“We will place as many crocodiles as we can there. I will search for the most ferocious type of crocodile,” he was quoted as saying by local news website Tempo.

Waseso said that crocodiles would be better at preventing drug traffickers from escaping prison as they could not be bribed – unlike human guards.

“You can’t bribe crocodiles. You can’t convince them to let inmates escape,” he said.

But he is banking on the convicts lacking the crocodile-running skills shown by Roger Moore’s 007 in the Bond movie Live and Let Die when he escapes from an island using the reptiles as stepping stones.

The plan is still in the early stages, and neither the location or potential opening date of the jail have been decided.

Indonesia already has some of the toughest anti-narcotics laws in the world, including death by firing squad for traffickers, and sparked international uproar in April when it put to death seven foreign drug convicts, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

But president Joko Widodo has insisted that drug dealers must face death as the country is fighting a “national emergency” due to rising narcotics use.

Despite the harsh laws, Indonesia’s corrupt prison system is awash with drugs, and inmates and jail officials are regularly arrested for narcotics offences.

Anti-drugs agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi confirmed authorities were mulling the plan to build “a special prison for death row convicts”.

He said only traffickers would be kept in the jail, to stop them from mixing with other prisoners and potentially recruiting them to drug gangs.

The agency is currently in discussions with the justice ministry about the plan, he added.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Douaniers vast voor drugssmokkel Schiphol

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Twee douaniers zijn vandaag opgepakt omdat ze mogelijk drugs hebben ingevoerd op Schiphol. Ook zouden ze een ambtenaar hebben omgekocht. RTV NH schrijft dat in totaal vier mensen vastzitten in deze zaak.

De ene douanier is een 32-jarige vrouw uit Zandvoort; de andere een 48-jarige man uit Purmerend. De andere twee verdachten zijn een 44-jarige man uit Purmerend en een 59-jarige man uit Oostzaan. Bij huiszoekingen werd bij de 44-jarige Purmerender een vuurwapen gevonden.

Het onderzoek is gedaan door de Koninklijke Marechaussee, onder leiding van het Openbaar Ministerie Noord-Holland. Ook de FIOD en de Rijksrecherche zijn betrokken bij het onderzoek.

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'Amsterdams ziekenhuis maakte miljoenen winst op heroïne'

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De drugs werden geproduceerd in opdracht van het ministerie van Volksgezondheid en waren bestemd voor drugsverslaafden die het onder begeleiding van hulpverleners kregen toegediend. Het VWS zegt in een reactie in NRC Handelsblad dat het op de hoogte is van de winst die wordt gemaakt.

Het ziekenhuis maakte meer dan 30 procent winst op de heroïne, schrijven Soeterhorst en Wester. 'Van de drie miljoen die de bv van het ministerie jaarlijks als vergoeding krijgt, is meer dan één miljoen winst. Die ging naar het eigen vermogen van het ziekenhuis - een kwart van dat totale vermogen werd verdiend met productie en verkoop van heroïne.'

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Neven presidentsvrouw Venezuela verdacht van smokkel 800 kilo cocaïne

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Twee neven van de vrouw van de Venezolaanse president Maduro worden donderdag in New York aangeklaagd wegens drugssmokkel. Het tweetal werd dinsdag op Haïti gearresteerd tijdens een undercoveroperatie van de DEA en overgebracht naar New York. Ze zouden hebben geprobeerd om 800 kilo cocaïne te smokkelen naar de VS. De vrouw van Maduro, Cilia Flores, is een van de invloedrijkste personen in het Venezolaanse bewind.

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Douane vindt 300 kilo cocaïne tussen bevroren kip | NOS

De Douane heeft in Rotterdam 300 kilo cocaïne gevonden tussen een lading bevroren kip. Er is verder niemand gearresteerd.

De drugs zaten in twaalf sporttassen verstopt tussen de kip in een container uit Brazilië. De cocaïne heeft een straatwaarde van ruim tien miljoen euro. De lading drugs is onmiddellijk vernietigd.

Het HARCteam, een samenwerkingsverband van Douane, Zeehavenpolitie en Fiod, onderzoekt wie er achter de smokkel zitten.

Bron: nos.nl

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America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs

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Karen Jennings patted her heavily made up face, put on a sardonic smile and said she thought she looked good after all she’d been through.

“I was an alcoholic first. I got drunk and fell in the creek and broke my back. Then I got hooked on the painkillers,” the 59-year-old grandmother said.

Over the years, Jennings’ back healed but her addiction to powerful opioids remained. After the prescriptions dried up, she was drawn to the underground drug trade that defines eastern Kentucky today as coal, oil and timber once did.

Jennings spoke with startling frankness about her part in a plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations.

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Leading the blight is a powerful and highly addictive opioid painkiller, OxyContin, known locally as "hillbilly heroin". Typically it is ground down and injected or snorted to give an instant and powerful high.

Its misuse is so routine that the bulk of court cases reported in the local papers are drug related. Just about everyone in Beattyville has a story of the human cost. Some mention the decline of the town's homecoming queen, Michele Moore, into addiction in the 1990s. Moore struggled by as a single mother living in a trailer home before she was stabbed to death by a man while the two were taking drugs.

At about that time, Beattyville's police chief, Omer Noe , and the Lee County sheriff, Johnny Mann, were jailed for taking bribes to protect drug smugglers. Five years later, the next Lee County sheriff, Douglas Brandenburg, went to prison for a similar crime.

Amid the relentless destruction of life, there is little that shocks. But four years ago residents of Harlan County - a couple of hours' drive to the south-east - were shaken by a series of deaths over six weeks of parents of members of the local boys and girls club. Eleven of the children watched a parent die.

Getting the drugs isn't difficult. Elderly people sell their prescription drugs to supplement some of the lowest incomes in the US. The national average retirement income is about $21,500. In Beattyville it is $6,500.

Last year, a pharmacy owner in nearby Clay County, Terry Tenhet, was jailed for 10 years for illegally distributing hundreds of thousands of pills after police tied the prescriptions to several overdose deaths. In 2011 alone, he supplied more than 360,000 OxyContin pills in a county with only 21,000 residents. Those prescriptions were mostly written by doctors in other states.

Prosecutors alleged that for years a single pain clinic nearly 1,000 miles away in south Florida had provided the prescriptions for a quarter of the OxyContin sold in eastern Kentucky. The bus service to Florida is known to police and addicts alike as the "Oxy Express".

In 2012, Dr Paul Volkman was sentenced to four life terms for writing illegal prescriptions for more than 3m pills from a clinic he ran in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the border with eastern Kentucky. Prosecutors said the prescriptions had contributed to dozens of overdose deaths.

Another doctor, David Procter, is serving 16 years in prison for running a "pill mill" at which at least four other doctors were involved in the illegal supply of drugs to eastern Kentucky.

There is little sympathy for doctors or pharmacists acting as dealers, but there is a view in Beattyville and surrounding towns that people have been exploited by something bigger than a few medics, largely because they are regarded as "backward".

Davis said the drug companies aggressively pushed OxyContin and similar drugs in a region where, because of a mixture of the mining, the rigours of the outdoors and the weather, there was a higher demand for painkillers.

Here's this synthetic opium product and they sell it as regular pain medicine. They knew how highly addictive it was

"You couldn't go to a doctor without seeing a merchant there. Here's this synthetic opium product that's supposed to be good for palliative care - cancer patients - and they start selling it as regular pain medicine. They knew how highly addictive it was and they sold it anyway," he said. "I live in a town of 1,500 people with seven pharmacies as well as pain clinics and methadone clinics and the full backup industry. Everybody gets paid, doctors and pharmacists and lawyers."

Recently released research shows that abuse of powerful opioid painkillers is in part responsible for a sharp rise in the death rate among white middle-aged Americans over the past two decades, particularly less-educated 45- to 54-year-olds. The report by academics at Princeton university also blamed misuse of alcohol and a rise in cheaper high quality heroin along with suicides. The researchers said they suspected that financial stress played a part in people taking their lives.

OxyContin's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, was penalised $634m by a federal court in 2007 for misrepresenting the drug's addictive effects to doctors and patients. Purdue is now being sued by the Kentucky government. The state's attorney general, Jack Conway, accuses the company of concealing information about the dangers of the drug in order to increase profits, and its salespeople of claiming OxyContin is less addictive and safer than it is.

"I want to hold them accountable in eastern Kentucky for what they did," Conway told the Lexington Herald-Leader. "We have lost an entire generation."

Purdue has denied the claim.

Late last year the Beattyville Enterprise reported that pharmacists in the town were appealing to drug companies for greater control over another prescription medicine, Neurontin, which is increasingly in demand and has been found at the scene of overdose deaths. Heroin use is also on the rise.

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Top drug expert says: the war on drugs is just a war on the poor

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Scotland’s war on drugs amounts to a war on the poor, according one of the country's leading authorities on substance abuse.

In a new paper, Dr Iain McPhee, from the University of the West of Scotland's Centre for Alcohol and Drugs Studies, calls the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, “unjust, unfair and unworkable.” McPhee was Project Leader of the National Drugs Helpline and the National AIDS Helpline, and has worked as a drugs specialist with social work and Scottish police.

According to the academic, tough key performance indicators to be met by officers from Police Scotland means that it is those living in areas of multiple deprivation, and seen as “problem drug users”, who are targeted the most.

Separately, another drug policy expert, former Scottish Government adviser Mike McCarron, has said that if drugs were decriminalised savings could be made by Police Scotland and health and social work amounting to £1.5 billion.

Although, according to a recent survey, drug crime is the public’s top priority for Police Scotland, McPhee says it is the enforcement of prohibition that “exacerbates drugs related crime” and says the way to deal with problematic drug use is through tackling social deprivation.

The force’s targets also explain why, since 2003, the arrest rate for drug dealers in Scotland is twice as high as it is in England and Wales.

McPhee told the Sunday Herald: “The war on drugs, one must conclude, is a war on the poor, as they are most affected by the performance indicators used by medicine, criminal justice social work, particularly child protection, and the police, enforcement and security agencies.”

He continued: “Only a continual challenging of the moral framework on which drug policy rests can lead to reforms of our unjust, unfair and unworkable drug policies.”

The academic said that the government was aware of this, and pointed to a report by John Birt commissioned by the Blair government. Birt’s report pointing out the unfairness of the act was then suppressed.

“All the things that we attribute to drugs, like poor health, or poor housing or poverty, these are in many ways enduring structural factors caused by inequality and deprivation, and these people when they use drugs may go on to be problem drug users, but the key factor here...is there is no relationship between the activity of the police, the availability of drugs and the number of drug users. And no matter what you spend on the misuse of drugs it can never achieve its aims.”

In a survey of 31,000 people across Scotland conducted by the police to feed into their annual plan, 28 per cent of the public said they wanted the force’s top priority to be tackling drug crime, ahead of road safety, violence and anti-social behaviour.

McPhee believes this is what has led to those in poorer areas being targeted. "I think it would be reasonable to conclude that they must be targeting scarce resources, which may or may not be intelligence-led, about where they think most activity which infringes the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 occurs," he said. "That would appear to be specific areas in Scotland that are also where there is most inequality and deprivation. I think it's no secret that by far the majority of people who are attending services for treatment and the majority of people who are incarcerated for infringements of the Misuse of Drugs Act invariably reside in areas characterised by deprivation, no matter what index is used."

A police source told the Sunday Herald that most drug arrests were in poorer areas because that was where the problem drug users and the gangs were.

“Nobody in the west end of Glasgow, or in the posh bits of Edinburgh or Aberdeen is bothered if their neighbour is doing a wee bit of coke. But see when you’ve got junkies breaking into folks houses and stealing bikes and stereos so they can get their next fit then of course we should be there. And by and large that’s happening in poorer areas where there’s higher dependency and you have the presence of gangs,” the source said.

There is seemingly little appetite to devolve drug laws to Scotland. Although the Scottish Government’s default position is to want all powers transferred to Westminster, in the White Paper for independence, there was only a passing mention made to independence allowing “decisions on drugs policy and drug classification to be taken together in a coherent way.”

Politicians will be keenly aware of Police Scotland’s survey results. There are few votes to be won from backing drug law reforms. Former Scottish Government adviser Mike McCarron, however, is hopeful that reform could be on the cards.

“I don't see the Westminster Government either now or in the foreseeable future adopting significant change of direction in drug policy, so if drug policy is not fully devolved then a very 'strong voice' of Scottish MPs will be needed at Westminster to increase harm prevention and service effectiveness within a significant change of policy direction.”

McCarron, who works with Transform Drug Policy Scotland, believes decriminalisation and taxation and regulation of drugs could see the costs to Scotland of drugs harm reduced by as much £1.5 billion.

“This might include, regarding the £600 million spent on police and prisons, potentially several hundreds of millions pounds saved or redeployed for other policing needs and further tens of millions raised in tax for investments.

“So we should scrutinise every detail of the the estimated £3.5 billion socio-economic costs for potential savings and tax gains, comparing prohibition with regulation. Savings and taxes could fund a greater number of services to meet Scotland's very high needs and also improve the quality of services.”

Scotland does have a problem with drugs. And it is worse here than it is in the rest of the UK. According to the UN's World Drugs Report, Scotland has a greater per-head use of heroin, ecstasy and cocaine than almost any other country in the world.

David Liddell Director of Scottish Drugs Forum said it’s difficult to quantify exactly how many drugs are in Scotland and how many people are using them.

“The nature of an illegal trade is that you would only ever have fairly crude estimates. However, from the available statistics, a troubling picture emerges.”

Liddell says that latest figures from the government show 6.2 per cent of adults reported using a drug in the last year including 0.5% who had taken new drugs or legal highs. A quarter of those who used drugs said they “felt dependent”.

“The estimated number of individuals with problem drug use in Scotland is 59,500 - 1.68 per cent of the population - 2.43 per cent of all males and 0.96% of all females resident in Scotland. In this context, problem drug use is defined very narrowly in terms of the use of heroin and benzodiazepines such as diazepam. Our fatal drugs overdose figures are very high – far higher than in England, for example - and amongst the highest in Europe which in part merely reflects the high levels of problem drug use, in particular heroin use.”

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Irish police back decriminalising personal possession of heroin

Minister in charge of drug policy calls for move as part of ‘radical cultural shift’ in tackling Ireland’s narcotics crisis

Police officers in Ireland have backed a proposal from a government minister to make possession of heroin, cocaine or other opiates for personal use no longer an arrestable offence.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, who is in charge of Ireland’s drug policy, said this month that the country should move towards decriminalising possession of small quantities of certain narcotics, including all class A opiates, as part of a “radical cultural shift”.

He said attitudes to drugs must move away from shaming users, focusing instead on helping them, and that there was a difference between decriminalisation and legalisation.

The Garda Representative Association, which represents 11,500 frontline officers, has welcomed the move to decriminalise personal possession, saying it would free up police resources.

“I think anything that can deal with the curse of drugs and some innovating thinking on this is to be welcomed,” the GRA’s general secretary, PJ Stone, said, adding that Ó Ríordáin’s proposal would be seen as a brave move.

Stone said that instead of targeting drug users, Garda and state resources should be directed against the “big guys” who make millions from the misery of drug use.

The GRA has called for a more realistic solution to Ireland’s drug crisis than simply arresting users on the streets.

One GRA source said resources are so stretched in Dublin, where heroin usage is rife in certain parts of the capital, that “we don’t even have enough cells to lock up drug users who get arrested for possessing drugs”.

Ó Ríordáin’s initiative marks a major break with the state’s decades-long policy of criminalising heroin and other drug users.

He also confirmed that one of his last acts as minister before the Irish parliament dissolves and a general election is held in early spring will be to introduce safe, supervised heroin injecting rooms in Dublin.

Speaking at his constituency office in north-east Dublin, the Labour party minister said the centre could be up and running within 12 months.

Denying that his call for such a centre in the capital made him soft on drugs, Ó Ríordáin said the idea, which he first proposed in a speech to the London School of Economics earlier this month, was winning support across Ireland.

“My initial sense was that there should be one in Dublin, near the city centre in an area where they are used to treating people with addictions in the methadone clinics. At first I thought I would get a lot of objections to this idea but instead over the last few days I have been getting contacts from people across the country, from Galway, Cork and Waterford, who are all saying to me that they need the same kind of facility in their cities too.”

The sight of people injecting heroin is commonplace not only on some of Dublin’s most deprived housing estates but also parts of the city centre. One of the most notorious spots, where open drug dealing is also prevalent, is the boardwalk along the river Liffey towards O’Connell Bridge and the lower end of O’Connell Street, Dublin’s most famous thoroughfare.

Retailers, the tourist industry and city councillors have all called for alternatives to the open heroin consumption and dealing in some of Dublin’s most famous quarters.

Ó Ríordáin pointed towards the window overlooking the area he represents and said that there was open drug dealing and injecting even in the parks and playgrounds of his constituency.

“Opening up a safe injection room is not a solution but it is a recognition of failure that our society has produced people who are so vulnerable that this is the habit that they have. But either we address it as it is or we ignore it or we try to criminalise it. I don’t think we can police our way out of it. Instead I think we have to look from a humanitarian perspective about where the drug user is coming from and we will have a better chance of success that way.”

In the film about the murdered campaigning journalist Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett, the reach of Dublin’s drug gangs is exposed and public anger is laid bare over the Garda Síochána’s inability to stem the flow of heroin and other opiates pouring into the city during the 1990s.

Ó Ríordáin said he did not believe in legalising the drugs themselves but added it was time to stop arresting and prosecuting users for possession of small quantities of narcotics.

“Seventy per cent of the drug convictions in this state involve those who had drugs on them for personal use. In my view that is a waste of Garda time, that is a waste of the courts’ time and it does absolutely nothing for people who suffer from addictions.

“What does a Guard [Irish police officer] do if he or she walks down the street and sees a person injecting? Technically that person is still committing a crime and should be arrested under the law. The same would go for anyone possessing heroin who was walking into our proposed safe injecting room.”

He added: “How therefore can we encourage addicts to get off the streets, stop injecting in public places, inject in a safe environment where there are clean needles, where the risk of contracting things like hepatitis C are minimal if they fear they would be arrested at the door for possessing heroin? The only solution is decriminalise possession of drugs for personal use.”

Frontline organisations that work with Dublin’s hardcore heroin users have welcomed the first ever anti-prohibition move taken by an Irish minister regarding the drug crisis. The Merchants Quay project based on the Liffey said there are an estimated 20,000 opiate users in the city with 10,000 currently registered on the state’s methadone/heroin substitute programme. In 1996 there were 2,000 registered users signed up to the programme.

“The graph in terms of the numbers of addicts in Ireland has moved in only one direction since the 1980s and that is upwards,” said Tony Geoghegan, Merchants Quay’s CEO.

“In places like Dublin we have met with and tried to help three generations of drug users from one single family. Changing the law so that addicts are not sent to prison or given criminal convictions is an important step in really tackling this crisis. As is opening up a safe heroin injecting space in the city centre. Criminalisation has not worked.”

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Fake ambulances used to smuggle £1.6bn of drugs into UK, court told | UK news | The Guardian

Leonardus Bijlsma and Dennis Vogelaar were allegedly part of gang that pretended to be paramedics to transport heroin and cocaine

Audacious smugglers may have sneaked up to £1.6bn worth of cocaine and heroin into the UK using a fleet of fake ambulances, a jury has heard.

The gang was kitted out with bogus paramedic uniforms and might even have used fake patients to make their cover more authentic, Birmingham crown court was told.

Two Dutchmen, Leonardus Bijlsma and Dennis Vogelaar, were allegedly part of a lucrative criminal conspiracy to bring huge hauls of drugs into the country under the noses of British police, it is claimed.

The jury was told the smuggling operation may have seen up to £420m in “top-quality” class-A drugs reach the UK, via the Channel’s ferry ports.

When the high-purity drug packets were cut down to individual street-value wraps, the total cash value could increase four-fold, reaching a staggering amount, said prosecutor Robert Davies.

He added: “The prosecution suggest this was a top-level, audacious, and – up to the point of interception and the arrests – a successful and lucrative criminal conspiracy.”

Davies said the conspiracy was uncovered when officers of the National Crime Agency (NCA) swooped on one of the ambulances after tracking it to Smethwick in the West Midlands on 16 June.

When police arrived they arrested Bijlsma, described in court by Davies as the “righthand man” in the organisation and the “ambulance” driver Vogelaar.

The men were equipped with bogus paramedic uniforms and a letter purporting to be from a Dutch patient being taken to a London hospital for treatment.

Investigations revealed that the ambulance was “rammed” to the roof with more than £38m of cocaine and heroin. Inside the back of the ambulance, concealed behind metal-riveted panels in six “hides”, were neatly stacked, colour-coded packets of class-A drugs including cocaine with a street value of more than £30m and heroin worth £8m. Officers also found 60,000 ecstasy tablets.

When the NCA officers swooped in Smethwick, two other men – Olof Schoon, 38, and Richard Engelsbel, 51 – were also detained, jurors heard.

Davies explained that they did not appear in the dock alongside Bijlsma and Vogelaar, both from Amsterdam because they had already admitted conspiracy to import class-A drugs.

Schoon, who was a director of the Dutch-based Schoon Ambulance Company, was described by prosecutors as “the central player”.

Davies, opening the case for the crown, said the ambulance tracked to Smethwick contained “an absolutely enormous amount of class-A drugs”. He added: “In truth, the ambulance was rammed with drugs.”

The prosecutor told the jury that further study of company records revealed that the fake ambulance journeys had been “going on over weeks and months”.

In the Netherlands, investigators discovered “a fleet of ambulances” being run by Schoon’s company, ostensibly transferring patients to and from the UK.

But Davies described the firm and its operations as nothing more than “a veneer” for the smuggling operation.

“Four [ambulances] had hiding places of a similar type,” he added. “Between the vehicles, at least 45 trips can be shown to have been made in 14 months, with the final trip in June.”

Bijlsma, 55, and Vogelaar, 28, are charged with conspiracy to smuggle. They deny the offence.

In police interviews, they told officers they had no knowledge of the drug-smuggling operation with Bijlsma stating he had travelled abroad to look at a car. Vogelaar said that he had believed his driving job to be genuine.

However, the prosecutor told jurors they would be studying “highly incriminating” evidence implicating both men, including a rivet gun found with Bijlsma’s DNA on it, which it is claimed was used to fasten the false panels inside the ambulance.

The prosecution likened Vogelaar, who was shown on CCTV played in court wearing a paramedic’s uniform, to the 70’s cartoon character Mr Benn, whose adventures always began with him visiting a fancy-dress shop and choosing a uniform or outfit.

“The organised crime group running this operation would not have risked an innocent stooge aboard one of its ambulances,” added Davies.

The trial, expected to last two weeks, continues.

Bron: www.theguardian.com