De War on Drugs in Mexico #4 - Hoe lossen we de oorlog op?

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Miljonair worden in de drugsindustrie? 50 Cent en Eminem geven tips

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“They say: let me help you help yourself. I’m gonna give you two and half grams. If you know what to do with this, you’re gonna be alright.”- 50 Cent.

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De Trailer van de documentaire How to Make Money on Drugs is deze week gelanceerd, en de film gaat op het Filmfestival van Toronto in première, debuterend regisseur Matthew Cooke is nog op zoek naar verdere distributeurs. Het belooft een aantrekkelijke eye-opener te worden, met heldere uitleg over de aantrekkingskracht van een industrie die teert op een voortwoekerende economische crisis. Een plekje op IDFA 2012 zou me niets verbazen.

How to Make Money Selling Drugs Official Trailer #1 (2012) - Documentary Movie HD

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‘Gedupeerde coffeeshopeigenaren achter bedreiging Wolfsen’

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Een dag voor het binnenkomen van de bedreiging zou het faillissement over een coffeeshop zijn uitgesproken. De twee eigenaren gingen ook persoonlijk failliet. Hun zaak werd eerder dit jaar op last van Wolfsen gesloten, nadat bleek dat ze een te grote voorraad softdrugs in huis hadden.

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Op maandag 3 september 2012 10:09 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Mexicaanse toestanden

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'Godmother of cocaine' shot dead in Colombia

Griselda Blanco, thought to have ordered scores of murders in Miami's drug wars, is killed outside butcher's shop

She lived as the "godmother of cocaine", ruthlessly ordering scores of bloody murders and violent revenge attacks as she plotted the course of Miami's infamous drug wars.

So it seemed only fitting that the manner of Griselda Blanco's death on Monday reflected the brutality for which she became notorious – gunned down in the street by a killer on a motorcycle as she left a butcher's shop in her hometown of Medellin, Colombia.

Blanco, 69, was credited with inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing during her years controlling southern Florida's fledgling cocaine trade in the late 70s and early 80s, an era in which she pocketed billions of dollars before being convicted of three murders, including that of a two-year-old boy. Detectives suspected her of dozens more.

"It's some kind of poetic justice that she met an end that she delivered to so many others," said Prof Bruce Bagley, head of the University of Miami's department of international studies and author of the book Drug Trafficking in the Americas.

"Here is a woman who made a lot of enemies on her rise and was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of people.

"She might have retired to Colombia and wasn't anything like the kind of player she was in her early days, but she had lingering enemies almost everywhere you look. What goes around comes around."

Blanco, who was deported from the US in 2004 after serving almost two decades in jail in New York and Florida for racketeering and murder, became one of Miami's original drugs gangsters as tidal waves of smuggled cocaine swept aside marijuana as the dealers' most profitable commodity.

She set up a distribution network across the US that netted her tens of millions of dollars a month, making shipments of more than 1,500kg, and maintained her dominance by building an empire staffed with violent enforcers, who were well rewarded for following her orders to execute rivals at the drop of a hat and make sure they left no witnesses.

She was also personally involved in developing creative methods to get cocaine into the US, even setting up a lingerie shop in Colombia that produced underwear for export with secret compartments.

Her colourful story, as featured in the 2008 documentary Cocaine Cowboys: Hustlin' with the Godmother, showed that her love of the underworld was not limited to just her drugs activities. A son with her third husband, Dario Sepulveda, was christened Michael Corleone Blanco after the central figure in the Godfather trilogy of mafia movies.

Meanwhile, two of her three other sons by her first husband were murdered after entering the family business.

Blanco also lost three husbands, and remained under suspicion for the deaths of them all. In one memorable 1975 episode that saw a level of violence remarkable even among Colombia's hardened drugs criminals, she confronted her husband and business partner Alberto Bravo in a Bogota nightclub car park over millions of dollars missing from the profits of the cartel they built together.

Blanco, then 32, pulled out a pistol, Bravo responded by producing an Uzi submachine gun and after a blazing gun battle he and six bodyguards lay dead. Blanco, who suffered only a minor gunshot wound to the stomach, recovered and soon afterwards moved to Miami, where her body count – and reputation for ruthlessness – continued to climb.

During her reign of terror in Florida she was suspected of responsibility in anywhere between 40 and 200 murders, yet was convicted of only three – two drug dealers who crossed her and a two-year-old boy, Johnny Castro, the son of a former Blanco enforcer, who was shot twice in the head by hitmen as he travelled in his father's car.

"At first she was real mad because we missed the father, but when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even," Blanco's former lieutenant, Jorge Ayala, told police.

She escaped the death penalty on a technicality when Ayala was discredited as a witness after being caught having phone sex with secretaries in the prosecutors' office.

Bagley said Blanco, who was shot twice in the head, was likely to become the subject of books or a Hollywood movie.

"She was a pioneer in the sense that she helped to forge and carve out the drugs trade in south Florida and used bloody tactics to do so," he said.

"The danger is she will be remembered not for her cold-heartedness and brutality but for being a woman entrepreneur in an emerging field dominated by men."

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Op dinsdag 4 september 2012 19:52 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Decriminalise cannabis, ecstasy to curb addiction: report

A national report into illicit drugs has recommended decriminalising ecstasy and cannabis under a government-controlled program to help curb addiction.

It comes as Australian Federal Police reveal there has been a massive increase in the amount of illegal drugs and criminal assets seized in the past year.

The 52-page report on alternatives to prohibition, by the Australia 21 group, was released in Adelaide today.

Read the report here

One of the report's proposals is to establish a government supplier for cannabis and ecstasy.

The drugs would be available to people over 16, who would then be supported by counselling and treatment programs.

The report also recommends similar programs for heroin and cannabis use.

Co-author Professor Bob Douglas says it is clear prohibition is not working, and Australia needs to have a serious debate about legalising controlled drug use.

"It's been a political benefit for people to pretend they're tough on drugs, but lots of politicians in Australia recognise now that this has to be changed," he said.

Professor Douglas says similar programs are being used in Europe with proven positive results.

He says criminal gangs have a monopoly on the black market, but a government regulated drug program could help to safely curb usage.

"Government just stands by and says 'well we'll criminalise the people who use drugs and we'll try and catch the people who are distributing them', but they're not doing very well," he said.

"The report makes clear despite the good work that Australian police are doing, they're not making a serious mark on the markets."

The Federal Government says it will consider holding a national summit on drugs, but it does not support decriminalisation.

Mental Health Minister Mark Butler says the Government balances health responses with law enforcement.

But Greens Senator Richard di Natale says it is short-sighted to ignore the recommendations of experts.

"It's very clear that many experts, not just here in Australia but right around the world, support treating this issue as a law and order issue," he said.

"What's very very clear is the evidence says if we want to save people's lives, if we want to have more money for intervention then we have to start treating this as a health issue rather than a law and order issue."

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Hennepkwekerij in huis dode politieman Kekerdom

Een team van ruim 20 rechercheurs onderzoekt de zaak rond de vondst van drie dode mensen in een huis in het Gelderse Kekerdom. De lichamen zijn zondagmiddag aangetroffen in een woning aan de Weverstraat nadat buurtbewoners de politie hadden gealarmeerd.

Een van hen is een 59-jarige politieman die werkte bij de politie Gelderland-Zuid. In zijn huis heeft de politie een hennepkwekerij ontdekt. Of de hennepkwekerij verband houdt met de zaak wordt onderzocht.

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Under the mask of the war on drugs

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Oliver Villar is a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, a country where he has lived for most of his life. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina. In 2008 he completed his PhD on the political economy of contemporary Colombia in the context of the cocaine drug trade at the UWS Latin American Research Group (LARG). Whilst completing his PhD, Villar's research interests in political economy, Latin America and the global drug trade followed teaching positions in politics at UWS and Macquarie University.

For the past decade his research has been devoted to the book (co-written with Drew Cottle)
'"Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia" (Monthly Review Press. He has published broadly on the Inter-American cocaine drug trade, the US War on Drugs and Terror in Colombia, and US-Colombian relations. This abiding interest extends across economic thought, economic development and the development of social and political relationships between the First World and Third World (in particular between the United States and Latin America) and the impact of neoliberal economic globalization.

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LS: From my perspective as a financial journalist it is remarkable to see that you treat cocaine as just another capitalist commodity, like copper, soy beans or coffee, but then again as a uniquely imperial commodity. [1] Can you explain this approach, please?

OV:Again drawing upon past empires or great powers, it becomes an imperial commodity because it is primarily serving the interests of that imperial state. If we look at the United States for instance, it becomes an imperial commodity just as much as opium became a British imperial commodity in a way it related to the Chinese. It means the imperial state is there to gain from the wealth, the United States in this case, but it also means that it serves as a political instrument to harness and maintain a political economy which is favorable to imperial interests.

We had the "War on Drugs", for example. It is a way how an imperial power can intervene and also penetrate a society much like the British were able to do with China in many respects. So it is an imperial commodity because it does serve that profit mechanism, but it is also an instrument for social control and repression.

We see this continuity with examples where this takes place. And Colombia, I think, was the most outstanding and unique example which I have made into an investigative case study itself.

Another thing worth mentioning is what actually makes the largest sectors of global trade, what are they? It's oil, arms, and drugs - the difference being that because drugs are seen as an illegal product, economists don't study it as just another capitalist commodity - but it is a commodity. If you look at it from a market perspective, it works pretty much the same way as other commodities in the global financial system.

LS: Cocaine has become one more means for extracting surplus value on which to realize profits and thus accumulate capital. But isn't it the criminalized status of drugs that makes this whole business possible in the first place?

OV: We have to think about what would happen if it was decriminalized? It would actually be a bad thing if you were a drug lord or someone to a large extent gaining from the drug trade. What happens if it is criminalized is that you are able to gain wealth and profit from something that is very harmful to society. First of all, it will never be politically acceptable for politicians to say: You know, we think that the war on drugs is failing, so we decriminalize it. That would be almost political suicide.

We know it is very harmful to society, and by keeping it criminalized it leaves a very grey area, not only in the studies and investigations that I've noticed on the drug trade, but it also leaves a very grey area in terms of how the state actually tackles the drug problem.

In many ways for law enforcement it allows a grey area in order to fight it. For instance, we can look for example at the financial center, which gains predominantly from it. But it also allows the criminal elements, which are so key to making it work, flourish.

And by not touching that, by largely ignoring the main criminal operation to take form and to operate, then what you are doing by criminalizing drugs is that you are actually stimulating that demand. So there is also that financial element to the whole issue as well. That's why this business is actually possible by that criminalized status.

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OV: We know that the estimated value of the global drug trade - and this is also debated by analysts - is worth something between US$300 billion to $500 billion a year. Half of that, something between $250-$300 billion and over actually goes to the United States. So what does this say if you use that imperial political economy approach I've talked about? It means that the imperial center, the financial center, is getting the most, and so it is in no interest for any great power (or state) to stop this if great amounts of the profits are flowing to the imperial center.

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Op maandag 10 september 2012 06:40 schreef El_Matador het volgende:
Gracias voor deze interessante artikelen, Papierversnipperaar.

Hot news hier de afgelopen dagen waren de onderhandelingen met de FARC, waar president Santos -in mijn ogen helaas- toe heeft opgeroepen. De dode drugspaisa heb ik niets van gehoord hier. Maar ik kijk ook nauwelijks tv.

Wel zag ik "Tanja's dagboek" (dat ik hier in het NLs heb liggen) voor 41.000 (~ 18 euro) in de supermarkt liggen.

Die PhD lijkt me interessant; hoe is het toch mogelijk dat een land dat 15 jaar geleden in een bloedige oorlog leefde, zo veilig kan zijn. Wat is er met al die drugsbazen gebeurd? Ze hebben voetbalclubs, corrupte lui om zich heen en meer van dat soort gein. Maar hoe is dat zo gekomen, die ontwapening en pacificatie (op de paramilitairen na) van niet minder machtig gemaakte baronnetjes. En baronesjes, blijkbaar.

De grote drugstransporten lopen volgens mij voornamelijk via de Pacifische kust (Chocó). Een ondoordringbare jungle waar bij de grootste stad niet eens een vliegveld is. Er wonen Colombianen van Oost-Afrikaanse afkomst.

Colombiaanse vriendin vertelde me van een gringo die daar had gereisd. Hem was niks overkomen, maar ja. Door drugstransportland reizen.... heftig.

Hoe is die oorlog zo verschoven naar Mexico en daar nog veul bloediger geworden dan in Colombia? Welke rol heeft de verkeerde keuze van Calderon daarin gespeeld?

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Mexican drug boss El Coss captured by authorities

Mexican navy says it has detained the head of the Gulf Cartel, one of the country's most wanted drug bosses

The Mexican navy has said it has captured one of Mexico's most wanted drug bosses, the head of the Gulf Cartel, in what would mark a major victory in President Felipe Calderón's crackdown on organised crime.

The navy said it would give more details about the arrest of the man it believed to be Jorge Costilla, alias El Coss, when it parades him in front of the media early on Thursday.

A government security official said the man was detained in Tampico in northeastern Mexico without resistance. The US state department has a reward of up to $5m (£3m) for his capture.

The arrest comes barely a week after the Mexican navy captured senior Gulf Cartel member Mario Cárdenas, alias Fatso.

The Gulf Cartel has been weakened by a violent turf war with the Zetas, a gang formed by army deserters which acted as enforcers for the cartel before 2010.

It could also have political implications because top officials in the cartel's stronghold, the state of Tamaulipas, have been accused of taking money from local drug gangs.

"All these politicians who were getting money from the Gulf Cartel ought to be very worried now because this information is going to come to light," said Alberto Islas, a security expert at consultancy Risk Evaluation.

He said he expected Costilla to be extradited to the US, and that his testimony could prove damaging to officials in Tamaulipas and neighbouring Veracruz state, which has also been dogged by allegations of corruption.

Tomás Yarrington, a governor of Tamaulipas between 1999 and 2005 for the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), which will retake the national presidency in December, is wanted in Mexico for aiding drug gangs.

The FBI said Costilla is believed to have taken over the daily operations of the cartel after his former boss Osiel Cárdenas was arrested and jailed in Mexico in 2003.

He features prominently on a wanted list of 37 kingpins the Mexican government published in 2009. Well over 20 on that list have now been captured or killed.

Costilla's apparent capture could however lead to more violence with the weakening of the Gulf Cartel intensifying turf wars for control of Mexico's northeastern border with Texas between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas.

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Half of drugs prescribed in France useless or dangerous, say leading doctors

The doctors claim that the state wastes money on unnecessary medicine that they blame for up to 20,000 deaths annually

Half of all medicines being prescribed by doctors in France are either useless or potentially dangerous for patients, according to two eminent medical specialists. They blame the powerful pharmaceutical companies for keeping these drugs on sale at huge expense to the health system and the taxpayer.

Professor Philippe Even, director of the prestigious Necker Institute, and Bernard Debré, a doctor and member of parliament, say removing what they describe as superfluous and hazardous drugs from the list of those paid for by the French health service would save up to ¤10bn (£8bn) a year. It would also prevent up to 20,000 deaths linked to the medication and reduce hospital admissions by up to 100,000, they claim.

In their 900-page book The Guide to the 4,000 Useful, Useless or Dangerous Medicines, Even and Debré examined the effectiveness, risks and cost of pharmaceutical drugs available in France. Among those that they alleged were "completely useless" were statins, widely taken to lower cholesterol. The blacklist of 58 drugs the doctors claimed are dangerous included anti-inflammatories and drugs prescribed for cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, osteoporosis, contraception, muscular cramps and nicotine addiction.

The Professional Federation of Medical Industrialists denounced the doctors' views as full of "confusions and approximations".

"This book is helping to alarm those who are sick needlessly and risks leading them to stop treatments," it saidin a statement.

Christian Lajoux, the federation's president said: "It is dangerous and irresponsible … hundreds of their examples are neither precise nor properly documented. We must not forget that the state exercises strict controls on drugs. France has specialist agencies responsible for the health of patients and of controlling what information is given to them."

Professor Even told the Guardian most of the drugs criticised in the book are produced by French laboratories. He accused the pharmaceutical industry of pushing medicines at doctors who then push them on to patients. "The pharmaceutical industry is the most lucrative, the most cynical and the least ethical of all the industries," he said. "It is like an octopus with tentacles that has infiltrated all the decision making bodies, world health organisations, governments, parliaments, high administrations in health and hospitals and the medical profession.

"It has done this with the connivance, and occasionally the corruption of the medical profession. I am not just talking about medicines but the whole of medicine. It is the pharmaceutical industry that now outlines the entire medical landscape in our country."

The French consume medication worth ¤36bn every year, about ¤532 for each citizen who has an average 47 boxes of medicine in cupboards every year. The state covers 77% of the cost, amounting to 12% of GDP; in Britain spending on medicines is 9.6% of GDP. "Yet in the UK people have the same life expectancy of around 80 years and are no less healthy," said Even.

The authors were commissioned by former President Nicolas Sarkozy to write a report over the Mediator affair, a drug developed for diabetes patients but prescribed as a slimming aid, that has been linked to the deaths of hundreds of patients who developed heart problems.

However, Even accused the industry of having a get-rich-quick attitude to making medicines and said it was interested in chasing only easy profits. "They haven't discovered very much new for the last 30 years, but have multiplied production, using tricks and lies.

"Sadly, none of them is interested in making drugs for rare conditions or, say, for an infectious disease in countries with no money, because it's not a big market. Nor are they interested in developing drugs for conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease because it too difficult and there's not money to be made quickly.

"It has become interested only in the immediate, in short term gains. On Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry is third after petrol and banking, and each year it increases by 20%. It's more profitable than mining for diamonds."

Asked to explain French people's apparent dependence on medication, Even said: "For the last 40 years patients have been told that medicines are necessary for them, so they ask for them. Today we have doctors who want to give people medicines and sick people asking for medicines. There's nothing objective or realistic about this."

He added: "There is nothing revolutionary in this book. This has all been known for some time."

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Towards revision of the UN drug control conventions

The logic and dilemmas of Like-Minded Groups

_{Series on Legislative Reform of Drug Policies Nr. 19
March 2012}

Recent years have seen a growing unwillingness among increasing numbers of States parties to fully adhere to a strictly prohibitionist reading of the UN drug control conventions; the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (as amended by the 1972 Protocol), the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances; and the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

application-pdfDownload the briefing (PDF)

Such behaviour has been driven by a belief that non-punitive and pragmatic health oriented domestic policy approaches that are in line with fundamental human rights standards better address the complexities surrounding illicit drug use than the zero-tolerance approach privileged by the present international treaties.

Those treaties were negotiated and adopted in an era when both the illicit market and understanding of its operation bore little resemblance to those of today. Since this stance runs counter to the rigid interpretative positions held by some parts of the UN drug control apparatus, and many other States Parties, tensions within the international treaty system, or what has usefully been called the global drug prohibition regime, are currently pronounced.

What can be called ‘soft defecting’ states, those choosing to deviate from the prohibitive ethos of the conventions whilst remaining within what they deem to be the confines of their treaty commitments, are regularly criticized by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) for engagement, in some cases at a subnational level, with a range of tolerant policy approaches.

Prominent among these are harm reduction interventions aiming to reduce the link between injecting drug use and HIV/AIDS (particularly drug consumption rooms/safe injection facilities), medical marijuana schemes and the ‘decriminalization’ of drug possession for personal use. Despite the positions of the Board, the detailed and robust legal justifications put forward by many states demonstrate that the policy choices are defensible within the boundaries of the existing treaty framework.

Moreover, they are further justified, and in some cases required, by national constitutional guarantees and concurrent obligations in international law. That national constitutional principles should operate as the locus for determining the appropriateness of certain policies (such as the criminalisation of personal possession of illicit substances) is specifically written into the drug control conventions.

Although revealing their considerable flexibility, the process of soft defection also inevitably highlights the limited plasticity of the conventions – they can only bend so far. The very act of justifying the legality of various policy options relative to the treaty framework emphasises an inescapable fact. Should they wish to do so, states already pushing at the limits of the regime would only be able to expand further national policy space, particularly in relation to production and supply, via an alteration in their relationship to the conventions and the prohibitive norm at the regime’s core.

Within such a context, growing and much needed attention is being devoted to the legal technicalities of treaty revision. There remains, however, a deficiency of analysis and discussion of the political and geopolitical practicalities of moving beyond the prohibitive confines of the current treaty framework.

This discussion paper aims to go some way to fill this space. Mindful of the recent experiences of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in the first formal challenge to the prohibitive norm at the heart of the regime, it focuses specifically on the possible benefits and dilemmas of the formation and operation of a like-minded group (LMG), or groups, of revisionist nations.

The paper suggests that, while substantive changes in the structure of international regimes in general is not uncommon, the varied nature of dissatisfaction with different aspects of the current drug control regime, the relatively few States parties openly expressing such dissatisfaction, and the character of drug policy itself combine to make the issue more problematic than it might be in other areas of multilateral cooperation. As will be discussed, the history of the issue area and the current mechanisms of regime compliance point to the use of an LMG approach to expand domestic policy freedom via some form of treaty revision. Yet, the inter-related issues of specific and often shifting national interest are likely to make such a process complex and multifaceted.

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Ontvoering legt drugshandel bloot

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De 29-jarige man deed 2 weken geleden aangifte van ontvoering van zijn vrouw. De ontvoering, die anderhalve dag duurde, zou zijn gevolgd op de diefstal van cocaïne uit een container. Politie en justitie denken dat de man daar zelf achter zit, aldus een woordvoerder van het Openbaar Ministerie in Rotterdam vrijdag.

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Op zaterdag 22 september 2012 22:09 schreef DS4 het volgende:

Maar zwakke punten... daar kun je aan werken. Mocht het echt volstrekt niet mogelijk zijn, dan moet je er wellicht van af zien, want wat je niet kan handhaven moet je niet verbieden. Dat is zinloos.

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Op zaterdag 22 september 2012 22:40 schreef DS4 het volgende:
Ja, "volstrekt niet mogelijk" is voor mensen die teveel snuiven kennelijk niet goed te begrijpen.

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Op zaterdag 22 september 2012 22:41 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

Of voor mensen die te veel zuipen of geilen op propaganda.

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Hoofdrolspeler Mexicaanse drugsoorlog gepakt

Een van de hoofdrolspelers in de drugsoorlog in Mexico is woensdag gearresteerd. Dat liet de Mexicaanse marine weten.

Het gaat om Ivan Velazquez, een van de leiders van het drugskartel Los Zetas. Velazquez staat ook wel bekend als Z-50 of El Taliban. Hij werd gearresteerd in de staat San Luis Potosi in het midden van Mexico, waar Los Zetas de afgelopen weken een interne strijd heeft uitgevochten.

Mexico heeft in 2006 het leger ingezet om de drugsoorlog onder controle te krijgen, maar sindsdien is het geweld juist uit de hand gelopen. Ongeveer 55.000 mensen zijn vermoord.

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Op donderdag 27 september 2012 22:07 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Nieuwsuur: Aandacht voor de War on Drugs op de Algemene Vergadering VN.