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

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De Ochoas - de echte bazen van het Medellínkartel

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Mexican Drug Cartels Threaten Texas Cops: Accept Bribes or Die

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Residents of El Paso, TX have witnessed a disturbing sight which would seem to be a direct threat to local police. Two billboards on I-10 have been defaced with a hanging effigy and the words "Plata o plomo" which means "silver or lead." It is believed to be a message from Mexican Drug cartels to local law enforcement to "accept bribes or die."

The Obama Administration released 68,000 criminally convicted illegals back to the streets in 2013.

Let's not forget the fact that Eric Holder and Barack Obama were both highly instrumental in arming Mexican Drug Cartels through the now infamous "Fast and Furious" debacle.

Despite obvious problems, legislators are in a rush to push the amnesty bill through, presumably before 2014 elections in a political move.

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Gemiddeld drugsgebruik nergens in Europa zo hoog als in Nederland

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Nergens in Europa ligt het gemiddelde drugsgebruik hoger dan in Nederland. Gemeten over 42 verschillende Europese steden blijkt dat Utrecht, Amsterdam en Eindhoven voor vrijwel alle soorten drugs eindigen in de Europese toptien. Vooral cannabis, speed, MDMA en cocaïne blijken populair. In Amsterdam worden tussen de 20- en 30 duizend lijntjes per dag gesnoven, ervan uitgaande dat een lijntje coke 100 milligram is en een zuivergraad heeft van 50 procent.

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Gemeten over drie opeenvolgende jaren en vertaald naar drugsgebruik per duizend inwoners, is Eindhoven de Europese nummer één voor wat betreft speed, wordt alleen in Antwerpen meer cocaïne gesnoven dan in Amsterdam en is het gemiddelde Nederlandse cannabisgebruik het hoogst van alle onderzochte landen. De topdrie van steden waar het meeste MDMA (xtc) wordt gebruikt, is zelfs helemaal Nederlands, met wederom Eindhoven als nummer een.

Uit eerder rioolwateronderzoek kwam al naar voren dat de cijfers in de gemeenten Nijkerk en Edam-Volendam vergelijkbaar zijn met die van de andere drie Nederlandse steden. Methamfetamine (chrystal meth) is de enige onderzochte drug die nauwelijks in het Nederlandse rioolwater voorkomt.

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Op dinsdag 27 mei 2014 14:36 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
en is het gemiddelde Nederlandse cannabisgebruik het hoogst van alle onderzochte lande

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Op dinsdag 27 mei 2014 16:50 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

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Dan moet er ergens een hiaat zitten tussen een van de onderzoeksmethodes die het trimbos instituut erop na houdt en toch met andere cijfers komt.

http://www.trimbos.nl/ond(...)en-cijfers-en-trends klik op het ndm jaarbericht.

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- Het recent en actueel cannabisgebruik onder Nederlandse volwassenen valt samen met het Europese gemiddelde (§ 3.5).

- Het percentage actuele cannabisgebruikers onder Nederlandse scholieren van 15-16 jaar is in 2011 twee keer hoger dan het Europese gemiddelde (§ 3.5).

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Op dinsdag 27 mei 2014 14:36 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

Gemiddeld drugsgebruik nergens in Europa zo hoog als in Nederland

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Op dinsdag 27 mei 2014 17:23 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Echte klinkklare onzin.

Ik heb nog nooit zoveel drugs gezien als in Londen.

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Op dinsdag 27 mei 2014 17:35 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Maar dat zegt toch niets? In NL word er gewoon veel minder drukte om gemaakt.

In veel landen kun je veel relaxter blowen dan in NL. Zat clubs in Spanje waar je gewoon mag blowen, maar ze zeggen het gewoon niet. En ondertussen klagen ze over het NL'se "relaxte" beleid.

Als je wil weten wat er gebruikt word moet je kijken naar wat er gebruikt word, niet wat er in folders staat of hoe vaak je iets krijgt aangeboden.

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"Limburg is het Colombia van de synthetische drugs"

Wietplantages, drugslabs, maffia: de Limburgse gemeente Maasmechelen is een uitvalsbasis van de georganiseerde misdaad geworden, zo schrijft het weekkblad Humo. "Het is al een tijd dweilen met de kraan open, zeker aan de Maaskant."

Wat is er aan de hand in het oosten van Limburg? De regio van Maaseik over Maasmechelen tot Lanaken is een draaischijf van de Europese drugshandel geworden, vol wietplantages en labs voor synthetische drugs. "Het Colombia van de synthetische
drugs", zo bestempelde Peter De Buysscher van het commissariaat-generaal van de federale politie Belgisch en Nederlands Limburg het onlangs.

De Limburgse grensstreek is een ideale locatie, zo klinkt het in Humo. Allereerst puur geografisch: "Wie in België woont, gaat crimineel aan de slag in Nederland en Duitsland, en omgekeerd. De handhaving loopt toch achter en raakt nog veel te vaak niet over de grens", zegt Patrick Van den Oetelaar, directeur van de federale gerechtelijke politie in Tongeren.

Daarnaast is de nabijheid van grote wiet- en xtc-organisaties in Nederlands Limburg essentieel. "De Nederlandse politie ziet daar hoe volledige straten - pand na pand - zich op de wietkweek toeleggen en hoe brave burgers voor de georganiseerde misdaad gaan werken." Hij noemt de oude mijnstreek rond Kerkrade, maar ook in Belgische mijnstreken duikt het fenomeen op. Meestal met Nederlanders achter de schermen, maar ook Belgen zetten soms hun eigen labs en plantages op poten.

Wachtlijsten
De aanwezigheid van Marokkaanse, Italiaanse en Turkse gemeenschappen in de cités van de vroegere mijngemeenten, waar de economie al een tijd in een dip zit, blijkt een doorslaggevende factor. "Allochtone families hebben buitenlandse contacten en familiale banden over de grenzen heen. Je ziet hoe Italiaanse criminelen in Limburg gebruikmaken van hun Italiaanse contacten in het buitenland en dat Turken voor het transport van drugs een beroep doen op familie of landgenoten in andere landen." Dat verklaart ook de aanwezigheid van Italiaanse maffiaorganisaties in Maasmechelen, met mensen die banden hebben met de Camorra of de 'Ndrangheta.

De situatie is dermate ernstig dat de politie tegenwoordig al met wachtlijsten werkt. Op het grondgebied van de gemeente Genk en de zone Midden-Limburg lopen ze continu een vijftiental wietplantages achter. En in Maasmechelen en Lanaken is het nog erger.

Geen volk, geen tijd
Een Limburgse magistraat zegt in Humo dat het probleem zeker ten dele bij het lokale bestuur ligt. "Er wordt zeker niet voldoende
op gewerkt. Wietplantages, xtc-labs en de smokkel van cocaïne zijn aan de Maaskant geen grote prioriteit voor lokaal bestuur en politie. Mensen in Maasmechelen of Lanaken liggen niet wakker van
wietboeren en hennepplantages, maar wel van gewapende overvallers en inbrekers. Die moeten eerst worden aangepakt door de lokale politie. En dan is er geen volk en tijd meer voor de rest."

Maasmechels bugermeester Raf Terwingen (CD&V) reageert dat hij niet goed op de hoogte is van de toestand van de georganiseerde misdaad in zijn gemeente. "Er wordt niet met mij gecommuniceerd. Zo'n highlevelcriminaliteit kun je niet aanpakken met het lokaal bestuur en de lokale politie. Dat moeten het parket en de federale politie doen." Dat de wijk Eisden-Tuinwijk vol criminele families zou zitten, noemt hij "overdreven". "Ik vind het erg dat men dat over die buurt zegt. Als jullie met mij naar Eisden gaan, dan zullen jullie daar gastvrij worden ontvangen."

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Experts evaluate drug laws in an era of surging substance use and overcrowding

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The dark legacy of Taiwan's war on drugs is ever-rising drug use and desperately overcrowded prisons. While measures to ease the overflow of inmates get under way this year, experts are weighing the merits and costs of time-honored laws.

A life sentence, like the size of a galaxy, is hard to fathom, even for an inmate serving one. Paul Douglas, a middle child from a middle-class family raised in the middle-of-the-road town of Wokingham, England, pleaded guilty to trafficking 1.9 kilos of heroin out of Bangkok for US$4,000 in 2002.

“I made a very bad decision,” said Douglas, 45, who has struggled to find peace, watching his early 30s drift into his mid-40s in gray prison garb, serving life at Taipei Prison for a first-time offense.

His peculiar hobby — collecting news clippings of “bizarre” court verdicts he reads about in Taiwanese newspapers — has only confused his understanding of local justice.

“It makes no sense,” Douglas said, comparing his case — a life sentence for trafficking a grade-one narcotic — to a March story in The China Post about 13 military officers sentenced between three to eight months for their roles in an army conscript's death. “What I ask is, does the punishment fit the crime?”

Taiwan's trafficking laws are relics of the 19th-century Opium Wars, when addiction raged along Asia's seafaring trade routes according to Edward Lai, professor at Central Police University. A state-run system of opium licenses, not the laws, eventually quelled the local epidemic, but popular fears that the “nightmare” could return are driving current policies, Lai said.

“The laws and policies for drug trafficking are too harsh,” said Lai, a former corrections officer at Taipei Prison, until ten years ago. “However, most citizens support 'get-tough-on-crime' policies, so politicians support those policies to win the votes.”

Draconian laws, empirically, are ineffective in deterring the drug trade, said Lai, who witnessed much recidivism among drug users while at Taipei Prison that foretold today's swelling incarceration rates. Two decades since the modern war on drugs was declared, 38 out of 49 penitentiaries are overcrowded while nearly half of the 58,565 inmates last year served time for drug crimes, according to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).

Still, legislators defend the current policies, arguing that addiction, namely to heroin, the deadliest and the island's most abused drug, is poison to the economy — costing a user US$18,310 per year — and ravages communities by attracting crime, according to a National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) study published last year.

“Drug criminals severely endanger public order,” said KMT legislator Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井), who is trying to resurrect a 2007 bill that commutes prison sentences to alleviate overcrowding — but excludes drug criminals. “They are unforgivable.”

Last year, Liao toured Taipei Prison — which is built for 2,705 inmates, but houses 3,716, according to the Agency of Corrections (AOC) — and said he realized, then and there, what constituents meant when they described the place as “horrible.”

Prisoners here sleep side by side on factory floors, not beds — violating United Nations covenants — and are allotted an average space of roughly a square meter, or “a spot on the floor,” according to Abdul Azeez Mahdi, 35, from Los Angeles, sentenced to 15 years for trafficking 1.2 kilos of heroin.

“It's not written down, but the prison rule is everyone gets 45 centimeters,” Mahdi said. “But my shoulders are 45 centimeters.”

The close quarters cause mental stress and health problems, inmates said. “It's just part of the course,” said Douglas about scabies outbreaks. “Like you're living in squalor.”

The Drug War Comes Full Circle

Last year, a shipment of 229 kilos of heroin was seized, the second largest haul in the island's history behind a heroin bust in 1993, the year the war on drugs was declared. To many it symbolized history coming full circle.

But the tide is turning. Although trafficking a grade-one narcotic is a capital offense in Taiwan, life sentences were largely automatic when Douglas was arrested. In 2009, however, the law was amended granting reduced sentences to anyone who pleads guilty — but the reduction doesn't work retroactively in Douglas's case. “It's disheartening to see people who come after you, leave before you for the same crime,” he said.

This year, expansions at three prisons, including Taipei Prison, will add capacity for nearly 2,000 inmates, while the Ministry of Defense transfers Tainan's military prison to the AOC.

But many, including Liao, are seeking alternatives to building prisons. A year incarcerated costs taxpayers NT$22,000 per prisoner, according to the NCKU study, while the prison population has doubled since 1992, casting doubt over the strategy's long-term sustainability.

“When I first got here,” said Douglas with a kind, sallow smile, “I used to wonder, 'What do the guards think when they look through the bars and see a sea of people '”

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Drug Use Is Not a Sustainable Development Issue - The War on Drugs Certainly Is

This month negotiators met at the UN in New York to discuss the Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs); government targets that will heavily influence policies through to 2030 and that will affect the lives of billions in the coming years. The SDGs are intended to address global challenges relating to our ability to survive and thrive on this planet, from climate change, poverty reduction, sustainable cities and disease prevention to functioning institutions of government. Done well, this could be transformative. But somehow (nobody seems to know how) a goal to rid the world of drug use has been included in the draft SDG document. This is harmful both for the aims of the SDGs and, given the lack of any transparency around its inclusion, for the credibility of the entire process.

The current draft includes a target to 'eliminate narcotic drug and substance abuse'. This is the essence of drug war rhetoric. But issue by issue, discipline by discipline, every canard, every straw man, every lie of the war on drugs has by now been exposed, including any pretense that a 'drug free world' is either possible or, given what it requires, a desirable goal to pursue. In fact, just as the UN negotiators were considering this target five Nobel Prize winning economists joined the growing chorus of community activists, experts and senior political figures calling for systemic change.

Aside from being a failure on its own terms (pick your indicator) the war on drugs has been a systematic human rights onslaught. It has eroded and crowded out constitutional values democratic societies should defend. It has fuelled urban violence and hindered peaceful resolution of conflicts. It has been a consistent barrier to development in producer nations. It has been a vector of disease and an economic catastrophe; billions poured down the sinkhole of tail-chasing drug enforcement at the expense of proven, life-saving harm reduction and treatment interventions.

To put it another way: the idea of a drug free world has produced and is producing effects that are anathema to everything the Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to stand for.

Now, there are some aspects of the draft SDGs that can be criticised as, for example, unachievable or immeasurable. But none are so directly harmful to the whole enterprise as this. So how did something so counterproductive make it in?

Sweden, which has a reputation for restrictive drug policies and a national goal of a 'drug free society', was credited with the suggestion. After contacting the ambassador in charge, however, we were told this was absolutely not the case. Sweden corrected the record, saying it had never proposed this target.

A group of NGOs known as the Women's Major Group was also credited with the proposal. On the contrary, the group objected strongly to it on the grounds that it had undermined so many other priorities, such as HIV prevention, and it said so forcefully at the meeting.

So the target was included outside of the official, transparent SDG procedures. But despite coming out of thin air (or perhaps, more realistically, from an arbitrary decision or error of a UN secretariat staffer) the target to eliminate drug abuse is now on the negotiating table. Once there it became part of the debate. Some States, such as Singapore, Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates liked it as it was. Others, mainly Latin American governments, wanted to amend it for an explicit focus on health, peace and security, not criminalisation (they clearly know what this well worn rhetoric means in practice). A few, including China and Indonesia, called for it to be deleted.

But the UN, of course, seeks consensus. So the upshot is that no agreement was reached and a very stupid and simplistic idea that was not officially proposed remains on the table as a baseline for negotiations by our governments. The only thing that changed after this round of debate was that any reference to where it came from is now gone.

This doesn't tell us much about the war on drugs we didn't already know. It's insidious, infectious and it undermines institutions and debates such as these. But what does it tell us about the SDG process? What faith can we have in these goals when official papers mysteriously include aims that no one wanted, falsely attributed to governments and NGOs, and that fail to display any understanding of contemporary science or politics, goals that would in their pursuit undermine precisely what the SDGs are for?

If drugs issues are to be included in the SDG targets then ideas must come from official, considered sources, including NGO consultations. They must be based on what is really happening, and real solutions, not the same discredited fantasies of the past. Drug use is not a sustainable development issue. The war on drugs certainly is.

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Bekende anti-legaliseringspersonen:
• Ivo O. en Fred T.
• Jan-Peter B.

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Op donderdag 29 mei 2014 11:52 schreef waht het volgende:

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Voeg dan ook gelijk even alle andere premiers/presidenten/ministers ter wereld toe.

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Duizenden drugsdealers Italië vervroegd vrij

Zo'n 9 duizend Italiaanse drugsdealers komen in aanmerking voor vervroegde vrijlating. Dit is het gevolg van een beslissing van de Italiaanse Hoge Raad van vandaag. Die bepaalde dat er ook met terugwerkende kracht een onderscheid moet worden gemaakt tussen harddrugs en softdrugs. Daarvan kunnen nu mensen profiteren die voor de handel met hasj tot deels jarenlange celstraffen waren veroordeeld.

Op initiatief van de rechtse politicus Gianfranco Fini werd in 2006 het verschil tussen softdrugs en harddrugs uit het strafrecht gehaald. Die wet is eerder dit jaar door het Constitutioneel Hof in Rome nietig verklaard.

Op het verkopen van hasj kwam door de 'Fini-wet' een maximumstraf van twintig jaar cel en een boete van 260 duizend euro te staan. Centrumlinkse politici vonden dat onnodig hoog en 'criminaliserend'. Daarnaast zijn de gevangenissen in Italië al overvol. Italië is daarvoor op de vingers getikt door de Raad van Europa.

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Op donderdag 29 mei 2014 12:11 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Behalve José Mujica van Uruguay dus.

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http://www.nu.nl/economie(...)britse-economie.html
'Drugs en prostitutie goed voor Britse economie'
Drugshandel en prostitutie leveren een bijdrage van circa 10 miljard pond (12,3 miljard euro) aan de Britse economie.
'Drugs en prostitutie goed voor Britse economie'
Foto: Thinkstock
Dat schrijft zakenkrant Financial Times.
De Britse overheid heeft aangekondigd prostitutie en drugshandel voortaan mee te nemen in het berekenen van de economische groei......

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JoinTheMajority twitterde op vrijdag 30-05-2014 om 06:28:51 BREAKING: US House passes amendment to stop DEA medical #marijuana raids 219-189!!!!!! RT if you’re excited! #mmot http://t.co/vAhuLeyAlL reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 30 mei 2014 16:57 schreef heiden6 het volgende:
Jongeren onwel na zelfgemaakte GHB

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Op vrijdag 30 mei 2014 10:19 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

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Dus we laten deze zaken wel illegaal maar om de economische cijfertjes op te poetsen nemen we ze wel weer mee.

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Megawinst door wietteelt in Limburg

Limburgse wiettelers verdienen per jaar bijna een kwart miljard euro. Desondanks staat de bestrijding van de softdrugshandel laag op de agenda van de politie. De pakkans is gering en de straffen zijn bovendien laag.

^{door Bram van der Heijden, Marco van Kampen en Serge Sekhuis}

Dit blijkt uit onderzoek van deze krant. Het Openbaar Ministerie onderschrijft de uitkomsten van de research.

De politie komt in de regel pas in actie na een tip, ze gaat zelden zelf op onderzoek uit. Dat blijkt een bewuste keus. Bronnen binnen de politie wijzen onder meer op de publieke roep om meer ‘blauw' op straat om het aantal overvallen en inbraken een halt toe te roepen. „Het is elke dag kiezen bij de politie”, is het enige dat politiechef Gery Veldhuis kwijt wil. Ook het dubbelzinnige kabinetsbeleid, dat enerzijds de verkoop van wiet via coffeeshops gedoogt, maar anderzijds de aanvoer via de achterdeur strafbaar stelt, speelt een rol bij de lage prioritering die de politie geeft aan de strijd tegen softdrugshandel.

De politie ontmantelde vorig jaar 599 wietplantages: 399 in Zuid- en 200 in Noord- en Midden-Limburg. De politie claimt één op de drie plantages te ruimen. Dit zou betekenen dat er verspreid over de provincie 1.800 zolders, kelders, garageboxen en loodsen zijn waar wiet wordt geteeld. Gebaseerd op een gemiddelde omvang van 260 planten per plantage, een opbrengst van 30,9 gram per plant en vijf oogsten, wordt er jaarlijks in Limburg 72.306 kilo wiet geoogst. Volgens justitie betalen coffeeshophouders, via tussenpersonen, telers zo'n 3.280 euro per kilo. Zo komt de winst op ruim 237 miljoen euro.

Het enorme financieel gewin dat wordt behaald met illegale hennepteelt, staat in schril contrast met het aantal verdachten dat een celstraf krijgt opgelegd. Uit een inventarisatie van deze krant van alle wietzaken die de rechtbank in Limburg in 2013 behandelde, blijkt dat slechts een fractie van de telers in de cel belandt. Van de 343 verdachten die werden gedagvaard, kwam ruim twee derde er vanaf met een voorwaardelijke gevangenisstraf, een taakstraf of een boete.

Lees meer in de krant van zaterdag en op Krant Digitaal.

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How Antwerp turned into Europe's go-to city for cocaine

Antwerp, Belgium's genteel port city, is now revealed as a global drugs gateway and the cocaine capital of Europe

A country probably has to admit to a drugs problem when even its wildlife is on cocaine. As of yesterday morning, an online petition calling on the Belgian government to protect the country's racing pigeons from being doped with performance-enchancing cocaine was 200 shy of its target of 45,000 signatures.

That nefarious pigeon fanciers have apparently been using the drug as their doping agent of choice is a reminder that a nation often pilloried for being boring is also partial to South America's most notorious export.

According to last month's Global Drug Survey, Belgians are the most enthusiastic consumers of cocaine in the world, giving the drug a rating of 5.5/10 compared with just 2.2/10 from Australians, who rated it the least highly.

And last week a scientific analysis of wastewater samples in 45 European cities, conducted between 2011 and 2013 and weighted against the size of their respective populations, concluded that the Belgian port city of Antwerp – not London, as widely reported in the British press – is Europe's cocaine capital.

The hipster district of Antwerp Zuid, a well-heeled place where bars and galleries give way to vintage shops and furniture stores, knocked Amsterdam into second place when it came to the amount of benzoylecgonine – the metabolised compound cocaine forms after it has been in the human body – washing through its sewerage system. Zurich was third and London fourth.

And yet a visitor to the city, home to Rubens and famed for its diamond trade, would find it hard to reconcile genteel Antwerp with its position at the top of the cocaine charts.

Dominated by cycling lanes and tramways, it is a city of green spaces and elegant buildings. Lavender plants fill its traffic islands; people wait for the green man to appear before crossing the road; the police stop traffic so that hundreds of cyclists towing children in small buggies can stage a public protest. Even Antwerp's famed red-light district, reputedly home to one of the biggest brothels in Europe, draws as many curious middle-aged tourists as stag parties.

No wonder many are reluctant to confront Antwerp's edgy reputation. Several Belgian politicians approached for comment declined to discuss the matter. Even those familiar with Antwerp's drug scene were shocked by the claims made for its cocaine usage. "There just aren't more people here doing cocaine than, say, in Brussels or Rotterdam," said Joep Oomen, who runs a cannabis social club that represents some 300 adults legally allowed to grow the drug to meet their personal needs.

Nevertheless, he concedes that cocaine is more popular now than when he came to Antwerp 22 years ago. "It's cheap here, too. When I was 20, cocaine was for people in Hollywood. Not any more."

According to the Global Drug Survey, Belgium is the cheapest country in western Europe to buy cocaine. Local people say that dealers on De Coninckplein, a small, cafe-lined square, close to its Chinese quarter, charge as little as ¤50 (£40)a gram, half the European average.

Received wisdom suggests Antwerp's proximity to its port, the second busiest in Europe after Rotterdam, ensures a cheap supply of coke, which in turn drives demand.

But Steve Rolles of Transform, a thinktank that advocates reform of the drugs laws, said the truth was more complex: "If there's a demand for a drug, then availability will follow. I mean, it's not like there's a lot of cocaine in Southampton, for example. There has to be something in the social fabric of the place that drives demand."

In the case of Antwerp, a city once famous for its merchants, this something appears to be a new era of embourgeoisement. The Ferraris, Porsches and Jaguars snaking their way past Antwerp's boutique designer shops suggest it is a place on the up.

"Twenty years ago Antwerp was a lot more empty," said Oomen, who puts the city's renaissance down to European integration. "The Flemish region is booming."

A rising middle class and cocaine use appear to be inextricably linked. "Cocaine is popular here, but it is a drug for professionals with money," said Katerine, a student drinking in a bar close to Antwerp Zuid's film museum. "Young people will do cannabis or pills. It is the architects, journalists, lawyers and politicians who do coke."

Daniel, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, suggested the city's rising affluence had seen it become a popular weekend destination for Europe's upwardly mobile, for whom cocaine was now an essential part of their tourist experience. "People come in by plane, by yacht, by boat, by train. You can get here quickly in a car from Holland or France. It's a beautiful city and people want to have a good time when they're here."

The city's reputation as a cocaine hotspot threatens to turn the clock back to the start of the millennium, when it attracted narco-tourists from northern France seeking to score cheap heroin.

Keen to avoid history repeating itself, last year Antwerp's mayor, Bart De Wever, declared war on the illegal drugs scene, tripling the size of the city's drugs squad from 15 to 45 officers and pledging "zero tolerance". He has set himself a formidable challenge. Few cities in the world are as immersed in the cocaine trade as Antwerp.

Around 25% of the cocaine moving from South America into Europe passes through Belgium. And most of this comes through Antwerp's port, the "supermarket of Europe", which has 140,000 employees and 160km of quayside. But only around 2% of the 8m containers passing through the port each year are screened.

"Screening is far from watertight," said Tom Feiling, author of The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. "Law enforcement want us to think that they know the size and scale of cocaine coming in, but the reality is that they just don't know."

The US State Department estimates that around 20 tonnes of cocaine comes through the port annually. But some studies suggest it could be 30 tonnes or higher. Certainly the cocaine cartels are becoming more ambitious. Two years ago the city's port authorities seized a record eight tonnes of cocaine with a street value of ¤500m, hidden in a container of bananas shipped from Ecuador.

Last year it emerged that hackers, working with the cartels, had breached the IT systems controlling the movement of shipping containers in the port so that they could remove them before they were searched. "It sounds like fantasy and science fiction, but it's the reality," said Calum MacLeod, who is a security expert at Lieberman Software Corporation.

At one time the wholesale trafficking of cocaine through the port was performed almost exclusively by Colombian drug cartels. But, according to a recent article in the Journal of Drug Issues, gangs from Albania and the Philippines are now muscling in. They are aware that Europe will soon outstrip the United States as the main market for cocaine.

All of which means that picturesque, prosperous Antwerp is unlikely to shed its relationship with cocaine any time soon.

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Silk Road Reduced Violence in the Drug Trade, Study Argues

The dark web may have a silver lining, according to a pair of academics: A new class of geekier, less violent drug dealers.

A law professor and a professor of criminal science argue, in a paper released online, that by reducing physical contact between drug dealers—particularly between dealers and their suppliers—the Silk Road’s bustling Web-based narcotics trade may have prevented bloodshed that would have occurred in the street-level illegal drug market.

The Silk Road, after all, became a bustling online drug bazaar by giving users a new way to deal in contraband anonymously. On the site and dozens of copycats that followed its takedown by law enforcement in October, users’ physical locations were obscured by tools like bitcoin and the anonymity software Tor. Those crypto protections are designed to prevent anyone–including cops and competitors–from knowing where users are. According to University of Lausanne criminologist David Decary-Hetu and University of Manchester law professor Judith Aldridge, that layer of anonymity made technical know-how and online customer service, not a propensity for violence, the barrier to entry for dealers on the Silk Road.

“This new breed of drug dealer is… likely to be relatively free from the violence typically associated with traditional drug markets,” reads the paper, the title of which calls Silk Road “a paradigm-shifting criminal innovation.” “Whereas violence [in the traditional drug trade] was commonly used to gain market share, protect turfs and resolve conflicts , the virtual location and anonymity that the cryptomarket provides reduces or eliminates the need – or even the ability – to resort to violence.

“In the drugs cryptomarket era,” the paper adds, “having good customer service and writing skills…may be more important than muscles and face-to-face connections.”

Aldridge and Decary-Hetu’s study, still being reviewed for publication by a journal they declined to name, doesn’t offer crime statistics to back up that argument. Instead, it uses slightly convoluted logic based on assumptions about the source of violence in the drug world. The Silk Road’s role in reducing bloodshed, they say, is a “very clear inference” from an analysis of the size of transactions made on the market. Using a custom web crawler, they scraped Silk Road in September of 2013–just before its shutdown by the FBI–to collect a snapshot of all feedback and review data from the site’s vendor profiles. Those posts provided a catalog of past deals on the site, including their frequency and size. They found that the high average price of those deals, along with other clues, implies a surprisingly large number of Silk Road buyers were not consumers, but dealers buying wholesale.

That’s a different take than previous studies, which have described Silk Road as an eBay for drugs. Instead, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu say their data shows a vast portion of the Silk Road’s sales were “business-to-business.” That finding moves the market’s role farther up the drug market supply chain than was previously thought, they argue, placing it closer to the cartel-controlled drug producers behind much of the trade’s violence. And since the study argues the traders on both sides of a Silk Road deal were often drug dealers, the researchers claim Silk Road’s business-to-business deals mean twice as many opportunities for violence were prevented.

All of that assumes, without much hard evidence, that transactions between drug dealers and their suppliers lead to dangerous conflicts more often than transactions between dealers and their customers. But Aldridge argues you don’t have to swallow that premise to take her larger point about how the Silk Road model reduces violence: Virtual drug deals don’t allow for physical attacks. “People who don’t meet face to face can’t hit each other or shoot each other,” she says.

According to the study’s measurements, the top 20 percent of Silk Road deals were for more than $1,000–$1,475 for cannabis and $3,494 for ecstasy, for instance. Those amounts, which Decary-Hetu and Aldridge compared with previous studies on real-world drug dealers, sound like far larger purchases than those intended for personal consumption. And in terms of revenue, those high-priced deals were much more important to the site’s sellers’ livelihoods, bringing in between 31 percent and 45 percent of their total revenue versus just 3 percent or 4 percent for deals in the cheapest 20 percent. The presence of products like “precursor” ingredient for synthesizing drugs and lab notes also implies that drug dealers, not just consumers, were shopping on the site.

The study also notes that the Silk Road trade focused far more on less addictive and harmful drugs than might have been previously assumed. “Drugs typically associated with drug dependence, harmful use and chaotic lifestyles (heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine) do not much appear on Silk Road, and generate very little revenue,” the study reads. It explains that skew by pointing to the waiting period between a Silk Road drug buy and the product’s arrival, vacuum-sealed, in the mail. “The site may therefore have suited purchases by recreational users with the resources and time to place orders and wait for deliveries; dependent users with chaotic lifestyles, in contrast, were likely to have had neither.”

If the Silk Road did in fact reduce violence, that’s in part by design. The site’s founder, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts and is alleged to be 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht, wrote that his creation was intended to enable non-violent, small-time dealers and to take power away from bloody cartels.

“For the first time I saw the drug cartels and the dealers, and every person in the whole damn supply chain in a different light,” he wrote on the site’s now-defunct user forums in 2012. “Some, especially the cartels, are basically a de facto violent power hungry state, and surely would love nothing more than to take control of a national government, but your average joe pot dealer, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, that guy became my hero…It wasn’t long, maybe a year or two after this realization that the pieces started coming together for the Silk Road.”

The notion of the Silk Road as a peace-loving innovation, of course, is tarnished by prosecutors’ accusations that Ulbricht paid would-be assassins to kill six people, including a blackmailer and an employee he worried might act as an informant.

But Aldridge counters that those murder-for-hire attempts took place outside the Silk Road’s market, and have little to do with its interactions. “Our argument about situational violence doesn’t mean people can’t be violent in other aspects of their lives,” she says. “They can engage in domestic violence or fight when they’re drunk, but none of those things are facilitated by a crypto market.”

She also notes that despite the prosecution’s claims, the killings Ulbricht allegedly commissioned don’t appear to have occurred; they may well have all been law enforcement stings or scams by con artists posing as assassins. The same anonymous, bitcoin-based transactions that worked so well for facilitating drug deals, Aldridge argues, haven’t turned out to be as convenient a system for paid murder. “We haven’t seen any, to our knowledge, murder-for-hires happening on crypto markets,” she says. “In fact, it may be much harder by virtue of the markets’ anonymity.”

Even if they do reward nonviolence, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu admit the Silk Road and the sites it’s inspired still account for just a tiny portion of the overall drug trade. Zeta drug cartel enforcers won’t need to trade their AK-47s and briefcases of cash for Tor and bitcoin just yet.

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Hulp leger gevraagd bij strijd tegen wietteelt

Limburgse burgemeesters roepen de hulp in van het leger bij de opsporing van hennepplantages op agrarische percelen.

De Venlose burgemeester Antoin Scholten, portefeuillehouder ‘hennep' namens alle Limburgse burgemeesters, stelt dat hierover gesprekken gaande zijn met het ministerie van Defensie. „Defensie kan ons ondersteunen door drones (onbemande vliegtuigen, red.) of helikopters met speciale opsporingsapparatuur in te zetten”, legt hij uit. „Defensie bekijkt of ze deze vorm van ondersteuning kan realiseren binnen de reguliere capaciteit.”

De politie ontdekte met eigen materieel in 2013 in Limburg op zeventig buitenlocaties 4000 planten. Hulp van het leger moet de opsporing intensiveren.
Uit onderzoek van deze krant is gebleken dat henneptelers in Limburg jaarlijks ruim 237 miljoen euro verdienen.

Het ministerie van Defensie kon maandag niet reageren.

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Op dinsdag 3 juni 2014 11:24 schreef Tism het volgende:

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twitter:

Hey_SaturdaySun twitterde op dinsdag 03-06-2014 om 19:23:21 Since legalizing, Colorado made $19 million in March, $2 million went to schools, crime down 10% #WarOnDrugs #420 http://t.co/8xgfsZyifD reageer retweet

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Op dinsdag 3 juni 2014 11:24 schreef Tism het volgende:

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Op dinsdag 3 juni 2014 20:28 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

twitter:

Hey_SaturdaySun twitterde op dinsdag 03-06-2014 om 19:23:21 Since legalizing, Colorado made $19 million in March, $2 million went to schools, crime down 10% #WarOnDrugs #420 http://t.co/8xgfsZyifD reageer retweet

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The multi-decade, trillion dollar waste that we call the drug war has become increasingly unpopular, with everyone from Nobel Prize winning economists to leaders from the religious and civil rights communities calling for its end. Those who defend arresting, incarcerating and militarizing our way into even more disaster often claim that it’s all in the name of protecting children. Yet, the war on drugs is waged with a shocking disregard for human rights, and even babies and children are not spared.

A woman in Texas named Nicole Guerrero recently filed a lawsuit over her 2012 drug possession arrest and detention in a Wichita County jail.She was pregnant at the time, and on the night of June 11, had labor-like symptoms and tried to alert her jailors. Guerrero was ignored for more than four hours. She was subsequently placed in solitary confinement. The following morning, Guerrero was forced to deliver her baby with the help of a guard. The baby was pronounced dead. Guerrero’s lawsuit claims no effort was made to resuscitate the newborn.

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It is a bitter irony that thousands of kids have experienced needless violence or had their families ripped apart in the name of drug prohibition. As many as 2.7 million children are growing up in U.S. households in which one or more parents are incarcerated.

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Op woensdag 4 juni 2014 08:30 schreef stoeltafel het volgende:
Keihard aanpakken, ook in Nederland, lol

’Verbied drugsfestivals’

Festivals en grote muziekevenementen waar niet krachtig wordt opgetreden tegen drugsgebruik, moeten worden verboden. Organisaties die niet keihard ingrijpen bij drugsgebruik, mogen geen vergunning meer krijgen voor dergelijke grootschalige evenementen.

Dick Trubbendorffer, directeur van de GGZ CrisisCare, vindt dat de overheid nu veel te slap optreedt: „Wanneer kickboksgala’s verboden worden omdat zij broedplaatsen zijn voor criminelen, dan vind ik het vreemd dat de festivals waar jaarlijks drugsdoden vallen, wel gewoon mogen doorgaan.”

Gevaarlijk
De GGZ denkt dat alleen hard beleid een herhaling van vorige zomer kan voorkomen. Toen kwamen bij verschillende evenementen tien feestgangers om het leven door hooggedoseerde xtc-pillen.

Daan van der Gouwe, onderzoeker van het Trimbos-instituut, constateert eveneens een gevaarlijke trend, maar hij legt de verantwoordelijkheid in de eerste plaats bij de drugsgebruikers zelf: „Toch moeten wij wel hulp bieden als het misgaat. Daarom vind ik het een slechte zaak dat de overheid ons verbiedt om feestgangers hun drugs te laten testen bij onze stands.”

Juist de hulp aan drugsgebruikende feestgangers valt slecht bij de GGZ. Trubbendorffer: „Datzelfde Trimbos roept al twintig jaar dat softdrugs niet schadelijk zijn. Ik stel vast dat het gedoogbeleid niet werkt. Onlangs is Amsterdam uitgeroepen tot xtc-hoofdstad van Europa. Nou, dan hou ik mijn hart vast voor de aankomende festivals.”

Gemakkelijker
De festivalgangers zelf maken zich niet zo druk. Volgens fanatiek bezoeker Werner (26) wordt het alleen maar gemakkelijker om drugs mee te nemen. „Ik ben nog nooit gepakt. Ja, ze fouilleren wel, maar daar houdt het op.” Hij stopt zijn pillen in plastic en stopt ze in zijn sok of, als het erom spant, in zijn onderbroek. „Daar checkt de beveiliging toch niet.”

Bron, http://www.telegraaf.nl/b(...)ugsfestivals___.html

War on drugs in Nederland

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Several Massachusetts doctors associated with prospective medical marijuana dispensaries are reportedly facing intense pressure from the federal government to cut ties with those companies.

Citing sources, the State House News Service reports at least two physicians have already resigned from their positions with medical marijuana organizations after federal agents with the D.E.A., which controls the licensing of doctors to prescribe controlled medications, threatened to revoke their licenses to prescribe certain medications.

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Colorado’s poster boy for ‘stoned driving’ was drunk off his gourd

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In January, Keith Kilbey crashed his car into a couple of parked Colorado police cars. The cars were blocking the entrance to an exit ramp, and their lights were flashing at the time Kilbey hit them. Shortly after the accident, a Colorado State Patrol (CSP) spokesman said Kilbey was high on pot the night of the crash and that he had been charged with driving under the influence of drugs. “This time we were fortunate,” warned CSP Corporal H. Cobler, “but many officers across the nation are not so lucky.”

In the state where recreational pot had just become legal, Kilbey became the poster boy for the dangers of driving while stoned. And with good reason. A sky-high driver who couldn’t even see the bright flashing lights of a couple of parked police cruisers confirmed all the predictions from law enforcement about the highway carnage Colorado would see after legalization. The CSP posted the incident on its Facebook page, and commenters responded by linking the incident to Amendment 64, the measure that legalized marijuana.

The Denver Post ran the headline “Colorado State Patrol says stoned driver crashed into 2 Patrol vehicles” and included a stock photo of a bag of joints. Denver’s alt weekly, the Westword, quoted extensively from police sources about how Kilbey’s wreck illustrated the dangers of driving while stoned. Denver’s Fox 31 reported: “Man charged with driving while stoned after hitting CSP vehicles.” The headline from Denver’s ABC7 was “Suspected stoned driver hits 2 Colorado State Patrol vehicles investigating a crash on I-76 ramp,” and for emphasis added on another line, “Driver suspected of being on drugs.” Colorado 9News asked, “Is weekend wreck a sign of ‘high’ times in Colorado?” then tied the wreck to an earlier fatal accident in which the driver was high on meth and heroin. From (ironically enough) the conservative news outlet the Blaze: “Man Allegedly High on Marijuana Made a Big Mistake on a Colorado Interstate.” Colorado’s 9News ran the story “Driver who hit 2 state troopers’ cars was high on pot” with an accompanying video that interspersed images of pot plants and an anonymous guy exhaling pot smoke with footage from inside of a car. And the CBS affiliate and Denver proclaimed, “Troopers Say Man Who Crashed Into Patrol Car Was Stoned.”

In a more nuanced piece published about a months after the crash, the Denver Post’s John Ingold noted that neither Kilbey’s official summons nor the incident report made any mention of pot.

This week, Keith Kilbey accepted a plea bargain. Here’s the headline from the Denver Post:

. Drunk, stoned driver takes plea deal after car crash in Adams County

Wait, Kilbey was drunk? Neither drunk nor alcohol appeared in any of those previous stories.

In fact, Kilbey had a blood-alcohol concentration of .268, more than three times the legal limit. The current legal limit is .08. People with Kilbey’s BAC typically experience severely impaired motor function, loss of consciousness and memory blackout. Kilbey also had pot in his system, about twice the state’s legal limit. But tests for pot impairment are a lot less precise, and pot itself has a much less pronounced effect on motorists than alcohol. (Scroll down to see the graph and link to the corresponding study under the section headed “Drugged driving is a concern, but it’s overblown” in this piece from Vox.) Kilbey’s alcohol consumption was by far the more likely cause of his impairment on the night of his wreck.

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Mother of Four Cures PTSD With MDMA

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Rachel Hope describes how MDMA dramatically transformed her life in just 6-8 hours. Rachel Hope is a mother of four who used MDMA to cure a life-long battle with PTSD. Rachel was given the MDMA as part of her participation in a Maps.org study. The study found MDMA-assisted psychotherapy cured 83% of participants with treatment-resistant PTSD, compared to 25% cured with psychotherapy alone.

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Op vrijdag 6 juni 2014 02:24 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:
http://www.alternet.org/n(...)-edible-pot-freakout
Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times column today that a marijuana chocolate bar she ate put her in an 8-hour hallucinatory state. Dowd, who was visiting Colorado, said she became immobilized on her hotel-room bed.
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It turns out the Dowd ate way too much of her chocolate bar (she was supposed to cut it into 16 pieces, but ate an undisclosed portion). However, she claims it was not properly labeled. And after sharing her own cautionary tale and warning others of the potential dangers of edibles, she referenced a 19-year old Wyoming college student who jumped off a balcony and a Denver man who shot his wife to death after over partaking.

En dit was haar eerste keer.

What Maureen Dowd's Absurd Weed Stunt Tells Us About Privileged White People

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Op maandag 9 juni 2014 20:14 schreef heiden6 het volgende:

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Ik geloof echt niet dat dit zo gegaan is als er wordt verteld, het is ofwel een verzonnen verhaal of opzettelijk zo gedaan.

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Mexico May Follow U.S. On Marijuana Legalization

The president of Mexico dubbed the drug war "failed policy," and hinted strongly that Mexico, the source of most of America's illegal drugs, could follow the U.S.'s lead on marijuana legalization.

Marijuana prices for cartel-connected farmers have plummeted in recent years as the U.S.'s drug policy becomes more and more lenient. Keeping marijuana illegal in Mexico makes no sense when the plant is legalized north of the border, President Enrique Pena Nieto told Madrid-based newspaper El Pais in an interview published Sunday, according to Reuters.

And as everyone -- including Maureen Dowd -- now knows, marijuana policy is changing rapidly in America, with the drug available for medical use in almost half of the country.

These words are just that: words. But they're the strongest words yet from a sitting Mexican president, whose predecessors have said much the same thing after leaving office.

Marijuana is legal in two American states -- Washington and Colorado. California muffed a chance to be the first state to end marijuana Prohibition in 2010, thanks in large part to interference from the federal government. And at least one leading leftist in Mexico says that as soon as California goes legal, the war on marijuana in Mexico will end.

In Mexico, possession of small quantities of drugs is legal. Trafficking huge quantities to satisfy American demand is not, and a military-style crackdown on cartel activity led to today's state of war between Mexican drug traffickers and the police and military.

This isn't good. It would take a fool to posit otherwise, and Pena Nieto is no fool. Following up on the "failed policy" admission, he added that Mexico can't continue on a "road of inconsistency" with liberalizing drug policy in America.

However, he is also practical.

Others who have come before him have said much the same thing about the efficacy of Mexico's war on drugs. Vicente Fox, who served as president from 2000 to 2006, criss-crossed the United States last year with that message -- one he also delivered in San Francisco in September with a strong addendum: legalize all drugs now.

Pena Nieto does not feel that way. He voiced strong support for keeping marijuana production illegal in Mexico, according to other sources.

Still, hearing the man in charge of Mexico say that it's time to rethink failed policy is a step toward sanity, and possibly fewer panga boats and catapults sending cartel-grown brick weed into the United States.

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Report Unveils How DEA Has Systematically Blocked Research and Reclassification of Marijuana, MDMA, and New Synthetic Drugs

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On Wednesday, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) will hold a press tele-conference to accompany the release of their new report, “The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science”. The report – which is being made available today – documents a decades-long pattern of systematically obstructing medical research and ignoring scientific evidence.

In a series of historic votes late last month, the U.S. House approved a bipartisan measure prohibiting the DEA from undermining state medical marijuana laws, as well as two amendments prohibiting the DEA from interfering with state hemp laws. The votes were seen as a rebuke to the DEA and DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, who is under increasing pressure to step down.

“The DEA is a police and propaganda agency,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “It makes no sense for it to be in charge of federal decisions involving scientific research and medical practice, especially when its successive directors have systematically abused their discretionary powers in this area. The time is long past for a top-to-bottom review of this rogue agency.”

Despite substantial evidence confirming marijuana’s medical benefits, the DEA has opposed efforts to reform federal policy to acknowledge marijuana’s medical value and made it very difficult for researchers to obtain marijuana to study its medical efficacy.

The federal government maintains a monopoly on the production of only one drug: marijuana. Researchers who want to conduct clinical trials of its therapeutic value are typically frustrated by bureaucratic obstacles. In 2007, a DEA Administrative Law Judge ruled that this decades-long monopoly was harmful to the public interest and should end – but the head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, rejected the ruling. State legislators and voters have taken matters into their own hands by making marijuana available for medical use at the state level. Almost half of all Americans now live in a state where medical marijuana is legal to one degree or another.

"The DEA has obstructed research into the medical use of marijuana for over 40 years and in the process has caused immeasurable suffering that would otherwise have been treated by low-cost, low-risk generic marijuana," said Rick Doblin, executive director of MAPS. "The DEA’s obstruction of the FDA approval process for marijuana has – to the DEA’s dismay – unintentionally catalyzed state-level medical marijuana reforms.”

Wednesday’s teleconference will feature medical researchers, members of Congress, medical marijuana patients and advocates.

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Akkoord Amsterdam: 'Voortrekkersrol wietteelt', meer sociale huurwoningen

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De partijen spraken ook af dat de stad een voortrekkersrol moet spelen bij het mogelijk maken van gereguleerde wietteelt.

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West Africa should decriminalise drugs - Obasanjo commission

Low-level drug offences should be decriminalised in West Africa, according to a high-level report.

The West Africa Commission on Drugs says drug cartels are undermining the region by using it to transit cocaine.

The commission, headed by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, says the cartels should be tackled but that punishing the personal use of drugs does not work.

It argues that current policies incite corruption and provoke violence.

Drug trafficking and consumption have become major issues in West Africa since the turn of the century.

Efforts around this time to stem the flow of cocaine from the producing countries of Latin America to consumers in the US and Europe led criminals to target West Africa as a new route.

Dramatic events like the crash landing of a Boeing 727 full of cocaine in Mali in 2009 have alerted the authorities to the problem.

The new report, commissioned by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, estimates that the annual trade in cocaine alone through West Africa is now worth $1.25bn (£744m) - more than the total of foreign direct investment in the region.

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Op donderdag 12 juni 2014 16:00 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Het artikel gaat verder.

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Op donderdag 12 juni 2014 16:38 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Ik heb een week op een West Afrikaans eiland gezeten dat helemaal vol stond met wietvelden (en cashewbomen) en de politie kwam er niet door de voodoo op het eiland. Een kg bushweed kostte daar ¤5.

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Op donderdag 12 juni 2014 16:41 schreef OllieWilliams het volgende:

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South American Drug Trade Deja Vu

Peru, after overtaking Colombia as the world's top producer of coca, cocaine's main ingredient, in 2013, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) announced this week that Peru greatly decreased cocaine cultivation, reducing coca production by 17.5 percent. U.N. officials herald it the "most remarkable reduction rate achieved in the last 14 years."

But no one is declaring victory in the war on drugs quite yet: Although Peruvian yields are down, the price of coca leaves has increased by 30 percent. Similarly, the price of base cocaine has increased more than 17 percent. Most importantly, the street form -- cocaine hydrochloride -- increased almost 32 percent from 2013 prices, according to the UNODC. Though authorities have squeezed the supply of coca and its products some, demand remains high. Moreover, if the Andean drug trade's history is any indication, supply will simply shift to another country.

Drug researchers call this the "balloon effect" -- where pressure from the authorities in one country or region pushes drug production elsewhere. Squeezing the balloon at one end causes drug producers to compensate and expand into another. Since the U.S.-led war on drugs began in the 1980s, the balloon effect has shaped the cocaine trade.

In 2013, fumigation and forced eradication of coca crops in Colombia finally hit a turning point and the South American nation bequeathed its crown as the world's top coca producer to its neighbor, Peru. Both the United States and the U.N. declared it a milestone. Unsaid was that the Colombian government's efforts to crack down on production -- in part under the banner of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-backed effort to combat left-wing guerrillas and drug traffickers -- simply shifted production to Peru.

Colombia and Peru have swapped the cocoa-producer champion crown for decades. In the mid-90s Peru launched an intense eradication campaign and Colombia was back on top. In 1990, Colombia was only responsible for 19 percent of the global coca market, behind top producers Bolivia and Peru. By 1997, it was the world's top producer. See the pattern here?

Growing global demand is a big factor in shifting supply locations. Even though demand for cocaine is dropping in the United States -- still the world's largest cocaine consumer -- it's up in Brazil, Europe, and Africa, according to the 2013 U.N. World Drug Report. Colombia is the United States' largest cocaine supplier but Brazil -- the No. 2 cocaine market and No. 1 crack-cocaine market -- and Europe are supplied by Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. Peru's crackdown will undoubtedly move coca central again but exactly where is unclear. History makes Colombia and Bolivia top contenders. Coca growers in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, and Brazil are trying to increase production in those countries.

Meanwhile, Brazil is also becoming a vital transit route for shipping cocaine to West Africa and Europe, where markets are growing. Brazilian consumption, as well as trade of the substance, will only open up more emerging markets to the high of cocaine. And as incomes rise in Asia, cocaine consumption there will likely spike, possibly more than making up for Americans' shrinking appetite.

As before, the South American drug trade will find a way to persevere.

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Ganja free: Jamaica decriminalises marijuana for personal use

'Being caught with a spliff' will no longer mean a criminal record, says justice minister, with fines given instead for small amounts

Jamaica is to decriminalise the possession of small amounts of marijuana, joining the trickle of countries moving to soften laws on the drug known on the Caribbean island as "ganja".

The country's minister of justice, Mark Golding, announced that Jamaica's prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, and her cabinet had decided to amend the Dangerous Drugs Act.

"Cabinet approved certain changes to the law relating to ganja. These relate to possession of small quantities of ganja for personal use, the smoking of ganja in private places and the use of ganja for medical-medicinal purposes," he said.

"Approval has been given also to a proposal for the decriminalisation of the use of ganja for religious purposes."

Uruguay recently became the latest country to legalise marijuana use, joining several countries in Europe as well as the US states of Colorado and Washington.

Possession of small quantities of the drug would become a non-arrestable, ticketable infraction in Jamaica resulting only in a fine, Golding said.

"Too many of our young people have ended up with criminal convictions after being caught with a spliff, something that has affected their ability to do things like get jobs and get visas to travel overseas," Golding said.

The government would propose a bill in the Jamaican parliament soon to expunge the criminal records of people convicted of possessing small amounts of the drug, which is grown widely across Jamaica.

The change means that a person cannot be arrested if in possession of up to 57 grams (2oz) of marijuana in a public space.

Anyone ticketed will be given 30 days to pay the fine, failure of which will result in it becoming a minor offence, resulting in the offender doing court-ordered community service.

Golding said the possession of ganja for religious or therapeutic purposes as prescribed by a registered medical practitioner, or for scientific research by an accredited institution, would also be decriminalised.

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‘Revisit Laws To Fight Drug Scourge’

KUALA LUMPUR: The worsening drug smuggling and abuse in the country has led to the Malaysian Crime Prevention Foundation (MCPF) calling for a review of existing laws.

MCPF vice-chairman Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye said frequent drug busts at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and elsewhere, either by the police or the Cu stoms, were alarming.

“Judging by the exposure, arrests and quantity of drugs confiscated, it appears that the drug issue in the country is endless, and what has been uncovered so far could just be the tip of the iceberg.

“If the statistics released by the authorities are anything to go by, it certainly appears that the death sentence has not deterred people from getting involved in the drug trade.

“We call on the government to review our existing laws with regards to the mandatory death penalty, and why it has not been a deterrent to potential drug traffickers. Looking at the drug problem today, we are certain that Malaysia will not be drug free by 2015,” he said.

Lee added that all incoming flights carried the message that Malaysia has stringent anti-drug laws which carries the death penalty for drug trafficking if proven guilty.

“But this has not deterred traffickers from taking a gamble in this trade. The time has come for the government to revisit various legislation related to drug issue and take necessary steps to fight the number one enemy in the country,” he said.

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Albanian police hit with grenades during cannabis crackdown

Police try to enter Lazarat village where authorities believe gangs produce about 900 metric tonnes of marijuana a year

Authorities say suspected gang members have fired rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns at hundreds of police officers who tried to enter a village in southern Albania as part of a crackdown on marijuana production.

Police said nobody was hurt in the pre-dawn attack on Monday outside Lazarat, where authorities believe gangs produce about 900 metric tonnes of cannabis a year. The drug production is estimated to be worth about ¤4.5bn (£3.6bn) – roughly half the country's GDP.

They said about 500 lightly armed police, including special forces officers, surrounded the village overnight after a smaller force was repelled over the weekend by small arms fire that injured one villager.

Police said they would continue the crackdown on drug producers to "liberate Lazarat from criminals".

twitter:

YourAnonCentral twitterde op maandag 16-06-2014 om 17:11:24 Meanwhile... Activists are planting #weed in public all over the #UKVia @VICEUKhttp://t.co/jg2XyP0mOH http://t.co/8ikzlNbJfD reageer retweet

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Op maandag 16 juni 2014 18:18 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Drugstoerist mag uit coffeeshop worden geweerd

In de strijd tegen drugstoerisme mogen gemeenten bepalen dat buitenlanders niet in coffeeshops mogen komen.
Drugstoerist mag uit coffeeshop worden geweerd
Foto: ANP
De Raad van State heeft dat woensdag bepaald over de regel waar coffeeshops uit Tilburg en Maastricht twee jaar tegen hebben geprocedeerd.
Het voorkomen van drugstoerisme en de bestrijding van georganiseerde criminaliteit zijn volgens de rechter legitieme doelen om indirect onderscheid te maken naar nationaliteit van de bezoekers.
Er zijn geen andere, minder ingrijpende maatregelen, oordeelt hij.
Wietpas
De regel werd bedacht door het vorige kabinet. Coffeeshops mogen alleen leden toelaten (het zogeheten besloten clubcriterium) en alleen volwassenen die in Nederland wonen, kunnen lid van een coffeeshop worden (ingezetenencriterium), en een zogenaamde 'wietpas' krijgen.
In de praktijk controleren echter alleen een paar gemeenten in het zuiden van Nederland of coffeeshops aan drugstoeristen verkopen.
In Maastricht sloot burgemeester Onno Hoes vorig jaar veertien coffeshops tijdelijk, omdat ze het verbod hadden overtreden. Vier daarvan bleven dicht in afwachting van de uitspraak van de Raad van State.
'Teleurstellend'
Marc Josemans, voorzitter van de Vereniging van Officiële Coffeeshops in Maastricht (VOCM), noemt het besluit van de Raad van State "teleurstellend en wrang".
Volgens Josemans is een meerderheid binnen de gemeenteraad van Maastricht tegen het zogeheten ingezetenencriterum, en zal burgemeester Hoes door lokale politici worden aangesproken op de kwestie. Er komt binnenkort een voorstel aan de orde.
Josemans put hoop uit een nieuwe procedure over de sluiting van zijn coffeeshop Easy Going door Hoes vorig jaar, toen er volgens Josemans duidelijk meer overlast was van straatdealers.
Tilburg
De Tilburgse vereniging van coffeeshops De Achterdeur hoopt dat de gemeente tot inkeer komt en onderkent dat de nieuwe regels niks hebben opgelost en dat de georganiseerde criminaliteit juist is toegenomen, reageerde woordvoerder Willem Vugs.
VVD
VVD-Kamerlid Ard van der Steur spreekt van een "terechte en logische uitspraak die voortvloeit uit de eerdere beslissing van het Europees Hof".
Van der Steur: "Nederland moet niet de grootste drugsdealer van Europa worden."
D66
Volgens D66 moet de uitspraak van de rechter gerespecteerd worden. De partij wil wel dat het beleid zo wordt aangepast dat burgemeesters zelf mogen beslissen of ze buitenlandse coffeeshopbezoekers willen weren.
Kamerlid Magda Berndsen: "Gemeenteraden zouden op basis van redenen als handhaving van de openbare orde en de volksgezondheid en met oog voor lokale belangen af moeten kunnen wijken van het door de minister opgelegde ingezeten-criterium."

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29 doodvonnissen in drugszaak Vietnam bevestigd

Een rechtbank in Vietnam heeft in hoger beroep 29 drugssmokkelaars tot de doodstraf veroordeeld en daarmee hun eerdere vonnissen bevestigd. De veroordeelden behoorden tot vier drugsbendes die tussen 2006 en 2012 bijna twee ton heroïne, amfetamine en xtc-pillen vanuit Laos via Vietnam naar China transporteerden.

Van één verdachte werd de doodstraf omgezet in levenslang. Hij had volgens de rechter minder heroïne gesmokkeld dan de anderen en hij had meegewerkt met justitie. Ook 59 anderen kregen levenslang. Het was het grootste proces tegen drugssmokkelaars ooit in Vietnam.

Vietnam heeft zeer strenge drugswetten. Het bezitten of verhandelen van zeshonderd gram heroïne kan iemand al de doodstraf opleveren. In Vietnamese cellen zitten bijna zevenhonderd ter dood veroordeelden.

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Pope Francis says don't legalise drugs

Francis says attempts to legalise recreational drugs are legally questionable and 'fail to produce the desired effects'

Pope Francis is has come out strongly against the legalisation of recreational drugs.

Francis told members of a drug enforcement conference meeting in Rome on Friday that even limited attempts to legalise recreational drugs "are not only highly questionable from a legislative standpoint, but they fail to produce the desired effects."

Francis has frequently railed against the "evil" of drug addiction and has met with addicts on several occasions.

Last month, Uruguay – which borders Francis' native Argentina – approved selling marijuana cigarettes in pharmacies, while recreational marijuana is legal in the US states of Colorado and Washington.

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Op vrijdag 20 juni 2014 14:20 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Religie is wel de gevaarlijkste en meeste verslavende drug.

[..]

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Op vrijdag 20 juni 2014 23:55 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:
Are You Kidding? New York Passes Limited Medical Pot Law, But Nanny Cuomo Says You Can't Smoke It

New York governor Andrew Cuomo says you may need cannabis for medical reasons, but you can't smoke it. Why? Because it is too dangerous, says Cuomo, ignoring tons of data showing that pot smoking is far less dangerous and more beneficial than alcohol. But Cuomo, for reasons that are unclear and open to severe head scratching, continues to remain in the Dark Ages when it comes to pot.

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 09:02 schreef Deeltjesversneller het volgende:

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cannabis roken is gewoon schadelijk voor je longen hoor

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 11:39 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:

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Hoe schadelijk??

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 11:40 schreef Deeltjesversneller het volgende:

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http://www.jellinek.nl/vr(...)lijk-voor-de-longen/

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 11:41 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:

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Ze zeggen dat,maar hebben ze ooit zelf geprobeerd??

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 11:48 schreef Deeltjesversneller het volgende:

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ik ken 1 van die onderzoekers, en ja, die blowt zelf ook.

maar als je het als medicijn gebruikt kan je veel beter cannabisolie oraal nemen, dus daar heeft die gouverneur gewoon een punt.

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 22:29 schreef heiden6 het volgende:
SWAT officer shot in the face breaking into window during no-knock raid

Als je 's nachts bij mensen inbreekt kun je wel eens een kogel in je kop krijgen. Risico van het vak. Opgeruimd staat netjes!

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Op zaterdag 21 juni 2014 22:56 schreef OllieWilliams het volgende:

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Bel dan godverdomme gewoon aan, die lui denken dat ze alles kunnen maken.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 11:39 schreef Individual het volgende:
The difference between legalisation and decriminalisation

Mooi stukje uit The Economist; altijd al voorvechter van legalisatie geweest.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 16:55 schreef heiden6 het volgende:

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Nadeel van legalisering is dat er belasting over zal worden geheven, niet alleen BTW maar waarschijnlijk ook accijnzen, dat betekent hogere prijzen voor de consument en meer inkomsten voor de staat.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 17:01 schreef Individual het volgende:

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De huidige hoge prijs van illegale drugs zit hem vooral in het illegaal zijn. De overheid zal er heel erg veel accijnzen over moeten heffen om het op huidig illegaal prijsniveau moeten krijgen, veel meer nog dan alcohol en tabak.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 17:17 schreef heiden6 het volgende:

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Dat zullen ze zeker als excuus gebruiken om er een hoop accijns over te heffen.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 17:21 schreef Individual het volgende:

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Prima. Liever legaal voor dezelfde prijs dan.

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Op zondag 22 juni 2014 17:24 schreef heiden6 het volgende:

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De staat zal vele miljoenen die nu zwart rond gaan aan de economie onttrekken, en kan daarmee nog meer schade aanrichten. Dat geld hoort te gaan naar mensen die een dienst of product leveren (in dit geval drugs) en niet naar parasieten.

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

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

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

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Nee, ik ben geen drugsdealer, hoezo?

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

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

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US police departments are increasingly militarised, finds report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Grootste heroïnevangst ooit in Zuid-Afrika

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

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

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'Softdrugsbeleid moet op de schop'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Day of Action 2014

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

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

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

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

[ afbeelding ]

Mauritius:

[ afbeelding ]

GDPP:

[ afbeelding ]

Maleisië:

[ afbeelding ]

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

[..]

Goede zaak.

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

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

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



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



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

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

[ afbeelding ]

Mauritius:

[ afbeelding ]

GDPP:

[ afbeelding ]

Maleisië:

[ afbeelding ]

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Deep Cover: Alice Goffman’s ‘On the Run’

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“On the Run” serves as a kind of coda to our war on drugs, an effort whose very rhetoric suggested it was us against them. The criminal justice system became a kind of invading force, aimed mostly at young black men. There was, of course, the inexplicable sentencing disparity between those caught with powdered cocaine and those caught with crack cocaine. States were emboldened to be equally punitive.In Illinois, for instance, the Legislature passed a law that automatically transferred a juvenile to adult court if caught with drugs within 1,000 feet of a public housing complex — a law clearly directed at African-American teenagers. The war on drugs mangled, if not destroyed, any trust between residents of distressed urban communities and the authorities. And when we speak of the authorities, it’s the police who on a day-to-day basis must contend with the rubble left behind from more than two decades of disturbingly misguided public policy. Goffman describes how “a climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life,” with the result that “a new social fabric is emerging under the threat of confinement: one woven in suspicion, distrust and the paranoiac practices of secrecy, evasion and unpredictability.” To her credit, she didn’t set out with this notion; rather, it’s where she landed after six years of up-close observation.

Goffman spent her time in a Philadelphia community she calls 6th Street, which consists of a commercial strip and five residential blocks. There she came to know the locals intimately, not only the young men but also their girlfriends and families. She became so embedded in the community that she witnessed 24 police raids, including one in which she herself was handcuffed. Her guide is a man in his 20s she calls Mike (Goffman changed everyone’s name), who introduces her to friends as his adopted sister. Mike has a low-paying warehouse job and supplements his income by selling crack, getting in and out of trouble with the law. Like the others we meet, he’s neither hero nor villain. He’s simply trying to get by.

The level of detail in this book and Goffman’s ability to understand her subjects’ motivations are astonishing — and riveting. Indeed, it’s a power of “On the Run” that her insights and conclusions feel so honest to what she’s seen and heard. She depicts a community where trust has evaporated, where young men like Mike often avoid girlfriends for fear that the women, for their own reasons, might turn their paramours in. And she describes an underground economy that has sprung up around what she calls the fugitive life, including entrepreneurs who sell their clean urine to those on parole. (One entrepreneur jokes that his trade encourages him to stay clean: “If you sell one dirty bag, you’re done.”) More than anything, Goffman helps us understand why residents of this neighborhood make the seemingly cockeyed choices they do, often for very rational reasons, often because they know well the repercussions of the alternative. She learns that many refuse to call the police not because of a cultural aversion to “snitching,” but because they fear it will only expose them, especially if they’re on parole or have an outstanding warrant. You can’t read this book without a growing sense of understanding as well as outrage.

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Ex drugsagent wordt cannabisactivist.
The times they are a-changin´...? Je zou het bijna denken. In ieder geval liegen de voortekenen in de Verenigde Staten er niet om. Oud-agent Frank Serpico, kort geleden nog in Amsterdam, vecht al jaren tegen de corruptie bij de Amerikaanse politie, en met name de rol die de War on Drugs daarin speelt. Barry Cooper, eveneens ex-politieman, gaat nog een stap verder. Acht jaar lang maakte hij zijn thuisstaat Texas onveilig als de fanatiekste agent van de dope brigade. Sinds kort trekt de kleurrijke ex-cop minstens net zo fanatiek ten strijde tegen zijn voormalige collega's. En dat is niet zonder gevaar...
In zijn internetshow Backtalk with Barry and Candi, die Cooper samen met mevrouw Cooper presenteert, maakt de voormalig agent flink reclame voor zijn eigen dvd's met de veelzeggende titels Never Get Busted en Never Get Raided. Deze dvd's leggen je haarfijn uit hoe je er zonder gepakt te worden een 'cannabis lifestyle' op na kunt houden, of zelfs op grote schaal dope kunt kweken.

Spraakwaterval
Grappend in zijn lijzige Texaanse tongval loopt Coopers spraakwaterval regelmatig stotterend vast - kwestie van teveel lettergrepen in een woord - waarna Candi hem liefdevol weer op gang trekt. "Rehabilitatie, bedoel je?" Ze herhaalt het desnoods drie keer, net zolang tot het Cooper zelf ook lukt. Vijf Coopertjes heeft ze al ter wereld gebracht, maar dat is de kittige Texaanse niet aan te zien. Haar decolleté doet Coopers kijkcijfers ongetwijfeld geen kwaad. Ongedwongen kletsen de echtelieden hun show bij elkaar. Vertellen over hun blowende dochter van 16, die desondanks uitstekende resultaten op school behaalt. Ze behandelen vragen van kijkers, die willen weten wat je rechten zijn als je wordt aangehouden bij een verkeerscontrole. "Ja, als er een gegrond vermoeden bestaat dat er geblowd is heeft de politie ook toegang tot het kruisgebied.

Daarom raad ik aan je pot te besproeien met Blunt Magic Spray." "Het werkt écht!", benadrukt Candi. "Zeker weten, ik heb het zelf net nog gebruikt", flapt Cooper er uit. Het is de zoveelste keer dat een van beiden de loftrompet steekt over dit ge-wel-di-ge product dat je op wiet kan spuiten, waarna die bij verbranding volmaakt neutraal ruikt. Sinds Coopers populariteit nationale dimensies heeft aangenomen krijgt het echtpaar tientallen producten toegestuurd om daar hun stempel van goedkeuring aan te geven. Slechts weinige zijn bijzonder genoeg om de show te halen, zegt Cooper streng.

KopBusters
In Texas kunnen de smerissen zijn bloed wel drinken. Wie zich in Amerika als ex-politie tegen zijn collega's keert neemt risico's. Frank Serpico's onkreukbaarheid werd hem bijna fataal toen hij tijdens een bust in zijn gezicht werd geschoten en collega's bewust verzuimden een ambulance te bellen. Cooper, die niet alleen zijn oude nest bevuilt, gaat nog een paar stappen verder door de wantoestanden voor zijn programma KopBusters met de verborgen camera te filmen. Maar tot nog toe komt Cooper er spectaculair mee weg. Pogingen van politiezijde om uitzending te voorkomen liepen dood op de in Amerika heilige vrijheid van meningsuiting. KopBusters legt zich toe op het ontmaskeren van politiecorruptie en onwettig optreden. Zo laat een van zijn filmpjes zien hoe Coopers team een fake wietkwekerij opzet, met twee kerstboompjes onder een kweeklamp. Al snel happen de locale wouten toe, maar laten daarbij duidelijk zien dat de inval bepaald niet volgens de wettelijke regels verloopt. Bij een andere aflevering van 'cannasplit' laten ze een tas met nep dope en cash bij een tankstation achter, waarna blijkt dat het geld in de zakken van de dienstdoende agent is verdwenen.

Bekering
Coopers bekering is des te opmerkelijker omdat hij ooit een van de meest rabiate drugsbestrijders van Texas was. Na een kalm begin op de telefoonkamer van het locale politiebureau hadden zijn superieuren al snel door dat er meer in de jongen zat. Hij verkaste naar het naburige Big Sandy, waar hij met grote toewijding zijn eigen drugshond trainde en uitgroeide tot een van de meest succesvolle highway-wouten van de staat Texas. Hoewel zijn jachtgebied maar een stukje snelweg van een kilometer of zeven besloeg, was hij al snel de trotse houder van het county-record, met bijna honderd drugsarrestaties en de grootste hoeveelheid marihuana die ooit in een keer in beslag was genomen.

Coopers fanatisme bleef ook elders niet onopgemerkt, en hij werd gevraagd voor de Drug Task Force in Odessa, dat de jurisdictie had over 19 counties. Hier werd hij pas een echte mean motherfucker en leerde hij gecompliceerde operaties op te zetten met het ATF, de DEA, de FBI, het leger en de grenspolitie. De theorie werd evenmin verwaarloosd: Cooper scoorde hoge cijfers voor alle vakken die op de drugspolitieschool werden gegeven: undercover operaties, werken met huiszoekingsbevelen en drugshonden, verkeerscontroles en het onderscheppen van drugstransporten per bus of vliegtuig. Dankzij zijn vakkennis, ervaring en toen al mediagenieke uitstraling werd hij een populair instructeur op politieacademies. Volgens de standaard overeenkomst moest hij eerst twee of drie dagen voor de klas, waarna hij op een praktijkdag moest bewijzen wat hij werkelijk waard was; lukte het niet een drugsarrestatie te verrichten, dan zou hij zijn vergoeding niet ontvangen. Natuurlijk faalde Cooper nooit.

Wroeging
Nadat was gebleken dat de politie door politici werd gebruikt om politieke rekeningen te vereffenen knapte er iets bij Cooper. Hij nam ontslag. Na acht jaar on the force stond zijn meter op meer dan 300 criminele drugsarrestaties, 500 drugsovertredingen en de inbeslagname van vijftig voertuigen en miljoenen aan geld en bezittingen. Al tijdens zijn werk bij de politie werd Cooper gekweld door gewetenswroeging, als hij zag hoe hardwerkende niet-gewelddadige burgers van huis en gezin werden losgerukt en in de bajes belandden. "Ik wist dat wat ik deed verkeerd was, maar mijn behoefte aan roem en erkenning door mijn collega's was sterker dan mijn geweten." Eindelijk drong het tot Cooper door dat hij niet tegen drugs had gevochten, maar tegen mensen. "Het is een mislukt beleid. De gevolgen van de War on Drugs zijn veel schadelijker dan de drugs zelf. Er zitten meer mensen in gevangenissen dan ooit tevoren, maar zelfs de DEA geeft toe dat er nog nooit zoveel drugs zijn geweest."

Na zijn vertrek bij de politie ging Cooper als ondernemer aan de slag. Het werd een kleurrijk verhaal van twaalf ambachten, dertien ongelukken. Nadat hij het als autohandelaar had geprobeerd, beproefde hij zijn geluk met autobanden, een nachtclub, een limousineservice en als organisator van kooigevechten. Uiteindelijk moest hij erkennen dat hij zijn ware roeping niet langer kon ontlopen: Cooper zou gaan vechten voor degenen die hij eerder had kapotgemaakt. Als burger was het hem al opgevallen dat de corruptie en het machtsmisbruik bij de politie steeds ernstiger werden. Zelf werd hij zonder gegronde redenen vijfmaal gearresteerd, waarvan eenmaal wegens 'diefstal'; dat wil zeggen, het te laat terugbrengen van twee Jeepers Creepers videobanden naar de locale videotheek. Barry erkent dat hij wellicht straf had verdiend voor zijn filmsmaak, maar niet voor het te laat terugbrengen van de banden.
Hoewel hij een stuk mellower is dan voorheen, is Cooper nog steeds geen softie als het om misdaad gaat. "Als we alle niet-gewelddadige drugsgevangenen vrijlaten hebben we meer ruimte voor echte criminelen en kunnen vredelievende drugsgebruikers bij hun gezinnen blijven, naar school gaan en werken."

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Op woensdag 2 juli 2014 07:25 schreef Blue_Panther_Ninja het volgende:
5 Startling Numbers Reveal the Militarization of U.S. Drug Policy
The US spends $5 billion more annually on the drug war than on the war in Afghanistan.

Drug War - A Huge Success?!?

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Op zondag 29 juni 2014 11:28 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

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Six months after marijuana legalization: Colorado tax revenue skyrockets as crime falls

DENVER (Reuters) – At the Native Roots Apothecary, a discreet marijuana shop in a grand old building in Denver’s busy 16th street shopping mall, business is so brisk that customers are given a number before taking a seat to wait their turn.

There are young men in ball caps, nervous-looking professionals in suits, and the frail and elderly. Staff say customers have been flocking to their outlets since Colorado voted to allow recreational pot use for adults from January.

Six months on, Colorado’s marijuana shops are mushrooming, with support from local consumers, weed tourists and federal government taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Tax dollars are pouring in, crime is down in Denver, and few of the early concerns about social breakdown have materialized – at least so far.

“The sky hasn’t fallen, but we’re a long way from knowing the unintended consequences,” said Andrew Freeman, director of marijuana coordination for Colorado. “This is a huge social and economic question.”

Denver, dubbed the “Mile High” city, now has about 340 recreational and medicinal pot shops. They tout the relaxing, powerful or introspective attributes of the crystal-encased buds with names like Jilly Bean, Sour Diesel and Silverback Kush.

In the first four months, marijuana sales amounted to more than $202 million, about a third of them recreational. Taxes from recreational sales were almost $11 million.

Despite some critics’ fears of a pot-driven crime explosion, Denver police say burglaries and robberies were down by between 4 and 5 percent in the first four months of the year.

THE DOWN SIDE

On the down side, sheriff’s deputies in neighboring Nebraska say pot seizures near the Colorado border have shot up 400 percent in three years, while Wyoming and New Mexico report no significant increases.

In May, controls on marijuana edibles were tightened after two people died. In one case, a college student jumped from a hotel balcony after eating six times the suggested maximum amount of pot-laced cookies. In the other, a Denver man was charged with shooting dead his wife after apparently getting high from eating marijuana-infused candy.

As Colorado passes the six-month mark, Washington state is approaching with some trepidation the launch next week of the nation’s second recreational pot market.

Up to 20 retail marijuana stores are due to receive licenses on July 7, fueling concerns about long lines, high prices, and the possibility of inadequate supplies when doors open the following day. Washington state officials have received some 2,600 applications from would-be weed growers, but say they have approved fewer than 80.

A recreational pot initiative will be on the ballot in Alaska this fall, and legalization bills look likely to pass in Oregon and the District of Columbia.

Although the Colorado law sanctioned pot sales only to those over the age of 21, one of the biggest concerns is the effect on teens.

Gina Carbone helped to found Smart Colorado, a non-profit aimed at informing young people.

She said the state’s commercialization of pot put the business interests of the marijuana industry at the forefront, and that youngsters’ perception of harm from the drug had been dramatically reduced.

Even before recreational retail sales began, Carbone said, rates of marijuana use among eighth-graders were significantly higher in Colorado than in other states.

“They are receiving messaging that this is medicine, that this is healthy,” she said. “A lot of people that even voted for (legalization) are saying, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know it was going to look like this.’”

Visitors at Denver weed stores have their ID checked, often more than once. Some 20 recent sting operations have failed to catch any shops selling to under-21s.

Store workers at Native Roots, among the most well-established outlets, say they’ve seen a diverse range of recreational buyers, from heavy-lidded students, to curious middle-class couples, and seniors.

Native Roots sells cannabis in child-proof plastic containers priced at about $60 for 1/8th of an ounce, as well as pot-infused cookies and candy and marijuana e-cigarettes.

“This will help your pain,” long-haired salesman Rob Folse told an older woman with a cane and a few tattered bank notes. “We’re giving you a discount, Dear, because we understand your situation.”

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The paradox of Iran’s war on drugs and its progressive treatment of addiction

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There are stories some people might not expect to read about Iran – and its progressive drugs policy is one. As a number of countries begin to slowly reconsider their approach towards illicit drugs, following the avant-gardiste move of José Mujica’s Uruguay, the issue of drugs and treatment of drug abuse might be one where Iran could provide some meaningful contribution to the rest of the world.

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Politie en leger vallen binnen bij coffeeshops Grass Company

De politie is bezig met een grote actie tegen de Brabantse coffeeshopketen Grass Company. De politie is onder andere binnengevallen bij de vier coffeeshops in Tilburg en Den Bosch en het kantoor in Tilburg.

Het bedrijf wordt verdacht van witwassen, hennephandel, valsheid in geschrifte, corruptie en belastingfraude. De politie zoekt naar drugs, administratie en contant geld. Het leger helpt mee.

Eerder deze week is in het buitenland al beslag gelegd op grote geldbedragen. Er is niemand aangehouden.

Het bedrijf en de coffeeshops zijn vaak doelwit geweest van acties van de politie. Vorig jaar was er al een inval in het kantoorpand in Tilburg. Het onderzoek vrijdag staat los van de eerdere actie, zei een politiewoordvoerder.

In 2011 werd de voorraad van het bedrijf opgerold. De politie noemde dat toeval. Het bedrijf meende dat gericht jacht werd gemaakt op de voorraad.

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Op donderdag 3 juli 2014 23:51 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Tax dollars are pouring in

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Man vlucht voor politie en overlijdt na sprong uit raam

Een persoon is vandaag overleden na een sprong uit het raam vanaf de tweede verdieping van de Fazendadreef in Utrecht. De politie was daar om poolshoogte te nemen na meldingen over een hennepkwekerij.

Een tweede man raakte door de sprong gewond en moest naar het ziekenhuis. Hij heeft letsel aan zijn arm, maar was wel aanspreekbaar.

De mannen sprongen vanaf het balkon aan de achterkant van de flat. Er werd overigens inderdaad een hennepkwekerij aangetroffen.

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A 48-year-old terminal cancer patient was rushed to the hospital from an Iowa courthouse Monday during his trial over felony charges for growing marijuana he uses as a treatment for his rare condition.

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Despite Mackenzie’s deteriorating condition, his trial is expected to be completed Friday, Linda Bowman, the judicial trial court supervisor at the Scott County Clerk’s Office, told The Huffington Post. If Mackenzie is found guilty, he faces at least three years in prison — a punishment that he’s said equates to a death sentence . . .

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District Court Judge Henry Latham ruled in May that Mackenzie is barred from using his condition as a defense in court during his trial as a reason for why he was growing marijuana, the Associated Press reported.

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Seattle's first marijuana shop closes after running out of stock in three days

Producers struggle to meet demand after Washington becomes second US state to allow recreational pot sales to adults

Seattle's first and only recreational marijuana store had to close on Friday after running out of stock in just three days after Washington became the second US state to allow pot sales to adults.

Cannabis City opened in Seattle on Tuesday with at least 4.5kg (10 pounds) of marijuana for sale, and by close of business on Thursday it was all gone. A message on the store's phone line said it would re-open on 21 July.

There were widespread concerns that shortages of pot would afflict retailers this week after the state issued its first 25 licences to outlets, under a heavily regulated and taxed system approved by voters in November 2012.

Some business owners planned to limit the amount of marijuana early customers could buy to try to make stocks last.

Amber McGowan, manager at Cannabis City, told Reuters on Thursday the store would probably not have enough inventory to stay open for all of its regularly scheduled business hours until a delivery that was due next week.

She said the shop was only able to stay open as long as it had by limiting customers to six grams per purchase, rather than the legal limit of 28 grams.

The roll-out of recreational sales in Colorado and then Washington comes as a broader trend of liberalisation and pro-pot activism takes hold in the United States.

Progress in Washington has been slow, however, with state regulators still processing more than 300 licence applications, and approved growers producing only limited harvests so far.

Industry insiders say the shortages are likely to be only temporary, caused in part by the short notice many retailers had to prepare for opening, and a surge of pent-up demand.

This week, Colorado estimated that the state's total marijuana demand for this year at 130 tonnes.

"A year from now, product is likely going to be far more available," said Sean Green, chief executive officer of Kouchlock Productions, a marijuana producer in Washington.

Another local supplier, Wow Weed, said they were trying to help the stores, but that there was only so much they could do.

"We have been hearing from retailers off the hook. My voice mail is full every single day," said Wow's Susy Wilson. "It's the same people calling over and over, hoping I'll pull something out of thin air."

Frustrated consumers in Seattle, a city of some 630,000 people, made light of the shortages, with one Twitter user urging outlets to adopt a green "Pot Light" system for their windows to show they had stock – similar to the Hot Light employed by a well-known donut brand.

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America's Drug Companies Are Bankrolling The Crusade Against Legal Weed

As more U.S. states legalize marijuana, special interest groups that have a financial stake in the fight have been pushing back under the guise of fighting drug abuse.

Last week, The Nation published an interesting look at who's driving the fight against the legalization of marijuana.

Pharmaceutical companies that make billions off painkillers and police unions are two big heavy hitters in the fight against marijuana legalization. They throw their monetary support behind groups that fight legislation that would legalize pot — even medical marijuana — and lobby Congress.

From The Nation:

It’s more than a little odd that [the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America] and the other groups leading the fight against relaxing marijuana laws, including the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids (formerly the Partnership for a Drug-Free America), derive a significant portion of their budget from opioid manufacturers and other pharmaceutical companies. According to critics, this funding has shaped the organization’s policy goals: CADCA takes a softer approach toward prescription-drug abuse, limiting its advocacy to a call for more educational programs, and has failed to join the efforts to change prescription guidelines in order to curb abuse. In contrast, CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids have adopted a hard-line approach to marijuana, opposing even limited legalization and supporting increased police powers.

It may seem counterintuitive that an anti-drug group would take a soft approach towards prescription drug abuse considering the rising number of people who are abusing painkillers and other pills. Prescription drugs kill more people than heroin and cocaine combined, and painkillers have been linked to a rise in heroin abuse. Marijuana is still used more widely, but it's not addictive in most people and isn't linked to deaths.

Legalizing marijuana could, however, hurt the bottom line of drug companies that make money off drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin. Medical marijuana could be a less-addictive alternative to treating lower-level pain that might otherwise be treated with prescription painkillers.

Police unions are also fighting legalization. As the author of The Nation article pointed out on Republic Report, local police departments have become dependent on federal funding from the war on drugs, which includes marijuana. Police unions have also lobbied for harsher penalties for marijuana-related crimes.

While some groups are lobbying to legalize pot, others are lobbying against powerful painkillers coming into the drug market. Their motives may not always be pure, though.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has sought to block the approval of the powerful and controversial new painkiller Zohydro, has a daughter who is the CEO of competing drug company Mylan Inc. The company is also a major campaign contributor.

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DEA may be losing the war on marijuana politics

For narcotics agents, who often confront hostile situations, Capitol Hill has been a refuge where lawmakers stand ready to salute efforts in the nation's war on drugs.

Lately, however, the Drug Enforcement Administration has found itself under attack in Congress as it holds its ground against marijuana legalization while the resolve of longtime political allies — and the White House and Justice Department to which it reports — rapidly fades.

"For 13 of the 14 years I have worked on this issue, when the DEA came to a hearing, committee members jumped over themselves to cheerlead," said Bill Piper, a lobbyist with the Drug Policy Alliance, a pro-legalization group. "Now the lawmakers are not just asking tough questions, but also getting aggressive with their arguments."

So far this year, the DEA's role in the seizure of industrial hemp seeds bound for research facilities in Kentucky drew angry rebukes from the Senate's most powerful Republican. The GOP-controlled House recently voted to prohibit federal agents from busting medical marijuana operations that are legal under state laws. And that measure, which demonstrated a shared distaste for the DEA's approach to marijuana, brought one of the Senate's most conservative members together with one of its most liberal in a rare bipartisan alliance.

How much the agency's stock has fallen was readily apparent in the House debate, when Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) denounced the agency's longtime chief.

"She is a terrible agency head," Polis said of Administrator Michele Leonhart.

The two had previously clashed over the DEA's insistence that marijuana continue to be classified as among the most dangerous narcotics in existence.

"She has repeatedly embarrassed her agency before this body," Polis said.

Leonhart, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed, is not getting much backup from the White House.

This year, she complained that President Obama seemed alarmingly blase about what she sees as a pot epidemic. Her remarks to dozens of sheriffs gathered at a conference in Washington came soon after Obama told the New Yorker magazine that marijuana seemed no more dangerous to him than alcohol.

"She said, 'I am so angry the president said what he said and completely ignored the science,'" recalled Thomas Hodgson, the sheriff of Bristol County, Mass.

Her remarks were so frank, Hodgson said, that another sheriff who had been attending such meetings for three decades interrupted Leonhart to tell the crowd what a risk she was taking. The audience then gave her a standing ovation, Hodgson said.

Leonhart went on to complain about a softball game White House staff had participated in with marijuana advocates, and declared that one of the low points of her career had been seeing a hemp flag fly over the Capitol — a display Polis had requested.

When Leonhart left, Hodgson said, she got another standing ovation.

The enthusiasm from law enforcement agents suggests why Leonhart, a holdover from the George W. Bush administration, where she served as acting DEA chief, remains ensconced in her post even as more than 42,400 people have signed a petition demanding her resignation.

"The Obama administration has to walk this tightrope," said Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver. "The youth vote and a number of populous states are moving in one direction, and elements of law enforcement are not."

He added: "These are people who have spent their lives enforcing marijuana laws. To say we are going to let the states decide what federal law is, is difficult for them to swallow."

The DEA also is operating amid mixed signals.

Many lawmakers think marijuana should no longer be classified among the most dangerous drugs, but they're reluctant to vote to change federal narcotics law. And despite cautious acceptance of state legalization laws by the White House, its enforcement strategy is ambiguous. The statutes that guided narcotics agents at the height of the war on drugs to aggressively go after pot remain on the books.

After word spread in May that Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. had called Leonhart in for a private chat and admonished her to stop contradicting the administration, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) rushed to her defense.

Wolf accused Holder's office of a "Nixonian effort to pressure a career law enforcement leader into changing her congressional testimony."

Leonhart "has done an outstanding job leading this agency during a challenging time," Wolf wrote in a letter to Holder.

But that view no longer commands a clear majority in Washington, as the agency repeatedly has run into congressional opposition.

The usually unexcitable Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, reprimanded the DEA after it impounded 250 pounds of hemp seeds en route to the University of Kentucky from Italy. The seeds were to be used by researchers exploring the possibility of reintroducing the hemp industry in the U.S.

Hemp, the fiber of a non-psychoactive cannabis plant, can be manufactured into clothing and numerous other products. One thing it can't do is make a person high. Nonetheless, the DEA deemed the seeds a controlled substance.

McConnell said the agency was wasting limited resources on the seizure "at the very time Kentucky is facing growing threats from heroin addiction and other drug abuse."

Amid political pressure and a lawsuit from Kentucky's Department of Agriculture, the agency granted the university an expedited controlled-substances permit.

The hemp offensive bewildered even some longtime DEA allies.

"It is an unnecessary fight," said Robert Stutman, a retired director of the agency's New York division. "It doesn't affect the drug issue one way or another."

The hemp case also irritated Kentucky's other senator, tea party favorite Rand Paul, who signed on to sponsor the Senate version of a House measure that would curb raids on medical marijuana dispensaries.

A desire to rein in the DEA has kindled an intriguing political alliance between Paul and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), one of the chamber's most liberal members, who is cosponsoring the measure.

As the DEA has struggled with the politics of marijuana, it also has faced a spate of incidents requiring administration officials to clean up after agents.

The Justice Department last year agreed to a $4.1-million settlement with a man whom DEA agents left handcuffed in a San Diego holding cell without food or water for five days. And federal investigators are looking into charges that the agency has been improperly collecting phone company data and concealing from defendants how the information was used against them.

But neither those problems nor changes in public opinion have caused the agency to shift its ground. The DEA's latest policy paper on pot declares the medical marijuana movement, which has won victories in 22 states, to be a fraud.

"Organizers," it says, "did not really concern themselves with marijuana as a medicine — they just saw it as a means to an end, which is the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes."

Displayed prominently in the DEA Museum at its Arlington, Va., headquarters is part of a California dispensary that narcotics agents raided and shut down. It sits alongside the rebuilt front of a crack house.

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Misdaad piekt in Brabant, Limburg

De georganiseerde criminaliteit in Noord-Brabant en Limburg dreigt onbeheersbaar te worden. Meerdere burgemeesters worden bedreigd door onderwereldfiguren en criminelen proberen via stromannen, soms oud-politici, greep te krijgen op de bovenwereld.

Achter de schermen werken burgemeesters, politie en Openbaar Ministerie in beide provincies aan een plan tegen de criminaliteit. Ze willen meer geld voor de opsporing en meer mogelijkheden voor de aanpak van bijvoorbeeld eigenaren van panden waarin drugslaboratoria zijn aangetroffen. Ook opperen ze dat er net als bij de aanpak van terrorisme, een nationaal coördinator misdaadbestrijding moet komen.

Dat blijkt uit gesprekken die de NOS heeft gevoerd met bestuurders en medewerkers van politie en justitie.

WK moest wijken

De urgentie is zo groot dat er zelfs tijdens WK-wedstrijden van Oranje over het probleem werd vergaderd. Zo ontmoetten politiechefs en hoofdofficieren van justitie in Brabant en Limburg elkaar in Driebergen tijdens de wedstrijd van Nederland tegen Australië. Ook de baas van het Openbaar Ministerie, Herman Bolhaar, en de plaatsvervangend chef van de Nationale Politie Bik waren daarbij.

Enkele dagen later, tijdens de wedstrijd Nederland tegen Chili kwamen de burgemeesters van vijf grote gemeenten bij elkaar. Ze werken aan een actieplan, zo bevestigen bronnen tegen de NOS.

Het beeld dat tijdens de bijeenkomsten is geschetst, is zeer ernstig. In de twee provincies zitten niet alleen de grootste wietproducenten van het land, ook de meeste synthetische drugs worden er geproduceerd. Motorclubs als Satudarah en No Surrender hebben vaste voet aan de grond. Bij invallen in woonwagenkampen worden telkens hennepkwekerijen, wapens, gestolen spullen en miljoenen euro's cash geld aangetroffen.

Miljardairs

Hoeveel geld er omgaat in de georganiseerde criminaliteit staat niet vast, maar volgens deskundigen gaat het om miljarden. Alleen al in de wietteelt in de regio Tilburg wordt jaarlijks, volgens een onderzoek van de universiteit Tilburg, zo'n 800 miljoen verdiend met de hennepteelt. Geschat wordt dat er in Tilburg dagelijks zo'n 2500 mensen in de wietteelt actief zijn. Enkele topfiguren zouden het zelfs geschopt hebben tot miljardair.

De grote zorg van bestuurders, politie en OM is dat de onderwereld in de bovenwereld infiltreert. Soms gaat het subtiel, bijvoorbeeld door een crimineel die een amateurvoetbalclub sponsort om zo aanzien in de samenleving te krijgen.

Intimidatie en corruptie

Maar volgens bronnen bij politie, justitie en de lokale overheid proberen criminelen ook rechtstreeks burgemeesters en wethouders te beïnvloeden. Zo is er een oud-wethouder die als adviseur optreedt voor mensen die bij xtc-productie betrokken zijn. Ook is er sprake van een wethouder wiens broer nauwe banden heeft met criminelen en die hem naar voren schuiven om hun belangen te behartigen. Ook zouden er politiemensen worden omgekocht. En burgemeesters die optreden tegen criminelen, worden bedreigd en geïntimideerd.

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Senaat: Ministers moeten problemen rond hennep serieus nemen

De ministers Ivo Opstelten (Veiligheid en Justitie) en Ronald Plasterk (Binnenlandse Zaken) moeten praten met de burgemeesters die 'met lede ogen aanzien aan dat steeds meer inwoners bij de productie van hennep worden betrokken en zo in de armen van criminele organisaties worden gedreven.' Dat schrijft de justitiecommissie van de Eerste Kamer in een open brief.

'De commissie is van mening dat het bij behoorlijke bestuurlijke verhoudingen hoort dat de regering een open oor heeft voor de gemeenten in Nederland', klinkt het verwijtend uit de Senaat. De ministers moeten de burgemeesters serieuzer nemen.

De Senaat wil op 9 september van het duo horen 'wat u reeds gedaan heeft om de problemen die gemeenten rond het softdrugsbeleid ervaren, op te lossen en wat u op dit vlak voornemens bent in concreto te doen'.

Strafbaar
De Senaat heeft voor oktober de behandeling van het wetsvoorstel op de agenda staan dat alle handelingen die illegale hennepteelt voorbereiden en bevorderen strafbaar maakt met een gevangenisstraf tot 3 jaar of een geldboete. Het gaat dan om personen en bedrijven die geld verdienen met de levering van goederen of diensten en de financiering van illegale hennepteelt: growshops, transport- en distributiebedrijven, verhuurders van loodsen en schuren, elektriciens die illegale elektrische installaties aanleggen of de handelaars in kant-en-klaar ingerichte kasten voor de illegale hennepteelt.

Intussen is er van verschillende burgemeesters ook een heftig pleidooi geweest voor gereguleerde hennepteelt. 'Het pleidooi dat deze burgemeesters bij u hebben gehouden, heeft niet geleid tot een gewijzigd inzicht bij u', mopperen de senatoren tegen Opstelten en zijn vakbroeder.

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"If a house is burning, people will jump out the window": The war on drugs and the border crisis

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A spectacle at the border drew the world’s attention: dozens of far-right protesters in the southern California desert held signs and chanted while attempting to block busloads of children from entering their town. Murrieta, California was suddenly on the map.

This is a struggle over “illegal” immigration, a problem related to border control, we are told. The media coverage has largely focused on the political questions raised by an influx of mostly Central American children—unaccompanied by their parents or other adults—into the United States. The numbers are indeed shocking: from 6,800 children in 2013 to almost 100,000 this year, if projections are correct.

Most republican elected officials, predictably, say to deport them all. The crisis is Obama’s fault, they claim, pretending the president in his first six years hasn’t deported more people than all prior office holders combined. The GOP narrative says that Obama’s generous immigration policies sent the message to Central Americans that their children will be accepted in the United States, and granted citizenship.

The facts about the Obama administration's actual policies don't fit into the hallucinatory narrative that he's "soft" on immigration, but that doesn't matter much for the spectacle. No matter that Obama has deported nearly four million people and is seeking funds and expanded powers to deport these children, too. No matter that Obama is asking congress to repeal a Bush administration law making it slightly more difficult to deport Central American children seeking asylum. The political narrative doesn't have space for these inconvenient truths.

But besides misrepresenting basic facts about policy positions on both "sides" of the immigration debate, the cynical political theater around the Murrieta crisis obscures the central issue at stake in the influx of Central American refugee children into the United States.

At the heart of the crisis lies the decades old war on drugs.

Sonia Nozario's must read op-ed in the New York Times describes the situation in Honduras, which many of the children are fleeing:

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The Children of the Drug Wars

A Refugee Crisis, Not an Immigration Crisis

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Politie verder met ontmanteling groot drugslab

De politie heeft vanochtend de ontmanteling van een groot drugslaboratorium in het Brabantse dorp Hoogerheide hervat. Het werk werd gisteravond laat gestaakt en het bedrijfspand werd in de nacht bewaakt.

Het drugslaboratorium is een van de grootste dat ooit in Nederland is gevonden. Via verschillende productielijnen werd drugsgrondstof en eindproduct (speed) gemaakt.

Het lab dat volop in bedrijf was, werd maandagavond laat ontdekt toen een voorbijganger de brandweer alarmeerde vanwege rookontwikkeling. Vier aanwezigen werden aangehouden. De politie denkt dat er meer mensen betrokken zijn geweest.

Er stonden 23 grote tanks met chemische stoffen en veel jerrycans in de loods. Volgens de politie moeten vier vrachtwagens de spullen afvoeren. De politie hoopt het werk woensdag af te ronden.

Zangeres Zonder Naam - Mexico

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'Hollandse misdaad' verschuift naar het zuiden

De traditionele Hollandse criminele netwerken verschuiven hun activiteiten naar het zuiden van Nederland. Daarom zijn de criminele acties als liquidaties, drugshandel en witwassen daar toegenomen. Het gaat dan met name om Brabant en Limburg, lieten politiebaas Gerard Bouman en OM-baas Herman Bolhaar vandaag weten.

Onder anderen leden van de zogenoemde outlaw motorclubs maken zich hieraan schuldig, stellen ze. 'De oude traditionele Hollandse netwerken hebben steeds meer bemoeienis in het zuiden van Nederland', zegt Bouwman. In totaal zijn er bijvoorbeeld niet of nauwelijks meer criminele moorden in Nederland.

Meer geweld
Deze misdaad zorgt voor onveiligheid in de samenleving. Het gaat namelijk om onder meer geweld, dealen van drugs, dumpen van gevaarlijke grondstoffen voor drugs, bemoeienis van de misdaad in de horeca, en bedreiging, onder meer van burgemeesters.

Om deze georganiseerde misdaad in het zuiden en de rest van het land te kunnen bestrijden zijn OM en politie vorig jaar begonnen met een bredere aanpak. Niet alleen het strafrecht, maar ook de Belastingdienst en gemeenten moeten helpen bij het bestrijden van de criminaliteit die de Nederlandse samenleving 'ondermijnt'. De eerste resultaten afgelopen jaar zijn positief, concludeert Bolhaar.

Bredere aanpak
Minister Ivo Opstelten (Veiligheid en Justitie) heeft eerder als doelstelling neergelegd dat er in 2014 twee keer zoveel criminele samenwerkingsverbanden moeten worden aangepakt als in 2009. OM en politie gaven toen aan slechts 20 procent van de bekende criminele netwerken te kunnen aanpakken, onder meer door de schaarse opsporingscapaciteit.

Door de bredere aanpak slaagden politie en justitie vorig jaar in die doelstelling al bijna te halen. Door samen te werken met andere organisaties blijkt de capaciteit slimmer te kunnen worden ingezet om 'criminelen zoveel mogelijk te raken'.

Bolhaar houdt er rekening mee dat in 2014 gegeven de beschikbare capaciteit, het plafond voor opsporing is bereikt.

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This ban on khat is another idiotic salvo in the UK's disastrous war on drugs

Making this mild natural stimulant a banned class C drug will only benefit criminal gangs and damage race relations

Khat has been legally imported into this country for 60 years, a mild natural stimulant chewed by a tiny slice of the population at hundreds of community cafes around the country. You may not have noticed these places, since they do not provoke the tension and violence associated with some pubs. But on Tuesday, the bitter-tasting plant became a banned class C drug – the latest example of the idiocy of the damaging war on drugs.

The impact will be felt largely among the Somali, Yemeni and Ethiopian communities, but we should all be concerned. For as 25 countries loosen drug laws and evidence grows from around the globe of the harm caused by prohibition in terms of lives lost and communities wrecked, this shows again how Britain is locked into a futile and backfiring battle that flies in the face of evidence, human rights and logic.

The decision to outlaw khat was taken last year by Theresa May, the home secretary. She ignored her own advisers on drug misuse who told her that it would be "inappropriate and disproportionate" to ban an innocuous trade that earns the Treasury a couple of million pounds a year in taxes. She brushed aside concerns from the Commons home affairs select committee, which concluded that it would make more sense to license importers than drive them underground.

Ministers admitted that it was hard to find evidence to back their ban; even the World Health Organisation says khat use carries low risk of harm. They ignored pleading – and a legal challenge – from Kenya, where farmers cultivating the herb in an impoverished corner of the country fear the decision will make their lives harder. Some tribal leaders called the act "a declaration of war" and threatened reprisals. Meanwhile the coalition boasts about its commitment to helping the Horn of Africa and curbing terrorism.

This myopic move comes as more progressive nations see that regulation is a more sensible solution than prohibition to the human desire to get high. After four decades, the war on drugs has cost hundreds of billions of pounds and thousands of lives. Anne-Marie Cockburn, whose teenage daughter died tragically from over-strong ecstasy, is the latest bereaved mother to jointhe campaign for reform; little wonder many doctors, police officers, intelligence officials and even politicians privately back her brave stance.

What will happen now? No doubt some people will stop chewing khat. Most traders in a thriving £15m-a-year sector will close down successful businesses, forcing scores of staff into unemployment. But others may carry on trading, joining the inevitable black market that springs up when something is banned. In the United States, where khat is already a controlled substance, it sells for 10 times its price on British streets; clearly, there will be hefty profits for any criminal gangs stepping in to meet demand.

As some MPs and community leaders have pointed out, asking the police to enforce a ban that only affects specific ethnic minorities also risks damaging race relations. There is a grave danger that outlawing khat risks further alienating sections of the Somali and Yemeni communities, already among the most marginalised groups in Britain and coming under increased pressure amid alarm over Islamic militancy.

There were claims of links between the khat trade and terrorism, but these seem tenuous. After all, al-Shabaab also bans its usage while the government's own drug experts have repeatedly said there is no evidence of criminal or terrorist involvement. They added, however, that they feared this might change following a ban; terror gangs have raised millions elsewhere in Africa by exploiting the drug market.

Such is the stupidity of Britain's latest salvo in the silly war on drugs. This will cost the country cash, put people out of work, increase communal tensions and may even help fund terrorism. One thing is sure: it will not terminate use of the banned substance.

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EXCLUSIVE: The Counterinsurgency War on—and Inside—Our Borders

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The Mexican police helicopter that flew into Arizona last month and fired shots near U.S. Border Patrol agents was no fluke—such incursions have become so frequent they amount to an internationalized shooting war along our southern border.

It’s not just Mexican police helicopters; Mexican military aircraft entered U.S. territory 49 times from 2010 through 2012. That’s according to a Customs and Border Protection list acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by WhoWhatWhy.

Along with other documents obtained independently by WikiLeaks, the recent incidents confirm that the U.S. has been taking a full-bore counterinsurgency approach to the border drug war. The possibility that was happening is something we told you about earlier.

Official statements and media reports about the Arizona incident have not come close to explaining the real significance of such cross-border operations. The facts are now clear: the Pentagon’s push to use counterinsurgency tactics against drug traffickers is giving Mexican armed forces the leeway to operate in the airspace above U.S. territory.

***

Specific Mexican military helicopter incursions and near-incursions are detailed in intelligence reports obtained by WikiLeaks and assessed by WhoWhatWhy. The reports were created by the Border Security Operations Center, an Austin nerve center run by the Texas state police that oversees hundreds of intelligence analysts and manages untold surveillance cameras. The reports came to WikiLeaks after hackers broke into the servers of private intelligence firm Stratfor, which got the documents from its sources.

These revelations about the extent of the cross-border war on drugs are the latest fruit of our investigative partnership with WikiLeaks to carefully assess selected documents from its vast trove. (Take a look at our earlier collaborations with the whistleblower group here and here.)

The Rio Grande Firefight

As the Pentagon faces sequestration funding cuts and a fighting force exhausted from Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is relying more and more on foreign armed forces, police and private contractors like Stratfor.

The close cooperation between U.S. and Mexican forces against drug traffickers follows from modern counterinsurgency strategy, which dictates that police should function like soldiers when necessary to deny funds to whichever rebels—or drug cartels—are out of favor.

This approach is on display in part of a report published by the Austin center on May 6, 2011. The document is marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive.” This means it was intended for law enforcement eyes only, according to intelligence analyst Kendra Miller. She was a contact point for those seeking access to the reports. [Email-ID 1966867, May 9, 2011]

The document describes a firefight about 30 miles from McAllen, Texas, during which a police chopper from that state provided targeting assistance to the Mexican military as an alleged drug smuggler was killed. It includes this photograph of a Mexican Air Force chopper flying above the Rio Grande:

CaptureThis apparent incursion, or near-incursion, was not included on the Customs and Border Protection list we obtained in response to our Freedom of Information request – indicating that Mexican military operations along the U.S. border are even more numerous than the FOIA document suggests.

It’s not clear if that Mexican chopper flew into U.S. airspace. But there’s no doubt the Americans took part in the gun battle, because the Texas state police helicopter guided the Mexican chopper and ground forces to the suspects, including one who was hiding in the brush.

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World Health Organisation calls for the decriminalisation of drug use

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This month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) – the UN agency that coordinates international health responses – launched a new set of guidelines for HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care for key populations. The new document is the culmination of months of consultation and review, and pulls together existing guidance for five groups: men who have sex with men, people in prisons and other closed settings, sex workers, transgender people, and people who inject drugs. These key populations are the most-at-risk of HIV, yet the least likely to access services – a fact that “threatens global progress on the HIV response” according to WHO. By consolidating previous guidance, the document is able to highlight common barriers and needs – including recommendations for legal reforms to support service delivery.

The guidance puts forward a “comprehensive” package of interventions that governments should provide:

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Crucially, the WHO Guidance also recommends that Laws, policies and practices should be reviewed and, where necessary, revised by policymakers and government leaders, with meaningful engagement of stakeholders from key population groups. Within this so-called critical enabler (see graphic) is an explicit calls for the decriminalisation of drug use in order to reduce incarceration as well as calls to reform laws and policies that block harm reduction services, and the end of compulsory treatment for people who use drugs. The Guidance also cites the experience of Portugal in terms of decriminalisation citing successes such as the increase in people accessing treatment, the fall in HIV cases among people who use drugs (from 907 cases in 2000 to 267 in 2008), reductions in drug use and less overcrowding within the criminal justice system. According to the press release accompanying the Guidance, Bold policies can deliver bold results.

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Drugsmokkelaars opgehangen in Singapore

Twee drugssmokkelaars zijn vandaag in Singapore opgehangen. Het waren de eerste executies in meer dan 3 jaar tijd. De smokkelaars van 36 en 28 jaar oud kwamen uit Singapore. Ze waren gepakt met heroïne en zijn in de Changi-gevangenis terechtgesteld.

Singapore heeft alle doodstraffen in 2011 opgeschort vanwege een herzieningen van de plicht voor rechters om drugssmokkelaars de doodstraf te geven.

Rechters hebben inmiddels meer armslag gekregen. Zo werd in november voor het eerst een doodstraf van een veroordeelde drugssmokkelaar omgezet in gevangenisstraf.

Nieuw proces
Door de nieuwe regels konden alle ter dood veroordeelden proberen een nieuw proces te krijgen. De twee opgehangen criminelen zagen daar zelf vanaf.

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Obama says he ended the ‘War on Drugs.’ Don’t believe him

If the Obama administration is to be believed, America’s infamous “War on Drugs” is over.

In its most recent National Drug Control Strategy, released last week, officials promised a more humane and sympathetic approach to drug users and addiction. Out, the report suggests, are “tough on crime” policies. Rather than more police and more prisons, officials talk about public health and education. They promise to use evidence-based practices to combat drug abuse. And they want to use compassionate messaging and successful reentry programs to reduce the stigma drug offenders and addicts face.

Unfortunately, the government’s actions don’t jibe with their rhetoric.

For decades, the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and its allies have used government resources to marginalize, stigmatize, and demonize drug users. There were the nonsensical ads like “this is your brain on drugs” and inexplicable demonstrations like torching cars and valued possessions. The ONDCP, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the Ad Council, and Above the Influence portrayed small time dealers as snakes and users as rats.

This Is Your Brain On Drugs (Original)

They also showed drug use as a gateway to prostitution and, in the wake of 9/11, explicitly linked casual drug users to supporting terrorism and cop killing. The United States has spent millions stigmatizing drug use, sale and abuse — all before one even begins to calculate the costs to arrest, try, and incarcerate offenders for the past 40 years. This, of course, comes in addition to the stigma that comes with incarceration and criminal records.

The Obama administration says it wants to de-stigmatize drug addiction. But no matter how hard it tries, it’s virtually impossible to de-stigmatize behavior that is still a crime.

And the administration is doing little to actually de-stigmatize drug use. Despite their supposed adherence to “evidence-based practices,” officials steadfastly refuse to consider legalization or decriminalization, even though the evidence unambiguously shows drug prohibition has been a disaster.

Prohibition-related violence has killed thousands in this country and multiples of that number more in supplier nations like Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan. In the United States, incarceration rates have become so onerous (over 700 adults per 100,000) that research suggests they’re probably doing harm to society by pulling too many workers out of the economy, breaking up families and making offenders less employable upon release.

Although “alternatives to incarceration” are touted throughout the latest strategy, suggestions for fully or even partially separating nonviolent drug use from the criminal realm altogether are absent. Indeed, the marijuana liberalization in Colorado and Washington State are mentioned only as adding “challenges” the ONDCP’s efforts to maintain the perception of the drug’s harm.

Though the ONDCP repeatedly states that drug addiction is a disease, police and incarceration remain the primary instruments to treat its myriad manifestations. (After all, you can’t get to drug court without being arrested first.) Unless the government plans to start selling MRAPs to the American Cancer Society, it’s fair to say that disease takes a backseat to the still-aggressive law enforcement tactics as the first weapon against American drug use and sale — even if the rhetoric sounds less harsh than it used to.

Supposing the old commercials and posters are relics of the past and the ONDCP has legitimately turned over a new leaf, there are others within the Obama administration that still haven’t received the memo. Seemingly everyone can agree that some drugs are more harmful than others, but the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration was unable or unwilling to say to Congress that marijuana was less harmful than methamphetamine, cocaine, or heroin.

Even under a prohibition regime like the United States’s, it is absurd to suggest that an honest, relative assessment of harms and consequences is unknown to the people in charge of setting and executing drug policy. Yet the nation’s top drug enforcement agent can’t say a drug on which is virtually impossible to fatally overdose is less harmful than drugs that kill thousands of Americans each year.

Clearly, this is not yet a federal government willing to apply compassion, embrace evidence, and repudiate years of drug misinformation.

If this administration is serious about ending the stigma associated with drug addiction and is truly dedicated to education and evidence-based methods to fight drug abuse, it must first address and then reject the rank dishonesty and propaganda that has defined the American drug war for decades. The ONDCP’s language seems to be moving in the right direction, but the government remains unable to be honest with itself, let alone the general public. As people in recovery might suggest, getting past entrenched denial is a requisite first step toward fixing America’s drug war problem.

This is your government on drugs. Any questions?

twitter:

vprogids twitterde op zaterdag 19-07-2014 om 20:00:20 In het Mexicaanse Chihuahua is de Amerikaanse ‘war on drugs’ totaal uit de hand gelopen. (Vranckx, Canvas, 20.10) reageer retweet

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Op zondag 20 juli 2014 03:42 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

[..]

Ik praat het uiteraard niet goed, maar heroine is klotespul. Wiet en ecstacy zijn echt compleet andere middelen. Vind dat er veel beter onderscheid gemaakt moet worden naar het soort drugs.

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Op zondag 20 juli 2014 09:00 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

[..]

Het is al verboden.

Maar doen alsof alle drugs hetzelfde zijn

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Duitse patiënten mogen zelf cannabis kweken

Chronisch zieke patiënten mogen in Duitsland in beginsel onder voorwaarden cannabis verbouwen ter bestrijding van pijn. Dit heeft een rechter in Keulen vandaag bepaald.

De administratieve rechtbank oordeelde in een zaak van vijf patiënten tegen medische autoriteiten. Die hadden hun toestemming geweigerd om thuis cannabis te verbouwen voor pijnbestrijding.

De rechter stelde drie van de vijf klagers in het gelijk en bepaalde dat de autoriteiten hun weigering moeten herzien, meldde de krant Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.

Verboden
Cannabisgebruik is in Duitsland verboden. Wel mogen zo'n 270 mensen de drug in de apotheek kopen omdat voor hun aandoening, meestal pijnklachten, geen andere werkzame behandeling beschikbaar is.

De overheidsinstantie BfArM die daar vergunningen voor afgeeft, vindt productie thuis onveilig. Het zou kunnen gebeuren dat patiënten hun woningen onvoldoende beveiligen. De advocaat van de chronisch zieke patiënten houdt er dan ook rekening mee dat de staat in beroep gaat tegen de beslissing van dinsdag.

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Satelliet moet genadeklap worden voor hennepteelt in open lucht

Politie en gemeenten in Limburg willen satellieten gaan inzetten voor de opsporing van hennep in maïsvelden en natuurgebieden.

Er loopt al een proef met het gebruik van satellietbeelden. Wanneer die test naar tevredenheid verloopt, is de hennepteelt in de buitenlucht binnen een paar jaar verleden tijd.

Dat zegt burgemeester Antoin Scholten van Venlo, die in Limburg de bestuurlijke aanpak van de wietteelt coördineert.

Vliegtuigen

Sinds 2005 spoort de politie al vanuit vliegtuigen en helikopters wietplanten op. Maar daarmee worden lang niet alle openluchtkwekerijen gevonden.

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Op donderdag 31 juli 2014 14:00 schreef Tism het volgende:

[..]

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http://www.nu.nl/festival(...)stival-roermond.html
Tien aanhoudingen bij Solar festival Roermond
De politie heeft vrijdag op het terrein van het Solar Festival in Roermond tien mensen aangehouden. Ze bleken in het bezit van kleine hoeveelheden harddrugs.
Tien aanhoudingen bij Solar festival Roermond
Foto: ANP
Volgens een woordvoerder van de politie kunnen ze een boete tegemoet zien van tussen de vijfhonderd en duizend euro.
Bovendien mogen ze het festivalterrein niet meer op. Tijdens deze tiende editie van het muziek- en creativiteitsfestival Solar aan de Maasplassen bij Roermond wordt streng gecontroleerd op drugs. Donderdag pakte de politie een dealer met ruim honderd xtc-pillen op. Hij kreeg via snelrecht een werkstraf van honderd dagen opgelegd.

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Op vrijdag 1 augustus 2014 19:31 schreef OllieWilliams het volgende:
Zero-tolerance bij festivals anno 2014

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Paris police lose 51kg of seized cocaine from their own headquarters

Drugs worth £2m vanish from force's famous HQ at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, just months after building was mired in rape allegation

Paris police are investigating the disappearance of 51kg of cocaine from a supposedly locked and sealed room in their own headquarters on the banks of the Seine.

The cocaine "bricks" with a street value of around ¤2.5m (£2m) were seized a month ago after officers smashed a drug trafficking network in the capital.

They were supposed to be under lock and key at the force's legendary headquarters at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, for ever associated with the fictional French detective Maigret.

Officials say the cocaine, placed in numbered evidence bags, was definitely still in the secured store room on 23 July when it was last checked, but was definitely missing on Thursday.

Police chiefs immediately ordered an inquiry, and the force's own internal investigations squad was sent into the building with sniffer dogs. So far, there have been no leads.

It is the second time this year that 36 Quai des Orfèvres has made damaging headlines.

In April, two officers belonging to an "anti-gang crime" squad were put under official investigation for the alleged rape of a 34-year-old Canadian woman visiting Paris. She had met the men during an evening of heavy drinking at a nearby Irish pub. The officers said she agreed to follow them to their headquarters, just across the Seine from the pub. Once there she said she was raped. One of the police officers charged admitted having sex with the woman, but claimed she had consented. The investigation is ongoing.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has ordered the national police investigation squad to leave no stone unturned in its search for the missing drugs and promised the culprits would be treated with "the utmost severity".

In a statement, the prefecture of police said: "This investigation will look into whether the relevant rules were followed for the management of evidence in the offices of this brigade in particular, and at 36 Quai des Orfèvres in general."

It promised "very firm measures" would be immediately taken "if the investigation shows the law has been broken".

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French drug squad officer arrested over missing cocaine

Narcotics officer held near Spanish border over disappearance of ¤2m-worth of drugs from Paris police headquarters


A French narcotics police officer has been arrested on suspicion of stealing over 50kg of seized cocaine from Paris police headquarters in a major embarrasment for the force.

The 34-year-old officer was believed to have made off with the illegal drugs – which have a street value of up to ¤2m (£1.6m) – after security cameras spotted a person resembling the officer entering police HQ with two bags, according to a statement from police and prosecutors.

The officer, who works with the Paris drug squad, was arrested near Perpignan, close to the Spanish border, where he was on holiday. He is being questioned by officers in the region before being transferred to Paris.

The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has called the allegations "extremely serious", and said the officer had been suspended pending an investigation.

"If the investigation confirms his involvement, and as soon as I have any news on the conclusions of the inquiry, I will not hesitate in taking all the necessary measures," he said.

The missing cocaine has become a major embarrassment, with French media describing its disappearance as a real-life heist worthy of a crime movie.

Police sources said several searches were taking place, both in Perpignan and at the officer's Paris home.

Colleagues expressed surprise at the arrest, describing the suspect as "unassuming" and "trustworthy".

The drug cache was seized in a Paris raid in early July that led to several arrests.

On Thursday, police learnt the drugs had gone missing from a secure room at police headquarters, which overlooks the river Seine close to the Notre Dame cathedral.

The haul had been kept in a high-security area, with security procedures requiring anyone entering the room to sign in and be accompanied by another officer authorised to have a key.

A number of elite police officers were questioned on Friday about the incident by a team from the national police's internal affairs division.

The Paris police headquarters attracted unwelcome attention in April when two elite French officers were charged with raping a Canadian tourist there in a case that sent shock waves across France.

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Dope in the USA - in pictures

Denver County Fair in Colorado made history this weekend by including America’s first Pot Pavilion. Over 21s could experience speed-rolling and Dorito-eating competitions, live music, pot-themed vendors and entertainment. In compliance with Denver’s new laws, there was no marijuana at the event so fair goers left the site to consume the legal recreational variety. The Observer despatched its non-inhaling photographer to check it out.

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Barcelona's booming cannabis clubs turn Spain into 'Holland of the South'

Catalonia health agency's move to tighten rules follows freeze on licences as clubs' membership in region soars to 165,000

Catalonia's public health agency has proposed strict new measures to regulate cannabis clubs in the region, amid claims that Barcelona is on its way to rivalling Amsterdam as a smoker's haven.

Amsterdam has tightened restrictions on cannabis sales just as the number of clubs in Spain has proliferated from some 40 in 2010 to more than 700 today, say smokers' groups. The Catalan capital is home to more than half of these clubs.

From swanky clubs that span three floors to others with a small room and a few plastic chairs, the clubs take advantage of a provision in Spain's drug laws that allow marijuana to be grown and consumed for private use.

The clause has turned Spain – and especially Barcelona – into what Spanish media call the "Holland of the South". But unlike Amsterdam's coffee shops, which are open to the public, Spain's clubs are for members only.

Skirting the membership policy is fairly easy; while many clubs stick to a policy of requiring new members to be sponsored by existing ones, a number of clubs allow prospective members to register online or via telephone. Some clubs have employees who hand out promotional flyers in the street, promising to ease the registration process.

The past two years have seen hundreds of these cannabis clubs spring up in Barcelona, creating a thriving industry as other sectors suffered the economic crisis. Catalonia's cannabis clubs now count some 165,000 members, who rack up an estimated ¤5m (£4m) in sales each month, according to El País newspaper.

Local officials in Barcelona have been watching closely. In June, the city imposed a one-year moratorium on new licences for cannabis clubs. Calling it a "preventative" measure, deputy mayor Joaquim Forn said it would give the city some breathing space to regulate the industry and "avoid it becoming a serious problem".

A first draft of the regulations, drawn up by the public health agency of Catalonia and obtained by El País, sets out strict regulations on the cultivation and transport of the drug and clubs' membership in an effort to chip away at the legal grey zone in which the clubs currently operate.

Memberships will be limited to Spanish residents, taking aim at the region's growing reputation for cannabis tourism. Members will have to be 21 years of age or older and belong to the club for at least 15 days before being given access to marijuana.

Other measures include forcing clubs to register their plants and undergo an annual inspection, in an attempt to give regional authorities a more complete idea of the product on offer in the region.

The maximum quantity that members will be allowed to access each month has yet to be determined, said the proposal, but is expected to be somewhere between 60 to 100 grams a month (2-3.5 ounces). With some clubs currently with as many as 5,000 users, the draft noted that a maximum number of members must also be determined.

The proposed regulations were welcomed by the Catalonia Federation of Cannabis Associations, one of many associations that has been pushing the government to better regulate the sector. While the association took issue with the draft regulations' proposal of a fixed schedule that would force the clubs to close for a three-hour lunch each day and close by 8pm most days, the regulations were "positive in general", a spokesman, Jaume Xaus, told El País. Many of the clubs, he noted, already follow similar regulations.

One notable omission, he said, was to set a criteria for municipal licences. Without this, he worried, the granting of permits would be left to individual mayors, allowing for discrepancies to arise.

Cannabis clubs have also become popular in the Basque country in recent years, registering more than 10,000 members and leading the regional government to begin drawing up regulations for the clubs earlier this year.

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Marijuana lobby group push for legalization at first New York meetup

National Cannabis Industry Association lobbyists told ‘You are representatives of the great American tradition of free enterprise’

Talk of the cannabis industry still sparks snickers and jokes from onlookers who expect business leaders in Birkenstocks and dreadlocks. But on Thursday afternoon, at the first New York meeting of the National Cannabis Industry Association, a lobbying group that supports the federal legalization of marijuana, it was collared shirts, suits and white tablecloths.

The well-tailored crowd of NCIA members had gathered in Manhattan for a fundraiser, at which they were joined by local politicians who have been pushing for legalization.

Politicians in attendance included New York assemblyman Steve Katz, who had opposed medical marijuana before he was arrested for unlawful possession of the drug in March 2013. “You are representatives of the great American tradition of free enterprise, entrepreneurialism, and yes, dare I say it, free-market capitalism,” Katz told the crowd.

Katz seized on the energy of the cannabis-oriented businesspeople in attendance who believe the industry has enormous potential. Their enthusiasm has strengthened in recent months, as recreational use became legal in Colorado and Washington this year, and a Gallup poll last fall showed for the first time a majority of Americans favoring legalization.

Some people at the meeting, however, said that starting in the industry isn’t a simple matter, and that it requires substantial capital.

“A new person coming into the industry is definitely going to need millions,” said Julie Dooley, the president and co-creator of Julie & Kate Baked Goods, a company that makes edibles – treats laced with marijuana. Standing near a basket of “non-medicated” samples of her sticky treats, Dooley explained that her business started on a “shoestring” budget, but said cannabis-business hopefuls need much more money to get started these days.

Part of that need is being filled by Silicon Valley-esque Angel Investors, who are banking on increased national support for legalization as they pour funds into marijuana startups in states like Colorado and Washington.

One of these angel investors, ArcView Group, has valued the legal marijuana US market at $1.53bn, and believes that the number could grow, as legalization becomes a reality in more US states.

But like most US industries, this one is currently dominated by white men. The women at the event said they were hoping that they can change that by seizing on the relative newness of the industry.

“No one knows what’s going on right now,” said Jane West, owner of the cannabis-themed events company Edible Events. “As long as you have the right connections and funding you can make anything you want happen.”

Of course, ventures promoting recreational use are operating in a two-state market. That is something supportive politicians and industry leaders are hoping to change, as they tout the medicinal benefits of cannabis, including studies showing it could help children who experience severe epilepsy.

Another of the keynote speakers, New York state senator Diane Savino, who sponsored the state’s Compassionate Care Act that would legalize medical marijuana, became involved with the cause when some of her family members began using the drug to cope with illness.

Savino called on Congress to support federal marijuana legalization, but said she believed change in New York would be enough to spur movement in other states.

“New York is a watershed state – as we go, so go the other states,” Savino said.

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Nick Clegg In Bold Call For Radical Overhaul Of 'Utterly Senseless' Drug Laws

Nick Clegg has claimed "we are never going to win the war on drugs" in a powerful call for reform of the UK's "utterly senseless" drug laws.

Drug prevention charities have praised the Lib Dem leader for highlighting the current failure of existing policies after he pledged Friday to abolish prison sentences for the possession of drugs for personal use - even Class A substances like heroin and cocaine.

While Britain currently locks up youngsters and burdens them with criminal records for possessing small quantities of drugs – usually cannabis – the deputy prime minister has pledged to approach the problem as a health issue, rather than a law and order issue - stating that imprisoning someone for drug use "should no longer be an option."

Mr Clegg made the controversial commitment as he outlined aspects of the Liberal Democrats manifesto in a dramatic call to fight organised crime.

[code]How The NHS Giving Heroin Addicts Free Foils Could Help The Fight Against Drugs[/code]

"Addicts need treatment, not locking up," Mr Clegg said. "It is a nonsense to waste scarce resources on prison cells for cannabis users."

The Lib Dems said that imprisonment does nothing to help addicts become drug free and is a waste of public money that could be better spent on tackling the problem in the community.

“We are never going to win a ‘war on drugs’," Mr Clegg added. "Illegal drugs still cause immense harm to the people who use them and to the communities they live in. We need a radically smarter approach if we are serious about tackling this problem."

At the moment, more than 1,000 people a year in England and Wales are jailed for possession of drugs for their own personal use - a move Mr Clegg branded "utterly senseless."

The party are calling for an immediate end to prison sentences for people whose only crime is the possession of drugs for personal use. Under the proposals, users would instead receive non-custodial sentences and appropriate medical treatment.

He said under the current system, drug legislation mean we are "chucking the people who need treatment behind bars so they simply become even more vulnerable to the criminal gangs who exploited them in the first place."

“Liberal Democrats believe in a stronger economy and a fairer society. These liberal reforms will ensure that drug users get the help they need and that taxpayers don’t foot the bill for a system that doesn’t work.”

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Tilburgse drugshandelaren vrijuit na foute huiszoeking


Een Tilburgs stel dat werd opgepakt omdat ze drugs zouden dealen, is vrijuit gegaan omdat het 'bezoek' van agenten en ambtenaren onrechtmatig was.

Twee gemeentemedewerkers en twee agenten gingen langs bij het huis aan de Jagerslaan en vonden amfetamine, cocaïne en xtc-pillen. Maar, het viertal had helemaal niet het recht om de woning binnen te gaan.

De rechtbank in Breda sprak het duo daarom vrij. Dat één van de verdachten toestemming gaf voor de huiszoeking is volgens de rechter niet te beschouwen als 'vrijwillig', omdat vier mensen imponerend over kunnen komen.

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The Immigration Crisis: Just Another Byproduct of the Drug War

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The thousands of Central American children being apprehended along our southern border are the refugees from our own War on Drugs, fleeing grotesque violence that is the direct product of our failed policy of interdiction. Until we alter our drug strategy, we can expect more murder and mayhem south of our border -- and greater numbers of immigrants fleeing north for safety.

A decade ago, Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nozario won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles and a book, "Enrique's Journey," about the Honduran children who flee to the United States atop northbound Central American freight trains -- "el tren de la muerte," or "the train of death" where homicide, rape and vicious assault are common.

In those days, Nozario documented, the journey was an economic one, brought on by crushing poverty at home and a desire to join parents who had fled north years before. Today, however, the 10-year-olds who flee Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are fleeing a vicious war that is being waged in their schoolyards and on their streets.

In testimony last month before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Nozario described her first visit in 10 years to the Nueva Suyapa neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, Honduras:

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End the Drug War "For the Kids" Coalition Forms

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In a move precipitated by the child immigration border crisis, but informed by the ongoing damage done to children on both sides of the border by law enforcement-heavy, militarized anti-drug policies, a broad coalition of more than 80 civil rights, immigration, criminal justice, racial justice, human rights, libertarian and religious organizations came together late last week to call for an end to the war on drugs in the name of protecting the kids.

"The quality of a society can and should be measured by how its most vulnerable are treated, beginning with our children," said Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance, the organization that coordinated the letter. "Children have every right to expect that we will care for, love and nurture them into maturity. The drug war is among the policies that disrupts our responsibility to that calling."

The groups, as well as prominent individuals such as The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander, signed on to a letter of support for new policies aimed at ending the war on drugs.

"In recent weeks," the letter says, "the plight of the 52,000 unaccompanied children apprehended at the US border since last October, many of whom are fleeing drug war violence in Central America, has permeated our national consciousness. The devastating consequences of the drug war have not only been felt in Latin America, they are also having ravaging effects here at home. All too often, children are on the frontlines of this misguided war that knows no borders or color lines."

Organizations signing the letter include a broad range of groups representing different issues and interests, but all are united in seeing the war on drugs as an obstacle to improvement. They include the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Center for Constitutional Rights, the Institute of the Black World, Presente.org, Students for Liberty, United We Dream, the William C. Velasquez Institute, and the Working Families Organization. For a complete list of signatories, click here. [Disclosure: StoptheDrugwar.org, the organization publishing this article, is a signatory.]

In the past few months, more than 50,000 minors fleeing record levels of violence in the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have arrived at the US border seeking either to start a new life or to reconnect with family members already in the country. The causes of the violence in Central America are complex and historically-rooted, but one of them is clearly the US war on drugs, heavy-handedly exported to countries throughout the Western Hemisphere in the past several decades.

Those northern Central American countries -- the so-called Northern Triangle -- have been especially hard hit by drug prohibition-related violence since about 2008, when, after the US helped Mexico bulk up its war on the drug cartels via the $2.4 billion Plan Merida assistance package (President Obama wants another $115 million for it next year), the cartels began expanding their operations into the weaker Central American states. Already high crime levels went through the roof.

Honduras's second largest city, San Pedro Sula, now has the dubious distinction of boasting the world's highest murder rate, while the three national capitals, Guatemala City, San Salvador, and Tegucigalpa, are all in the top 10 deadliest cities worldwide. Many of the victims are minors, who are often targeted because of their membership in drug trade-affiliated street gangs (or because they refuse to join the gangs).

The impact of the war on drugs on kids in the United States is less dramatic, but no less deleterious. Hundreds of thousands of American children have one or both parents behind bars for drug offenses, suffering not only the stigma and emotional trauma of being a prisoner's child, but also the collateral consequences of impoverishment and familial and community instability. Millions more face the prospect of navigating the mean streets of American cities where, despite some recent retreat from the drug war's most serious excesses, the war on drugs continues to make some neighborhoods extremely dangerous places.

"In the face of this spiraling tragedy that continues to disproportionately consume the lives and futures of black and brown children," the letter concludes, "it is imperative to end the nefarious militarization and mass incarceration occurring in the name of the war on drugs. So often, repressive drug policies are touted as measures to protect the welfare of our children, but in reality, they do little more than serve as one great big Child Endangerment Act. On behalf of the children, it is time to rethink the war on drugs."

Although the signatory groups represent diverse interests and constituencies, coming together around the common issue of protecting children could lay the groundwork for a more enduring coalition, said Jeronimo Saldana, a legislative and organizing coordinator for the Drug Policy Alliance.

"The idea was to get folks together to make a statement. Now, we have to figure out how to move forward. The letter was the first step," he said.

"The groups have been very positive," Saldana continued. "They're glad someone was speaking up and putting it all together. What's going on in Central American and Mexico is tied into what's happening in our own cities and communities. This crosses partisan lines; it's really obvious that the failed policies of the war on drugs affects people of all walks of life, and the images of the kids really brings it home. We hope to build on this to get some traction. We want folks to continue to make these connections."

Different signatories do have different missions, but a pair of California groups that signed the letter provide examples of how the drug war unites them.

"We have a history of working on behalf of youth involved in the criminal justice system and their families," said Azadeh Zohrabi, national campaigner for the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. "We see desperate families trying to stay connected, strong, and healthy, but mass incarceration is really making that difficult. We work both with families whos kids are involved in the justice system and with families with one or both parents in prison or who have lost custody of their kids because of their involvement in the criminal justice system," she explained.

"We are working to combat this, and we think the war on drugs overall has had disastrous consequences for families, both here and abroad," Zohrabi continued. "The trillions poured into policing and militarization has just produced more misery. It's time for drugs to be dealt with as a public health issue, not a crime."

"We signed on because the letter is very clear in addressing an important component of the discussion that hasn't really been out there," said Arturo Carmona, executive director of the Latino social justice group Presente.org. "This crisis on the border is not the result of deferring actions against immigrant child arrivals, as many right-wing Republicans have been saying, but is the result of one of the most deadly peaks in crime and violence in the Northern Triangle in recent memory," he argued.

"The violence there is one of the main push factors, and when we talk about this in the US, it's critical that we acknowledge these push factors, many of which are connected to the war on drugs," Carmona continued. "You'll notice that the kids aren't coming from Nicaragua, where we haven't been supporting the war on drugs, but from countries that we've assisted and advised on the drug war, where we've provided weaponry. This is very well-documented."

While Presente.org is very concerned with the immigration issue, said Carmona, there is no escaping the role of the war on drugs in making things worse -- not only in Central America and at the border, but inside the US as well.

"We're very concerned about the chickens coming home to roost for our failed war on drugs policy," he said. "The American public needs to be made very aware of this, and we are starting to see a greater understanding that this is a failed policy -- not only in the way we criminalize our young Latino and African-American kids here in the US, but also in the way this policy affects other countries in our neighborhood. As Nicaragua shows, our lack of involvement there has seen a lower crime rate. Our military involvement through the drug war is an abysmal failure, as the record deaths not only in Central America, but also in Mexico, shows."

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Chinese celebrities caught in net of drugs crackdown

Authorities conduct random drugs tests and pressure organisations to not hire people with histories of drug use amid clampdown

Chinese authorities have intensified one of the country's biggest crackdowns on drugs in recent memory, detaining celebrities, conducting random drugs tests at bars, and putting pressure on institutions to ensure that they will not hire people with histories of drug use.

Nine Chinese celebrities have been detained for drug-related offences in the first half of the year, state media reported on Thursday. Earlier this month, authorities detained Gao Hu, a 40 year-old actor who played a minor part in the 2011 Zhang Yimou film The Flowers of War, for possession of marijuana and methamphetamines. In June, police detained Zhang Yuan, a film director, after he attempted to evade a random drugs check at a Beijing train station. They detained the writer Chen Wanning for using meth. "Taking ice is harmful to the body. If I stop taking it from now on, my life will get better," he reportedly said in a confession. In the spring, authorities sentenced the reality TV star Li Daimo to nine months in prison for "hosting crystal meth parties at his apartment".

More than 40 performing arts organisations in Beijing have signed agreements with municipal police, promising that they would not employ any performers who are "involved with drugs", the state-run Beijing News reported on Thursday. These performers, the newspaper said, "have had a harmful influence on society."

"Of course, as celebrities these people often sacrifice their privacy," said Shen Tingting, advocacy programme director for Asia Catalyst, an NGO campaigning for the rights of drug users, sex workers and people with HIV/Aids. "But in these cases, [the government's] main purpose is to show that this is a crackdown on the use of drugs, and even celebrities cannot get out of it."

Over the past two years, China's president, Xi Jinping, has overseen crackdowns on a variety of perceived social ills, from corruption to prostitution, pornography and, increasingly, drugs. In late June, Xi called for "forceful measures to wipe [drugs] out"; the country's prime minister, Li Keqiang, called drugs a "common enemy to humanity".

Shen said that while heroin accounts for the majority of drug use in China, the use of "party drugs" such as crystal meth is rising rapidly, especially among young, educated people with disposable incomes.

Chen and Zhang both received the typical sentence for first-time offenders of recreational drug-related crimes: administrative detention, which can last a maximum of 15 days. But if the police consider a detainee an addict, they may force them to undergo compulsory rehabilitation for up to three years.

According to a Health and Human Rights investigation from 2013, people held in rehab centres are frequently "subject to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment". Physical beatings and solitary confinement are common; some centres require detainees to perform forced labour. "The detox centre is a factory," Du, a former detainee from southern Guangxi province, told the organisation. "We work every day, until late in the night, even if we are sick, even if we have Aids."

Beijing police raided a popular bar on Saturday night, forcing party-goers to undergo a random drugs test, according to widely-forwarded social media posts and local expat magazines. The police showed up at the bar – 2Kolegas, an established indie music venue – at about 2am. They blocked the exits, and forced everybody inside to urinate in plastic bottles; the police then held the bottles up to the light for an instant result. About nine people tested positive. Many of them were handcuffed; all were bundled into vans.

The foreigners are currently in administrative detention, and will likely be deported immediately on release.

Although estimates vary, China could be keeping hundreds of thousands of people in detention for drug-related crimes. The country sentenced nearly 40,000 criminals for "drug offences" in the first five months of this year, up 27.8% year on year, according to the supreme people's court in Beijing. Over 9,000 were sentenced to "more than five years imprisonment or death", Xinhua reported.

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Tientallen aanhoudingen op dancefestival Decibel om drugs

Op het dancefeest Decibel in Hilvarenbeek zijn gisteren zo'n zeventig mensen aangehouden. De meeste aanhoudingen waren vanwege drugsbezit, meldt het Openbaar Ministerie (OM).

Bezoekers die wapens of drugs bij zich hadden konden zich meteen melden bij een op het festival aanwezig team van het OM. De meeste zaken werden daarafgehandeld met een een boete van maximaal 500 euro. Het OM inde in totaal ongeveer 6000 euro. Negen mensen gingen akkoord met een taakstraf. Drie anderen moeten voor de rechter verschijnen.

Vrijdag waren al twee mensen op het campingterrein aangehouden die GHB en 200 xtc-pillen bij zich hadden. Zij moeten voor de rechter komen. Alle aangehouden festivalgangers waren, nadat hun zaak behandeld was, niet meer welkom op het feestterrein.

Volgens het OM waren er ongeveer 60.000 bezoekers op het festival. Vorig jaar waren er 28 aanhoudingen. Het OM inde toen in totaal 7500 euro.

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Honderden kilo's cocaïne in beslag genomen in Paraguay

Bij een grote antidrugsoperatie in Paraguay heeft de politie 847 kilo cocaïne in beslag genomen. Dat maakte de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken vandaag bekend.

De drugs zaten in twee containers met zakken rijst, die in een privéhaven niet ver de hoofdstad Asuncion stonden. De containers zouden net verscheept worden naar een Afrikaans land.

De coke heeft een straatwaarde van zo'n 75 miljoen euro. Paraguay onderzoekt nog wie er achter de drugshandel zit.

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After Treating Son's Head Injury With Cannabis Oil, Minnesota Mom Faces Jail Time

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Ever since Angela Brown’s son suffered a severe brain injury in 2011, he's been complaining of excruciating pain. Brown tried everything to ease her son’s suffering, but said nothing worked except cannabis oil. Although the 38-year-old Minnesota mother seemingly had good intentions, she's now being charged with possession of a controlled illegal substance and child endangerment. She could now face up to two years in jail and a $6,000 fine.

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Vermont Quits War on Drugs to Treat Heroin Abuse as Health Issue

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin devoted his entire State of the State address in January to what he called Vermont’s “full-blown heroin crisis.” Since 2000, he said, the state had seen a 250 percent increase in addicts receiving treatment. The courts were swamped with heroin-related cases. In 2013 the number of people charged with heroin trafficking in federal court in Vermont increased 135 percent from the year before, according to federal records. Shumlin, a Democrat, urged the legislature to approve a new set of drug policies that go beyond the never-ending cat-and-mouse between cops and dealers. Along with a crackdown on traffickers, he proposed rigorous addiction prevention programs in schools and doctors’ offices, as well as more rehabilitation options for addicts. “We must address it as a public health crisis,” Shumlin said, “providing treatment and support rather than simply doling out punishment, claiming victory, and moving on to our next conviction.”

Vermont has passed a battery of reforms that have turned the tiny state of about 627,000 people into a national proving ground for a less punitive approach to getting hard drugs under control. Under policies now in effect or soon to take hold, people caught using or in possession of heroin will be offered the chance to avoid prosecution by enrolling in treatment. Addicts, including some prisoners, will have greater access to synthetic heroin substitutes to help them reduce their dependency on illegal narcotics or kick the habit. A good Samaritan law will shield heroin users from arrest when they call an ambulance to help someone who’s overdosed. The drug naloxone, which can reverse the effects of a heroin or opioid overdose, will be carried by cops, EMTs, and state troopers. It will also be available at pharmacies without a prescription. “This is an experiment,” Shumlin says. “And we’re not going to really know the results for a while.”

Leniency won’t apply to traffickers or major drug suppliers. “The culture hasn’t shifted if you’re a heroin dealer,” says South Burlington Police Chief Trevor Whipple. “If you’re trafficking hundreds of bags of heroin a day in our community, we’re probably not going to [think] much about, you know, ‘How can we help you?’ ”

Vermont isn’t the first place to test such harm-reduction policies, as they’ve come to be known. About half of U.S. states allow some distribution of naloxone, and at least 20 have a version of the good Samaritan law. Cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee offer certain people charged with drug crimes alternatives to incarceration. But Vermont is going further, investing in harm reduction as a primary method of battling heroin addiction and drug-related crime statewide. In an e-mail, Lindsay LaSalle, an attorney for the Drug Policy Alliance who has helped draft legislation in several states, said, “Vermont has emerged as the leading state in the country in addressing opioid overdose through broadscale and comprehensive overdose prevention legislation.”

Harm reduction has typically found broader support among academics who study addiction and criminal justice than among cops and politicians. “The way I was brought up is that people have to accept responsibility for their actions,” says Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux Jr., who’s fine with having his officers carry naloxone but skeptical of letting people caught with illegal narcotics off the hook. “When I arrest somebody for doing heroin or having heroin, [and] he tells me, ‘It’s not my fault, I’m an addict,’ I don’t buy that.”

Despite such skepticism, Vermont’s new policies passed the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature without much opposition from law enforcement groups. Even Marcoux says he’s “got an open mind to it” and will be “waiting to see what statistics tell us about the success rate.” One champion of the over-the-counter naloxone legislation was Republican Representative Thomas Burditt, a libertarian. “I was surprised,” he says, because the new naloxone rule “just flew right through.” He calls it “a no-brainer,” and says he got no pushback from voters. “As everybody knows, the war on drugs is lost, pretty much. It’s time to go down a new road.”

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Drug decriminalisation in Portugal: setting the record straight

^{Submitted by: George Murkin
Post Date: 11th Jun 2014}

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Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs for personal use in 2001, and there now exists a significant body of evidence on what happened following the move. Both opponents and advocates of drug policy reform are sometimes guilty of misrepresenting this evidence, with the former ignoring or incorrectly disputing the benefits of reform, and the latter tending to overstate them.

The reality is that Portugal’s drug situation has improved significantly in several key areas. Most notably, HIV infections and drug-related deaths have decreased, while the dramatic rise in use feared by some has failed to materialise. However, such improvements are not solely the result of the decriminalisation policy; Portugal’s shift towards a more health-centred approach to drugs, as well as wider health and social policy changes, are equally, if not more, responsible for the positive changes observed. Drawing on the most up-to-date evidence, this briefing clarifies the extent of Portugal’s achievement, and debunks some of the erroneous claims made about the country’s innovative approach to drugs.