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

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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......

twitter:

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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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