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

MS-13 - Root Of All Evil

Reefer Madness (1936) Full Movie

Retired Police Captain demolishes the War on Drugs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Missing Story of the Drug War - The New Yorker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bron: www.newyorker.com

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

[..]

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

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

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


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

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


Source: Ann Fordham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bron: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

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Duizenden Amerikaanse gevangenen komen vrij

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

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

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Agent aangehouden die informatie verkocht aan onderwereld



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

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

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

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

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

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

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Drugsbaas 'El Chapo' zet miljoenen op hoofd Donald Trump

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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

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


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

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

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

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

Related: Cannabis petition forces MPs to consider debating legalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Cannabis: healthy benefit or deadly threat?

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

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

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

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Drugs tijdens Amsterdam Dance Event

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bron: www.vox.com

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

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

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Rotterdamse haven knooppunt in drugssmokkel

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

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