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

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US Drug Laws Destabilize Other Nations

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This article in USA Today is headlined, “El Salvador: World’s New Murder Capital.” El Salvador’s murder rate is 104 per 100,000 population, and as the article notes, this is a national average. “If you start looking at where the pockets of violence are, it’s shocking.”

Why are things so bad in El Salvador? The article says, “All countries south of the U.S. border face the same problem: cartels and gangs fighting to control smuggling of drugs and people to the United States and infiltrating government institutions to help them.”

It should be difficult for Americans to support domestic policies that have such pernicious effects overseas.

The effects spill over at home too. The article says, “The surge in violence explains why thousands of Salvadorans and other Central Americans have fled to the United States and why immigration officials are stepping up efforts to send them back home.”

The drug war clearly compromises individual liberty at home. Freedom has no meaning if people are only free to engage in activities that meet with government approval. I could list a host of other negative consequences stemming from the war on drugs, but I will save that for another time, to emphasize how our domestic policies have had such negative consequences for our neighbors.

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Ex-VVD-raadslid voor rechter om deelname criminele organisatie

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Volgens het OM heeft De Kruif crimineel geld witgewassen, dat ze heeft verdiend met drugsteelt en -handel op grote schaal. De 43-jarige vriend van De Kruif is volgens het OM hoofdverdachte.

Met het geld zou het paar onder meer een auto, een jetski, een caravan en een boot hebben gekocht. De Kruif ontkent dat en zegt dat ze met bonnen kan aantonen dat ze haar aankopen met eigen geld heeft gedaan. Maar justitie denkt dat ze een valse factuur heeft overgelegd.

In februari deed de politie na maandenlang onderzoek op een aantal plaatsen in Nederland invallen. Daarbij zijn administratie, geld en luxegoederen in beslag genomen, terwijl ook diverse hennepkwekerijen werden ontmanteld.

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The Heemskerk Declaration

Final declaration of the Global Forum of Producers of Prohibited Plants


In a global meeting small scale farmers of cannabis, coca and opium from 14 countries discussed their contribution to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS). The UNGASS will discuss all aspects of global drug control policies, including the worldwide ban on the cultivation of coca, poppy and cannabis, an issue the Global Farmers Forum demands that their voices be heard and taken into account.

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22 January 2016, Heemskerk, Netherlands

Today in a meeting in The Netherlands, small scale farmers of cannabis, coca and opium from 14 countries* discussed their contribution to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS), to be held in New York from 19 to 21 April 2016. The UNGASS will discuss all aspects of global drug control policies, including the worldwide ban on the cultivation of coca, poppy and cannabis, an issue the Global Farmers Forum demands that their voices be heard and taken into account.

Considering:

To date representatives of small farmers of prohibited plants and affected communities have not been adequately taken into account in international debates on drug policy.
Inherent contradictions and inconsistencies exist in the application of international drug control, including Alternative Development programs and human rights treaties, which take precedence over the drug control treaties. UN agencies and UN member states are all bound by their obligations under the Charter of the United Nations to promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms."
A previous Farmers Forum provided input to the UN evaluation of the missed target of reaching a drug-­-free world by 2009. The UN Political Declaration adopted at the time established 2019 as a new target date to "eliminate or reduce significantly and measurably" the illicit cultivation of opium poppy, coca bush and cannabis.
Taking into account the problems faced by the communities where these plants are cultivated the Farmers Forum discussed the following issues:
a) Crop control policies and forced eradication;
b) Traditional, medicinal and modern uses of controlled plants;
c) Sustainable rural development;
d) Drugs and conflict.

Conclusions

1. Forced eradication - chemical, biological, manual or any other form - of crops produced by small farmers is contrary to human rights, causes diverse forms of conflict, expands countries' agricultural frontier, leads to environmental degradation, causes food insecurity and destroys rural economic survival strategies. It aggravates social problems - as well as problems related to health and internal security -­--­- increases poverty, leads to displacement of affected populations, delegitimizes state institutions, militarizes local communities and is a form of undemocratic intervention, forcing those impacted to seek survival strategies in other informal or illicit economic activities and in some cases pushes people to take more radical positions. Finally, forced eradication is counterproductive with regards to sustainable development.

2. The inclusion of the three plants in the international treaties impedes the recognition of both traditional, and modern uses** and the ability to obtain them legally. Not all people have access to medicinal uses and the market is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. In some countries, laws recognize traditional and medicinal uses. Nutritional uses and other forms of industrialization of these plants have not been widely promoted, despite the fact that there are many examples of community and institutional initiatives that demonstrates the benefits of such use. Recreational use of these plants is completely prohibited even as an increasing number of countries seek to regulate these markets. Producers and users and their organizations, communities and leaders continue to be stigmatized, criminalized and incarcerated.

3. Rural development strategies must promote small-­-scale agriculture. Most participants in the Farmers Forum have not been beneficiaries of Alternative Development or other forms of assistance. Those who have had experiences with Alternative Development programmes affirm that these have largely failed to improve the livelihood of affected communities. The main problems have been the lack of community involvement in the design, planning and execution of the interventions; short-­-term time-­-frames; inadequate technical assistance; foments corruption and funding does not reach the intended beneficiaries; failure to take into account a gender perspective; the use of alternative crops negatively impact the environment and do not promote food sovereignty but focuses on mono-­-cropping, fostering land grabbing for big companies, and a lack of sustained access to land, markets and technologies. The conditioning of development assistance on prior eradication leaves people without sources of income, pushing people back into illicit crop cultivation. Present Alternative Development programs do not envisage the cultivation for licit purposes.

4. The prohibition of coca, cannabis and opium poppy generates conflicts, as the people that grow them are criminalized, their human and cultural rights are violated, they are discriminated against and legally prosecuted. The different levels of conflict that exist have their origins in both drug control policies and the drugs market itself. Conflicts and violence are caused by the interventions of state authorities (police and armed forces), through eradication acts or other interventions; the presence of armed groups and internal wars; ethnical divisions and territorial and border disputes; access to and control of land; access to water and other natural resources/common goods; corruption; migration and displacement; the overload of the judicial system; the illegal trade in arms and precursors and illicit logging; unemployment, amongst others.
Recommendations

1. We reject prohibition and the war on drugs.

2. We demand the removal of coca, cannabis and opium poppy from the lists and articles in the 1961 UN Single Convention and the 1988 Convention. No plant should be a controlled drug under the UN Conventions or national legislation. We claim the right to cultivation for traditional and modern uses of these plants.

3. We call for the elimination of all forms of forced and non-­-voluntary eradication.

4. We demand that all affected communities should be involved in all stages of drug policies and development, from the design to its implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

5. In case crop reduction is desirable and feasible it needs to be gradual and reached in dialogue and agreement with the affected communities, based on mutual respect and confidence.

6. The conditioning of development assistance on prior eradication is unacceptable. The proper sequencing of development interventions is fundamental to its success. 7. Integrated sustainable development should be the main intervention for crop producing communities. Such development should promote and protect the livelihoods of small scale farmers and rural workers, and should guarantee access to and control over land and common goods.

8. The state and its institutions will need to assume responsibility to address the needs of the communities involved in cultivation of coca, cannabis and opium poppy.

9. We demand that the farmers and their families involved in the cultivation of coca, cannabis and opium should not be prosecuted by criminal law, or discriminated against.

10. Coca, cannabis and opium poppy and their use should not be criminalized.

11. The expansion of licit markets of coca, cannabis and opium poppy should become part of development strategies.

12. We support the peace process in Colombia and Myanmar, which should be inclusive.



_{* Albania, Bolivia, Colombia, Spain, Guatemala, Indonesia, Jamaica, Morocco, Mexico, Myanmar, Paraguay, Peru, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and South Africa.
** Traditional use understood as ceremonial, religious, traditional medicinal. Modern is recreational, alimentary, and medicinal.}


Bron: www.tni.org

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Marijuana nuns defy local cannabis ban in California – video | US news | The Guardian

Sisters of the Valley look and act a lot like religious nuns, but they’re of no formal religious affiliation. They do, however, express great reverence for the cannabis plant and its medicinal properties. A recent local ban on growing and production of cannabis products has forced the Sisters to make a decision to defy the law and continue their mission

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Mexican actor says government wants to 'destroy her' for El Chapo interview | World news | The Guardian

Univision published a statement from Kate del Castillo after Mexico’s attorney general said Joaquin Guzman may have helped finance her tequila business

Kate del Castillo, the actor who helped Sean Penn interview drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, said Mexico’s government wants to “destroy her”, Univision reported over the weekend.

Mexican attorney general Arely Gomez has said that there were “indications” the actor may have used money from Guzmán to help finance her tequila business.

“I have no reason to give explanations to the press. If I don’t talk its because my lawyers told me not to because the government wants to destroy me,” the actor said in a message to Univision, which published the comment on its website.

A publicist for Del Castillo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An official for Mexico’s attorney general’s office declined to comment on the remarks, but noted that Gomez has guaranteed that the presumption of innocence will be respected.

Del Castillo’s father said last week that his daughter will testify at the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles, where she will present proof “she is clean”.

The attorney general’s office said Del Castillo would be questioned by authorities this week, although there were no details on when or where it would happen.

The Mexican government has said a meeting between the actor, who played a drug boss in the television series La Reina del Sur, Oscar-winning actor Penn and Guzmán was essential to the kingpin’s recapture earlier this month.

The day after El Chapo was apprehended, Rolling Stone magazine published an article by Penn, based on his and del Castillo’s secret meeting with Guzmán while the drug lord was on the run.
Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Paul LePage Wants To Bring Back The Guillotine For Drug Traffickers

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) believes drug traffickers shouldn't just get longer prison sentences, they should be subjected to the death penalty -- specifically, the guillotine.

"What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back. We should have public executions," LePage said in a Tuesday interview with the radio station WVOM.

Maine, like many other states, is struggling with a heroin epidemic, and LePage frequently talks about it at his public events.

He recently made national news when he commented on traffickers coming from Connecticut and New York with names like "D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" who "come up here, they sell their heroin and they go back home."

"Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we've got to deal with down the road," LePage added.

After intense criticism, LePage said he never meant his comments to be about race.

"I tried to explain that Maine is essentially all white," he said. "I should have said 'Maine women.'"

"I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers," LePage said Tuesday, adding, "I think four years [in prison] is not good enough. We've got to go to 20 years. We have to keep them here until they die."

The last time France executed someone by guillotine was in 1977. The country abolished the death penalty in 1981. The United States has never used this method of execution.

LePage also told WVOM Tuesday that he will not be delivering his annual State of the State address, in which governors traditionally speak to the state legislature about their accomplishments and policy priorities. Instead, he will be submitting his remarks in written form.

"I'm going to do a State of the State in writing, so people can't change my words," he said. "It makes no sense. Last week, they tried to impeach me. This week, they're throwing rotten tomatoes at me. Why would I go stand in front of them for an hour and a half?"

On Jan. 14, the state House did try to start an investigation that could lead to LePage's impeachment, but lawmakers failed to get enough votes to move forward.

LePage will be holding a public town hall at Husson University in Bangor Tuesday night. The governor is an outspoken supporter of GOP presidential candidate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

H/T: Bangor Daily News

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Bron: www.huffingtonpost.com

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Vaten met drugsafval gevonden in Noord-Brabant | NOS

Onbekenden hebben vannacht vaten met drugsafval gedumpt in de buurt van Hilvarenbeek. Het gaat om twee vaten van 1000 liter, vier vaten van 200 liter en tientallen kleine jerrycans, schrijft Omroep Brabant.

Ooggetuigen zagen dat de vermoedelijke daders na de dumping wegreden in een bestelbus. Agenten en een boswachter hebben naar hen gezocht, maar ze werden niet meer gevonden. De politie vermoedt dat het afval afkomstig is van een xtc-lab.

De gemeente Hilvarenbeek is direct begonnen met opruimen. Het is niet duidelijk hoe groot de schade is.

Bron: nos.nl

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A New Kind of Coca Leaf Is Thriving in Southern Colombia

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The sky above Charras de Boquerón, a town in the middle of the Colombian jungle, is always pierced by planes filled with glyphosate. Each day they fly over thousands of plantations, searching for coca leaf crops to disperse the chemical. Behind them, they leave hectares of dead fruit and vegetable crops.

The coca leaf is unaffected.

"There's the coca leaf, nothing has happened to it," one farmer told VICE News. Beside him, the lawn was black and burnt, but the crop seemed untouched.

This super resistant crop is the boliviana mona, and it has been cultivated by most farmers in the Guaviare region since 2014.

"Almost ten thousand families rely on growing coca leaf in Guaviare," said Pedro Arenas, former mayor of San José del Guaviare.

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Tientallen vaten drugsafval gedumpt in sloten Tholen | NOS

In sloten in Sint Philipsland en Poortvliet (gemeente Tholen) zijn tientallen vaten met chemicaliën gedumpt. De politie denkt dat het gaat om afval uit een drugslaboratorium. Het is nog onduidelijk om welke stoffen het precies gaat en of deze giftig zijn. Dat wordt onderzocht.

Omroep Zeeland schrijft dat de vaten een penetrante, chemische lucht verspreiden. Het waterschap is bezig om verdere verspreiding van de gedumpte stoffen te voorkomen.

In Sint Philipsland lagen twintig vaten. In Poortvliet is er op twee plekken gedumpt. Volgens de politie gaat het daar om elf vaten.

Vannacht zijn er ook vaten met drugsafval gevonden in de buurt van Hilvarenbeek. De vaten zien er hetzelfde uit als in Zeeland. De politie denkt dat het ook hier om drugsafval gaat.

Bron: nos.nl

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Twee doden door misbruik pijnstillende pleisters | NOS

In België zijn deze maand twee mannen overleden na misbruik met fentanylpleisters. Dat is een sterke pijnstiller die vooral wordt gebruikt door mensen die niet meer beter worden en veel pijn hebben.

Fentanyl is vele malen sterker is dan morfine of heroïne. Bij gebruik van fentanylpleisters wordt de stof in kleine hoeveelheden opgenomen door de huid. Wanneer de fentanyl uit de pleisters op een andere manier in het lichaam komt, bijvoorbeeld oraal of rokend, kan de hele dosis in een keer in het lichaam terechtkomen. Dat kan leiden tot een overdosis, met de dood tot gevolg.

Volgens het Belgische Wetenschappelijk Instituut Volksgezondheid hebben de overleden mannen, die tussen de 20 en 30 jaar waren, de fentanylpleisters "oneigenlijk gebruikt". De pleisters waren ook niet voorgeschreven door een arts, maar op een andere manier bemachtigd.

Het instituut houdt in de gaten of er sprake is van een nieuwe trend van drugsgebruik. Vooralsnog lijkt het daar niet op.

Wel meldt het instituut dat er deze maand ook nog iemand is overleden die fentanyl heeft ingenomen in combinatie met de nieuwe drug U-47700. Dat is een psychoactieve stof die zeven tot acht keer sterker is dan morfine. De man had de middelen via internet verkregen.

Bron: nos.nl

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Study Shows That Alcohol, Not Marijuana Is The Major “Gateway Drug” | The Free Thought Project



A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida has shown that alcohol is far more of a “gateway drug” than marijuana is.

The study concluded that:

Results from the Guttman scale indicated that alcohol represented the “gateway” drug, leading to the use of tobacco, marijuana, and other illicit substances. Moreover, students who used alcohol exhibited a significantly greater likelihood of using both licit and illicit drugs. The findings from this investigation support that alcohol should receive primary attention in school-based substance abuse prevention programming, as the use of other substances could be impacted by delaying or preventing alcohol use. Therefore, it seems prudent for school and public health officials to focus prevention efforts, policies, and monies, on addressing adolescent alcohol use.

According to the study’s co-author, Adam E. Barry, the later in life that a person consumes alcohol, the less likely they are to abuse drugs. Also, it seems that in most cases, use of alcohol and tobacco comes earlier in life than the use of marijuana.

Barry said that his studies were intended to correct some of the propaganda that has infected American culture since the “Reefer Madness” era.

“So, basically, if we know what someone says with regards to their alcohol use, then we should be able to predict what they respond to with other [drugs]. Another way to say it is, if we know someone has done [the least prevalent drug] heroin, then we can assume they have tried all the others. I think [these results] have to do with level of access children have to alcohol, and that alcohol is viewed as less harmful than some of these other substances,” Barry added.

Just like prescription pills and tobacco, alcohol is seen as more socially acceptable in American society because the government approves of it. However, these substances are largely more dangerous than many of the illegal drugs that people have a deep fear of.

Since certain drugs are taken less seriously, people are more likely to abuse them and not keep their addiction in check. That is not to say that these legal drugs should be banned as well, in fact, all drugs should be legalized so honest discussions can be had about the uses and dangers of each drug.

Don Cook:

As a teacher in the 80's-90's i was repeatedly in conflict with the DARE officers...i would prompt kids to ask the cops, "what about alcohol and cigarettes?"...the answer was-always-"the law says that there are some drugs that are okay to use if You are an adult". i would ask if the officer knew hjow many deaths could be attributed to pot, or heroin...they couldn't give an aswer. i would tell them, and the kids that the use of alcohol and the use of tobacco killed nearly 600,000 people a year...DARE din't like that. later in life, i worked as a psychotherapist in Methadone Tx...i would tell the old-line drug "counselors" that people who started with alcohol---a body toxin--were almost our entire population, and that pot, apparently, was NOT the "gateway drug"...much resistance and anger...people have been brainwashed.

Sally Oh:

Agreed!

Bhagavad Gita:

Regarding alcohol being the gateway drug? Yes, I have always said this same exact thing.

Maura_Lina:

My last pay check was $9500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out. This is what I do... ----------------->>www.workonline44.comONLY Please don't include ONLY

Sally Oh:

There is no such thing as a "gateway" drug. The entire theory is junk. Please stop promoting it.

Don Cook:

you are corrrect...the "gateway" for addictions are myriad psychological issues....

Sally Oh:

Don Cook as an addict, I can attest that's not always the case. Mostly, from my experience, it's an inability to grow up

Don Cook:

Sally Oh The "inability to grow up" is a great descriptor of a psychological issue!!! Another way to say it would be, "the inability to grow past...."...it is commonly called PTSD/Complex PTSD.

Vedad Sladic:

Don Cook It's a bit ignorrant to link evrything to psychological issues. The curiosity to try out things is something we are born with and doesn't necessarily have to do with psychological issues. There are many examples of drug users who are far more stable psychologically than your average shrink, and because of that some people that cannot accept that fact just choose to write it down as psychological illness.

Bron: thefreethoughtproject.com

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The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.

Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.

This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

Johann will be speaking on August 26th in Edinburgh, in early September in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, and in mid-September in Mexico City. For details of these events go to www.chasingthescream.com.

The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes.

If you would like more updates on the book and this issue, you can like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chasingthescream

Bron: www.huffingtonpost.com

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'Crimineel gewaarschuwd voor invallen door politielek'

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Een lek bij de politie heeft het onderzoek tegen de van moord en drugshandel verdachte Miloud B. uit Bergen op Zoom mogelijk beschadigd. Dit constateert BN De Stem uit verslagen van politieverhoren.

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Plan Colombia's mixed legacy: coca thrives but peace deal may be on horizon | World news | The Guardian

This week, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos will visit the White House to seek increased aid and celebrate the successes of the US-backed military programme. But Plan Colombia has had mixed results: ‘Bad weeds never die’

This week, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos will visit the White House to seek increased aid and celebrate the successes of the US-backed military programme. But Plan Colombia has had mixed results: ‘Bad weeds never die’

In the lowlands surrounding the town of La Hormiga, coca was once king.

Fields of the bright green bushes stretched to the horizon in every direction and farmers were flush with cash. The surrounding municipality was the one with the most coca crops in the country that produced the most cocaine in the world.

This was “ground zero” for Plan Colombia, a massive multipronged effort funded by nearly $10bn in US aid that started in 2000. The plan aimed to recover a country that was in the grips of drug mafias, leftist guerrillas and rightwing militias, and whose institutions malfunctioned and economy faltered.

Fifteen years on, cattle graze where coca once grew by the side of the road and cacao is more easily spotted than coca. Farmer Fulgencio Quenguan traded his coca for fish farming. “I don’t make as much money but no one can take this from me,” he says as he scales a few tilapias for a customer in his own shop in town.

Today, Colombia is a country transformed. It has one of Latin America’s healthiest economies, violence has dropped dramatically and the country is on the verge of ending more than half a century of internal conflict with Farc guerrillas who appear prepared to sign a peace deal in coming months.

At a White House ceremony on Thursday, Barack Obama and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos will make a pitch for increased aid for Colombia once a peace accord is signed, while celebrating the successes of Plan Colombia.

But here in Putumayo, Plan Colombia has a mixed legacy.

Plan Colombia’s first target was to reduce the amount of coca in Putumayo by half in five years. It did that and more. The total area planted with coca dropped from just over 66,000 hectares (163,020 acres) in 2000 to less than 9,000 hectares (22,230 acres) in 2005.

But the crops and related violence moved elsewhere in the country, and after some 4m hectares (9.88m acres) of coca were sprayed with herbicide in 15 years, coca production is on the rise again and Colombia remains the world’s top producer of coca and cocaine.

“Coca is stubborn,” says farmer Quenguan. He hasn’t grown coca on his 12-hectare (30-acre) farm in the village of Los Laureles for more than 10 years. But there’s one bush that, no matter how many times it has been sprayed with herbicide, no matter how many times he cuts it down, keeps popping back up.

“Bad weeds never die,” he says, reciting an age-old Spanish adage.

Plan Colombia has become a catch-all phrase for several different strategies. It is most widely understood as a US aid package to Colombia which has totaled about $10bn since 2000. More broadly, it was a joint US-Colombian strategy to strengthen the military, state institutions and the economy.

“There is this idea that it is some vast orchestrated project but Plan Colombia doesn’t exist as such,” says Winifred Tate, author of Drugs, Thugs and Diplomats, a study of US policymaking in Colombia. Rather, it has been a series of programs whose emphasis has expanded and recalibrated over the years, she says.

Initially, Plan Colombia was described as a counter-narcotics and military strengthening strategy and the focus was on massive drug crop spraying, building up military capacity and offering some incentives to coca growers to switch to legal crops.

Andres Pastrana, the Colombian president under whom Plan Colombia began, says the strategy was a turning point in the country’s decades-old war. “Before the Plan, security forces were on the defensive and on the verge of military defeat [by guerrillas],” he told the Guardian in an emailed response to questions.

Afraid of getting bogged down in a Vietnam-style quagmire, Congress initially restricted the use of donated helicopters and other hardware strictly to fighting drug production and trafficking. A battalion of 3,000 men trained by US special forces could not be used to combat the guerrillas or paramilitaries unless their targets were clearly protecting drug labs or coca fields.

“Those limitations ... on the use of Plan Colombia caused (operational) problems,” said Pastrana, who will also be at the White House ceremony.

That ended after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, when the US became openly engaged in fighting “narco-terrorism” in Colombia. That is where Plan Colombia did succeed: in helping the Colombian government take control – in some areas for the first time – of its territory, fighting back guerrillas to mountain and jungle redoubts and driving them to begin peace negotiations with the government in 2012.

But the security gains came at a high cost. In the first three years of the plan, 1.8 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes as violence and aerial spraying peaked. The military, which received the bulk of US aid, was embroiled in a scandal in which soldiers executed as many as 3,000 civilians and presented them as combat deaths to inflate the body count.

For Quenguan, Plan Colombia is synonymous with aggressive crop dusters dumping herbicide on his crops and weak offers of alternative development programs. Until 2004, his entire farm was planted with coca. Every six months, he would harvest 17,000kg of coca leaf, which he would then process into coca paste. With every harvest, he would make $15,000 profit, even after the cut he had to give Farc guerrillas who controlled the area.

Plan Colombia was heralded by a brutal incursion of rightwing paramilitaries – often working in collusion with military forces against suspected or real members of the guerrillas – in which hundreds were killed or disappeared.

“First came the paramilitaries and then came the fumigation,” Quenguan says. “The fumigations ruined our food crops but the coca would just grow back stronger.” As the herbicide rained down on their farms, NGO’s with Plan Colombia cash offered coca growers were offered incentives to substitute coca for legal crops. They were encouraged to plant yucca, which would be processed in a new drying plant. The yucca flour would then be bought up by a new animal feed plant.

Today, the equipment at the yucca plant is silent and rusting. All that’s left of the animal feed factory is a vast empty shell of a building in the town of Orito, where a plaque offers gratitude to the US development agency for its donation to build the plant that would “generate for our farmers a legal economy”.

Miguel Alirio Rosero, the town’s mayor at the time the plant was built, says it cost $3m to build and was in operation only eight months before being abandoned. “There was a certain degree of improvisation in the design of the [alternative development] projects,” Rosero says.

“Millions of dollars just melted away in that,” said Tate.

Later programs seem to have got it better and convinced Quenguan to pull out of coca. In 2004, he signed onto a Colombian government program – with Plan Colombia funds – that allowed him to save enough to uproot his coca and dig three artificial ponds on his farm to cultivate fish. Today, he makes $250 a month selling fish at a small shop in town.

But hundreds of farmers continue to plant coca throughout the country. In 2014, the last year for which figures are available, Colombia had 113,000 hectares (279,110 acres) of coca, only slightly below 1999 figures.

Santos has said that warrants a change in drug policy. “It’s like being on a stationary bicycle. We make a huge effort, we sweat, and we end up in the same place,” he told a recent forum in Bogota.

In October, Colombia halted its aerial spraying program after a World Health Organisation body found the herbicide used, glyphosate, was probably carcinogenic. The United States balked at dropping the spraying program but said it would respect Colombia’s decision.

Related: Colombians dare to hope as end of decades-long civil war appears in sight

As part of peace negotiations, Farc guerrillas – who have lived off taxing the drug trade – have agreed to support the government’s anti-narcotics strategy, which it says will be more holistic than past policies, investing heavily in rural development, including badly needed roads, while going after big time traffickers rather than coca growers.

“We must stop confronting the farmers and turn them into our allies,” said Eduardo Díaz, head of the new agency that will lead crop substitution efforts.

Aside from celebrating Plan Colombia, Santos’s Washington agenda also includes making the case among congressional leaders for increased US aid in a likely post-conflict scenario, including regional development and demobilization and reintegration of Farc fighters as well as de-mining. Currently, US aid to Colombia stands at about $300m a year. Obama plans to seek an increase in aid for Colombia in the next budget.

A senior US official said the Obama administration would seek an additional $100m to back the peace effort. “We were with them in a time of war; we should be with them at a time of peace,” the official said.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Officier die doodsbedreiging verzon: ik bezweek door de stress | NOS

Het Openbaar Ministerie is een strafrechtelijk onderzoek begonnen tegen officier van justitie Lucas van Delft, van het arrondissement Zeeland West-Brabant. De man zou volgens NRC doodsbedreigingen aan zijn adres hebben verzonnen. Hij was belast met de bestrijding van zware georganiseerde misdaad.

De aanklager zou in november afgelopen jaar onder een valse naam hebben gemeld dat mensen van plan waren hem te liquideren. Van Delft is voorlopig geschorst. Formeel verdenkt justitie hem van het delict ambtsdwang waar een straf van maximaal vier jaar cel op staat.

In NRC Handelsblad erkent Van Delft dat hij fouten heeft gemaakt. Hij zegt dat hij de melding deed omdat hij niet meer tegen de stress kon die zijn werk met zich meebracht.

Zo'n vijftien jaar geleden kwam hij te werken in een team dat de productie van synthetische drugs bestreed. "Ik zag het enorme geweld dat ze in het milieu gebruikten: liquidaties."

Van Delft werd sinds begin 2015 herhaaldelijk echt met de dood bedreigd, zegt hij. "Op verschillende momenten kwam er informatie uit het drugsmilieu dat ik geliquideerd zou worden of ernstig gevaar liep. Dat trok een zware wissel op mij.”

De knop ging om toen hij in november vorig jaar onderzoek moest doen naar een aanslag op een 63-jarige man in Breda. "Ik stond tussen de stukken vlees van het uit elkaar gespatte slachtoffer. Toen dacht ik: dat gaat mij dus ook overkomen. Dat heeft me over de rand geduwd."

De volgende dag tipte hij de politie onder een valse naam. Hij zei dat Van Delft uit de weg zou worden geruimd. "Ik wilde zo nog meer veiligheid voor mezelf creëren."

Van Delft werd 2,5 maanden ondergebracht op geheime locaties. Ook zijn gezin dook onder.

Van Delft zegt dat hij zelf van een bron uit het criminele circuit informatie kreeg dat er een liquidatie op hem aanstaande was. Tegenover collega's wil hij de identiteit van de bron niet prijsgeven, omdat deze dan in levensgevaar zou komen. Het OM zegt daarom niet te kunnen beoordelen of de bron wel echt bestaat.

De geschorste officier erkent in het interview dat hij fouten heeft gemaakt. " Ik bied mijn excuses daarvoor aan." Hij zegt te hopen op een terugkeer bij het OM "omdat ik die organisatie een warm hart toedraag".

Bron: nos.nl

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Het einde van het 500-eurobiljet?

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Inlichtingendiensten en Europol beschikken over sterke aanwijzingen dat het merendeel van de 500-eurobiljetten zich in criminele circuits ophoudt. In 2006 bevond maar liefst een kwart van alle 500-eurobiljetten zich in Spanje, dat Zuid-Amerikaanse drugskartels als toegangspoort naar Europa gebruiken. Narcostaat Colombia exporteert extreem veel 500-eurobankbiljetten, terwijl er jaarlijks maar een paar duizend legaal het land binnenkomen. Het Britse agentschap dat belast is met het onderzoek naar de georganiseerde misdaad concludeerde in 2010 dat 90 procent van de 'Bin Ladens' in handen van criminelen is. Naar aanleiding van die bevinding nam het Verenigd Koninkrijk het biljet in 2010 uit circulatie (hoewel het daar nog steeds een geldig betaalmiddel is).

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Hasjbaas doet aangifte tegen drugsofficier Van Delft

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Johan van Laarhoven, die in Thailand een gevangenisstraf van 20 jaar uitzit, gaat aangifte doen tegen de geschorste officier van justitie Lucas van Delft. 'Wegens schending van de geheimhoudingsplicht en smaad', licht zijn advocaat Gerard Spong toe.

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'Mijn cliënt heeft uit de krant moeten vernemen dat hij wordt beschuldigd van belastingontduiking. Dat hij dus een fiscaal misdrijf heeft begaan', zegt Spong. 'Dat onderzoek loopt nog. Er ligt nog niet eens een dagvaarding. Dan gaat een aanklager, zeker een die geschorst is, ver over de schreef.' Spong hoopt op zeer korte termijn over het spreekverbod te overleggen met de hoofdofficier van justitie. 'Van mij mag Van Delft alle mogelijke onzin uitkramen, maar niet over mijn cliënt.'

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Tim Farron calls for legalisation of cannabis for recreational use | Society | The Guardian

Lib Dem is first main party leader to propose decriminalisation of drug for recreational use ahead of expert report on ‘legal cannabis market’


Tim Farron is to become the first leader of one of Britain’s main political parties to call for the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use after declaring that the war on drugs is over.

In one of the most significant moves by the Liberal Democrats since they were reduced to a shell of just eight MPs at the election, Farron will call on the government to develop a framework for the legal regulation of cannabis.

Farron is to endorse a motion at spring conference which calls on the party to extend its existing support for the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal use to recreational use.

The motion, to be tabled by the former health minister Norman Lamb, will be debated after the release of the findings of an expert panel appointed by the Lib Dems to examine how a legal market for the use of cannabis would work in the UK. The panel has found that the legal use of cannabis could save the exchequer more than £1bn a year. It could generate between £400m-£900m in tax revenues and could save £200m-£300m in the criminal justice system.

The Lib Dem leader said: “The Liberal Democrats will be releasing a report in due course that lays out the case for a legalised market for sales of cannabis. I personally believe the war on drugs is over. We must move from making this a legal issue to one of health.

“The prime minister used to agree with me on the need for drug reform. It’s time he rediscovered his backbone and made the case again.”

Related: A new deal on drugs is as vital as a climate change accord | Nick Clegg and Bohuslav Sobotka

Farron and Lamb, the two rivals for the Lib Dem leadership after Nick Clegg stood down when the party lost 49 of its 57 MPs, showed that they wanted to act in a radical way when they appointed the expert panel last October. The panel, whose members included the former chairman of the government’s advisory committee on the misuse of drugs, Prof David Nutt, was charged with examining how a legal market for cannabis could work in Britain.

The panel looked at evidence from Colorado and Washington State where the use of cannabis has been legal since 2012. Its work has also been backed by Lord Paddick, the Lib Dem peer and former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, who led a pilot scheme in Lambeth which effectively decriminalised cannabis for personal use over a 12-month period.

Farron’s remarks about the prime minister are a reference to his support as a young MP for a report by the Commons home affairs select committee, of which he was a member. This called for the prescribing of heroin and the provision of safe injecting rooms.

The future prime minister, who said that the lives of friends and people close to him had been ruined by drugs, told MPs in December 2002: “When I first heard about the concept of safe injecting rooms, I hated it. I thought the concept of the state providing a room for someone to inject something into their veins awful, but I listened to the arguments ... People who live in inner-city areas whose children have to step over drug paraphernalia in the streets and on housing estates deserve a break from heroin use in their communities. That takes me back to the point that safe injecting rooms at least get heroin users to a place where they can be contacted by the treatment agencies so that the work of trying to get them off drugs can start.”

As prime minister, Cameron has ruled out the legalisation of all drugs.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Families of Americans killed by Mexican cartels sue HSBC for laundering billions | Business | The Guardian

Four families are suing the British banking giant for allegedly allowing the gangs to launder billions, providing ‘systematic material support to the cartels’

Four families of Americans killed by Mexican drug cartels are suing British banking giant HSBC for allegedly contributing to their deaths by allowing the gangs to launder billions of dollars.

It is a fresh setback for the bank, whose operations in Mexico have been under scrutiny by US authorities for years. The bank processed at least $881m in cash for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, regarded as the most powerful drug gang in the world, according to US authorities.

The suit claims that HSBC “knowingly provided continuous and systematic material support to the cartels and their acts of terrorism by laundering billions of dollars for them. As a proximate result of HSBC’s material support to the Mexican drug cartels, numerous lives, including those of the Plaintiffs, have been destroyed”.

It was filed on Tuesday in a federal court in the Texas border city of Brownsville. Rob Sherman, an HSBC spokesman, said in a statement that the bank intends to “vigorously” defend itself against the claims and is “committed to combating financial crime and [has] taken strict steps to help keep bad actors out of the global financial system”.

In 2012 a US Senate report described the bank as having a “pervasively polluted” culture that saw it allow drug kingpins, rogue nations and terrorists to move hundreds of millions of dollars around the financial system. US prosecutors said that deposits at Mexican branches were so frequent that drug traffickers used boxes that were designed to fit perfectly through the teller windows. HSBC apologised, pledged to reform its procedures and paid a $1.9bn settlement to US authorities.

On Tuesday a judge in New York said he would probably delay the release of a report by a federal monitor appointed to examine the level of HSBC’s compliance since that agreement.

The lawsuit graphically details several murders at the hands of some of Mexico’s most brutal cartels.

In one incident, Lesley Redelfs, a US consulate employee in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, and her husband, Arthur, a detention officer in El Paso, Texas, were ambushed after leaving a children’s birthday party in Juárez. Their SUV was sprayed with bullets and Lesley Redelfs, who was four months pregnant, was shot twice in the head. Her husband was gunned down as he tried to reach the border and their seven-month old daughter was found screaming in the back seat.

Two months later, in May 2010, as Rafael Morales Valencia stepped outside a church after his wedding ceremony, assassins invaded the courtyard, forced the wedding party to the ground then kidnapped the groom, his uncle and his brother. They were transported to a safe house, tortured and asphyxiated by duct tape wrapped around their faces.

“Driven by its desire to expand its business and increase revenue, HSBC intentionally implemented criminally deficient anti-money laundering programs, processes and controls, which were designed to guarantee that billions of dollars would go through its banks undetected or unreported. And that is exactly what happened,” the lawsuit alleges, claiming that due diligence processes at Mexican bank branches were non-existent or fabricated, allowing suspicious individuals to deposit hundreds of thousands or even millions of US dollars.

The suit says that money laundering is essential to the cartels’ prosperity because “without the ability to place, layer, and integrate their illicit proceeds into the global financial network, the cartels’ ability to corrupt law enforcement and public officials, and acquire personnel, weapons, ammunition, vehicles, planes, communication devices, raw materials for drug production, and all other instrumentalities essential to their operations would be substantially impeded”.

It describes the cartels’ activities as “terrorist acts” in a bid to argue that HSBC is liable under the US Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows survivors of terrorist acts to demand damages from organisations that provide material support to terrorists. HSBC and several other banks are the subjects of a lawsuit from US soldiers accusing them of financing terrorists who attacked American troops in Iraq.

Arab Bank, headquartered in Jordan, was successfully sued by US citizens who brought claims under the Anti-Terrorism Act. It was accused of facilitating Hamas attacks.

However, unlike Hamas, the Mexican groups are not designated as terrorist organisations by the US State Department. A 2011 attempt by a Texas congressman to put the top cartels on the list faltered amid concerns it would damage America’s relationship with Mexico and arguments that the groups do not fit the definition of terrorism as they are motivated by money rather than political ideology.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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Mexico's deadliest prison riot underlines power of cartels inside | World news | The Guardian

Mexico’s deadliest prison brawl in many years was a bloodbath in which inmates attacked each other with hammers, cudgels and makeshift blades, authorities said on Friday, underlining yet again the power that drug cartels wield inside many of the country’s lockups.

Jaime Rodríguez, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, said 60 hammers, 86 knives and 120 shivs were used in the previous day’s fighting at the Topo Chico prison in Monterrey, where 49 inmates were hacked, beaten or burned to death, and a dozen more injured.

At least 40 of the victims “died from wounds from stabbing and cutting weapons, blows from hammers and clubs”, Rodríguez said at a news conference.

Authorities also seized various kinds of contraband items from marijuana and cocaine to televisions and USB memory sticks.

A dispute between rival factions of the Zetas cartel was believed to be behind the violence.

“What we have to see as a reality in the entire penitentiary system is that there is self-rule” by the inmates, Rodríguez said. “All this corruption inside the prison creates the conditions we have today.”

He acknowledged that prisoners effectively lord over the facility and that there were not enough guards watching them: “Nobody wants to be a guard,” he said, because of the meager pay.

About half the inmates at Topo Chico have been sentenced for minor offenses or are suspects still awaiting trial. Nevertheless they are housed in the prison’s overcrowded general population alongside many of the country’s most hardened killers.

One of them was Raymundo González Hernández, a 23-year-old who is accused of kidnapping but whose trial is still pending. He was not among those listed as wounded during the riot, but his cousin said he was covered by bruises and welts when she was allowed inside to see him.

“Both his eyes were practically closed from all the hits they gave him,” Cynthia Hernandez said.

“He couldn’t even speak, he just went like this,” she added, moving her head from side to side.

The harsh conditions inside the lockup were a familiar story for Victoria Casas Gutiérrez, a cleaning lady who waited for hours for news of her 21-year-old son, Santiago Garza Casas, who was facing trial for allegedly acting as a lookout for a criminal gang.

Garza was sent to Topo Chico in September for missing a parole appointment and immediately thrown in with a prison population that included convicted murderers.

With their gang ties and access to drugs and guns, many say the Zetas and Gulf cartels run the prison.

“They charge taxes, and if the relatives don’t bring a certain amount ... they beat them,” Casas Gutiérrez said, adding that the payments can run into the thousands of pesos. “Sometimes we have to sell our homes.”

“There is vice inside and everything that is in there is their fault, the authorities,” she said.

Casas Gutiérrez’s son was not on the list of the dead, but some bodies were so badly burned it may take days to identify them.

No escapes were reported in the clash, which took place on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival in Mexico, a visit that is scheduled to include a trip next week to another prison in the border city of Ciudad Juárez.

The fighting began around midnight with prisoners setting fire to a storage area, sending flames and smoke billowing into the sky.

The clash was initially said to be between two gangs led by a member of the infamous Zetas drug cartel, Juan Pedro Zaldívar Farias, also known as “Z-27”, and Jorge Ivan Hernández Cantú, who has been identified by Mexican media as a Gulf cartel figure.

But National Security Commissioner Renato Sales Heredia said later that authorities believe the fight was between two factions of the Zetas for control of the prison.

Related: 'A new era for Juárez': pope's visit hails optimism for a city ravaged by drug wars

Governor Rodríguez blamed the violence on “the old, outdated, obsolete system” under which Mexican prisons are run and suggested after having visited the United States that his country may have to move to US-style, privately operated prisons.

“We have to think about efforts with private initiative,” he said. “We have not been doing rehabilitation work.”

He also criticized judicial reforms that have given inmates greater ability to appeal transfer orders that could send them farther from their hometowns. Zaldívar had successfully fought to be moved to Topo Chico, while Hernandez had won a similar appeal against transferring him elsewhere.

“Basically this is creating the conflicts in the prisons,” Rodríguez said.

Bron: www.theguardian.com