tagged w/ drug policy
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As of early August, 650 people had been killed in Acapulco, Mexico in 2011, making it one of the the bloodiest cities in Mexico, due primarily to the drug war.
As a key passageway for South American cocaine, the city has long attracted drug gangs, with agents of the Sinaloa Cartel battling the Zetas as far back as 2005. Both gangs are targeted in America’s war on drugs, which unfortunately has bolstered their capacities in various ways as they expand their dominance in the black market.
Men from the Zetas gang are suspected of having terrorized and burnt down a crowded casino last week, killing over 50 people. The motivation for the attack is reportedly a failure to pay protection money.
Twenty-three local gasoline stations closed down on Friday to protest against increased extortion demands from these gangs, while authorities reported a 20-fold rise in car robberies along the highway which connects Acapulco to Mexico City. After a series of robberies on shops last week, a handful of jewelers in the city’s downtown announced a weekend shutdown to take a stand against the violence.
The US response to such drug-related violence has been to crackdown and weaponize local armies. But this is counterproductive, as the Zetas gang is tied to US-trained and supported Guatemalan militias notorious for various human rights abuses. Similarly, the Sinaloa Cartel, which US authorities have cooperated with in the past, is involved in the smuggling and distribution of Colombian cocaine, where the US has funded various drug-trafficking militias as well as a corrupt government which has provided protection for such groups.
http://news.antiwar.com/2011/08/31/drug-related-mexican-violence-soars-as-us-policy-bolsters-cartels/As of early August, 650 people had been killed in Acapulco, Mexico in 2011, making it... more
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Advocates call for shift from incarceration to rehabilitation and legalization
NEW ORLEANS, La. – On Friday afternoon, with festive music and diverse protestors, Women with a Vision led a peaceful march against what the organization describes as a trillion dollar “abject failure”—the now forty-year-old war on drugs.
With the support of likeminded organizations in 15 cities across the country, approximately 60 protestors marched through Central City, soaking up 90 degree temperatures. They called for an end to what they allege to be racial profiling, lengthy sentences, and unfair drug policies.
More here:
http://www.politicalfailblog.com/2011/06/forty-year-war-on-drugs-incites-new.htmlAdvocates call for shift from incarceration to rehabilitation and legalization
NEW... more
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Researchers now think that if you are going to go crazy...smoking weed may speed up the process.
The study is here: http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/archgenpsychiatry.2011.5#YMA05005T1
The NPR article follows:
"Can marijuana use lead to mental health problems popping up sooner?
The question weighs on the minds of parents and doctors. Now there's more evidence, culled from more than 80 different studies, that marijuana can speed up development of serious psychotic illness.
Australian researchers found that marijuana users who developed psychosis were 2.7 years younger than nonusers who became psychotic. Other sorts of substance abuse sped up psychosis by 2 years, but alcohol alone showed no effect. The result were published online by the Archives of General Psychiatry.
What's going on?
The researcher say the results point toward a strong effect for marijuana in vulnerable people:
This study lends weight to the view that cannabis use precipitates schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders...."
**More at link**
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/02/09/133615747/researchers-link-marijuana-and-earlier-onset-of-psychosis?ps=sh_sthdlResearchers now think that if you are going to go crazy...smoking weed may speed up... more
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VIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal's nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates.
Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
Some researchers caution that Portugal's results may be due not so much to tolerance for drug possession as to making more treatment available. But of course these two always go hand in hand, in any harm-reduction strategy for drug use: it's only by decriminalising possession that you get problem users to come in for treatment.
Portugal is far from the only country that's embraced such harm-reduction strategies, and the verdicts everywhere seem to be similar: they may lead to greater usage of soft drugs, they don't seem to lead to significant increases in hard-drug usage, and they significantly reduce the costs of drug addiction to society. That doesn't mean that drug policy disappears from the political agenda in countries that move towards harm reduction. The newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it's instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:
On the one hand, we must ensure that the lowest possible number of people use that stuff. On the other hand, if they do, they should use clean needles, not borrow them from each other. And they should try to limit the health risks. That's the perspective from which I look at the site.
This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that Amsterdam's heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That's even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal's for heroin users: they've been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run "safe injection points", under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population "doesn't relate to hard drugs at all", and that there's no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They're more likely to find it pathetic.
Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there's one thing government has going for it, it's the ability to make anything unfashionable. This insight into government's jujitsu-like capability to render the cool uncool should be more obvious to conservatives than to liberals. And yet, in America, the very people who are most distrustful of government's ability to do anything right are the ones who are steadfastly opposed to letting the government use its secret power of deadly uncoolness to fight drug abuse. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/harm_reductionVIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing... more
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The drug czar has gone to great rhetorical lengths to convince the American people that our drug policy isn’t a war any longer, but you don't have to look very hard to see the violence that still erupts daily, not only in Mexico, but right here in our own communities. If you can handle it, I'd like you to take a look at just one example of the incredible violence police use when enforcing our drug laws.
That is how quickly lives are lost in the war on drugs. When police invade private homes in search of drugs, anything and everything can go wrong, and even the slightest misunderstanding becomes a matter of life and death. The victim in this case, Todd Blair, brandished a golf club in terror as armed men stormed his home in the night. We'll never know for sure if he realized they were police. But we do know that only a small amount of drugs were found in the raid that took his life.
That drugs and violence often go hand in hand isn't a mystery to many among us – the bloodshed gripping Mexico is old news by now – but this is a very different kind of drug war violence than the infamous turf wars of the cartels. This is a rare glimpse into the unbelievable level of force our own public servants unleash routinely in order to protect us from ourselves. This man was just a drug user. Whether he ever sold drugs is in dispute, but there's no question that he lived and died in poverty, and not from drugs, but from police who gunned him down in his own home.
So long as we rely on police to lead the fight against drug abuse, the consequences will unfold brutally all around us and people who could have been helped – not to mention innocent bystanders – will be lost to us forever. Mistakes and misunderstandings will continue to occur with deadly frequency, but to a very large extent, the tragic events that take place daily in the war on drugs are not mistakes at all; they are the real and inevitable results of the laws our police enforce and the orders they receive. If heavily-armed pre-dawn drug raids are standard protocol, then people getting shot dead in the dark obviously can't be considered a crime, and it shouldn't be called an accident either.
The movement to end the war on drugs isn't just about making drugs legal. It's also about making it illegal for police to kill our friends and family over small bags of contraband.
Blair had been under investigation for several months by the strike force on suspicion of dealing meth and heroin. Only a small amount of marijuana, and paraphernalia, was found in the home, Smith said, and a small vial of what appeared to be meth was in the dead man's pants pocket.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy/2011/jan/18/brutal_drug_raid_killing_caughtThe drug czar has gone to great rhetorical lengths to convince the American people... more
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Can Police Can Kick Down Your Door If They Smell Pot? Some Justices Think So
Police smelling marijuana coming from behind an apartment door can enter the home without a warrant if they believe the evidence is being destroyed, some U.S. Supreme Court Justices said on Wednesday.
More than 60 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police couldn't enter a residence without a warrant just because they smelled burning opium, reports Adam Liptak at The New York Times.
On Wednesday, during the argument of a case about what police were entitled to do upon smelling marijuana outside the door of a Kentucky apartment, two justices were concerned that the Court may be ready to eviscerate the 1948 ruling which stemmed from a Seattle case.
"Aren't we just simply saying they can just walk in whenever they smell marijuana, whenever they think there's drugs on the other side?" asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor, considering what a decision against the defendant would tell the police. "Why do even bother giving them a search warrant?"
The old ruling, Johnson v. United States, involved the search of a Seattle hotel room. The smell of drugs could provide probably cause for a warrant, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote for the majority, but it did not entitle police to enter without one.
"No suspect was fleeing or likely to take flight," Justice Jackson wrote. "The search was of permanent premises, not of a movable vehicle. No evidence or contraband was threatened with removal or destruction."
Since the War On Drugs was re-started by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the Supreme Court has steadily given police more leeway to search cars, travelers and baggage, reports David Savage at the Los Angeles Times. But the justices have been reluctant to allow searches of homes without a warrant.
In the new case, Kentucky v. King, police in Kentucky were looking for a suspect who had sold cocaine to an informant. They smelled burning marijuana coming from another apartment -- where Hollis King and his friends were smoking marijuana -- knocked loudly, and announced themselves.
When they heard sounds coming from inside that made them think evidence was being destroyed, they kicked the door in and found marijuana, cocaine, King, two friends, and some cash, but not the original suspect, who was in another apartment.
King was sentenced to 11 years(!) in prison, but the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned his conviction and threw out the evidence, ruling that any risk of drugs' being destroyed was the result of the decision by police to knock and announce themselves rather than to obtain a warrant. The Kentucky court ruled that officers had entered the apartment illegally and that the evidence they found should not have been considered in court, reports Robert Barnes at The Washington Post.
The key issue is whether an "exigent" or emergency circumstance allows the police to enter a residence without a warrant. Sadly but no longer shockingly, Obama Administration lawyers joined the case on the side of Kentucky's prosecutors.
The police who broke into the apartment "reasonably believed that there was destruction of evidence occurring inside," said Ann O'Connell, an assistant to Obama's Solicitor General.
Prosecutors for Kentucky and the federal government told the justices Wednesday that the Kentucky court had erred. They claimed there had been no violation of the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches, because they claimed police had "acted lawfully."
But Justice Elena Kagan had doubts about that approach.
If the court looks only at the lawfulness of police behavior, Justice Kagan said, that "is going to enable the police to penetrate the home, to search the home, without a warrant, without going to see a magistrate, in a very wide variety of cases."
All the police would need to say, Justice Kagan said, is that they smelled marijuana and then heard a noise. "Or," she added, "we think there was some criminal activity going on for whatever reason and we heard noise."
"How do you prevent your test from essentially eviscerating the warrant requirement in the context of the one place that the Fourth Amendment was most concerned about?" Kagan asked Kentucky Assistant Attorney General Joshua D. Farley, who claimed the police had done nothing that violated the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Sotomayor was even more direct, asking "Aren't we just doing away with 'Johnson'?"
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked why the police could not simply roam the hallways of apartment buildings, sniffing for pot, knocking whenever they smelled marijuana, then breaking in if they "hear something suspicious."
"That would be perfectly fine," Kentucky Assistant Atttorney General Farley replied.
Justice Antonin Scalia revealed some unflattering things about his worldview -- which, God help us, seems to be that of a judgmental 10-year-old -- as he said he was not troubled by the standard the government lawyers proposed. He said that police can't go wrong by knocking loudly on the door.
"There are a lot of constraints on law enforcement," Justice Scalia said, "and the one thing that it has going for it is that criminals are stupid."
Scalia said that "criminals" often cooperate with police when not legally required to do so. They might open the door and let officers inside -- and if not, the police can break in, he said.
"Everything done was perfectly lawful," Scalia said. "It's unfair to the criminal? Is that the problem? I really don't understand the problem."
http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2011/01/supreme_court_looks_at_smell-based_home_searches_f.php#moreCan Police Can Kick Down Your Door If They Smell Pot? Some Justices Think So
Police... more
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It’s a messed-up message.
By refusing last week to legalize medical marijuana, the Illinois House said this: Drug dealers and gangs win. Taxpayers lose.
The response to a recent column about the legalization of pot has me more convinced than ever the time has come to end a costly, dangerous and ineffective prohibition.
But don’t take my word for it.
Maybe you can imagine my surprise when Iowa 7th District Senior Associate Judge Douglas McDonald, of Bettendorf, wrote to say he also hopes to see cases of pot possession “de-emphasized or legalized.”
McDonald is 75. He served on the bench from 1988 until his retirement in 2007. He continues to serve on a part-time basis. He has never tried marijuana.
“In Scott County, we do about 5,000 indictable misdemeanors a year, and 25 percent of those are marijuana possessions,” he began in an interview Friday. “(Most) cases have an arraignment, pretrial, motion hearings, judges, prosecutors, public defenders and police officers who have to take time off to come to court.
“Public defenders are paid $400 to $500 per case, and they may have 1,000 of them. And that’s just Scott County. This is my primary concern: It’s all needless.”
McDonald acknowledges he is neither a doctor nor a chemist, but his 19-plus years on the bench have opened his eyes to the realities of all kinds of drugs. Marijuana, in his estimation, “is no big deal.”
“I guess that’s not what a judge is supposed to say,” he added. “But, from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t cause people to do bad things. It doesn’t make them angry. Unless you work with it like I do, you wouldn’t know that.”
To be clear, the judge does not advocate pot smoking. He is, in fact, opposed to any form of smoking, because it is harmful.
“But I also know what alcohol does to people, and it’s pretty severe,” he said. “I don’t see marijuana itself hurting people. Cocaine does that. Methamphetamine does that. In my opinion and my experience, marijuana is not like that.”
The experiences and opinions of another courtroom regular are strikingly similar to that of the judge.
James Gierach is a former Cook County, Ill., prosecutor who serves on the board for a group called LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
He testified before the Iowa Board of Pharmacy last year, which voted unanimously to recommend the Iowa legislature legalize medical marijuana. He said the war on drugs was lost a long time ago and is only creating more crime.
“Pick a crisis: guns, gangs, prisons we can’t afford, health-care bills we can’t pay … yet
60 percent of the money made by Mexican drug cartels is coming from marijuana,” he said. “All you have to do is join a gang, get a gun, (because) we’ve put a pot of gold next to the thing we said people can’t have: drugs.”
The criminalization of pot has been especially good for gangs, he said, because that is where they make their money.
“All you need to go into the drug business is a pair of tennis shoes and a gun,” he said. “We corrupt the police just like we do the kids because of temptation.”
Illegal drugs not only put police in danger via enforcement attempts, Gierach said, but put officers in a position to make criminal decisions, too. Drug money that is confiscated in busts often cannot be precisely accounted for, he said, and thousands of dollars in drug money often are left in the hands of a cop’s conscience.
And then there are the jails.
“We have 2.3 million people in prison — the highest rate of incarceration in the world,” he said Friday. “In Cook County, more than half the inmates are nonviolent (no gun was used in the crime) drug offenders.
“The most unproductive thing you can do with a dollar is build a jail. We are hiring people to watch people who are doing nothing. Besides, you build a prison, and you don’t have the money to build a school.”
LEAP’s mantra is: Legalize, regulate, tax. Its members point out the end of alcohol prohibition put Al Capone and his thugs out of business. They no longer were killing cops and hiding millions.
Maybe all of that is too far from our backyard?
So consider the viewpoint of Jeff Terronez, Rock Island County state’s attorney.
He predicted the “feel-good” medical marijuana law would have created a slew of legal challenges. But that doesn’t mean minor pot possession should remain a crime.
“My suspicion is this: If the law passes, everyone who smokes marijuana is going to come up with a reason to use it,” he said of the medical marijuana measure that failed. “If they want to legalize marijuana, they should legalize it. My personal opinion: If the State of Illinois legalizes marijuana, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
The ones losing sleep, say Gierach and McDonald, are politicians who are too afraid to enter the fray.
“The most important thing to a legislator is his or her seat,” Gierach said.
McDonald told of a conversation he had with a former police officer-turned-Iowa-legislator, a Republican.
“He was sympathetic to what I was saying, and he agreed with the inefficiencies and needlessness of criminalization,” the judge recalled. “But his answer was, ‘Maybe you know of some Democrat you could talk to?’
“No one wants to appear soft on crime.”
Some people will read this column and, for a moment or two, agree the arguments for decriminalization make sense. But the myths, hysteria and propaganda are hard to shake.
In fact, they’re almost addicting.
http://qctimes.com/news/opinion/editorial/columnists/barb-ickes/article_99f843a6-1b9f-11e0-aaa5-001cc4c03286.htmlIt’s a messed-up message.
By refusing last week to legalize medical marijuana,... more
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source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100628/ap_on_he_me/eu_austria_aids_policy_reform
By VERONIKA OLEKSYN, Asociated Press Writer Veronika Oleksyn, Asociated Press Writer
VIENNA – Policies that criminalize drug users fuel the spread of AIDS and should be reformed, experts preparing for an international conference said Monday.
Instead, governments, international organizations and the U.N. should promote policies that include opiate substitution therapy and needle and syringe programs that have been shown to reduce HIV rates without increasing rates of drug use, said the experts from groups such as the International AIDS Society, the International Center for Science in Drug Policy and the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. They also want compulsory drug treatment centers to be scrapped, saying they are ineffective and violate human rights.
"The criminalization of illicit drug users is fueling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed," the experts said in a declaration issued ahead of an AIDS conference that gets under way in the Austrian capital on July 18.
Among other things, the declaration says there is no evidence that increasing the "ferocity" of law enforcement reduces the prevalence of drug use and claims that the number of countries in which people inject illegal drugs is growing.
"Many of us in AIDS research and care confront the devastating impacts of misguided drug policies every day," Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society and director of the BC Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said in a statement.
"As scientists, we are committed to raising our collective voice to promote evidence-based approaches to illicit drug policy that start by recognizing that addiction is a medical condition, not a crime," added Montaner, who will serve as chairman of the Vienna conference.
The declaration urges governments, international organizations and the United Nations to carry out a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies and to implement a science-based public health approach.
While legal barriers to needle programs and opiate substitution therapy mean hundreds of thousands of people become infected with HIV and hepatitis C every year, the criminalization of drug users has resulted in record incarceration rates, the experts said in joint statement.
They added that opiate substitution therapy, and needle and syringe programs, are cost-effective, help drug users access health care and have not been shown to have negative consequences.
"The current approach to drug policy is ineffective because it neglects proven and evidence-based interventions, while pouring a massive amount of public funds and human resources into expensive and futile enforcement measures," said Evan Wood, founder of the International Center for Science in Drug Policy.
"It's time to accept the war on drugs has failed and create drug policies that can meaningfully protect community health and safety using evidence, not ideology."
Wood appeared to be echoing a comment made by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske last month. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said that after 40 years the United States' $1 trillion war on drugs has not been successful.source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100628/ap_on_he_me/eu_austria_aids_policy_reform... more
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At a conference last weekend, researchers reported positive results on the effectiveness of MDMA in relieving PTSD and talked about psilocybin in reducing stress in late-stage cancer patients
SAN JOSE, California—Michael Bledsoe’s story begins like that of many other Iraqi war veterans. In 2007, he was chasing insurgents through Anbar province when a roadside bomb exploded, breaking Bledsoe’s back and both his feet. A former Army Ranger working as a securitycontractor, Bledsoe soon knew his high-paying military career was over.
Back home, Bledsoe (not his real name) felt angry almost constantly. Nightmares haunted him. He withdrew and became isolated. “It was a serious sense of loss,” he says. His psychiatrist quickly diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Despite months of talk therapy, the nightmares continued, and Bledsoe grew desperate. Then “something almost miraculous” happened, he says. An online search brought him to a unique study of the banned drug MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), well known as the street drug ecstasy.
Read full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/04/26/can-the-peace-drug-help-clean-up-the-war-mess/At a conference last weekend, researchers reported positive results on the... more
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by:Bill Piper
April 20th (4/20) has long been associated with marijuana, both marijuana use and marijuana activism. Thousands of Americans will gather on that day at rallies in Boston, Boulder, New York, Santa Cruz, Seattle and other cities. For people who prefer to relax with a joint instead of a beer or martini it's a time to celebrate. For those who don't use marijuana it's a time to stand up in support of their friends, family, and fellow citizens who face arrest for nothing more than what they put into their body. For the Drug Policy Alliance and the drug policy reform movement 4/20 represents something even bigger.
The movement to end marijuana prohibition is very broad, composed of people who love marijuana, people who hate marijuana, and people who don't have strong feelings about marijuana use one way or the other. We all agree on one thing though - marijuana prohibition is doing more harm than good. It's wasting taxpayer dollars and police resources, filling our jails and prisons with hundreds of thousands of nonviolent people, and increasing crime and violence in the same way alcohol Prohibition did. Police made more than 750,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2008 alone. Those arrested were separated from their loved ones, branded criminals, denied jobs, and in many cases prohibited from accessing student loans, public housing and other public assistance.
Fortunately, the tide is quickly turning against the war on marijuana. Legislators in California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Virginia are considering legislation to decriminalize or legalize marijuana. The Economist magazine noted that "marijuana could follow the path that alcohol took in the 1930s" out of prohibition into a regulated market. Celebrities are speaking out. The musician and activist Sting, for instance, recently urged people to oppose the entire war on drugs. In November Californians will vote on whether to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol; the measure is ahead in the polls. Local California papers like the Orange County Register and the Long Beach Press-Telegram have editorialized in favor of the initiative, seven months before the vote. Nationally, support for making marijuana legal is about 44 percent, with support increasing about two percent a year. A recent Gallup poll predicts a majority of Americans will favor marijuana legalization within just four years if current trends hold.
The war on marijuana won't end, however, if everyone who supports reform stays silent. Maybe you smoke marijuana and are tired of being considered a criminal. Maybe you work in law enforcement and are tired of ruining people's lives by arresting them. Maybe you're a teacher or public health advocate tired of politicians cutting money for education and health to pay for the construction of new jails and prisons Maybe you're a civil rights activist appalled by racial disparities in marijuana law enforcement. Or maybe you just don't want your tax dollars wasted on ineffective policies.
Regardless of your motivation, April 20th (4/20) is a good opportunity for you to make a pledge to end marijuana prohibition. The Drug Policy Alliance is asking people to use 4/20 as the time to commit to doing something in 2010 to end the war on people who use marijuana. There are many ways to help end marijuana prohibition. Donate to a drug policy reform organization. Tell your elected representatives to end marijuana prohibition. Talk to your friends and family about why people who use marijuana shouldn't be arrested. Twitter this oped. Change your Facebook status to announce your support for ending the war on marijuana. Stand up today with other Americans and get the word out there. This war will end; how soon depends, in part, on you.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/146412/don%27t_just_smoke_a_joint_on_4_20_--_take_action_against_marijuana_prohibitionby:Bill Piper
April 20th (4/20) has long been associated with marijuana, both... more
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James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT entities...
Hey Clifford, a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall. I have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years, and though I have not published the results of all my research I would like to share with you some of the conclusions I’ve made about DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.
In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it induce contact with autonomous elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid responses, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be “shocking,” it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.
Now don’t get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain’s perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this point I would like to offer the following observations:
Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/04/07/have-we-cracked-the-dmt-puzzle/James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT... more
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Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today–in prison or jail, on probation or parole–than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/21/1116/Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the... more
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COLUMBUS, OH—In an alarming trend that some are calling a failure of U.S. drug prevention policies, daily marijuana use increased nearly threefold this month among 26-year-old Gary.
Researchers at the Department of Health and Human Services are attributing the spike in cannabis consumption to a number of troubling factors, including Gary- related underemployment, decreased motivation, and prolonged exposure to Josh.
“This is very distressing, to say the least,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who blamed the increase on a lack of programs designed to educate Gary about the dangers of marijuana. “As a nation, it is vital that we learn how to talk to Gary about drugs—and how to listen to what he’s trying to tell us.”
Read the rest of this worrying report at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/18/marijuana-use-triples-among-gary/COLUMBUS, OH—In an alarming trend that some are calling a failure of U.S. drug... more
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Of all the factors on the table in the current Afghan strategic review, the war on drugs and its unintended consequences should be front and center. Our 95-year effort to create a Drug Free America by enforcing world-wide prohibition has twisted our foreign policy out of shape all over the globe and the nightmare in Afghanistan is just the latest manifestation.
It seems to be an open secret that President Karzai’s brother is a player in the heroin trade, and the whole administration in Kabul is said to be riddled with corruption. Unfortunately, the replacement of Karzai, even if that proved possible, would not change the fundamental dynamic. Nearly a tenth of the population relies on the illegal opium industry for their daily bread. Corruption will be the norm as long as the American people are willing to invest limitless resources manning an arbitrary barricade between the sellers and buyers.
Unfortunately narco-corruption, like narcotics themselves, can penetrate any border and there is growing evidence that this cancer has metastasized into every nook and cranny of the known world. Consider, for example, this headline from London: “Corrupt officers exist throughout the UK police service.”
Read the full article here http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/01/29/lets-eliminate-welfare-for-terrorists/Of all the factors on the table in the current Afghan strategic review, the war on... more
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A British charity is stepping up efforts to rehabilitate LSD, one of the world’s best-known “recreational” drugs, for medicinal use.
The Beckley Foundation, which numbers Professor Colin Blakemore, former head of the Medical Research Council, among its scientific advisers, is helping fund and lobby for a series of clinical trials to study the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide on the human brain.
Read the full article on how LSD can help treat a plethora of different ailments:
http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/16/lsd-for-the-nhs/A British charity is stepping up efforts to rehabilitate LSD, one of the world’s... more
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Bringing Back the Biker Speed-
Old school meth: Mexican cartels go back to basics -By DAVID W. KOOP, Associated Press Writer
MEXICO CITY – Mexican cartels are increasingly going "old school" to keep supplying America with methamphetamine despite an ingredient squeeze.
Some gangs have responded to a Mexican crackdown on their meth chemical of choice — pseudoephedrine — by reviving a production method so old, it was used by U.S. motorcycle gangs and bathtub chemists in the 1970s and '80s, recent seizures show.
The re-emergence of the "P2P method" demonstrates how frustrating it is to crack down on a synthetic drug that — unlike cocaine, heroin and marijuana — comes from recipes of chemical ingredients, known as "precursors," instead of a plant.
When police succeed in cutting off the supply of one precursor, traffickers move on to or make another.
"Chemical restrictions are like squeezing mud, the stuff just comes out between your fingers," said Steve Preisler, who wrote the "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture" under the nom de plume Uncle Fester and is considered the father of modern meth-making. "They make life difficult for the smurfers (home producers) but for people with connections, well, they find it to be no problem at all."
Still, authorities contend going after precursors has produced results. The crackdown contributed to a sharp decrease in meth production in Mexico and a drop in availability on U.S. streets in 2007 and in the first half of 2008, according to the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center's 2009 methamphetamine report.
And authorities say the P2P method is less desirable for the gangs because it reputedly produces a less-potent drug.
But using easy-to-get phenylacetic acid, as well as new sources of contraband pseudoephedrine, Mexico's meth gangs regrouped, and their output was stabilizing or increasing by late 2008, the drug center's assessment said.
The latest turn in the meth fight began in 2005, when Mexican officials started imposing progressively tighter restrictions on imports of the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine used in cartels' meth labs. A near-total ban on medicines containing pseudoephedrine went into effect last year.
Traffickers found ways to smuggle the banned chemical into Mexico, and they moved some manufacturing abroad. They also started looking into new ingredients.
They came across phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P. While P2P itself is highly restricted and closely monitored by authorities, there are many ways to make it. Gangs found they could get their hands on phenylacetic acid, which can be made into P2P, which in turn can be made into meth. They began acquiring phenylacetic acid and its derivatives in huge quantities.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091214/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_drug_war_mexico_retro_meth
http://static.blogo.it/twowheelsblog/sexy-bikers-gooichi-749-01/big_sexy_bikers_gooichi749_2009_02.jpgBringing Back the Biker Speed-
Old school meth: Mexican cartels go back to basics... more
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One of the most sensible arguments for a different approach the War on Drugs. Getting tough on drugs hasn't worked, lets get smart about drug policy.
From the article:
Three years before I became a Baltimore police officer in 1999, I started my research with the Amsterdam police. The Dutch approach toward drugs, by and large, works. Without declaring a war, authorities there have managed to lower addiction rates, limit use and save lives. The United States, by contrast, spends $50 billion a year on its war on drugs and leads the world in illegal drug use, with millions of Americans regularly using marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy.
Clearly, what we're doing doesn't work.
There is little violence surrounding the private drug trade between friends, coworkers and family members. The real drug problem, along with addictive heroin and crystal meth, is illegal public dealing. In public drug markets, signs of violence are everywhere: Intimidating groups of youths stand on corners under graffiti memorializing slain friends; addicts roam the streets and squat in vacant buildings; "decent" people stay inside when gunshots ring out in the night.
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In another neighborhood in Amsterdam, a man caught breaking into cars was released pending trial. The arresting officer returned to him, along with his shoelaces and personal property, his heroin and drug tools. I was amazed. The officer admitted he wasn't supposed to do that; heroin is illegal. But the officer had thought it through: "As soon as he runs out of his heroin, he'll break into another car to get money for his next hit."
For the addict, the problem was drugs. But for the police officer, the problem was crime. It made no sense, the officer told me, to take the drugs and hasten the addict's next crime. The addict was not a criminal when he had drugs (beyond possessing them); he was a criminal when he didn't have drugs.
I asked the officer if giving drugs to addicts sends the wrong message. He said his message was simple: "Stop breaking into cars!" With a subtle smirk in my direction, he added, "It is very strange that a country as violent as America is so obsessed with jailing drug addicts." Indeed, Dutch policymakers plan, regulate, fix and pragmatically debate harms and benefits. Police in the Netherlands are not involved in a drug war; they're too busy doing real police work.
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Without federal control, states, cities and counties would be free to bar or regulate drugs as they saw fit. Just as with alcohol and tobacco regulation, one size does not fit all; we would see local solutions to local problems.
Even without federal pressure, most states and cities would undoubtedly start by maintaining the status quo against drugs. That's fine. In these cases, police with or without federal assistance should focus on reducing violence by pushing the drug trade off the streets. An effort to shift the nature of the illegal trade is different than declaring a war on drugs.
Regulating and controlling distribution is far more effective at clearing the corners of drug dealers than any SWAT crackdown. One can easily imagine that in some cities -- San Francisco, Portland and Seattle come to mind -- alternatives to arrest and incarceration could be tried. They could learn from the experience of the Dutch, and we could all learn from their successes and failures.
Regulation is hard work, but it's not a war. And it sure beats herding junkies.
Peter Moskos is an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of "Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District."One of the most sensible arguments for a different approach the War on Drugs. Getting... more
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juicie
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2 years ago
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