Drug War // Current TV

DEA "investigating" state legislators in Montana who wrote medical marijuana law

This is spooky. The DEA is apparently "investigating" state legislators in... more

HarukoHaruhara
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4 months ago
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44 comments

Afghan opium profits up 133% according to UN

12 January 2012 Last updated at 19:49 ET Help In a new survey, the UN Office on... more

rodstradamus
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5 months ago
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20 comments

What Some Black People Think About Ron Paul

YouTube mashup of what some black people really think of Ron Paul instead of how many... more

rodstradamus
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5 months ago
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1 comment

NYPD SETS OUT TO PROVE DRUG LAWS APPLY TO EVERYONE, BUT PROVES THEY JUST APPLY TO POOR PEOPLE

One year ago the NYPD carried out "Operation Ivy League", arresting some... more

TheFederalGovt
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5 months ago
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2 comments

The real reason why the media establishment attacks Ron Paul over 'racism'

It's fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep.... more

maasanova
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5 months ago
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Joe Rogan & Duncan Trussell on the National Defense Authorization Act

rodstradamus
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5 months ago
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MAPS (suing DEA for Medical Cannabis Rights) Receives Pro-Bono Representation to Appeal Craker Case in First Circuit Court of Appeals

MAPS has received a generous offer for pro-bono legal representation from the... more

Tyrannous
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6 months ago
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Does cheap cocaine make us safer?

INCENTIVES matter, as economists and other behavioural scientists have been trying to drive into our heads for decades now, and Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones has a great piece at the Atlantic's Cities blog amassing the evidence that the remarkable drop in crime rates in America since the mid-1990s is largely due to the plummeting price of cocaine. This makes profit rates for coke dealers insufficient to warrant violent efforts to control territory.

Once the margin of profit for dealing small amounts of crack cocaine disappeared, being part of the drug trade was no longer worth the persistent threat of violence or the stiff criminal penalties. A 70 percent drop in cocaine prices like the one that occurred in the mid 1990s combined with competition from decentralized sources for methamphetamines and prescription narcotics would completely eliminate the minimum wage drug dealer as a viable profession.

The low price of methamphetamines, which have taken off in popularity since the early 90s, makes it similarly unappealing to wage violent turf wars over crystal-meth distribution. (That thud you just heard was my disbelief in the plot line of "Breaking Bad" crashing out of suspension.) But I'm still left wondering about the narrow focus on cocaine here. After all, crime rates were pretty high already in the late 1970s before the crack cocaine wave took off. The big surge in contemporary (post-Depression) crime rates in America came in the early 1960s to the mid-1970s (see charts).

Maybe it's just my folk understanding of cultural history, but it seems implausible that the run-up from 1963 to 1974 was due to cocaine. Heroin, maybe? But the central point being made here isn't so much whether cocaine, or drugs in general, were exclusively responsible for the run-up and subsequent decline in violent crime; it is that the role played by cocaine prices in causing crime may be the reverse of what the criminal-justice system has assumed.

As Mr Hinkes-Jones writes, "one of the DEA's stated objectives for the War on Drugs was to make drugs more expensive and therefore harder to access for the individual user." It has clearly failed at that task, and if Mr Hinkes-Jones is right, that's a good thing.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/crime-and-drugsINCENTIVES matter, as economists and other behavioural scientists have been trying to... more

ampersand
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6 months ago
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Pentagon’s War on Drugs Goes Mercenary

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly... more

Anonmaly
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6 months ago
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Comment: Reefer madness in a final frenzy

As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies written about cannabis in the British press.

By Peter Reynolds

In the mid 1930s, after the end of alcohol prohibition, Harry Anslinger, former assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Prohibition, was settling into his exciting new job as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and working on his next campaign.

"This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with negroes, entertainers and any others," he wrote in one of Randolph Hearst's newspapers. Hearst was behind the organised campaign against cannabis hemp, then one of America's most successful crops, by timber, oil and paper interests. The strategy was to slur the plant with the racist term "marijuana", demonise it, outlaw it and wipe it out.

Come forward about 80 years to the present day. In the US there is the White House drugs czar Gil Kerlikowske and the head of the DEA, Michelle Leonhart. In Britain we have James Brokenshire, the Home Office minister. These people are faithful in style and message to their role model Anslinger. They use arguments and propaganda of exactly the same type and value but adjusted to politically correct 2011 terms. Their weapon is deceit and their strategy is intransigence. The prejudice, discrimination and media scaremongering continues. As Anslinger had Randolph Hearst's media empire, so Brokenshire has the Daily Mail.
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The Mail came out all guns blazing last week in response to the Global Initiative on Drug Policy Reform and the ex-head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, calling for legal regulation. Despite the furious propaganda war it has waged against cannabis and cannabis users the issue won't go away. Why? Because millions of British citizens regularly use and enjoy cannabis with no ill effects and many find it of enormous therapeutic benefit for conditions such as chronic pain, MS and Crohn's disease. Also, because this war on cannabis is just another war on people. It is futile, expensive and causes far more harm than it prevents. It has created the modern phenomenon of rented property being destroyed, electricity being stolen with human trafficked gardeners and intensive production of high potency cannabis.

(much more at link)As the Leveson Inquiry looks at media standards, we should investigate the lies... more

Vierotchka
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6 months ago
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Mexican Terrorists Behead Anonymous Blogger For Informing On Social Networks

America has to attack Iran over imaginary nuclear weapons program, but terrorists are... more

maasanova
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7 months ago
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40 comments

Anonymous Takes on Mexican Drug Cartel

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release... more

JRBarilla
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7 months ago
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1 comment

We Fabricated Drug Charges Against Innocent People To Meet Arrest Quotas, Former Detective Testifies.

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was... more

Vic_Romano
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8 months ago
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24 comments

Debate: Legalize marijuana? And a look at demand side policies in the U.S. war on drugs

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/07/debate-legalize-marijuana-and-a-look... more

Avior
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9 months ago
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3 comments

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
(See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100.)

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html#ixzz1WcNUeNJUPop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not... more

Jennifer_Guinn
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9 months ago
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23 comments

Doubling Down in the Drug War

Why can’t the U.S. government ever learn lessons from any of its failed... more

wbradleyjr1
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9 months ago
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1 comment

The 5 Worst States To Get Busted With Pot

Source: AlterNet (US Web) Copyright: 2011 Independent Media Institute Website:... more

simplecj
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1 year ago
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22 comments

Mexico’s drug war inspires Gandhian-style protest

– Thousands marched to protest a proposed national security law, but drug war... more

joeeddy
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10 months ago
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5 comments

Was the CIA behind Operation Fast and Furious?

Why did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let criminals... more

maasanova
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10 months ago
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0 comments

Up in Smoke 300 acres of pot. R.I.P.

Soldiers in Mexico are preparing to set fire to the largest marijuana plantation ever... more

joeeddy
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11 months ago
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37 comments

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