Crime // Current TV

There are currently an estimated 23.2 million people in the United States, age 12 or older, in need of treatment for alcohol or illicit drug abuse (Levinthal 2010). This is a far cry from the “Drug Free America” we were promised by politicians and policy makers when the near forty-year-old War on Drugs began in the United States. In 1972, one year into the current policy of drug prohibition, the federal allocation of drug money present in the country was $101 million and in the year 2000 that number was reported to be around $20 billion (Booth, 2007). Along with the fact that the amount of illicit drugs in the country has continually grown during the War on Drugs, illicit drugs have grown stronger and more potent than ever before as black market manufacturers and dealers compete to have the best product on the streets (Booth, 2007). Such facts are a clear indication that the current drug enforcement policies in the U.S. are failing to accomplish what officials have stated as their goals.

For most of the duration of the War on Drugs, there has been an assumed presupposition that law enforcement focuses on the dealers and sellers of illicit drugs but the numbers do not add up. “Of the 1,841,182 arrests for drug law violations in 2007, 82.5% (1,518,975) were for possession of a controlled substance. Only 17.5% (322,207) were for the sale or manufacture of a drug.” (McVay, 2008) At the same time, most federal drug laws prohibit any chance for probation or parole. Demographically, most people incarcerated for drug possession or “intent to sell” illicit substances are of minority races and from the low-income bracket of the socioeconomic scale (Levine, 2003). When the private prison industry costs taxpayers $50 billion annually and the majority of their inmates are nonviolent drug offenders, it raises a few eyebrows to say the least. At the same time, you have the tobacco and alcohol industries hypocritically as the largest contributors to the Partners for a Drug Free America campaign (Booth, 2007). In the 2007 documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope, CIA Clandestine Officer Robert Steele may have surmised it all best when he stated:

"The drug war is a perfect continuing example of why we will never win the war on terrorism because it captures the ineffectiveness of U.S. government and it captures the fact that it's being used against poor people and not against the people who benefit most from drugs, which are bankers that launder the money." (Booth, 2007)

The backlash against the War on Drugs has consistently escalated over the past two decades and the movement has mainly focused on supporting the decriminalization or legalization of marijuana. Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in not just the United States, but the entire world (Levinthal 2010). This November, the State of California will vote on whether or not to legalize marijuana at the state level and tax it. The recent economic atmosphere has certainly lit a fire under the marijuana reform movement as states look for ways to recover from the current recession. Now that marijuana reform has hit the mainstream debates, the spotlight has expanded to encompass the entire War on Drugs itself. More and more political and social leaders are speaking out against the current drug policies in the United States each week in both the mainstream and alternative media. The proceeding reviews of literature will address the social, political, and economic dilemmas of the current War on Drugs and envision avenues for which the United States may turn down in order to end it while revamping our social values, norms, and policies in regard to drug use for the betterment of the entire nation as a whole. The economics of the War on Drugs is a hot topic currently and thus the starting point for the following research.

In a 1993 article titled Drug Prohibition: A Legal and Economic Analysis, Walter Block supports the legalization of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin with his argument based in economic and legal analysis. His economic argument is based on pure, capitalistic free market values and ideology as he states there is, “nothing in the tenets of value free economics that would preclude the legalization of drugs.” (Block 1993) Block goes on to discuss basic fundamentals of free market economics, asserting that it bases itself on the premise that no trade occurs unless both parties assume they will both benefit and that there will always be third parties, uninvolved in the trade, who are distressed “when consenting adults engage in voluntary capitalist acts.” (Block 1993) With this, he denounces the argument against drug legalization that claims it would lead to an increase in economic welfare since in all instances of free market trade the economic welfare of all participants is enhanced and that third parties not liking the sale of drugs occurring does not equate to a violation of the third party’s rights as would a trade that resulted in the third party’s murder, for example. Legally, Block refers to Libertarian legal code and argues that each person’s body is their own property and they should be free to put whatever they wish into it. He likens prohibition to slavery on the premise that restrictions are made on our own personal bodies (Block 1993).

The analysis by Block brings to light a daunting contradiction in the current political atmosphere in regard to drug prohibition... Continued at: http://scopicthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/03/end-failed-war-call-to-end-war-on-drugs.html

There is an inevitable time ahead where the federal government will have no choice but to admit their failure and respond accordingly. How they should respond is debatable, but significant amounts of research time, gathered evidence, and living, breathing examples to model new policy initiatives after do exist. A complete overhaul of our society’s perception of drug use, drug users, and our goals for dealing with the negative aspects of drug use in society with helping in mind rather than punishment is severely needed. The American people can no longer tolerate this war on them by their own government economically, socially, and psychologically. Academic study and analysis, as evident in the aforementioned articles, has destroyed the antiquated knowledge base upon which the current policy of prohibition is built. It is time for a new way.There are currently an estimated 23.2 million people in the United States, age 12 or... more

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Soccer Match Prompts Racist Mall Riot in Jerusalem

Imagine the media coverage in the Western world if hundreds of Muslims attacked a mall... more

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Ironies in American justice and political cheerleading

(1) A reader reminded me of this yesterday and it’s really quite something: in... more

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Sarkozy's Backers To Use Toulouse Attacks To Steal French Election

Believe it or not, at one point last year with Obama's bombing of Libya, France had more wars going on than the US!

***

The Crisis

A little over a week ago, on the 11th March, a French off-duty soldier was shot dead by an unknown gunman wearing a helmet in a suburb of Toulouse. The gunman escaped on a Yamaha T-Max scooter.

Then on the 15th of March, the same gunman shot dead two soldiers and wounded a third outside their barracks in Montauban (30 mins north of Toulouse). Again, he escaped on a scooter.

Then on the 19th March, the same gunman arrived at a Jewish primary and secondary school in Toulouse at 8am and shot dead a Rabbi teacher, his two young sons and a four-year-old girl, the school principal's daughter. All were shot in the head at point blank range. The young girl with a .45 caliber hand gun. He again escaped on a scooter. French security services have definitively linked the shootings and concluded that the same person was responsible for all three.

The killer's choice of targets were intended to maximise outrage. Witnesses of the broad-daylight shooting in Montauban saw him calmly reload his weapon and shoot one of the unarmed soldiers from point blank range as he tried to crawl away. Clearly, the gunman had professional training.

French President Sarkozy's 2012 re-election bid has been faltering almost since he was 'elected' in 2007.

Long viewed by a majority of the French public as a latter-day Napoleon wannabe, some were perplexed as to how he won the 2007 presidential race, given that one year before the election, opinion polls placed him a definite second, and between then and the election he did nothing to justify his alleged increase in popularity, with his 'Bling Bling' approach to electioneering turning the stomachs of many French people.

In addition, within a few months of his 'victory' in May 2007, Sarkozy's popularity had plummeted to around 30% as people reacted to his austere economic reforms, on which he had openly campaigned, mind you. How to explain such a sudden turnaround so soon after his victory?Believe it or not, at one point last year with Obama's bombing of Libya, France... more

maasanova
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Women In Italy Lead Fight Against the Mafia

Italy held a grim spring rite this week. On March 21, the country observed its... more

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TWO INJURED IN SHOOTINGS

What would you do if you came home and your family was being held hostage by a man... more

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Toulouse Shootings: All the Hallmarks False Flag Terror Attack

First the shooting suspect was supposed to be an ex-military with "neo-Nazi" conections then all of the sudden the media started calling him a Muslim with links to Al Qaeda.

Mohammed Merah, the suspect in the killing of seven people outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, fits the pattern of an al-Qaeda intelligence asset. According to the BBC, he was on the radar of French authorities because of visits he made to Afghanistan and the "militant stronghold" of Waziristan in Pakistan (edit and Jordan, India and Israel).

More specifically, Merah was handled by France's DCRI intelligence service "for years," according to Claude Gueant, the interior minister.

Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, was arrested on December 19, 2007, and was sentenced to three years in jail for planting bombs in the southern province of Kandahar in Afghanistan.
In April of 2011, the United States admitted it has operated secret military prisons in Afghanistan where suspected terrorists are held and interrogated without charges.

The notorious Bagram airbase detention center is operated by the Joint Special Operations Command and the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC).

The DCHC "will be responsible for developing an 'offensive counterintelligence operations'... capability for the Department of Defense, which may entail efforts to penetrate, deceive and disable foreign intelligence activities directed against U.S. forces," Secrecy News reported in 2008 after the government announced the creation of DCHC.

The Pentagon and the CIA specialize in creating terrorists as part of a so-called covert and unconventional war doctrine dating back to the end of the Second World War (see Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 for an in-depth examination).

Although virtually ignored by the corporate media, it is an established fact that the CIA and Pakistani intelligence created what is now known as al-Qaeda out of the remnants of the Afghan mujahideen following the CIA's covert three billion dollar war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

It was the so-called Safari Club - organized under the CIA and with the participation of intelligence agencies in France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and (under the Shah) Iran - that ramped up the largely contrived threat of international terrorism prior to and during the CIA's manufactured war in Afghanistan (see Peter Dale Scott, Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia).

Intelligence agencies have specialized in the covert - and not so covert - creation of terrorists which are then used to provide a cynical raison d'être for launching military intervention around the world and also providing a pretext to build and expand a domestic surveillance police state.

A textbook example of this process is the Christmas Day, 2009, underwear bomber fiasco - subsequently exposed as a false flag event - that was exploited to push for installing dangerous radiation-emitting naked body porno scanners at U.S. airports.First the shooting suspect was supposed to be an ex-military with "neo-Nazi"... more

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Randi Savage gets 5 years in prison for sex with 13yo boy

http://femalesexoffenders.com/fso/index.php/the-news/530-randi-savage-gets-5-years-in-p... more

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Illinois woman accused of sex abuse of the son of the family she was living with

Maria Beoletto, 32-year-old woman from Pekin, Illinois is facing one count of... more

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Diboll woman pleads guilty to sex with 13-year-old boy

Natalie Deshan Johnson, 33-year-old woman from Angelina County, Texas, has pleaded... more

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