Dayton Cops Concoct Weed Murder Mystery
July 1st, 2009 by Russ
Either the Dayton police have been up late staring at too many drug files, or they’re about to pitch a pilot of Unsolved Mysteries: Dayton Edition to their local network executives. It seems that the brass there would like to blame several recent area shootings on the assailant’s or victim’s possession of small amounts of weed.
According to baffled Lieutenant, Patrick Welsh:
The trend in several of the homicides and even non-fatal shootings is that they’re related to marijuana use and sales.
And the evidence for this? Apparently Dayton police found a man shot at a residence in which they had made a weed-related arrest three-months earlier. Let’s forget, for a moment, that the same residence was cited as an after hours alcohol distributor. This, combined with a few scattered cases of Dayton weed dealers being hit for either money or baggies prompted the Dayton Daily News columnist (of the story in question) to conclude:
Now, marijuana seems to be the dangerous drug.
Sherlock Holmes, this guy isn’t. Any Drug War newbie could tell you that the presence of the drugs in these cases are completely irrelevant, save for the fact that they’re worth money. And they’re worth so much money because of their illegality. Do you really think people would be shooting each other over this easily cultivated plant if anyone could grow it without fear of arrest or reprisal? Do people shoot each other over basil or tarragon? How many rosemary-related murders have we tallied this year?
Criminalization of plants is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you increase the value of an object and prohibit legal businesses from selling it, then you are literally handing a valuable monopoly over to the black market. That’s the market where business is settled with the business-end of a sawed-off shotgun. So, logically speaking, it was the police who were the cause of the very crimes that they were investigating. Elementary, my dear Watson.
U.S. Reverses Afghanistan Opium Policy
June 29th, 2009 by Rick
The U.S. has changed it’s policy when it comes to eradicating poppy fields in Afghanistan, that’s done nothing but put Afghani farmers out of work.
Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan said at the G8 conference in Trieste, Italy on Saturday:
The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work. [...] We are not going to support crop eradication. We’re going to phase it out.
The new plan, being all about bringing the fight to the drug lords and drug suppliers, seems more like an old plan, seeing how the drug lords in these regions are also the Taliban. The U.S. has been in that region fighting the Taliban since the invasion in 2001, yet according to the U.N., Afghanistan’s opium production has risen 40-fold.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the effort has been a “sad” joke and:
Sad because many, many Afghan policemen and soldiers … have been killed and only about 5,000 hectares were eradicated, about 3 percent of the volume.
The U.S. plans on reducing the budget it allocates for crop eradication in Afghanistan and spending several hundred million dollars on supporting legal crops.
Mexican Street Dealers Dying in Droves
June 29th, 2009 by Russ
The Modesto Bee told a heart-wrenching story last weekend of a young Tijuana meth dealer named Hector Rodriguez Estrada, who was killed in cold blood along with his pregnant girlfriend, by a rival gang attempting to seize his drug turf. The story gives a face to the deteriorating social system in many parts of Mexico, in which cities are morphing into nothing more than shooting galleries between rival cartels.
In impoverished areas where factory workers make $60 a week, selling meth on a corner can be a very attractive economic option. According to Rodriguez’s older brother, Samuel:
When you live by the sea, you look for fish.
In other words, for many people in the poorest nations of the world, drug production or distribution is not a moral or ethical issue. It’s a matter of survival. These people exist within a black market that provides massive financial incentives to participate. Without any regulation or government-imposed morality, there is also a huge incentive to kill off competitors. This is a completely free market economy. There are no longer any rules or norms.
Perhaps once cartels saw benefit in respecting rival turf and developing in areas without conflict. But an aggressive campaign by President Calderon, coupled with an influx of US military weapons and aid has created a virtual anarchy to replace a tenuous balance. Tijuana drug rivalries fueled 443 murders in the last three months of 2008. Gang members were left in dumpsters by the dozens with severed heads, limbs, and fingers.
Until this economic system is supplanted with another, the cycle of violence will continue. There will be many more Hector Rodriguez Estradas. And there will be just as many rivals willing to punch his ticket for a new drug corner to run. Madness begets madness.
Drug Czar Conforms to the War on Drugs
June 25th, 2009 by Rick
The UN 2009 World Drug Report was released and our very own Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, endorsed it within his own statement. Although decriminalizing the publicly supported recreational drugs is exactly what was done in certain cities in Europe, the U.S. Drug Czar failed to mention the word “decriminalization,” yet seemed to be in support of the ideas that led to the successful statistics of Portugal and Switzerland.
Basically, Kerlikowske wants to stop blindly throwing people in jail without really seeking to help them with their addiction. More money is planned to be spent on programs for juveniles and family courts. On top of this the U.S. vows to pump more money into bringing down the most hardcore drug traffickers throughout the world, ironically starting in countries that we’ve already had a heavy presence in, for decades.
The U.S. plans to reduce the amount of weapons the cartels obtain, put a dent in the drug profit and slow the flow of the chemicals needed to make some of these drugs. Over a billion dollars will be put into more research and studies that won’t be published unless it aids the negative antiquated psychobabble rhetoric accustomed with the war on drugs.
It seems that Kerlikowske had more of a free reign while in Seattle as Chief of Police, but now he seems to be doing the bidding of the Obama Administration which is business as usual, when it comes to the drug war.
Obama Budget Whiffs on Needle Exchange
June 10th, 2009 by Russ
To the chagrin of progressives everywhere, the Obama budget was released this week without any alteration to the 20-year old ban on funding needle-exchange programs.
According to White House Spin Meister Ben LaBolt:
We have not removed the ban in our budget proposal because we want to work with Congress and the American public to build support for this change.
The Obama White House is making an appeal here to higher minded politics by claiming to put the needle exchange debate on the floor of Congress instead of obscuring it in the murky land of Omnibus. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach:
Firstly, if Republicans have been waging political war through the budget for the better part of a decade, Dems are ceding a great deal of ground by refusing to go back and revise it. A budget provision to ban needle exchange funding is inherently political, in itself. We’re not talking about a grey area where funding can vary administration to administration. This is a prohibition on federal support for all time until the ban is lifted.
Secondly, wasn’t the Obama budget already hailed as a political statement? Obama’s first address to Congress repeatedly stressed the budget’s importance in setting a new national agenda. Health care, renewable energy, and education funding were hammered into the budget as a direct statement of purpose by the new administration. Therefore, we can only assume that Obama is selectively choosing what budget items to play politics with and what not to. This is exactly what Bill Clinton did on this issue in 1998, when a lifting of the needle exchange ban became a victim of political negotiations and remained intact.
The new dialogue on drugs in this country (as embodied by Obama and Kerlikowski) is supposed to dispose of the crusader’s ‘moral’ approach to the problem. In point of fact, there is no moral approach to the problem. What people choose to put in their own bodies is not a moral issue, it’s a public health issue. And public health officials have been crystal clear on the benefits to having these clean needle programs.
The premise of this program is mind numbingly simple. Needle exchange reduces the spread of HIV, and thereby reduces suffering and death. No one on either side of the political aisle disputes this. Any stance that opposes needle exchange, therefore, fosters an increase in HIV and deaths. If that’s the moral approach to the issue, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
Mexico’s Drug Crusade Plagues Citizens
May 22nd, 2009 by Russ
Over the last few months, stories of the debilitating drug violence in Mexico have become commonplace in the US media. While the murders of civilians and law enforcement officers continue to climb, other casualties of this escalation are going unnoticed. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor, the government’s assault on Mexican cartels has vastly increased the availability of drugs in the country.
As major cartels are targeted by Mexican law enforcement, they have begun to fragment, causing more competition among a greater pool of lower-level dealers. When the cartel hierarchies break down, the additional competition for sales not only increases the purity of the product (be it cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines), but also considerably decreases the price. At current rates, a gram of cocaine can be had for as little as $11, a price that is one-third that of a few decades ago.
This flooding of the market has created an entire new generation of addicts. Over the last six years, Mexico has suffered a 50% rise in addiction, towards a number approaching half a million.
Short of creating a completely facist, totalitatiran state (something well beyond the abilities of Mexican authorities) there seems to be absolutely no violence-based solution to the drug problem. In the meantime, Mexico is being laid to waste by its denial of the immutable, uncompromising laws of the drug trade.
Cop Reveals Ugly Truths of Drug War
May 21st, 2009 by Russ
Academics and left-wing activists are well known for their opposition to the war on drugs. It’s less often that one hears the criticism straight from the horse’s mouth. In an interview for Allison Kilkenny’s blog, a former detective lieutenant and narcotics officer offered up some first hand evidence that the war on drugs is little more than a police-orchestrated charade.
The detective, Jack Cole, is now a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.) A 26-year veteran of the New Jersey state police, Cole was well-acquainted with the discrepancy between department objectives and the reality on the ground:
We nor our bosses had any idea of how to fight a war on drugs. Our bosses did know one thing though; they knew how to keep that federal cash-cow being milked in their personal barnyard. To accomplish that they had to make the drug war appear to be an absolute necessity. So early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our statistics and lie we did.
And so the department inflated arrest statistics, seizure statistics, and any other metrics that would make them look successful:
We exaggerated the amount of drugs we seized by adding the weight of any cutting agents we found (lactose, mannitol, starch, or sucrose) to the weight of the illegal drug. So we might seize one ounce of cocaine and four pounds of lactose.
And as the lie steamrolled onward, the department funding poured in. Soon, “cooking” the stats was a mere formality and part of everyday policework. And, as they tend to do, the lie spiraled out of control.
In Cole’s words:
The War On Drugs gives the racists an easy hook to hurt people they don’t like. And they do.
The need for stats bred racial profiling, destroyed minority communities, and locked up hundreds of thousands of non-malicious, non-violent youths.
David Simon in Real Time on Real Time
May 19th, 2009 by RussLast week, Bill Mahr’s HBO series, Real Time, featured drug policy guru and tv production savant, David Simon. Having created The Wire, one of the most nuanced and insightful television series ever, Simon has ascended to the rank of soothsayer amongst progressive political talking heads.
Too weighty to be a simple panelist, Simon was invited onto the show in a specially dedicated interview segment to discuss his take on Obama’s drug policies, amongst other things. One striking point made by Simon, was his avocation for jury nullification. Jury nullification is a mostly archaic court occurrence whereby the jury decides to acquit a defendant regardless of the evidence held against him. Simon argued that all juries should use this practice to protest the overzealous prosecution of non-violent drug crimes.
Just another instance of Simon’s forward thinking in the land of no creativity. If the legislators, magistrates, and attorneys won’t act, the people certainly should.
