A U. N. Special Session Will Examine the Effects of the Hard- Line Approach and Will Study Alternatives. At what is being billed as the most significant high-level gathering on global drug policy in two decades, the stage will be set for world leaders to discuss what would have once been unthinkable - reversing course in the war on drugs. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, which begins Tuesday in New York, will bring together government, human rights and health leaders to discuss whether the hard-line tactics of combating drug trafficking and money laundering have failed. [continues 800 words]
Nick Clegg has accused the home secretary, Theresa May, of attempting to delete sentences from a Whitehall report after it concluded that there was no link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use. The former deputy prime minister also said senior Conservatives, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, have failed to act on drug reform because they see the issue as a "naughty recreational secret" at Notting Hill dinner parties instead of a public health crisis. In an interview with the Guardian before a major UN conference on the global drug problem, Clegg said the Tories were failing to listen to warnings that the war on drugs had failed. [continues 638 words]
HOW on earth did I end up on friendly terms with Howard Marks, the drug smuggler and pro-cannabis propagandist who died last week? Yet I did. You might think we would loathe each other. He stood for almost everything I am against. But not quite. He was a fierce and instinctive defender of free speech, a rare and precious quality. I learned this one long-ago evening in Blackpool, when a squawking rabble of ignorant, intolerant students succeeded in having me driven off the stage at a debate. [continues 519 words]
The president of Colombia will this week present a plan for the complete and radical overhaul of global policy towards drug trafficking and organised crime at a special session of the United Nations general assembly. Unveiling his proposals in the Observer today, Juan Manuel Santos said urgent measures were needed to bring about "a more effective, lasting and human solution" to the misery and crisis of narco-traffic. The most sensational element in Santos's presentation is the announcement that his government will - as a result of a four-year peace process soon to bear fruit as a peace treaty be implementing its own domestic struggle against narco-traffic alongside its bitter enemies, the Marxist guerillas of Farc. The group admits to having funded its war by what it calls "taxation" of narco-profits. [continues 355 words]
Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, argues that his country's narco-related violent history illustrates exactly why a global rethink on prohibition should be the key discussion at this week's UN general assembly special session on drugs How does one explain to a Colombian peasant in a rural community in the south-west of the country that he will be prosecuted under criminal charges for growing marijuana plants, while a young entrepreneur in Colorado finds his or her legal recreational marijuana business booming? [continues 1116 words]
Colombia's president, Juan Manuel Santos, arrives in New York this week with a clear message to the UN general assembly special session on drugs: the failure of the "war on drugs" to deal with the human cost of narco traffic and drug abuse. Santos's message will be: the whole policy needs to be rethought, with a different set of priorities. President Santos first called for an overhaul in policy towards drugs in an interview with this newspaper in 2011, urging that "a new approach should try and take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking". He has continued to drive that conversation forward with the moral authority bestowed by leading a country that was nearly destroyed by the violence and corrupting influence of cartel money on the police, judiciary and the body politic. It was close to a failed state in the late 90s and it was drugs that did that damage. [continues 194 words]
NEW YORK - Howard Marks, an Oxford-educated drug trafficker who at his peak in the 1970s controlled a substantial fraction of the world's hashish and marijuana trade, and who became a best-selling author after his release from a US prison, died Sunday. He was 70. His death, from colorectal cancer, which he disclosed last year, was confirmed by Robin Harvie, publisher for nonfiction at Pan Macmillan, which released Mr. Marks's final book, "Mr. Smiley: My Last Pill and Testament," in September. No other details were provided. [continues 719 words]
Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs - and up to now, they've always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is "drug-free." They've consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly by the United States, which require every country to arrest and imprison their way out of drug-related problems. But at this year's meeting in New York City later this month, several countries are going to declare: This approach has been a disaster. We can't do this anymore. Enough. [continues 549 words]
Kingpin's Plea With U.S. Triggered Years of Bloodshed Reaching All the Way to Southlake Zetas Saw Gulf Cartel Leader As Traitor, Declared a War That Has Killed Thousands of People A plea agreement between a Mexican drug kingpin and the U.S. government helped generate a violent split between two drug cartels that led to the deaths of thousands of people in Mexico and along the Texas border, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found. A masked gunman fired multiple times at Juan Jesus Guerrero Chapa with a 9 mm handgun through the passenger window of his Range Rover at Southlake Town Square in May 2013. Three Mexican citizens were arrested more than a year later and charged with stalking, and aiding and abetting in the hit. [continues 4074 words]
Howard Marks, an Oxford-educated drug trafficker who at his peak in the 1970s controlled a substantial fraction of the world's hashish and marijuana trade, and who became a best-selling author after his release from an American prison, died on Sunday. He was 70. His death, from colorectal cancer, which he disclosed last year, was confirmed by Robin Harvie, publisher for nonfiction at Pan Macmillan, which released Mr. Marks's final book, "Mr. Smiley: My Last Pill and Testament," in September. No other details were provided. [continues 735 words]
The Decades-Old Consensus Built on Punishment Is Crumbling. Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs - and up to now, they've always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is "drug-free." They've consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly by the United States, which require every country to arrest and imprison their way out of drug-related problems. [continues 1127 words]
Jamie Doward's admirable special report rightly stressed the importance of the UN general assembly special session on drugs (Ungass) to be held in New York later this month.("Is the prohibition era finally coming to an end?", News, last week). As Doward makes clear, the international drugs trade is an ongoing problem that affects all countries but reaches crisis level in producer and transit countries. It is to a very large degree the product of the well intentioned but misguided UN conventions that imposed drugs prohibition on all countries without regard for their cultures or traditions. [continues 185 words]
With Peace at Hand, Coca Farmers and Traffickers Consider Their Futures If Their Cash Crop Is Eradicated LA GABARRA, Colombia - Daniel Duarte has thick, rough hands and the burned scalp of someone who has spent more than two decades under the sun tending coca crops. Toiling over a few acres in a remote northeastern part of Colombia, Duarte says the bright green shrub is the only plant that has allowed him to feed his family, even as neighbors go broke trying to get their bulky yucca and plantain crops to market. [continues 1073 words]
The year 2008 was momentous. Lehman Brothers collapsed, Radovan Karad i was arrested, Russian troops massed on the Georgian border, and Barack Obama beat John McCain to the White House. But 2008 was also significant for something that didn't happen. It was the year that the world didn't eliminate the illicit drugs problem. This quixotic goal had been set a decade earlier at a United Nations general assembly special session when, under the vainglorious slogan "We can do it", the supranational body pledged that, by 2008, the world would be "drug free". [continues 2177 words]
How to Win the War on Drugs In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco's anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman's boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first "war on drugs" and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. [continues 6943 words]
In the mountains of Pondoland in the Eastern Cape, 'intsangu' is green gold: the key to the rural poor's economic survival. Why then, despite global progress towards decriminalising cannabis, are police spraying crops with poison from helicopters? Niren Tolsi investigates. THE mountains meet the Indian Ocean on the Wild Coast. At Ebulawu, south of Port St Johns, green-topped peaks undulate up towards sheer drops into the blue maelstrom below, where waves crash against cliffs of white, grey and red. [continues 2891 words]
Outdated drug policies around the world have resulted in soaring drug-related violence, overstretched criminal justice systems, runaway corruption and mangled democratic institutions. After reviewing the evidence, consulting drug policy experts and examining our own failures on this front while in office, we came to an unavoidable conclusion: The "war on drugs" is an unmitigated disaster. FOR NEARLY a decade, we have urged governments and international bodies to promote a more humane, informed and effective approach to dealing with "illegal" drugs. [continues 656 words]
Outdated drug policies around the world have resulted in soaring drug- related violence, overstretched criminal justice systems, runaway corruption and mangled democratic institutions. After reviewing the evidence, consulting drug policy experts and examining our own failures on this front while in office, we came to an unavoidable conclusion: The "war on drugs" is an unmitigated disaster. For nearly a decade, we have urged governments and international bodies to promote a more humane, informed and effective approach to dealing with "illegal" drugs. We saw a major breakthrough a few years ago, when the United Nations agreed to convene a special session of the General Assembly to review global drug policy. It is scheduled to begin April 19. [continues 621 words]
The Monstrous Cartels That Run the Narcotics Business Face the Same Dilemmas As Ordinary Firms - and Have the Same Weaknesses In April, the world's governments will meet in New York for a special assembly at the United Nations to discuss how to solve the drug problem. Don't hold your breath: Since the previous such gathering nearly two decades ago, the narcotics industry has done better than ever. The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren't any closer to finding a way to stamp them out. This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms - and have the same weaknesses.In El Salvador, the leader of one of the country's two big gangs complained to me about the human-resources problems he faced given the high turnover of his employees. (Ironically, his main sources of recruitment were the very prisons that were supposed to reform young offenders.) In Mexican villages, drug cartels provide basic public services and even build churches - a cynical version of the "corporate social responsibility" that ordinary companies use to clean up their images. Mexico's Zetas cartel expanded rapidly by co-opting local gangsters and taking a cut of their earnings; it now franchises its brand rather like McDonald's and faces similar squabbles from franchisees over territorial encroachment. Meanwhile, in richer countries, street-corner dealers are being beaten on price and quality by "dark web" sites, much as ordinary shops are being undercut by Amazon. [continues 815 words]
The Feb. 15 editorial "Success in Colombia" focused almost entirely on counterinsurgency success against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and thus was another sad example of willful amnesia about U.S. drug control policy impacts abroad. Ignored by the editorial were the equally important counternarcotics goals and impacts of Plan Colombia. After 15 years and almost $10 billion in U.S. aid, the question needs to be asked if U.S. taxpayers received their money's worth from this investment in the largest drug control program in the annals of the war on drugs in the Western Hemisphere. Today, Colombian cocaine production is increasing. Moreover, Colombia is a major source of heroin in the United States' national epidemic, with Maryland a sad case in point. [continues 88 words]
In Colombia, Peace Deal With the FARC in Sight But Herbicide-Resistant Coca Production on Rise 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. [continues 1427 words]
The United Nations is aiming to set a new macro policy on recreational drugs worldwide, starting today. It has taken almost a generation even to get to this point, which is the token beginning of a UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs. There are strong feelings emerging that the UN itself might even take a stand leaning towards legalisation of such drugs. A kickoff meeting this evening in New York will hear testimony, mostly from the pro-enforcement side. This is, essentially, Thailand's time to stand up for this country's policies on illegal drugs - or to call for changes. It is certain that after today's "interactive panel discussions" on the subject that a handful of Latin American countries and most of the 279 NGOs registered to attend will be lobbying hard on the legalisation side. Thailand and Thais are not prepared to go that far. Yet changes must be made. [continues 429 words]
Billionaire warlords, who started as small-time weed smugglers, have swathes of Latin America under their bloody rule, and the chaos is creeping north. But, says IOAN GRILLO, they owe their power to white-collar crooks from the States, who first set up their deadly networks A chain of crime wars is currently strangling Latin America and the Caribbean, drenching it in blood. And the first link in the chain is found in the US. Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble bookshop in a mall in El Paso, Texas. [continues 2430 words]
Nick Clegg and Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka Set Out Their Vision Before a Forthcoming UN Summit Standing on the podium at the United Nations in New York in June 1998, Kofi Annan declared: "It is time for all nations to say 'yes' to the challenge of working towards a drug-free world!" The leaders assembled at that meeting agreed: illegal drugs were to be eradicated from the face of the planet. They even set a deadline: 10 years to rid the globe of this scourge. A drug-free world by 2008. [continues 979 words]
A massive drug empire spanning North and South America that delivered untold tons of heroin and cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. over two decades via sophisticated cross-border tunnels, private 747s and submarines. Intimidation, bribery and murder in two countries. And, finally, the recapture of the world's most infamous drug lord, in part due to a visit by a pair of celebrities - and a big order of tacos delivered to his hide-out. With allegations like these, what federal prosecutor in the U.S. wouldn't want to be the first to try Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman when Mexican authorities extradite him to this country? The seven jurisdictions that have filed indictments against him and other alleged leaders and associates of the Sinaloa cartel had begun competing to get the first shot at him even before Guzman's second prison break in July. [continues 623 words]
Mexico City - ON the morning of Jan. 2, a team of hired killers set off for the home of 33-year-old Gisela Mota, who only hours before had been sworn in as the first female mayor of Temixco, a sleepy spa town an hour from Mexico City. Ms. Mota was still in her pajamas as the men approached her parents' breezeblock house. She was in the bedroom, but most of her family was in the front room, cooing over a newborn baby. As the family prepared a milk bottle, the assassins smashed the door open. Amid the commotion, Ms. Mota came out of her bedroom and said firmly, "I am Gisela." In front of her terrified family, the men beat Ms. Mota and shot her several times, killing her. [continues 1708 words]
Roberto Saviano is determined to uncover capitalism's complicity with the narcolords of South America, writes Ed Vulliamy Pablo Escobar was "the first to understand that it's not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine". Of course, Escobar didn't put it that way: this heretical truth was posited by Roberto Saviano in his latest book Zero Zero Zero , the most important of the year and the most cogent ever written on how narco-traffic works. It speaks what must be told at the end of another year of drug war spreading further and deeper, that tells what you will not learn from Narcos , Breaking Bad or the countless official reports. [continues 1225 words]
Ask Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper how marijuana legalization is going, now almost two years into a historic initiative of allowing licensed stores to sell cannabis to anyone over 21, and he offers this: "In many ways, the first two years of marijuana legalization has been a testament to Coloradans and our ability to work together." Hickenlooper praises opposing sides for settling on common pot policies that he believes have so far helped the legalization rollout go smoothly. But what he stops short of saying is whether legalization, overall, is positive or negative for the state. [continues 1463 words]
For Anthony Miles, Feb. 15, 2013, was a busy day of juggling calls, setting up meetings and touting a high-quality shipment he was expecting soon. Still, he found time to put air in the tires of his Mercedes and to note how well the day was going. Raising a large stack of bills in both hands, he bragged to a companion: I just made $20,000 in one hour. Just three days later, Miles was less euphoric. He grumbled he was making "chump change" while an associate was clearing $150,000 a day "with his eyes closed." [continues 4070 words]
President Barack Obama's National Drug Control Strategy in 2010 first proclaimed the major policy goals of the administration's approach to the drug problem and the goals were to be met by 2015. Not only have they not been met, in critical instances, the policies have been going in the wrong direction, rapidly. We learned last week that, in the midst of the opiate overdose crisis, heroin overdose deaths rose an additional 28 percent between 2013 and 2014. That's on top of the 340 percent rise in heroin deaths since 2007, such that beyond the 8,217 deaths of 2013, we now have another 10,574. That is, we now see a 440 percent increase from the Bush years. [continues 948 words]
Neighbors to North Look to U.S. Experience MONTREAL - For police forces across Canada, August is harvest time. Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and forest clearings. If the grower is unlucky enough to be caught redhanded, he is cuffed and taken off to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about two weeks, and then it's back to normal police work. [continues 984 words]
MONTREAL - For police forces across Canada, August is harvest time. Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and forest clearings. If the grower is unlucky enough to be caught red-handed, he is cuffed and taken off to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about two weeks, and then it's back to normal police work. [continues 1101 words]
It Would Be the First G-20 Country to Nationally Allow Recreational Use Montreal - For police forces across Canada, the month of August is harvest time. Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and forest clearings. If growers are unlucky enough to be caught red-handed, they are cuffed and taken to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about two weeks, and then it's back to normal police work. [continues 1082 words]
MONTREAL - For police forces across Canada, the month of August is harvest time. Officers slip on their coveralls, grab thick gardening gloves, shoulder machetes and begin the annual ritual of chopping down marijuana plants hidden in cornfields, remote mountain valleys and forest clearings. If the grower is unlucky enough to be caught red-handed, he is cuffed and taken off to court. Each police unit hits two or three of these hidden marijuana plantations, with the confiscated pot taken to incinerators. The destruction of marijuana plants goes on for about two weeks, and then it's back to normal police work. [continues 751 words]
I agree with Jorge Castaneda's Nov. 12 column "Mexico's marijuana legalization could ease drug war." It is time to legalize marijuana and end the war on drugs not only in Mexico but here in the United States. This terrible war has caused thousands to be killed in Mexico, and Mexican society has been ripped apart. I have visited both Mexico and Colombia as a Witness for Peace. The war on drugs has caused extreme pain and suffering in Colombia as well as in Mexico. Now over five million Colombians have been displaced by the U.S. funded "war on drugs." [continues 91 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Colombia's government plans to legalize the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal and scientific purposes, officials said Thursday in a surprise shift by the longtime U.S. ally in the war on drugs. The change is coming in an executive decree that President Juan Manuel Santos will soon sign into law. It will regulate regulating everything from licensing for growers to the eventual export of products made from marijuana, Justice Minister Yesid Reyes said. With the new policy, Colombia joins countries from Mexico to Chile that have experimented with legalization or decriminalization as part of a wave of changing attitudes toward drug use and policies to combat it in Latin America. But unlike many of its neighbors, Colombia has long been identified with U.S.-backed policies to eradicate drug production and a sharp decline in levels of violence over the past 15 years is largely attributed to the no-tolerance policing. [continues 232 words]
Prosecutors Adamant That Budget Amendment Doesn't Block Their Case Against Colorado Attorney Federal prosecutors say a Colorado attorney charged in connection with major raids on state-licensed medical marijuana businesses is not protected by a new law that tells the feds to back off. Attorney David Furtado was one of four men charged after sweeping raids two years ago targeting the VIP Cannabis dispensary and related businesses. The men were ultimately indicted on charges of money laundering and trying to deposit money from an illegal enterprise into a bank account. [continues 407 words]
Colombia plans to legalize the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal and scientific purposes, government officials said in a surprise shift by the longtime U.S. ally in the war on drugs. The change comes in an executive decree that President Juan Manuel Santos will soon sign into law. With it, Colombia joins countries from Mexico to Chile that have experimented with legalization or decriminalization amid changing attitudes toward drug use and policies. [end]
Despite U.S. Efforts to Cut Off the Drug at the Source, Colombia Is Again the World's Top Coca Producer Tierradentro, Colombia - Illegal coca cultivation is surging in Colombia, erasing one of the showcase achievements of U.S. counternarcotics policy and threatening to send a burst of cheap cocaine through the smuggling pipeline to the United States. Just two years after it ceased to be the world's largest producer, falling behind Peru, Colombia now grows more illegal coca than Peru and third-place Bolivia combined. In 2014, the last year for which statistics are available, Colombians planted 44 percent more coca than in 2013, and U.S. drug agents say this year's crop is probably even larger. [continues 1487 words]
TIJUANA - A Mexican Supreme Court ruling permitting marijuana use for recreational purposes has sparked a sensitive debate in Mexico about the country's drug laws, involving health advocates, scholars, law enforcement officials, and business and political leaders. Wednesday's 4-1 decision applies only to four members of an advocacy group seeking to decriminalize marijuana, granting them the right to consume and produce for their own personal use. Still, the issue has touched a nerve for many in Mexico, opening a wide-ranging discussion about the country's drug policies. [continues 940 words]
SCOTLAND must start the debate on decriminalising drugs, campaigners, MSPs and former government advisers have said. The call follows an announcement by the Irish government that it plans a "radical culture shift" which will see possession of drugs decriminalised in ordered to focus on offering helping to addicts and users rather than punishing them with criminal convictions and prison. As the call came, the Scottish Government also told the Sunday Herald that it was reaffirming its wish for Holyrood to take responsibility over drug laws, which are currently reserved to Westminster. [continues 2043 words]
The Mexican Supreme Court opened the door to legalizing marijuana on Wednesday, delivering a pointed challenge to the nation's strict substance abuse laws and adding its weight to the growing debate in Latin America over the costs and consequences of the war against drugs. The vote by the court's criminal chamber declared that individuals should have the right to grow and distribute marijuana for their personal use. While the ruling does not strike down current drug laws, it lays the groundwork for a wave of legal actions that could ultimately rewrite them, proponents of legalization say. [continues 1185 words]
Marijuana Law A Lawyer Challenges His DOJ Indictment, Wanting It Tossed. In a motion that could throw federal enforcement of marijuana laws in Colorado into commotion, a lawyer at the center of one of the biggest criminal pot cases in the state's legal-marijuana era is asking a judge to toss out the case against him. In the new motion, lawyer David Furtado argues that the federal crimes he is charged with - money laundering and trying to deposit proceeds from an illegal enterprise into a bank - all stem from activity that is legal under state law in Colorado. Because Congress last year passed a law prohibiting the U.S. Department of Justice from spending money to interfere with state medical marijuana laws, Furtado argues that the indictment against him should be dismissed. [continues 759 words]
At sea, what does it mean for a ship to 'fly a flag?' That was a key, and somewhat improbable, question in a federal drug smuggling case in Manhattan federal court. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan typically write legal briefs that cite the lofty decisions of the United States Supreme Court, congressional statutes or articles in law reviews. But in a recent case, the government pointed to a more lyrical precedent. "You're a grand old flag, you're a high-flying flag. And forever in peace may you wave," the brief practically sang in a footnote. [continues 1060 words]
Another Failure of the War on Drugs Each year, the United States spends more than $51 billion on the war on drugs - a war we're clearly losing. The war has become so futile that the federal agency charged with leading the fight has undermined its own mission - and no one is being held accountable. A Justice Department review found that, for years, DEA agents assigned to Colombia indulged in sex parties involving prostitutes supplied by drug cartels. The report found that local police often stood guard during the parties, keeping an eye on the agents' weapons and other belongings, and that three DEA supervisors involved in the parties accepted gifts of money, weapons and other items from the cartels. [continues 354 words]
America will never get control of illegal drugs or immigrants until it accepts the failure of the "war on drug." For over four decades, the U.S. government has been on a quixotic mission to stamp out drug use through prohibition, mass incarceration and international interdiction. One trillion dollars and millions of arrests later, 49.2 percent of Americans aged 12 or older reported illicit drug use in their lifetimes, 16.7 percent in the past year and 10.2 percent in the past month, according to the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. [continues 554 words]
Misconduct Involved Drugs, Prostitute Parties When internal affairs investigators do find wrongdoing, the most common outcome is either a letter of caution or a brief unpaid suspension. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has allowed its employees to stay on the job despite internal investigations that found they had distributed drugs, lied to the authorities or committed other serious misconduct, newly disclosed records show. Lawmakers expressed dismay this year that the drug agency had not fired agents who investigators found attended "sex parties" with prostitutes paid with drug cartel money while they were on assignment in Colombia. The Justice Department opened an inquiry into whether the DEA is able to adequately detect and punish wrongdoing by its agents. [continues 1138 words]
He practiced with baby carrots, swallowing them whole, easing them down his throat with yogurt. Later came the heroin pellets, each loaded with 14 grams of powder, machine-wrapped in wax paper and thick latex. Long gone were the days of swallowing hand-knotted, drug-filled condoms. The Mexican drug trafficking organizations were always perfecting their craft. On this trip, Gerardo A. Vargas would swallow 71 pellets - a full kilo, just over two pounds, enough for as many as 30,000 hits at $10 a pop on American streets. And so before he set off on his 3,900-mile journey from Uruapan, Mexico, Vargas was given the rules: No soda, because it could erode the pellets' wrapping. No orange juice, either. Drink only water. He was told which airports to avoid, which places to go, his every move orchestrated by his handler in Mexico. [continues 2599 words]
How many wars can we fight? Our presidential candidates demand "stronger action" against both illegal immigration and illegal drugs. But those goals conflict. The War on Drugs makes border enforcement much harder! America's 44-year-long Drug War hasn't made a dent in American drug use or the supply of illegal drugs. If it had some positive effect, prices of drugs would have increased, but they haven't. American authorities say drugs are more available than ever. Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, creates fat profits that invite law-breaking. [continues 621 words]
Veteran Actor in His Element for Thriller 'Sicario' TORONTO (AP) - No other actor has covered all angles of the war on drugs - its tragedies, its violence, its farces - more than Benicio Del Toro. It's a story that has followed the Puerto Ricoborn actor from the start: One of his first credits was the 1990 NBC miniseries "Drug Wars: The Camarena Story." He's played a recovering drug addict ("21 Grams") and one not so recovering at all ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"). He starred as Pablo Escobar in last year's "Escobar: Paradise Lost." And the critical pinnacle of his career came in his Oscar-winning performance as an honest Mexico police officer in Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." [continues 581 words]
