Obama's Pick To Head ONDCP Is Better Than Your Average Drug Czar President Obama caught even close observers off-guard with his mid-February nomination for the nation's new drug czar, R. Gil Kerlikowske. Kerlikowske, 59, Seattle's police chief, with nearly 40 years in law enforcement behind his badge, will direct the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), pending Senate approval. But Kerlikowske isn't just any urban police chief. He's the top cop of a city with a progressive reputation on several drug-related matters, including needle-exchange programs and marijuana possession laws. [continues 790 words]
Will the Obama Administration Put Justice Back in the Criminal Justice System? President Obama faces a heap of crises: a major economic recession, crumbling national infrastructure, and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Buried in that heap is another war, one less present in public discourse but no less toxic: the drug war. The concentrated battleground of the drug war has been on domestic soil, with America's so-called interdiction efforts spreading the fight across the world, from poppy-rich Afghanistan to the coca-nurturing Andes to the most brutal battlefield of them all, Mexico, which saw more than 5,600 drug-related murders last year, including several that involved publicly displayed decapitations [continues 3100 words]
NEW YORK - When I read the news that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy "blasted the U.S.-led drug war as a failure that is pushing Latin American societies to the breaking point" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12), I thought: Someone is finally talking sense. I have long regarded the U.S. approach to drugs as self-righteous, overbearing and destructive. This is not the first time the U.S. "war on drugs," which President Richard Nixon started back in 1971, has been pronounced a failure. Five years ago, for example, none other than President George W. Bush's "drug czar," John Walters, admitted that the "war" was failing. Of course, Walters, a hard-nosed conservative, made it clear that the U.S. had no intention of abandoning it. Today, he insists that intensified drug-related violence in Mexico - 4,000 people killed in 2008 alone - is a sign that the U.S. war is succeeding. [continues 851 words]
The White House office responsible for fighting illegal drug use has focused for nearly a decade on youths smoking marijuana instead of a broader strategy that would sufficiently target adult drug users, according to a new study. The nonprofit National Academy of Public Administration says the $1.2 million study, which it planned to release Thursday, found that the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George W. Bush relied on selected data to show progress in combating illegal drug use by youth. [continues 587 words]
Although the fight to federally legalize medicinal marijuana is far from new, supporters hope President Barack Obama's administration will be more favorable to their cause than previous leaders, they said. The Drug Enforcement Administration continues to crack down on cannabis dispensaries in California, one of thirteen states that has legalized medicinal marijuana, according to a Feb. 7 Boston Globe article. However, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said the new administration is reviewing the federal policy toward medical marijuana. [continues 480 words]
Obama choosing Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to become the next drug czar in Washington, D.C., at first, looks like the same old beltway logic: cops and prison terms are the snake-oil cure for drug addictions. Some change, Obama. Right? Under Clinton's and Bush's drug czars, the United States experienced the steepest spike drug arrests in its history (contributing to the fattest swell of anti-drug spending). Drug arrests jumped over 80 percent since 1992. And despite the effort, the White House reports that drug use has Risen [continues 893 words]
WASHINGTON - A recent Drug Enforcement Administration raid on a South Lake Tahoe, Calif., medical marijuana dispensary showcases one of the legal conflicts inherited by the Obama administration. The Jan. 22 raid near the California-Nevada border occurred two days after Obama took office and before the new president's own Justice Department team was in place. The raid resembled many conducted during the Bush administration, but seemingly clashed with Obama's campaign opposition to such tactics. "I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors (is) entirely appropriate," Obama told Oregon's Mail Tribune newspaper in March. "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue." [continues 605 words]
How the Crusade Against Drug Paraphernalia Punishes Controversial Speech A few weeks before Barack Obama was elected president, Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania, filed criminal charges against the makers of the Whizzinator, a fake penis used to deliver clean urine for drug tests. The strap-on phallus, which comes in assorted "natural, lifelike skin tones," is connected by a tube to a hidden bladder containing urine (sold separately) that is untainted by marijuana metabolites. According to its manufacturer, Puck Technology of Signal Hill, California, the Whizzinator is so realistic that "we can't show you the whole thing," which is why ads for it in publications such as High Times had to be censored, with a marijuana leaf obscuring a photograph of the product in action. [continues 6497 words]
************ By Bill Conroy, Narco News and the Narcosphere What is the new administration going to do about all those cocaine-laden planes connected to covert operations that keep crashing in Latin America? http://drugsense.org/url/njeYWr2w ************ Mr. Walter has cashed his check. Pete Guither, DrugWarRant http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/2009/01/15.html#a3232 ************ BONGS AWAY! How the crusade against drug paraphernalia punishes controversial speech. [continues 320 words]
At the start of the Afghan war, the British government implored the Bush administration to bomb Afghanistan's heroin labs and opium storehouses. The United States refused. America's Afghan partners in the struggle against the Taliban were involved in the drug trade. They were crooked, but useful. In 2004, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared a "jihad on the cultivation of drugs." Europeans guffawed. European intelligence had already named both the head of the Afghan Central Bank and Mr. Karzai's "anti-corruption czar" as "drug lords." And Mr. Karzai's youngest brother, Ahmed Wali, was named as a trafficker in early 2005 in U.S. intelligence documents discovered by CBS' "60 Minutes." In fact, there has never been a "drug lord" arrested in post September 11th Afghanistan. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in 2005 found more than nine tons of opium in the office of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province. Under British pressure, Mr. Akhundzada was removed, but the next year, Mr. Karzai found a place for him in the Afghan Senate. [continues 854 words]
Buried in the latest Monitoring the Future survey -- the major annual, federally funded survey of teen drug use -- is an astonishing finding: More 10th-graders now smoke marijuana than smoke cigarettes. Strangely, in announcing the results, White House drug czar John Walters failed to mention this evidence that our current drug policies constitute an utter train wreck. In the just-released survey, 13.8 percent of 10th-graders reported smoking marijuana in the past 30 days (considered "current use" by researchers), while just 12.3 percent smoked cigarettes. For 8th and 12th grades, cigarette use still exceeded marijuana, but the gap narrowed to insignificance. [continues 490 words]
Most Americans agreed that alcohol suppression was worse than alcohol consumption. It's already shaping up as a day of celebration, with parties planned, bars prepping for recession-defying rounds of drinks, and newspapers set to publish cocktail recipes concocted especially for the day. But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time. [continues 1021 words]
Workplace Tests for Cocaine Show the Lowest Use on Record. Whatever challenges await him, President-elect Barack Obama will not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to keeping a lid on the use of illegal drugs. Our policy has been a success -- although that success is one of Washington's best kept secrets. Reported drug use among eighth, 10th and 12th graders has declined for six straight years. Teen use of cocaine, marijuana and inhalants is down significantly, while consumption of methamphetamine and hallucinogens like LSD and Ecstasy has all but collapsed. [continues 628 words]
Peter Christ used to arrest people for doing drugs. Now he wants to legalize them. All of them: pot, cocaine, heroin, LSD, meth. "My attitude toward the policy we're following is that it's a stupid policy," Christ said. "It creates crime and violence in our society . When's the last time you heard of a shoot-out at a brewery?" That message - which he'll deliver at Schenectady County Community College Thursday - commands attention because of the man delivering it. Christ isn't some "drugs-are-cool" hippie, as he put it in a voice dripping with sarcasm. [continues 211 words]
Successful Efforts Will Be Recognized Next Week In Washington. WASHINGTON -- The Central Valley's award-winning anti-drug forces will have some friends in the Obama administration. Incoming Vice President Joe Biden backs the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which steers federal funds to regional anti-drug efforts. This could help the 10-county Central Valley HIDTA, which maintains a Fresno-based staff, prevail in the inevitable budget and bureaucratic fights to come. "Sen. Biden was a founding father of the HIDTA program and has maintained an interest in our operations over the years," said Bill Ruzzamenti, executive director of the Central Valley program. [continues 510 words]
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's former anti-drug czar has been detained in a widening corruption scandal that suggests a large percentage of top agents assigned to fight the drug trade here have instead been cooperating with cocaine cartels. Noe Ramirez, who headed Mexico's elite anti-drug agency until August, accepted a bribe of $450,000 to leak information to a drug gang, Mexico's Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora alleged on Friday. Mr. Ramirez, who since August has been Mexico's acting envoy to the United Nations office for drug control in Vienna, was detained on Thursday and charged with participating in organized crime. It wasn't possible to reach him for comment. [continues 1550 words]
On a chilly, overcast morning in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, a steady trickle of sallow-faced drug addicts shambles up to a storefront painted with flowers and the words "Welcome to Insite." One by one, they ring the doorbell and are buzzed into a tidy reception area staffed by smiling volunteers. The junkies come here almost around the clock, seven days a week. Some just grab a fistful of clean syringes from one of the buckets by the door and head out again. But about 600 times a day, others walk in with pocketfuls of heroin, cocaine or speed that they've scored out on the street; sign in; go to a clean, well-lit room lined with stainless steel booths; and, under the protective watch of two nurses, shoot their drugs into their veins. [continues 3868 words]
Growing Plants for Medical Purposes Will Be Legal - but Having Seeds Won't Though medical marijuana soon will be legal in Michigan, patients and their caregivers still will have to break the law to get it, at least the first time. Proposal 1 will allow approved patients and their caretakers to possess and grow the drug, but there won't be a legal way to get marijuana seeds or seedlings. "How do you get from point A to point B? There is no law that protects you there," said James McCurtis, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Community Health, "and we are not giving any advice on how you get your marijuana." [continues 829 words]
The impact of the economic downturn is felt not solely in legal markets - increasingly drug users are turning to cheaper options, especially in rural Britain where amphetamines such as uppers and base are on the rise. Havana Marking examines a growing concern As the effects of the credit crunch kick in, spare a thought for the 13 million illegal drug takers in the UK. If you can't give them any sympathy, have some for the drug agencies, mental-health organisations and police forces bracing themselves for a new wave of drug-related problems. One effect of economic downturn is being felt: cocaine dealers are offering the much cheaper amphetamine as an alternative high. [continues 2524 words]
