The UK’s Chief Drugs Adviser Fired For Disagreeing With Country’s Drug Policy

The UK’s chief drugs adviser has been sacked by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, after criticising government policies.

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Homeland Security: Mexican drug cartels infiltrating U.S. Border Patrol

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Slowly, states are lessening limits on marijuana

“I ask kids all the time, and they’ll tell you it is easier to get marijuana than a six-pack of beer because that is controlled by the government,” he said, noting that drug dealers don’t ask for IDs or honor minimum age requirements.

So Gray — who spent two decades as a superior court judge inOrange County, Calif., and once ran for Congress as aRepublican— switched sides in the war on drugs, becoming an advocate for legalizing marijuana.

“Let’s face reality,” he says. “Taxing and regulating marijuana will make it less available to children than it is today.”

Gray is part of a growing national movement to rethink pot laws. From California, where lawmakers may outright legalize marijuana, to New Jersey, which implemented a medical use law Jan. 19, states are taking unprecedented steps to loosen marijuana restrictions. Advocates of legalizing marijuana say generational, political and cultural shifts have taken the USA to a unique moment in its history of drug prohibition that could topple 40 years of tough restrictions on both medicinal and recreational marijuana use.

A Gallup Poll last October found 44% favor making marijuana legal, an eight-point jump since the question was asked in 2005. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in January found 81% favor making marijuana legal for medical use.

Attorney General Eric Holder last fall announced that raiding medical marijuana facilities would be the lowest priority for U.S. law enforcement agents — a major shift that is spurring many states to re-examine their policies. The American Medical Association recommended in November that Congress reclassify marijuana as a drug with possible medicinal benefit.

At least 14 states this year — some deeply conservative and Republican-leaning, such as Kansas — will consider legalizing pot for medical purposes or lessening the penalties for possessing small amounts for personal use. Fourteen other states and the District of Columbia already have liberalized their marijuana laws.

“We are absolutely in an important new era in which increasing majorities of Americans are not just questioning the wisdom and efficacy of marijuana prohibition but are demanding alternatives,” says Stephen Gutwillig, California director for theDrug Policy Alliance, which favors legalizing marijuana.

Kurt Gardinier, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which promotes marijuana for medical use, calls Holder’s shift “one of the most significant changes in federal drug policy in the last 30 years. It puts states at ease that they won’t be in conflict with the federal government.”

The Obama administration still opposes smoking marijuana for its medicinal benefit, says Tom McLellan, deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He says more research is needed to deliver the medically useful ingredients in a non-smokable form.

“We have the safest medications in the world and it’s not a coincidence. We have an enviable process by which we approve medications, and that’s through the (Food and Drug Administration),” he says. “It’s a bad idea to approve medication by popular vote.”

Yet even a few prominent opponents admit it’s getting harder for them to persuade lawmakers to continue tough restrictions on marijuana, though they vow to continue fighting against legalization and warn of dire long-term consequences.

“The momentum is not with us, and we understand that,” says Michael Carroll, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the police chief of West Goshen Township in Chester County, Pa.

The 20,000-member police chiefs association opposes legalizing medical marijuana and decreasing penalties for possession because it fears abusers will cause drugged-driving accidents and other societal and health problems that come with drug abuse. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says marijuana can cause heart irregularities, lung problems and addiction.

“We’re going to multiply the problems we have with alcohol abuse,” Carroll says. “Things are not going our way, but that’s not stopping us for speaking out about it.”

Among the states considering marijuana bills this year:

• Alabama, Delaware, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, are debating allowing medicinal use of marijuana for people with certain illnesses;

• Hawaii and Rhode Island, are considering bills to reduce the penalties for marijuana possession to fines rather than jail time;

• Vermont is weighing whether to allow state-licensed liquor stores to sell medical marijuana.

California leads the way

California became the first state to allow marijuana for medical use when voters approved a statewide ballot issue in 1996, and its provisions are so broad that tens of thousands of people have obtained a doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana for ailments from cancer to arthritis.

Now California’s Legislature is considering a bill that would make it the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use as well. It is unlikely to pass this year, but Gray and other advocates hope to have a proposition on the November ballot that would legalize marijuana use for anyone 21 or older. California would levy taxes that the state tax board says could raise $1.3 billion or more a year for the deficit-plagued state, while saving tens of millions in prison and law-enforcement costs. Sponsors of the ballot issue have turned in 690,161 signatures on petitions for verification, far more than the 433,971 valid signatures required to get on the ballot.

A 2009 statewide Field Poll found 56% support pot making pot legal for recreational use and taxing it.

The economics argument may be the clincher, proponents hope. They call the proposition a matter of “tax and regulate” rather than “legalize,” saying state control will take marijuana out of criminals’ hands while generating badly needed revenue.

“It’s history repeating itself, with (the) alcohol prohibition repeal during the Great Depression,” says Richard Lee, an Oakland marijuana entrepreneur and president of Oaksterdam University, which trains people to work in the medical marijuana industry. Lee, who is pushing the ballot issue, says, “Now we have the Great Recession. That will be on people’s minds.”

Yet as changing attitudes and economic forces propel the legal pot movement in California, some wrinkles have emerged as the medical marijuana industry expands. After some complaints from neighbors, municipalities and prosecutors are moving to regulate the industry more closely to limit the growth of pot dispensaries and prevent sales for recreational use.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles and San Diego contend that while the law allows marijuana for medical uses, it does not specifically permit the sale of marijuana. They have launched a series of raids aimed at closing some of the hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries now operating out of storefronts.

“I call it the slippery slope,” says Dennis Zine, an Los Angeles city councilman. “Now we have it for medical purposes. Now let’s expand it to anyone who wants to get high? I don’t support that. … Do we then legalize cocaine, legalize heroin?”

Tehama County, Calif., Sheriff Clay Parker said the state’s current medical marijuana law is filled with gray areas that make enforcement uneven and difficult. He says he opposes further relaxation of state laws but would welcome a federal change that would drop marijuana’s status as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, the most tightly restricted, to a lower level that would place marijuana in a category with prescription drugs that pharmacies could dispense.

Gray, who retired as a judge in 2009, says many judges agree with him that sending marijuana users to jail places a costly burden on the state and clogs the justice system, ultimately taking police and court resources from pursuing violent criminals. Most judges, he says, fear saying so.

“Probably half of my colleagues talk privately the same way I do, but publicly they’re concerned about standing out,” he says.

Jeff Studdard, 46, is another one-time drug warrior who has changed his thinking. A former school police officer and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, Studdard tried marijuana to ease pain and restore his appetite after a broken back forced him out of law enforcement. “I have stopped all my (other) pain meds now and I’ve gained weight. It’s almost like a wonder drug,” he says.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a Democrat from San Francisco who introduced the tax and regulate bill, predicts California eventually will legalize marijuana and other states will follow.

“It’s inevitable that there will be some kind of legalization of recreational marijuana,” Ammiano says. “How and where it’s going to happen I think is an open question, but I think a lot sooner than later.”

Support not politically risky

Despite growing popular acceptance of marijuana, battles are still fought in state legislatures when such bills are introduced, and many of the bills still fail. Yet advocates say politicians are more willing to take on what only a few years ago was a politically risky cause.

“Politicians are finally catching up with the American public,” Gardinier says.

Most of the changes have come on the West Coast and Northeast, but lawmakers in a few Southern and Central states also are proposing bills, in part because they see marijuana as a potential money-maker, says Gutwillig of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Rhode Island is among the states considering legislation that would regulate and tax marijuana or reduce penalties for personal use to a misdemeanor and fine.

Rhode Island’s Legislature adopted medical marijuana last year, setting up dispensaries and a registration system. A decriminalization bill introduced in the 75-member House has 35 co-signers, including three of the six Republican lawmakers.

Sen. Joshua Miller, a Democrat from Cranston, R.I., leads a Senate commission that is studying whether to drop tough penalties for marijuana use. He says statewide polls show 80% of Rhode Islanders favor decriminalization. Rhode Island borders Massachusetts, which decriminalized marijuana last year. The debate, he says, has been framed by the state’s poor financial condition.

“We’d rather spend our resources on violent crime,” he says. “I’d also argue that the best way to get to people who abuse drugs is treatment over incarceration.”

That argument is being reinforced at the federal level by President Obama’s drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief who favors a treatment-driven approach to drug abuse.

Even in conservative Kansas, where the Legislature recently voted to outlaw a synthetic drug that mimics marijuana, backers of looser marijuana laws say they have hope.

Rep. Gail Finney, a first-term Democrat, has proposed legalizing marijuana for use by the critically ill. The bill is unlikely to pass this year, Finney says, but she wants to use the hearings to educate fellow lawmakers and plans to reintroduce it until it passes.

“It’s time for Kansas to have an open, honest debate about this,” she says.

She thinks many of her House colleagues would support the bill if they didn’t fear backlash in an election year — a fear she says is unfounded. A Feb. 2 poll of 500 Kansans by KWCH-TV in Wichita found 58% supported medical marijuana.

“If they were in touch and in tune with their constituents,” Finney says, “they would know that this is what they want.”

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-08-marijuana_N.htm

Texas jury jails man 35 years for marijuana possession

(RAW STORY)   For being caught with just over a quarter pound of pot, 54-year-old Henry Walter Wooten will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, thanks to a jury in Tyler, Texas.

His prosecutor, Smith County Assistant District Attorney Richard Vance, originally sought a sentence of 99 years over the 4.6 ounces of marijuana police found in Wooten’s vehicle, according to published reports.

Wooten was reportedly caught smoking pot within 1,000 feet of a day care center, within the radius of a so-called “drug free zone.” Tipped off by the smell, police would later search the man’s vehicle, only to discover his cannabis stash and a digital scale, according to The Tyler Morning Telegraph.

Wooten, who was convicted of two felonies in the 1980s, was also accused of marijuana possession in a drug free zone in 2008, the paper noted. Drug free zones, or perimeters around schools, playgrounds, churches and other selected institutions or organizations, mandate significantly stronger penalties for anyone caught with illegal substances on the wrong side of the boundary. They were passed in the 1980s amid a surge in the popularity of “crack” cocaine, which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was later found to have aided the distribution of.

The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, reported in 2006 that drug free zones have done little to enhance public health or safety and have instead disproportionately targeted minorities, according to the Associated Press.

“We just hope [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] can free up room for this menace to society; maybe the state can release a child molester or serial arsonist to find a cell for Wooten,” Houston Press scoffed in a Friday blog post.

“The fact is that most of you who are reading this article will probably believe that sentencing a person to prison for 35 years for the possession of a non-toxic, non-addicting, all natural substance that has proven anti-cancer capabilities is not really protecting society from anything dangerous,” opined a post on the Texas NORML forum. “He might have been stupid choosing his location to medicate, after all, it was Tyler, ‘Texas’, but nobody should spend a day in a steel cage for medicating, much less their entire life or 35 years.”

Wooten’s sentence is identical to the punishment dealt to Alejandro Arreola, who was given 35 years in jail by a jury in Del Rio, Texas for his involvement in a multimillion dollar marijuana smuggling ring. Arreola, according to reports, transported over 24 tons of the stuff into the United States. His accomplice, Casey Bob Hutto, got 24 years.

The U.S. State Department claimed earlier in March that Mexican marijuana cultivation escalated some 35 percent in 2009, while the Mexican military’s interdiction efforts decreased in the face of more dangerous substances like methamphetamine. Houston and the surrounding areas are well-known drug trafficking zones for the Mexican marijuana cartels and a significant portion of marijuana consumed in the state can be traced south of the border.

CORRECTION: The closest major metropolitan area to Tyler is Dallas/Fort Worth, not Houston.Modified from an original version.

http://rawstory.com/2010/03/texas-jury-jails-man-35-years-marijuana-possession/

Colorado Congressman Fights Back Against DEA’s Medical Marijuana Raids

(STOP THE DRUG WAR)   The DEA’s recent tough-guy tactics in Colorado aren’t winning them any friends in the press, the public, or even in politics. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis sent a scathing letter to Attorney General Holder and President Obama demanding that DEA be required to uphold the administration’s policy of respecting medical marijuana laws. Here it is in part:

Despite these formal guidelines, Friday, February 12, 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided the home of medical marijuana caregiver Chris Bartkowicz in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. In a news article in the Denver Post the next day, the lead DEA agent in the raid, Jeffrey Sweetin, claimed “We’re still going to continue to investigate and arrest people…Technically, every dispensary in the state is in blatant violation of federal law,” he said. “The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody. They’re violating federal law; they’re at risk of arrest and imprisonment.”

Agent Sweetin’s comment that “we arrest everybody” is of great concern to me and to the people of Colorado, who overwhelmingly voted to allow medical marijuana. Coloradans suffering from debilitating medical conditions, many of them disabled, elderly, veterans, or otherwise vulnerable people, have expressed their concern to me that the DEA will come into medical marijuana dispensaries, which are legal under Colorado law, and “arrest everybody” present. Although Agent Sweetin reportedly has backed away from his comments, he has yet to issue a written clarification or resign, thus the widespread panic in Colorado continues.

On May 14, 2009, Mr. Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal: “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.” The actions and commentary of Mr. Sweetin are inconsistent with the idea of not waging war against the people of the State of Colorado and are a contradiction to your agency’s laudable policies. [Westword]

Right on. We’re witnessing a conspicuous disruption of the White House’s carefully crafted effort to reduce controversy in the war on drugs, and it’s clear that the silence must soon be broken in Washington. It’s easy to say “we’re not at war,” but until you order the soldiers under your command to lay down their arms, it won’t be possible to sugarcoat any of this.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_blog/2010/feb/25/colorado_congressman_fights_back

Despite Obama admin’s promise, DEA continues raids on medical marijuana growers

(RAW STORY)   On Thursday, a Denver news station interviewed Chris Bartkowicz about his medical-marijuana operation in the basement of his home. Bartkowicz, confident of his compliance with state laws, boasted of its size and profitability.

“I’m definitely living the dream now,” he told 9News.

The following day, the dream was over.

Drug-enforcement agents raided his home, placed him under arrest, and carried off dozens of black bags of marijuana plants and growing lights.

The Obama administration promised in October that the federal government would respect state laws allowing the growing and selling of marijuana for medicinal use, but the Drug Enforcement Agency sent a loud message with the arrest of Bartkowicz.

“It’s still a violation of federal law,” said Jeffrey Sweetin,  the DEA special agent in charge of the Denver office. “It’s not medicine. We’re still going to continue to investigate and arrest people.”

The United States Attorney’s office will decide Tuesday if charges will be filed against Bartkowicz.

In an interview from his jail cell, Bartkowicz said he believes the DEA is making an example of him. He would never have exposed himself if he believed his business was illegal.

“According to him and according to what he’s seen on the news, he probably believes he is legal,” Sweetin said.

And according to Sweetin, it isn’t just growers who face arrest. The dispensaries are next on the list.

“The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody. They’re violating federal law; they’re at risk of arrest and imprisonment,” he said to The Denver Post. “Technically, every dispensary in the state is in blatant violation of federal law.”

Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden told federal agents in an October memo to not target people in “clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.”

Sweetin said the memo does nothing to change federal law, which makes marijuana illegal.

The difference between the Obama administration’s stated mission to end the “war on drugs” and the actual enforcement of that policy by DEA agents may not come as a surprise to those who have seen the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s (ONDCP) budget for fiscal year 2011.

“We’re not at war with people in this country,” Obama’s drug czar Gil Kerlikowske told The Wall Street Journal in May.

But according to 2011 funding “highlights” released by the ONDCP (PDF link), the Obama administration is growing the drug war and tilting its funds heavily toward law enforcement over treatment.

During the interview in his jail cell, Bartkowicz said he realized his arrest is the center of a national debate and defended his right to publicly declare his business.

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/obama-admins-promise-dea-continues-raids-medical-marijuana-growers/

CIA Shoots Down Plane With Mother and Infant Aboard, Then covered It up

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NYC makes a How to Guide for Heroin

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CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan

(AFP)   Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).
The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”

Soon,  as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”

Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research, McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”

By 1994, a new force emerged in the region—the Taliban—that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that “the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”

These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West. Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.

In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction to this development. “When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn’t go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had lain the groundwork with local warlords, he erupted, ‘I have all these guys under arms, and we’ve got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?’”

ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER

But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union. Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage “passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks”? The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage’s presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, “I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president.”

These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney’s former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder. More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea’s vast energy reserves was the Taliban.

Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the “Vulcans”—along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim—who coordinated Bush’s geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives. Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush’s deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.

Our “enemy,” or course, was the Taliban “terrorists.” But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad— who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as “supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being  “a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban.”

Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so. Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that “U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.” Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets?

Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cia_and_heroin_158.html

Let’s set the record straight about Amsterdam

Most people know that the Fox channel isnt the most objective news source on American TV.  But in a pretty recent broadcast Amsterdam is so falsely portrayed as a city of crime, drugs and anarchy, that I had to show the facts.

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