Drugs

Will Mexico’s New Leader Reshape Its Drug Policies?

July 10, 2018 Julia Barajas, Cannabiswire.com Create! Drug Policy, Drugs, Mexico, Policy

Mexico’s next president will take office at the end of 2018, and among the many big puzzles he must solve is how to deal with the nation’s dangerous and powerful illegal drug trade. He has been careful not to say much about what policies he will pursue, but there have been strong hints. Back in 2006, more than half a million people took to the already-crowded streets of Mexico City to protest the defeat of presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, often referred to by his initials, AMLO. According to widely reported accounts, the protesters hailed from throughout the country, and they demanded a recount, as López Obrador reportedly lost to right-wing candidate Felipe Calderón by just 0.57%.

Gun Violence Debate Needs To Include Police Militarization And Drug Prohibition Violence

April 17, 2018 Morgan Humphrey, Drugpolicy.org Strategize! Drugs, Gun violence, Militarized police

On March 14th thousands of students walked out of school to protest gun violence, demanding legislators enact more stringent gun control in the U.S. Later that night, black Brazilian city council member and vocal critic of Brazil’s militarized law enforcement, Marielle Franco, was assassinated. Four days later, 22 year old father of two, Stephon Clark, was shot in his back eight times by the Sacramento Police. While news outlets and social media made note of these murders, the national conversation instead largely focused on the March for Our Lives protest that took place the following weekend. As the media continued to cover the responses to the March for Our Lives, news broke that the two officers responsible for the murder of Alton Sterling would not be facing charges for their use of lethal force that left yet another black father dead.

If You Want To Kill Drug Dealers, Start With Big Pharma

April 6, 2018 By Domenica Ghanem, Otherwords.org Educate! Big Pharma, Corporations, Drugs, Opioids

At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug traffickers as part of a plan to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. At a Pennsylvania rally a few weeks earlier, he called for the same. Now his administration is taking steps toward making this proposal a reality. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo on March 21 asking prosecutors to pursue capital punishment for drug traffickers — a power he has thanks to legislation passed under President Bill Clinton. Time and again, these punitive policies have proven ineffective at curbing drug deaths. That’s partly because amping up the risk factor for traffickers makes the trade all that more lucrative, encouraging more trafficking, not less. But it’s also because these policies don’t address the true criminals of the opioid crisis: Big Pharma.

What It’s Like For American Drug Reformer To Go To A Country With A Compassionate System

April 4, 2018 By Phillip Smith, AlterNet.org Educate! Drugs, Policy, Portugal

The American activists couldn't wrap their heads around it. Sitting in a dingy office in a nondescript building in central Lisbon, they were being provided a fine-grained explanation of what happens to people caught with small amounts of drugs in Portugal, which decriminalized the possession of personal use amounts of drugs 17 years ago. The activists, having lived the American experience, wanted desperately to know when and how the coercive power of the state kicked in, how the drug users were to be punished for their transgressions, even if they had only been hit with an administrative citation, which is what happens to people caught with small quantities of drugs there. Nuno Capaz was trying to explain. He is vice chairman of the Lisbon Dissuasion Commission, the three-member tribunal set up to handle people caught with drugs.

Morgan County Had 27 Overdose Deaths From 2011 To 2015

March 23, 2018 Russell Mokhiber, Morgancountyusa.org Educate! Drugs, health, West Virginia

That’s according to the Appalachian Overdose Death Mapping Tool released yesterday by the Appalachian Regional Commission and NORC at the University of Chicago. Outside of coal country, Berkeley County and Morgan County had the highest overdose death rates in West Virginia. Morgan County’s death rate was 51.1 overdose deaths per year per 100,000 population. That is twice the national overdose death rate of 20.6 deaths per year per 100,000 population and more than 50 percent higher than the Appalachian death rate of 30.6 overdose deaths per year per 100,000. Berkeley County’s death rate was 52.2 overdose deaths per year per 100,000 population. Berkeley County suffered 189 overdose deaths in the five years from 2011 to 2015. Michael Meit, co-director of the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Analysis, said that while the study covered only the years 2011 to 2015, “the 2016 numbers eclipse 2015.”

Norway Takes First Steps From Extreme Drug War To Sensible Policy

January 18, 2018 By Péter Sárosi, Drogriporter.hu Create! Drugs, Norway, Policy

This was definitely a result of a bottom-up movement. It has had a few strong voices for quite some time, like Arild Knutsen and Thorvald Stoltenberg. Since the beginning of 2016 The Association for Safer Drug Policies has become a strong voice in Norwegian drug policy, and together with the other organisations working for drug policy reform we have been able to shift the centreline of the Norwegian public debate and influence the programs of almost all major political parties, including the party of government. Even though we were certain changes would come at some point, we didn’t expect our Health Minister from the Conservative party to change his view on decriminalisation as fast as he did. It really takes courage to front new drug policies and to take a new stand in a heated debate like this, like he did.

The Logic Of Drug Legalization

November 16, 2017 Jeff Berg, theguardian.com Create! Drugs, Legalization

By Jeff Berg for Counter Punch - The Drug Lords of today exist because of the extraordinary profits resulting from criminalization. Estimates run in the half a trillion range globally per year. By way of comparison there are only twenty or so countries with a national economy of that size. The situation is exactly analogous to the prohibition era. When gunfights, beatings, murders and firebombs were the business strategy of choice for the pushers of alcohol. Once booze was legalized the bootleggers were immediately driven out of business. Alcohol is heavily taxed today there are however no Bootlegging Lords on the playground pushing cheaper booze on our children. Nor would such pushers exist for any other drug that we might choose to legalize. Sure the criminals could evade the cost of taxes on their product but there are enormous costs incurred by criminal enterprises that don’t apply to legal ones. This is why marijuana today is sold for hundreds of times what it costs to grow. Our legal producers will not be faced with those costs and so can sell to us below current prices on the street. With profit margins cut to the bone the ‘dread lords and masters’ that control the illegal drug market today will simply melt away like the last snow before the advancing spring. If you are worried about our kids as relates to the issue of the legalization and/or decriminalization of marijuana and other harder drugs then know this.

Opiod Crisis Demands Care Not Criminalization

September 11, 2017 Ellie Hamrick et al, www.socialistworker.org Resist! Big Pharma, Criminalization, Drugs

By Ellie Hamrick, Katherine King and Neil Hamrick for Socialist Worker - After Tori was arrested on drug charges in 2015, she began suffering from heroin withdrawal in jail. She was denied medical treatment, and her cellmate was threatened with punishment for attempting CPR when Tori collapsed. By the time medical staff arrived, Tori hadn't been breathing for 10 minutes. "I would've loved to see what her future would've been," Tori's mother, Stephanie Moyer, told the local news. But as Moyer points out, Tori was "sentenced to death before she even saw the judge." Tori's death was not an isolated incident. More and more women are dying from causes related to opioid use, and the state's response has been criminalization, not care. In 2015, 418 women in Tori's home state of Pennsylvania died from opioid overdoses, a marked rise from previous years. This increase mirrors a rise in overdose deaths among women across the nation. Although men still use opioids at higher rates than women, women are quickly catching up. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported in 2013 that "deaths from prescription painkiller overdoses among women have increased more than 400 percent since 1999, compared to 265 percent among men."

Diseases Of Despair

September 8, 2017 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Crisis, Drugs, Opioids

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The opioid crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of acute desperation and morbidity. A loss of income causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social bonds that give us meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and health care and a loss of hope are crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness. In short, when you are marginalized and rejected by society, life often has little meaning. “When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Don’t Blame Addicts For America’s Opioid Crisis. Here Are The Real Culprits

September 4, 2017 Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com Educate! Drugs, Opioids, War On Drugs

By Chris McGreal for The Guardian - America’s opioid crisis was caused by rapacious pharma companies, politicians who colluded with them and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another. Of all the people Donald Trump could blame for the opioid epidemic, he chose the victims. After his own commission on the opioid crisis issued an interim report this week, Trump said young people should be told drugs are “No good, really bad for you in every way.” The president’s exhortation to follow Nancy Reagan’s miserably inadequate advice and Just Say No to drugs is far from useful. The then first lady made not a jot of difference to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. But Trump’s characterisation of the source of the opioid crisis was more disturbing. “The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place,” he said. That is straight out of the opioid manufacturers’ playbook. Facing a raft of lawsuits and a threat to their profits, pharmaceutical companies are pushing the line that the epidemic stems not from the wholesale prescribing of powerful painkillers - essentially heroin in pill form - but their misuse by some of those who then become addicted.

The Fight Over Price Gouging By The Pharmaceutical Industry

August 5, 2017 Lydia O'neal And David Sirota, www.ibtimes.com Resist! Big Pharma, Drugs

By Lydia O'neal And David Sirota for International Business Times - As the Democratic Governors Association raised $2.28 million from drug companies and health insurers in the first half of 2017, the group’s chairman, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, echoed a health care lobbyist’s criticism of a landmark bill to combat drug price-gouging, according to documents obtained by International Business Times. The documents detail how Malloy’s insurance department, led by a former Cigna lobbyist, tried to water down the bipartisan initiative as it moved through the state’s legislature. This spring, while Washington lawmakers wrestled over national health care policy, Connecticut lawmakers worked to join several other states that have passed legislation to curb an alleged drug price fraud scheme at the heart of multiple class-action lawsuits across the country. The suits accuse insurance firms and their pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, of attaching arbitrary and fraudulent premiums to consumers’ prescription drug prices, then pocketing the cost difference — all while using “gag orders” to keep pharmacies from informing customers about lower-priced options.

Again, Body-Camera Footage Shows Officers Planting Drugs

August 2, 2017 Kevin Rector, www.baltimoresun.com Educate! Baltimore, Drugs, Police abuse

By Kevin Rector for The Baltimore Sun - For the second time in as many weeks, Baltimore police body-camera video has emerged showing what defense attorneys say is officers planting drugs on a criminal defendant. Josh Insley, a local defense attorney, released the footage Tuesday, a day after the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office dropped all charges against his client based on concerns raised by the video. Insley said he believes the video shows officers “engage in what appears to be a staged recovery of narcotics,” and that he will be pursuing legal action against the police department. The video, which represents the latest in a string of controversial incidents for a police department confronting historic violent crime, is under investigation, police said. Insley’s client, Shamere Collins, 35, was arrested on Nov. 29, 2016 after police stopped her vehicle after observing a passenger conducting what officers believed was a drug deal, according to case records. After stopping the vehicle, police said they smelled marijuana, searched the car, and recovered heroin and marijuana. Charges were filed against Collins and the passenger. “Those drugs were not in that car when we were pulled out, the state dismissed the case against me and my attorneys are reviewing the tapes to see what steps to take next,” Collins said in a statement.

Drug Prosecutions Drop To Historic Lows Under Trump

August 1, 2017 Staff, www.trac.syr.edu Create! Drugs, Trump Administration

By Staff of Trac Reports - Despite widespread concern about an epidemic of opioid abuse, and announcements by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others of stepped of efforts by his department and the Trump administration to address it, federal criminal prosecutions for drug offenses have dropped to historic lows. "This epidemic of opioid abuse is a crisis," Sessions said in remarks at an opioid summit in May. "It's ravaging our communities, bringing crime and violence to our streets and destroying the lives of so many Americans." While acknowledging prevention is ultimately the key, Sessions said that "criminal enforcement is crucial[1]." The latest data from the Justice Department, current through June 2017, show that fewer drug offenders were federally prosecuted over the past 12 months than at any time during the last quarter century. According to the case-by-case records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, during the first five months of the Trump administration (February - June 2017), there were only 8,814 drug offenders federally prosecuted. This represents a drop of 9.0 percent as compared with the 9,687 federal criminal cases prosecuted during February - June 2016.

Ex-Cop Posing As Heroin Addict Wants Drugs Decriminalized

May 16, 2017 Kashmira Gander, www.independent.co.uk Educate! Decriminalization, Drugs

By Kashmira Gander for Independent UK - For 14 years, Neil Woods risked his life as a drug squad police officer posing undercover as a heroin and crack addict. As among the first of his kind in the UK, he helped to establish tactics and training to infiltrate the most notorious and violent drug gangs across the country. In over a decade, he had completed operations in areas including Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Leeds and Brighton. But despite his efforts, he gradually realised his work was only making the situation worse. Criminals were becoming more brutal as they wised up to police strategies. Drug-related deaths were climbing and drugs were becoming stronger and more readily available. To Woods, the war on drugs had failed. Determined to undo the damage he'd done as an officer - which caused him to suffer from PTSD - he launched Law Enforcement Against Prohibitions (Leap) in the UK. Founded in the US, the organisation brings together former members of the criminal justice system, including ex-MI5 staff and the authorities in Afghanistan who have seen how the black market funds terrorism. The Independent spoke to Woods about his most extreme experiences as a drug squad cop, and why he believes politicians need to decriminalise drugs.

Massachusetts: 21,000 Drug Cases Could Be Dismissed

April 22, 2017 Staff, www.aljazeera.com Educate! ACLU, Drugs, Massachusetts

By Staff of Al Jazeera - More than 21,000 convicted drug offenders in the US state of Massachusetts may have their cases dismissed because a former police chemist tampered with evidence and falsified tests. If the cases are thrown out, the event would mark the largest dismissal of criminal convictions in UShistory, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts. The state's highest court had ordered district attorneys in seven counties to produce lists by Tuesday indicating how many of approximately 24,000 cases involving Annie Dookhan they would be unable or unwilling to prosecute if the defendants were granted new trials. The cases would be formally dismissed by court action, expected on Thursday, the ACLU said. "Today is a major victory for justice and fairness, and for thousands of people in the commonwealth who were unfairly convicted of drug offences," Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said on Tuesday. An investigation in 2013 found that Dookhan falsified test results as far back as 2004.

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