I’m telling you, you can’t make this stuff up!
Tag: war on drugs
Looking back from the future
“Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering,” says Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Washington Post. Thinking of that, Pete Guitherobserves: I think it’s clear that the drug war is one of those travesties that will be reviled in some way by future generations. How is uncertain. Will…
Good news in (ending) the war on drugs
From the UK’s Observer (sister paper of The Guardian). One. Two. And three articles about the war on drugs, or lack thereof, in Portugal. Excerpts: Drugs have not only been decriminalised for almost a decade, but users are treated as though they have a health and social problem. … Nor has it seen its addict population markedly increase. Rather it…
News Bueno or News Malo?
You want the good news or the bad news? Good news! “Mexico arrests drug trafficker Edgar ‘Barbie’ Valdez.” Pop the corks! But I wasn’t even going to post on that cause who the f*ck cares? It’s not like it will change anything or win the war on drugs. From the NYT: Mr. Valdez, who was born in Laredo, Tex., faces…
L.V. F-Up
Now I wasn’t there, but as I understand it… A pothead and occasional seller in Las Vegas, let’s call him “Vegas Cole,” is sitting with his pregnant fiance on a Friday night watching TV. Police bust down the door and shoot and kill him. Just another day in the drug war, right? Police did find a small amount a weed,…
$4.9 million for the estate of Kathryn Johnston
Four years after it happened. One of the worst happenings in the War on Drugs.
ICE Agent Almost Gets It
The key to combating [Mexican Drug Cartels], said Alonzo R. Pena, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy assistant secretary for operations said, is to go after their money — money used to corrupt officials and to buy weapons. William J. Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said “We have to get to…
Meanwhile, Mutiny in Juárez
“A bunch of angry, fed-up federal police in Juárez launched a mini-rebellion against some of their commanders Saturday, accusing them of corruption…. The bottom line is that nothing seems to be able to stop or even lessen the violence in Juárez.” So says the El Paso Times, just across the border, in the peaceful twin city of El Paso. Probably,…
“Presidente Fox? There are men here to see you”
The crack research-librarian staff here at Copinthehood Incorporated (aka, my wife) reminds me that President Vicente Fox tried to do something about drug legalization as president but then backed down under US pressure. Indeed, I dug through the basement archives here in at 1 Copinthehood Plaza and dusted this off from the L.A. Times on May 3, 2006: Mexican President…
Legalize Drugs, Says Former Mexican President
Reuters reports: “Legalization does not mean that drugs are good … but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs) as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits,” Fox wrote in a posting over the weekend. “Radical prohibition strategies have never worked.” Newsweek adds: Fox, a…