Weed to the Rescue in the Budget Crisis?

Congress Should Stop Blowing Smoke
by LINN WASHINGTON JR.


Imagine U.S. House Speaker John Boehner blasted on weed.

Given Boehner’s teary-eyed trait, he’d probably cry uncontrollably when high on pot alternating his crocodile tears with hysterical laughter…perhaps even laughing at some of that dumb shi-tuff he and his GOP colleagues constantly do on Capitol Hill.

With Boehner and his GOP congressional confederates battling the Obama White House over federal budget expenditures and debt ceiling limits, there could be value in putting pot legalization into this partisan wrangling if Boehner is honest when claiming these fiscal imbroglios are really about federal government expenditures exceeding revenue.

Putting an end to the federal government’s failed pot prohibition policies, now nearing the eighty-year mark, would provide tremendous sources of new revenue. The federal government could save the estimated $10-billion-plus now spent annually on just law enforcement. The federal government could reap additional billions from taxing what experts estimate is the now untaxed $113-billion per year illegal marijuana industry. Plus ending prohibition would save millions now spent on the anti-pot propaganda oozing from government agencies.

A prime example of the money wasted by the federal government on enforcement efforts is evident in the September 2012 invasion of a predominately Latino community in Santa Rosa, CA by dozens of combat-clad/assault-rifle-armed agents from Homeland Security, the FBI and the DEA. That massive raid, also involving state and local cops, did net a stack of just pot plants but some of those plants were lawfully grown under provisions of California’s state approved medical marijuana law. That invasion, however, did accomplish a mission to terrorize that community including the spectacle of handcuffing mothers in front of their young children.

Yes, the Latino community site of the raid evidenced the racially discriminatory targeting embedded in America’s War on Weed. Other evidence of racism in pot prohibition is evident in blacks being arrested for pot possession in the county encompassing Santa Rosa in excess of twice their percentage of that county’s population according to a 2010 study conducted for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Drug warriors and others quickly dismiss charges of racially discriminatory practices but is it just mere coincidence that of the 3,709 pot possession arrests in Philadelphia, Pa during 2012, only 629 whites were arrested compared to 3,052 blacks? More than 600 whites smoke pot daily on just college campuses in Philadelphia.

This year, as thousands of federal government employees endured having their paychecks slashed by the bi-partisan boondoggle called Sequestration, the National Park Service in Philadelphia wasted money paying park rangers and other police overtime specifically to arrest pot legalization activists who smoke marijuana during monthly protests near the iconic Liberty Bell. And adding insult to the insanity of wasting money arresting peaceful pro-pot protestors, federal prosecutors want to send two of those arrested activists to prison for six months each.

This vengeful antic by federal prosecutors sending ‘a message’ to prohibition opponents will snatch over $28,000 in just jail-cell costs from federal coffers that Boehner-&-Company claim is too empty to fund food stamps for hungry children.

Ending pot prohibition would end the need for expensive anti-pot propaganda from the federal government that still touts discredited rationales initially fashioned by federal anti-drug warriors in the late 1930s.

President Obama’s Office of National Drug Control Policy still contends that use of cannabis causes “cognitive impairment” – propaganda belied by the personal/professional accomplishments of Obama himself. The president admits that he smoked marijuana as a teen and that cannabis consumption didn’t impede him from graduating from two Ivy League institutions including Harvard’s Law School. If marijuana is as mentally destructive as ONDCP contends Obama could have never made it to the Oval Office.

Officials across America have historically exaggerated the so-called ‘pot problem’ ignoring solid evidence that pot is benign and is not a ‘gateway’ drug to harder drug addition. Do some people get whacked-out on weed? Yes! But some people get whacked-out on religion. And some get whacked-out on politics. Remember the craziness radiating from Capitol Hill is not caused by conservatives smoking Whacky-Weed.

A few years after the federal government’s formal prohibition of pot in 1937 the mayor of New York City ordered an extensive examination into the alleged pot problem in his city. That multi-layered examination spanning over four years reached conclusions that contradicted alarmist claims of federal pot police. The fed’s top cannabis cop, Harry “Reefer Madness” Anslinger, indignantly dismissed that NYC study as “unscientific” despite it having been conducted by the New York Academy of Medicine, hardly a cabal of cannabis consumers.

With federal, state and local governments in desperate need of new revenues legalizing pot would clearly offer a good source of currently untapped income. The legalization of medical marijuana in 19 states so far has produced tax revenues for governments while stimulating employment and other economic benefits.

Santa Rosa, the site of that September 2012 pot raid, is the seat of Sonoma County, a jurisdiction providing examples that stupid spending priorities are not exclusive to Capitol Hill.

Many Sonoma County residents wanted to tap that jurisdiction’s contingency fund to restore full-day operating hours in its century old public library system. County officials had cut library hours to shave expenditures, a policy stance that penalizes children heavily. Yet, the same Sonoma County Board of Supervisors that defiantly refused to use contingency funds to restore library hours quickly approved using $240,000 from that fund to retain a marijuana eradication officer when federal funding for that anti-pot position was eliminated.

Legalizing and taxing marijuana will not eliminate the federal budget deficit but it will end the absurdity of ruining lives with arrests for simple pot possession like the 658,231 persons nabbed nationwide in 2012 according to recently released FBI statistics.

Drug Agents Have an NSA-Style Spying Problem

Thursday, September 5, 2013 by ACLU Blog
by Ezekial Edwards

Over the last few months, we've been bombarded with revelation after revelation about the NSA's unprecedented spying on Americans. But, according to The New York Times, the NSA's untethered snooping is eclipsed by the agents fighting in a war that began long before 9/11: the costly and failed War on Drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration's secret Hemisphere Project, news of which broke this week, allows drug law enforcement agencies broad access to billions of AT&T phone records going back a quarter century—to 1987. As The New York Times explained, "the scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.'s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act."

Our government's mass telephonic data-mining has sparked immense and deserved outrage. But to those who have been targeted by the War on Drugs for the last several decades, the Hemisphere Project is only one in a long line of privacy-invading tactics employed by the U.S. government. Many other intrusions – such as the thousands of unconstitutional stops-and-frisks of people of color in cities across the country, the countless doors kicked in by police in search of drugs, the seizure and forfeiture of property of people never convicted of a crime – are representative of the kinds of common corporal intrusions that have been endured by many Americans, disproportionately of color, long before many post 9/11-era invasions of privacy became commonplace for all Americans.

Further, since 9/11, there has been an increasingly entrenched relationship between overreaching national security programs and domestic drug law enforcement policies. Each has fed on the other: the long-running drug war provided useful surveillance blueprints for the massive domestic spying programs that have sprouted up since 9/11. At the same time, domestic drug law enforcement agencies have seized upon the dismantling of basic constitutional protections over the past decade – in the name of national security – and pointed the resulting weapons toward America's own citizens.

It should not surprise us then that the Hemisphere Project is only the latest disclosure of mission creep.

We found out last month that the DEA secretly uses NSA surveillance data against Americans as part of its drug investigations – and then conceals its reliance on this foreign intelligence information. This practice jeopardizes the right to a fair trial for anyone facing criminal prosecution based on evidence derived from that surveillance data.

Or consider "sneak and peek" warrants, in which law enforcement enters a home or office when no one is present and conducts a search of the premises, without giving notice to the occupant beforehand. Provisions allowing for these warrants were included in the Patriot Act after government officials said they are necessary to fight terrorism, but 76% of "sneak and peeks" were used in drug investigations in 2010. (And that is no anomaly: from 2006-2009, 1,618 sneak and peek warrants were used in drug cases, 22 in fraud cases, and 15 in terrorism investigations). Further, the use of GPS tracking devices, aerial surveillance, and the militarization of police – often justified by national security needs – are instead often coopted as highly destructive components of our domestic drug war.

In keeping with the clandestine nature of our government's various spying programs, the DEA had delineated a series of steps to "keep the program under the radar" by instructing "all requestors … to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document" and "‘walling off' the information the government obtains from Hemisphere." This is all in the name of enforcing drug prohibition, a 40-year failure that has cost billions, led to the unnecessary incarceration of millions of Americans, and failed to make a significant dent in the use, availability, or potency of drugs.

Why has the DEA kept this surreptitious surveillance program in the shadows? Because, as with so many of government surveillance programs, Hemisphere raises serious constitutional questions. There is a strong argument that it is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the government to outsource the automatic collection and storage of millions of Americans' phone records without any individualized suspicion and without court approval or oversight—simply so that law enforcement agencies have easy and immediate access in the future. Like the N.S.A.'s mass call-tracking program, such extensive and unlimited data gathering, particularly reaching back decades, allows the government to construct incredibly detailed and invasive pictures of our past and present lives.

Simply put, under the tired guise of protecting Americans from drugs, the U.S. government has secretly targeted and invaded the life and privacy of millions of its own citizens. The U.S. should be ending the War on Drugs, not expanding it by secretly outsourcing widespread surveillance.

The Will of the People Doesn’t Mean Jack Shit to the Drug Warriors

Gangsters With Federal Pensions
by DAVE HUMMELS


The Associated Press reports that eight former DEA administrators are urging the Obama administration to sue Washington and Colorado over their voter-approved moves toward marijuana legalization.

One former chief, Peter Bensinger, fears that successful legalization efforts will lead to “a domino effect” in the US. Where have we heard that phrase before? Bensinger continues breathlessly, “My fear is that the Justice Department will do what they are doing now: do nothing and say nothing … If they don’t act now, these laws will be fully implemented in a matter of months.”

So drug warriors are losing their minds over Colorado and Washington. Good! We can only hope that Bensinger’s dire predictions come true and that more Americans are indeed waking up to the absurdity of marijuana prohibition.

The former DEA bureaucrats argue, accurately, that marijuana remains illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. Even in cases involving medical marijuana, the federal government may abuse the commerce clause as a rationale to criminalize users, growers and sellers of marijuana (per Gonzales v. Raich). The commerce clause has become the federal government’s drug war equivalent of catch-all disorderly conduct statutes in the states.

Unfortunately, these goons have a solid case to present to US Attorney General Holder. In New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), US Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis said, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” But today’s political class views federalism as archaic.

Hopefully the administration will choose to ignore this thuggish recommendation. But if they do decide to litigate, this will be another sign that the feds don’t give a damn about the will of the people. Liberty-loving Americans should respond to this federal intrusion with a massive wave of civil disobedience.
Let’s start by publicly shaming the DEA heads mentioned by the AP: “Bensinger, John Bartels, Robert Bonner, Thomas Constantine, Asa Hutchinson, John Lawn, Donnie Marshall and Francis Mullen.” Get to know their names, libertarians. They are your enemies!

Then, let’s publicize the efforts of these authoritarians to undermine the voters of Colorado and Washington. Ask them why they continue to support a policy with openly racist origins which has resulted in mass incarceration. Publicly reveal the motives of the police agencies that enforce these laws . When drug warriors drone on about “protecting the children,” confront them with the horrific reality of wrong door raids, slaughtered family pets and children terrorized with flash-bangs. Wherever an apologist for prohibition gives a speech or attends a meeting, he or she should be met by throngs of boisterous picketers.

As we expose these petty tyrants, we should also seek opportunities to throw a wrench into the machinery of prohibition. A mass movement of jury nullification in drug cases may be a promising tactic. Prosecutors can use voir dire to remove one or two questionable jurors, but what if nullification becomes widespread? They can’t remove all of us. In the future, we should view jury duty as a chance to liberate non-violent people from the state’s clutches.

In Tao Te Ching, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu writes, “The more laws are posted, the more robbers and thieves there are.” Time and time again, this observation has been proven correct. The violence of the drug war is perpetuated by government, yet officials insist they must keep fighting. In their vile attempt to protect their old turf, former DEA bosses show their true colors. They are gangsters with federal pensions. They will do anything to ensure that they and their ilk continue to get their cut of drug war booty. It is up to us to expose their racket and to finish the job sensible voters in Colorado and Washington started in November.

US drugs prosecutors switch sides to defend accused Colombian traffickers

After working to take down cartels, former officials say America's 'war on drugs' is misguided and the human cost too high
Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
The Guardian, Wednesday 27 February 2013


US prosecutors and other senior officials who spearheaded the war against drug cartels have quit their jobs to defend Colombian cocaine traffickers, saying their clients are not bad people and that United States drug policy is wrong.

Senior former assistant US attorneys and Drug Enforcement Administration agents are turning years of experience in investigating, indicting and extraditing narcos to the advantage of the alleged traffickers they now represent.

"I'm not embarrassed about the fact that I changed sides," said Robert Feitel, a Washington-based attorney who used to pursue traffickers and money launderers at the Department of Justice. "And I'm not shy about saying that no one knows better how a prosecutor thinks. That's what people get when they come to me. There are lots of hidden things to know about these cases."

The fence-jumpers include Bonnie Klapper, who was feted for taking down the Norte del Valle cartel, Leo Arreguin, who headed the DEA's office in Bogota, and reportedly former members of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Ice. They work in separate legal practices with their own clients, not as a group.

In interviews with the Guardian, Feitel and Klapper spoke of recognising the humanity of their clients and called for alternatives to a four-decade-old "war on drugs" which costs billions of dollars and incarcerates thousands.

Feitel (pictured) called for cocaine and cannabis to be legalised and complained that extradited drug suspects were treated worse than Guantanamo Bay detainees. "I don't think I could ever be a prosecutor again. The human drama that I see on this side is sometimes more than I can bear."

The sight of high-profile former US officials visiting clients in Colombian and US jails has astonished observers in Colombia – which has long followed Washington's lead on drugs – but passed largely unnoticed in the US.

Last December Arreguin, who was director of the DEA in Colombia from 1998 – 2003, tried to visit the alleged drug lord Diego Pérez, alias Diego Rastrojo, at his jail in Giron, Santander, but was turned away because he lacked permission, local media reported. Rastrojo, a former member of the Farc, is accused of commanding 800 hitmen and smuggling tonnes of cocaine. Contacted at his home in Virginia, Arreguin declined to be interviewed: "I have nothing to say."

Feitel, who worked closely with the Department of Justice's Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs Section until retiring from public service in 2009, said he grew frustrated with official bungling in drug-related cases. "I realised I no longer wanted to be part of this process. It was time to go. After 22 years, enough."

He became a defence lawyer, started learning Spanish and uses his expertise to represent around two dozen Colombian clients from a DC-based office. "It's hard to defend a Colombian on drugs trafficking if you don't understand the predicate of how drugs trafficking currently works in Colombia."

With Colombia's justice system geared towards extradition suspects face intense pressure to trade information for a deal with US authorities before fellow arrestees do the same. "You can try to head off your problem by trying to hire a US lawyer and get ahead of the curve so to speak."

Traffickers' lawyers usually trade reduced sentences for information, but Feitel said he liked to fight cases if justified on merit. "Otherwise I'm just like everyone else. But I'm not because I was a prosecutor for so long." He occasionally teams up with his wife, a defence attorney, and another colleague at a different firm. "We are fighters for our clients, we don't just say to the government, OK, you can have it your way. I'm not in it for the theory, I'm in it to win. "

Often government cases, when analysed, proved weak, he said. "My job is to try to maximise the ability of my clients to cooperate, if that's what they want. And if they want to fight, then my job is to fight every single step once they come to the United States."

He fought "tooth and nail" for Ramiro Anturi, a Colombian prosecutor accused of leaking information to traffickers. Anturi received an unexpectedly light sentence – 55 months despite the DEA trumpeting the case as evidence it would "not tolerate any acts that put our agents' lives in jeopardy".

Feitel said he was shaken by the "trauma" of suspects who were extradited to the US speaking no English, with no visits from relatives denied visas. "They have no one to hug them. There is a lot of human anguish that I had not previously seen. I've had clients whose parents have died while they've been in jail. It's a pretty terrible fate to be extradited. While it might be defensible to do it to the leaders I don't think it's defensible to do it to the rank and file traffickers in Colombia. I find it really troubling."

He said the US system punished traffickers not according to their importance but the quantity of drugs, meaning a truck driver nabbed with a big consignment could face a longer stretch than a capo caught with a lesser amount. The practise of squeezing information and sending traffickers back to Colombia after their sentence, Feitel said, left them vulnerable to revenge. "Sooner or later someone is going to get killed and that will deter others from talking."

He said most of his clients had no history of violence but that even those implicated in kidnapping and murder were entitled to a defence. "I don't represent people I don't like. So I like all my clients." The former prosecutor said he had some regrets about his previous career. "I try to grow with what I do. I think I would change certain things that I did."

Former colleagues respected him for his honesty even though now they were on opposite sides, he said. "When we disagree, we do it like professionals. Agents are pretty savvy; they know when there are weaknesses in their case."

As an assistant US attorney Bonnie Klapper, working from New York, earned a high profile in helping to dismantle the Norte del Valle cartel, a role publicised in the books The Takedown, by Jeffrey Robinson, and El Cartel de los Sapos, by Andres Lopez Lopez, a best-seller in Colombia which was turned into a telenovela and a film.

Klapper (pictured) retired from public service last February after 26 years and went into private practice with offices in New York and Miami. Two months later Colombian media reported her visiting La Picota jail in Bogota to see Andrés Arroyave, alias Máquina, a 25-year-old alleged drug lord accused of killing a lawyer and a DEA informant, among others, in revenge for his father's murder. He has a reported $100m fortune.

In an email interview Kappler said she stopped being an assistant US attorney because of long commutes, threats to her life and meddling supervisors. "I don't see that I have moved from one side of the fence to the other. As an AUSA, I never felt it was my job to obtain the harshest sentence; I always felt that my mission was to see that justice was done. I feel the same about my role now. The system only works when there are hard-working, honest people with integrity on both the government and the defense side."

Former colleagues supported her switch, she said. "In fact, those with whom I worked previously are happy to see me on the other side, as they know they can trust me and I will capably represent my clients. The few negative comments I have heard have been either from agents (not AUSAs) who did not know me before."

Unlike Feitel, Klapper said her new role had not really changed her perspective. "As a prosecutor, while I did prosecute a number of very bad, violent individuals, the vast majority … were good people who made bad choices."

For the people she once pursued, and those she now defended, trafficking was a family business and route out of poverty, she said. "I have always felt that it was unfair of our government to place all of the onus on Colombians or Mexicans or Central Americans when the demand for the drugs comes from our own country."

Klapper called for "more innovative solutions" to replace the drug war's "endless cycle of arrests, prosecutions and convictions, where there is always someone waiting in the wings to take the place of the last individual convicted".

Feitel was more emphatic in calling the drug war a failure, saying decades of effort, billions of dollars and countless lives had made no appreciable difference to the quantity of drugs on American streets. He urged federal authorities to legalise and regulate cannabis and cocaine. "And I say that even though it would be bad for my business."

Retired Judge Reveals the Surprising Rationale for America's Extremist Drug Laws

From 1875 to the present, our country has been hell bent on prohibiton.

By Frederic Block - Alternet - January 9, 2013


What follows is an excerpt from Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge (Thomson Reuters Westlaw 2012), a book where the author tries to explain life on the bench and the unknown parts of our legal system.

The first anti-drug law in our country was a local law in San Francisco passed in 1875. It outlawed the smoking of opium and was directed at the Chinese because opium smoking was a peculiarly Chinese habit. It was believed that Chinese men were luring white women to have sex in opium dens. In 1909 Congress made opium smoking a federal offense by enacting the Anti-Opium Act. It reinforced Chinese racism by carving out an exception for drinking and injecting tinctures of opiates that were popular among whites.

Cocaine regulations also were triggered by racial prejudice. Cocaine use was associated with blacks just as opium use was associated with the Chinese. Newspaper articles bore racially charged headlines linking cocaine with violent, anti-social behavior by blacks. A 1914 New York Times article proclaimed: "Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are a New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to 'Sniffing.'" A Literary Digest article from the same year claimed that "most of the attacks upon women in the South are the direct result of the cocaine-crazed Negro brain." It comes as no surprise that 1914 was also the year Congress passed the Harrison Tax Act, effectively outlawing opium and cocaine.

Marijuana prohibition also had racist underpinnings. This time it was the Mexicans. Just as cocaine was associated with black violence and irrational behavior, in the southwest border towns marijuana was viewed -- beginning in the early 1920s -- as a cause of Mexican lawlessness. A Texas police captain suggested that marijuana gave Mexicans superhuman strength to commit acts of violence:

Under marijuana Mexicans [become] very violent, especially when they become angry and will attack an officer even if a gun is drawn on him. They seem to have no fear. I have also noted that under the influence of this weed they have enormous strength and it will take several men to handle one man while, under ordinary circumstances, one man could handle him with ease.

The American Coalition -- an anti-immigrant group -- claimed as recently as 1980 [5]: "Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious of narcotics, is a direct byproduct of unrestricted Mexican immigration."

The racial fallout from our drug laws has persevered. In her article, The Discrimination Inherent in America's Drug War  Kathleen R. Sandy reported in 2003 that black Americans then constituted approximately 12 percent of our country's population and 13 percent of drug users. Nevertheless, they accounted for 33 percent of all drug-related arrests, 62 percent of drug-related convictions and 70 percent of drug-related incarcerations.

The country's concerted crackdown on drugs -- and the imposition of increasingly harsh punishment for illicit usage, importation, and distribution -- probably owes its genesis to the appointment in 1930 of Harry Anslinger as the commissioner of the newly created United States Narcotics Bureau. He started a media campaign to classify marijuana as a dangerous drug. For example, he wrote a major article titled "Marihuana, the Assassin of Youth [7]." It was rife with accusations that marijuana was responsible for encouraging murder, suicide, and insanity. Anslinger's campaign was wildly successful. Before he took office only four states had enacted prohibitions against non medical usage of marijuana--California (1915), Texas (1919), Louisiana (1924), and New York (1927) -- but by 1937 46 of the nation's then 48 states had banned marijuana.

Since then Congress has enacted a spate of comprehensive anti-drug laws with strict penalties. For example, today one can be sentenced to life for distributing one kilogram of heroin; 40 years for distributing 100 grams, and 20 years for distributing any quantity at all. Nevertheless, this has not stemmed the country's appetite for illicit drugs in spite of every administration's continued "war on drugs" since President Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1972, which has grown through the years to a staff of almost 10,000 employees and a budget of $2 billion.

According to data from the 2010 National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, almost 120 million Americans 12 or older -- roughly 47 percent of that population -- reported illicit drug use at least once in their lifetime; 15.3 percent admitted to using an illegal drug in the prior year; and 8.9 percent -- roughly 23 million people -- did it within the prior month. The New York Times recently reported that one out of every 15 high school students smokes marijuana on a near daily basis.

When it comes to sentencing, the main culprit is drugs. About half of the roughly 220,000 criminals in the federal prisons have either brought them into our country, have distributed them here, or have otherwise associated themselves with this illicit activity. This means that probably half of the $6.8 billion of the Bureau of Prisons budget is eaten up by incarcerating the criminal druggies. Half of the prison population is there because of drugs, costing us billions of dollars a year to keep them in jail.

Big Banks and Drug Money

Apologize Then Call it a Day
by HELEN REDMOND

The illicit drug trade relies heavily on money laundering because it is almost exclusively a cash business. Drug interdiction, while an essential component of attacking the illicit drug trade cannot, standing alone, reverse the tide of illicit drugs. Combating money laundering, combined with strong interdiction efforts, offers a more effective law enforcement response.
- Money Laundering in Florida: Report of the Legislative Task Force, 1999

Stuart Gulliver, the Chief Executive of the London-based international banking giant HSBC said: “We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them and we do so again… What happened in Mexico and the US is shameful, it’s embarrassing, it’s very painful for all of us in the firm…The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes.”

What was Mr. Gulliver apologizing for and was he sincere? His bank got caught laundering tons of cash for drug cartels and alleged terrorists. That is a crime.

Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice (DOJ) explained at a press conference, “HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight – and worse – that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries… The record of dysfunction that prevailed at HSBC for many years was astonishing.”

U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch added, “HSBC’s blatant failure to implement proper anti-money laundering controls facilitated the laundering of at least $881 million in drug proceeds through the U.S. financial system…”

As punishment, HSBC was assessed a fine of 1.9 billion — about four weeks’ worth of its pre-tax profits. No bank officials who were caught red-handed will be prosecuted or imprisoned.

Take responsibility, apologize, pay a fine for your drug crimes and then call it a day. Go home to family who will forgive you for doing business with so-called “narco-terrorists.” Prison time? Felony record? Asset forfeiture? No. Not for drug trafficking executives of laundromat/banks that are “too big to fail” or jail.

It is not so for those individuals and organizations that provide other, equally vital services to the $400 billion illicit drug trade. From the heads of Afghan drug cartels, to drug couriers like the Panamanian woman who had cocaine implanted in her breasts, to injection drug users in America’s needle parks, they will be demonized as purveyors of poison and death then punished severely. They won’t go home for a very long time, if ever.

The U.S. justice system will mete out life sentences without the possibility of parole or mandatory minimum sentences of decades to drug kingpins, mules and the drug addicted. Drug law offender’s lives behind bars will become a dystopia that the profits of the privatized correctional industries depend on.

The convicted will be disappeared in to twenty-first century concentration camps in remote, rural towns. Some prisoners will end up in solitary confinement and be driven mad. Their children will be orphaned and their families destroyed by shame, lack of visitation and communication.

Everything will be legally stolen from drug law violators. Cars, jewelry, family heirlooms, clothes, cash, homes and property will be seized and put up for sale to benefit various branches of law enforcement.

Check out the Asset Forfeiture Program at the DOJ website. You can bid on Rita A. Crundwell’s farmland in Dixon, Illinois. If you prefer a warmer climate, there is beachfront property for sale in the Dominican Republic.

Admitting guilt, apologizing, promising “fundamental” change and paying a financial penalty will not suffice for the poor, low hanging fruit convicted of drug crimes. They have to be taught a “tough love” lesson in zero tolerance, and this: “You do the crime, you do the time.”

This stripping the person of everything that connects them to society and to other human beings and locking them up in spaces smaller than a bathroom has to happen because as the Mission Statement of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) asserts, those involved in the drug trade are criminals who “…perpetrate violence in our communities and terrorize citizens through fear and intimidation.” The DEA and the DOJ’s unapologetic modus operandi in the forty-year long War on Drugs is, Lock ‘em up and throw away the key!

Except when the criminals are rich, well-connected bankers who wash drug trafficker’s dirty Benjamin Franklin’s clean. Tough on crime and the rule of law doesn’t apply to them.

DOJ attorneys argued that aggressively prosecuting HSBC could destabilize the entire international banking system. Breuer said in an interview with the Washington Post, “If you prosecute one of the largest banks in the world, do you risk that people will lose jobs, other financial institutions and other parties will leave the bank, and there will be some kind of event in the world economy?” In other words, banks that break the law by laundering money for drug cartels and rogue states are immune from criminal prosecution because a global financial meltdown could be triggered.

But that didn’t happen twenty-five years ago when the Bank of Credit and Commerce International Bank (BCCI) was prosecuted for laundering drug profits. Like HSBC, BCCI did business with an international cast of unsavory drug dealers and dictators. BCCI helped former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the Columbian Medellin cocaine cartel convert millions of dollars into pesos. An aggressive investigation led by Senator John Kerry and New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau concluded that BCCI was “one of the biggest criminal enterprises in world history.”

BCCI was indicted for money laundering, grand larceny and bribery. Bank branches were shut down in seven countries and restricted in dozens more. The criminals at BCCI were punished and effectively put out of business. They got drug war tough love and the world banking system didn’t crash.

The convictions almost didn’t happen. The Bush Administration only wanted a slap on the wrist for BCCI, but Kerry was apoplectic. He went on national television slamming the hypocrisy: “We send drug people to jail for the rest of their life, and these guys who are bankers in the corporate world seem to just walk away, and it’s business as usual…When banks engage knowingly in the laundering of money, they should be shut down. It’s that simple, it really is.”

That was in 1999. Where is Senator Kerry and the rest of Congress’s outrage for the career drug criminals at HSBC that facilitated the illegal deposit of millions of dollars packed into specially designed boxes that would fit through the bank’s teller windows in Mexico?

Why isn’t the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that accused HSBC of exposing the United States “financial system to money laundering and terrorist financing risks” and for violating the Trading With the Enemy Act screaming hysterically that those who fund “narco-terrorism” must be punished to keep America safe?

The most Congress could muster was a letter written by Rep. Barney Frank to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to reconsider the agreement with HSBC. A letter. Wow! That’s tough on crime?

How come the nation’s top drug warrior Michelle Leonhart, Administrator of the DEA, isn’t demanding that HSBC officials pay for their crimes? According to an investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), from 2006 to 2010 the bank laundered millions in profits for the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and the Norte Del Valle cartel in Columbia through the Black Market Peso Exchange (BMPE.)

And why isn’t Leonhart extraditing Gulliver and other senior bank executives to the United States to face drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges?

The DEA and the DOJ gloat in their ability to extradite or simply seize alleged drug kingpins from all over the world and bring them to the United States to stand trial – especially suspects from Afghanistan and Latin America. They’re not concerned about the impact that these extraditions will have on the international drug trade. The consequence is often an uptick in violence and murder as internecine fighting erupts to reconfigure drug markets.

The case of Haji Bagcho, a 70-year-old Afghan man convicted of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism reveals the double standard of the DEA and the DOJ when it comes to who they chose to criminally prosecute for drug crimes. Afghan drug traffickers are shown no leniency, are never offered sweetheart deals and are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Both Breuer and Leonhart expressed outrage and contempt for Bagcho’s alleged crimes. Breuer said, “Haji Bagcho led a massive drug production and trafficking operation that supplied heroin in more than 20 countries, including the United States. In 2006 alone, he conducted heroin transactions worth more than $250 million. Today’s life sentence is an appropriate punishment for one of the most notorious heroin traffickers in the world.”

Leonhart added with her usual bravado, “This is DEA at its finest, working in close collaboration with our Afghan partners to end the long reign of this Afghan drug lord whose drug proceeds financed terror. One of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers who helped fund the Taliban will spend his remaining days behind bars in a U.S. prison…”

Now imagine those words being hurled at Mr. Gulliver and his “massive” operation (HSBC has branches in 85 countries) “whose drug proceeds financed terror.” Imagine “notorious,” high-level HSBC officials spending their “remaining days behind bars in a U.S. prison.” Hard to imagine isn’t it?

But not for Afghans like Haji Bagcho or Haji Bashar who was also given a life sentence even though he cooperated with the DEA and the DOJ. And there’s Haji Juma Khan. He’s been held in solitary confinement awaiting trial since he was extradited to the United States in 2008. Incarcerating Bagcho, Bashar and Khan hasn’t weakened the Taliban or made a dent in the Afghan drug trade. Afghanistan retains its premier position as the number one grower of poppy and exporter of heroin to Central Asia and Europe. Moreover, Afghans are involved in the illicit drug trade out of economic necessity as are Mexicans, because the legal economies in both countries are in shambles. British bankers have no such reason – their motive is pure greed.

It is a mathematical certainty that as long as drugs are illegal, banks will continue to launder drug trafficker’s money. Superprofits are guaranteed and the financial penalties aren’t a deterrent.

The HSBC scandal shows how the illicit drug trade is completely integrated into the world financial system. I In the face of the enormous economic power of the global banking industry to circumvent anti-laundering regulations, winning the war on drugs is utterly futile.

The only solution is to legalize and regulate the sale of all drugs. It is an inescapable reality that heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana are global commodities that cross all borders. Millions of people buy drugs and making them illegal has never stopped the use or abuse of them.

Ending the war on drugs would not only save human lives and billions of dollars, it would free up law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute banks whose real crimes are far worse than laundering drug money.

Decriminalization of Drug Possession Doesn't Increase Drug Use, New Report Finds

Ernest Drucker - HuffPo
Posted: 07/07/2012


Drug "legalization" is no mystery. A new report shows that there are many alternatives to drug prohibition -- and all of them improve things.

Alcohol prohibition in the United States -- in place from 1920 to 1933-- was a national ban on the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol. Ending alcohol prohibition in 1933 required a new constitutional amendment, repealing the one that made alcohol illegal in the first place. Yet many people act as though creating alternatives to drug prohibition (drug legalization) would be like changing one of the 10 Commandments.

Just like ending alcohol prohibition, making the current crop of drugs legal simply means changing the laws.

But changing the laws has been turned into a bloody legal and political battle that is about everything except drugs. Instead of endless rhetoric and empty speculation about how and why it can't be done, we need to be talking about actual solutions.

Mexico, which just elected a new president, appears ready to do whatever it takes to put an end to the horrific violence of failed drug prohibition policy that has already caused over 60,000 murders.

In the United States, the rise of overdose deaths is increasingly from "legal" pharmaceuticals -- showing that the need to change how we regulate and control dangerous drugs is an urgent matter for us too.

What most Americans don't realize is that drug laws are now changing around the world -- step by step and country by country. And a new report concludes that decriminalization of drug possession has not led to increase in drug use.

The report, published by Release, the U.K.'s "national centre of expertise on drugs and drug laws," reviews the evidence in 21 countries that have adopted some form of decriminalization and finds that the model of enforcement adopted has little impact on the rates of drug use in these countries -- but has a profound impact on the use of arrest and prisons for drug users. (In fact, the huge social and economic costs that accompany drug prohibition are a form of violence in themselves.)

The report, "A Quiet Revolution: Drug Decriminalization Policies in Practice across the Globe", finds that "countries and States as disparate as Belgium, Estonia, Australia, Mexico, Uruguay, the Netherlands and Portugal have adopted different models of decriminalization." Some countries (Spain and the Netherlands) have been moving towards decriminalization since the 1970s -- with the result that their drug use rates are lower than in the United States.

It's time for the United States to shake its obsession with drug prohibition and join the successful global movement that is reducing the problems that come not from the drugs per se, which are amenable to smart and well tested medical and social policies, but to bad drug policies.

Government-sponsored study destroys DEA’s classification of marijuana

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story 

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

 

 

A government-sponsored study published this month in The Open Neurology Journal concludes that marijuana provides much-needed relief to some chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed, utterly destroying the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) classification of the drug as having no medical uses.

While numerous prior studies have shown marijuana’s usefulness for a host of medical conditions, none have ever gone directly at the DEA’s placement of marijuana atop the schedule of controlled substances. This study, sponsored by the State of California and conducted at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, does precisely that, driving a stake into the heart of America’s continued war on marijuana users by calling the Schedule I placement simply “not accurate” and “not tenable.”

Reacting to the study, Paul Armentano, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), told Raw Story that the study clearly proves U.S. drug policy “is neither based upon nor guided by science.”

“In fact, it is hostile to science,” he said. “And despite the Obama Administration’s well publicized 2009 memo stating, ‘Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration,’ there is little to no evidence indicating that the federal government’s ‘See no evil; hear no evil’ approach to cannabis policy is not changing any time soon.”

Schedule I is supposedly reserved for the most inebriating substances that have no medical value, like LSD, ecstasy, peyote and heroin. As the DEA describes it: “Drugs listed in schedule I have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States and, therefore, may not be prescribed, administered, or dispensed for medical use. In contrast, drugs listed in schedules II-V have some accepted medical use and may be prescribed, administered, or dispensed for medical use.”

And that’s the problem, the study’s authors portend.

“The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug as well as the continuing controversy as to whether or not cannabis is of medical value are obstacles to medical progress in this area,” they wrote. “Based on evidence currently available, the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that information on safety is lacking. It is true cannabis has some abuse potential, but its profile more closely resembles drugs in Schedule III (where codeine and dronabinol are listed). The continuing conflict between scientific evidence and political ideology will hopefully be reconciled in a judicious manner.”

They add that their evidence showed marijuana reliably reduced chronic neuropathic pain and muscle spasticity due to multiple sclerosis versus trials where a placebo was used. They also specifically tested marijuana’s effects when smoked, calling the delivery method “rapid and efficient” but noting that vaporization is a better choice because it produces less carbon monoxide.

The study adds that, like all medicines, there are negative side effects associated with marijuana, such as dizziness, fatigue, lightheadedness, muscle weakness and pain and heart palpitations — all of which can pose a risk in some chronic pain patients with co-occurring conditions like cardiovascular disease or substance abuse disorders. However, they call these side effects “dose-related” and “of mild to moderate severity,” adding that they “appear to decline over time, and are reported less frequently in experienced than in naïve users.”

Researchers also noted that “fatal overdose with cannabis alone has not been reported.”

Authors additionally found that marijuana does cause withdrawal symptoms within 12 hours of use, noting the symptoms are mild in experienced users and typically abate within 72 hours. They added that ingesting marijuana “can acutely impair skills required to drive motor vehicles,” but noted that the data on marijuana and traffic accidents is “inconclusive.”

Ultimately, they concluded that more clinical trials are needed to determine which individual components of the marijuana plant are causing the medicinal effects, and whether the plant can be used to treat a host of other ailments.

“Medical marijuana is mostly used for chronic pain, and has enabled countless patients to either reduce or eliminate their pharmaceutical drug regimen,” Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access (ASA), one of the nation’s leading medical marijuana advocacy groups, told Raw Story. “However, it can also be used for: arthritis, nausea or as an appetite stimulant for people living with HIV/AIDS or cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, and movement disorders (not just for people with multiple sclerosis). That is only a sampling of health conditions for which cannabis has been found helpful in alleviating symptoms. Other health conditions include: [post-traumatic stress disorder], [attention deficit disorder], [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and other mental health conditions, glaucoma, and migraines.”

In hopes of forcing recognition of marijuana’s medical value, ASA sued the federal government last year after a long-running appeal for the reclassification of marijuana was shot down nearly a decade after it was filed. That case should go before the U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit later this year.

“The federal government’s strategy has been delay, delay, delay,” ASA chief counsel Joe Elford said in an advisory. “It is far past time for the government to answer our rescheduling petition, but unfortunately we’ve been forced to go to court in order to get resolution.”

“Reform advocates can and should use this study to show their congressional representatives that our country’s leading medical marijuana researchers agree that it should be reclassified,” Hermes added. “…This certainly should also have a bearing on the D.C. Circuit’s deliberations in the appeal of the rescheduling petition denial.”

Medical marijuana is currently legal in just 17 states and Washington, D.C.

Why is the Obama Administration Suddenly Fixated on Stomping out Medical Pot?

At the same time public support for marijuana legalization reached record highs, Obama shifted from one time medicinal cannabis sympathizer to White House weed-whacker.
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
Posted on February 8, 2012

Broken promises are nothing new in Washington, DC. Yet even by the Beltway’s jaded standards, President Obama’s role reversal from one time medicinal cannabis sympathizer to White House weed-whacker is remarkable.

Indeed, the man who once pledged on the campaign trail that he was “not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” has – since taking the Presidential oaths of office – done virtually everything in his administration’s power to do precisely that. Yet he's taken these steps at the very time that a record number of Americans, including 57 percent of democrats and a whopping 69 percent of self-described liberals, endorse doing just the opposite.

Nonetheless, in recent months, the Obama administration – via a virtual alphabet soup of federal agencies – has launched an unprecedented series of attacks against medical cannabis patients, providers, and in some cases even their advocates.

To review:

-- Deputy Attorney General James Cole, along with the four US Attorneys from California, has ramped up federal efforts to close or displace several hundreds of medical cannabis providers in California. Their tactics have included: raiding specific dispensaries and prosecuting their owners; filing civil forfeiture proceedings against landlords who rent their property to medical marijuana providers; threatening to federally prosecute newspapers and radio stations who accept ad revenue from medical cannabis operations; and, most recently, intimidating local lawmakers who have either enacted or are publicly supportive of cannabis oversight regulations. Speaking with radio station KQED San Francisco last month, Tommy LaNier – Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's National Marijuana Initiative – boasted about the administration’s efforts to strong-arm local officials, stating "[We] have ... advised those places where they're trying to regulate marijuana -- which is illegal under the Control Substances Act -- (that) they cannot do that.” 

-- In Colorado, United States Attorney John Walsh has sent letters to owners of dozens of the Centennial State’s medical cannabis facilities stating, "Action will be taken to seize and forfeit their property" if they do not cease their operations. Unlike similarly targeted dispensaries in California, the operations on Walsh’s hit list are explicitly licensed by the state and thus fully compliant with state law – a fact that Walsh’s letters readily acknowledge but appear content to ignore. "This ... constitutes formal notice that action will be taken to seize and forfeit (your) property if you do not cause the sale and/or distribution of marijuana and marijuana-infused substances at (this) location to be discontinued,” they state. “[T]he Department of Justice has the authority to enforce federal law even when such activities may be permitted under state law.” Ironically, the Justice Department’s letters arrived just weeks after US Attorney General Eric Holder publicly told (read: lied to) Colorado Congressman Jared Polis, an ardent supporter of the medicinal cannabis industry, that that the federal government would only target medical cannabis operators that "use marijuana in a way that's not consistent with the state statute."

-- But the Obama Justice Department isn’t only sending letters to cannabis dispensaries owners and their landlords. Last year, the DOJ also mailed letters to numerous state lawmakers, including the Governors of Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, as they were debating legislation to allow for the licensed distribution of medical cannabis. The letters threatened federal prosecution for those involved with said efforts – including, in some cases, state civil servants – if the measures went forward. As a result, most didn’t.

The Justice Department isn’t the only agency directly involved in the administration’s medical pot crackdown. Also over the past six months:

-- The IRS has assessed crippling penalties on tax-paying medical cannabis facilities in California by denying these operations from filing standard expense deductions;

-- The Department of Treasury has strong-armed local banks and other financial institutions into closing their accounts with medicinal marijuana operators. In Colorado, where the state’s estimated 700 licensed cannabis dispensaries are routinely subjected to state audits, there no longer remains even a single bank willing to openly do business with med-pot operators.

-- The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms has sternly warned firearms dealers not to sell guns to medical cannabis consumers, and stated that patients who otherwise legally possess firearms are in violation of federal law and may face criminal prosecution; 

-- In July, the Drug Enforcement Administration rejected a nine-year-old administrative petition that called for hearings regarding the federal rescheduling of marijuana for medical use, ignoring extensive scientific evidence of its medical efficacy. “[T]here are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving (marijuana's) efficacy; the drug is not accepted by qualified experts,” the agency alleged. “At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.” 

-- This fall, the National Institute on Drug Abuse rejected an FDA-approved protocol to allow for clinical research assessing the use of cannabis to treat post-traumatic stress disorder; a spokesperson for the agency conceded, “We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana.” 

-- The DEA has reduced the total number of federally qualified investigators licensed to study plant marijuana in humans to 14 nationwide.

Most recently, and perhaps most egregiously, the DEA acknowledged that it was investigating a Montana state lawmaker for potentially conspiring to violate federal anti-marijuana laws. The lawmaker, Rep. Diane Sands – a Democrat from Billings, Montana – served as the chairwoman of a 2011 interim legislative committee that sought to enact statewide regulations governing the production and distribution of medical pot, which has been legal in the state since 2004. "Can you say McCarthy?” she told The Missoulian newspaper. “This sounds like stuff from the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy. So once you talk about medical marijuana in reasonable terms, you're on some sort of list of possible conspirators. … It's ridiculous, of course, but it's also threatening to think that the federal government is willing to use its influence and try to chill discussion about this subject."

* * *

So has the Obama administration collectively lost its mind when it comes to the subject of medical cannabis? That certainly seems to be the case. But the bigger question still remains: Why now?

Speculation among reformers and the general public is widespread. Many activists contend that the administration's about face is due to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, which they surmise may be hoping to eliminate competition in the marketplace for their own forthcoming, soon-to-be FDA-approved cannabis-based drug.

Others believe that Obama’s crackdown is a Machiavellian attempt on the part of the President and his advisors to appeal to independent, conservative-leaning swing voters during an election year.

Still others argue that the recent attacks have little to do with President Obama at all. Instead, they believe the efforts of the DEA, DOJ, and other federal agencies are being coordinated primarily by drug war hawks within the administration, many of whom are holdovers from the George W. Bush regime, such as DEA administrator Michele Leonhart. Adding weight to this claim are recent statements from US Attorney Andre Birotte, who acknowledged that the DOJ’s recent activities were led by the federal prosecutors themselves and were not instigated by either President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder – both of which are engaged in their own personal battles for political survival and, as a result, are unlikely to expend even a shred of political capital to halt the efforts of the administration’s more ardent drug warriors.

There may be a grain of truth in all of the above theories. But perhaps the greatest underlying motivator for the administration’s sudden and severe crackdown on medical marijuana providers and patients is its desire to preserve America’s longstanding criminalization of cannabis for everyone else. There is little doubt that the rapid rise of the medical marijuana industry and the legal commerce inherent to it is arguably the single biggest threat to federal cannabis prohibition. Just look at the poll numbers. According to Gallup, in 1996 – when California became the first state to allow for the legally sanctioned use of cannabis therapy – only 25 percent of Americans backed legalizing marijuana for all adults. (Seventy-three percent of respondents at that time said they opposed the idea.) Fast forward to 2011. Today, a record high 50 percent of Americans support legalizing the plant outright and only 46 percent of respondents oppose doing so. It’s this rapid rise in the public’s support for overall legalization that no doubt has the Obama administration, and the majority of America’s elected officials, running scared.

While the passage and enactment of statewide medical marijuana laws – 16 states and the District of Columbia now have laws recognizing marijuana’s therapeutic use on the books – is not solely driving the public’s shift in support for broader legalization, it is arguably a major factor. Why? The answer is simple. Tens of millions of Americans residing in these states are learning, first hand, that they can coexist with marijuana being legal! And that is the lesson the federal government fears most.

In states like California and Colorado, voters have largely become accustomed to the reality that there can be safe, secure, well-run businesses that deliver consistent, reliable, tested cannabis products. They have come to understand that well-regulated cannabis dispensaries can revitalize sagging economies, provide jobs, and contribute taxes to budget-starved localities. Most importantly, the public in these states and others are finally realizing that all the years of scaremongering by the government about what would happen if marijuana were legal, even for sick people, was nothing but hysterical propaganda. As a result, a majority of American voters are now for the first time asking their federal officials: ‘Why we don’t just legalize marijuana for everyone in a similarly responsible manner?’

That is a question the President remains unable and unwilling to answer. And the administration appears willing to go to any lengths to avoid it.

Colorado asks DEA to recognize marijuana’s medical value

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Thursday, December 29, 2011

 

The state of Colorado has become the third in the nation to formally ask the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to reclassify marijuana in such a manner that would recognize its potential for medical value, similar to drugs like morphine and cocaine.

The letter, sent just before Christmas by Colorado’s Department of Revenue, was required by a law passed in 2010 that set up a state regulatory framework for medical marijuana. The law required the state to petition the DEA for reclassification of the drug before Jan. 1, 2012.

Current federal prohibitions mean “[there] is a lack of certainty necessary to provide safe access for patients with serious medical conditions,” director Barbara Brohl wrote.

The state became the first in the nation earlier this year to begin licensing businesses that sell marijuana and products containing the drug, a move that potentially puts them at odds with federal officials.

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice has made a practice of not prosecuting medical marijuana patients in states where the drug has been approved, but it still considers distributors to be fair game for arrest.

Colorado also allows people who’ve been given a doctor’s recommendation for marijuana to grow their own plants inside their home.

The governors of Rhode Island and Washington have also petitioned the DEA to change marijuana’s classification from Schedule I to Schedule II, more commonly reserved for addictive drugs that have clearly defined medical uses.

Marijuana is known to be helpful to cancer patients grappling with nausea from chemotherapy, AIDS patients with wasting syndrome and people with chronic pain. It also has been shown to reduce the size of certain brain and breast tumors.

Many pharmaceutical companies are also seeking patents on cannabis-based drugs that aim to solve dozens of different medical problems, including a drug that can kill cancerous tumors.

The Obama White House, as well, has admitted that “individual components of the cannabis plant” have at least “some” medical value, but the DEA remains steadfast in opposing any reclassification of the substance.

Obama Is Attacking the Perfectly Legal Medical Marijuana Industry

With storefront dispensaries popping up across the country, the Obama Administration is fighting the burgeoning industry. 

By Ted Cox, AlterNet
Posted on October 27, 2011

At the moment 16 states and Washington DC have legalized medical cannabis, providing safe access to patients, creating thousands of jobs and pumping millions of dollars in tax revenue into struggling state and local economies. Some of those state and local governments are working with their medical cannabis providers to adopt common-sense regulations and to cut down the potential for abuse -- with varying degrees of success.

But under the federal Controlled Substance Act, cannabis is a Schedule I substance -- right along with heroin, ecstasy and LSD -- and still illegal. The feds are concerned that medical cannabis is making its way onto the black market, that dispensaries are generating obscene profits and that cannabis providers are targeting children in ads.

Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden issued a memorandum in October 2009 saying the Justice Department was unlikely to go after cannabis patients, but that "prosecution of commercial enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana for profit continues to be an enforcement priority of the department." But recent months have seen a strong push-back by the federal government. With storefront dispensaries popping up across the country, and medical cannabis expected to grow to a $1.7 billion industry, here are four ways the federal government is fighting the burgeoning industry.

1) Land seizure
The big announcement that has everyone hunkered down is that U.S. attorneys in California have threatened to seize land that is rented or leased to dispensaries.

Four U.S. attorneys have already sent letters threatening to seize land leased to cannabis clubs. Letters have so far gone out to landlords in Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego and Marin, giving them 45 days to kick out any medical marijuana operations. The feds seem to be targeting larger clubs and those operating within 1,000 feet of schools.

"Marijuana stores operating in proximity to schools, parks and other areas where children are present send the wrong message to those in our society who are the most impressionable," said Melinda Haag, attorney general for the Northern District of California. "In addition, the huge profits generated by these stores, and the value of their inventory, present a danger that the stores will become a magnet for crime, which jeopardizes the safety of nearby children."

The crackdown was the result of local officials asking the feds to step in after pot clubs fought back against attempts to shut them down. Eviction notices were sent to eight Lake Forest dispensaries and feds froze $130,000 in assets of the landlord who leased to them.

The tactic has had a chilling effect on the industry, even in jurisdictions where no eviction notices have been reported. In San Jose, some dispensaries have seen up to half of their business drop in the two weeks since the announcement.

2) Ads
Just days after feds announced the crackdown on California landowners, Laura Duffy, one of the four California U.S. attorneys, said she would next go after radio stations and newspapers that run ads for cannabis dispensaries "as part of the enforcement efforts in Southern California." Federal law prohibits advertising illegal substances.

"I'm not just seeing print advertising," Duffy is quoted as saying in California Watch. "I'm actually hearing radio and seeing TV advertising. It's gone mainstream. Not only is it inappropriate – one has to wonder what kind of message we're sending to our children – it's against the law."

Newspaper ad revenue has crashed with the tanking economy, forcing papers to lay off reporters. Cannabis ads have proved a lifeline for struggling newspapers, especially alternative newsweeklies. But even some mainstream dailies like the Sacramento Bee have started running cannabis ads.

So far, alt weeklies in the San Diego area that run cannabis ads for years have not received any warnings from the U.S. attorney office. Other California U.S. attorneys didn't say whether they would follow Duffy's lead.

3) Bank services
Cannabis dispensary owners say they're having trouble obtaining bank and credit card services and federal authorities in Northern California have ordered banks to spy on transactions of cannabis club accounts.

When it came to finding a bank, Denver-area Alpine Herbal Wellness owner Sue Harank told news service Thomson Reuters, "It was a nightmare."

Big banks like Bank of America were initially eager to provide services for cannabis dispensaries, but a warning from the DEA said banks could be open to legal liability for those services.

Under pressure from the DEA, banks are shutting down any accounts associated with medical cannabis dispensaries, making difficult for dispensaries to pay employees and payroll taxes, or to provide credit card processing equipment for transactions.

Earlier this year, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported that federal banking regulators would require banks on the Northern California coast to monitor accounts for medical cannabis because the area had been designated a "high-risk area" for money laundering, especially from those in the medical marijuana business.

4) IRS
In October, the IRS told Oakland, Calif.-based dispensary Harborside Health Center it owed $2.5 million in back taxes for 2007 and 2008 -- $2 million more than the dispensary had paid. The tax bill could shut down Harborside.

Because federal law prohibits cannabis dispensaries, the IRS said Harborside couldn't take standard deductions for payroll, workers' comp, rent and other business expenses. Federal tax code 280-E keeps "drug trafficking organizations" from deducting those expenses.

The IRS will also audit Harborside's 2009 and 2010 tax returns. At least a dozen California dispensaries are also being audited, according to a California attorney representing them.

A similar decision was handed to Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Fairfax in March, with owner Lynette Shaw saying they now owed "millions and millions."

"This is not an effort to tax us. We're happy to pay our taxes," Harborside executive director Steve DeAngelo told the San Francisco Chronicle. "This is an effort to shut us down."

The Iranian “Plot” (2 articles)

 (This "terror plot" more and more smells like bullshit and goes to show when it comes to politicians, there are almost NO good guys.--jef)

 

 

None of It Makes Sense

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

 

First, a simple rule: utter absurdity in allegations leveled by the US government is no bar to a deferential hearing in our nation’s major conduits of official opinion.   Suppose the CIA leaks a secret national security review concluding that the moon is actually made of cheese, and the Chinese are planning to send up a pair of gigantic bio-engineered rats to breed in numbers sufficient to eat the cheese and thus sabotage US plans for Missile Defense radar deployment on the moon’s dark side.

The headlines will initially proclaim “Doubts on Chinese Rat Threat Widespread. Many scoff.”  The lead paragraphs in news stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal will quote the scoffers, but then “balance” will mandate respectful quotation from “intelligence sources”, faculty professors, think tank “experts” and the like, all eager to dance to the government’s tune: “Many say ‘rat  scenario ‘plausible’” etc etc. Lo and behold, by the end of a couple of days of such news stories, the Chinese rat plot is firmly ensconced as a  credible proposition. News reports  then turn to respectful discussion of the US government’s options in confronting and routing the Chinese rat threat: “Vice President says ‘all options are on the table” etc.  For verification, merely study the news stories  about the Iranian “plot” in the major papers across the past three days.

Even by the forgiving standards of American credulity, the supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US is spectacularly ludicrous. Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi envoy –  the mild-mannered functionary, Adel al-Jubeir? I could understand an inclination  to dispose of the irksome Prince Bandar who held the job for 22 years, from 1983 to 2005  – simply in the spirit of “change”. But to  kill any ambassador – particularly a Saudi ambassador – is to invite lethal retaliation, even war. Iran doesn’t want war with the US.

Manssor J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, has been indicted as the chief conspirator working for Iranian intelligence. He is charged with promising to pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas – one of the Mexican drug cartels – to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington.

The FBI claims that Arbabsiar told the Drug Enforcement Agency’s informant – posing as a high-ranking member of Los Zetas – that it would be “no big deal” if many others died at the restaurant, possibly including United States senators. He also proposed bombing the Israeli embassy.

If even one US senator died in a terrorist bombing in Washington, if anything larger than a firecracker detonated outside the Israeli embassy, US bombers would be raining high explosive on Iranian targets within 24 hours. Why would Iran want to invite such a response?

Gareth Porter points out on our site this weekend that the whole “plot” has the familiar aroma of an FBI sting in which the most outlandish propositions are actually voiced by the DEA informant to Arbabsiar. The supposed plot is certainly wreathed in incidental grandiose absurdities: a side deal between the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and Los Zetas to smuggle vast shipments of opium from the Middle East to Mexico, and plans to bomb the Saudi and Israeli Embassies in Argentina.

To repeat: Iran doesn’t want war with the US. Quite the reverse. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently tried to refloat the Tehran Research Reactor nuclear fuel swap. He proposed that Iran suspend production of some uranium-enrichment activities in exchange for fuel supplies from the United States. On September 29 the International Herald Tribune ran an op-ed piece saying the proposal was well worth consideration by the US government. All such hopes of a warming in relations have now been snuffed out, most vigorously by Obama on Thursday, endorsing the Attorney General Holder’s  wild allegations and threatening ferocious new sanctions against Iran.

There are two powers in the Middle East that most certainly do want war, or a deepening rift between the US and Iran – namely Saudi Arabia and Israel. And we should not forget the  cultish Iranian MEK, beloved by many on Capitol Hill.

Iranian intelligence is famously efficient at hiding its tracks. Though many believe that it was the Iranians who blew up PanAm flight 103 in 1988 – in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US Navy ship, the Vincennes – no convincing trail has ever come to light. Yet it is supposedly Iranian intelligence that wired $100,000 to the used car salesman, using a known Quds bank account.If the bid was a false flag operation mounted by the Saudis or Israelis, an open transfer of money would be one obvious tactic.

The US has made swift use of dubious “plots” in the not-so-distant past. In 1981 it flourished charges of a Libyan “hit squad” entering the US through the border tunnel between the Canadian town of Windsor to Detroit, with a plan to assassinate newly elected President Ronald Reagan. No evidence was ever offered for this accusation but it kindled animosities that culminated five years later with the US raid on Tripoli, aiming to assassinate Col Gaddafi in his compound.

In April 1993 former president G.H.W. Bush  was visiting Kuwait to commemorate the victory over Saddam in the Gulf War. Detection by the Kuwaitis of a plot to kill him with a car bomb was announced. The FBI duly declared that the wiring of the bomb  indicated that the bomb-makers belonged to Iraqi intelligence.

In June 1993 Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the UN, denounced the plot in the Security Council and a day later President Clinton ordered the firing of 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the HQ of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad. One of the missiles landed in a Baghdad suburb and killed Layla al-Attar, one of Iraq’s leading artists. This set the tone for relations during the Clinton years.

There have also been some spectacular cases of gullibility on the part of supposedly seasoned US intelligence operatives and high military commanders.

A year ago General Petraeus and the US high command in Afghanistan placed great confidence in Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, allegedly a senior Taliban commander empowered to make peace proposals. The US negotiators and Afghan officials were initially suspicious of Mansour’s credentials but their doubts soon melted.

According to a New York Times report, “Several steps were taken to establish the man’s real identity; after the first meeting, photos of him were shown to Taliban detainees who were believed to know Mr. Mansour. They signed off, the Afghan leader said.”

It turned out that Mansour, given quite large sums of money by the Americans, was a freelance impostor. Note that in the case of the Iranian plot, the FBI says that Manssor J. Arbabsiar correctly identified a known Quds Force officer from a photo array.

The question is why the US government should nail its colors so firmly to the mast of this purported Iranian assassination plot. On two other occasions the US made passionate commitments at the UN to concocted evidence – with both used as levers to launch wars.

The first was US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s unveiling to the UN in February of 2003 of the infamous dossier of entirely bogus evidence that Iraq had a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The second was the allegation by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, in February of this year, that Gaddafi was committing crimes against humanity up to and including genocide against his own people – charges decisively refuted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Absurdity, as noted above,  is not a decisive factor. Once the DOJ launched its Complaint, the accusations are official and immune to reasoned demolition. Iran doesn’t want war with the US. But how far will the US go in its response, led as it is by a weak president entirely committed to using the “war on terror” to buttress his bid for reelection.

++++++

Bizarre Iranian “Plot” Doesn’t Add Up

by PATRICK COCKBURN

 

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.

The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is that the US government has very publicly committed itself to a version of events, however unlikely, that, if true, would be a case for war against Iran. It will be difficult for the US to back away from such allegations now.

Could the accusations be true? The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks. A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

None of this makes sense. The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran. It usually operates through proxies. Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico. The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident. There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world. Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington. There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.

In Iraq, the US and Britain were always seeing Iran’s hidden hand supporting their opponents, but they could never quite prove it. It was also true, to a degree never appreciated in the US, that Washington and Tehran were at one in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and installing a Shia government. There were points in common and a struggle for influence. The same has been true in Afghanistan, where Iran was delighted to see the anti-Shia Taliban overthrown in 2001.

Some Iran specialists suggest there might be a “rogue faction” within the Revolutionary Guard, but there is no evidence such a body exists or of a convincing motive for it to be associating with Mexican gangsters.

DEA Moves to Emergency Control Synthetic Stimulants

(Bath salts that are really drugs...this is from the DEA website.--jef)

Agency Will Study Whether To Permanently Control Three Substances

SEP 07 -- WASHINGTON, D.C. – The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using its emergency scheduling authority to temporarily control three synthetic stimulants (Mephedrone , 3,4 methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and Methylone).   This action was necessary to protect the public from the imminent hazard posed by these dangerous chemicals. Except as authorized by law, this action will make possessing and selling these chemicals or the products that contain them illegal in the U.S. for at least one year while the DEA and the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) further study whether these chemicals should be permanently controlled.  

A Notice of Intent to temporarily control was published in the Federal Register today to alert the public to this action. This alert is required by law as part of the Controlled Substances Act. In 30 days or more, DEA intends to publish in the Federal Register a Final Order to temporarily control these chemicals for at least 12 months, with the possibility of a six-month extension. The final order will be published in the Federal Register and will designate these chemicals as Schedule I substances, the most restrictive category, which is reserved for unsafe, highly abused substances with no currently accepted medical use in the United States. 

“This imminent action by the DEA demonstrates that there is no tolerance for those who manufacture, distribute, or sell these drugs anywhere in the country, and that those who do will be shut down, arrested, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart.  “DEA has made it clear we will not hesitate to use our emergency scheduling authority to control these dangerous chemicals that pose a significant and growing threat to our nation.”  

Over the past few months, there has been a growing use of, and interest in, synthetic stimulants sold under the guise of “bath salts” or “plant food”. Marketed under names such as “Ivory Wave”, “Purple Wave”, “Vanilla Sky” or “Bliss”, these products are comprised of a class of chemicals perceived as mimics of cocaine, LSD, MDMA, and/or methamphetamine. Users have reported impaired perception, reduced motor control, disorientation, extreme paranoia, and violent episodes. The long-term physical and psychological effects of use are unknown but potentially severe. These products have become increasingly popular, particularly among teens and young adults, and are sold at a variety of retail outlets, in head shops and over the Internet.  However, they have not been approved by the FDA for human consumption or for medical use, and there is no oversight of the manufacturing process. 

In the last six months, DEA has received an increasing number of reports from poison centers, hospitals and law enforcement regarding products containing one or more of these chemicals.  Thirty-three states have already taken action to control or ban these or other synthetic stimulants.  The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 amends the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to allow the DEA Administrator to temporarily schedule an abused, harmful, non-medical substance in order to avoid an imminent hazard to public safety while the formal rule-making procedures described in the CSA are being conducted.