The 3 Worst Arguments for Legalizing Marijuana

Hey kids, don't make these rookie mistakes!

Mike Riggs | March 23, 2012


When Gallup first asked Americans how they felt about marijuana in 1969, only 12 percent of respondents favored the legalization of weed. That number has increased steadily with each passing decade, and in October 2011, Gallup reported that 50 percent of Americans favor the legalization of marijuana, the country’s most popular illicit drug.

The shift in popular opinion reflects not just decades of scientific research showing that marijuana is safer than both alcohol and harder drugs (including many prescription pills and cigarettes), but also the savvy PR efforts of drug reform wonks and activists. When even conservative Christians such as The 700 Club's Pat Robertson are calling for legalizing pot, you know that the war on the War on Drugs is not just winnable, but practically over.

But that doesn't mean all arguments in favor of legalization are equally good, effective, or factual. Here are the three weakest arguments for legalizing marijuana. As you work to convince the shrinking ranks of drug prohibitionists - we're looking at you, Mr. President! - don't make these rookie mistakes when arguing for changing the legal status of cannabis.

3. Legalizing Marijuana Will End Cartel Violence in Northern Mexico
The election of Mexican President Felipe Calderon in 2006 ushered in a new era of prohibition-fueled drug violence. Six years and 50,000 drug-war deaths later, the argument that repealing marijuana prohibition could stem the violence in Mexico and along the U.S. border is ubiquitous. The claim was a major selling point for Proposition 19 in California, which would have legalized marijuana and subjected its sale to taxation and regulation, and has been made repeatedly by drug reform advocates in the two years since.

“We have created an illegal marketplace with such mind-boggling profits that no enforcement measures will ever overcome the motivation, resources and determination of the cartels,” Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Washington Times. Legalizing pot, he added, would deny the cartels “their largest profit center and dramatically reduce not only the role of the United States in their business plans, but also the motivation for waging war along our southern border.”

But there are objections to that claim. In October 2010, the RAND Corporation released a study saying that Mexican cartels derived only 16 percent of their revenue from marijuana. (As pointed out by NORML, that number conflicted with the ONDCP's estimate that 61 percent of cartel revenue comes from marijuana.)

In June 2011, Mexico analyst Sylvia Longmire argued that cartels have diversified to the point that legalizing marijuana might dent their war chests, but it won’t stop them; they’d still make money stealing oil from pipelines, pirating and selling contraband intellectual property, extorting small businesses, bribing politicians, ransoming kidnap victims, manufacturing and moving harder drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and meth, and trafficking undocumented immigrants and sex workers.

In 2011, David Borden, executive director of StoptheDrugWar.org, emailed me with objections to Longmire’s argument: “Some of the other criminal enterprises that cartels are involved in (enterprises they've been able to enter because of having drug cash and organizations built by drug cash) are less straightforwardly tied to demand, such as kidnapping for ransom, but they have their limits—for all we know they are already doing as much of those things as they think could be sustained, and the more profit they continue to make from drugs, the more money they are going to invest in all kinds of enterprises, both illicit and licit.”

“Will the cartels vanish from the face of the earth because of marijuana legalization?" Borden continued. "Probably not. Would even full legalization of all drugs accomplish that? Unclear.”

That lack of clarity is exactly why marijuana reformers should be careful when promising what legalizing pot can and can’t do for Mexico. The war on drugs has weakened the country’s political institutions, corrupted its military and police forces, and devastated its economy. While pot legalization in the U.S. would allow users to divest from the cartels' brutality, pitching marijuana legalization as anything other than a baby step toward peace and stability in Mexico puts drug reformers on tenuous grounds.

2. Marijuana Should Be Taxed and Regulated Because It Is America’s Largest Cash Crop
In 2006, ABC News reported that with “a value of $35.8 billion, marijuana exceeds the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion).” That number came from a report published by Jon Gettman, director of the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis. Gettman arrived at this figure by multiplying the estimated number of metric tons of marijuana cultivated in the U.S. in 2005 (10,000 tons, or 20 million pounds) by a production value of $1,600 per pound.

Drug law reformers claimed Gettman’s report was evidence that eradication and enforcement efforts had failed. In the intervening years, however, the statistic has been used to make the case that taxing and regulating marijuana would solve many of America’s fiscal woes. The former argument is a sound one, the latter is not.

Here’s why: Gettman’s estimate of $1,600 per pound was conservative when compared to law enforcement agencies, which in 2005 cited the street value of marijuana at between $2,000 and $4,000 a pound. Marijuana cultivated in a post-prohibition market, however, would cost a fraction of that.

“To get a sense of the disparity in price between legal and illegal drugs,” Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in 2007, “compare the production value of marijuana—about $1,600 per pound, by Gettman’s estimate—to the production value of tobacco, a legal psychoactive weed that U.S. farmers sell for less than $2 per pound.”

Let’s go back to 2005, make marijuana legal, and give it an astronomically high production value of $800 per pound, or half of Gettman’s black market estimate: It would have tied with soy beans in 2006 as America’s third largest cash crop, with an average production value of roughly $17 billion. If it had the same production value per pound as tobacco, or $2, its APV in 2005 would have been $44 million; or less than 10 percent of beans, 2005’s 20th most valuable cash crop.

So while pointing to marijuana as America’s largest cash crop is a good indicator of its popularity (and arguably, the safety of its use), it doesn’t follow that taxation and regulation of the drug in a post-prohibition market would be an unlimited boon to government coffers, especially when factoring in the costs of an aggressive regulatory framework.


1.) Marijuana Should Be Legal Because It’s Medicine
There’s no question that marijuana eases pain, stimulates the appetite, reduces nausea, and helps with a slew of other physical and psychological ailments. There is some question, however, as to whether promoting it as medicine is the best political strategy for making it fully available as a recreational drug.

Earlier this year, NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre wrote a searing critique of the medical marijuana strategy.

“If this were the 1920s, advocacy of today's ‘medical’ cannabis industry would sound like a lawyer back then fronting for the legal sellers of ‘prescription’ alcohol during Prohibition. Prescriptive alcohol was a sham then, and the ‘medical’ cannabis industry (not medical cannabis itself) is largely a sham now.”

“Cannabis consumers," he continued, "who NORML represents, want good, affordable cannabis products without having to go through the insult and expense of ‘qualifying’ as a ‘medical’ patient by paying physicians and/or the state for some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. How intellectually honest is all of this?”

One response is that successful medical marijuana ballot initiatives protect people who use marijuana for genuine medical reasons from harassment and imprisonment. But the problems with those laws--such as who counts as a caregiver, and the number of prescriptions given to people who are using it recreationally--don’t reflect well on the political acumen of drug law reformers.

Legislators and regulators are wising up and changing tactics. Because most states that currently have medical marijuana laws make the bulk of their sales to people with chronic pain—the only ailment eligible for medical marijuana that doctors can't test for, and thus the ailment most likely to be cited by recreational users looking for safe access—Washington, D.C. decided to omit chronic pain from its list of ailments that qualify for medical marijuana. In the District, only people with cancer or a terminal illness will be able to get medical pot. In Colorado, where legislators claim only 20 percent of marijuana sales are to people with "legitimate" illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, Crohn's disease, and MS, legislators are looking for ways to limit the number of recommendations doctors can write to the other 80 percent of users.

In short, while medical marijuana laws initially gave more users safe access, anti-pot legislators now seem to know that the best way to limit marijuana sales is to treat it exactly like advocates claim to want: as medicine subject to a strict and invasive regulatory prescription scheme.

Putting Drug Legalization on the Agenda

Time to End a Failed War
by JEFFREY DHYWOOD

The so-called War on Drugs has been going on for over 40 years, but despite the colossal resources that have been thrown at this failed social experiment, the world’s appetite for illicit substances keeps heading stubbornly upwards and drug–trafficking is as flourishing as ever, sowing mayhem and chaos all over the planet. To whoever is willing to analyze the issue without ideological or moralist goggles, it is painfully obvious that this doomed war is even less winnable than the war in Afghanistan (or the war in Iraq for that matter), and has been going on four times longer, at a far higher cost. The list of retired world leaders speaking out against drug prohibition and calling for a paradigm shift on drug policy is growing by the day, and includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and a long string of ex-presidents, ex-drug czars and top drug-warriors, most notably from Latin America. The flow of retired high-level officials coming out of the War on Drugs closet is turning into a stampede.

Unfortunately, it was so far considered political suicide for lawmakers of all nationalities, kept in tight line under the hawkish watch of US Prohibitionist-in-chief, to acknowledge the abysmal failure of the War on Drugs while they were in office. Colombian President Santos was a notable exception, tiptoeing over a careful legalization line even before he was elected, and keeping his stance once in office. Mexican president Calderon started his mandate with a fierce determination to tackle the problem once and for all, but nearing the end of his 6 years term, and after a semi-official body count toppling 50,000, doubt seems to be creeping in. His determination was first shaken by the Monterrey massacre in August 2011, while the fast-and-furious debacle rightly infuriated him. The first expression of regional discontent came on December 6th, 2011, with the publication of a declaration calling for the exploration of “regulatory or market oriented options”, signed by 10 heads of states of the Central-American and Caribbean region members of the Tuxtla System for Dialogue.

But the big surprise came from Guatemala where, a few days after taking office in January 14th, 2012, President Perez Molina, a former general elected on a law and order platform, started talking about legalization as a way out of the War on Drugs conundrum. Following discussions with Colombian President Santos, President Perez Molina further declared on February 11th his intention to present a proposal for drug legalization in Central America at the April 14-15 Summit of the Americas. Guatemalan Vice-President Roxana Baldetti started a tour to discuss the proposal with regional leaders and garner support for it, starting with Panama, Costa Rica and Salvador on February 29th.

Unsurprisingly, the move was greeted by a quick rebuke from the US government, who dispatched Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to the region on February 28th, one day ahead of Roxana Baldetti’s own tour. Napolitano gained support for the continuation of the war on drugs from the Presidents of Costa Rica, Salvador and Panama, three of Baldetti’s prime targets. Suspecting arm-twisting would of course be disingenuous. Earlier in that tour, Napolitano declared that the Mexican war on drugs was not a failure, despite its 50,000 body count, though she came short of calling it a success. How do you spell denial? But then, if the war on Iraq is the new benchmark, the most dismal failure can be touted as success. (If Napolitano really thinks the drug war isn't a failure, then she is incompetent and not qualified to hold the position she holds.--jef)

It is remarkable that Baldetti still managed to get the support of Costa Rica and El Salvador. On Sunday Marhc 3rd came the announcement that the US administration is now sending VP Biden himself, a staunch supporter of the war on drugs, to tour the region.

President Perez Molina’s initiative is unprecedented and marks the first time since the launching of the War on Drugs by Richard Nixon in 1971 that a foreign head of state actively challenges the US-led policies of drug prohibition and try to build a coalition against it. A former top-brass Guatemalan military, President Perez Molina has impeccable credentials to launch such a move. Guatemala is on the major transit route from Colombia to the US and drug violence has exploded there over the past few years, turning this already impoverished and unstable country into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

It remains to be seen whether President Perez Molina will be able to withstand the US pressure. A lot will depend on the attitude of Colombia and Mexico, the most influential countries in the region. Should these countries decide to seriously explore alternatives to the War on Drugs and move resolutely towards more pragmatic and realistic policies, the balance of power would be drastically altered and other countries could be persuaded to align behind them, but nothing can happen without Colombia and Mexico onboard.

There are reasons to believe that the recent development represent a lasting shift in Latin American approach to the intractable drug trafficking problem that has caused tremendous damage to the region over the past 3 decades. There is growing realization that the current prohibitionist approach is powerless to tackle the issue, as any apparent success on one front just displaces the problem. Methamphetamines displace cocaine. Guatemala replaces Mexico. A splinter of mini-cartels take over mega-cartels after their demise, in endless vicious circles. Violence is contained, at best, as seems to be currently the case in Colombia.

Latin America deeply resents that the US has long blamed producing and transiting countries while being unwilling and unable to curb demand at home. Adding fuel to the resentment is the constant flow of US weaponry and the extremely lax US gun laws that US lawmakers are too terrified to challenge. Latin Americans also realize that they are bearing the brunt of the human cost of a war that has been largely imposed on them, and were they somewhat feel as innocent bystanders, especially in transiting countries.

More worrisome, the region is facing a drug problem of its own as drug-related services and transactions are often paid in kind, a move started by the cartels in the late 80s. The substances used as payment end up fueling an explosion of the local demand. As a result, the turf wars between gangs and cartels are increasingly fought over local territories rather than transit routes. The most vulnerable, children, youths and women are cannon fodder on the front line, used as lookouts, couriers, mules or even hired guns.

At the same time, Latin American countries are increasingly eager to assert their independence from their often over-bearing Northern neighbor. The current power vacuum in the US, where the government is practically held hostage by a fanatical political fringe, reinforces this desire for independence and creates favorable conditions. The intransigence displayed by the Obama administration and Janet Napolitano might end up backfiring. The time is gone when the US could dictate its fiat to the region. Its strategy of string-attached aid, which often amounts to intimidation and bribery, eerily mirrors the “plomo o plata” strategy of the drug cartels.

Who Benefits from the War on Drugs?

by Tim Kelly  February 23, 2012

Libertarians are absolutely correct about the war on drugs. Governments should have no say in what an adult ingests or consumes. And therefore all laws regulating or restricting the production, sale, or use of any drug or substance should be repealed.

Libertarians are also correct in pointing out the drug war’s disastrous consequences. Drug prohibition has made criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens, cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, made drugs more dangerous, created powerful criminal syndicates, increased violent crime, corrupted law enforcement at all levels, and expanded the size and scope of government.

As Wendy Kaminer writes

A sensible person … might wonder why we criminalize the use of cocaine and heroin, not to mention marijuana, while we tolerate and even celebrate alcohol consumption. Of course, we learned long ago that prohibition of alcohol was bound to fail. So a sensible person might propose that we consider ending prohibition of drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, which pose much less threat to the public safety than alcohol, or at least reduce harsh penalties for their use. But sensible people have had little influence over the nation’s drug policies.

All of this has led many to declare the government’s anti-drug crusade a failure. But one man’s failed government program is another’s success. The war on drugs has transferred a vast amount of wealth and power to those who would otherwise have to find honest work. One doesn’t have to be a public-choice scholar to recognize that the drug war, like any war, is merely “politics by other means,” and that those who benefit from it have no desire to see it ended anytime soon.

Who are the beneficiaries of the war on drugs?

A major beneficiary, of course, is the U.S. government, which has used the drug war as a pretext to shred the Bill of Rights and claim vast new powers over the American people. That the drug war would lead to the depredation of civil liberties and the erosion of the rule of law was inevitable, given that there is simply no way for the government to effectively enforce its drug laws while abiding by the Constitution.
And as libertarians and many other constitutionalists have tirelessly pointed out, Washington’s drug war is illegal because the power to prohibit drugs has never been given to the federal government. Just as with alcohol prohibition, any federal law prohibiting or restricting the production, sale, and use of drugs (marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc.) would require a constitutional amendment.

The war on drugs generates huge profits that enrich drug dealers and drug warriors alike. The dealers get very wealthy shipping and selling their contraband. The drug warriors, for their part, receive billions of dollars a year from the taxpayers and bank a sizeable portion of the war booty their raiding parties routinely snatch up. And this plunder includes more than just “drug money” but any property they suspect mightbe involved in narcotics trafficking. As the economist Robert Higgs writes,

The drug war has been a bonanza even to law-abiding cops, as the altered forfeiture laws have given the police free rein to seize private property more or less at will. … If in the process of padding their budgets the police arrest a throng of street-corner entrepreneurs who subsequently land in prison, well, c’est la guerre. (PDF)

Largess from asset forfeitures and federal grants allows local police departments to augment their salaries, expand payrolls, and purchase sophisticated surveillance equipment, high-powered weaponry, and other menacing-looking paramilitary gear. Indeed, the militarization of America’s police departments over the last 35 years has largely been a function of the drug war.

And behind the frontlines of this war is a vast legal-industrial-imprisonment complex employing thousands of judges, prosecutors, criminal-defense attorneys, bail bondsmen, prison guards, and vendors. For the corporations operating privatized “correctional facilities,” the drug war provides a steady supply of warm bodies to fill their prison cells.

Another major beneficiary of the drug war is the banking system, which takes in hundreds of billions of dollars annually from narcotics traffickers. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) describes money laundering as “the method by which criminals disguise the illegal origins of their wealth and protect their asset bases in order to avoid suspicion of law enforcement agencies and to prevent leaving a trail of incriminating evidence.”

Money laundering is more than just an opportunity for greedy bankers to collect fat commissions. The huge amount of cash churned up by the illegal drug trade has become a vital source of liquidity for the rickety fractional-reserve banking system. UNODC’s director, Antonio Maria Costa, told the British newspaper the Observer in late 2009 that proceeds from the illicit drug trade were “the only liquid investment capital” available to many banks on the brink of collapse. In fact, “a majority of the $352 billion of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

According to Costa, “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities. … There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”

The CIA has long been involved in drug trafficking. This conflux of the intelligence netherworld and the narcotics-trafficking underworld has been written about by a variety of credible journalists and scholars. The reports usually involve the CIA working with drug traffickers, providing them assistance in return for intelligence and material support. Alfred C. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, writes,

In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking … the CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability.

Peter Dale Scott, a retired professor and the author of many books including Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, and Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, believes McCoy understates the extent of CIA involvment. Scott believes rather than being passively drawn into “drug alliances,” the CIA actively engages in narcotics trafficking in pursuit of certain “national-security” objectives and to finance “off-the-books” operations. Scott writes, “Far from considering drug networks their enemy, U.S. intelligence organizations have made them an essential ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad.”

Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press, & “Project Truth” and Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press are two well-researched books supporting Scott’s contention. And perhaps most notable is the reporting of the late Gary Webb. His “Dark Alliance”series published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 sparked a firestorm of controversy by asserting the CIA had engaged in cocaine smuggling as part of its covert operations supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. Though Webb was criticized at the time and driven out of the mainstream press for his investigative journalism, much of what he reported in the series was validated later by an inspector general’s investigation of the CIA.

The war on drugs has created shared interests for the world's largest banks, drug cartels, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus. As the economist Michel Chossudovsky writes,

This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have “political friends in high places.” Legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between “businesspeople” and criminals is blurred. In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions.

The drug war is not about squashing narcotics trafficking, nor is it about protecting Americans from the ravages of drug addiction. The ugly truth is the war on drugs is one of America's most lucrative industries, funding police salaries and supporting the country’s vast prison system. It is apparently also propping up a bankrupt financial system and reportedly providing the spooks at Langley with cash to finance their black ops.

nding the drug war would require fundamentally rethinking decades of official policy, closing down multiple government agencies, as well as undermining the powerful, entrenched corporate interests that have developed over the last 40 years. Perhaps this is why U.S. government will make sure the war on drugs never ends. Meanwhile, civil liberties are violated, the Constitution is trashed, lives are ruined, and the death toll mounts.

The Drug War Transformed

Connie Mack and the "Terrorist Insurgency" in the Americas

by TOM BARRY

 

“This is a terrorist insurgency,” says Connie Mack, the Republican who chairs the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mack, who introduced the Enhanced Border Security Act in mid-December, believes that the Merida Initiative has failed and that the administration needs to revamp the counterdrug assistance program to include a “counterinsurgency plan.”

Explaining why his Enhanced Border Security bill is needed, Mack said: “The Mexican drug cartels have evolved into what some call the greatest national security threat faced by the United States with the ability to severely damage the U.S. economy.”

Adopting the language of the Obama administration’s new strategy to “combat transnational organized crime,” Mack warns that both Mexico and the United States are facing a “terrorist insurgency” waged by transnational criminal organizations “along our southern border, with operations across Mexico and Central America as well as in over 1,000 U.S. cities.”

Five years after President Felipe Calderón launched Mexico’s drug war in December 2006 and three years into the Merida Initiative counterdrug assistance program, there is widespread anxiety in Mexico that the government is not gaining the upper hand on the drug cartels and that the drug-related violence, which has left a toll of 50,000 dead, will continue into the next sexenio, the six-year presidential term.

Whatever their politics, most close observers of the drug war in Mexico would agree with the Republican firebrand from Florida that the last five years of Mexico’s drug war have done little to increase governmental security and social stability. Most assessments of the Merida Initiative’s impact on Mexico and Central America are similarly negative.

The basic facts of the drug-related crisis in Mexico are clear enough, but what’s not so evident is its character and identity.

As President Calderón’s sexenio draws to an end and as the U.S. government evaluates its involvement in Mexico’s drug war and its border policy, new questions are being asked about drug threat and about the proper response.

Mack insists that traditional counternarcotics strategies are insufficient and out of step with the changing character of the drug trade in Mexico and in Central America.

What we are seeing in the region is not simply the business and violence of drug-related crime, says Mack. Instead, Mexico and the drug transit countries of Central America are facing insurgency and terrorism that threatens the security of region and of the United States.

Mexico has vociferously rejected Mack’s contention that the drug cartels represent an existential threat to state power.

But the basic facts of the drug war – widespread territorial loss of effective governing power, the involvement of local drug bosses in politics, the massive deployment of the military, the increasing firepower of the cartels, the war-level loss of life, and the use of horrific violence to make statements – seem to support Mack’s contention that Mexico is facing what he variously calls a “terrorist insurgency” and a “criminal insurgency.”

The inability of the Obama administration’s expanded border-security operations to significantly obstruct the crossborder flow of drugs from Mexico also points to the inadequacy of the U.S. response, whether at home or in Mexico.

Mack is, of course, not alone in his characterization of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) as insurgents and narcoterrorists. Nor is he the only major public figure who is raising alarm about an increased threat to U.S. national security.

Two retired U.S. generals, including the former chief of the U.S. Southern Command, came to similar conclusions in a recent report commissioned by the Texas state government alarmingly titled Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment.

There’s no disputing the severity of the drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America. Yet the increasing discussion of the security implications of illegal drug trade also relates to the Obama administration’s own attempt to redefine the domestic and international drug problem as a battle against transnational criminal organizations.

The Transformed Drug Threat
The U.S. government has traditionally referred to Mexican and other Latin American drug cartels as drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). But the Obama administration has altered the nomenclature of the drug trade, and the DTOs are now routinely categorized as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

By newly designating the Mexican DTOs as transnational criminal organizations, the Obama administration has opened new political room for foreign policy hawks and anti-drug hardliners like Connie Mack to credibly argue that the U.S. needs to respond differently and more aggressively to the evolving drug trade scenario in the hemisphere.

Obama counternarcotics officials have dropped the term “war on drugs.” Instead, the four-decade war has been superseded by the newly organized “combat against transnational crime” and transnational organized criminal organizations – as spelled out this year by the White House in the Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime.

The shift in the terminology to describe the U.S. national and international enforcement of its drug control laws – shedding an embarrassing military metaphor and adopting a more appropriate law-enforcement one – was long overdue.

Wars, after all, are fought to win not to flounder — with nary a sign of victory after four decades of drug war-fighting. In contrast, crime-fighting is accepted as a constant slog where no final victory is ever expected.

President Obama, however, insists, that the combat against the drug-trafficking TCOs is a matter of urgent national security, promising to prioritize the targeting of TCOs that represent a “high national security risk.”

In keeping with new parlance of the administration, Connie Mack, who chairs the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, contends that the U.S. and Mexican governments no longer simply confront drug trafficking organizations but now face powerful transnational criminal organizations that threaten not only the region’s security but also U.S. national security.

In contrast to Mack, other critics, apart from those of the right wing, lambast the Merida Initiative for contributing to widespread human rights violations by the Mexican military and for continuing drug war strategies that are based on failed drug prohibition policies.

Counting on Connie Mack
During his seven years in Congress, Mack has won strong support from his conservative constituency for his hardline positions on U.S. Latin America policy, particularly with his shrill anti-communist critiques of Castro in Cuba, Chávez in Venezuela, and Zelaya (removed by military-backed coup) in Honduras.

As chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee, Mack has won a larger megaphone for a view of hemispheric relations in which U.S. hegemony persists. In language reminiscent of the imperial era politics in Latin America, Mack states: “You can count on me to challenge these tyrants wherever they are and always stand on the side of freedom, security and prosperity.”

Mack’s hawkish views on Mexico represent an ideological continuity in that he regards the TCOs as insurgents who challenge the established order. Yet his new focus on Mexico and the border security also have more immediate political origins – including an opportunity to bash the Obama administration and an attempt to assuage anti-immigrant constituents outraged over Mack’s criticisms of the repressive Arizona immigration law as threat to “freedom-loving conservatives.”

Mack may see his hawkish stances on border security and on the Mexico drug war as restoring the trust of his conservative constituents and helping him in his likely bid to to unseat Democratic Senator Bill Nelson.

In a Sept. 16 letter to the State Department complaining about the failures of the Merida Initiative, Mack wrote that “the transformation of drug cartels into TCOs and their attempts to undermine the Mexican government through tactics labeled as characteristics of an insurgency” required an overhaul of the Merida Initiative to address the new security environment.

Mack told the State Department:

The failure of this Administration to set performance measures, target dates or tangible goals to measure the success of U.S. programs has made it impossible to claim ‘success’ on the initiative itself. Meanwhile, the Mexican drug cartels have capitalized on the United States’ sluggish assistance to actively undermine the Mexican state through insurgent activities such as violence, corruption, and propaganda.

Both the Calderón and Obama administrations insist that the battle against the cartels – called drug war in Mexico and combat against transnational crime in the U .S. – is making steady progress toward the goal of reducing the threat of the drug-trafficking organizations.
Responding to Mack’s letter, the State Department wrote:

We believe the [Merida] Initiative is already having a positive impact. Through its bold efforts, with U.S. support, the Mexican government has successfully dismantled drug smuggling routes, seized major amounts of illicit drugs and jailed drug kingpins.

Critiquing the Merida Initiative, Mack says, “If we are unable or unwilling to identify the problem correctly, then we are unable to properly put a policy forward to combat the issue at hand.  The security and safety of the American people depend on it.”

That’s exactly right. But it is not a problem that began with the Merida Initiative or with the Obama administration.  Mack only compounds the problem of incorrectly identifying the issue at hand in Mexico and at the border by introducing new identifiers such as “terrorist insurgency” and “criminal insurgency.” Such terms confuse tactics and methods with objectives and goals, while leading both countries down the path of increased militarization.

The Obama administration also confiscates the drug-related crisis in Mexico by raising the specter of transnational crime as a national security threat and by identifying the Mexican drug trafficking organizations as the cause of the crisis rather than as largely a product of America’s own drug war and drug prohibition policies.

Anonymous Hackers Vs. Mexican Drug Cartel

Analysis by Nic Halverson - Mon Oct 31, 2011

The days of hackers and computer geeks being pegged as pasty, 90-pound weaklings are over. In fact, they've been flexing some serious muscle lately with tough-guy bravado, and they're intent on saving the day.


Need proof? Look no further than the international hacker movement known as Anonymous.

The Guy Fawkes-masked collective just released an Internet video threatening vengeance on arguably one of the world's most savage and violent criminal outfits: Mexico's Zetas drug cartel.

Claiming to be from Anonymous "Veracruz, Mexico, and the world," the YouTube video is a response to the Zetas cartel's alleged kidnapping of an Anonymous member.

"You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him," says a masked, computer-voiced individual in the video.

Reminiscent of a WWE hype video, Anonymous puts forth an ultimatum to Zetas: either release the Anonymous member, or they will release the identities of local police, journalists, taxi drivers and other allies who conspire with the Zetas.

"We cannot defend ourselves with a weapon, but we can do this with their cars, houses, bars, brothels ..." the video message adds, alluding to properties and possessions owned by cartel supporters. "It will not be difficult. We all know who they are and where they are."

Anonymous has given the Zetas cartel until the end of the week to release their kidnapped member.

"If anything happens to him, you will always remember this upcoming Nov. 5," the message states. "Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forget. Wait and see."

The Used Car Salesman, a Mexican Drug Cartel and the Saudi Ambassador

An Anatomy of Sanctioning Iran's Central Bank

by SASAN FAYAZMANESH

 

When on October 11, 2011, the Obama Administration claimed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) had attempted to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, many commentators expressed skepticism. Why would IRGC-QF, supposedly a professional organization, hire a used-car salesman, with a dubious background, to carry out such a delicate task on the US soil, knowing full well that if the plot is uncovered, there would be severe consequences for Iran? Why would those involved in the plot converse on the phone, knowing full well that such phone calls might be monitored? Why would they wire money for the plot via a foreign bank to a US bank, knowing full well that Iran is under severe US financial sanctions and any transaction originating from Iran will be scrutinized? These and a number of other anomalies made the story hard to believe.

Indeed the story was so bizarre that in announcing the case FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that it “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script” (Reuters, October 11, 2011).  Others, of course, saw it more as a Keystone Kops script.

The comical nature of the case made it appear so implausible that President Obama became defensive when he was asked about the issue in a press conference on October 13, 2011. In answering the question, Obama referred to the Attorney General’s “specific set of facts” and stated: “those facts are there for all to see.  And we would not be bringing forward a case unless we knew exactly how to support all the allegations that are contained in the indictment.”

Even though comical, it is difficult, at least in the short run, to prove or disprove the US allegation against Iran. After all, when invading Iraq in 2003 the US government showed a set of evidence that at first was hard to disprove. It was only later that the set of evidence was shown to be fabricated.

In the absence of evidence to prove or disprove the US allegation, one might approach the issue from a different angle. If the plot was somehow concocted by the US—for example, the used-car salesman was entrapped—what was the US motivation? This question is much easier to answer.

On the same day that the US Attorney General and FBI Director went public with the alleged plot, the Department of Treasury issued a press release announcing the “designation” of not only the used-car salesman but four “senior” IRGC-QF officers connected to the plot. Among the four individuals was IRGC-QF commander Qasem Soleimani. As the press release stated, the Treasury Department had designated Soleimani twice before, once for “his relationship to the IRGC” and again for his connection to “human rights abuses in Syria.”

Soleimani’s name was also mentioned as a “key person” involved in “nuclear or ballistic missile activities” in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, issued on March 24, 2007. In addition, on June 23, 2011, the European council had announced that it is banning travel and freezing the assets of some Syrian individuals and companies and targeting three commanders of IRGC for supporting the Syrian government. Among these was Qasem Soleimani. Thus, it appears that the US was connecting a high profile character, such as Soleimani, to the assassination plot in order to make the case more significant and ominous. But why was the Treasury Department involved in what appeared to be a criminal case in the first place?

There was a partial answer to the above question in the Treasury Department’s announcement. The press release quoted David S. Cohen, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, as saying: “Iran once again has used the Qods Force and the international financial system to pursue an act of international terrorism, this time aimed against a Saudi diplomat. . . The financial transactions at the heart of this plot lay bare the risk that banks and other institutions face in doing business with Iran.” In his press conference on October 13, 2011, President Obama also gave a hint as to why the Department of Treasury was involved in dealing with the alleged terror plot and what the US intended to do about it. He stated that we will “apply the toughest sanctions [against Iran] and continue to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and that it pays a price for this kind of behavior.”

A more specific answer became available on October 13, 2011, when Cohen gave his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. Cohen announced that the Department of Treasury is “weighing more sanctions against Iran’s central bank to tighten the financial screws and deepen the country’s estrangement from the international financial community” (Reuters, October 13, 2011). After this testimony, many news sources correctly realized that the US Treasury Department was intent to use the alleged plot to sanction Iran’s Central Bank or Bank Markazi. Some also realized that such a sanction might paralyze the Iranian economy, since Bank Markazi is the bank of banks in Iran, and sanctioning it is equivalent to immobilizing the US Federal Reserve System.  Indeed, one AFP headline on October 14, 2011, read “US mulls Iran ‘sanction of mass destruction’”. 

The news report correctly pointed out that after “three decades of blanket US sanctions against Iran, it has become received wisdom that the United States has few financial tools left to bend Iran’s will.” One of those tools, the report went on to say, was sanctioning “Bank Markazi—which sits at the center of Iran’s financial and energy interests.” The report quoted Avi Jorisch, a former advisor at the Treasury Department’s office of terrorism and financial intelligence, as saying: “Essentially financial institutions around the world would have to choose between doing business with the United States and with the central bank [of Iran].”

What was missing from the above reports, however, was the history of the attempt by the US to sanction the Central Bank of Iran. Also missing, was the host of characters and institutions behind the attempt. Below, I will provide a brief account of the missing pieces.

After decades of sanctioning Iran and not bringing about the intended “regime change,” the neoconservatives, Israeli lobby groups and their conduits in the US government came up with a novel idea: sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran. In late May and early June of 2008, two resolutions were introduced in the House and Senate, which effectively called, among other things, for a US blockade of Iran and sanctioning of Bank Markazi. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) summarized the two resolutions on its website under “Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program” and called for action:

Members of the House and Senate have introduced resolutions (H. Con. Res. 362 and S. Res. 580) calling on the administration to focus on the urgency of the Iranian nuclear threat and to impose tougher sanctions on Tehran. The resolutions, introduced in the House by Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Mike Pence (R-IN) and in the Senate by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and John Thune (R-SD), urge the president to sanction Iran’s Central Bank and other international banks and energy companies investing in the country. They also demand that the United States lead an international effort to increase pressure on Iran by curtailing Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum products. Please urge your representatives to cosponsor this critical resolution.

The Bush Administration, however, realized that the rest of the world would not go along with sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank. Instead, the Administration relied on the Treasury Department to sanction major banks in Iran and prepare the ground for sanctioning Bank Markazi at some later date. Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who was well known for his connection to Israeli lobby groups and his personal war against Iran, was given the task [1].  Levey did succeed, and under his tenure, which lasted well into the Obama Administration, major banks in Iran were sanctioned. Yet, the neoconservatives, Israeli lobby groups and their conduits in the US government wanted more.

Sanctioning Bank Markazi became a campaign issue in the 2008 presidential election.  As I mentioned in my pre-election essay, “What the Future has in Store for Iran,” in spring of 2008 John McCain, who was being advised by the neoconservatives, delivered a speech at the AIPAC conference in which he mentioned sanctioning Bank Markazi. “Central Bank of Iran,” McCain stated, “aids in Iran’s terrorism and weapons proliferation.”

He further stated that the Europeans “can help by imposing targeted sanctions that will impose a heavy cost on the regime’s leaders, including the denial of visas and freezing of assets; as a further measure to contain and deter Iran, the United States should impose financial sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran which aids in Iran’s terrorism and weapons proliferation. We must apply the full force of law to prevent business dealings with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

The push to sanction the Central Bank of Iran continued during the campaign season, and just prior to the presidential election of 2008 Senator Charles Schumer pressed the Bush Administration to impose financial sanctions on Bank Markazi (AP, November 6, 2008). Yet, the Bush Administration remained unconvinced that other countries would go along with the sanction and left the matter to be handled by the next administration. Stuart Levey, who stayed in his post in the Obama Administration, continued to lead the sanction campaign against the financial sector of Iran and waited for an opportunity to sanction Bank Markazi.  Once he left office in March of 2011, the campaign was carried on by Levey’s deputy, David S. Cohen.

On August 8, 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that more “than 90 U.S. senators signed a letter to President Barack Obama pressing him to sanction Iran’s central bank, with some threatening legislation to force the move, an outcome that would represent a stark escalation in tensions between the two countries.” This, as the report noted, would be a drastic action, a “nuclear option” that if implemented, “could potentially freeze Iran out of the global financial system and make it nearly impossible for Tehran to clear billions of dollars in oil sales.”

The letter, as the report stated, was co-sponsored by Senators Mark Kirk and Charles Schumer.  It told the President:

We must do more to increase the economic pressure on the regime. In our view, the United States should embark on a comprehensive strategy to pressure Iran’s financial system by imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), or Bank Markazi. If our key allies are willing to join, we believe this step can be even more effective.

As you know, the Iranian regime continues to pursue avenues to circumvent both U.S. and multilateral sanctions. In the banking sector, the Central Bank of Iran lies at the center of Iran’s circumvention strategy. In May, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen stated that “the activities of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) have been, and continue to be, a focus of the Treasury Department. Treasury has noted previously that the CBI and Iranian commercial banks have requested that their names be removed from international payment messages to make it more difficult for intermediary financial institutions to determine the true parties to the transaction, and we remain concerned that the CBI may be facilitating transactions for sanctioned Iranian banks.”

The time has come to impose crippling sanctions on Iran’s financial system by cutting off the CBI. There is strong bipartisan support in Congress for the imposition of sanctions on the CBI. As recently as consideration of the FY10 National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate unanimously supported an amendment urging you to impose such sanctions. We urge you to strongly consider imposing U.S. sanctions against the CBI and to encourage key allies to join us in this important action.

According to the above report, in an interview Kirk stated that “he would introduce a law by year’s end to enforce sanctions on Bank Markazi if the White House doesn’t move independently.” The report quoted Kirk as saying: “The administration will face a choice of whether it wants to lead this effort or be forced to act.” It also quoted Schumer as saying: “It’s time for the administration to use the tools Congress has provided and choke off the money spigot.”

The pressure was on and Under Secretary David S. Cohen had to find a plot to push for sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran. The used-car salesman, hired by IRGC-QF to arrange for the assassination of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador, was just that plot. It was now time to bring on board the rest of the world.

Immediately after the alleged plot, US officials, particularly Under Secretary Cohen, were travelling around the world, trying to convince other countries, especially those that were reluctant to sanction Bank Markazi, that the plot was real. On October 14, 2011, Harakah Daily reported from Ankara that a “US team will travel to Turkey soon to brief Turkish authorities on what the US says a clumsy plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil.” On October 21, AP reported that following the visit by two US officials to Turkey to “brief the country on evidence they have in the alleged plot,” Turkey’s foreign minister urged Iran to cooperate with the US. On October 24, 2011, the headline of a news item published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty read: “Top U.S. Treasury Official [Cohen] in Europe for Talks on Sanctioning Iranian Central Bank.” After his stop in London, the report stated, Cohen will take his message to Berlin, Paris and Rome. On the same day, AP reported the same news and quoted Cohen as saying: “Iran needs to be held accountable for this plot. . . We are going to continue to look at those financial institutions that are involved with proliferation activity for Iran and continue to try to isolate them from the international financial sector.” According to the report Cohen added: “Any further sanctions would also be part of efforts to deter Iran from pursuing nuclear capabilities . . . and could target the country’s central bank.”

In sum, the bizarre story of the used-car salesman, Mexican drug cartel, and the Saudi Ambassador is inextricably linked to the US-Israeli desire to sanction Bank Markazi. It is expected that this “sanction of mass destruction,” or “nuclear option,” will do the trick and will help to paralyze the Iranian economy. Down the line, it is hoped, the shattered economy will create the right conditions for the overthrow of the “Iranian regime” and its replacement by a US-Israeli friendly government.

What a way to bring about regime change!

Notes. 
[1] On Levey’s connection to the Israeli lobby groups and the role that he played in sanctioning Iran in the Bush Administration see my book: The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment, Routledge, 2008.

The “War on Drugs” is Really a War on You

by Kevin Carson on Oct 28, 2011
Hardly a week goes by without me seeing another think piece on the question: “Are we winning the war on drugs?”

That depends on who “we” is. The War on Drugs has certainly served some very powerful interests in our society. Between the Drug War and the War on Terror, we’ve militarized police culture with SWAT teams, turned the Fourth through Sixth Amendments into toilet paper, and created the biggest prison-industrial complex in the world. From the standpoint of those who push the Drug War the hardest, these are all — as Martha Stewart would say — good things.

The Drug War has handed over the entire country to organized crime gangs fighting over control of the drug trade. And one of the biggest gangs involved in this turf war is the one in police uniforms. Big city (and increasingly, small city) law enforcement is a wretched empire of entrapment, warrants sworn out on false pretenses, perjured testimony by jailhouse snitches, coerced plea bargains, and civil forfeiture robbery.


Internationally, by far the biggest drug cartel of all is the CIA. It’s used the global drug trade, from the Golden Triangle to the Northern Alliance territory in Afghanistan, to fund black ops that wouldn’t even pass the smell test of the U.S. Congress — and that’s saying a lot.

Just consider the real story behind Afghanistan. One of the reason the Taliban was so unpopular, and the population was so eager to throw off their rule, was that they really did hate drugs — they virtually stamped out the poppy cultivation that had been a main source of income for dirt-poor Afghans. Meanwhile, the opium trade flourished in Northern Alliance territory (a lot like the good ol’ boy sheriff here in Arkansas who turns a blind eye to the farmer with a mortgage who cultivates a little wacky weed to make ends meet). And now that the Northern Alliance has become the Afghan national government — that’s right, you got it — Afghanistan is once again the center of world opium production. If you believe Our Troops are really trying to stamp it out, you probably still look under your pillow for a dime from the Tooth Fairy.

So the Drug War is every bit a success in furthering the interests of America’s real government: The unholy alliance of the intelligence community, the drug cartels, the big banks that launder drug cartel money, and the domestic police state apparatus.

My guess is that the most hard-core drug warrior politicians, sincere or not, whether they’re aware of it or not, get most of their campaign funds from laundered drug cartel money — just as bootleggers used to be the biggest campaign contributors to teetotaling Baptist preachers running for office.

I would guess, further, that any major party presidential candidate who offered a credible promise to end the War on Drugs would find himself buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa, with more fingerprints on the operation than a million Warren Commissions sitting for a million years could make sense of.

So in the War on Drugs, the important thing to keep in mind is that the public isn’t the customer — it’s the product. On second thought, maybe you better forget it and go back to watching “Dancing with the Stars.”

Fast and Furious weapons were found in Mexico cartel enforcer's home

Guns illegally purchased under the ATF operation were found in April hidden in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, court records show.

By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau

October 8, 2011 -- LA TIMES

 

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.

In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The smugglers' tactics — quickly moving the weapons far from ATF agents in southern Arizona, where it had been assumed they would circulate — vividly demonstrate that what had been viewed as a local problem was much larger. Six other Fast and Furious guns destined for El Paso were recovered in Columbus, N.M.

"These Fast and Furious guns were going to Sinaloans, and they are killing everyone down there," said one knowledgeable U.S. government source, who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. "But that's only how many we know came through Texas. Hundreds more had to get through."

Torres Marrufo, also known as "the Jaguar," has been identified by U.S. authorities as the enforcer for Sinaloa cartel chieftain Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. The Fast and Furious weapons were found at one of Torres Marrufo's homes April 30 when Mexican police inspected the property. It was unoccupied but "showed signs of recent activity," they said.

The basement had been converted into a gym with a wall covered with built-in mirrors. Behind the mirrors they found a hidden room with the Fast and Furious weapons and dozens more, including an antiaircraft machine gun, a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher.

"We have seized the most important cache of weapons in the history of Ciudad Juarez," Chihuahua state Gov. Cesar Duarte said at the time, though he did not know that many of the weapons came from the U.S. and Fast and Furious.

Torres Marrufo has been indicted in El Paso, but authorities have been unable to locate and arrest him.

In the U.S., intelligence officials consider the Sinaloa cartel the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world. Weekly reports from U.S. intelligence authorities to the Justice Department in the summer of 2010, at the height of Fast and Furious, warned about the proliferation of guns reaching the Sinaloa cartel.

Under Fast and Furious, begun in fall 2009, the ATF allowed illegal buyers to walk away with weapons in the hope that agents in Phoenix could track the guns and arrest cartel leaders.

Three months into the program, El Paso began to emerge as a hub, perhaps the central location, for Fast and Furious weapons. On Jan. 13, 2010, El Paso police stumbled upon 40 firearms after following a suspicious dark blue Volkswagen Jetta that backed into a garage at a local residence, according to federal court records.

Alberto Sandoval told authorities he acquired the weapons three days after they were purchased from someone he knew only as "Rudy." He said he was paid $1,000 to store the guns and "knew the firearms were going to Mexico."

Sandoval pleaded guilty in federal court in El Paso and was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison. A month later, on Dec. 17, 2010, he escaped from a minimum-security prison in Tucson; officials believe he fled to Mexico.

Two others, Ivan Chavira and Edgar Ivan Galvan, were subsequently charged in that gun recovery, along with the recovery of 20 Fast and Furious weapons on April 7, 2010, in El Paso. Those guns also were discovered by chance by local authorities, and ATF trace records show that the weapons were purchased in Phoenix two weeks before they were found in El Paso.

Chavira and Galvan pleaded guilty. Chavira received eight years in prison; Galvan is to be sentenced next month.

Pres. Jimmy Carter: Call Off the Global Drug War

Friday, June 17, 2011 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune
by Pres. Jimmy Carter

In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade.

The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America's "war on drugs," which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008.

Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with U.S. drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts.

I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."

These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.

This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.

The commission's facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment "with models of legal regulation of drugs ... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens." For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.

But they probably won't turn to the U.S. for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million.

There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!

Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and "three strikes you're out" laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes.

And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.

Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state's budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.

Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America's drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.

A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in college or trade school.

To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies more humane and more effective, the American government should support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

The War on Drugs is Lost (3 articles)

Saturday, June 4, 2011 by Reuters
Failed: The War on Drugs and a Milestone Critique
by Bernd Debusmann

The war on drugs is a waste of time, money and lives. It cannot be won. The world’s drug warriors are out of ideas.

The war on drugs President Richard Nixon launched 40 years ago has failed. Fresh thinking is of the essence. Governments should consider legalizing drugs to take profits out of the criminal trade.

Filling prisons with drug users does nothing to curb the billion-dollar illicit business, one of the world’s richest. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. Arresting small-time dealers does little but create a market opportunity for other small fry. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one opens up.

By one group or another, each of the above points has been made about long-running drug policies that bring to mind Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But never before has such criticism come from an international panel of establishment figures with such high profiles as the Global Commission on Drug Policy which presented a devastating assessment of the drug war in New York on June 2. Its 19 members include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, three former Latin American presidents (of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia), former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Richard Branson, the flamboyant billionaire chairman of the Virgin group, and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Other commission members of impeccable mainstream respectability: George Shultz, U.S. Secretary of State during the Reagan administration; Louise Arbour, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and now president of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank; former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss; Javier Solana, former European Union foreign affairs chief; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel literature laureate, and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.

Whether their report will bring about change remains to be seen but it looks like a milestone on a long road toward reforms that some see as inevitable. “Today is the day when we start to end the war on drugs,” Branson said at the commission’s New York news conference.

The commission’s report does not mince words:

“The global war on drugs has failed. When the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs came into being 50 years ago and when President (Richard) Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs 40 years ago, policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in … drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug-free world.’”

“In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period.”

A KIND OF ARMS RACE

So has bloodshed and violence as government forces and drug trafficking organizations engage in what the report calls “a kind of arms race” – tougher crackdowns prompt criminal mafias to respond with greater force.

Exhibit A for this arms race is Mexico, where at least 36,000 people have died since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug cartels and unleashed the Mexican army to fight them. The death toll has mounted year by year, the army is not winning, and there is no end in sight.

“Poorly designed drug law enforcement practices can actually increase the level of violence, intimidation and corruption associated with drug markets,” notes the report. It echoes many of the points made in a 2009 by a commission that focused on Latin America but did not go as far as recommending that governments debate and seriously consider “models of legal regulation” of all drugs, not only marijuana.

The driving force in the Global Commission, a private initiative launched in Geneva in January, is former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who also led the 2009 Latin American group together with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and former president Cesar Gaviria of Colombia.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana, largely to the insatiable U.S. market, and a major supplier of opium and heroin. Around the world, drug producing countries are vulnerable to what Moises Naim, a scholar at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Venezuelan trade minister calls “the politicization of criminals and the criminalization of politicians.” It’s a process that has given birth to “narco states,” a label that has been used for countries as far apart as Venezuela and Afghanistan.

There is reason to be skeptical about the prospect of change within years rather than decades and the commission alluded to it – “a built-in vested interest” in continuing with policies that focus on enforcement, interdiction and eradication. It is an entrenched anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens.

One of the essential elements required to change that system is spelt out in the first of the commission report’s 11 recommendations: “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”

 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sunday, June 5, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
The War on Drugs War is Lost. Now It's Time for a Rational Response
Politicians are too scared to propose legalisation and controlled use, but without radical changes many more lives will be destroyed or ruined
by Ian Birrell

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon was casting around for a new enemy to shore up support for his unique brand of uncompassionate conservatism. Having risen to national prominence as an anti-communist campaigner, then turned his attention to crime, he found a new foe in the counterculture.

The media were full of stories of clean-cut young men returning from Vietnam as wrecked junkies, while intellectuals such as Timothy Leary were promoting the use of LSD. So Nixon, elected on a wafer-thin margin and desperate to turn back the tide of permissiveness, declared war on drugs. "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse," he thundered.

While the Vietnam conflict has faded into history, thousands are dying and millions of lives are still being destroyed in his insane struggle. Fittingly, since it was launched by a president who turned out to be a crook, the biggest beneficiaries have been the most murderous gangsters on the globe as they rip apart country after country. Yet our leaders limp on in this self-defeating, $100bn-a-year war. Last week saw the latest salvo in the struggle when a host of distinguished names gathered under the banner of the Global Commission on Drug Policy to urge a truce. Their thoughtful report pointed out a series of obvious truths underlying how the war backfired so terribly and called for policies based on treatment rather than prosecution.

Look at the rise in drug use. In 1998, the United Nations committed member states to achieve a "drug-free world", pledging to eliminate or "significantly reduce" use of opium, cannabis and cocaine by 2008. Instead, global opiate use rose by more than one-third over that time, with big rises also for cocaine and cannabis. It is estimated almost 5% of the world's adults take illegal drugs.

Worse is the damage done by gangs fighting over the huge profits created by the illegality of this trade. We have all heard tales of headless bodies littering the landscape of Mexico. But the world's most violent region away from active war zones is further south – Guatemala and Honduras, for instance, both have more murders than the 27 countries of the European Union combined. Now the cancer is working its way through west Africa.

The trade is so lucrative that in several countries – some signed up to those sanctimonious UN pledges – drug gangs have bought or fought their way to power. Kosovo has a prime minister linked to drug smuggling, as are the leaders of Afghanistan, Burma, Guinea, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Then there are cases such as South Africa, where the police chief turned out to be the head of a crime syndicate.

There are so many arguments against current policies it is hard to believe anyone who is not stoned still signs up to Nixon's war. The vast costs, the crime waves, the racial dimensions, the stigmatisation, the futility. Then there is the dreadful hypocrisy of politicians who use and tax the lethal drug of alcohol then jail others who enjoy less damaging relaxants such as marijuana and ecstasy.

The key question is why? After all, we live in a world in which grandparents took acid or smoked pot while listening to the Grateful Dead and many parents were the people who dropped ecstasy at outdoor raves. The current occupant of the White House has confessed to taking cocaine, while several of our cabinet ministers admitted smoking weed. Drug use is no longer that big a deal, while it is clear many of the problems and much of the misery are byproducts of banning.

The Global Commission is a valiant effort, but it is noticeable that signatories include 11 former presidents, politicians and diplomats, but just one in office – the Greek prime minister, who presumably needs any extra revenue he can find. This is the fundamental problem: serving politicians lack the bottle to take the obvious remedial actions.

As the report rightly states:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and the war on drugs cannot be won."

This failure of nerve is particularly acute in Britain. One cabinet minister who has admitted smoking cannabis in his youth said politicians were scared to act, despite knowing they should, since they would be slaughtered by rivals and the media for every drug-related death following liberalization. "You may think it is absurd regulation and it may cost more lives but deregulation is impossible in our political climate."

Sadly, he is right. Witness the infantile response – especially from local Labour parties, as the campaign group Transform will testify – to any politician standing for election who has dared suggest saner drug laws. They should listen to the admirable Bob Ainsworth, who had a Damascene conversion while a home office minister: "The public are in a far more progressive place on this issue than most politicians and sections of the press."

Recent polling proves he is correct. One survey last year found 70% of Britons favoured the regulated sale of cannabis, with smaller majorities supporting legally available heroin, ecstasy and cocaine. Curiously, the groups most in favour were Conservative voters, middle-aged women and readers of mid-market tabloids. And just think how tax proceeds would help the public spending crisis.

Politicians say they fear drug use would rise if prohibition is lifted. Evidence from abroad shows they are wrong. Look at Scandinavia, where the tough Swedes and more liberal Norwegians have similar addiction rates. Or Switzerland, where heroin demand and crime fell sharply following new policies based on public health rather than legality. Or Portugal, where heroin use fell by half after decriminalization.

These are places where there have been tentative steps forward. There are even signs the US, which remains the bastion of bigotry on this issue, is slightly shifting its stance under Barack Obama. It has, for example, permitted its blood-soaked neighbor Mexico to loosen cannabis laws.

Meanwhile, the tone of debate in Britain serves only to highlight the immaturity of our public discourse, with too many politicians lost in the fog of this foolhardy war. So here is a suggestion for our three main party leaders, who are all young enough to know better: why not hoist the white flag and work out a unified way to end a struggle that does so much more harm than good?

The alternative is to carry on fighting like generals in the First World War, ignoring the deaths, the devastation and the wastelands created around the world in a battle than can never be won.

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Drug Control Imperialism
Marijuana, Psychosis and the Failed War on Drugs
By PATRICK COCKBURN

In 2002 my elder son Henry was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His final breakdown came when he tried to swim Newhaven estuary in mid-winter fully clothed and was lucky to be rescued by some fishermen before he died of cold.  He spent the next eight years in and out of mental hospitals, though more recently has shown strong signs of recovery.

Henry later said that between the ages of 14 and 19 he had taken marijuana almost every day. He did so because it made him feel less shy with other people and his generation of teenagers all did so too. The music-scene, of which he wanted to be part, was drug orientated. “It would have been better if I hadn’t,” he says now, “but about half the people I knew in Canterbury [where he lived] were smoking dope.”

At the time I knew little about cannabis and nothing about mental illness. Henry was very intelligent, charming and passed all his exams.  I was at Oxford in the late 1960s and early 1970s when cannabis smoking was becoming popular, but I had probably puffed at a joint about twice in my life. I never knew about the dangers involved.

The risks are quite specific in the case of cannabis and tend to be masked by blanket disapproval or disapproval of the drug. Not everybody taking it is vulnerable to the same degree, but numerous scientific studies show that cannabis can be the precipitating factor for the sizeable minority of the population, perhaps 20 per cent, with a genetic pre-disposition to psychosis.

The evidence for this has been mounting for decades. A study of 1,900 people between the ages of 14-24 published in the British Medical Journal this year, who at the start of the survey had not taken cannabis, were reassessed at three and eight year periods. Those who took to smoking cannabis had a higher risk of developing psychosis. Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry, said “this study adds a further brick to the wall of evidence showing that use of traditional cannabis is a contributory cause of psychoses like schizophrenia.”

The conclusion mirrors my own experience. When Henry first showed symptoms of mental disorder I was amazed to discover how many friends, many of whom I had known well for years, had a close relative disabled by schizophrenia whom they had never told me of. Again and again the common feature in these tragedies was that the victim had taken cannabis in significant quantities at a young age.

It is this failure to take adequately on board the dangers of cannabis which is a serious failing of an otherwise impressive report by the Global Commission of Drug Policy published last week which is signed by luminaries such as the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker. All agree that the 40-year-old “war on drugs” has been a failure at every level and suggest other approaches such as decriminalization, education and treatment to replace incarceration.

The report was predictably rejected, despite its high level endorsement, by politicians across the world who learn from the cradle that a policy of “being tough on drugs” however counter-effective is invariably popular. But there is a second, less mindless reason why a well-researched report like this has less impact than it should. This has because supporters of decriminalization in the media and among the intelligentsia in general see cannabis as harmless and discount opposition to it as ill-informed prejudice. 

Even in a well-informed report like this there are repeated signs of an underestimation of the dangers of some drugs. For instance it blithely reproduces a chart published in Lancet drawn by “independent experts” claiming that cannabis carries a lower risk to the consumer than alcohol and cigarettes. They fail to make clear that for people genetically susceptible to psychosis the risks involved in taking cannabis may be lethally high. Cigarettes and alcohol, whatever harm they cause, do not, at a young age, send you mad. The report would carry more political punch if it underlined that its proposed “experiment in decriminalization” does not imply that cannabis is less harmful than was once believed. It may, indeed, be much more dangerous.

It is not as if there were only a small number of people at risk. An estimated 51 million people worldwide, including 2.2 million in the US and 250,000 in the UK, are estimated to suffer from schizophrenia, which may have been precipitated or hastened as to the time it manifests itself by cannabis, so the potential casualty list from ill-judged experimentation is large. 

The proponents of current drug policies, largely devised and propagated by the US, scarcely bother to justify them in rational terms. The present demagogic approach is usually attributed to President Nixon, though it was first used as a political weapon by his Republican rival the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. As with “red-baiting” in the US in the 1940s and 1950s and “the war on terror” post 9/11, the “war on drugs” was always a means of manipulating and exaggerating public fears as a means of winning political power and as Nixon put it privately to his aide Haldeman, essentially aimed at America’s blacks.
   
The results, as the Global Security’s report cogently explains, have been devastating. Demand and profits will always be so high that arrests of dealers, punishment of consumers, crop eradication, highly publicized seizures of drug shipments, have no overall effect. Where an obstacle to the drug trade appears, the trade simply flows through different people and countries. States with weak security systems like Mexico and the Central American states or, increasingly, West Africa, do not have the strength to combat the hordes of gunmen which drug money can pay for.

Security agencies justify their bloated budgets as participants in the “war on drugs” despite its manifest failure. Cheaper and demonstrably more effective methods are under-funded or neglected. For instance, provision of clean syringes to heroin users in UK and Germany has kept HIV prevalence among people who inject drugs to below five per cent while in Russia and Thailand, where there is no such provision, it is over 35 per cent.

The war on drugs incorporates and exacerbates racial and social conflict. Of the 2.3 million people in jail in the US about a million are there for non-violent offences, mostly to do with drugs, and of these half are African-Americans and a quarter Latinos. Despite ruining the lives of so many non-criminal consumers, imprisonment has not reduced drug consumption or dented the profits to be made.

None of this is going to change while the US plays the predominant role in determining the drugs policies of the rest of the world. The “war on drugs” is too politically attractive in the US to be abandoned as futile. The report rather daringly denounces this as ‘drug control imperialism’ that lands the rest of the world with a failed American policy while more successful drug policies tested successfully in European countries are ignored.

Too Big to Do Time?

Fed Wrist-Slap for Wachovia Makes Farce of Drug War
By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.

The U.S. government won convictions against 23,506 drug traffickers nationwide during 2010, sending 96 percent of the offenders to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.

Yet one of the biggest entities busted by the feds for involvement in drug trafficking last year received just a wrist-slap deal from federal prosecutors with nobody getting prison time.

During 2010, the U.S. government also won convictions against 806 persons involved in smaller-time drug-related money laundering, sending nearly 77 percent of those offenders to prison.

Yet when it came to a case involving billions of dollars in illegal drug profits, the federal government gave the same unusual wrist-slap to the same entity caught giving greed-blinded assistance to Mexican drug cartels by laundering billions of dollars in illegal profits for them.

So, what is this entity that federal prosecutors found worthy of big breaks for its laundering of billions of dollars, and for its blatant facilitating or tons of smuggled cocaine?

Meet Wachovia – once the nation's sixth largest bank by assets and now a part of Wells Fargo Bank… a too-big-to-fail bank that for the feds is apparently too-big-to jail.

Wachovia recently completed what amounted to a year-long probation arising from a March 2010 settlement deal with federal prosecutors who were pursuing criminal proceedings against Wachovia for its facilitating of illegal money transfers from Mexico totaling $378-billion…a staggering sum greater than half of the Pentagon's annual budget, which included billions of dollars traced directly to violent Mexican drug cartels.

The record $160-million fine slapped on Wachovia under terms of that settlement deal included a $50-million assessment for failing to monitor cash used to ship into the US 22 tons of cocaine. (That fine amounted to less than two percent of Wachovia's profits during the prior year.)

Wells Fargo now owns Wachovia. Wells Fargo, federal prosecutors stress, was not involvement in the misdeeds that landed Wachovia in court, where it received a deferred prosecution deal.

Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia in early 2009 for $12.7-billion, shortly after Wells Fargo had received $25-billion in federal bail-out funds from the TARP program. That purchase helped make Wells Fargo America's second-largest bank.

Many condemn the federal government settlement with Wachovia as a farce.

Criticism has come from persons in law enforcement frustrated by big-bank involvement in laundering drug money and from those who claim federal drug enforcement practices provide bigger breaks to drug kingpins than to low-level operators.

"All the law enforcement people wanted to see this come to trial. But no one goes to jail," said Martin Woods, an English expert on anti-money laundering, whose work while with Wachovia's London office helped unravel the drug connections. Woods says Wachovia officials bashed him for his investigative diligence and whistle-blowing as an employee.

"It's simple: it you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point," Woods said in an April 3, 2011 article published in The Observer, a British newspaper published on Sundays.

Wachovia's involvement in big-time money laundering paralleled the period of a murderous escalation in violence in Mexico's Drug War that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 Mexicans since 2006 alone, with the dead including politicians, prosecutors, police, soldiers, drug gang members and innocent bystanders.

During the same month last year when federal prosecutors gave Wachovia a break, finding no need to imprison any bank personnel for their involvement in massive drug-tainted money laundering, other federal prosecutors were pounding domestic drug dealers with long prison sentences.

For example, an Anchorage, Alaska man received a ten-year term for selling four ounces of crack cocaine, while an East St. Louis, Ill. businessman received a life sentence plus a $2.25-million fine for distributing three thousand pounds of cocaine between 2004 and his arrest in April 2008.

The amount of cocaine trafficking that sent the Illinois man to prison for life – one and a half tons - was much smaller than that single 22 ton cocaine shipment referenced in the Wachovia settlement document.

The settlement agreement Wachovia officials signed with federal prosecutors in Miami last year clearly stated that the bank knew that many of the transactions with Mexican financial institutions from 2004 to 2007 carried the stench of drugs.

That settlement agreement stated in part that as early as "2005 Wachovia was aware that other large US banks were exiting the [Mexican] business based on [anti-money laundering] concerns…Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in business" according to news media reports.

One reason Wachovia stayed in the business as others pulled out is that the bank reaped hefty fees from that money-laundering "business," in which billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveler's checks and bulk cash shipments went into Wachovia accounts from Mexican exchange facilities called casa de cambios (CDCs).

Jeffery Solman, the federal prosecutor who handled the Wachovia case, stated last year that "Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations."

Last year Bloomberg News, in an article on the Wachovia money laundering scandal, reported how the federal government cited other mega-financial institutions in the U.S. like American Express Bank International and Bank of America for their complicity in laundering drug money.

Making a farce out of the nation's supposed War on Drugs, none of the mega-financial institutions identified by federal authorities as having been involved with laundering drug money and none of the well-paid individuals at those institutions which were facilitating that laundering has faced go-to-jail federal criminal prosecutions like those targeting small fry in the drug trade.

Days after Wachovia received its wrist-slap deal for laundering billions of dollars in drug money, federal prosecutors secured a five-year sentence for a 26-year-old Johnstown, Pa. man involved with a drug ring it claimed was responsible for $10,000 in drug sales per month.

Imprisoning that Johnstown street dealer for five years will cost taxpayers $113,115, based on the average cost of $22,623 annually to house a federal prisoner. He was one of six people netted during a drug crackdown in that small former steel town located in the mountains 66 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Alarming evidence of the Drug War farce – the prosecutorial pounding of small fry while major players get a pass – is evident in statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal agency that advises Congress on criminal sentencing matters.

During 2009, in the Southern Florida district where Miami is located, 96.1 percent of the 669 persons convicted in federal courts for drug trafficking received prison time. Twenty-percent of the persons convicted in Southern Florida federal courts for simply possessing drugs received prison time.

Of the 67 persons convicted of money laundering during 2009 in those same Southern Florida courts, 77.6% went to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.

As noted in that April 2011 article in The Observer, the conclusion of the Wachovia case "was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the "legal" banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer."

That Observer article included observations made in 2008 by the then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime providing evidence suggesting that drug/crime money was "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drug trade," the Observer article quoted the U.N. official as stating. "There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."

The June 2010 Bloomberg News article provided an ominous observation about the wrist-slap protection large banks receive from criminal indictments due to a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory:

"Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets," says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering. The theory is like a get-out-of-jail free card for big banks, Blum says.

Another anti-money laundering expert disappointed with the federal government's settlement with Wachovia is Robert Mazur, identified in the Observer article as one of the world's "foremost figures" in providing anti-money laundering training and the point-man for US law enforcement during prosecutions against Columbian drug cartels two decades ago.

Mazur told The Observer, "The only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom."