Drug WarRant

Mexico…

It’s hard to even pay attention any more… the continuing reports from Mexico of destruction start to numb a person.

Mexican Singer Vega Shot Dead in Car

Hours later, on the way to his concert, [Sergio] Vega was gunned down by the Sinaloa cartel. Gang members opened fire on Vega’s red Cadillac, which caused him to lose control of the car. According to the newspaper El Debate, the gunmen “finished [Vega] off” with shots to the head and chest.

According to BBC, musicians who focus on the drug issues in Mexico have become targets for the violent drug gangs. In the past three years, at least seven musicians have suffered similar fates as Vega.

How Wachovia And Major U.S. Banks Have Spent The Past Four Years Helping Mexican Drug Cartels

Back in March, Wachovia struck a deal with Federal prosecutors under which the bank admitted it didn’t do enough to prevent money-laundering between criminal organizations, in which illicit funds transferred flew past the $300 billion mark. Now Wachovia faces charges from the Department of Justice over violating the Bank Secrecy Act – a first for the bulge bracket of large U.S. banks.

Similarly, traffickers used accounts at Bank of America to purchase three planes that ended up smuggling 10 tons of cocaine. “Federal agents caught people who work for Mexican cartels depositing illicit funds in Bank of America accounts in Atlanta, Chicago and Brownsville, Texas, from 2002 to 2009,” says the article.

Killing Escalates Mexico Drug War

A leading Mexican gubernatorial candidate was killed early Monday in a state bordering Texas, in the highest-level assassination of a politician here since President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels in 2006.

The killing of Rodolfo Torre, who was seen as a shoo-in for governor in Tamaulipas, represents an escalation of the drug traffickers’ war against the Mexican state.

We’ve gotten so numb, that we even forget about incidents such as this one…

When he first learned about what Juarenses have come to call the “massacre at Villas de Salvarcar,” Calderón hinted that the thirteen teenagers who died at the hands of professional executioners were common criminals and city low life. He could not have been more wrong. In fact they were honor students and athletes who had gathered to celebrate a friend’s seventeenth birthday. They had the misfortune of belonging to a football club whose initials, “AA,” were mistaken for the initials of the Sinaloa cartel’s local enforcers, the Artistic Assassins. And so, in the middle of the night, while the teens danced in a room cleared of furniture, they were gunned down. Seven hours later, when the first daylight photos were taken, the concrete floor where they died still glistened with their clotting blood.

And so it continues, day after day, while venal drug warriors, who care about nothing but their own gravy train, tell us soberly that the violence is a sign that we’re winning, and that we must continue to countenance and even fuel this destruction and corruption.

Why? Merely to avoid the remote possibility that a few extra people may voluntarily get stoned and eat Doritos.

This post is a plug for my latest artistic enterprise and a bit off-topic for drug policy.

As some of you know, one of my long-time artistic pursuits has been the photography and performance art of The Living Canvas — a unique art approach that is demonstrates the incredible expressive power of the human body through its function as a living canvas for projected textures and images.

The latest event is my seventh Living Canvas theatrical production: Living Canvas: Demons.

Join The Living Canvas in a journey through the mind of a young woman, encountering creatures of nightmare, mystery, and merriment. Eleven performers, clad only in the textures of projections and light, reveal a hidden world where naked flesh morphs into the manifestations of fantasy and nothing is what it seems.

Pete Guither’s The Living Canvas has been projecting textures and images onto naked performers since 2001, and Demons is their seventh show in Chicago. Each show has had a different theme and structure, but all celebrate the power of the human body to be an expressive canvas, with an underlying theme of body acceptance. In fact, each show not only has a Q and A session following, but also an opportunity for adventurous audience members to see what it’s like to be a Living Canvas.

OK – here’s a stretch for a connection to drug policy… One review of a past Living Canvas production said: “Stoners, Dali fans, sensualists of every stripe, this show’s for you.” — Brian Nemtusak, The Reader. However, you don’t have to be stoned to be blown away by the images and the story that is told.

Other reviews of past shows:

Nina Metz of the Chicago Tribune called The Living Canvas “intensely peculiar and mesmerizing… It’s riveting.” Time Out Chicago said “Pete Guither’s high-def projections of intricate patterns across naked actors is eye candy on the order of a laser-light show.” And ChicagoCritic.com called it a “sensual and visceral performance art piece done with craft and good taste.”

“The Living Canvas: Demons” opens Friday and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 10:00 p.m. from July 2 through July 31 at National Pastime Theater, 4139 N Broadway in Chicago. Tickets are $20 each and can be purchased by online or by calling 773-327-7077.

The show is part of a larger theatrical festival at National Pastime Theater called Naked July: Art Stripped Down. There is also a blog that discusses and previews the shows.

If you’re in the Chicago area during July, make it a point to see the show — it’s short (just under an hour) and unforgettable. Plus, there’s always that opportunity for audience participation if you’re interested. I’ll be at all of the performances. Feel free to come up and introduce yourself afterwards.

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This is an open thread.

One of the true tragedies in the drug war has been the failure of leaders in the black community to speak out against the new Jim Crow laws — the drug war that has decimated the black communities through intended and unintended racist application and the systematic disenfranchisement of blacks due to over-incarceration.

In fact, much of the African-American community has called for tougher drug laws and enforcement, perhaps partially due to a lack of understanding of the true effects of prohibition, partially due to a fear of appearing to be excusing or promoting drug abuse/trafficking among their own, and partially due to the tremendous power within the black community of what tends to be a socially conservative moralistic view promoted by the church.

So it is heartening to see the California chapter of the NAACP endorse marijuana legalization.

Saying that prohibition takes a heavy toll on minorities, leaders of the NAACP’s California chapter announced Monday that they are backing passage of a marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot.

The war on drugs is a failure and disproportionately targets young men and women of color, particularly African-American males, said Alice Huffman, president of the NAACP’s state conference.

The group cited statistics from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice showing that in 2009, 62% of the state’s marijuana arrests were of nonwhite suspects and that 42% were under 20.

The pattern was consistent in the state’s 25 largest counties, with arrests of African Americans at double, triple and quadruple the rate of whites even though studies show that blacks use marijuana at lower rates than whites, NAACP officials said.

Of course, this move by the NAACP was not without controversy within the community.

But [Sacramento minister Ron Allen, president of the International Faith-Based Coalition, a Sacramento group representing 3,600 congregations, said he is stunned the state NAACP would favor legalized marijuana.

“Most African American pastors are disappointed, absolutely disappointed with the decision,” said Allen, bishop of the Greater Solomon Temple Community Church in Oak Park. “If anyone should know the effects of illicit drugs in the black community, it should be one of our most respected civil rights organizations.”

The point, Reverend Allen, is that the NAACP knows the effects of the drug war in the black community, and also knows that criminalization hasn’t done a thing to help the problem of the effects of illicit drugs in the community.

You and the rest of your religious leaders need to get your heads out of your asses and actually take the time (and open-mindedness) to learn what will be best for your flock instead of reflexively and ignorantly assuming that moral choices and government criminalization work the same way.

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Note: Good job by Malcolm Kyle with having currently the featured popular comment at the second article above.

In other news related to California legalization, former Governor Gary Johnson endorses the legalization campaign:

You can contribute here.

The one thing that scares drug war governments more than anything else is… the truth. They know that they can’t sustain the people’s support for their policies without lies and propaganda.

We’re the truth tellers.

More valuable than any strategy or campaign, celebrity or coalition, we have the ability to counter that propaganda just by telling the truth.

And yes, that scares them. We scare them.

Our friends at Transform worked diligently for a long time to get their government to actually release the results of drug policy studies the government had commissioned but then didn’t want to release because the data didn’t support their drug war.

They got a little look at the internal workings when a government memo accidentally got released as well…

“The release of the report entails the risk of Transform, or other supporters of legalisation, using information from the report to criticise the Government’s drug policy, or to support their call for the legalisation of drugs and the introduction of a regulated system of supply. These risks should be considered in reaching a decision on whether to release the report, as recommended.”

Remarkable, yet not at all surprising.

Here’s another interesting quote, this time in the newly released World Drug Report 2010 from the UNODC. In the introduction, Director Antonio Maria Costa says:

So grave is the danger that the issue is now periodically on the agenda of the Security Council. Unless we deal effectively with the threat posed by organized crime, our societies will be held hostage – and drug control will be jeopardized, by renewed calls to dump the three UN drug conventions that critics say are the cause of crime and instability.

Another remarkable statement. This time we have Costa, who has previously admitted that prohibition fuels violence, candidly state that, unless they can somehow find a way to get rid of the criminals (an impossibility within the context of the drug war), reformers could have the upper hand and end up dismantling their precious drug war.

Yep. We’re dangerous, all right.

This video was put out by The International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. Be sure to sign the Vienna Declaration.

Tel Aviv forbids marijuana legalization rally

On Sunday the demonstration’s organizer, Liora Gelber received a notice from Tel Aviv Municipality official Ruby Zelof reading, “I hereby inform you that your request to hold a rally for the legalization of cannabis has been rejected.”

“The police did not give us any trouble, but the municipality said it would cost us NIS 16,600 (about $4,300) to hold the rally at Rabin Square,” said Gelber. “We began to raise the money, and various artists confirmed their participation. The notice we received today infuriated us. The municipality did not even give us a reason for why it is not authorizing the rally.

A small thing to us, but in a way, we are responsible. It is our drug war that we promote and export to the world that gives all sorts of governments (from the more permissive to the most severe) the justification, the cover, the encouragement to cancel a rally, suppress political talk, imprison, and worse.

We can hope that other countries will rise up and collectively force global change despite the drug war bullying of the U.S. But it’s really our responsibility to fix what we’ve broken.

Happy International Anti-Drug Abuse day.

U.N. Says War Between Mexican Drug Cartels Benefits U.S.Another variation on the increased-violence-shows-we’re-winning theme.

A war between Mexican drug cartels is benefitting the United States by making black market drugs less accessible as gang members turn their efforts against each other, according to a new United Nations report.

“This struggle is a blessing for the United States because the drought of cocaine generates low levels of addiction, high prices and doses that are less pure,” said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N.’s Office of Drugs and Crime.

A blessing?

At least they’re not shooting offenders in Scotland… Drink drivers ‘to have cars seized and crushed for first offence’
They’re adding drugged drivers as well.

Bill O’Reilly Thinks of the Children (Again) Jacob Sullum does a nice job of taking apart O’Reilly’s attack on DPA and interview with Nadelmann.

This is an open thread

We always have idiots in this country who like to claim that if we only got tougher(!) on drugs, we’d end the drug problem.

Of course, all you need to do is point to countries like China who regularly execute drug traffickers, and yet still never seem to run out of traffickers to execute.

Unfortunately, tomorrow is the U.N.’s annual International Day Against Drug Abuse and Trafficking, known as Anti-Drug Day. It’s a day to dread, because just about every year, China likes to “celebrate” it by shooting a whole bunch more of their citizens in the head.

And how is that get as tough as it’s possible to be policy working?

China says drug cases shot up 16 percent last year from 2008 with courts convicting more than 56,000 people.

Chinese courts handled more than 50,000 drug trafficking cases in 2009 and about 17,000 people received severe sentences – from five years in prison to a death sentence – up almost 9 percent from the year before, the Supreme People’s Court said Thursday.

Police seized nearly 28 tons of drugs last year, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

Drug prohibition, even at its most extreme, does not work. And the U.N. has been criminally culpable by not focusing on human rights abuse while it encourages and even pushes countries to get tougher on drugs.

With the UNODC’s director Antonio Maria Costa’s term expiring in July, there’s an opportunity, but also a danger…

New UN drugs tsar must be a leader on human rights by Damon Barrett in the Guardian

Unfortunately, the current frontrunner for the role of UN drug tsar is the candidate being pushed by the Russian government.

The candidate is Yuri Fedotov, current ambassador to the UK. But this is not about the individual except to the extent that he is a career diplomat of over 40 years’ service. It is about Russia’s disastrous drug policies, its appalling human rights record and despite this, a government official nonetheless taking a high-profile position of strategic importance to both issues.

Russia is no supporter of human rights scrutiny in drug control, and works to block any such progress in international political fora such as the UN commission on narcotic drugs. There are nearly 2 million people who inject drugs in Russia, and the government has abandoned them to HIV and abusive “treatments” such as “flogging therapy”. Moreover, the government regularly seeks to block political progress on public health interventions such as opioid substitution therapy and needle and syringe exchange intended to fulfil their human rights. It is now estimated that 37% of people who inject drugs in Russia are HIV positive and as many as 80% of all new HIV infections in the country are due to unsafe injecting practices.

A UNODC director from Russia would likely be a disaster.

The new director will soon be appointed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

My condolences to the families of those who will likely be shot to death by the Chinese government tomorrow.

There’s a lot we don’t control, but the internet is ours.

The “Tax Cannabis in 2010” Facebook page as of Thursday afternoon had 101,386 fans (i.e., people who “like” the page).

The “Public Safety First — Against the Legalization of Marijuana in CA” Facebook page had six fans.

This was new to me…

The Desert Springs Equestrian Center in Tucson takes in horses used by drug smugglers to pack in heavy bales of marijuana.

After arriving in the U.S., the horses are often abandoned to die in the desert.

Just one more of the many destructive by-products of prohibition.

Desert Springs nurses the horses back to health, then trains them and looks for adoptive homes.

Good for them! Here’s the Desert Springs Equestrian Center site.

The horse at right is Homer, one of the former drug trade horses you can adopt.