Drug WarRant

How else can you read this?

BOGOTA, Colombia — Despite growing bipartisan concern over alleged corruption in the Colombian army, the U.S. Congress appears likely to approve increased funds for this country’s war on drugs.

A final vote on Plan Colombia funding — the largest U.S. foreign aid program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan — probably won’t take place until after the November congressional elections. But staffers and analysts in Washington say Colombia will receive more than $750 million, exceeding the $728 million for the current fiscal year.

So what’s this corruption they’re talking about? Well, there’s this…

…reports that army officers planted explosives in Bogota, the capital, in the days leading up to Uribe’s second inauguration in August, in an apparent scheme to collect rewards for discovering the bombs.

and this…

In August, army units in the Caribbean port of Barranquilla killed six people, an incident at first portrayed as accidental deaths during a kidnapping rescue attempt, then as drug-gang killings.

oh, but wait! There’s this one…

But the most disturbing incident for some U.S. legislators happened in May, when Colombian army troops killed 10 U.S.- trained anti-narcotics police officers and an informant in the village of Jamundi, near Cali in the west of the country.
The shootout was first described as a case of mistaken identity. But one high-ranking Uribe official has since then called it “a criminal act” in which the army units allegedly did the bidding of narco-traffickers.

So the drug war in Colombia has encouraged and fueled widespread corruption and violence in the country. It has caused the destruction of poor farmers’ lives, ruined their crops, and poisoned their water. It has led to the destruction of valuable rainforest.

And it doesn’t work.

Just look at the numbers daksya put together below and it’s clear as can be.

But Congress wants to spend more money on it.

Idiots.

To be fair, the LA Times article, through their interview with Adam Isaacson of the Center for International Policy, gets to perhaps the real reason for Congress’ interest in increasing funds to the Colombia Drug War:

“Uribe knows he is one of the only friends the U.S. has in Latin America, and he is taking advantage of it.”

If Congress wants to buy a country, I wish they wouldn’t use something so destructive as the drug war as their excuse.

Via
Great quote from the Reno News and Review:

The fact is, the prohibition against marijuana has to end in this country, and that’s why we endorse Question 7 (Regulation of Marijuana Initiative), which will make possession of up to one ounce of Mary Jane legal in Nevada for people over 21 years old. (OK, there’s more to it than that, check out www.regulatemarijuana.org.) With all the important things we have to worry about, it doesn’t make sense to spend one more cent of resources persecuting a mostly innocuous and private activity. Don’t prohibit it, regulate it. American citizens have been irreparably harmed by the so-called War on Drugs. There are dozens of reasons for ending prohibition and not that many for keeping it.

This is going to be interesting. Recent polls show it to be getting very close.

This is old news to many of you by now, yet it is an essential and critical moment in American criminal drug war history that rivals the exposure of the Tulia, Texas drug sting scandal.

Blogger Radley Balko got things going. A lot of other wonderful people stepped up to the plate, and now a man who was on death row for protecting himself and his daughter from home invasion is now getting a new trial. It’s not over, of course. But at least it’s on a path that could lead to a more sane future for Cory and his daughter.

You can get the background to the story here and read Radley’s full archive of Cory Maye posts here.

And be sure to read Sure beats getting Dan Rather fired, huh by Jim Henley, and The Cato policy analyst who may have saved a man’s life by Gene Healy.

Well, I had an incredible adventure exploring Prague and the Czech Republic, the mountains of Slovakia, Budapest, and Vienna. And I didn’t even have to go through body cavity searches at customs — the very nice customs lady looked at my passport and warmly said: “Welcome home, Peter!”
A lot of people have asked me about the fact that the Czech Republic has very lax laws regarding marijuana. While I don’t know the specifics of the laws, as far as I can tell, it’s somewhat the equivalent of decriminalization — they just don’t bother arresting people for it. And, quite frankly, it was a total non-issue. Nobody cared. I didn’t see any drug dealers or drug problems. Society hadn’t gone crazy. Some people smoked pot. Most didn’t. (Most, in fact, drank beer, which is very big there.)
Anyway, I’ve been wading through all my emails and phone messages and everything since I got back and now I’ll be back to regular posting again. A few posts will be catch-up, but I won’t be able to get to everything that happened while I was gone.
A special thanks to all the regulars who kept Drug WarRant active in the comments and through the community messageboard while I was away!

The headline at CNN online shouts ‘Cali leaders forfeit $2.1 billion‘. In the article, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales noticeably omits any comment on the impact of this event on the overall US cocaine trade, instead offering a meek self-congratulation:

“The brothers’ guilty pleas effectively signals the final, fatal blow to the powerful Cali cartel,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at a Washington news conference. “This is a day of pride for the people of Colombia and for international law enforcement.”

With good reason.

The heads of the Medellin cartel, one, Carlos Lehder, was incarcerated in the US in 1992, and two, Pablo Escobar, was killed in a shootout in 1993. The heads of the other big cartel, based in Cali, once responsible for 80% of the cocaine imported into the US, are now behind bars as well. So how has the War on Drugs been going? One corner away from victory? Well, not quite.

According to the UN World Drug Report 2006, these are the figures depicting the recent state of the cocaine trade.

• Production: Potential cocaine production in Colombia in metric tons
• Wholesale: US Wholesale price (per gm; inflation-adjusted)
• Retail: US Retail price (per gm; inflation-adjusted)

Year	Production	Wholesale	Retail
1990:	92	68	275
1991:	88	69	254
1992:	91	67	237
1993:	119	60	199
1994:	201	56	180
1995:	230	50	168
1996:	300	44	157
1997:	350	42	154
1998:	435	38	149
1999:	680	36	138
2000:	695	34	147
2001:	617	24	108
2002:	580	25	93
2003:	550	23	80
2004:	640	23	90
2005:	640	*	104

Just give it five more years. This time..

Plan Colombia and Beyond is a very nice blog to keep up with the WoD and Colombia.

I took lots of pictures in Vienna today, but I thought I’d share this one with you.

Group against pot initiative plans lectures

The group opposing Amendment 44, which seeks to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes, said Wednesday that a series of lectures will serve as the primary weapon in the campaign.
The lectures by various experts on drugs and addiction will focus on the dangers of marijuana and the effects on the state of legalizing cannabis…
Members of the coalition include… Andrew Barthwell, a Chicago-based doctor and former deputy director for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

I guess she’s hoping people won’t Google her name and find this.

Yep. They’re kicking me out of here in 10 minutes and I haven’t even been able to download all my email yet. Heading for Vienna tomorrow by boat up the Danube River. The riots in Budapest have been relatively well-mannered and have affected us not in the least.

I’m having a very hard time keeping up with all the news while on vacation, so do your stuff!
You guys are the greatest!

This is late coming to you because of my vacation — I had very little internet access on top of the mountain at Lomnicky Stit in Slovakia, and I’m now in the basement of an open-late internet store in Budapest — but please follow through on this action alert from SSDP:

This week, out of nowhere, the House will vote on a bill giving school officials and police much broader authority to search public school students for drugs. Under the bill, groups of dozens of hundreds of students could be searched on the mere suspicion that just one of them has drugs.
This is the same logic that allowed police officers to storm a high school in Goose Creek, SC, in 2003, forcing dozens of students to the ground and pointing guns directly at their faces during a misguided raid in which no drugs were found.
The new bill, the deceptively named “Student and Teacher Safety Act,” wasn’t supposed to go anywhere, but its sponsor, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) is in a tight race this November and has convinced the Republican leadership to bring his bill directly to the floor (completely skipping the committee process) so he can tell his constituents that he’s doing something in Washington.
But, because of the shady legislative tricks, we only need to get 1/3 of the House to vote against the bill to kill it.
We’ve got a real chance to stop this bill, and we would appreciate it if you could point your readers to the action alert that Students for Sensible Drug Policy has set up at:
http://capwiz.com/mobilize/issues/alert/?alertid=8779706&type=CO
More information about the bill, as well as video footage of the 2003 Goose Creek raid, is available on SSDP’s blog at:
http://daregeneration.blogspot.com/2006/09/take-action-now-stop-school-drug.html

Take action now.