A Teller County reporter for TMJ snapped this photo of the DEA visiting a local elementary school to give a presentation advising children against the use of drugs. The DEA agents landed a helicopter on the school playground to join reservists already deployed. Despite having secured the perimeter, and disarmed the kids, weapons were the show and tell.
Here’s our spiel for those burned out on the reformist treadmill. Jury Nullification is not about reforming the justice system or asking power to temper its abuse. This is about convincing ordinary people that as jurors they can upset the whole racist classist for-profit applecart.
Ordinary citizens serving their jury duty can refuse to be par† of the system which funds municipal coffers and supplies the prison system. They can listen to the jury instruction and the legalese box outside of which they are restrained from thinking, and they can say no.
When jurors refuse to convict, prosecutors can’t press charges and cops can’t make arrests.
Jury Nullification doesn’t reform law so much as explode it from within. Not via the legislator, nor civil servant, but through ordinary conscientious people.
Jury Nullification has the potential for radical change. When more people figure this out, these juries will be the pitchforks and torches that riot police can’t stop.
You want to make Black Lives Matter, put them in the hands of subversive jurors.
You want to defeat Denver DA Mitch Morrissey? Load his juries with people who don’t support him.
Undermine the cases authorities bring against people, don’t become preoccupied with prosecuting cops. That’s just reinforcing the power of the prosecutor.
Take away the authority of the police state by denying them guilty verdicts. Acquit arrestees so they can sue for false arrest. Acquit accused people of color on principle. Defeat the racial incarceration problem by halting the conviction of minorities.
End the war on drugs. The war is over if you want it. Just say no to one more mandatory sentence. Tell the judge and prosecutors and your fellow people that the war is over.
A young doctor I once met travelling in Thailand told me that a heroin addiction would be his ideal state, provided his supply remained stable. A person could function, maintain a job even, regularly dosed with heroin. Unlimited financial means wasn’t required, just a regular, regulated source. That detectives found a full pantry of heroin in the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s home indicates someone in his household was nursing his habit. Given the actor’s prolific and excellent work, it’s hard to consider Hoffman a victim of addiction. Hoffman didn’t die from an overdose, he died from a toxic batch, a result of drug production and distribution being illegal. The War on Drugs killed Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was rich enough to support a drug habbit, but not inhumanely so to afford a royal poison taster.
COLORADO COLLEGE- Today’s presentation by Brigadier General Daniel Hokanson, on the role of NORAD and NORTHCOM in the War on Drugs on the US-Mexico border was abruptly closed to the public, for reasons not made clear to community members who might have appeared to offer a critical reception. Was it something we said, or didn’t get to say, except through our signs held outside Worner Center? What’s wrong with NORTHCOM & PENTAGON OUT OF COLOMBIA & MEXICO? Who can argue with this arithmetic: CRIMINALIZED + MILITARIZED DRUG WAR = DEATH & TYRANNY? Although I suppose neolibs would deny DRUG WAR IS U.S. EXCUSE TO SUPPRESS REBELLION. Popular with students was: WAR ON DRUG IS AS BOGUS AS WAR ON POVERTY. We’d compare it to the so-called Global War on Terror, but at a neoliberal institution like CC, who knows how that would be interpreted. If I’d been able to ask any question at all, it would have been to the Political Science Department. Why hadn’t they invited a second speaker to offer a corresponding critique of US Latin American policy? Turnout for the talk was sparse, and the sponsoring faculty member expressed his bemusement at our diligence to protest what he thought had been scheduled under the radar. So we beat NORAD at its own game.
Team Argentina unfurled a banner before Saturday’s match against Germany, against FIFA regulations, but it wasn’t the one above which calls attention to the organization of grandmothers trying to lift the veil on Argentina’s Disappeared, some of whose murderers still occupy high office. This picture was taken during an earlier practice session. Instead, before today’s game, the Spanish-speaking Argentines were joined by their German-speaking adversaries to hold a sign in English: “SAY NO TO RACISM.” It reached American and British viewers, but could the message have been more innocuous?
The admonition resembled “Just Say No To Drugs,” Nancy Reagan’s pseudo-urbane theme of America’s War On Drugs, an attack on the lower class that continues today and couldn’t be more racist.
Note how two dark-suited gentlemen unrolled the English banner while FIFA line judges enjoin a handful of players from both teams to form the backdrop. About the “bold letters” television commentators described the cause of the brief delay as “something we all believe in.”
Will we learn from those in the stadium that the Argentine team had unfurled its anticipated banner, but the TV cameras were kept aimed at a FIFA diversion?
One might be excused the impression that the soccer game that followed, Argentina’s catastrophic loss to Germany, appeared to have suffered a similar negotiation. Half of the excitement of an Argentine ascendancy was anticipating the mouthpiece it would give coach Diego Maradona, beloved star and great fan of international upstarts Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maradona hasn’t been speaking truth to only Argentina’s power.
The Argentine dribblers dominated the Germans at every turn, but none seemed disposed to coordinate a goal. At keep-away, they surrendered the ball to Germany only four times.
The South American quarterfinal losses to Netherlands, Spain and Germany confirmed that as sports mirror life, the New World Order is the Old World Order. The Ghanian Black Stars are out, and the Dutch rise from the ashes of South Africa.
10,000 rally in Boulder and 3,000 rally in Denver against laws making marijuana illegal. It’s time to end Prohibition, end the violence- inducing ‘War on Drugs’, and to at last end Prohibition. It’s also time to end the war on women and make prostitution a legal act, too. All these activities need to be regulated of course, but legalization can only help reduce disease and stop violence due to bad enforcement of bad law. See article about the Denver protest
Ciudad Juarez is a city of 1,500,000 plus people directly opposite El Paso, Texas, and Presidente Fecal Calderon and his Gringo manager, US President Barack Obama, have occupied the city with 10,000 Mexican troops. In short, this is where and what the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has ‘retreated’ to.
Sure military pacification works short term but not long term, as the examples of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Gaza so poignantly illustrate. So what happens when the troops are withdrawn, and they eventually must be? What happens then? See An Army Takeover Quells Violence in Mexico/ Drug Killings in Juarez Plummet, but Rights Complaints Surge
My guess is that they move on and occupy with troops yet other major cities in the years ahead. And eventually… voila! we have a situation much like that of Colombia. In other words, ‘the solution’ becomes the bigger problem.
Obama and Mexico’s Presidente Felipe Calderon got themselves together at the big house, Los Pinos, to celebrate their blood lust for more militarization of both Mexico and the US disguised as a so-called war on drugs.
Calderon, like some blood thirsty Aztec god of the past, insured that the international press would take due note of this big time pow wow, by having the Mexican Army do a human sacrifice of 16 nubile virgins… no I am sorry… one heroic soldier of the patria, and 15 ‘sicarios’ in honor of the visit by the Drug War God Obama. See Obama pledges support in Mexico’s drug-trade war
Nobody questioned the timing of this human sacrifice at all, and the world went about its business of watching sadly on as the Drug War God Obama requested yet more human sacrifice in the days ahead from his Mexican quisling, affectionately known by most as ‘Fecal’ (SHIT) Calderon.
See the initial press version about this human sacrifice- Mexico drug clash kills 16 ahead of Obama trip
‘Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.’
YES, there is something wrong with the law, when the law is made by elites to deliberately criminalize millions of poor people so as to further brutalize them.
See Financial Times columnist Clive Crook (good name!) writing about Prohibition- A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US
When elites do something as overtly and obviously dysfunctionally stupid as promoting Prohibition and a ‘War on Drugs’ then there is almost always a covert reason for why they are doing it, too. Same is true with all their other war making policies.
When a ‘Global War on Terrorism’ produces more terrorism than it eliminates yet the elites keep on pushing it, then there is a covert reason for doing that, too. What would those covert reasons be? Begging the elites to stop it because their overt reasons don’t add up right just will not succeed. They continue to do what they are doing for hidden reasons, and often even hidden from themselves reasons as well.
One of those hidden reasons is that what the program is really about is building a security apparatus to protect themselves, and not really to be used against drug spread and terrorism spread. They simply need a society blindly following authoritarian orders that are used to keep themselves, the elites, in power. Consider these ‘wars’ as excuses to build a security structure around themselves. It is a welfare program for the building of a group of security ‘servants’ for the top dogs. It is a program to make the lower classes of society more miserable and therefore more demoralized and self-destructive. Demoralized and self-destructive people are less able to rebel when there is military, courts, and police around every corner of their lives.
…In my book there are only 2 major international metropolitan areas in the Northern part of North America, those being Montreal and El Paso-Ciudad Juarez. I would add San Diego-Tijuana in there too except for the fact that the two cities are 25 miles apart from each other. Of course, most Anglo US citizens have never thought of El Paso-Ciudad Juarez in that manner as they mainly just drive past the area, usually with some sense of dismay.
So what’s going on down south these days a short drive right past Albuquerque from us? Put simply, basically the area has been turned into a war zone because of US drug policy and now Martial law is being implemented for the most part. See the Reuters report- Mexico to send more troops to besieged city
Yes, 1.6 million of the metro area’s population will be put under Marshall Law, but don’t think that none of people in El Paso north of the Rio Bravo is affected by this militarization, for they are. Crossing The Border now resembles walking into Northern Ireland, and all because the US government will never admit to losing its wars, no matter that they have.
Here is a slide show that gives people some small idea of the area being militarized. Audio slideshow: Mexico drug violence …Except for the fact that quite a lot of Ciudad Juarez looks not all that much different than the US does. Deserty, that’s all. And poorer. And scary. KInd of like the Bronx perhaps?
Drug cartel roundup in U.S. nets 750 in just another stupid war for the US government-military-industrial-prison complex welfare program for ‘security’ meat heads and those that profit off them.
Mexicans are increasingly getting fed up with ‘Fecal’ Calderon’s militarization of their country, an act that comes directive of Washington D.C. See Mexican protesters block bridges into Texas …How much bloodshed in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ will the US government enforce against the Mexican people? It comes, too, as the plunge of the American economy itself is destroying the Mexican economy alongside it. Bloodshed, violence, torture, mayhem, poverty? Thanks, Uncle Sam!
Do you think Michael Phelps should be suspended, and lose commercial endorsements, because a photograph surfaces of America’s winningest Olympic athlete with America’s most unfairly maligned recreational drug?
How antiseptic can corporate media expect to paint its role models? TV land can use cosmetics, hairspray and vivid primary colors to shut out the real world, but indignation about the image of a marijuana bong repudiates plenty of very ordinary sensibilities. It demonizes a broad cultural element that has been leading the charge, actually, against this nation’s disastrous “War on Drugs.”
Do we allow these intolerant, no doubt hypocritical, prudes to marginalize pot smokers? I’m just dumb enough to think it’s time to flood the web with our own bong snapshots!
Next the klieg-lit culture makers are going to insist their washed out features are natural and that it’s an aberration to have freckles.
Bill Clinton presided over murdering off hundreds of thousands of Iraqis via economic warfare, the bombing of multiple civilian targets in Yugoslavia including TV stations, water treatment plants, and the Chinese Embassy, and also the financing of Colombia’s death squads where tens of thousands of Colombians were murdered. Barack Obama has given new jobs in government policy making to these same Democratic Party political hacks that made all this bloodshed happen back in the 1990s. See “Body count mentalities” for some of the Colombian story about Democratic Party promotion of war and torture abroad. This was D.C.’s war, too. It was the Democrats’ war.
Antiwar.com reports that ‘since at least 1990, U.S. diplomats were reporting a connection between the Colombian security forces and far-right drug-running paramilitary groups, according to the Washington-based National Security Archive (NSA). In the meantime, the U.S. State Department continued to regularly certify Colombia’s human rights record and to heavily finance its “war on drugs.” The declassified documents were published Jan. 7 by the NSA, a non-governmental research and archival institution located at the George Washington University that collects, archives, and publishes declassified U.S. government documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.’
That was all back when only Israel and Egypt were getting more U.S. ‘aid’ dollars than Colombia was. With the Gaza slaughter underway as I write, we can today see the results there, too, of all that US money. Barack Obama is not about to change a damn thing! He is not CHANGE.
Secret Documents Show US Aware of Colombian Army Killings in 1990s
Mexico’s current Right Wing government has been duped into fighting a US ‘war on drugs’ inside Mexico. Actually it has been paid money big time to do so. Mexico also is fighting D.Cs war on immigrants, too, as its own treatment of Central American immigrants entering Mexican territory is abysmal, and yes it too is mainly being paid for by US dollars. The daily casualties in Mexico just yesterday from this war were 33 nationwide, 14 of them in Ciudad Juarez alone, the city right across from El Paso, Texas. And then there were Mexico’s headless Drug War soldiers.
If the US wants to give Mexico a Christmas gift of a different type, it might ought to call off this nonsense, and change the whole way it deals with drugs? If not, we may soon see headless American soldiers from this war, not from the idiotically US government named ‘Global War on Terrorism’. How many wars against shadows can the Right Wing nuts running the US lose at one time? On to Afghanistan, Obama! You’ll be bigger losers than even Cheney and Dubya were when it’s all said and done.
The press doesn’t cover in the US the real results of the US sponsored and run Drug War on Mexico soil. There’s basically nothing about the headless Mexican soldiers this week in the papers here, but instead we get treated to pictures of the photos of the Sinaloa beauty queen busted for supposedly riding in a vehicle full of gang members and guns. The stop was made by Mexican soldiers who still have their heads attached. MESSAGE- The Drug War is effective. REALITY- The Drug War is a ongoing disaster.
The US ‘Drug War’ is a spectacular international failure, whether it be Afghanistan, Colombia, Central America, or even the US-Mexico Border towns. In fact, the whole country of Mexico is being eaten alive by this so-called Drug War and the US population is hardly aware of what’s going on! How soon will it be before this newest bloodshed and carnage crosses to this side of the Border?
Fear keeps Americans out of Mexican sister city/ Nogales’ tourism-dependent economy paralyzed by gun, drug battles This is much worse than Prohibition ever was, and yet there is hardly a sign of a forthcoming intelligent decision to stop the carnage by stopping the ‘War’ now. Very sad. Will the US soon become a land of common beheadings and dumped bodies, too? Americans thought they had already seen Drug War violence, but what is headed our way soon will be much worse.
As a professional drug pusher, I have seen the worst abuse with drugs comes most often from the doctors. Society doesn’t seem to much mind that though, because these doctors are considered esteemed members of society. On the other hand our Christianity influenced hate filled world does despise ‘self abuse’, whether it be masturbation, self medication for depression (often called alcoholism), or filling prescriptions without a doctor’s order. As a result of this madhouse way of thinking, people’s heads are being decapitated (in Mexico and other countries) and little babies and small children are getting shot down through apartment building walls. Is there not another approach other than the ‘Christian’ one of punishment?
Yes there is, and Vancouver, BC seems to be at least partially taking a different route toward winning the ‘Drug War’. It has declared Peace! Vancouver’s Radical Approach to Drugs: Let Junkies Be Junkies Good for them! For their approach to truly win the ‘War’ though, it must be made national, and not just local. Otherwise junkies in Canada will just migrate West until they reach Vancouver. Hey, they did that for years even before the change in local law! Even junkies like good scenery, it seems. And good Chinese food, too!
So how’s the US War on Drugs really going? From right on The Border a message was sent just yesterday. Human heads sent to Mexico police
It is an insidious ruse to think that either of the 2 Democratic Party candidates are pledging to get the US out of Iraq. At least that is the conclusion reached by Jeremy Scahill, as he discusses why no presidential candidate plans on fully leaving Iraq Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
But even beyond Iraq, none of the 3 candidates plan to end the so-called ‘War on Global Terrorism’ or the ‘War on Drugs’. We have 3 war candidates to choose from if we decide to vote. Sure you can vote for Nader and/ or a Green Party candidate. But due to their late announcements, these are truly token candidacies and are not viable challenges to the Democratic and Republican parties. No democracy here, except for maybe Democracy Now being what we are kind of left with, along with a few non-Establishment blogs. etc. We are left with a voice on the margins but no vote.
The war on drugs. Oh yes, it’s a nasty endless little war, one that’s filling our prisons with small-time users/entrepreneurs and costing the taxpayers billions. It’s a war that hasn’t helped our poor addicted countrymen one iota, and it’s a war for which win-happy Bush has not yet declared victory. But neither has he hung his head in defeat, which he certainly should.
The DEA bigwigs ought to be lamenting the indisputable fact that its decades-long fight against drugs is not working. In fact, it’s making things worse. After spending more than six billion dollars to cripple the Medellin and Cali cartels, the IBM and General Motors of the drug industry, cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia has actually increased. Hundreds of smaller and more efficient cartels have filled the void left by the blue chip cartels, kind of like the dot.com explosion, except the brilliant, creative, innovators happen to run drugs. And the DEA hasn’t a clue who they are or how to stop them.
The war on drugs has penalized and incarcerated thousands of small-time drug dealers/users, the weak and dumb, the poor souls who would never be counted among the fittest in a Darwinian assessment. Years of artificial selection have given rise to the super drug-dealer, the one who, like the virulent bacteria that have arisen from overuse of antibiotics, is more efficient, more cunning, more innovative and much more difficult to eradicate. How can politicians hope to win a war with a strategy that ensures that only the most efficient and creative drug traffickers survive?
The relentless persecution of small-time drug dealers has decreased the supply of drugs on our streets. I suppose this can be seen as a good thing. However, the demand remains. Thus, according to accepted economic theory, interdiction has supported higher prices for the super dealers and provided incentive for more traffickers to enter the drug economy.
Alas, the war on drugs has been a complete waste of time and money. It’s time for the DEA to huddle in the war room and come up with a new strategic plan. They should bring in some new generals, hopefully with public health backgrounds. They might even want to get off their moral steeds and decriminalize recreational drug use, thereby decreasing the demand for illegal drugs. They might decide to throw their allotted resources at dangerous criminals and our underlying social problems and let the small-time stoners be. That is if success is truly their goal.
After all, wouldn’t it make sense to address the underlying demand for drugs? Shouldn’t the DEA stop focusing on supply and address the unchanged demand for illicit drugs? Of course, this would mean funding public health initiatives and educational programs which are not nearly as fun as fighting a war against cagey dark-skinned enemies in exotic foreign locales. No, the men in suits aren’t really interested in giving up their fat federal budgets in order to win the struggle against drug abuse.
The war is too much fun.
So we will keep building expensive prisons and filling them disproportionately with people of color, too poor to make waves. We’ll keep propping up the super-drug dealers we’ve created. We’ll ask Congress for $1.4 billion to fight the drug-crazed Mexicans from Merida, the enemy du jour. And we’ll rejoice that, as is true for all of our wars, there is no end in sight.
In my opinion, noted chronicler Ken Burns, whom I otherwise respect, does Americans a great disservice to title his multimedia WWII homage THE WAR.
I do resent the President and his enablers admonishing Americans for what may or may not be appropriate behavior “in a time of war.” We were not “at war” during the Cold War or the War on Drugs. And the War on Terror is equally an [existential, so-called] abstraction. Fighting terrorists, including the invasion of Afghanistan, is a police action. If we are talking about apprehension. Missile strikes are extra-judicial assassination. Undeclared military aggression.
But since our soldiers are being sent to war, and there is profound anti-war revulsion, and congress is being asked to collude by providing war funding, and we are detaining combatants which at a minimum should be awarded Prisoner of War status, we cannot escape discussing Iraq as a war, and most notably as an illegal war.
So when Ken Burns calls his WWII tome THE WAR, isn’t it more than slightly dismissive of veterans of all combat since? The Vietnam War lasted three times as long as WWII, to Baby Boomers it was the war. The Korean War, termed a “conflict” to avoid having Congress refuse a declaration of war, is now called the Korean War, even tragically the Forgotten War. World War One before it was The First World War, was known as The Great War, even the War to End All Wars. De facto it WAS THE WAR, but imagine anyone thinking to call it that in the midst of WWII.
Does Burns mean to deny [The] Iraq [War] its significance, even as he might suggest it lacks the legitimacy of WWII, the Just War? As Iraq casualties and atrocities slip from the headlines, it’s hard to see the diversion of WWII nostalgia as helpful.
Iraq may turn out to be simply the opening salvo of THE WAR declared by the corporate west on all of humanity. It deserves its due.
America’s ‘War on Drugs’ is creating disaster across the planet. This week it came home to my neighborhood, as the Colorado Springs police closed down a whole block on Madison Street, of all places, to do its Swat Team training. Helped in this endeavor by the local Jewish Synagogue, who loaned them a house to use, about 20 cops, 5 dog terrorists, and 12 pig mobiles wasted the afternoon away playing with their toys.
Switch now to a new Brazilian film, Tropa de Elite, that shows how this nonsense plays out in the poor neighborhoods of that great South American country, as the very same militarized policing units act as death squads, all in the name of ‘fighting drugs’.
Switch to Afghanistan where a US occupation army pretends to be fighting the spread of opium.
Switch to Colombia, where the US death squads pretend to be fighting cocaine.
It’s time to get the police out of all our neighborhoods, cut the Pentagon down to size, and fight the expansion of Fort Carson into yet more of SE Colorado. Aren’t you tired of them militarizing society everywhere?
Here’s how it works. The US pays the Mexican government to wall off Mexico’s southern borders to keep immigrants out. It helps militarize Mexico, too, and it can be called the ‘War on Drugs’.
But in reality it’s a war on immigrants even more. Let them die! That’s official US immigration policy. The latest poor folk murdered by US immigration policy
‘Orgies on the negotiating table’ by Colombian death squad leaders is in the news in Latin America.
A pretty picture of what the Organization of American States (OAS) located in Washington DC has actually deteriorated to, since they sponsored and secured the area where these criminals partied. And think that the US and its allies have a tough-on-crime attitude? How about a monthly $200 pension for death squad members who lay down their knives and stop dismembering peasants and other poor folk with?
Isn’t that nice? All part of the so-called War on Drugs, otherwise know as the daddy of the so-called ‘War Against Terrorism’.
See also, Colombia’s Civil War and the US
It was just a matter of time. The US State Department has awarded a contract to a US spyware company to set up intercepts of telephone calls, emails, and other information system communications in Mexico.
In Mexico, the government is calling this part of the ‘War on Drugs’. Here, with our more updated propaganda system in place, it is being called a contract to help stop TERRORISM! Who could ever be against such nice goals? Don’t you feel protected? I bet you do!
This is the same company and same system given by the US Government to their friends in Colombia, the Colombian oligarch government and their allied death squads. With the ‘War on Terror’ in fool gear, the US Government and its private contractors will be exporting Orwell everywhere! Be sure to check out the contracted company, VERINT, and its brochures.
It has been weeks since the US and its ally Ethiopia invaded Somalia. Invasions of other countries, lest we forget, are violations of international law. Unfortunately, the United Nations Security Council acts as Bush’s puppet and is once again rubber stamping US imperialist aggression. Now, Mogadishu threatens to spin into total anarchy ala Baghdad.
Every place the US carries its wars, chaos develops and security disintegrates. That goes for whether it is the US international so-called war on drugs, are it’s phoney so-called war on terror. Get the US and its hired goons out of Somalia now. In fact, get them out of Africa altogether!