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.
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.
And the appeals are on the back page. That was something actually said by a Dallas County District Attorney in relation to having convicted a Spanish-American citizen for “dealing crack” and the so-called evidence turned out to be ground up wallboard. Gypsum. CHALK. When the Appeals Court overturned the Conviction, they kept the guy in prison for two more years while the Dallas DA first appealed the Appeal and then tried to fabricate new “evidence”.
This practice is alive and well.
It’s being used to try to whitewash the Pentagoons persecution of WikiLeaks with release to a Swedish Newspaper the disinformation about Assange being charged with rape. Something the Swedish police dropped, turned their backs and walked away from it.
So now the Pentagon can say, Sure, we “inadvertently” committed torture, murder and other war crimes, constantly and without any remorse, but, hey, Assange was falsely charged with rape so that makes OUR crimes disappear!
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.
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.
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
I support terrorists?
I do drugs, I fund crime, I help terrorism. Well, because there’s a war on drugs, my money goes to criminals, druglords and terrorists.
If drugs were not illegal, my money would go to legitimate sources. I do drugs, my government has declared war on me.
The war on drugs is part of the war against terrorism, nothing to do with people who think differently, who want to lead their lives differently, who don’t want to be oppressed by capitalism’s whims.