Who Keeps The US Drug War Going?

We do.

What were we talking about?

xpost dude

Companies Using Rapid Eye Check
Communications: NYNEX and Continental Cablevision
Law Enforcement: Houston Police Department; California Highway Patrol; US Department of the Army
Manufacturing: Frito-Lay; Pepsi-Cola; Texaco Refining Co.

http://www.geocities.com/gcrites80s/eagle_snacks.htm

American Politics Journal calls for the boycott of ALL sponsors who ponied up cash for the "Un-auguration" of the Usurping Pretender presently occupying the Oval Office, Ex-Governor George W. Loserman Bush -- until such time as he and all his handlers are voted out of or removed from office:

Frito-Lay, Inc. Dallas TX $ 100,000.00

A threatened boycott of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP) was averted Wednesday as the company came to an agreement with the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network's “Campaign for Respect” and the Ludacris Foundation. The agreement, reached late Tuesday night, settles a dispute stemming from a yanked Ludacris ad and will distribute millions to youth organizations around the U.S.

Last week, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons announced that the hip-hop community would stop buying Pepsi products, which include such brands as Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, and Gatorade, unless the company addresses what Simmons perceived to be an act of disrespect.

The background to many engineered conflicts is illuminated by analysis of the drug implications. In Vietnam a Pepsi Cola bottling plant was a drug distribution point with CIA helicopters supplying it with drugs from the fields. Drugs were also smuggled back to the US in the body cavities of carefully labelled corpses.

Professor Alfred McCoy's 1972 classic, The Politics of Heroin In South East Asia, and his 1991 update, The Politics of Heroin - CIA Complicity In the Global Drug Trade, tell of how CIA helicopters in Vietnam were carrying drugs from the fields to the distribution points, when the American public thought they were there to fight 'communism'. He describes how a Pepsi Cola bottling plant was used for this trade and how the media suppressed this information. 58,000 Americans and goodness knows how many Vietnamese were killed in that conflict and nothing sums up more powerfully the lack of respect this mindset has for human life than the way the CIA smuggled drugs into America in plastic bags hidden in the body cavities of the dead soldiers being returned home for burial from Vietnam. CIA operative, Gunthar Russbacher, has told how some bodies were gutted and filled with drugs for shipment back to the States.

The bodies carried secret codes which allowed those carrying the drugs to be identified on arrival at West Coast air bases, particularly the Travis Air Force Base in California. The drugs were then removed and made available for the young people of America.

http://www.members.tripod.com/~aspartame/

Aspartame Information

In 1990 I had a physical in the Air Force and while waiting in the flight surgeons office I read an article about aspartame (nutrasweet) discussing the complications that can occur from ingesting nutrasweet. This was an official Air Force publication.

It went on to say it can cause vision and memory related problems and warned that people in the position to make command decisions, especially pilots, should not use any products with aspartame in it.

Since then I have done a lot of research on nutrasweet and can't believe it's being put in more and more products instead of being banned. Basically for the producer of consumer goods (ie Pepsi, Coke, etc.) it's cheaper because it takes so much less to sweeten their products and that increases profits.

welcome to sunny acapulco!

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) — Police found the bodies of 15 slain men, 14 of them headless, on a street outside a shopping center in the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco on Saturday.

Police in the southern state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, said handwritten signs were left with the bodies, a common calling card of Mexico's cartels.

Acapulco has seen bloody turf battles between drug gangs in recent years.

The bodies were found in an area not frequented by tourists. The victims all appeared to be in their 20s.

It was the largest single group of decapitation victims in recent years.

In 2008, a group of 12 decapitated bodies were piled outside the Yucatan state capital of Merida. The same year, 9 headless men were found in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo.

In keeping with a policy designed not to give the cartels publicity, state police did not release the text of the messages found with the bodies.

But Reforma newspaper reported that they referred to the Sinaloa cartel, headed by drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Reforma said they apparently indicated the victims were killed by the Sinaloa cartel for trying to intrude on the gang's turf and extort residents.

At least 30,196 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against cartels in late 2006.

Also Saturday, authorities said a small-town mayor was found dead in northern Mexico.

Saul Vara Rivera, mayor of the municipality of Zaragoza, was reported missing by family members Wednesday, Coahuila state prosecutors said in a statement. His bullet-ridden body was discovered Friday in neighboring Nuevo Leon state.

There were no immediate arrests.

At least a dozen mayors were killed nationwide last year in acts of intimidation attributed to drug gangs.

The bodies were found in an area not frequented by tourists.

This comes several paragraphs higher on the "inverted pyramid" than:

Also Saturday, authorities said a small-town mayor was found dead in northern Mexico.

the 80s are back!

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/marinesvszetas/

The war on drugs just got a whole lot more warlike. Two hundred U.S. Marines have entered Guatemala, on a mission to chase local operatives of the murderous Zeta drug cartel.

The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just “kicked off” their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

It’s a big shift for U.S. forces in the region. For years, the Pentagon has sent troops to Guatemala, but these missions have been pretty limited to exercising “soft power” — training local soldiers, building roads and schools. Operation Martillo is something quite different.

The news comes as two U.S. agents wounded in an attack in Mexico last week were discovered to be likely working for the CIA.

GREAT
Let's hope we can get some expensive private contractors in on this too, for maximum shitup potential.

The Ahuas shooting “demonstrates the risks of flooding foreign countries with armed representatives of the U.S. government, to fight an enemy that is largely indistinguishable from the civilian population on unknown terrain,” wrote Patrick Corcoran of InSight, a Latin America crime monitor. ”The Ahuas shooting may not have been inevitable, but as Americans take a more hands-on role, such scandals are likely to be repeated,” he wrote.

It's almost as if there were people in the usa who have insatiable appetites for the money produced by selling private security forces (and training) to people in other parts of the world.

some grim humor in this. hey, the marines showed up! oh ps the DEA blew up a family in a boat back in may.

Who Keeps The US Drug War Going?

1) Labor Unions / The Private Prison Industry? Vested interest in keeping people in jail.
2) Rural counties with prisons - I'm told that (non-voting) inmates count towards electoral representation...?
3) The Gas Companies - LET ME MAKE MY HEMPMOBILE!!!
4) Paper / Timber Lobby?
5) Moral Majority Types - Puppets of the above?

None of the above - it's the drug cartels themselves. The decriminalization of drugs is their worse nightmare, since it would obv derive them of the monster profits they have become accustomed to. I've come across several instances of drug cartels surreptitiously funneling funds toward pro-"war on drug" candidates and legislation to this effect. Organized crime of all sorts also want to keep drugs illegal and penalties high, since it often funds their activities. Even small-time drug dealers in the US and elsewhere like things the way they are, since they can rat on other drug dealers and get them arrested, then move into their turf and increase their own profits. I've seen it happen.

ugh, just read this:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman?currentPage=all&pink=VZyHUf&src=longreads

in short: juvenile offenders get pressured into becoming informants and even participating in sting operations, and get killed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/holder-seeks-to-avert-mandatory-minimum-sentences-for-some-low-level-drug-offenders/2013/08/11/343850c2-012c-11e3-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html

http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/28/drug-czar-slams-criminalizing-moms-haslam-mulls-veto/8435967/

“Under the Obama administration, we’ve really tried to reframe drug policy not as a crime but as a public health-related issue, and that our response on the national level is that we not criminalize addiction"

about. fucking. time.

http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/05/06/this-world-map-of-prison-populations-is-an-embarrasment-to-every-american/?tid=rssfeed

http://www.lse.ac.uk/IDEAS/publications/reports/pdf/EndingDrugWarsFINAL.pdf

Decades of evidence conclusively show that
the supply and demand for illicit drugs are
not something that can be eradicated.
They can be managed, either well or badly.
They are currently being managed badly.

no shit

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmorrell/2015/07/01/the-oxycontin-clan-the-14-billion-newcomer-to-forbes-2015-list-of-richest-u-s-families/

The richest newcomer to Forbes 2015 list of America’s Richest Families comes in at a stunning $14 billion. The Sackler family, which owns Stamford, Conn.-based Purdue Pharma, flew under the radar when Forbes launched its initial list of wealthiest families in July 2014, but this year they crack the top-20, edging out storied families like the Busches, Mellons and Rockefellers.

How did the Sacklers build the 16th-largest fortune in the country? The short answer: making the most popular and controversial opioid of the 21st century — OxyContin.

...

Arthur, simultaneously, was a standout in the field of medical advertising. He helped Pfizer PFE +1.25% establish itself in the prescription drug arena, and he is credited with writing scientific papers that contributed to Valium becoming the first $100 million drug, according to his listing in the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame.

...

By the time Arthur died in 1987 at age 73, brothers Mortimer and Raymond had Purdue Pharma dabbling in pain medications. They eventually took generic painkiller oxycodone — invented in World War I-era Germany — and installed a timed-release mechanism, which promised to stymie abuse by spreading the drug’s effects over half-day period. This enabled them to market it beyond the traditional target audience for powerful opioids — cancer patients — and not long after OxyContin’s launch in 1995, primary-care doctors were prescribing it for an array of painful symptoms. Sales hit $1.5 billion by 2002.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/07/07/heroin-deaths-have-quadrupled-in-the-past-decade/?postshare=711436292676423

Primed by widespread use of prescription opioid pain-killers, heroin addiction and the rate of fatal overdoses have increased rapidly over the past decade, touching parts of society that previously were relativel unscathed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.

The death rate from overdoses nearly quadrupled to 2.7 per 100,000 people between 2002 and 2013, CDC Director Tom Frieden said during a telephone news conference Tuesday. In 60 percent of those cases, the cause of death was attributed to heroin and at least one other drug, often cocaine, according to Chris Jones, lead author of the report and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Public Health Strategy and Analysis.

But it is the highly addictive pain-killing opioids, prescribed and sometimes over-prescribed by physicians who are not highly trained in pain management, that concerns officials most, Frieden said.

National Opioid Overdose Epidemic
-Over 100 Americans died from overdose deaths each day in 2013
-46 Americans die each day from prescription opioid overdoses; two deaths an hour, 17,000 annually
-While illicit opioid heroin poisonings increased by 12.4% from 1999 to 2002, the number of prescription
opioid analgesic poisonings in the United States increased by 91.2% during that same time period
-Drug overdose was the leading cause of injury death in 2013, greater than car accidents and homicide
-About 8,200 Americans die annually from heroin overdoses
-About 75% of opioid addiction disease patients switch to heroin as a cheaper opioid source
-In 2012, 259 million opioid pain medication prescriptions were written, enough for every adult in America to
have a bottle of pills

http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/opioid-addiction-disease-facts-figures.pdf

More dangerous than heroin but totally legal!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/28/it-s-time-to-legalize-drugs-an-open-letter-to-congress-and-the-president.html

this came out a little while ago but i'm reading winslow's latest book, the cartel (which while fictional is based in a great deal of research by all accounts) so just finding it now

some of the points made are def obvious/have been made before but thought it was ballsy of him to simultaneously run this as a full-page ad in the washington post