WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing online site, obtained 8,324 documents related to drugs, an area of great interest to the border region. However, the public will have to wait to learn what most of those cables contain because WikiLeaks does not plan to release all 251,287 of its leaked documents at once. As of Monday, only 272 diplomatic cables had been released.

54% of respondents agree with the Canadian government approving a citizen transfer so that Emery can serve his sentence in Canada. This recommendation was first issued by Emery's defense team in September 2010, and it was met with the concurrence of District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez.

A confidential diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks says Afghan President Hamid Karzai has freed dangerous detainees and pardoned suspected drug dealers because they had connections to powerful figures.

Saying the billions spent on the war on illegal drugs have done nothing other than fuel the transmission of HIV and hepatitis C, a coalition of Quebec addiction support centers is calling for the creation of a supervised injection site for drug users in Montreal.

 

A four-year army crackdown in Mexico's methamphetamine-producing heartland has provoked a dizzying increase in violence, fueling fears that the country is losing its battle against drug traffickers. Despite heavily armed patrols, hundreds of drug lab busts and thousands of arrests, locals say gangs in the president's home state wield huge power, ramping up drug output while using terror and bribes to control towns mired in poverty. "Crime has only gotten worse. Before, things were calm. Now you don't know what could happen...We are afraid here," said Miriam Ortiz, a 32-year-old teacher.

The Star-Ledger editorial board opines that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seems intent on wrecking the state's medical marijuana program with restrictive regulations. His Department of Health has drafted rules that would restrict marijuana use, availability and potency.

Two attorneys say they'll take an Iowa case before the nation's highest court next week that could alter how federal judges sentence convicts after appeals. The issue is if judges can weigh a convict's efforts at rehabilitation while an appeal is pending.

Virginia Delegate Harvey Morgan has proposed a bill to decriminalize marijuana possession in the upcoming General Assembly session. HB 1443 would replace criminal penalties for simple possession with a civil fine of $500. Morgan is a Republican and, more important, an assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school.

Yosmireli and Griselda, two and four years old, died by bullets to their heads from soldiers' guns -- their mother, aunt and seven-year-old brother Joniel were also killed, on a rural road in northwest Mexico. The killings became the first known case of civilians gunned down by soldiers in the prohibitionist war on drug traffickers declared by the government of conservative Felipe Calderón, which tipped the country into a spiral of violence. One very clear effect is "the invisibility of violence against women...If a girl is found dead on the street and the body shows signs of violence, whether she has a bullet wound, is tied up, or there is a dead man next to her, her death is recorded in the category of 'organized crime'...By recording the cases in the catch-all category of organized crime, the victims' families no longer have access to the case file and cannot pressure the authorities to solve the crime," said David Peña of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers.

Medical marijuana dispensaries are now putting hundreds of thousands of dollars a month into state and city treasuries in Colorado. So far this year, the state has collected more than $2.2 million in sales tax from dispensaries.

New Jersey lawmakers today will seek to change rules proposed by the Christie administration over medical marijuana. Some lawmakers say the rules don't follow the intent of the law they passed earlier this year to make New Jersey the 14th state to allow medical marijuana.

Without leaving American airspace, remotely piloted surveillance drones — outfitted with cameras that provide real-time video — fly along the Texas border searching U.S. territory for drug smugglers, illegal immigrants and potential terrorists. Does the U.S. government ever risk the international fallout of using the aircrafts' high-tech surveillance abilities to take a peek south of the border — or share what they see with Mexican counterparts fighting for their lives? The American public likely never will know.

For Immediate Release: November,19 2010

Contact: Hiedi Handford at 406-594-7932 or Irv Rosenfeld at 954-536-9011

Russell Barth of Educators for Sensible Drug Policy opines that Canada's new "drugsnot4me" campaign video is a total embarrassment due to the over-the-top rhetoric which generates fear rather than educates youth.

Lawmakers are deciding whether Illinois will become the 16th state to legalize medical marijuana. Illinois lawmakers are in Springfield for a veto session and SB 1381 is one of the bills up for discussion. The bill was written by state Senator Bill Haine (D-Alton), a former prosecutor.

Drug prohibition related cases are clogging the dockets of the country’s courts and, as a result, jails are filled with drug suspects. Former Supreme Court Associate Justice Adolf Azcuna and present head of the Philippine Judicial Academy, said, "If you want to restore the drug offenders, you should be improving the places where you help drug addicts recover from their addiction."

It has been more than a year since a majority of Maine voters approved a medical marijuana initiative. Since that time, several of the proposed dispensaries have been delayed by zoning problems and local moratoriums. But, at least one facility, the Remedy Compassion Center, is likely to be up and running by next spring.

 

 

 

 

Today, NOVEMBER 16, 2010:

Events and quotes of note from this week's drug policy events of years past.

The L.A. City Council is considering putting a special tax on medical marijuana collectives, however the voters will have the final say. Today the Council is expected to be presented with the City Attorney's recently issued report on the tax measure, and they are being recommended to adopt the resolution and have the proposition put on the March 8th, 2011 ballot.

Eleven blocks from the Texas border, hundreds of destitute Mexicans are gathered in a shelter, escaping what they fear is certain death.

The story of Oakland as the premier cannabis city in the United States starts with the coalescing, more than a decade ago, of an open-minded city council, an impoverished downtown, and a handful of determined activists.

Now that it's clear that Arizona voters have approved medical marijuana, the Department of Health Services is scrambling to meet the four month requirement to implement the law. Medical users could be legally using marijuana by next summer, Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) Director Will Humbles said.

Newly-elected Republicans coming to Washington this week to slash the federal budget are taking note of a tiny federal agency in the rusting steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania -- the National Drug Intelligence Center, a pet project of the late Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa). Conceived in the early 1990's as a clearinghouse for all of the intelligence in the nation's war on drugs, the agency was installed on the fifth floor of a defunct department store. For years, Murtha lavished federal dollars on the little agency, even as it struggled to find a mission and critics blasted it as unnecessary.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 15, 2010
9:28 AM

As America's drug war spirals out of control, Europe's reformist organizations offer a view that policymakers must heed, argues Charles Shaw.

Mexican police detained a minor accused of working as a gunman for a drug trafficking organization after shocking videos and photos surfaced online of fresh-faced boys mugging for the camera with guns and corpses. One video, briefly posted on YouTube, showed a youth, apparently in his teens, confessing to working for a branch of the Beltran Leyva organization. "When we don't find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver," the youth said.

 

 

Arizona's measure to legalize medical marijuana is still trailing but the gap is closing. The measure was about 3,100 votes below the 50 percent plus one needed for passage after more votes were counted on Thursday afternoon -- by Thursday night when more totals were posted, the measure was losing by less than 1,500 votes. Elections officials say about 14,000 early ballots and 45,000 provisional ballots are left to be processed and counted from the Nov. 2 election.

The Los Angeles City Council pushed for a ballot measure to begin taxing medical marijuana. There are cities in California that tax medical marijuana, such as San Jose, La Puente, Oakland, Richmond, Sacramento, and Berkeley. With a vote of 9-3 the Los Angeles City Council has informed city attorney’s to draft a ballot measure for the March 8 election in favor of taxing marijuana.

The head of Venezuela’s narcotics agency, Nestor Reverol, denied allegations made by one of the world’s top drug traffickers that he had stolen his money and used some of it to buy a $2 million home. Walid Makled, arrested in Colombia in August, alleged in two TV interviews that Reverol took over his businesses worth as much as $70 million annually after he fled Venezuela, where he is wanted on charges of drug trafficking and murder. Makled said that before fleeing Venezuela he had retrieved videos, receipts and other evidence to back up his allegations.

Prohibition-caused threats and violence by drug trafficking organizations are preventing some government oil workers from reaching installations in northern Mexico and costing state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos about $350,000 every day in lost production. That amounts to about $10.5 million per month, or about 2.3 percent of Mexico's $450 million per month average in monthly natural gas revenues.

Last week's killing of the top drug lord in the Gulf Cartel marked the second takedown of a major capo in Mexico in a little over two months. Experts in Mexico and the United States say the strategy has a real downside.

 

 

Dear friends,

Some conservatives outraged by Obamacare’s individual mandate had helped pave the way for it through drug prohibition policies. The Justice Department is defending Obamacare by asserting that a 2005 Supreme Court case about medical marijuana, Gonzales v. Raich, permits such a broad reading of the Commerce Clause that the federal government can tell individual citizens that they have to buy health insurance.

Elaborate methods of smuggling cocaine and a record number of new unregulated drugs are challenging drug control policies in Europe. Traffickers are increasingly using exports such as clothes, plastics and fertilizers to smuggle cocaine base which is then extracted in clandestine laboratories.

Low attendance and a drop in donations have caused a financial crisis for the northeastern Mexican Diocese of Nuevo Laredo, which is located in an area plagued by drug prohibition violence. Weekly collections are no longer sufficient to pay for basic services, such as water and electricity.

Drug traffickers are moving drugs into India via terminally ill patients -- mostly women from foreign countries. Most of them go scot free on humanitarian grounds.

 

It's easy to say and easy to document, but quite difficult to really internalize, the human suffering and the outright absurdities wrought by our 40-year-old war on drugs. Sometimes it takes a picture to drive the point home. The Drug Policy Alliance has teamed up with award-winning artist Ricardo Cortes to produce an engaging, eye-catching 2011 wall calendar about the history of drug prohibition in the United States.

California voters may have rejected Proposition 19 last week, but a poll released after the election shows that a majority of California voters still believe marijuana should be legal in principle, and that our current laws do more harm than good.

The rejection of nearly 2,000 medical marijuana applications due to a new health department policy has generated anger among patients and doctors no longer allowed to write recommendations. A representative of the advocacy group Sensible Colorado, which took part in a successful court challenge against the department last year, confirms that the organization is considering similar action this time around.

The Mexican Army's military jurisdiction privileges are being reviewed by Cto determine the nature of several cases in which drug traffickers bribed troops and military leaders. Emeequis Magazine revealed some of the files being reviewed, showing how members of the Juarez and Sinaloa drug organizations infiltrated Mexican military intelligence, particularly the Anti-drug Information Center (AIC). In addition, transcripts of several phone calls involving active and former military personnel show how they worked as an information network that would alert drug traffickers regarding possible military operations against them.

Proponents of a new law giving chronically ill patients access to medical marijuana say New Jersey's rules are too strict to comply with the intent of the law. An Assembly resolution to be considered today would force the Republican administration to rewrite the rules before they take effect in January.

It has been a year since Prime Minister John Key declared war on the drug P (methamphetamine). The authorities, and Mr. Key, had hoped to see P prices rising as evidence that the anti-P campaign was working. But that hasn't happened.

Despite Proposition 19's loss at the polls last week, marijuana legalization advocates in California are already working on their comeback plan for 2012 and are almost giddy about their prospects. They see the election as a trial run that could lead to a campaign with a better message, a tighter measure and more money. Both the winning and losing sides say California's voters rejected this specific initiative, but remain open to legalizing the easily obtainable drug.

Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, also known as 'Tony Tormenta,' the highest-profile leader of a powerful drug trafficking organization, was gunned down by Mexican government forces this weekend, but signs that the death will lead to more violence and turf battles have terrified residents.

While some Mexicans expressed relief that California’s Proposition 19 was defeated in Tuesday’s election, others felt that the fight in Mexico was just beginning. The proposition, which essentially would have legalized marijuana in California, had a renewed sense of urgency south of the border, where the body count in the government’s crusade against drug trafficking organizations continues to rise.