Drug-Pharma Monday | The True Cost of the War on Drugs

The illegal drug market is one of the most profitable in the world. It is extremely difficult to know the global value of the drug trade since it is a business that is illegal, underground, and hard to trace. The United Nations Drug Control Program estimates that it is worth $400 billion per year, equivalent to 8% of world trade. In the United States, alone, the drug trade is worth upwards of $100 billion per year. It is now close to 20 years since the U.S. government has been fighting the “War On Drugs,” but despite the billions of dollars spent, an enormous amount of drugs continues to flow into the country.

The drug trade in the United States has had extremely negative consequences in terms of violence and corruption. But its effect on Latin American countries has been even more severe. It has led to violence, corruption, and social dislocation on such a scale that in many cases the very viability of the state as an institution has been threatened. Domestic drug consumption in Latin America is relatively low. The vast majority of the drugs produced in Latin America are intended for the U.S. market. When talking about the negative effect of drugs, it is important to look at the overall effect throughout the continent, not just in the United States.

This article examines changes in the narcotics industry over the past 20 years. It focuses particularly on the negative effects of the drug trade on the countries of Latin America. Finally, the article explores some of the implications of the drug trade for our border community here in El Paso/Ciudad Juarez and forms an argument for the legalization of the production and sale of drugs.

Developments in the Drug Trade During the 1980s

One of the most significant trends in the drug trade during the 1980s was the growth in the trafficking of cocaine and its synthetic derivatives. This development led to the infamous appearance of crack cocaine on the streets of U.S. cities, which enormously affected the drug market for users as and fueled violent gang wars between the suppliers. Although Bolivia and Peru were the largest coca and cocaine base producers, it was Colombia that dominated the actual processing of the drug. By the 1980s, Colombian trafficking organizations were supplying approximately 50% of the cocaine to the U.S. market, primarily by way of maritime and air routes through the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean. During this time, Colombian drug organizations were firmly entrenched in the South Florida area.

Also during the 1980s, Colombia was the primary source of foreign-produced marijuana in the United States, supplying approximately 80% of the market. Mexico and Jamaica were responsible for a further 10%, while domestic production supplied the rest. During the same decade, Southwest Asia was the primary source (60%) of heroin to the United States. The other 40% was Mexican-produced heroin, which supplied the western half of the United States.

The 1980s was the first time that the power of drug trafficking organizations to seriously disrupt civil society was witnessed. The 1980 coup in Bolivia, led by Garcia Meza and apparently backed by one of the country’s drug organizations, undermined drug control policies in that country. In 1981, the Colombian M-19 guerilla group kidnapped the sister of the head of the Medellin drug cartel. The cartel responded by organizing death squads that systematically killed guerillas and their families until the sister was released. These death squads went on to intimidate and murder journalists and politicians in an effort to repeal Colombia’s extradition treaty with the United States.

It was also during the 1980s that the drug trade was first perceived as a threat to the national security of the United States. As a response, the resources of the CIA and the military were put at the disposal of the anti-drug effort that was to become known as the War on Drugs.

Emergence of Mexico’s Role During the 1990s

The 1990s saw a significant shift in where drugs were produced and how they were brought into the United States. Because of increased surveillance of the Caribbean area by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Colombian drug traffickers began to rely upon Mexican organizations to smuggle cocaine into the United States, making Mexico the main transshipment point for U.S.-bound drugs. Central America was also increasingly used as an arrival destination for Colombian cocaine. Colombian organizations paid Mexican drug cartels with portions of the smuggled cocaine, sometimes up to half of the load. Usually small, twin-engine planes were used to transport drugs from Colombia as far as northern Mexico, but there were occasions when large, ex-service commercial jets brought in multi-ton quantities.

Drug-related violence continued unabated in South America. Over 150 groups loosely organized into cartels dominated the cocaine trade in Colombia. Guerilla groups such as the FARC and the ELN became more powerful and wealthy as they taxed drug producers, while right-wing paramilitary groups, often funded by the drug cartels, carried out murders and kidnappings in support of the drug cartels’ objectives.

Mexican heroin continued to supply the western half of the United States during the 1990s, while Colombian heroin replaced the supply from Southeast Asia. Colombian heroin was of an extremely high quality and could be snorted, avoiding the stigma of injecting Southeast Asian heroin with a needle.

Partly due to the success of marijuana eradication programs in Colombia, production there was severely disrupted, so Mexico stepped in as the major supplier to the United States. According to U.S. government figures, the number of marijuana users in the United States declined sharply between 1980 and 1990, but it was still extremely attractive to Mexican traffickers because of the high profit margin. The 1990s also saw the beginning of production in Mexico of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine, which until then had been produced mainly inside the United States.

Mexico’s development as the main transshipment point for Colombian cocaine entering the United States, and largest supplier of marijuana to the U.S. market, led to an enormous increase in wealth and power for the Mexican drug cartels. This growth has had serious consequences for Mexican society. In 1994, the Mexican Attorney General’s office estimated that the drug trade contributed around $30 billion annually to the Mexican economy. Only $7 billion was generated that year by oil earnings. The amount of money laundered in Mexico from drug trade was thought to represent between 4% and 20% of the GDP. The drug trade directly employed directly approximately 360,000 Mexicans and occupied as many as 20,000 soldiers in drug eradication efforts on a daily basis.

The enormous income generated from the drug trade is used to build and buy houses, cars, and ranches, and is invested in legitimate businesses such as hotels, factories, and stores. Much of the large tourist development in states such as Jalisco and Yucatan is funded in part with proceeds from the drug industry. Analysts have argued that drugs are Mexico’s most successful export. They also assert that the drug industry has softened the blow of economic restructuring programs and financial crises experienced by Mexico and other Latin American countries over the past 20 years. In the face of an agricultural crisis brought on by the import of cheap foreign food imports, Mexican farmers are turning to the cultivation of poppies or marijuana as alternative cash crops. Many involved in the drug trade are poor people with limited economic opportunities, tempted by the ease with which large amounts of money. This is not to excuse their participation in what is an illegal and dangerous occupation. But the widespread poverty and deprivation that exists in Mexico and the rest of Latin America cannot be discounted as a factor in the growth of the drug trade.

Drug Trade and the Border

Today, the southwest border has become the main entry point for illegal drugs into the United States. The long, rugged, and in many places, isolated, 2,000 mile border is an ideal place to smuggle narcotics. Seventy-two percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States is brought across it. Colombian organizations continue to use the Mexico-Central America corridor to transship cocaine into the United States. Increasingly, they use the Pacific Ocean as the preferred maritime route as it is much larger than the Caribbean and an easier place to evade detection. Fishing boats and speedboats transport multi-ton quantities of cocaine to southern Mexico, where it is broken down into smaller loads and transported through Mexico and into the United States. Nonetheless, the Caribbean continues to be an important transit point for cocaine, by way of countries such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

After almost 20 years since the initiation of the War on Drugs, and despite a current annual budget of $20 billion, an enormous amount of narcotics continues to enter the United States. In 1996, 120 tons of cocaine a month was being brought into the country from Chihuahua, Mexico, alone—1,440 tons a year (El Diario de Juárez, March 2004). In the same year, according to DEA statistics, almost 45 tons of cocaine was seized nationwide. Officially, the DEA estimates that it seizes between 20% and 25% of drugs brought into the country. Unofficially, the figure is put at 1% to 2%. Only 13 truckloads are required to supply the United States with cocaine for a year. With almost 20,000 kilometers of coastline, 300 ports of entry, and 7,500 kilometers of land border, stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States has been compared to looking for a needle in a haystack.

According to the DEA, southern New Mexico plays a major role in the laundering of drug revenue. Much of this money passes through Native American casinos that are unregulated by the state. The DEA also points to the large number of banking institutions in Las Cruces, New Mexico as evidence of the economic benefits of the drug trade. A city of Las Cruces’ side would typically have five to six banking institutions, but the city actually has over 200. El Paso also reaps considerable benefit from the trade in drugs. The Federal government estimates that $3.5 billion of drug money is laundered through the El Paso economy each year—more than twice the $1.7 billion budget of the military base at Fort Bliss, which itself represents 10% to 15% of the local economy.

Negative Effects of the Drug Trade

Anti-Drug Laws in the United States

A distinction can be made between negative effects caused by government policy to combat drugs, and negative effects caused by the actual trafficking of the drugs. In the United States, one of the government responses to the drug trade has been increasingly harsher sentences for those convicted of drug offenses. These measures, however, are generally seen as having failed since they have not led to a noticeable decrease in drug use and are extremely expensive. In 2001 it was estimated that the 55% of prisoners convicted for drug offenses were costing the taxpayer $3 billion per year. Some of these prisoners are untreated drug addicts stuck in a cycle of constant re-imprisonment in the criminal justice system. Others are people who have been convicted for minor offenses, such as possession of small amounts of narcotics. In 2002, over 45% of arrests for drug offenses involved marijuana, the vast majority for possession. The decision to introduce mandatory minimum sentences for the possession, sale, and use of drugs has made the U.S. prison population balloon to two million people. On a per capita basis, that is the largest prison population in the world. Many people argue that harsher drug sentences have had little effect on drug use.

One of the most controversial aspects of the War on Drugs is how anti-drug laws have disproportionately impacted the minority population. Almost 77% of prisoners are from minority populations (56.7% African-American and 19% Latino). In the early 1990s, there were more young African-American men in prison than in college. According to the federal Household Survey, 72% of illicit drug users are white, a slight over-representation given that they make up 69% of the population. Yet 52% of prisoners convicted of drug-related offenses in state prisons are African- Americans. African-American and Latino populations are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites, and much more likely to receive prison sentences.

Drug-Related Violence

Another negative effect of the drug trade is the enormous amount of violence that accompanies it. It is difficult to estimate, but the majority of murders and other types of violence in Mexico are linked to the trade in narcotics. It is estimated that in Sinaloa, a state in western Mexico where a large amount of marijuana and poppies are grown, close to 16,000 people have died over the past 20 years as a result of drug-related violence. The vast majority of the violence is between and within the cartels, sometimes between cartels as they struggle for control of a share of the drug trade. In other cases, factions within a cartel dispute control of a particular area, theft of drugs, or other conflicts. Occasionally, drug-related violence spills over and innocent people are targeted or affected. The mere existence of such a high level of violence, even when it doesn’t affect the average citizen, is extremely detrimental to the overall well being of the society.

Much of the drug-related violence in the U.S. occurs in poor, inner city areas. Although these areas have average drug use rates, they are often used as drug distribution points because of their lack of social capital, and thus become battle grounds for gangs and factions that seek to control the drug market. Indeed, the majority of gang violence in U.S. cities is related to the drug trade. Inner cities areas subsequently experience a higher level of violence and crime than they otherwise would.

Economic Effects and Government Corruption

Although the drug trade in Latin America does create a large influx of money into generally unstable and impoverished economies, many analysts argue that the overall economic effects are negative. For example, taxes are often not paid on the income generated by the drug trade. Also, businesses funded by drug money are able to operate at a loss, which undercuts legitimate businesses selling the same products.

The trade in drugs in Mexico and the United States also causes enormous amounts of corruption and lawlessness. Mexican sociologist Luis Astorga argues that since the beginning of the drug trade in his country, drug traffickers have had a very close relationship with the political elite. It is not an exaggeration to say that many politicians in Mexico are directly benefiting from the drug trade. Probably the most famous example is General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, who in 1996 was installed as the equivalent of the Mexican Drug Czar with great fanfare. It was felt at the time that the military was Mexico’s most uncorrupted institution. By early 1997, however, General Rebollo had been arrested and charged with actually being a paid employee of the Carrillo Fuentes, or Juárez drug cartel.

This does mean that all politicians are corrupt. But it does mean that political institutions are so intertwined with and compromised by drug cartels that they are incapable of bringing them under control. In Mexico, organizations that produce and traffic drugs have penetrated the political, law enforcement, and judicial institutions to such an extent that they are able to carry out their business with a minimal amount of interference from the authorities. Many drug cartels actually employ police officers and soldiers, both active and retired. There are numerous cases in which the soldiers or police officers that are supposed to be fighting the drug trade are actually working with the drug traffickers themselves. President Fox has a reputation as an honest politician. But the fact that cocaine seizures by Mexican authorities were down from 33.5 tons in 1999 to 12.5 tons in 2002 suggests that as a whole, the Mexican government is unwilling or unable to stem the flow of illegal drugs in to the United States.

Despite changes in government, the production and trafficking of drugs is relentless. From 1986 to 2004, three governors from different political parties were in power in Chihuahua, Mexico. During their respective administrations, the cultivation and trafficking of drugs in Chihuahua was constant. In 1984, 11,000 tons of marijuana was seized from El Bufulo, a plantation in Jimenez, Chihuahua covering 200 hectares and employing 12,000 men. Obviously, the existence of a plantation of this size employing so many people was not a total surprise. El Bufulo was “discovered” by the Mexican authorities after it was revealed by DEA agent Enrique Camarena. According to a government report, the plantation was run not only by the Juárez drug cartel, but also by Mexican police organizations that offered protection and safe passage up to the northern border. During the early 1990s, the Juárez drug cartel would regularly fly into Chihuahua and other northern states multi-ton loads of cocaine aboard large ex-commercial planes. The Carrillo Fuentes cartel alone is alleged to have operated 22 ex-service Boeing 727 jets.

In 1994, two more large marijuana plantations were “discovered” in Chihuahua, one of 90 hectares and the other of 103 hectares. In 2004, Jesus Solis Silva, Chihuahua’s attorney general resigned, partly because of accusations that he was directly benefiting from the trafficking of drugs. There are allegations that the governors of Chihuahua were directly benefiting form the drug trade. Either way, the scale of drug trafficking in Chihuahua, and the fact that it continued despite changes in the government, are astounding.

In January, 2004, police in Juarez uncovered the bodies of 12 men in the small back yard of a house in a middle class area of the city. The men were all victims of the drug trade and all involved in trafficking. The extent of police involvement in the murders in Juárez is incredible. Many of the murders were carried out by a unit of the Chihuahua state police while their were on duty, in uniform, and using police vehicles. They would identify their victims, stop them, kidnap them, torture them, and then murder them. In El Diario of Juárez there are photographs of the state police commandante at the scene of murder investigations. He is standing with other police officers purportedly investigating murders that he himself committed. This unit of the Chihuahua state police was not an isolated rogue unit. Such actions by law enforcement are terrifyingly common. Some of the people who were murdered at this site had gone to a federal police unit, the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI), the equivalent of the FBI. They had gone to denounce a drug safe house, then found themselves detained and eventually murdered. Reporting crime in Mexico can be dangerous. Being a police officer in Mexico can be deadly. Police are faced with a stark choice: la plata o el plomo—silver (money) or lead (bullets). Many times even turning a blind eye is not an option.

Obviously the drug trade cannot be blamed for causing corruption nor the smuggling of contraband products. These are structural problems that have existed in all societies since the beginning of time. Eradicating them is a process that requires much time and effort. Many people argue that if it weren’t drugs that were being trafficked, another illicit product would take its place. But a strong argument can be made that drugs are a special case because of the ease with which they are cultivated and transported and the enormous profit margin that can be obtained with them. Officials estimate that a drug smuggler can lose 90% of his or her load and still make a profit. Additionally, one of the factors that make the drug trade so powerful in Latin America is that it is such an extremely lucrative and powerful industry, taking place in fragile societies where there are huge disparities of wealth and severe lack of economic opportunities. From the highlands of Peru and Bolivia to the shantytowns that skirt the cities of the U.S./Mexico border, the poverty is fertile ground for the growth and development of an illegal narcotics industry.

Although the United States is the richest society in the world, and by and large its institutions are well run and respected, the enormous wealth generated by the drug trade means that even here there is corruption involving law enforcement officials. Although U.S. customs agents are well paid (earning on average $40,000-$50,000 per year, the amount of money offered by the drug cartels is often too much of a temptation to resist. The immigration and customs agencies of the United States investigate about one case of corruption per week. It is hard to understand how such large quantities of drugs are able to enter the United States without some collusion by customs, immigration, and other law enforcement officials on the U.S. side.

Destructive Effects of Violence and Corruption

Probably the most destructive impact of the drug trade in Mexico and Latin America is the general destabilizing effect that the violence and corruption has on the society. Of the almost 400 murders of women in Juárez since 1993, it is estimated that around 25% were directly related to the drug trade.

When such a high level of drug-related violence is experienced by a society, violence and crime in general start to be tolerated and accepted; so, when other crimes are committed, there is less outrage and less expectation that the crimes will be solved. Also, when there is a general understanding that police officers are to some extent complicit in the trafficking of drugs and other illegal activities, law enforcement is not trusted. In Juárez, it is estimated that 95% of crimes go unsolved and unpunished. There are widely held perceptions that crimes can be committed with no consequences, and that if someone is inclined to report a crime, the police is the last place to go. At best, nothing will be done about it; at worse, you could pay for it with your life. People are often scared of reporting even mundane crimes, fearful of where it may lead. All this has extremely negative consequences for the smooth and orderly functioning of any society. The trade in drugs has simply become far too powerful, and far too lucrative, to be brought under control by the Mexican government and other governments in Latin America.

The power of the drug cartels and the influence that they exert on countries such as Mexico has never been greater. The Mexican drug cartels now exist as institutions more powerful than the state itself. This has had an enormous impact on our border region. The former director of the DEA, Thomas Constantine, has publicly stated that Mexico is in danger of becoming a narco-democracia, where the drug cartels are in control and lawlessness and violence are the norm. Mexican soldiers are patrolling the streets of Nuevo Laredo in northern Mexico. In Juárez, a unit of the state police has been accused of operating as a hit squad for the local drug cartel.

Examples like this show how the drug trade is destabilizing the countries of Latin America to such an extent that the very fabric of their society is seriously threatened. The vast majority of the violence and corruption that these societies experience is directly caused by the drug trade. The United States as a society bears great responsibility for this situation since it is our fellow citizens who are consuming the products of the drug trade. One of the reasons that the drug trade is so entrenched in Latin America is because there is simply not a viable economic alternative to it. Until there is, it seems likely that the trade in illegal drugs will continue to act as a subsidy to the legal economy. Mexico has struggled in the ten years since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Its agricultural sector is devastated, and its manufacturing sector is subject to the whims of the U.S. consumer. The United States is currently attempting to create a similar free trade zone throughout Latin America. These free trade agreements are structured to benefit the wealthy in both the United States and Latin America. Unless there is a serious effort to restructure trade and to reorient the current economic model so that society as a whole benefits, the drug trade will continue to flourish, to the detriment of the entire continent.

The Case for the Legalization of Drugs

In the meantime, there is a strong case for the legalization of the drug trade. The benefits are that the drug trade would be taken out of the hands of the powerful criminal organizations responsible for so much violence and corruption. It would be regulated by the government and subject to taxation. In the United States, legalization is still very much a fringe issue, but in Europe and Latin America it is starting to become part of public debate.

There are many arguments about the best way to legalize the drug trade. The most popular public perception of legalization is a free market distribution of all drugs. Some people advocate the legalization of soft drugs such as marijuana; hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin would have restrictions put on them, much like alcohol and tobacco. Others advocate a regulated distribution of drugs through public health facilities, where they would be legal but monitored and where addicts would be in regular contact with health professionals.

The actual form that legalization would take would be the product of extensive discussion and negotiation. But it is at least time to start to have a public debate about the legalization of drugs. To do otherwise is to ignore the grave injustice that the drug trade is inflicting on all of the American continent, but especially in Latin America.

In the fall of 2003, Maria arrived at Casa Peregrina in Juárez with her two small boys. She had been referred by a local domestic abuse organization. Maria was different from most of the guests we receive at Casa Peregrina. She had money, her children were well educated, and she had traveled widely in both Mexico and the United States. Maria had been subjected to serious domestic abuse and was seeking a separation from her husband. The problem was that her husband was a member of the Juárez drug cartel. Maria could not go to the authorities to report what had happened to her because the police regularly visited her husband at home and could not be trusted. Maria’s only option was to go to the international bridge and request political asylum. She did this and is presently in hiding in the United States.

In the spring of 2004, Rosa Emma Carbajal was given a parking ticket in the small town of Palomas, Chihuahua for double parking. Because of this she attempted to run over the police officer and was subsequently charged with resisting arrest. Shortly after being released on bond, she returned to the police station with between 30 and 40 people. The mob assaulted the police station, smashing windows and destroying equipment. Fearing for their lives, the police commander, along with six colleagues managed to flee. They dispersed the crowd by firing into the air and managed to reach the US Border where they immediately requested political asylum. The day after the incident we received the police commander’s wife and child at Annunciation House where they stayed for a few days until family members in the US could be contacted.

Drug-Pharma Monday | UN Agency Warns Afghanistan Over Opium

Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.

 

Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by “narco-terrorists” and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.

Two years after US air power and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world’s biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates despite the introduction of western programs aimed at eliminating the drug .

The UN’s annual survey of Afghanistan’s opium poppy cultivation and production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international community, humanitarian organizations and charities to wean Afghan farmers off the lucrative crop.

The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this year’s harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the bumper production of 4,600 tons of opium in 1999, a year before Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.

This year’s production of 3,600 tons represents a 6% year-on-year increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.

“The country is at a crossroads,” said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UNODC. “There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists.”

Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in western Europe, supplying 90% of the market.

The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world’s illicit opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan. The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic product.

The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.

The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe via Moscow and St. Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.

“Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this, the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to Kabul,” Mr Costa said.

“Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country and on its borders.”

In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.

To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition of the regime.

The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year’s opium production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a “major resurgence” of poppy growing”.

Mr Costa called for stiff “interdiction measures”, backed by the international community, “to destroy the terrorists’ and warlords’ stake in the opium economy”.

 

Two years after US air power and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban from power, the world’s biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates despite the introduction of western programs aimed at eliminating the drug .

The UN’s annual survey of Afghanistan’s opium poppy cultivation and production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international community, humanitarian organizations and charities to wean Afghan farmers off the lucrative crop.

The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this year’s harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the bumper production of 4,600 tons of opium in 1999, a year before Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.

This year’s production of 3,600 tons represents a 6% year-on-year increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.

“The country is at a crossroads,” said Antonio Maria Costa, director of UNODC. “There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists.”

Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in western Europe, supplying 90% of the market.

The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world’s illicit opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan. The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic product.

The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.

The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe via Moscow and St. Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.

“Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this, the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to Kabul,” Mr Costa said.

“Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country and on its borders.”

In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.

To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition of the regime.

The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year’s opium production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a “major resurgence” of poppy growing”.

Mr Costa called for stiff “interdiction measures”, backed by the international community, “to destroy the terrorists’ and warlords’ stake in the opium economy”.

Drug-Pharma Monday | The true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives

 

Yes, I know this all happened in 2005, but how is it that we still aren’t pissed-off.

The pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for criticism when the film ‘The Constant Gardener’ opens next month. But Jeremy Laurance reports that away from the Hollywood script is a true story of how multinational drug companies took liberties with African lives with devastating consequences.

 

In a dusty schoolyard in Kano, northern Nigeria, a group of children are kicking a football. One of them, a solemn-faced boy called Anas, sits watching quietly. He cannot play because he has pains in his knees that prevent him from running.

Nobody knows what caused Anas’ pain but suspicion has fallen on Big Pharma. Six years earlier, Anas was a patient in a trial of a new drug run by one of the world’s biggest companies. A known side effect of the drug, called Trovan, was joint pain. The issues raised by Anas’ story have become the subject of a major British film.

The multinational pharmaceutical industry is bracing itself for an uncomfortable autumn. Next month, The Constant Gardener, the film based on the novel of the same name by John Le Carré, opens in London.

Directed by Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame, it is a thriller, a love story and a blistering attack on the drugs industry and the way it carelessly expends the lives of innocent citizens in the Third World in the quest for billion-dollar medicines to sell to the first world.

As with dramas of this kind – such as the 1999 film, The Insider, which detailed the perfidious dealings of the tobacco industry – it raises the question of how far fiction resembles fact. So it is worth examining the background to The Constant Gardener. The film opens in a remote area of northern Kenya where Tessa Quayle (played by Rachel Weisz), the wife of a British diplomat, has been murdered. Her travelling companion, a local doctor, has disappeared, and the evidence points to a crime of passion.

At the time of her death, Tessa, an activist and passionate campaigner, was on the verge of uncovering a conspiracy involving the testing of a new drug. In personality she was the opposite of her husband, the mild-mannered Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), whose chief passion is his plants – he is the gardener of the title.

But in his grief, and goaded by whispers of her infidelity, he sets out to complete what she started, embarking on a quest to expose the truth about the pharmaceutical industry.

What he uncovers, as the film’s blurb puts it, is “a vast conspiracy, at once deadly and commonplace, one that has claimed innocent lives – and is about to put his own at risk”. At the center of this conspiracy is the idea that pharmaceutical companies use African people to test drugs which are destined to become huge profit-earners in the West.

It is not the first time such allegations have been made, but they have rarely been leveled with such dramatic effect. Some will find The Constant Gardener’s thesis overblown, but it is a gripping thriller, ravishingly shot by César Charlone, that conveys the chaos, grandeur and darkness of Africa with unequaled authenticity. After the credits roll, a note from John Le Carré appears on screen that reads: “Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world. But I can tell you this; as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.” This is hard to credit. The film features two brutal killings, a savage beating, a campaign of harassment, intimidation and threats involving two governments and their security services – all to protect the interests of a pharmaceutical company that is testing a drug on mothers and children and quietly burying its failures.

Maybe there are pharmaceutical companies that have engaged in such crimes and enlisted the support of corrupt governments. Who can say? But it is not necessary to posit such a gargantuan conspiracy, where paranoia is the only rational response. The crimes of the pharmaceutical industry – from the price protection of Aids drugs which have denied life-saving medicines to millions, to the cover up of lethal side effects to protect profits – are well documented.

But there are two cases in which named companies have been accused of wrongdoing that partly inspired The Constant Gardener and which give resonance to the allegations about the secret testing of drugs on the unsuspecting and the suppression of any negative findings.

In 1996, Kano was suffering from outbreaks of cholera and measles when a third, even more deadly, disease arrived: meningitis. The infection spread quickly through the cramped slums of the city and within weeks thousands of children were ill.

The outbreak was not reported in the West but it did not go unnoticed. An internet message alerted scientists at the research headquarters in Connecticut, of one of the world’s biggest drug companies: Pfizer.

The company reacted swiftly. It chartered a plane to Kano with a new drug called Trovan that was a potential life-saver and a potential billion-dollar profit earner. But Trovan had never been tested on children.

The Infectious Diseases Hospital in Kano was under siege from desperate parents who brought their dying children begging for help. One of these was Anas, then aged six. His father, Mohammed, said his son was given a drug by “a doctor from overseas” and put to bed. Mohammed assumed the doctors who treated his son were from Médecins Sans Frontièrs, an independent medical organization, who had arrived several weeks before the Pfizer team.

Only later when he examined a card he was given did he realize that Anas had been included in a trial of the new drug Trovan. The card was numbered 0001 – Anas was the first.

His story was told in the documentary “Dying for Drugs”, broadcast in 2003, which alleged that Pfizer had failed to obtain informed consent from the parents of the children tested, and had back-dated a letter granting ethical approval for the trial from the ethics committee of the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital. Pfizer said it remained satisfied the Kano experiment was conducted properly.

Since the trial, Anas has had a pain in his knee which X-rays showed was inflamed and which prevents him from running. Trovan was not used in the US because it caused side effects including joint pain. It is impossible to tell whether Anas’s knee problem was caused by the drug or was a consequence of the meningitis. Trovan was later withdrawn from the market for unrelated reasons, after it was linked with a number of deaths of patients from liver damage.

But the case against Pfizer did not end there. Lawyers seeking damages for the children involved in the Trovan trial obtained a letter sent by Pfizer’s childhood diseases specialist, Dr. Juan Walterspiel, protesting strongly about it. Dr. Walterspiel set out eight grounds for opposing the trial including the fact that Trovan had “not been tested for its sensitivity before the first child was exposed to a live-or-die experiment.” His contract with the company was terminated soon after.

Brian Woods, who made Dying for Drugs, met Meirelles and Le Carré, during the development of The Constant Gardener. “We had an entertaining lunch in which we were all frothing about the pharmaceutical industry,” said Woods, who last week won a commission from Channel 4 to make a follow-up film.

Meirelles, whose Brazilian background gave him a strong interest in the issue of first world/Third World exploitation, distributed copies of Dying for Drugs to cast members, and it had the desired effect. After watching it and reading other background material that Meirelles had given him, Ralph Fiennes said: “There are huge questions about Big Pharma. The companies are not obliged to disclose a lot of information about how they test or make their drugs. There’s big, big money involved.” Rachel Weisz concurred. “It’s David and Goliath; the little people taking on the big corporations. They [the pharmaceutical companies] make all this money, yet people in developing countries can’t afford the drugs that could save their lives.”

A second case of dubious practice by the pharmaceutical industry also has echoes in The Constant Gardener. A Canadian specialist, Dr Nancy Olivieri of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, was among the world’s leading experts in the blood disorder thalassaemia when she agreed to take part in the trial of a new drug, Deferiprone, made by the US company Apotex.

Deferiprone helps clear iron from the blood which builds up in patients with thalassaemia and can be fatal. At first the trial went well and Dr Olivieri published promising results in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Then she noticed worrying liver changes in some of her patients. She raised her concerns with the company and tried to find a way of adapting the trial. But she was unprepared for the response of the company, whose potential million-dollar drug she was now questioning.

Mike Spino, the vice-president of Apotex, informed her that the trial had been terminated, and warned her that she would face legal action if she spoke about it to anybody, in breach of her duty of confidentiality.

That triggered a dispute between Dr Olivieri and Apotex that has dragged on for more than five years, during which she has not published new research. Sir David Weatherall, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and a supporter of Dr Olivieri, said the case raised a “fundamental issue of academic freedom”. Nor was it an isolated case. Sir David added that editors of medical journals including The Lancet and The Journal of the American Medical Association had come under pressure not to publish data or to change it.

This story is also told in Dying for Drugs. Deferiprone is now licensed in more than 24 countries, including the UK, and Apotex insist it is safe and effective. The company also accused Dr Olivieri of making errors in the trial that made her results worthless.

Wherever the truth in the cases of Pfizer and Apotex, the behaviour of Big Pharma will come under renewed scrutiny thanks to The Constant Gardener. Even if its picture of multinational corporations engaged in global conspiracies with corrupt governments seems excessively paranoid, there are real issues to confront. The bigger scandal lies not in the forging of consent forms to clinical trials, nor even in the intimidation of recalcitrant researchers. It lies in the rapacious pricing of the pharmaceutical industry that puts life-saving drugs out of reach of individuals, hospitals and even nations. The words used to justify these prices are “research and development”. But in truth, the industry’s biggest cost is marketing. Extraordinary sums are spent persuading doctors to prescribe new drugs only fractionally different from older, cheaper ones, which ramp up prices.

Great as this conspiracy is, unfortunately it does not provide for a blockbuster thriller.

 

Drug-Pharma Monday | Drug firms ‘bury’ poor trial results

Drug companies are placing depressed patients at risk by not publishing negative results from clinical trials and distorting the evidence doctors use to decide which drugs to prescribe.

New research published in The New England Journal of Medicine found nearly a third of the 74 industry-sponsored studies of antidepressants they examined were not published, most of which showed negative outcomes for the drug involved. Not only were positive results 12 times more likely to be published, but negative results were often written so as to convey a favorable outcome.

Researchers warn that selective reporting of clinical trials can lead to misrepresentation of the benefits and risks of a drug and could mislead healthcare professionals into believing some drugs are more effective and less harmful than they actually are, which could place patients at risk.

The published articles suggest 94 per cent of the trials conducted had positive results, whereas analysis by the FDA found only half were favorable.

Drugs-Pharma Monday | Biting the Bullet: The Case for Legalizing Drug

The drug war is over. We lost it long before the latest declaration of war by President Bush. Whatever the other factors, we lost primarily for spiritual reasons. We merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition: the harder we tried to stamp out the evil, the more lucrative we made it. We should know that prohibition doesn’t work.

Forcible resistance to evil simply makes it more profitable. Our attempts to stamp out drugs violate a fundamental principle that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount: “Resist not evil.” The Greek term translated “resist” is antistenai. When it is used by the Greek Old Testament or by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, however, the word is usually translated, “to be engaged in a revolt, rebellion, riot, insurrection.”

It is virtually a synonym for war. It means to stand up against an enemy and fight. So Jesus’ words should be translated, “Do not resist evil by violent means. Do not fight evil with evil. Do not mirror evil, do not let evil set the terms of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, “Do not resist drugs by violent methods. “When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties and break the same laws as do those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes us over into its mimetic double. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having been established through the means used. More often, however, both sides grow, fed by their mutual resistance, as in the arms race, the Vietnam war, the Salvadoran civil war and Lebanon. This principle of mimetic opposition is illustrated abundantly in the drug War.

Bush’s drug-war strategy has three elements. First, it requires cutting off the drug source in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Yet this appears to be impossible. Already we see signs that Colombia is collapsing into civil war. Officials and journalists are being gunned down on the streets, civilian homes are being raided and seized, civilian government is increasingly being taken over by the military — and so far the drug lords have only engaged in selective terrorism.

Moreover, the Colombian army has seldom confronted the 140 paramilitary private armies of the drug lords, or raided their training bases. For in certain areas of the country the military has formed a marriage of convenience with drug traffickers and landowners in a common front against a 30-year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency. With an income in the billions of dollars, drug leaders are able to buy generals, judges and police. In one week last fall, the Colombian national police fired 2,075 officers for having links with the cartels. The drug lords have also bought limited public acceptance by sponsoring the national soccer league, diversifying into legitimate businesses, supporting charities and offering to pay off the government’s $10 billion external debt.

To test public reaction, the Bush administration may talk about sending in U.S. troops. But even if only military advisers are sent, they will soon discover in the field what our advisers found in Vietnam: an army not really committed to a fight. And even if those producing countries could be rid of coca tomorrow, production would simply be moved somewhere else, and the eradication effort would have to be started all over again in Southeast Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and other countries far less likely to let us call the shots. So far, cocaine cultivation uses only 700 square miles of the 2.5 million square miles suitable for its growth in South America. There is simply no way the U.S. can police so vast an area.

Second, the Bush strategy calls for interdicting cocaine at our borders. We have been trying that for years, and it simply cannot be done short of militarizing the borders. According to a Government Accounting Office study, the U.S. Air Force spent $3.3 million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance planes over a 15-month period ending in 1987. The grand total of drug seizures from that effort was eight. During the same period, the combined efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy, sailing for 2,512 ship days at a cost of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20 drug-carrying vessels. Drugs are easy to smuggle. The entire country’s current annual import of cocaine would fit into a single C-5A cargo plane.

Even when interdiction works, it does nothing to reduce drug availability. On September 29, 1989, 21.4 tons of cocaine was seized in Los Angeles; within a week nine tons was taken in Harlingen, Texas, and five more at sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The almost 36 tons netted in the three seizures was valued at $11 billion. Yet ten days later undercover agents were able to buy cocaine in bulk at the same price as before the seizures.

William Bennett, director of the National Office of Drug Control Policy, hopes that interdiction will raise drug prices. In fact, however, cocaine has become more available, while its wholesale price has dropped by 80 percent during the past decade. Increased prices would not deter addicts anyway; it would simply increase their rate of criminal acts. In Dade County, Florida, a mere 254 young addicts accounted for 223,000 crimes in a single year — almost 2.5 per youth per day. Multiply that by a nation and you see why the drug war was lost before it began.

As Senator John Kerry’s subcommittee on narcotics reported in December 1988, increased cooperation with foreign governments has neither cut the amount of cocaine entering the U.S. nor led to the destruction of the major smuggling organizations. Fifteen percent of the drugs entering this country are being confiscated, but “for the drug cartels, whose production capacities stagger the imagination, a 15 percent loss rate is more than acceptable.”

Third, the Bush plan calls for arresting drug dealers and casual users. There are already 750,000 drug arrests per year, and the current prison population is overtaxing facilities. At an average of $51,000 per inmate per year, just to incarcerate the 750,000 arrested annually would cost $38 billion. There are 35 to 40 million Americans who have used illegal drugs within the past year. To jail all users would run a tidy $1.785 trillion.

As for using the death penalty for deterrence, it seems unlikely that this country is ready to execute drug dealers by the hundreds of thousands. If so many millions are flouting the law, Prohibition style, is there really a political will for harsh enforcement? And how sincere is our anti-drug effort going to be when the financial community realizes that the cash flow from the drug trade is the only thing preventing a default by some of the heavily indebted Latin American nations or major money-laundering banks? Cocaine trade brings Bolivia’s economy about’ $600 million per year, a figure equal to the country’s total legal export income. Revenues from drug trafficking in Miami are greater than those from tourism, exports, health care and all other legitimate businesses combined.

It is not drugs but rather drug laws that have made drug dealing profitable. Drug laws have also fostered drug-related murders and an estimated 40 percent of all property crime in the U.S. Ethan A. Nadelmann, whose article “Drug Prohibition in the United States” in the September 1, 1989, issue of Science has been a major catalyst for public discussion of legalization, argues that “the greatest beneficiaries of the drug laws are organized and unorganized drug traffickers. The criminalization of the drug market effectively imposes a de facto value-added tax that is enforced and occasionally augmented by the law enforcement establishment and collected by the drug traffickers.” Rather than collecting taxes on the sale of drugs, governments at all levels expend billions of dollars in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.

The war on drugs creates casualties beyond those arrested. There are those killed in fights over turf, innocents caught in cross fire, citizens terrified of city streets, escalating robberies, children fed free crack to get them addicted and then enlisted as runners and dealers, mothers so crazed for a fix that they abandon their babies, prostitute themselves and their daughters, and addict their unborn. Much of that, too, is the result of the drug laws. Cocaine, after all, has been around a long time and was once sold over the counter in tablet form and consumed in Coca-Cola. What makes it so irresistible today is its lucrativeness. And it is lucrative only because it is illegal.

The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. The New York Times reported on October 1, 1989, that there are more crack addicts among the white middle and upper class than any other segment of the population and far more such occasional cocaine users. The typical user is a single white male 20 to 40 years old who generally obtains his drugs from black dealers. The white demand makes the drugs flow. Americans consume 60 percent of the world’s illegal drugs — too profitable a market for dealers to ignore.

In the drug war, we are blindly fighting what we have become as a nation. Some observers say that drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs trying desperately to become upwardly mobile. That is why we cannot win the war on drugs. We Americans are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launch a half-hearted, half-funded, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors what we have ourselves become as a nation.

The uproar about drugs is itself odd. In 1987, according to the Kerry subcommittee, there were 1,400 deaths from cocaine; in 1988, that figure had increased to 3,308. Deaths from all forms of illegal drugs total under 6,000. By contrast, 320,000 to 390,000 people die prematurely each year from tobacco and 100,000 to 200,000 from misuse of alcohol. Alcohol is associated with 40 percent of all suicide attempts, 40 percent of all traffic deaths, 54 percent of all violent crimes and 10 percent of all work-related injuries.

None of the illegal drugs are as lethal as tobacco or alcohol. If anyone has ever died as a direct result of a marijuana overdose, no one seems to know about it. Many people can be addicted to heroin for most of their lives without serious consequences. Cocaine in powder form is not as addictive as nicotine; Nadelmann points out that only 3 percent of those who try it become addicted. Crack is terribly addictive, but its use is a direct consequence of the high cost of powdered cocaine. Crack was a cheap ghetto alternative, and its spread to the middle and upper classes has in part been a function of its low price. Severely addicted humans may in some ways resemble those experimental monkeys who will starve themselves to death if supplied with, unlimited cocaine, but the vast majority of users are not in such danger (and alcoholic humans also will drink themselves to death)

We must be honest about these facts, because much of the hysteria about illegal drugs has been based on misinformation: All addiction is a serious matter, and the churches are right to be concerned about the human costs. But many of these costs are a consequence of a wrongheaded approach to eradication. Our tolerance of the real killer drugs and our abhorrence of the drugs which are far less lethal is hypocritical, or at best a selective moralistic reflecting fashions of indignation.

Drug addiction is singled out as evil, yet we are a society of addicts living in an addictive society. We project on the black drug subculture profound anxieties about our own addictions (to wealth, power, sex, food, work, religion, alcohol and tobacco) and attack addiction in others without having to gain insight about ourselves. New York City Councilman Wendell Foster illustrated this scapegoat attitude when he suggested chaining addicts to trees so people could spit on them.

I’m not advocating giving up the war on drugs because we cannot win. I am saying that we cannot win as long as we let drugs dictate the means we use to oppose them. The only way to win is to ruin the world market price of drugs by legalizing them. When drug prices plummet, drug profits will collapse — and with them, the drug empire.

Some people have called for decriminalization, but they probably mean legalization. Decriminalization would mean no more laws regulating drugs, no governmental restraints on sales to minors, no quality controls to curtail overdose and no prosecution of the inevitable bootleggers. Legalization, however, means that the government would maintain regulatory control over drug sales, possibly through state clinics or stores. Advertising would be strictly prohibited, selling drugs to children would continue to be a criminal offense, and other evasions of government regulation would be prosecuted. Driving, flying or piloting a vessel under the influence would still be punished. Taxes on drugs would pay for enforcement, education, rehabilitation and research (Nadelmann estimates a net benefit of at least $10 billion from reduced expenditures on enforcement and new tax revenues) Street users would be picked up and taken to hospitals, like drunks, instead of arrested.

Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders, burglaries and robberies, paralleling the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933. Cheap drugs would mean that most addicts would not be driven to crime to support their habit, and that drug lords would no longer have a turf to fight over. Legalization would be a blow to South American peasants, who would need support in switching back to less lucrative crops; but that would be less devastating than destruction of their crops altogether by aerial spraying or biological warfare. Legalization would enable countries like Peru to regularize the cocaine sector and absorb its money-making capacity in the taxable; legal, unionized economic world. Legalization would be a blow to ghetto dealers, who would be deprived of their ticket to riches. It would remove glamorous, Al Capone-type traffickers who are role models for the young, and it would destroy the “cool” status of drug use. It would cancel the corrupting role of the drug cartels in South American politics, a powerful incentive to corruption at all levels of our own government and a dangerous threat to our civil liberties through mistaken enforcement and property confiscation. It would free law-enforcement agencies to focus on other crimes and reduce the strain on the court and prison systems. It would nip in the bud a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy whose prosperity depends on not solving the drug probe. It would remove a major cause of public cynicism about obeying the laws of the land.

Legalization would also free up money wasted on interdiction of supplies that are needed desperately for treatment, education and research. Clinics in New York have room for only 48,000 of the state’s estimated half-million addicts. Only $700 million has been earmarked by the Bush administration for treatment, out of a total expenditure of $8 billion for the drug war. Yet nationally, approximately 90 percent of the addicts who apply to drug treatment and rehabilitation Centers are turned away for lack of space, resources, and personnel. For those who do persist, the waiting period is six to 18 months. Even then, one-third to one-half of drug abusers turned away do reapply after waiting the extended time.

The worst prospect of legalization is that it might lead to a short-term increase in the use of drugs, due to availability, lower prices and the sudden freedom from prosecution. The repeal of Prohibition had that result. Drugs cheap enough to destroy their profitability would also be in the range of any child’s allowance, just like beer and cigarettes. Cocaine is easily concealable and its effects less overt than alcohol. The possibility of increased teenage use is admittedly frightening.

On the other hand, ending the drug war would free drug control officers to concentrate on protecting children from exploitation, and here stiff penalties would continue to be in effect. The alarmist prediction that cheap available drugs could lead to an addiction rate of 75 percent of regular users simply ignores the fact that 35 to 40 million Americans are already using some drugs and that only 3 percent become addicts. Most people have strong reasons not to become addicts. A major educational program would need to be in effect well before drug legalization took effect.

Fighting the drug war may appear to hold the high moral ground, but this is only an illusion. And while some have argued that legalization would place the state’s moral imprimatur on drugs, we have already legalized the most lethal drugs — and no one argues that this constitutes governmental endorsement. But legalizing would indeed imply that drugs are no longer being considered satanic like “demon rum.” It’s time we bit the bullet. Addicts will be healed by care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers will be cured by a ruined world drug market, not by enforcement that simply escalates the profitability of drugs. Legalization offers a nonviolent, nonreactive, creative alternative that will let the drug menace collapse of its own deadly weight.

 

Treaties & Pacts Thursday | The Sykes-Picot Agreement

With all the trouble we’re having over in the Middle East, I thought it would be important for you to know some background as to how this and that came about. (The trouble is, no doubt, caused by various countries sticking their noses where they don’t belong. We have – as well has England, most of Europe, Russia and Japan to thank for that).

We’re not going to start at the beginning of the story, rather we’re going to have a series on the Middle East (as well as other parts of the world) which I hope will educate and enlighten you.

Thanks for stopping by.

The Sykes-Picot agreement is a secret understanding concluded in May 1916, during World War I, between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France.

Some historians have pointed out that the agreement conflicted with pledges already given by the British to the Hashimite leader Husayn ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, who was about to lead an Arab revolt in the Hejaz against the Ottoman rulers on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive a much more important share of the territory won.

The agreement

It is accordingly understood between the French and British governments: That France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab states or a confederation of Arab states (a) and (b) marked on the annexed map, under the suzerainty of an Arab chief. That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall have priority of right of enterprise and local loans. That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall alone supply advisers or foreign functionaries at the request of the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.

That in the blue area France, and in the red area Great Britain, shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.

That in the brown area there shall be established an international administration, the form of which is to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other allies, and the representatives of the sheriff of Mecca.

That Great Britain be accorded (1) the ports of Haifa and Acre, (2) guarantee of a given supply of water from the Tigris and Euphrates in area (a) for area (b). His majesty’s government, on their part, undertake that they will at no time enter into negotiations for the cession of Cyprus to any third power without the previous consent of the French government.

That Alexandretta shall be a free port as regards the trade of the British empire, and that there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards British shipping and British goods; that there shall be freedom of transit for British goods through Alexandretta and by railway through the blue area, or (b) area, or area (a); and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against British goods on any railway or against British goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.

That Haifa shall be a free port as regards the trade of France, her dominions and protectorates, and there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards French shipping and French goods. There shall be freedom of transit for French goods through Haifa and by the British railway through the brown area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the blue area, area (a), or area (b), and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against French goods on any railway, or against French goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.

That in area (a) the Baghdad railway shall not be extended southwards beyond Mosul, and in area (b) northwards beyond Samarra, until a railway connecting Baghdad and Aleppo via the Euphrates valley has been completed, and then only with the concurrence of the two governments.

That Great Britain has the right to build, administer, and be sole owner of a railway connecting Haifa with area (b), and shall have a perpetual right to transport troops along such a line at all times. It is to be understood by both governments that this railway is to facilitate the connection of Baghdad with Haifa by rail, and it is further understood that, if the engineering difficulties and expense entailed by keeping this connecting line in the brown area only make the project unfeasible, that the French government shall be prepared to consider that the line in question may also traverse the Polgon Banias Keis Marib Salkhad tell Otsda Mesmie before reaching area (b).

For a period of 20 years the existing Turkish customs tariff shall remain in force throughout the whole of the blue and red areas, as well as in areas (a) and (b), and no increase in the rates of duty or conversions from ad valorem to specific rates shall be made except by agreement between the two powers.

There shall be no interior customs barriers between any of the above-mentioned areas. The customs duties leviable on goods destined for the interior shall be collected at the port of entry and handed over to the administration of the area of destination.

It shall be agreed that the French government will at no time enter into any negotiations for the cession of their rights and will not cede such rights in the blue area to any third power, except the Arab state or confederation of Arab states, without the previous agreement of His Majesty’s government, who, on their part, will give a similar undertaking to the French government regarding the red area.

The British and French government, as the protectors of the Arab state, shall agree that they will not themselves acquire and will not consent to a third power acquiring territorial possessions in the Arabian peninsula, nor consent to a third power installing a naval base either on the east coast, or on the islands, of the red sea. This, however, shall not prevent such adjustment of the Aden frontier as may be necessary in consequence of recent Turkish aggression.

The negotiations with the Arabs as to the boundaries of the Arab states shall be continued through the same channel as heretofore on behalf of the two powers.

It is agreed that measures to control the importation of arms into the Arab territories will be considered by the two governments.  

If you’re still with me, here’s the actual document:

The Sykes-Picot Agreement

Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, 16 May 1916

I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Excellency’s note of the 9th instant, stating that the French Government accept the limits of a future Arab State, or Confederation of States, and of those parts of Syria where French interests predominate, together with certain conditions attached thereto, such as they result from recent discussions in London and Petrograd on the subject.

I have the honour to inform your Excellency in reply that the acceptance of the whole project, as it now stands, will involve the abdication of considerable British interests, but, since His Majesty’s Government recognise the advantage to the general cause of the Allies entailed in producing a more favourable internal political situation in Turkey, they are ready to accept the arrangement now arrived at, provided that the co-operation of the Arabs is secured, and that the Arabs fulfil the conditions and obtain the towns of Homs, Hama, Damascus, and Aleppo.

It is accordingly understood between the French and British governments:

1. That France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab states or a confederation of Arab states (a) and (b) marked on the annexed map, under the suzerainty of an Arab chief. That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall have priority of right of enterprise and local loans. That in area (a) France, and in area (b) Great Britain, shall alone supply advisers or foreign functionaries at the request of the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.
2. That in the blue area France, and in the red area Great Britain, shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab state or confederation of Arab states.
3. That in the brown area there shall be established an international administration, the form of which is to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other allies, and the representatives of the sheriff of Mecca.
4. That Great Britain be accorded (1) the ports of Haifa and Acre, (2) guarantee of a given supply of water from the tigres and Euphrates in area (a) for area (b). His majesty’s government, on their part, undertake that they will at no time enter into negotiations for the cession of Cyprus to any third power without the previous consent of the French government.
5. That Alexandretta shall be a free port as regards the trade of the British empire, and that there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards British shipping and British goods; that there shall be freedom of transit for British goods through Alexandretta and by railway through the blue area, or (b) area, or area (a); and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against British goods on any railway or against British goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.

That Haifa shall be a free port as regards the trade of France, her dominions and protectorates, and there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards French shipping and French goods. There shall be freedom of transit for French goods through Haifa and by the British railway through the brown area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the blue area, area (a), or area (b), and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against French goods on any railway, or against French goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned.

1. That in area (a) the Baghdad railway shall not be extended southwards beyond Mosul, and in area (b) northwards beyond Samarra, until a railway connecting Baghdad and Aleppo via the Euphrates valley has been completed, and then only with the concurrence of the two governments.
2. That Great Britain has the right to build, administer, and be sole owner of a railway connecting Haifa with area (b), and shall have a perpetual right to transport troops along such a line at all times. It is to be understood by both governments that this railway is to facilitate the connection of Baghdad with Haifa by rail, and it is further understood that, if the engineering difficulties and expense entailed by keeping this connecting line in the brown area only make the project unfeasible, that the French government shall be prepared to consider that the line in question may also traverse the Polgon Banias Keis Marib Salkhad tell Otsda Mesmie before reaching area (b).
3. For a period of twenty years the existing Turkish customs tariff shall remain in force throughout the whole of the blue and red areas, as well as in areas (a) and (b), and no increase in the rates of duty or conversions from ad valorem to specific rates shall be made except by agreement between the two powers.

There shall be no interior customs barriers between any of the above mentioned areas. The customs duties leviable on goods destined for the interior shall be collected at the port of entry and handed over to the administration of the area of destination.

1. It shall be agreed that the French government will at no time enter into any negotiations for the cession of their rights and will not cede such rights in the blue area to any third power, except the Arab state or confederation of Arab states, without the previous agreement of His Majesty’s government, who, on their part, will give a similar undertaking to the French government regarding the red area.
2. The British and French government, as the protectors of the Arab state, shall agree that they will not themselves acquire and will not consent to a third power acquiring territorial possessions in the Arabian peninsula, nor consent to a third power installing a naval base either on the east coast, or on the islands, of the red sea. This, however, shall not prevent such adjustment of the Aden frontier as may be necessary in consequence of recent Turkish aggression.
3. The negotiations with the Arabs as to the boundaries of the Arab states shall be continued through the same channel as heretofore on behalf of the two powers.
4. It is agreed that measures to control the importation of arms into the Arab territories will be considered by the two governments.

I have further the honor to state that, in order to make the agreement complete, His Majesty’s government are proposing to the Russian government to exchange notes analogous to those exchanged by the latter and your excellency’s government on the 26th April last. Copies of these notes will be communicated to your excellency as soon as exchanged. I would also venture to remind your excellency that the conclusion of the present agreement raises, for practical consideration, the question of claims of Italy to a share in any partition or rearrangement of Turkey in Asia, as formulated in Article 9 of the agreement of the 26th April, 1915, between Italy and the allies.

His Majesty’s government further consider that the Japanese government should be informed of the arrangements now concluded.

 

Wide Open Wednesday | In Alabama, a Fight to Regain Voting Rights Some Felons Never Lost

 Anne Reynolds, a former convict, with her ballot in Dothan, Alabama.

DOTHAN, Ala. (NYT) — The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, onetime criminal and founder of a ministry called The Ordinary People Society, spent years helping people with criminal records regain the right to vote in Alabama, where an estimated 250,000 people are prohibited from voting because of past criminal activity.

Then he discovered that many of them had never actually lost the right.

Because of a quirk in its Constitution, Alabama disqualifies from voting only those who have committed a “felony involving moral turpitude.” Those who have committed other felonies — like marijuana possession or drunken driving — can cast ballots even if they are still in prison, according to the state attorney general.

But it has been slow work cajoling public officials to enforce and publicize the law. Until Friday, the secretary of state’s Web site advised, incorrectly, that those with any kind of felony conviction could not register unless they had served their time and their right to vote had been restored by the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Because neither the Legislature nor the attorney general has offered a definitive list of crimes involving moral turpitude, there is no way of knowing how many inmates are eligible to vote. But state agencies generally agree that those convicted of drug possession — at least 3,000 of Alabama’s 29,000 prison inmates and thousands more on probation — are eligible. Most felons and former felons, however, assume that they have lost the right to vote.

“This is an issue that’s never come up before,” said Richard F. Allen, the commissioner of corrections. “I would think that if there were any latent feeling out there that they wanted to vote, they would have expressed it by now.”

Mr. Glasgow, who is the half-brother of a far less obscure crusader based in New York, the Rev. Al Sharpton, believes that not only do inmates and former convicts want to vote, but also that their ballots could alter the political landscape in this Republican-leaning state, adding that his group has registered more than 500 people by visiting a handful of county jails.

“There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected officials and our presidents that we’ve had,” he said. “It would definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama.”

Republicans agree. They railed against a statute passed in 2003 that made it easier for some former felons to regain their voting rights by side-stepping a lengthy and backlogged pardon process.

“There’s no more anti-Republican bill than this,” said Marty Connors, the chairman of the state Republican Party, according to news reports at the time. “As frank as I can be, we’re opposed to it because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.”

In the two years after the 2003 statute took effect, more than 5,500 former felons had their rights restored, and interest in the November presidential election is running high, said Sarah Still, manager of the pardons department. In January, Ms. Still received more than 280 applications for voting rights, up from an average of 140 a month last fall.

Nationally, 5.3 million people are barred from voting because of their criminal history, according to a 2004 estimate cited by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice policy group. In the last decade, as criminals who were swept into prison during the drug war have been released and the difficulty of re-integrating them into society has become clear, at least 16 states have made it easier for former felons to vote.

But in the South, where restrictions on former convicts are among the most severe and in many cases date to Jim Crow laws, there have been fewer changes. Last Monday the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in protest of a 2006 Tennessee law that requires former convicts to pay back child support before regaining the right to vote. In Alabama, the Republican attorney general, Troy King, has proposed a constitutional amendment that would delete the moral turpitude clause, prohibiting all felons from voting.

Though he is an active Democrat, Mr. Glasgow, 42, says his main goal is not to aid his party but to help former inmates become productive members of society.

But for most of his own life he was hardly an exemplar of civic engagement. Mr. Sharpton, in his memoir, “Go and Tell Pharaoh,” says his parents’ marriage was wrecked when his father, Al Sharpton Sr., had an affair with his mother’s teenage daughter from a previous marriage, resulting in the birth of Kenneth.

By the time Kenneth was a teenager, his mother had taken him to her hometown, Dothan, Ala., where he began to get in trouble for selling drugs, became addicted to crack cocaine and did time in Alabama and Florida for armed robbery and other crimes.

It was during his longest stint in prison, nine years, that the genes of activism and oratory that run in Mr. Glasgow’s family emerged and he began to preach. When he was released in 2001, the bondsman who had repeatedly bailed him out of jail became treasurer of The Ordinary People Society and paid for Mr. Glasgow to attend seminary.

Mr. Glasgow opened a soup kitchen, held church services under a white tent and began to help former convicts like Anna Reynolds, a recovering addict, regain the right to vote — a process often made onerous by the moral-turpitude clause.

As a legal concept, moral turpitude refers to conduct that would be immoral even if it were not illegal, unlike, say, speeding. The delegates to the 1901 constitutional convention who used the term also took away voting rights for other infractions that they believed blacks were more likely to commit, like wife beating, adultery and vagrancy. In 1985 the United States Supreme Court struck down most of the law on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory, but the moral-turpitude clause remained.

Most officials in Alabama were unaware of the clause until 2005, when it came to light after a man on probation tried to vote in St. Clair County. The parole board requested clarification, and the attorney general responded with an incomplete categorization of felonies based largely on previous court decisions.

The opinion leaves a large gray area, said Ms. Still of the pardons department. It says, for example, that rape is a crime of moral turpitude and that assault is not, but offers no clarification on variations like statutory rape or assault with intent to kill.

The parole board settled on a policy of treating drug possession and drunk driving as crimes devoid of moral turpitude, but that has not put an end to the confusion, Mr. Glasgow said.  

Initially Ms. Reynolds, 52, was told by the local registrar that she could not vote because of a conviction for drug possession. She applied to the parole board, which told her that it could not restore her right to vote because she had never lost it. Finally, The Ordinary People Society helped cut through the red tape.

On Feb. 5, Ms. Reynolds stood outside the public library handing out sample ballots before casting her own. “Voting, that’s part of getting back to normal life,” she said. “I’ve been out of the loop for a long time, and it was good to have help getting back into the loop.”

Just another fine example of how America treats all its citizens, regardless of stripe, fairly and without prejudice.

Political Goings On Tuesday| In a Outraged State of Mind

To paraphrase Billy Joel, Americans are in an outraged state of mind.

We’re angry. We’re fed up with the way most institutions in our society operate, and we’re appalled at the pervasive culture of corruption that’s becoming more and more evident in all levels of government, in major corporations, and even in humanitarian organizations.

We’re offended by the unmistakable bias of the mainstream media. Even more, we’re sick of the way Washington insiders spin every political misstep for public consumption, while they scratch each other’s backs to maintain the status quo.

We’re tired of watching special interests use their money and power to distort the legislative process and buy elections. Finally, we’re infuriated to see that such behavior has become so de rigueur that we’re no longer shocked by it. We actually expect it!

All of this needs to change. Immediately.

Wherever we look, in every sector of our economy, at every level of government, and throughout the world of politics, it’s obvious that the prevailing policies are deliberately designed to benefit an elite few at the expense of the rest of us. This systematic corruption has been going on for too long. It is time to turn our democracy back into what it was intended to be: no longer a government of the pampered congressmen, paid for by the lobbyists who pervert the process for the benefit of greedy special interests, but a government truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

How many times have you heard me say that.

It’s time for a transformation – a change we have the power to accomplish.

We’re already seen the beginnings of such a change. That’s why American voters sent a cleat message in the 2006 midterm elections. Turning Congress on it’s head, we defeated thirty incumbent Republican members of the House of Representatives and six GOP senators, ending the 10-year Republican majority in both houses. Furious about the never-ending ethical scandals, the flagrant self-dealing, the unproductive “do-nothing” Congress, voters desperately sought a clean slate – and they got it.

Unfortunately, new faces don’t necessarily mean new rules. If we don’t follow this shake-up with serious institutional reforms, we won’t have much of a revolution. Shifting players alone won’t be enough to transform the system. And it’s the system that needs a major overhaul. After all, the Democrats are hardly morally superior to the Republicans. They’ve had their own scandals, and they’re equally beholden to their own particular special interests. The American people didn’t choose them because of some positive belief in their message. We chose them because we were tired of the same old gang of thieves.

No, this recent election wasn’t a mandate for the Democratic Party. It was a mandate for correction and reform. As they have often said before, the American people voted for a slate of non-incumbents, and in this case that meant non-Republicans. (We would have done the same had the players been reversed).

It was definitely time for a change. If history is any guide, however, once the outsiders take power, they tend to forget about the very reforms that they promised. So now it’s up to us, the voters, to keep the pressure on – to force both Democrats and Republicans to clean up the Congress and reform our business community and public organizations. Because we know they’re not working. They’re certainly not being held accountable. And unless we start to hold their feet to the fire by pushing the enactment of some serious ethical reforms, the 2006 election will go down in history as a sophisticated game of political musical chairs.

There are some encouraging opening signs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has forced through a series of reforms that curb some – though not most and certainly not all – of the abuses in her chamber. She has successfully induced her colleagues to ban travel and gifts from lobbyists….though congressional wives or husbands can still double-dip by going on their spouses’ campaign payrolls or working for lobbying firms. She’s required congressmen to identify the wasteful earmarked appropriations they cram into spending bills….though she hasn’t curbed the abuse by giving the president the power to veto or ignore the bloated spending amendments. Still, she has done something about the culture of congressional corruption, which is a lot more than he predecessor – Dennis Hastert – ever did.

The Senate reforms have led to serious changes, too. All corporate – and lobbyist – sponsored travel is now prohibited, as is the use of corporate jets by senators under any circumstances. In the House, new rules simply require members to reimburse the corporate sponsor for the actual cost of the flights, not just the first-class airfare.

These new rules are a step in the right direction, but we deserve much more. Before Congress can restore confidence in the integrity of its legislative actions, it must earn the trust of the American people.

And that’s no small job.

We’re skeptical. We’ve learned too often that corporations are cooking their books, humanitarian agencies are on the take, and congressmen are taking bribes and secretly increasing their net worth. We’ve felt swindled too often after watching our investments dwindle while corporate executives go around stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. We’ve grown resentful that they get away with it – and if they do get caught all they receive is a little slap on the wrist. And we want it to stop.

We’re revolted by the endless daily barrage of news stories chronicling fraud and abuse among our leaders. We cringed to learn the United Nations looked the other way while Saddam Hussein stole almost $2 billion of humanitarian aid funds designated for emergency food and medicine the Iraqi people in the UN’s so-called ‘Oil-for-Food Program’. And we bristled to learn that the UN ignored Saddam’s bribery of Russia and France to buy their support against the United States in the Security Council. Remember France’s then ambassador to the UN, Dominique de Villepin, and the impassioned speech he made against intervention in Iraq? Turns out, he wasn’t motivated by any fiery socialist idealism. No, his ulterior motive was calculated capitalist realism. France had become Iraq’s largest trading partner and de Villepin didn’t want to jeopardize that cozy and lucrative relationship. Moreover, Saddam had given several French politicians – including Chirac’s former interior minister, Charles Pasqua vouchers to sell Iraqi oil. Unfortunately for the French and Russians involved, Saddam also kept a ledger of these little favors – a document that later revealed the depths of these sneaky deals.

RUSSIA, FRANCE, SADDAM, AND THE UN

What France Got:

• Vouchers for 11 million barrels of oil to former interior minister Charles Pasqua (each voucher for 10 million gallons could generate between $1 and $3.5 million in revenue)
• Rights to develop a rich Iraqi oil field
• Payoffs to top French politicians, including diplomat Jean-Bernard Merimee (who holds the official title of ‘ambassador for life’), who took $156,000 in bribes to renovate his Moroccan vacation home while he served as a ‘Special Adviser’ to UN secretary general Kofi Annan

What Russia Got:

• Vouchers for 55 million barrels of oil to the Russian foreign minister
• Vouchers for 53 million barrels to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former Russian presidential candidate and deputy speaker of the Duma (the Russian equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives)
• Vouchers for 110 million barrels to the Russian Communist Party
• Vouchers to a former chief of staff to Valdimir Putin
• Vouchers to the Russian Orthodox Church
• Rights to another Iraqi oil field

What the UN Got:

• $1.9 billion in cash from the Iraqi oil sales.
• 13 million barrels of oil to the head of the Oil-for-Food Program, Benon Sevan later indicted on bribery charges

What Kojo Annan, Son of the Un Secretary General, Got:

• $2,500 per month for four years after he left the employment of a Geneva company that got an Oil-for-Food contract while he worked for them

What Saddam Got:

• More than $12 billion in cash for his personal use.

What the Iraqi People Got:

• Bupkiss. After all the bribery, graft, and outright theft, all the got were the leftovers.

And that’d not all. During the entire time the UN officials were supervising the Oil-for-Food Program, they never even noticed when Saddam shook down another $1.8 billion from corporations and government officials who were bidding to provide the food and other necessities to his starving citizens. It’s especially hard to understand why UN officials did nothing about their own employees who were on the take – or why Secretary-General Annan had no idea that his own son was riding the profitable bandwagon of surreptitious payoffs.

During the past several years, we’ve witnessed the shocking bankruptcy of Enron and WorldCom. With respective assets of $64 billion and $104 billion at the time of the bankruptcy filings, the two companies had been among the largest and most successful corporations in the United States. Because of the greed and fraud that permeated the highest echelons of these international businesses, thousands of hardworking men and women lost their jobs, their pensions, and their hopes for the future. Yet so far only a handful of the guilty executives who bled those companies dry have been prosecuted and convicted for those crimes, which changed the lives of so many.

And it’s not just public corporations that are the problem. Our government agencies has been just as crooked. Look at Fannie Mae, the federally charged organization owned by private shareholders that purchases mortgages in order to increase the availability of mortgage funding for low and middle-income housing. In 1998, Fannie Mae failed to report more than $200 million in expenses; from 2000 to 2003, it overstated its earnings by more than $12 billion. Why did they engage in this financial trickery? Because its top executives’ compensation packages – that is, their excessive bonuses – we tied to the company’s performance. No profits, no bonuses. So the only way the folks in charge of Fannie Mae could line their pockets with obscene bonuses was to make the bottom line look great.

The Amazing Democratic Gravy Train at Fannie Mae

• Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s CEO, collected $90 million in bonuses and salary
  

• Jamie Gorelick, its vice chairman, got $25 million
  

• Jim Johnson, its former CEO, got $2.9 million
  

• Hundreds of liberal nonprofits were given $35 million a year in grants
  

Raines, Bill Clinton’s former budget director, was forced to resign, but he kept his $90 million; now he ekes out a meager living on a $114,000 monthly pension, part of a total retirement package estimated at $25 million. According to the Rocky Mountain News, former Clinton assistant attorney general Jamie Gorelick got more that $25 million in compensation, including $15 million in bonuses. Jim Johnson, a Democratic insider who served as Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign manager, received $966,000 in salary and a $1,932,000 bonus in 1998.

According to federal regulators, however, if Fannie Mae had been keeping accurate accounting, it would have paid no bonuses that year.

Congress is in on the game, too. And it’s not just one party that’s guilty. Fairly recently, Democrats and Republicans alike have been caught in major corporation scandals. One member of Congress was actually caught hiding $90,000 in cash in his home freezer (giving new meaning to the term frozen assets) and was apparently taped by the FBI as he accepted a $100,000 bribe. Louisiana Democratic congressman William Jefferson (I almost wrote Clinton) allegedly demanded cash payments and other favors for himself and his family in exchange for using his congressional position to help advance an African business scheme. After finding the frozen dollars, the Justice Department executed a search warrant on his congressional office. Republican and Democratic House leaders were furious, castigating the FBI for daring to search a congressman’s office and screaming about the separation of powers. Apparently, they view the House of Representatives as an asylum for criminal activity beyond the reach of the United States Department of Justice. Former House speaker Dennis Hastert and his successor, Nancy Pelosi, both righteously claimed that the documents were unconstitutionally seized from Jefferson’s office and demanded their immediate return. Now, isn’t that outrageous? Shouldn’t our congressional leaders want to investigate alleged criminal activity in their midst, rather than closing ranks around a suspect? (This rather reminds me of the Steven Segal movie “Hard to Kill”, wherein Steven confronts this crooked senator – and as the police start putting him in hand cuffs, he screams “You can’t arrest me, I’m a Senator”).

This bunker mentality in defense of institutional prerogative is common to both parties, and it may grow as more members come under criminal investigation.

And there are plenty to choose from. Former House Majority leader, Tom Delay (R-Texas) resigned after he was indicted on money laundering charges and implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, one of the most amazing examples of special-interest influence peddling in the history of our nation. Former Republican congressman Duke Cunningham (R-Calif) went to prison last year for accepting bribes from government contractors. As he was sentenced, he boldly named other members of Congress he claimed had also take bribes! Ohio Republican congressman Bob Ney resigned in 2006 after pleading guilty to making false statements and accepting trips, meals, airline tickets, cash, and gaming chips in exchange for pushing legislation for Abramoff’s clients. And Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla) also resigned after details exposed his relationship with male high school students serving as House pages.

Stay tuned…….

Drug-Pharma Monday | UN: Afghan Rebels Growing More Opium

TOKYO — Opium cultivation in rebel-controlled areas in southern and southwestern Afghanistan is expected to grow this year, fueling the Taliban insurgency with more drug money, a U.N. report said Wednesday.

The report, by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said that Afghanistan, in turmoil since a U.S.-led military operation toppled the repressive Taliban regime in 2001, is also steadily increasing its production of marijuana.

Afghanistan supplies some 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium, the main ingredient in heroin, and the Taliban rebels fighting the U.S.-led forces receive up to $100 million from the drug trade, the U.N. estimates.

“Indeed, it is the insurgents, the Taliban, that are deriving an enormous funding for their war by imposing … a 10 percent tax on production,” said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. agency.

Afghanistan cultivated a record 477,000 acres of opium in 2007, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. Total production, spurred by unusually high rainfall, increased even further, by 34 percent.

The one bright spot in the report, which was released on the sidelines of an international meeting on Afghanistan in Tokyo, was that the area under cultivation outside of the rebel strongholds was expected to fall.

That meant overall cultivation area would stay even or fall slightly in 2008, the report said, though wet weather could boost the productivity of each poppy plant.

Costa and Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting counter-narcotics minister, attributed the stall in overall growth of cultivation to eradication efforts and programs aimed at convincing farmers to switch to legal crops.

“The pre-planting campaign is the best way to fight drugs in Afghanistan because we involved the local people … and we’re encouraging people not to grow poppy,” said Khodaidad, who, like many Afghans, uses one name.

The report showed mixed results in the battle against opium in 2007. Poppy cultivation increased in eight provinces and decreased in 26, including 13 that became poppy-free.

For the coming year, 12 of Afghanistan’s provinces _ mainly in the central and northern regions _ are likely to remain poppy-free, and decreases recorded elsewhere in the east, north and northeast “may result in an overall decrease in poppy cultivation in 2008,” the report said.

Nearly a third of villages said they had received cash advances from drug traffickers to grow poppy. All respondents in the southern region and 72 percent in the west said they paid taxes to anti-government entities, including mullahs, local commanders and the Taliban, the report said.

The U.N. report suggested “effective prevention campaigns and eradication efforts” could help control spring cultivation and rid more regions of the crop.

The Senlis Council international policy think tank said, however, that the report showed current approaches were ineffective and counterproductive.

“You need short-term economic incentives and solutions, such as trying to make use of the poppy crop for medicinal use, and producing crops with a high market value, such as saffron,” said Jorrit Kamminga, Senlis’ director of policy research.

However, none of Afghanistan’s legal crops _ such as maize, rice or cotton _ can match the income from opium poppies, estimated at $2,024 per acre, the report said.

In addition to opium, the survey found an increase in cannabis cultivation, with 18 percent of villages planning to grow it in 2008, compared with 13 percent last year, when some 172,970 acres of cannabis crops were cultivated.

Christina Gynna Oguz, a U.N. representative in Afghanistan, said the study suggested officials should offer incentives to farmers in the more secure north not to grow poppy.

But in the south, officials have to face an alliance between drug traffickers, corrupt officials, and insurgents.

“So there you will have to fight all these three elements, meaning that you must have much more emphasis on interdiction and fighting corruption,” she said.

Despite the failure to curb poppy production, Zalmai Afzali, the spokesman for the Ministry of Counter Narcotics, said there would be no major change in the strategy to combat the problem, which he blamed on the lack of security.

The report was issued as Tokyo hosted an annual international conference on the country’s reconstruction on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The 24-member Joint Coordinating and Monitoring Board monitors the Afghanistan Compact, a five-year blueprint to promote security, the rule of law, human rights and development.

Afghan Foreign Minister Dadfar Spanta said Kabul planned to destroy 123,500 acres of opium cultivations in 2008, and he called for more international help in the fight to convince farmers not to plant poppy.

“We need technical and financial support from the international community to create a new perspective for Afghan farmers,” he told reporters after the Compact talks ended.

___

On the Net:

U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, http://www.unodc.org

Gimmie That Good Time Religion Sunday | Christianity’s True Colors

Sometimes it is nice to be reminded of what we as free thinkers are fighting.

Last May, 2007, the House of Representatives passed legislation that in part, would make it a hate crime to attack a man or woman because of sexual orientation. To quote a past leader of the CIA, this would seem like a “Slam Dunk”. After all, who would be afraid of a law designed to inhibit violence against gays or lesbians? Unfortunately this is not the case.

Apparently “Good Christians” are all afraid that it will inhibit their freedom of speech. The Big Bushie has promised to veto the bill once the Senate passes it.Now Christians are so quick to point out their religion is a religion of love. However history has shown that this has never been the case.

The history of Christianity is rife with examples of how the Church used fear of the “other” to raise vast sums of money for their coffers.

The Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the litany of violence against “others” goes on and on.

During WWII, the Catholic Church supported the extermination of the Jews by Germany. In fact, German soldiers belt buckles had the motto “Gott Mit Uns” or “God With Us” stamped on the metal face to remind them daily of their sacred mission. The German soldiers felt they were fighting for God. After all, they were going after the “killers of Christ.”

No small wonder the Pope was behind them. However, in all probability, the Vatican’s support for Hitler probably had more to do with the millions of dollars in stolen loot that the Nazi’s were storing in the Vatican Bank than the Church supporting the good fight. Lawsuits are still underway to recover this gold for the survivors of the Nazi holocaust.Of course the Vatican Bank is assiduously fighting to retain this gold. “Papa” has to pay off a lot of victims of pedophile priests.

During the first half of the 20th century, white Christian churches were promoting hatred of another “other” – blacks in this country.

The Ku Klux Klan was known to sing Christian hymns as they burned crosses, marched through black neighborhoods terrorizing the populations, or hung black men from trees.

Again, they were blessed by Christ, and on their mission for God to rid the United States of Blacks. Their bible and their pastors supported this. Recently the KKK literature has also picked up the new “other” from the Christian Churches, the homosexual.

One of the main arguments the far right and Christians use against laws like the hate crime bill is the usurpation of States Rights. However they forget their dedication to the States when they promote the Constitutional Amendment banning gays and lesbians from marriage. They do not trust the States with this since they have already seen some states promoting equal civil rights for all their citizens including Gays and Lesbians.

All civil rights enjoyed in the US, are based upon Federal law, not State law. This was true during the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and it is still true today.

If Blacks had waited for the State of Mississippi to pass legislation to provide for their voting rights, they would in all likelihood still not be voting today. Today’s Republicans know this very well. This is why they promote a State solution. Of course, eventually civil rights will win out. It always does.
One funny aspect of the civil rights movement is many of the most anti-civil rights Democrats changed parties over the issue.

Led by Strom Thurman and the Dixiecrats, overnight they became Republicans. Thus the party of Lincoln, that freed the slaves and began the march toward the civil rights movement, became the party of prejudice, hatred, and the KKK.
Ironically today, the Bushies have found traction for their anti-civil rights stance in a place few would have expected to find it, Black Churches. They, along with the Southern Baptist and the Catholic Church make up the largest majority of those who seek to stop the Hate Crimes bill. They fear that it may result in Churches and Pastors being held responsible for the hateful rhetoric they spew weekly from their pulpits.

Christianity is not about accepting responsibility, far from it. Should something bad happen, it’s just God’s will, not theirs. Christians are just “His” instrument. A conduit to be used as God sees fit.

If someone should take the pastors messages of hate to heart and actually injure or kill a homosexual – that is also not their fault. It is God’s punishment on the wicked. The Pastors and Churches are just preaching the “Word of God”. Of course secretly many are proud of their roll in teaching the “faggots” a lesson. Repent or Die. If you are not for us, you are against us.

Southern Baptists are taught from an early age they are at war with the Satan and his minions. Minions could be loosely defined as anyone not following the Christian principles as the Southern Baptists’ doctrine defines them. They are taught that homosexuals are godless, ergo the enemy. It definitely makes them a minion. It is just a small step to follow the logic to its conclusion. You as God’s soldier have the right, nay the duty to God to prosecute his enemies. You are good. They are bad. You are superior to – them.

The Hate Crimes bill has been named after Matthew Shepard. The young, nice looking college student was taken out to the country, robbed, severely beaten, then tied to a fence in a pose dramatically like that of a crucifixion. Here he was found, nearly dead by a passerby hours later. Matthew never regained consciousness. He died never knowing the love of that special someone to share his life with. He died with all the great-unfulfilled promises his life had yet to attain. No – his life was snuffed out by two young thugs who knew it was okay to beat up and rob faggots because the bible said so, and after all, they needed some beer money.
Just like a junkie seeking to regain his original high, Christians come to church seeking an emotional adrenaline crazed high.

A good pastor is skilled at manipulating the emotional gamut of his flock to give them their sought after experience. If he succeeds, they keep coming. Fill the pews, fill the offering plate. Screw civil rights, Pastor’s got his eye on a new Cadillac.