The War on Drugs (band) – Wikipedia

American rock band

The War on Drugs is an American rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, formed in 2005. The band consists of Adam Granduciel (vocals, guitar), David Hartley (bass guitar), Robbie Bennett (keyboards), Charlie Hall (drums), Jon Natchez (saxophone, keyboards), Anthony LaMarca (guitar) and Eliza Hardy Jones (keyboards).

Founded by close collaborators Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs released their debut studio album, Wagonwheel Blues, in 2008. Vile departed shortly after its release to focus on his solo career. The band's second studio album Slave Ambient was released in 2011 to favorable reviews and a lengthy tour.

The band's third album, Lost in the Dream, was released in 2014 following extensive touring and a period of loneliness and clinical depression for primary songwriter Granduciel. The album was released to widespread critical acclaim and increased exposure. Previous collaborator Hall joined the band as its full-time drummer during the recording process, with saxophonist Natchez and additional guitarist LaMarca accompanying the band for its world tour. Signing to Atlantic Records, the six-piece band released their fourth album, A Deeper Understanding, in 2017, which won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards. The band released their fifth album, I Don't Live Here Anymore, in 2021.

In 2003, frontman Adam Granduciel moved from Oakland, California, to Philadelphia, where he met Kurt Vile, who had also recently moved back to Philadelphia after living in Boston for two years.[2] The duo subsequently began writing, recording and performing music together.[3] Vile stated, "Adam was the first dude I met when I moved back to Philadelphia in 2003. We saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I was obsessed with Bob Dylan at the time, and we totally geeked-out on that. We started playing together in the early days and he would be in my band, The Violators. Then, eventually I played in The War On Drugs."[4]

Granduciel and Vile began playing together as The War on Drugs in 2005. Regarding the band's name, Granduciel noted, "My friend Julian and I came up with it a few years ago over a couple bottles of red wine and a few typewriters when we were living in Oakland. We were writing a lot back then, working on a dictionary, and it just came out and we were like "hey, good band name" so eventually when I moved to Philadelphia and got a band together I used it. It was either that or The Rigatoni Danzas. I think we made the right choice. I always felt though that it was the kind of name I could record all sorts of different music under without any sort of predictability inherent in the name."[5]

While Vile and Granduciel formed the backbone of the band, they had a number of accompanists early in the group's career, before finally settling on a lineup that added Charlie Hall as drummer/organist, Kyle Lloyd as drummer and Dave Hartley on bass.[6] Granduciel had previously toured and recorded with The Capitol Years, and Vile has several solo albums.[7] The group gave away its Barrel of Batteries EP for free early in 2008.[8] Their debut LP for Secretly Canadian, Wagonwheel Blues, was released in 2008.[9]

Following the album's release, and subsequent European tour, Vile departed from the band to focus on his solo career, stating, "I only went on the first European tour when their album came out, and then I basically left the band. I knew if I stuck with that, it would be all my time and my goal was to have my own musical career."[4] Fellow Kurt Vile & the Violators bandmate Mike Zanghi joined the band at this time, with Vile noting, "Mike was my drummer first and then when The War On Drugs' first record came out I thought I was lending Mike to Adam for the European tour but then he just played with them all the time so I kind of had to like, while they were touring a lot, figure out my own thing."[10]

The lineup underwent several changes, and by the end of 2008, Kurt Vile, Charlie Hall, and Kyle Lloyd had all exited the group. At that time Granduciel and Hartley were joined by drummer Mike Zanghi, whom Granduciel also played with in Kurt Vile's backing band, the Violators.

After recording much of the band's forthcoming studio album, Slave Ambient, Zanghi departed from the band in 2010. Drummer Steven Urgo subsequently joined the band, with keyboardist Robbie Bennett also joining at around this time. Regarding Zanghi's exit, Granduciel noted: "I loved Mike, and I loved the sound of The Violators, but then he wasn't really the sound of my band. But you have things like friendship, and he's down to tour and he's a great guy, but it wasn't the sound of what this band was."[11]

In 2012, Patrick Berkery replaced Urgo as the band's drummer.[12]

On December 4, 2013 the band announced the upcoming release of its third studio album, Lost in the Dream (March 18, 2014). The band streamed the album in its entirety on NPR's First Listen site for a week before its release.[13] Award winning alt-country rocker Ryan Adams tweeted that Lost in the Dream was a perfect album.[14]

Lost in the Dream was featured as the Vinyl Me, Please record of the month in August 2014. The pressing was a limited edition pressing on mint green colored vinyl.

In June 2015, The War on Drugs signed with Atlantic Records for a two-album deal.[15]

On Record Store Day, April 22, 2017, The War on Drugs released their new single "Thinking of a Place".[16] The single was produced by frontman Granduciel and Shawn Everett.[17] April 28, 2017, The War on Drugs announced a fall 2017 tour in North America and Europe and that a new album was imminent.[18] On June 1, 2017, a new song, "Holding On", was released, and it was announced that the album would be titled A Deeper Understanding and was released on August 25, 2017.[19] "Holding On" was also used on the official soundtrack of EA Sports' FIFA 18.

The 2017 tour began in September, opening in the band's hometown, Philadelphia, and it concluded in November in Sweden.[20]

A Deeper Understanding was nominated for the International Album of the Year award at the 2018 UK Americana Awards.[21]

At the 60th Annual Grammy Awards, on January 28, 2018, A Deeper Understanding won the Grammy for Best Rock Album.[22]

On October 6, 2020, The War on Drugs announced a live album titled Live Drugs, which was released on November 20, 2020.[23]

The War on Drugs released their fifth studio album, I Don't Live Here Anymore, on October 29, 2021. Along with the album announcement, the band also released a single and accompanying music video for the album's lead track, "Living Proof", along with a 2022 tour announcement.[24] The album was released to widespread critical acclaim, placing highly on several end-of-year lists. For the album's accompanying tour, keyboardist Eliza Hardy Jones - who has previously played with bass guitarist Dave Hartley in his solo project, Nightlands - joined the band.

The band has been described as indie rock,[6][25][26][27][28] heartland rock[27][29] and neo-psychedelia,[28][30] as well as Americana.[31] Their Dylan and Springsteen-influenced lyrical approach meets Tom Petty and Sonic Youth musically for a roots-soaked-synth-and-guitar approach to American rock and roll. Not only do they draw inspiration from artists like Bruce Springsteen, Talk Talk, and Granduciel's "favorite modern day band", Wilco, but they have inspired their own wave of guitar-forward, synth-layered indie rockers.[32]

Granduciel and Zanghi are both former members of founding guitarist Vile's backing band The Violators, with Granduciel noting, "There was never, despite what lazy journalists have assumed, any sort of falling out, or resentment"[33] following Vile's departure from The War on Drugs. In 2011, Vile stated, "When my record came out, I assumed Adam would want to focus on The War On Drugs but he came with us in The Violators when we toured the States. The Violators became a unit, and although the cast does rotate, we've developed an even tighter unity and sound. Adam is an incredible guitar player these days and there is a certain feeling [between us] that nobody else can tap into. We don't really have to tell each other what to play, it just happens."

Both Hartley and Granduciel contributed to singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten's fourth studio album, Are We There (2014). Hartley performs bass guitar on the entire album, with Granduciel contributing guitar on two tracks.[citation needed]

Granduciel is currently[when?] producing the new Sore Eros album. They have been recording it in Philadelphia and Los Angeles on and off for the past several years.[4]

In 2016, The War on Drugs contributed a cover of "Touch of Grey" for a Grateful Dead tribute album called Day of the Dead. The album was curated by The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner.[20] Granduciel had been curious about the Grateful Dead and other jam bands since he attended Phish concerts when he was younger.[34]

Current members

Current touring musicians

Former members

Delivered since 2010, the GAFFA Awards (Swedish: GAFFA Priset) are a Swedish award that rewards popular music awarded by the magazine of the same name.

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The War on Drugs (band) - Wikipedia

Philippines War on Drugs – Human Rights Watch

Since taking office on June 30, 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has carried out a war on drugs that has led to the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos to date, mostly urban poor. At least 2,555 of the killings have been attributed to the Philippine National Police. Duterte and other senior officials have instigated and incited the killings in a campaign that could amount to crimes against humanity.

Human Rights Watch research has found that police are falsifying evidence to justify the unlawful killings. Despite growing calls for an investigation, Duterte has vowed to continue the campaign.

Large-scale extrajudicial violence as a crime solution was a marker of Dutertes 22-year tenure as mayor of Davao City and the cornerstone of his presidential campaign. On the eve of his May 9, 2016 election victory, Duterte told a crowd of more than 300,000: If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out because I'll kill you.

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Philippines War on Drugs - Human Rights Watch

50-year war on drugs imprisoned millions of Black Americans

By AARON MORRISON

https://apnews.com/article/war-on-drugs-75e61c224de3a394235df80de7d70b70

Landscaping was hardly his lifelong dream.

As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was the right-hand man to his musical best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&B heads know as DJ Nabs.

But rather than jet-setting with Fowler, Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the so-called war on drugs. Addicted to crack cocaine and involved in trafficking the drug, he faced decades-long imprisonment at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing major cities and working class Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today.

By chance, Lucas received a rare bit of mercy. He got the kind of help that many Black and Latino Americans struggling through the crack epidemic did not: treatment, early release and what many would consider a fresh start.

I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony, said Lucas. His Sunflower Landscaping got a boost in 2019 with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education.

Lucas was caught up in a system that imposes lifetime limits on most people who have served time for drug crimes, with little thought given to their ability to rehabilitate. In addition to being denied employment, those with criminal records can be limited in their access to business and educational loans, housing, child custody rights, voting rights and gun rights.

Its a system that was born when Lucas was barely out of diapers.

Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemics worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.

Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream.

An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

The racial disparities reveal the wars uneven toll. Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the Black incarceration rate in America exploded from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000. In the same timespan, the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew from 103 per 100,000 people to 242.

Gilberto Gonzalez, a retired special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who worked for more than 20 years taking down drug dealers and traffickers in the U.S., Mexico and in South America, said hell never forget being cheered on by residents in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood near Los Angeles as he led away drug traffickers in handcuffs.

That gave me a sense of the reality of the people that live in these neighborhoods, that are powerless because theyre afraid that the drug dealers that control the street, that control the neighborhood are going to do them and their children harm, said Gonzalez, 64, who detailed his field experiences in the recently released memoir Narco Legenda.

We realized then that, along with dismantling (drug trafficking) organizations, there was also a real need to clean up communities, to go to where the crime was and help people that are helpless, he said.

Still, the law enforcement approach has led to many long-lasting consequences for people who have since reformed. Lucas still wonders what would happen for him and his family if he no longer carried the weight of a drug-related conviction on his record.

Even with his sunny disposition and close to 30 years of sober living, Lucas, at age 54, cannot pass most criminal background checks. His wife, whom hed met two decades ago at a fatherhood counseling conference, said his past had barred him from doing things as innocuous as chaperoning their children on school field trips.

Its almost like a life sentence, he said.

___

Although Nixon declared the war on drugs on June 17, 1971, the U.S. already had lots of practice imposing drug prohibitions that had racially skewed impacts. The arrival of Chinese migrants in the 1800s saw the rise of criminalizing opium that migrants brought with them. Cannabis went from being called reefer to marijuana, as a way to associate the plant with Mexican migrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1930s.

By the time Nixon sought reelection amid the anti-Vietnam War and Black power movements, criminalizing heroin was a way to target activists and hippies. One of Nixons domestic policy aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted as much about the war on drugs in a 22-year-old interview published by Harpers Magazine in 2016.

Experts say Nixons successors, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, leveraged drug war policies in the following decades to their own political advantage, cementing the drug wars legacy. The explosion of the U.S. incarceration rate, the expansion of public and private prison systems and the militarization of local police forces are all outgrowths of the drug war.

Federal policies, such as mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses, were mirrored in state legislatures. Lawmakers also adopted felony disenfranchisement, while also imposing employment and other social barriers for people caught in drug sweeps.

The domestic anti-drug policies were widely accepted, mostly because the use of illicit drugs, including crack cocaine in the late 1980s, was accompanied by an alarming spike in homicides and other violent crimes nationwide. Those policies had the backing of Black clergy and the Congressional Black Caucus, the group of African-American lawmakers whose constituents demanded solutions and resources to stem the violent heroin and crack scourges.

I think people often flatten this conversation, said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization pushing decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

If youre a Black leader 30 years ago, youre grabbing for the first (solution) in front of you, said Frederique, who is Black. A lot of folks in our community said, OK, get these drug dealers out of our communities, get this crack out of our neighborhood. But also, give us treatment so we can help folks.

The heavy hand of law enforcement came without addiction prevention resources, she said.

Use of crack rose sharply in 1985, and peaked in 1989, before quickly declining in the early 1990s, according to a Harvard study.

Drug sales and use were concentrated in cities, particularly those with large Black and Latino populations, although there were spikes in use among white populations, too. Between 1984 and 1989, crack was associated with a doubling of homicides of Black males aged 14 to 17. By the year 2000, the correlation between crack cocaine and violence faded amid waning profits from street sales.

Roland Fryer, an author of the Harvard study and a professor of economics, said the effects of the crack epidemic on a generation of Black families and Black children still havent been thoroughly documented. A lack of accountability for the war on drugs bred mistrust of government and law enforcement in the community, he said.

People ask why Black people dont trust (public) institutions, said Fryer, who is Black. Its because we have watched how weve treated opioids its a public health concern. But crack (cocaine) was, lock them up and throw away the key, what we need is tougher sentencing.

Another major player in creating hysteria around drug use during the crack era: the media. On June 17, 1986, 15 years to the day after Nixon declared the drug war, NBA draftee Len Bias died of a cocaine-induced heart attack on the University of Maryland campus.

Coverage was frenzied and coupled with racist depictions of crack addiction in mostly Black and Latino communities. Within weeks of Biass death, the U.S. House of Representatives drafted the Anti-Abuse Act of 1986.

The law, passed and signed by Reagan that October, imposed mandatory federal sentences of 20 years to life in prison for violating drug laws. The law also made possession and sale of crack rocks harsher than that of powder cocaine.

The basketball players death could have been one of the off-ramps in Lucass spiral into crack addiction and dealing. By then, he could make $10,000 in four to five hours selling the drug.

One of the things that I thought would help me, that I thought would be my rehab, was when Len Bias died, Lucas said. I thought, if they showed me evidence (he) died from an overdose of smoking crack cocaine, as much as I loved Len Bias, that I would give it up.

I did not quit, he said.

He was first introduced to crack cocaine in 1986, but kept his drug use largely hidden from his friends and family.

What I didnt know at the time was that this was a different type of chemical entering my brain and it was going to change me forever, Lucas said. Here I am on the verge of being the right-hand man to DJ Nabs, to literally travel the world. Thats how bad the drug did me.

By 1988, Fowlers music career had outgrown Durham. He and Lucas moved to Atlanta and, a few years later, Fowler signed a deal to become the official touring DJ for the hip hop group Kris Kross under famed music producer Jermaine Dupris So So Def record label. Fowler and the group went on to open for pop music icon Michael Jackson on the European leg of the Dangerous tour.

Lucas, who began trafficking crack cocaine between Georgia and North Carolina, never joined his best friend on the road. Instead, he slipped further into his addiction and returned to Durham, where he took a short-lived job as a preschool instructor.

When he lacked the money to procure drugs to sell or to use, Lucas resorted to robbing businesses for quick cash. He claims that he was never armed when he robbed soft targets, like fast food restaurants and convenience stores.

Lucas spent four and a half years in state prison for larceny after robbing several businesses to feed his addiction. Because his crimes were considered nonviolent, Lucas learned in prison that he was eligible for an addiction treatment program that would let him out early. But if he violated the terms of his release or failed to complete the treatment, Lucas would serve more than a decade in prison on separate drug trafficking charges under a deal with the court.

He accepted the deal.

After his release from prison and his graduation from the treatment program, Fowler paid out of his pocket to have his friends fines and fees cleared. Thats how Lucas regained his voting rights.

On a recent Saturday, the two best friends met up to talk in depth about the secret that Lucas intentionally kept from Fowler. The DJ learned of his friends addiction after seeing a Durham newspaper clipping that detailed the string of robberies.

Sitting in Fowlers home, Lucas told his friend that he doesnt regret not being on the road or missing out on the fringe benefits from touring.

All I needed was to be around you, Lucas said.

Right, Fowler replied, choking up and wiping tears from his eyes.

Lucas continued: You know, when I was around you, when there was a party or whatnot, my job, just out of instinct, was to watch your back.

In a separate interview, Fowler, who is a few years younger than Lucas, said, I just wanted my brother on the road with me. To help protect me. To help me be strong. And I had to do it by my damn self. And I didnt like that. Thats what it was.

___

Not everyone was as lucky as Lucas. Often, a drug offense conviction in combination with a violent gun offense carried much steeper penalties. At the heights of the war on drugs, federal law allowed violent drug offenders to be prosecuted in gang conspiracy cases, which often pinned homicides on groups of defendants, sometimes irrespective of who pulled the trigger.

These cases resulted in sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, a punishment disproportionately doled out to Black and Latino gang defendants.

Thats the case for Bill Underwood, who was a successful R&B and hip hop music promoter in New York City in the late 70s through the 80s, before his 33-year incarceration. A judge granted him compassionate release from federal custody in January, noting his lauded reputation as a mentor to young men in prison and his high-risk exposure to COVID-19 at age 67.

As the AP reported in 1990, Underwood was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole for racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and narcotics conspiracy, as part of a prosecution that accused his gang of committing six murders and of controlling street-level drug distribution.

I actually short-changed myself, and my family and my people, by doing what I did, said Underwood, who acknowledges playing a large part in the multimillion-dollar heroin trade, as a leader of a violent Harlem gang from the 1970s through the 1980s.

Underwood is now a senior fellow with The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit pushing for an end to life imprisonment. He testified to Congress in June that his punishment was excessive.

As human beings, we are capable of painful yet transformative self reflection, maturity, and growth, and to deny a person this opportunity is to deny them their humanity, he said in the testimony.

Though he feels the system is broken, Brett Roman Williams, a Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker and anti-gun violence advocate, said a lack of counseling and support for people re-entering society after incarceration has serious consequences.

Williams grew up watching his older brother, Derrick, serve time in prison for a serious drug offense. But in 2016, his brother who discouraged young people from making choices similar to his own was killed by gunfire in Philadelphia less than three weeks after he left prison, where he had been held on a parole violation.

We do need reform, we do need opportunities and equity within our system of economics. But we all have choices, Williams said, adding that those were the principles that my brother stood on.

Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis, following similar action by several members of Congress before her, last month introduced legislation to decriminalize all drugs and invest in substance abuse treatment.

Growing up in St. Louis, the War on Drugs disappeared Black people, not drug use, Bush, who is Black, wrote in a statement sent to the AP. Over the course of two years, I lost 40 to 50 friends to incarceration or death because of the War on Drugs. We became so accustomed to loss and trauma that it was our normal.

___

The deleterious impacts of the drug war have, for years, drawn calls for reform and abolition from mostly left-leaning elected officials and social justice advocates. Many of them say that in order to begin to unwind or undo the war on drugs, all narcotics must be decriminalized or legalized, with science-based regulation.

Drug abuse prevention advocates, however, claim that broad drug legalization poses more risks to Americans than it would any benefits.

Provisional data released in December from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show overdose deaths from illicit drug use continued to rise amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. And according to the latest Drug Enforcement Administration narcotics threat assessment released in March, the availability of drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and cocaine remained high or plateaued last year. Domestic and transnational drug trade organizations generate tens of billions of dollars in illicit proceeds from sales annually in the U.S., the DEA said.

Many people think drug prevention is just say no, like Nancy Reagan did in the 80s, and we know that did not work, said Becky Vance, CEO of the Texas-based agency Drug Prevention Resources, which has advocated for evidenced-based anti-drug and alcohol abuse education for more than 85 years.

As a person in long-term recovery, I know firsthand the harms of addiction, said Vance, who opposes blanket recreational legalization of illicit drugs. I believe there has to be another way, without legalizing drugs, to reform the criminal justice system and get rid of the inequities.

Frederique, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said reckoning with the war on drugs must start with reparations for the generations senselessly swept up and destabilized by racially biased policing.

This was an intentional policy choice, Frederique said. We dont want to end the war on drugs, and then in 50 years be working on something else that does the same thing. That is the cycle that were in.

It has always been about control, Frederique added.

As much as the legacy of the war on drugs is a tragedy, it is also a story about the resilience of people disproportionately targeted by drug policies, said Donovan Ramsey, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book, When Crack Was King.

Even with all of that, its still important to recognize and to celebrate that we (Black people) survived the crack epidemic and we survived it with very little help from the federal government and local governments, Ramsey told the AP.

Fowler thinks the war on drugs didnt ruin Lucas life. I think he went through it at the right time, truth be told, because he was young enough. Lukes got more good behind him than bad, the DJ said.

Lucas sees beauty in making things better, including in his business. But he still dreams of the day when his past isnt held against him.

It was the beautification of doing the landscaping that kind of attracted me, because it was like the affirmation that my soul needed, he said.

I liked to do something and look back at it and say, Wow, that looks good. Its not just going to wash away in a couple of days. It takes nourishment and upkeep.

___

Morrison reported from New York. AP writers Allen G. Breed in Durham, North Carolina, and Angeliki Kastanis in Los Angeles contributed.

___

Morrison writes about race and justice for the APs Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

___

This story was first published on July 21, 2021. It was updated on July 23, 2021 to correct that the brother of Brett Roman Williams, a Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker and anti-gun violence advocate, was killed less than three weeks after he was freed from prison.

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50-year war on drugs imprisoned millions of Black Americans

Human Rights and Dutertes War on Drugs

Since becoming president of the Philippines in June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte has launched a war on drugs that has resulted in the extrajudicial deaths of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users across the country. The Philippine president sees drug dealing and addiction as major obstacles to the Philippines economic and social progress, says John Gershman, an expert on Philippine politics. The drug war is a cornerstone of Dutertes domestic policy and represents the extension of policies hed implemented earlier in his political career as the mayor of the city of Davao. In December 2016, the United States withheld poverty aid to the Philippines after declaring concern over Dutertes war on drugs.

How did the Philippines war on drugs start?

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When Rodrigo Duterte campaigned for president, he claimed that drug dealing and drug addiction were major obstacles to the Philippines economic and social progress. He promised a large-scale crackdown on dealers and addicts, similar to the crackdown that he engaged in when he was mayor of Davao, one of the Philippines largest cities on the southern island of Mindanao. When Duterte became president in June, he encouraged the public to go ahead and kill drug addicts. His rhetoric has been widely understood as an endorsement of extrajudicial killings, as it has created conditions for people to feel that its appropriate to kill drug users and dealers. What have followed seem to be vigilante attacks against alleged or suspected drug dealers and drug addicts. The police are engaged in large-scale sweeps. The Philippine National Police also revealed a list of high-level political officials and other influential people who were allegedly involved in the drug trade.

When Rodrigo Duterte campaigned for president, he claimed that drug dealing and drug addiction were major obstacles to the Philippines economic and social progress.

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Philippines

Rodrigo Duterte

Drug Policy

Human Rights

The dominant drug in the Philippines is a variant of methamphetamine called shabu. According to a 2012 United Nations report, among all the countries in East Asia, the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine abuse. Estimates showed that about 2.2 percent of Filipinos between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four were using methamphetamines, and that methamphetamines and marijuana were the primary drugs of choice. In 2015, the national drug enforcement agency reported that one fifth of the barangays, the smallest administrative division in the Philippines, had evidence of drug use, drug trafficking, or drug manufacturing; in Manila, the capital, 92 percent of the barangays had yielded such evidence.

How would you describe Dutertes leadership as the mayor of Davao?

After the collapse of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, there were high levels of crime in Davao and Duterte cracked down on crime associated with drugs and criminality more generally. There was early criticism of his time as mayor by Philippine and international human rights groups because of his de facto endorsement of extrajudicial killings, under the auspices of the Davao Death Squad.

Duterte was also successful at negotiating with the Philippine Communist Party. He was seen broadly as sympathetic to their concerns about poverty, inequality, and housing, and pursued a reasonably robust anti-poverty agenda while he was mayor. He was also interested in public health issues, launching the first legislation against public smoking in the Philippines, which he has claimed he will launch nationally.

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What have been the outcomes of the drug war?

By early December, nearly 6,000 people had been killed: about 2,100 have died in police operations and the remainder in what are called deaths under investigation, which is shorthand for vigilante killings. There are also claims that half a million to seven hundred thousand people have surrendered themselves to the police. More than 40,000 people have been arrested.

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Although human rights organizations and political leaders have spoken out against the crackdown, Duterte has been relatively successful at not having the legislature engaged in any serious oversight of or investigation into this war. PhilippineSenator Leila de Lima, former chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights and a former secretary of justice under the previous administration, had condemned the war on drugs and held hearings on human rights violations associated with these extrajudicial killings. However, in August, Duterte alleged that he had evidence of de Lima having an affair with her driver, who had been using drugs and collecting drug protection money when de Lima was the justice secretary. De Lima was later removed from her position chairing the investigative committee in a 16-4 vote by elected members of the Senate committee.

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Rodrigo Duterte

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What is the public reaction to the drug war?

The war on drugs has received a high level of popular support from across the class spectrum in the Philippines. The most recent nationwide survey on presidential performance and trust ratings conducted from September 25 to October 1 by Pulse Asia Research showed that Dutertes approval rating was around 86 percent. Even through some people are concerned about these deaths, they support him as a president for his position on other issues. For example, he has a relatively progressive economic agenda, with a focus on economic inequality.

Duterte is also supporting a range of anti-poverty programs and policies. The most recent World Bank quarterly report speaks positively about Dutertes economic plans. The fact that he wants to work on issues of social inequality and economic inequality makes people not perceive the drug war as a war on the poor.

How is Duterte succeeding in carrying out this war on drugs?

The Philippine judicial system is very slow and perceived as corrupt, enabling Duterte to act proactively and address the issue of drugs in a non-constructive way with widespread violations of human rights. Moreover, in the face of a corrupt, elite-dominated political system and a slow, ineffective, and equally corrupt judicial system, people are willing to tolerate this politician who promised something and is now delivering.

Drug dealers and drug addicts are a stigmatized group, and stigmatized groups always have difficulty gaining political support for the defense of their rights.

There are no trials, so there is no evidence that the people being killed are in fact drug dealers or drug addicts. [This situation] shows the weakness of human rights institutions and discourse in the face of a popular and skilled populist leader. It is different from college students being arrested under the Marcos regime or activists being targeted under the first Aquino administration, when popular outcry was aroused. Drug dealers and drug addicts are a stigmatized group, and stigmatized groups always have difficulty gaining political support for the defense of their rights.

How has the United States reacted to the drug war and why is Duterte challenging U.S.-Philippines relations?

Its never been a genuine partnership. Its always been a relationship dominated by U.S. interests. Growing up in the 1960s, Duterte lived through a period when the United States firmly supported a regime that was even more brutal than this particular regime and was willing to not criticize that particular government. He noticed that the United States was willing to overlook human rights violations when these violations served their geopolitical interests. He was unhappy about the double standards. [Editors Note: The Obama administration has expressed concern over reports of extrajudicial killings and encouraged Manila to abide by its international human rights obligations.] For the first time, the United States is facing someone who is willing to challenge this historically imbalanced relationship. It is unclear what might happen to the relationship under the administration of Donald J. Trump, but initial indications are that it may not focus on human rights in the Philippines. President-Elect Trump has reportedly endorsed the Philippine presidents effort, allegedly saying that the country is going about the drug war "the right way," according to Duterte.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

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Human Rights and Dutertes War on Drugs

The Shocking Story Behind Richard Nixons War on Drugs … – AEI

This Sunday, June 17 will mark the 47th anniversary of a shameful day in US history its when President Richard Nixons declared what has been the US governments longest and costliest war the epic failure known as the War on Drugs. At a press conference on that day in 1971, Nixon identified drug abuse as public enemy number one in the United States and launched a failed, costly and inhumane federal war on Americans that continues to today. Early the following year, Nixon created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) in January 1972 to wage a government war on otherwise peaceful and innocent Americans who voluntarily chose to ingest plants, weeds, and intoxicants proscribed by the government. In July 1973, ODALE was consolidated, along with several other federal drug agencies, into the newly established Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a new super agency to handle all aspects of the War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans.

But as John Ehrlichman, Nixons counsel and Assistant for Domestic Affairs, revealed in 1994, the real public enemy in 1971 wasnt really drugs or drug abuse. Rather the real enemies of the Nixon administration were the anti-war left and blacks, and the War on Drugs was designed as an evil, deceptive and sinister policy to wage a war on those two groups. In an article in the April 2016 issue of The Atlantic (Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs) author and reporter Dan Baum explains how John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? As Baum discovered, heres the dirty and disgusting secret to that great mystery of what must be the most expensive, shameful, and reprehensible failed government policy in US history.

Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Franciscos anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichmans boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first War on Drugs in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. Id tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixons domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.

You want to know what this was really all about? he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Im saying? We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Nixons invention of the War on Drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since Democrat and Republican alike has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the Drug War is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesnt end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.

MP: As much as Prohibition (The War on Alcohol) was also an expensive, epic and misguided failure of government policy, it didnt have its origins in any type of equivalent sinister and evil plot like the War on Drugs to destroy enemies of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1919. In fact, President Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, but the House and Senate both voted quickly to override the veto and America started the War on Alchohol Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Chose to Ingest Beer, Wine, and Spirits in 1920.

If the real goal of the War on Drugs was to target, convict and incarcerate subversive anti-war hippies and black Americans, as Ehrlichman describes it, it sure worked as the chart above of the male incarceration rate in the US shows. During the nearly 50-year period between 1925 and the early 1970s, the male incarceration rate was remarkably stable at about 200 men per 100,000 population, or 1 US male per 500, according to data from Bureau of Justice Statistics. By 1986, about a decade after the War on Drugs started locking up drug users and dealers in cages, the male incarceration rate doubled to 400 per 100,000 population. Then within another decade, the male incarceration rate doubled again to more than 800 by 1996 before reaching a historic peak of 956 in 2008 (about one in 100) that was almost five times higher than the stable rate before the War on Drugs. The arrest and incarceration data show that the War on Drugs had a significantly much greater negative effect on blacks and Hispanics than whites, making the Drug War even more shameful for its devastating and disproportionate adverse effects on Americas most vulnerable and disadvantaged populations.

Since the 2008 peak, the male incarceration rate has been gradually declining in each of the last seven years of available data through 2016, possibly because of three trends: a) decriminalization of weeds at the city and state level, b) the legalization of medical weeds at the state level, and c) now legalization of recreational weeds at the city and state levels.

While there could have been other factors that contributed to the nearly five-fold increase in the male incarceration rate between the early 1970s and the peak in 2008, research clearly shows that the War on Drugs, along with mandatory minimum sentencing in the 1980s and the disparate treatment of powdered cocaine and crack cocaine (powdered cocaine processed with baking soda into smokable rocks) were all significant contributing factors to the unprecedented rate of incarcerating Americans. Here are some conclusions from the 2014 book The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (my emphasis):

Bottom Line: Even without the nefarious, vile, and veiled origins revealed by Ehrlichman in 1994, the War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Choose To Ingest or Sell Intoxicants Currently Proscribed by the Government, Which Will Lock Up Users or Sellers in Cages if Caught would represent one of the most shameful chapters in Americas history. But with its intention to destroy the black community and anti-war peace activists, which has certainly been successfully achieved for the black community, the shamefulness of the War on Drugs is elevated to a much higher level of despicable, evil immorality.

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The Shocking Story Behind Richard Nixons War on Drugs ... - AEI

Editorial: War on drugs – Telangana Today

In the past one year, over 3,600 kg of drugs have been seized from freight containers across several ports in the country

Published Date - 12:30 AM, Mon - 26 December 22

The drug menace not only destroys individual lives and their families but also poses a serious threat to national security. The profits from narcotic trafficking are being used to finance terrorism, thereby weakening the economy. Indias location in the middle of the two largest sources of illicit drugs in South Asia Golden Crescent (Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) on the northwest and the infamous Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos) on the northeast makes it more vulnerable to the trafficking of narcotics and drugs. The NDA governments much-touted zero tolerance policy on drug menace must be made visible on the ground. union Home Minister Amit Shah, who recently told Parliament that the big criminals involved in narcotic trafficking would be put behind bars in the next two years, must walk the talk and deliver on his promise. Despite the Border Security Force (BSF) stepping up vigil near the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, the frequent seizures dont seem to be deterring drug traffickers. There are reports that the illicit drug trade continues to flourish in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, which had promised a crackdown on narcotics after it grabbed power in August last year. India has proactively used multilateral platforms this year to push for a joint fight against terror funding. International cooperation is needed to punish the countries that aid and abet narco terror. State-of-the-art counter-drone technology must be deployed to block the aerial route of drug supply.

While waging an all-out war on drug trade, the government agencies need to differentiate between users, who must be treated as victims, and peddlers, who should not be spared. Similar sensitivity needs to be adopted by law enforcement authorities while applying the harsh provisions of Indias anti-narcotics law, where the burden of proof is often effectively shifted on to the accused and bail is sparingly given. Studies show that people arrested for personal consumption constitute the bulk of those behind bars and many of them are from marginalised backgrounds. Drug trafficking is a major transnational organised crime with the potential to undermine national security. The growing nexus between drug smugglers and terrorist groups is a matter of concern for countries like India. Such complex security concerns can be dealt with a comprehensive review of the surveillance mechanisms along with effective coordination between the Centre and the States. The emerging trend of international criminal syndicates using the containerised trade networks for trafficking drugs has posed a major challenge to the enforcement agencies in India and other countries in the region. In the past one year, over 3,600 kg of drugs have been seized from freight containers across several ports in the country. Apart from a more efficient coordination among various government agencies, real-time data on shipments is essential to develop an artificial intelligence-based algorithm for zeroing in on suspect consignments.

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Editorial: War on drugs - Telangana Today

OPINION: Honor our lost loved ones by ending the war on drugs – HubcitySPOKES.com

My son, Robert, passed away in January 2017. He died of an accidental overdose of opioids. For me and my family, the last five years have been filled with minutes, hours, and days of tremendous sadness with grief gripping every ounce of us. How can we use our horrific loss and heartbreak? We can wield it in anger and bitterness, or we can use it to support life-giving solutions.

Recently I recalled some of my thoughts from the night of Roberts death. I thought of all the moms who lost their sons and daughters in war. Someone had appeared at their doorstep with the horrific life-altering news that their precious child had died in battle. The one held most dear to their heart had passed from this world. I remember thinking they died for a cause.

Our present-day battle is the War on Drugs, where we are using our criminal justice system to handle a health crisis. For the loved ones we lost in its collateral damage, bringing an end to it is perhaps the best way to honor them.

I can't help but wonder what our lost loved ones would say if they were able to speak. Would their message be for more jailing to heal the problem? Would their message be for long sentences? Or would it be listening to the stories of people using drugs and in addiction?

Would our loved ones want more and more punitive reactions? Or would they want us to look for the best way to keep people in the struggle alive and functioning?

What would those who have died want for other people using drugs who are still here?

Perhaps they would challenge us to sit in on an open AA meeting or any support group, coming face to face with people who are in the struggle. Those who are walking the walk. The people in these groups are real people exposing their thoughts and fears. Each one can share and is understood. Being able to totally relate gives strength and courage.

I pray those we have lost have not died in vain. And their legacy collectively can be for more understanding and compassion and less shame. Maybe they will be known in years to come as trailblazers in the fight against the War on Drugs. And their lives will be viewed as a sacrifice to upend the old way of using the criminal justice system to tackle our drug problems. Maybe this is part of the battle. Maybe our loved ones have died for a cause. I feel that would be the most amazing blessing that could develop from this tragedy that is being played out before us.

Will apathy progress us? Will turning a blind eye advance solutions? Will the same old path of punishment lead us to a better place? It hasn't yet. How can we fight for the betterment of those still on earth, those still enveloped in the struggle? I think I know what our loved ones would say. Let's give them a voice.

Lee Malouf is an advocate for health-centered responses to drug use. She can be reached at missyazoo@aol.com

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OPINION: Honor our lost loved ones by ending the war on drugs - HubcitySPOKES.com

‘One Pill Can Kill’: How Fentanyl changed the war on drugs – – KUSI

SAN DIEGO (KUSI) The fentanyl epidemic in the US is unprecedented, and the DEA has seized enough fentanyl to give a lethal dose to every person in America.

San Diego is the gateway for the majority of those pills coming over the border, and the special agent in charge of the DEA says everyone in the community needs to be aware of the fentanyl epidemic, before you make a deadly mistake.

KUSIs Ginger Jeffries has spent endless hours getting to the bottom of this epidemic, getting facts on how it is impacting Americans, specifically our children.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It was originally developed for pain management applied in a patch on the skin. However, because of its high-powered ability drug dealers started to add it to heroin to either increase the potency or even disguise it as a cheap alternative.

It works by binding the areas of the brain that control pain. Someone on fentanyl will experience sedation, often confusion, and extreme emotions. A lethal dose is as small as 3 granules of salt.

The DEA launched the One Pill can Kill public awareness campaign in September of last year, to attack this growing problem on every level.

The majority of the counterfeit drug production is happening in other countries, mainly China and Mexico, and then trafficked here to the US.

Common emojis for fake prescription drugs include, a blue dot, or a banana for Oxy and Percocet.

Other signs to watch out for is how a dealer will try to advertise by using the plug or money bag and how potent a batch is and if they have a lot or a little.

As a parent, knowing what your kids are communicating about could be the difference between life and death!

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'One Pill Can Kill': How Fentanyl changed the war on drugs - - KUSI

The New War on Drugs Will Be Fought With Trade Policy – The Wall Street Journal

Regarding your editorial Bidens Missing Trade Agenda (July 6): What should have been a precondition to the Trump administrations trade talks with China, and what should now be a precondition to the Bidens administrations decision to lift tariffs, is a demand that China stops the production and export of synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, and their precursor chemicals. Concerns about prices of pork, soybeans and solar panels are small beer in light of this scourge, which is now responsible for the annual deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

Chinese manufacturers make this stuff. The Chinese Communist Party knows this and knows who they are. It allows the material to be shipped to Mexico for distribution by the drug cartels, enabled by a porous southern border. This is the new war on drugs. Fight it with trade policy. China fought the same war against the British opium trade for the same reasons.

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The New War on Drugs Will Be Fought With Trade Policy - The Wall Street Journal

Cannabis Laws in France Have Disproportionately Affected Muslims – High Times

In the U.S., its an all-too-familiar story that Black and Mexican folks have been disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs, but in France, they have a similar issue with the impact cannabis laws have on Muslims.

France, like many other countries around the world, are finally flirting with the idea of ending prohibition. They have CBD cafes now, which are gaining popularity, and the European Union is slowly starting to change the tune about how they treat cannabis. But like in many other spots, it is the marginalized folks who have been impacted the most.

New research shows that the past 50 years have been rough for Muslims when it comes to the War on Drugs. Close to one-fifth of prisoners in the French prison system currently were arrested for drug offenses, and most of them are men. It is hard to gain specific demographics in France because their absolute equality law makes it illegal to collect data based on race, ethnicity, or religion.

However, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar studies the French prison system and found that half the people incarcerated today in France are either of Muslim or Arab descent. This means that half of the 69,000 people who are incarcerated are Muslim or Arab, although those demographics only make up 9% of the 67 million people in France.

Another study from 2018 commissioned by the French National Assembly shows that when looking at the 117,420 of the arrests in 2010, 86% of them were over cannabis charges, and the amount of people arrested for cannabis use between 2000 and 2015 rose from 14,501 to 139,683. When all these studies are compared, it paints a clear picture of Muslim and Arab folks being arrested for cannabis at a disproportionate rate.

Much like how America demonized cannabis by equating it to a poison pedaled by Mexican drug cartels and Black criminalsa largely false and inflated narrativeFrench historians have done something similar with Muslims. French fiction talked of Muslim hashish-eating assassins who were deranged, violent, and dangerous. French researchers also grew tired of working with cannabis when it was clear it was not a cure for cholera. The combined lack of medical interest and racist propaganda led to a distrust of cannabis throughout the culture. In 1953, medical hashish became illegal.

They even have their own version of reefer madness: folie haschischique. French colonialists in Algeria claimed that hashish caused insanity and violent criminal behavior, often putting sober or self-medicating mentally ill folks into psychiatric care and claiming cannabis was the cause.

In 1968, again mirroring events in the U.S., there were racial tensions against the North Africans who emigrated to France, claiming they were prone to violence and criminality due to the use of cannabis in their culture. This led to even harsher criminalization of the plant. The drug problem in France was referred to as a foreign plague and blamed on Arab and Muslim drug traffickers, people of color, and immigrants. There was talk of a cult of Muslim murderers inspired by cannabis and known as the Hachichins.

Today, of course, France is making a stand against such racist phrasing and thought, but it is still inherently a part of their culture when it comes to the backlash against cannabis, and it clearly shows in the numbers when prison data is pulled. Like many other places in the world, France has a lot of work to do when it comes to separating out what truly needs to be regulated about cannabis and what just comes from a history of racist propaganda.

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Cannabis Laws in France Have Disproportionately Affected Muslims - High Times

A welcome retreat in the drug war – Toronto Star

Most wars are easier to start than to end, and the misguided and often malevolent War on Drugs is no exception.

Little by little, however, that dubious campaign is in sensible and overdue retreat.

As the Stars Jacques Gallant reported this week, Canadians with criminal records for drug possession will see them effectively vanish within two years after the federal governments criminal justice reform bill becomes law, a measure that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.

The landscape has changed.

Cannabis is now legal in Canada. Drug addiction is widely seen as a health rather than criminal issue. There is greater support for harm-reduction strategies and safe-injection sites. And, recently, selected exemptions were granted for possession of small amounts of harder drugs for personal use.

But largely owing to the stigma attached to drug use and addiction, each step has been controversial, fiercely opposed, and slow in coming.

Drug laws in Canada and elsewhere have been deeply tinged with racism, disproportionately affecting and incarcerating racialized individuals, Indigenous people and those living in poverty.

A study published last year looking at arrest data in five Canadian cities found an over-representation of Black and Indigenous people arrested for cannabis possession in all but one.

The consequent burden of a criminal record, which hugely impedes chances of employment, housing, travel and increases likelihood of future criminality, flies in the face of fairness and the pretence of the justice system as concerned chiefly with rehabilitation.

The proposed bills automatic sequestration of drug possession records which means they wont show up on a criminal records check was made possible due to a New Democratic amendment to the Liberal governments Bill C-5.

Randall Garrison, NDP justice critic, said the government has assure him that in two years from the passage of the bill criminal records for personal possession for all drugs will disappear.

The bill, to be studied by a Senate committee this fall after passage by the Commons in June, would also repeal mandatory minimum sentence for all drug offences, expand the use of conditional sentences, and require police and prosecutors to use their discretion to keep drug possession cases out of the courts.

It's estimated that as many as 250,000 Canadians may have drug-possession convictions stemming from cannabis possession alone when it was still illegal.

Three years ago, the government launched a revamped pardon application process, but Garrison said only a few hundred people have been successful because of the convoluted, expensive process involved.

The bill stops short of decriminalizing drug possession, a step health advocates have long called for.

The opioid epidemic that has hit communities across the country and is especially lethal in Vancouver and Toronto has changed the views on how drug crises should be seen and tackled.

The moralizing tough on crime rhetoric so favoured by conservative politicians, and so dismissive of public health and harm reduction approaches, no longer resonates quite so viscerally with those encountering addiction in their own neighbourhoods and families.

By legalizing cannabis, the federal government admitted that 100 years of prohibition of the drug in Canada was at the very least unwarranted, and more bluntly put a huge injustice against hundreds of thousands of people.

The Garrison amendment is a good step in the large project of righting the lifelong consequences of damage done by what was essentially a war not on drugs, but on people.

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A welcome retreat in the drug war - Toronto Star

Safe consumption sites: End the war on people who use drugs! – Workers World

New York City 2020. In the shadow of the COVID-19 epidemic are two others: the opioid and overdose epidemics. Since the start of epidemics, there have been thousands of deaths from overdoses, even when the people who OD dont even know theyve consumed opioids.

What is the difference between the two? The opioid epidemic is the epidemic of people knowingly abusing opioids. The overdose epidemic is the epidemic of people overdosing from fentanyl analogues and other opioids unknowingly, such as overdoses when non-opioid drugs are tainted by dangerous opioids such as acrylfentanyl, acetylfentanyl, ohmefentanyl and carfentanil.

What are the preventative measures to keep people from overdosing on opioids, knowingly or unknowingly? One is to keep naloxone (Narcan, Evzio) on hand to ensure that users can have their overdoses reversed. Another is to keep fentanyl test strips on hand, to catch the presence of fentanyl or most fentanyl analogues before one uses tainted substances. These methods save lives. But they require people being ready ahead of time. So what can consistently save the lives of drug addicts and others with Substance Use Disorder?

Safe consumption sites

Safe consumption site, OnPoint NYC, East Harlem location. Credit: New York Harm Reduction Educators

The operation and usage of safe consumption sites are places that addicted people can go to to keep from overdosing. These provide clean needles, fentanyl test strips, naloxone rescues. Some even provide methadone and buprenorphine referrals or treatment. Around the world where these services are offered, peoples lives have been saved in more than one way.

Whether its being rescued with Narcan or saved from the risk of HIV and Hepatitis B and C, the sites work to serve working and oppressed people with Substance Use Disorder.

In the U.S., there has been a so-called War on Drugs that began in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, continued under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s and the Trump administration in the 2010s. The decades of anti-drug measures were in fact a war on communities of color, with many young people sent to jail for life.

Now theres good news from the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a July 15 research letter to the JAMA Open Network, there is proof that safe consumption sites in the U.S. work here, just like in other countries. (tinyurl.com/4eyhbtx4)

Despite the continued demonization of people who use drugs, the City of New York authorized the two safe consumption sites by OnPoint NYC: one in East Harlem and the other in Washington Heights. From the JAMA report, its now known that within the first two months of operations of the two sites, 613 people used the services almost 6,000 times.

Opioid overdoses required 19 naloxone and 35 oxygen interventions, while overall overdose prevention strategies were used 125 times overall. Other than overdose interventions, additional services were utilized at OnPoints two locations: naloxone distribution, counseling, Hepatitis C virus testing, HIV testing, medical care and holistic services such as acupuncture.

The sites give a wide variety of services to the most oppressed and crushed people and provide them with love for themselves. A popular phrase used in addiction and recovery is We will love you until you learn to love yourself. The services provided at the sites demonstrate the power of that process for the actively using addict.

This is only the beginning of studies into the usefulness of safe consumption sites in the United States. And the future looks promising, indeed.

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Safe consumption sites: End the war on people who use drugs! - Workers World

Whats Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? – The New York Times

KCTV5, after receiving responses questioning its reporting, appended an editors note that did not mention the medical consensus on this question, noting instead that medical records showed the officer was treated for fentanyl exposure and that the D.E.A. had affirmed that its agents potential exposure to fentanyl puts their safety and health on the line.

Three or four decades ago, the American media found itself producing plenty of readily identifiable villains in the nations war on drugs. The Miami of the 1980s, for instance, became a high-intensity zone of armed conflict between cocaine traffickers and the government, an era that inspired countless stylized Hollywood action flicks about cops, drugs and cartel enemies. By the 1990s, local news increasingly entrenched in the business of covering crime sustained a national obsession with urban gangs, which were depicted as so well armed and lawless that a bipartisan consensus formed around cutting the police blank checks to combat them; departments across the country received billions of dollars worth of military-grade equipment, from flash-bang grenades and night-vision goggles to armored trucks, for use in executing even low-level drug warrants. Nightly news broadcasts portrayed both drug users and dealers as dangerous elements concentrated in poverty-blighted inner cities, yet always at risk of creeping into the middle-class viewers suburb.

Police officers on the front lines of todays drug war confront a very different landscape. The human misery of todays overdose crisis is largely hidden from view, and it is certainly not centered on the police; it is squarely borne by drug users and their loved ones. Every single hour of every single day, 12 Americans die from a fatal overdose, according to preliminary C.D.C. data a slow-motion disaster quietly playing out in banal locales like residential neighborhoods, gas-station bathrooms and strip-mall parking lots, in the smallest towns and the largest cities, across social and economic classes. Fatal overdoses occur largely among those who are using substances alone, with no one there to revive them with Narcan. Unlike the police officers, they dont hyperventilate and gasp for air. Instead, they slowly drift off, gradually stop breathing and never wake up again.

Todays astonishing overdose death toll comes not from gang violence or turf wars but from a ubiquitous market of cheap and potent synthetic drugs. And so it is in the drugs themselves that police officers now see grave danger, including to themselves. Last year, the San Diego County Sheriffs Department produced and released its own public-safety video featuring what Sheriff Bill Gore described as traumatic body-worn camera footage of an officers life-threatening fentanyl exposure footage that circulated through various media outlets despite the skepticism of health professionals. Its as though each of these videos seeks to identify the new villain, the shocking peril, in an era whose drug-war battlefields are too diffuse and mundane to capture the public imagination. Images of cinematic urban war zones and Uzi-toting gangsters have been replaced by the knowledge that drug use quietly pervades communities of all sorts. So fear attaches to something equally slippery: fentanyl particles lurking in the air, or even just a few specks on a police uniform, blamed for one officers overdose in Ohio. (According to local reporting, the officer was eventually terminated from the force for, among other reasons, gross misconduct.)

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Whats Really Going on in Those Police Fentanyl Exposure Videos? - The New York Times

War on narcotics – The Shillong Times

Editor,

Pockets of Shillong are witnessing a rise in drug-related crimes. In the past weeks the law enforcers conducted counter-narcotics programs using community-based intelligence which has worked wonders on a temporary scale but this is a long war which will test the mettle of governments now and later. In this game of interests the lines are blurred from traffickers to a porous border along the North Eastern corridor. What we have not witnessed is the rise of rival cartels backed by corrupt states similar to situations in Mexico or Honduras. Unemployment is a matter of grave concern as each year students are getting out of institutions with degrees but no jobs. Technically, the distribution channels of narcotics are gaining ground in cyberspace too.Legalisation and decriminalization have always been on the cards but whether they will be implemented in letter and spirit is a debatable matter. We cannot be swayed by the capital punishment in Singapore or the failed Plan Colombia to draw a roadmap for ourselves, but the answer lies deeper than the series Narcos. Antony Loewensteins Pills, Powder and Smoke (Inside the Bloody War on Drugs) weaves it beautifully on this powerful multi-billion dollar industry which will not yield submissively.

Yours etc.,

Christopher Gatphoh,

Via email

Editor,

Apropos the letter Plight of NEHU students by Wilbert Thangkhiew (ST, July 15, 2022) I wholeheartedly endorse the views of the author. Being a victim of the issues highlighted issues in Wilberts letter, its even more frustrating to realise that youre not the only person struggling but a part of a larger disgruntled group. NEHU has become a den of politics for personal vendetta and vested interests. Many Vice-Chancellors have come and gone and we, the indigenous people, who have had multiple generations graduating from this university, feel sorry to witness the gradual downfall of this once esteemed institution. From having professors under CBI scanner for taking bribes from research scholars in broad daylight, disruptive forces meddling with everyday affairs to officials guilty of dereliction of duty from time immemorial, it seems NEHU has come a full circle with the appointment of the current Vice Chancellor.The VC is always out of station and a simple task of issuing a bonafide certificate takes more than two weeks to process. Whenever someone tries to raise an important issue there is an acting VC in office with no responsibility. Perhaps, employees in NEHU have gone into retirement mode with the VC eternally being away from the helm of affairs. So, the question is, are all VCs expected to be in Delhi for the majority of their tenures? I believe hefty salary and facilities makes the man affluent enough to neglect his primary duty of serving the state and the nation through quality education. The grapevine is abuzz that the VC has constructed a new chamber for himself from taxpayers money while vehemently giving false assurances of improving hostel facilities amidst crunch for funds.The Tura Campus has received step-motherly treatment with false assurances time and again. The question to be asked is how did NEHU find itself in such a situation of giving a 15- day time frame to casual workers, 7- day time frame to Tura Campus and again 15- day time frame to the students to meet their demands which has lapsed a long time ago?I hence urge the Chief Minister, all stakeholders and particularly the Chief Rector- the Honble Governor to initiate an academic audit to draw a comparison of how many days the VC has been in station and the reasons for his travels out of state. This culture of having institutional leaders being a law unto themselves should be done away with once and for all. And still, if the VC does not understand, which seems very likely, we do have a popular English coaching institute- Avenues in Shillong.

Yours etc.,

Benny Shira,

Tura

Excerpt from:

War on narcotics - The Shillong Times

NY To Begin Accepting Cannabis Applications From People Harmed By War On Drugs – The Fresh Toast

The New York cannabis industry plans to prioritize those whove been disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.

On Thursday, the citys cannabis regulators approved rules that make it possible to start accepting retail applications from injured parties.

RELATED: New Yorks Draft Conditional Retail Regulations Raise Practical Concerns

The regulations explain that, in order to qualify, applicants must have experience operating a qualifying business and must have faced a conviction for a drug-related offense before the state legalized marijuana. Applicants can also qualify for a conditional adult-use marijuana retail license if they have a close family member that was convicted with a drug-related offense.

While good intentioned, these regulations have been criticized in the past due to how limiting they might end up being. A person thats been impacted by the war on drugs may have had encounters with the law in the past, something that makes it difficult for them to also have experience managing and running a business.

New York legalized marijuana on March 31 2021, and has been working on how to implement it fairly and profitably over the past year. While its legal to consume marijuana and possess up to three ounces of cannabis, the sale remains illegal, a topic that has created some confusion in the state, especially since new businesses continue to appear in the form of trucks, pop ups and brick and mortar, taking advantage of the marijuana boom.

Responsible authorities have tried to control these businesses by sending out cease and desist letters while still trying to keep the police uninvolved.

RELATED: New York Senate Just Approved This Critical Marijuana Bill

Sale of untested products put lives at risk, said Tremain Wright, chair of New Yorks Cannabis Control Board. I implore these illegal store operators, and any other stores pretending to be legal operations, to stop selling cannabis products immediately.

Read more:

NY To Begin Accepting Cannabis Applications From People Harmed By War On Drugs - The Fresh Toast

How the right waged a 100-year war to conquer America and why it’s winning – Salon

In two blockbuster decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court throttled the power of government to regulate pollution (West Virginia v. EPA) and expanded the power of government to regulate women's reproductive lives (Dobbs v. Jackson). There is no contradiction in these two decisions. They continue a hundred years of right-wing support for private enterprise and control over women's autonomy.

The American right has held together as a political movement through its core commitment to conserving what it views as traditional Christian values and private enterprise. American conservative politics is not about limited government, states' rights, individual freedom or free markets. These are all dispensable ideas that the right has adjusted and readjusted to protect core principles. Conservatives have built their own versions of big government and carved out innumerable exceptions to free markets for tariffs, business subsidies, friendly regulations and pro-business interventions abroad. They have backed individual choice and states' rights, for example, on racial issues, but not on alcohol and drug use, pornography, contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage. In defense of core objectives, conservatives shifted from being isolationists before Pearl Harbor to aggressive warriors against communism and terrorism. They have abandoned protectionism for free trade, public education for private school vouchers, and deficit control for "supply-side" tax cuts.

Control over women's allegedly dangerous sexuality and autonomy grounds the moral appeal of conservative politics. In this view, a morally-ordered society requires a morally-ordered family, with clear lines of divinely ordained masculine authority and the containment within it of women's erotic allure. Salacious, non-motherly displays of female bodies, sex education in schools, abortion rights, easy divorces and the tolerance of homosexuality and other forms of "deviance" undercut the reproduction and orderly progress of civilization. Feminist demands since the 1920s to upset manly and womanly distinctions and erode patriarchy, through the right's lens, de-feminizes women and feminizes men, opening the family and the nation to conquest (rape) and subversion (seduction). The history of failed civilizations, conservative physicianArabella Kenealywrote in 1922, "shows one striking feature as having been common to most of these great decadences. In nearly every case, the dominance and [sexual] license of their women were conspicuous."

Conservative politics has had an enduring appeal to Americans seeking the clarity and comfort of absolute moral codes, clear standards of right and wrong, swift and certain penalties for transgressors and established lines of authority in public and family life. Ultimately conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they have seen as not just wrong on issues, but sinful, un-American and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great. To achieve their ambitious aims, conservatives had to stay disciplined, mobilize their resources and wage total war against liberals, with unconditional surrender as the only acceptable result.

During the 1920s, conservatives pioneered their programs for enforcing their vision of traditional values and protecting private enterprise, which endure today. Efforts to uphold the traditional family and control the licentiousness of women emerged in the 1920s, not just through the prohibition of alcohol but in lesser-known campaigns against sexual "deviance," "smut" and drugs, and in defense of conservative motherhood. In 1925, British historianA.F. Pollardcited the U.S. as "the rising hope of stern and unbending Tories." American laws, he said, "were not so much a means of change as a method of putting on record moral aspirations, a liturgy rather than legislation; and the statutebook was less the fiat of the State than a book of common prayer."

The erotically charged society of the 1920s led to fears that Americans, especially the young, were falling victim to deviant sexuality, such as oral sex and homosexuality, and to the scourge of venereal disease. After World War I,however, efforts to prevent venereal disease through education and the administration of chemical prophylaxis gave way to moral uplift and law enforcement. For moral reformers of the 1920s, preventative measures only encouraged prostitution and promiscuity.

Conservative answers to venereal disease involved the restoration of the supposed moral integrity of society and the rigorous prosecution of prostitutes and other sex offenders. Congress failed to renew wartime appropriations for controlling venereal disease, and state censorship boards banned as obscene sex-education films and other forms of anti-venereal propaganda. In 1926, the federal government eliminated federal aid to the states to prevent venereal disease, while state appropriations for this purpose declined.

After World War I, the Catholic Church crusaded worldwide for moral renewal. In 1920,Pope Benedict XVwarned that atrocities of war had led to "the diminution of conjugal fidelity and the diminution of respect for constituted authority. Licentious habits followed, even among young women." In 1930, his successorPope Pius XIissued 12 rules designed to assure that "feminine garb be based on modesty and their ornament be a defense of virtue." Catholic authorities joined by evangelical white Protestants promoted in the 1920s the censorship of books, plays, movies and artwork that displayed obscenity, nudity, drinking, sex outside of wedlock, suggestive dancing, drug use, homosexuality, prostitution and love between people of different races.

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In the 1920s, conservatives backed the closing of America's public drug treatment clinics and, as they did with venereal disease, adopted a moral and law enforcement approach to narcotics. Addicts had no recourse other than illegal sources of supply. For moral reformers, drug and alcohol use undermined the family and threatened the purity of American women. Even more than drink, however, enslavement to narcotics was understood to undercut discipline, self-mastery and the free will needed to follow a godly life.Richard P. Hobson, head of the International Narcotic Education Association, charged that civilization was "in the midst of a life and death struggle with the deadliest foe that has ever menaced its future." Narcotics threatened "the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world, and the future of the human race." In 1929, Congress began the national war on drugs by establishing a Federal Bureau of Narcotics to enforce the drug laws.

Conservative women drew on a maternalist ideology that affirmed inherent differences between the sexes and women's unique role in rearing children as healthy, moral and productive citizens. Conservative maternalists urged women of the New Era not to slip the bonds of men and custom but to reclaim their motherly responsibilities to rear courageous sons and domesticated daughters. They opposed reforms that confused sex roles, weakened families or substituted state paternalism for parental responsibility.

Conservative women warned against radicals who would rip children from the home and rear them in nurseries run by the state. The radicals would end sexual restraint and manly competition. They would feminize men and coerce women into "unnatural" masculine roles through forced work and conscription. Conservative women found dangerous sex-role reversals in women who embraced the unisex hedonism of the times: short skirts and bathing suits, bobbed hair, drinking, smoking, vigorous sports, necking and petting, and sensual music and dancing. Patriotic mothers would uphold family morals and shun the competitive male spheres of business, politics and war. Like women of Sparta, they would raise patriotic sons ready to risk their lives for the common defense. This view of women and their place in society was represented in such 1920s organizations as the Women's Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the American Legion Auxiliary and the Daughters of 1812.

Women of the right mobilized against the first federal welfare measure, the Sheppard Towner Bill of 1921, which provided aid to the states for the health care of mothers and infants. They argued that the law would weaken families, undercut traditional values and advance paternalistic government. In the Sheppard-Towner fight, wrote editor Mary Kilbreth of the conservative publication Woman Patriot, "we have with us as allies the Constitution, and all the institutions on which 'Western civilization is based.'"

The right's pro-business policies included the anti-government initiatives of deregulation and tax cuts. Yet they also turned to government for protective tariffs, support for foreign trade and investment, controls over strikes and labor organizing, and pro-business regulations. Our goal is "putting government behind rather than in business,"Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hooversaid in 1924. In 1926, under Hoover's guidance, the Republican Congress stabilized the struggling airline and railroad industries with the Air Commerce Act and the Railway Act. On the seas, Congress extended subsidies to shipbuilders and operators in the Merchant Marine Act of 1928. To impose order on the broadcast spectrum, Congress established a Federal Radio Commission in 1927 and let broadcasters keep or sell their existing frequencies and block competitors from sharing airtime. Republican presidents appointed pro-business jurists to regulatory agencies and the federal courts.

Support for profit-seeking enterprise may contradict the right's emphasis on moral probity. However, conservatives linked private enterprise to stable, traditional families that nurtured the virtues of thrift, sobriety, self-reliance, honor and diligence. Even as Americans evolved from savers and craftsmen to producers and consumers, conservatives sustained the linkage between family virtue and enterprise. "The whole fabric of Business rests upon these moral forces," wrote journalistEdward Bokin 1926. Cultural warfare, in turn, gave the right a mass base and a passion that economic conservatism lacks. By uniting traditional Christian values and enterprise, conservatives claim to have protected Americans' pocketbooks and saved their souls.

Cultural and business conservatism converged forcefully again when the right regrouped in the 1970s. Conservatives then put a positive spin on their cultural prohibitionism. They weren't just against sinners and feminists; they were the "pro-family" and "pro-life" champions of wholesome "family values." Still, defense of the family meant battling the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, pornography, gay rights and gun control. Phyllis Schlafly, the prime mover of the pro-family agenda, described "the family as the basic unit of society, with certain rights and responsibilities, including the right to insist that the schools permit voluntary prayer and teach the 'fourth 'R' (right and wrong) according to the precepts of the Holy Scriptures." At a well-attended "Pro-Family Rally" that upstaged the feminist 1977 "International Year of the Woman" gathering in Houston, she warned that feminists were "going to drive the homemaker out of the home. They want to relieve mothers of the menial task of taking care of their babies. They want to put them in the coal mines and have them digging ditches." The ERA would "only benefit homosexuals. The American women do not want ERA, abortion, lesbian rights, and they do not want childcare in the hands of government."

In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell issued a call to arms by conservatives shortly before his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. The "Powell Memo"guided the rebuilding of business conservatism and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. He warned that new regulations that cut across industry to limit pollution, control energy production, advance minority and consumer rights and protect worker health and safety threatened the survival of private enterprise. Powell insisted that conservatives, aided by the financial might of business, should not have "the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it." Conservatives must aggressively capture the centers of power that shaped policy and public opinion: the political parties, the academy, the media, the courts and popular culture.

Consistent with the reformulation of cultural issues, conservatives in the 1970s put a positive spin on their pro-business policies, labeling them "supply-side economics." Entrepreneurs would create a new era of American abundance if they were free to innovate without penalty or control. They would produce enough goods and services to cure inflation, accelerate government revenue growth and reduce the deficit. Supply-side advocates promised that their bonanza to business would flow down or "trickle down," as critics charged to the lower strata because employment and wages would boom.

After his transformation election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan turned the supply-side dream into reality. His conservative economic policies rested on reducing tax liabilities for corporations and the wealthy, relieving businesses of civil rights, environmental, and economic regulations, cutting social spending and curbing the power of labor unions. It was a blueprint that the right would follow through today.

The history of the modern American conservative movement demonstrates that the Dobbs and EPA decisions are not aberrations. In fact, they realize priorities that the right has pursued since the 1920s. The only change is a right-wing grip on the Supreme Court that is unprecedented in modern American history. The court will likely extend its curtailment of air pollution regulation to water pollution in the upcoming case ofSackett v. EPA. And despite surface disagreement from other justices, it is also likely to follow Justice Clarence Thomas' call for reconsidering the rights to contraception, private sexual encounters and same-sex marriage. Given the right's quest for absolute power, it would not be surprising if the court then grants state legislatures controlled by Republicans in key swing states exclusive control over federal elections.

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How the right waged a 100-year war to conquer America and why it's winning - Salon

DeLucas 5 Picks: Pink and Margo Price protest songs, plus Nightlands and music of The Bear – The Philadelphia Inquirer

1. Pink, Irrelevant. One day last week Pink tweeted: Woke up. Got heated. Wrote song. Coming soon.

The song that the Doylestown native born Alecia Moore penned and posted handwritten lyrics to is Irrelevant, an emphatic protest song, a rallying cry of defiance in which the singer refuses to be defined by others and works herself up into a righteous rage.

The collaborative effort with songwriter-producer Ian Fitchuk is clearly inspired by the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but is ready made to fit all kinds of protests.

It strategically evokes both The Whos The Kids Are Alright and Cyndi Laupers Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, which was written by the late Philadelphia singer Robert Hazard. Girls just wanna have rights, she sings. So why do we have to fight?

In a statement, Pink wrote: As a woman with an opinion and the fearlessness to voice that opinion, it gets very tiring when the only retort is to tell me how irrelevant I am. I am relevant because I exist, and because I am a human being. No one is irrelevant. And no one can take away my voice. Proceeds from sales of the song go to Michelle Obamas voting initiative When We All Vote.

2. Nightlands, Moonshine. Besides playing with The War On Drugs you know, the Philly band that opened for the Rolling Stones in London last month Dave Hartley makes music as Nightlands, a project that leans toward the ethereal, with spacious synth-based songs and vocals that reach skyward.

Moonshine is the first Nightlands album since 2017s I Can Feel The Night Around Me, and its contemplative nature is in part the result of the musicians move from Philadelphia to Asheville, N.C., where Hartley, a new parent, worked in isolation during the pandemic in a studio in a barn outside his century-old house.

Lots of Philly musicians make contributions to New Age-tinged tracks like No Kiss For the Lonely, however, including Eric Slick, Michael Kiley, and Jessie Hale Moore, plus Hartleys bandmates Charlie Hall, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Anthony LaMarca. The War On Drugs play the XPoNential Music Festival with Patti Smith on Sept. 16.

3. Margo Price featuring Mavis Staples and Adia Victoria, Fight To Make It. Last September when Margo Price played the Mann Center with Willie Nelsons Outlaw Music Tour, she debuted a cover of Lesley Gores You Dont Own Me in protest after Texas passed restrictive antiabortion legislation that month.

Now, Price has teamed with gospel great Mavis Staples and blues and Americana songwriter Adia Victoria to release this rockin country fight song that she has said was originally inspired by Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks.

Along with Irrelevant, its one of what will surely be many protest songs released in the coming months. In a statement, Price said: Every day I see more of our rights stripped away in America. The right to reproductive health in this country has become a luxury for the wealthy . Black women in particular experience maternal mortality at a rate two to three times higher than white women.

Proceeds from Bandcamp sales of the song benefit Noise for Now, which connects artists with grassroots organizations that work in reproductive justice, including abortion access. Prices memoir Maybe Well Make It is due from University of Texas Press in October.

Don McCloskey. Bucks County born Don McCloskey is celebrating the release of The Chaos & the Beauty, a 10-song collection recorded in Brooklyn with Philly expats Devin Greenwood and Ali Wadsworth and guitarist Ross Bellinoit and released on his own Lemon Hill Records label.

The St. Joes Prep grad has a varied history: He wrote Unstoppable, the Phillies anthem that was played at Citizens Bank Park during the teams (long ago) 2009 World Series run, hes toured with Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon and last Christmas he released a terrific reworked version of O Holy Night.

On Friday, he was set to play Ardmore Music Hall with Philly songwriter Chris Kasper, whose 2017 song City By The Sea is a Jersey Shore snapshot of Ventnor before it went bougie. This show has now been postponed because of COVID and will be rescheduled for the fall. ardmoremusichall.com.

The music of The Bear. The highly bingeable series about a hotshot chef who comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop, that stars Jeremy Allen White, has a serious verisimilitude quotient in its authentic depiction of in-the-kitchen restaurant culture.

But the FX on Hulu series created by Christopher Storer also has something else going for it: a top notch, consistently surprising but not show-offy soundtrack put together by Storer and his music supervisor partner Josh Senior. Theres not too much music forced on the viewer as is often the case with prestige TV productions. Instead, its used sparingly, and often packs an emotional punch, whether its Counting Crowes Have You Seen Me Lately? or John Cougar Mellencamps Check It Out.

The shows Windy City identity comes through with Wilcos Via Chicago (and also Impossible Germany) and also Sufjan Stevens Chicago, though theres no sign of Sinatras My Kind of Town in the first season. But theres also lots of not-trendy far-flung acts, like Swedish hard core band Refused and perfectly fitting instrumental rock from Staten Island ensemble The Budos Band. Last week the show was renewed for a second season.

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DeLucas 5 Picks: Pink and Margo Price protest songs, plus Nightlands and music of The Bear - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Woody Harrelson’s weed store reviewed: Into The Woods – Leafly

Reviewed The Woods WeHo

8271 Santa Monica BlvdWest Hollywood, CA

http://www.thewoodsweho.com

When an A-List actor like Woody Harrelson opens up a weed dispensary in a posh part of Los Angeles, you gotta go scope it out.

Were here to report back that the rustic, outdoorsy, The Woods champions artisanal, craft sungrown flower to locals in each price bracket. Its kind of the perfect fit for Harrelson, who has spent decades advocating weed legalization, criminal justice reform, and environmentalism. Humboldt hippies helped make California cannabis the best in the world. The Woods hopes LA folks will pay fair-trade prices to see these farmers survive the high taxes and red tape of legal weed.

Opened May 16 just off Melrose Avenue in the northern part of LA, The Woods is a project of Harrelson and the owner of the Erba dispensary chain.

Harrelson has supported weed law reform since at least 1996 when he got arrested for symbolically planting hemp in Texas. Cannabis went legal in California in 2016, and stores opened in 2018. Four years later, Harrelsons team converted an interior design store into a chic sungrown boutique that embodies the actors values.

Walking up to the store you are greeted by a concrete horse next to a large, intimidatingly ornate wooden door. The shop has kept many of the pieces of its former resident, hence the horse. Its bougie. This is West Hollywood, people.

Walking inside, the store manages to give more of a high-end furniture store feel rather than a dispensary. But details throughout invite inspection and browsing. Thats not typical for dispensaries that often hide product behind the counter and have limited informational resources.

The Woods has plenty of plant life throughout and is abundantly lit by a skylight, so it has a fresh, open feel.

The abundance of houseplants creates a fresh, herbal smell in the air. Absent birds, you instead hear the chirping of local passersby, since the large front door stays invitingly propped open.

Display cases all throughout the space show off brands and their products for perusal. Certain cases focus on categories like edibles, or pre-rolls. The clienteles favorite? Staff said edibles.

You can also buy an entire walls worth of award-winners from the worlds largest outdoor pot contest The Emerald Cup. The awards show took place for the first time in Hollywood this year and coincided with the opening of The Woods. Several awardees of the Emerald Cup donated their trophy to the display in The Woods. The display encourages shoppers to buy organic, sun-grown cannabis and to support the legacy farmers in the state.

Support Your Local Weed Farmer, the merch reads. On the wallframed, historic photos of cannabis farms from times past. A mural painted by a local artist covers the back wall and carries through the long hallway that will eventually lead to a smoking lounge. In the hallway, a gallery of NFT art by people imprisoned for weed cycles through on digital screens.

In one corner, you can sit down and look into a dozen little branded, weed farm dioramas. Its not the easiest display to browse, but it does encourage close inspection.

The chill vibes continued with the friendly budtenders wholl explain sun-grown organic cannabis benefits, the impacts of the War on Drugs, or the plight of legacy farmers in todays market.

The spacious store fosters browsing, with a decent-sized, well-curated selection. We saw 155 flowers on the menu. Los Angelenos are hooked on indoor flavors, and outdoor has a tough time penetrating the concrete jungle. The Woods stands out with Emerald Triangle brands not usually available this far south:

Woody also made concessions to LAs indoor exotic pot culture. We see tasty new flavors from:

Typically, you can expect lower prices on outdoor weed, and eighths of outs top out at $41 plus taxes at The Woods. Better quality weed should be worth more, The Woods believes, and consequently, some of their outdoor prices rival indoor.

In the future, the store will be one of a cluster of related businesses: a bar, a smoking lounge, and a dispensary. Each will have separate entrances and requirements, and it sounds like the bar and lounge will be very upscale.

I admit Im not the typical client of a store like The Woods. I prefer a dispensary connected to a different facet of LA culturethe Backpack Boyz, Dr. Greenthumbs, Cookies, Sherbinskis, and Greenwolfs of LA. But Woodys chic Woods gives WeHoans the chance to put their money where their values liestarting with sungrown, organic top-shelf from small, legacy NorCal hippies.

Dan Wilson

Dan Wilson is an independent pot journalist based in Los Angeles. Wilson is the founding Editor of Visit Hollyweed, California's cannabis community newspaper. His Los Angeles Dispensary Guidebook was published in April.

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Katy J Pearson : Sound of the Morning – Treble – Treble

It wasnt so long ago that music fans and critics openly ragged on adult contemporary as a rite of passage. The entire genre allegedly comprised treacly pablum and tender feelings designed exclusively for moms in minivans. An entire generation rejected those sounds, preferring songs that expressed emotions with heart-on-the-sleeve intensityno matter the genre.However, the soft rock of the 70s and 80s has recently experienced a slight resurgence. Artists such as Kevin Morby, Father John Misty, and The War on Drugs have built entire careers on updating and reinventing the music of acts such as Bread or Boz Scaggs. A generation of music fans that didnt experience it the first time now adore acts that embrace nuance, discomfort, and malleability. By taking slightly more care in how they express emotions, these musicians can hone greater songwriting acumen, production flairs, and compositional skill.

This is the environment into which Katy J Pearson strides with confidence. On her new album, Sound of the Morning, she delivers delightfully quirky singer-songwriter fare matched with upbeat pop-rock arrangements that would have been a perfect fit for 70s AM radio. Released on Heavenly Recordings, this 11-song project combines the chill vibes of Laurel Canyon with the sentimentality of 80s pop radio to delightful results. Its as if Joni Mitchell, Patty Griffin, and Destroyer collaborated across the decades to create thoughtful, yet catchy folk tunes.

It all starts with Pearsons expressive vocal range. Sitting comfortably in a high alto, she can both dip down low and reach for the heights as a song demands, complete with the rare break to seal the deal. She also displays a deft lyricism about a variety of grownup ideas and motifs including romantic misunderstandings, anxiety about relationships, and making sense of love, as well as feeling stuck in a dead-end situation and needing to grow so she can find a way out.

Despite this being a solo project, the album is rich with full-band arrangements. The production is bright and clear, allowing space for each instrument and vocal in the mix. Its also easy to become enamored with the superb musicianship in that the songs feel both light and substantivethe players are in sync, which means everything is intentional and nothing is overwrought. Crisp drums, warm guitars, lovely horns, and intricate piano phrasings flow together to create pristine arrangements packed with delicate flourishes.

Talk Over Town reeks with a delicious War On Drugs aesthetic, including spacey guitars, echoing vocals, and driving drums. The chorus erupts into a rich crescendo as Katy asks a simple question: Can you show me something Im missing? Is it something I can live without? On The Riverhead, the tempo slows down slightly, evoking a steady stroll between lovers as they walk around the banks of a lake in a park. The mood and lyrics call to mind a serious relationship about the future couched in pleasant memories of the past.

With Float, the tone takes a melancholy turn, as Pearson openly questions the long-term viability of a relationship. She plaintively sings about wandering the halls of their home, looking at pictures on the walls, and getting tired of pretending that her heart is fully committed. Game of Cards channels Fleetwood Mac by first fusing loping verses to a caustic chorus and then comparing a late-night chat with a partner to a high-stakes hand of poker. The album closes with the luscious Willows Song, a tune that features effervescent guitars, supple drumming, creeping string-centric synths, and well-timed horn bleats. Its a jaunty minor key affair that serves as both a mission statement for the project as well as a farewell note to the tumultuous relationships shes chronicled.

Sound of the Morning represents a profound progression in the career trajectory of Katy J Pearson. Like her musical forebears, she couches heavy feelings in immaculate, danceable pop grooves. The chord progressions seem familiar, but she turns them inside-out with artful aplomb so that listeners feel comfortable but never bored. Moreover, the sublime pacing to the track listing allows for terrific control of the emotional ebbs and flows. Pearson also knows how to express strong, yet realistic emotions with a matter-of-fact tone that belies her relative youth. Shes unafraid to face tough situations, preferring to persevere even if the journey isnt easy or the resolution very clean.

Label: Heavenly

Year: 2022

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Katy J Pearson : Sound of the Morning - Treble - Treble

War on drugs prolonged Colombias decades-long civil war, landmark report finds – The Guardian

The punitive, prohibitionist war on drugs helped prolong Colombias disastrous civil war, the countrys truth commission has found, in a landmark report published on Tuesday as part of an effort to heal the raw wounds left by conflict.

The report, titled There is a future if there is truth was the first instalment of a study put together by the commission that was formed as part of a historic 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

That deal formally ended five decades of civil war that killed more than 260,000 people and forced seven million from their homes. Other leftist rebel groups, state-aligned paramilitaries and Colombias security forces contributed to the bloodshed, with atrocities committed on all sides.

The violence has affected all sectors of Colombian society from political and business elites to rural peasant farmers with drug money funding insurgents, paramilitaries and corrupt politicians. The poorest farmers have often been forced either economically or at the barrel of a gun to grow coca, the base ingredient used to make cocaine.

But the report found that the union of the interests of United States and Colombia led to the construction of Plan Colombia, a massive multibillion-dollar military aid programme that began in 2000, which merged together the counter-insurgency, anti-terrorist and anti-narcotics programmes with the war against narco-terrorism.

The report found that a substantial change in drug policy should be implemented and that a transition to the regulation of drug markets should follow, while also placing some of the blame at the US, who funded Colombias armed forces during the war.

We cannot postpone, as we did after millions of victims, the day when peace is a duty and a mandatory right, as expressed in our constitution, said Francisco de Roux, the truth commissions president at a ceremony in Bogot.

The report called for major changes to Colombias military and police forces, which have received more than $8bn from the US over the past two decades.

It said the militarys objectives should be re-evaluated and all human rights violations committed by security forces should be tried by civilian courts instead of falling under the military justice system.

Like many victims of the conflict, ngela Mara Escobar celebrated the launch of the report as a chance for Colombia to heal after decades of bitter war. Escobar survived sexual violence at the hands of members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (or AUC), a now-defunct rightwing paramilitary organisation.

Its vital that all Colombians, and the whole world, truly understand what happened during the conflict, which affected so many families and so much of society, said Escobar, who now runs an organisation for female victims of the conflict.

The report also made policy recommendations which could be picked up by the incoming administration of president-elect Gustavo Petro, including reforming the armed forces, the creation of a ministry for reconciliation, and the protection of human rights defenders from political violence.

Petro the first leftist ever elected head of state in Colombia will take office on 7 August. He was a guerrilla fighter with the M-19 militia in his youth and is a firm supporter of the peace process with the Farc.

The leftwing firebrand attended the launch ceremony in Bogot on Tuesday morning, along with his vice president-elect, Francia Mrquez, who was forced to flee her home during the conflict. She will be the first black woman to fill the post.

Outgoing president Ivn Duque, a sceptic of the deal who has been accused of slow-walking its implementation to undermine it, was in Portugal for the United Nations ocean conference.

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War on drugs prolonged Colombias decades-long civil war, landmark report finds - The Guardian