It was just 14 months ago when Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom told a state oversight council that meth use had gone off the charts and was out of control in parts of South Dakota.

Since then, the state has appropriated several hundred thousand dollars to bolster treatment opportunities, start a marketing campaign to warn youth and others of the dangers of meth, and to incentivize those on probation and parole to stop using a drug that is almost instantly addicting.

It appears, however, that these efforts have been akin to putting a finger in a dyke that is about to crumble. Meth use has skyrocketed in the past year and is often a key ingredient in violent crimes.

Now, however, meth and the madness and mayhem it creates has a rival and experts say its potency makes it far more dangerous. It's called fentanyl analog and should alarm everyone who is concerned about public health and public safety.

On Tuesday, the Lawrence County State's Attorney's Office announced that nine people were indicted on 50 felony drug charges. The primary drug cited was fentanyl analog. The investigation that led to the indictments came after two Spearfish residents, ages 23 and 38, died in January after using the synthetic opiod that the National Institute on Drug Abuse says is 50 to 100 more times potent than morphine, making it extraordinarily lethal.

The Lawrence County indictments come just one week after a 19-year-old Chamberlain man was arrested for possessing 20,000 fentanyl pills worth $500,000.

Until recently, fentanyl has been seen as primarily a big-city problem in a few states. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 80 percent of fentanyl seizures occurred in 10 eastern states.

Since then, however, this killer drug has swept through the nation and now has surfaced in central and western South Dakota where many of us feel insulated from drug epidemics and their fatal consequences. The drug, however, has the potential to sweep through a state like a plague. In New Hampshire, for example, the number of fentanyl-related deaths climbed from 145 to 283 from 2014 to 2015, according to the National Drug Early Warning System. The state's population is only around 1.3 million people.

In Lawrence County, 37-year-old Eric Reeder now faces 20 felony charges, including two counts of first-degree manslaughter. Spearfish police said the suspect told them he ordered the fentanyl on the darknet and they were delivered to him. Also facing a first-degree manslaughter charge is 32-year-old Ashley Kristina Kuntz.

The Lawrence County Sheriff's Office, the Lawrence County State's Attorney's Office and Spearfish police are to be congratulated for pursuing this case and seeking convictions on manslaughter charges. It's become all too clear that our ongoing war on drugs has become a lot tougher and the stakes are even higher.

It is a problem that requires an immediate and strong response from law enforcement. In the meantime, we all have a duty to report any suspected drug activity to law enforcement and to do everything possible to protect our families and loved ones from this devastating drug.

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OURS: War on drugs just got tougher | Editorial | rapidcityjournal.com - Rapid City Journal

Fighting marijuana

prohibition isn't just about marijuana. It's also about fighting police brutality, militarization, and asset forfeiture. It's about reducing a U.S. prison population that is the biggest in the world. It's about civil rights and civil liberties.

The national law enforcement group LEAP connected the dots on much of that last week in announcing the organization's name change from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Maintaining the same acronym probably saves a little money on letterheads and the like.

Success in the LEAP agenda, however, saves lives.

"LEAP wanted to start focusing beyond just speaking out against the war on drugs and talking about criminal justice reform in general," says Steve Miller, a sergeant retiree from the Canton police department and a spokesman for LEAP. "My philosophy is the war on drugs is central to all of this. If we end the war on drugs we could solve a lot of other areas that are in need of reform in the criminal justice system."

LEAP is officially making a connection that many of its members made long ago. LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a retired Maryland State Police officer, helped convince the national NAACP board to call for an end to the war on drugs back in 2011. Not that the Detroit chapter seems to have heeded that call.

Attorney Michelle Alexander was also in the working group that helped convince the NAACP to make that choice. Her book The New Jim Crow details how the war on drugs has crippled black communities by labeling marijuana users as criminals.

Despite that, the black community has been slow to come around on marijuana legalization. At least among the local institutions that tend to support or represent African-Americans. After all, they're working on civil rights, not drug user rights. And while there are plenty of black marijuana consumers (and inmates), there are precious few in the new and growing industry. Somewhere around 1 percent.

That's something the Rev. Al Sharpton mentioned in addressing the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition on Friday, June 16. In a pre-exposition statement told to The Huffington Post, Sharpton said, "I will challenge the cannabis industry and its distributors in states where it is legal to support civil rights movements and ensure that we are not disproportionately excluded from business opportunities."

Sharpton asserts a connection between the marijuana insurgency and civil rights movements here. They are indeed connected.

At a time when the idea of "fake news" is prominent in the national political discourse, the war on drugs stands out as a testament to the government's ability to just make things up and destroy lives from that base. Marijuana prohibition went nationwide in 1937 as a racist attack on Latinos and blacks. When President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs it was in direct contradiction to the findings of his own Shafer Commission that recommended marijuana possession be decriminalized.

The success of that propaganda has been that even though the war on drugs has obvious detriments to black communities, most "responsible" members of those communities can't see it.

"The misconceptions out there are horrible and they are based on government lies that have been passed on for the past 80 years," says Miller. "The most dangerous part of the drug war is the drug war itself."

Can the government make things up and base life-altering policy on it? You bet it can. That's one reason why fighting marijuana prohibition is intricately tied to larger political struggles.

Here's how Dan K. Morhaim, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, put it in a May Baltimore Sun opinion piece:

"It's a war that has claimed tens of thousands of casualties both at home and abroad, destroyed the lives of countless innocent bystanders, turned neighborhoods and in some cases whole regions into killing fields, filled prisons to overflowing with non-violent offenders, poisoned farmlands and forests, undermined police and government agencies, corrupted multinational banks and financial companies, funded overseas enemies and terrorists, and despite the tremendous cost in blood and treasure, has not advanced the cause for which the war was declared. Drug use has not measurably declined since President Nixon started that war in 1970.

"Not only has the war on drugs failed, it continues to make the situation worse. It's turned into a war on people, communities, institutions, and ultimately ourselves. A new strategy is needed."

That is what LEAP seeks. It's not a strategy aimed only at drugs. It's a holistic strategy aimed at what the war on drugs has done to our people, police forces, and our communities. Even the police know we need a new strategy. Unfortunately, they generally don't speak out about it until they have retired. It's their job to enforce the law, not change it.

Miller has totally flipped his script. Since retiring from the police force he has gotten a private investigator's license and works for attorney Mike Komorn, a prominent defender of people charged with marijuana offenses. He's also become a supporter of MI Legalize, part of the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol that is running a petition initiative to get the question of recreational legalization in Michigan on the 2018 ballot. He believes legalizing marijuana will change the way police do their business.

"For one, we're taking a huge thing away from the police to go out and use that aggressive enforcement," says Miller. "Marijuana is an easy target with its smell. It's low-hanging fruit for the police. ... The majority of my career it was get in these crappy neighborhoods and stop every kid that's passing on the street. It's all centralized in the war on drugs getting people, searching people, get in their car, find drugs. Police go out and use that and create a hostile relationship. If marijuana is legal police can move on and do other things. Drug task forces spend a large amount of time on marijuana."

In 2014, according to FBI data, almost 90 percent of about 700,000 marijuana arrests were for possession alone. It seems that if police didn't have to spend their time chasing people for marijuana possession it would save them a lot of effort and expense, let alone pressure on the courts and jails.

LEAP is on the right path and it would do us well to get with it. Repealing marijuana prohibition will ease a lot of other problems that have grown in the prohibition industry. And maybe if police don't have that adversarial relationship with communities, there could be a lot more Officer Friendly types on the streets.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been making lots of noise about enforcing federal marijuana laws and belittling the idea that the plant has medicinal value. Maybe he should spend a little time studying up on recent science about cannabinoids. However, based on the amount of things he just couldn't remember during recent testimony to the U.S. Senate, information retention isn't one of his strong points.

The rest is here:

Ending the war on drugs - Detroit Metro Times

Written by Adil Akhzer | Chandigarh | Published:June 22, 2017 11:34 am

The Punjab government that promised eradication of drug menace to be on top of its agenda did not allocate any additional funds in its maiden budget worth Rs 1.18 lakh crore presented on Tuesday. Other than an amount of Rs 50 crore for establishment of primary rural rehabilitation and drug de-addiction centres in the state, the template of the budget set aside for health was nothing different than the one presented last year by the SAD-BJP government.

The government allocated Rs 1,358 crore for medical and public health in this fiscal year, which is 14.21 per cent higher than the allocations made the previous year. The allocation had nothing for fighting drugs.

Punjabs Finance Minister Manpreet Badal, during his budget speech on Tuesday said to restore the health of all the citizens of Punjab, while some new initiatives are being taken, some of the existing would be reinforced and remodelled to address the problem in a focused manner.

The previous government, in the last budget, had allocated funds for the similar heads. Then, the government had allocated Rs 708 crore for providing affordable and accountable health care services to the community, Rs 36 crore for ambulance services, Rs 25 crore for treatment of cancer patients, Rs 100 crore for medical insurance for the poor people, and Rs 150 crore for creation of cancer and drug de-addiction treatment infrastructure.

And on Tuesday, when Manpreet Badal presented his budget, he had almost similar things in the health sector. Of the allocated Rs 1,358 crore, Rs 777 crore were allocated for providing affordable and accountable health care services to the community under National Health Mission Programme, Rs 38 crore for providing emergency response services (108-Ambulance Services), medical helpline (104) in the State, Rs 30 crore for treatment of cancer patients under CM Cancer Relief Fund, Rs 100 crore for Universal Health Insurance for the under privileged people, Rs 50 crore for the creation of cancer and drug de-addiction treatment infrastructure, Rs 50 crore for the establishment of primary rural rehabilitation & drug de-addiction centres in the state and Rs 50 crore for tertiary care cancer centre.

Badal said new tertiary-level infrastructure was being created in the field of cancer and drug de-addiction in the state medical colleges. For cancer patients, he said tertiary care centres were being set up at the cost of Rs 50 crore in Fazilka and Hoshiarpur districts.

Badal also said a new medical college would be set up at SAS Nagar (Mohali) with an additional outlay of Rs 10 crore in 2017-18. Rs 100 crore has been provided for upgradation of infrastructure in the Government Medical College and Hospital, Patiala.

The government has planned to transform approximately 3,000 centres in rural and urban areas as Health & Wellness Clinics which will ensure preventive as well as limited curative services, he said.

Reacting to the budget, States Health Minister Brahm Mohindra told The Indian Express that he will set the priority about funds usage in the health sector, as per the needs of the people of Punjab.

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No additional funds for war on drugs - The Indian Express

President Trump speaks as Jeff Sessions listens in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Feb. 9, 2017. Andrew HarrerBloomberg/Getty Images

Donald Trump wants to drag us back into one of the most catastrophic social policies in this nations history: the war on drugs.

The president wants to return to a bygone era of mass incarceration and a full-blown War on Drugs that significantly contributed to the current American prison population of 2.2 million people the largest in the world. Apparently, that isnt enough for the "law and order" president and his accomplice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump and Sessions think the War on Drugs has been a very good thing. They are either woefully or willfully ignorant of the facts.

As author of The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, I spent almost 20 years researching and writing about the War on Drugs. After five decades of this war, drugs are cheaper, more plentiful and more potent than ever (as Mr. Sessions himself has conceded). If thats Trumps idea of success, Id hate to see his version of failure.

The so-called War on Drugs quadrupled our prison population (overwhelmingly and disproportionately composed of minorities), handed out life sentences to nonviolent offenders, militarized our police forces, promoted the disgusting concept of for-profit prisons, shredded the Bill of Rights and cost taxpayers upward of a trillion dollars.

Did Trump and Sessions somehow miss all this? Surely the president and the top justice official in the country are aware that violent crime is at a a record low , and most criminologists agree that incarceration was a minor factor in its thirty-year decline. The more important causes were demographic changes, improved police techniques, community policing and strong economic growth.

Trump and Sessions cite a rise in homicide rates in some cities since 2015. But fully half those murders, mostly a result of gang violence, occurred in one city Chicago while many of the rest were concentrated in Houston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The murder rate in New York City actually dropped 25% during that period.

Trump and Sessions blame this gang violence on drugs, but that's reductive to say the least.

Lets look at Chicago. Writing in US News & World Report, Alan Neuhauser points out that the Chicago police force has lost a quarter of its homicide detectives since 2008. And two years ago the state of Illinois drastically cut funding for community policing and violence prevention programs, which directly corresponds to the spike in violence.

Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson said, Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope, do these kind of things... You show me a man that doesnt have hope, Ill show you one thats willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it.

Johnson has a point. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that cities with at least a ten-year history of poverty and unemployment are the same cities that have experienced a rise in violence.

That there is a relationship between poverty and crime should come as no surprise to our country's chief executive and his top law enforcement official, but apparently it does.

Trump and Sessions want to cut funds for social programs and community policing and return to the era of mass arrests and incarceration in short, the War on Drugs. They want to trade policies that work for policies that dont.

Sessionss assistant Steven Cook told the Washington Post, Drug trafficking is inherently violent. Drug traffickers are dealing in a heavy cash business. They cant resolve disputes in court. They resolve the disputes on the street and they resolve them through violence.

Mr. Sessions made remarks to the same effect.

And they're right: Drug trafficking is inherently violent . Because of drug prohibition .

Nicotine is a legal drug you dont see the tobacco companies slugging it out on the street. Alcohol is a legal drug, and you dont see gangs killing each other for the right to sell beer and whiskey (as they did in Prohibition days).

There is, of course, another major difference between drug dealers and people who sell nicotine and alcohol products the latter two are mostly white. Sell drugs, youre a guest in the Big House; sell enough booze or cigarettes, youre a guest in the White House.

The racial disparities are indisputable. African-American males are thirteen times as likely to be sent to prison for drug offenses than white males, whose drug usage is proportionally much higher . Sentences for African-American males are over 13% longer than those for whites. The War on Drugs has largely been a war on people of color.

Apparently, the current administration doesnt mind that these policies are racist. Prompted by his boss, Mr. Sessions recently instructed federal prosecutors to seek maximum sentences for even nonviolent drug offenses.

Its wrong, and it makes no sense on any level.

We know that rehabilitation programs and treatment are vastly more effective at reducing drug use than imprisonment. In fact, our jails and prisons are rife with illegal drugs, and those who go in as addicts usually come out as addicts. If mass incarceration worked, wouldnt our drug problem now be better instead of worse?

But rather than make a real effort to address the drug problem at its roots at a time when more Americans die from opiate overdose than from car accidents Trump and Sessions hand us fantasies such as the border wall, which will do absolutely nothing to slow the flow of drugs, and facile, intellectually lazy, "lock `em up" sound bites that make for good politics but horrible policy.

The mass incarceration policy is also a fiscal disaster.

An administration that prides itself on trimming the budget wants to expand our spending on prisons, even though a year spent in a California cell is more expensive $75,650 than a year at Harvard. As of 2012, the United States spent $63.4 billion a year on incarceration . Trump and Sessions want to spend even more.

Trump and Sessions are tough on gangs that wield guns, but not so much on those who push guns on the American public. The National Rifle Association donated over $30 million to Trumps campaign, and he promised, among other things, to end gun-free zones. The attorney general has an A+ rating (along with $35,750 in Senate campaign contributions) from the NRA and has voted against background checks on buyers at gun shows.

My most recent novel, The Force, deals with the New York Police Departments struggle against drugs and guns. My research shows that most of the weapons used in gang violence originate in states that have weak gun laws and unrestricted gun shows. From there, buyers ship weapons up the "Iron Pipeline" of Interstate 95 and its connecting highways, to cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.; guns that police forces are desperate to get off their streets; guns that kill gang members, innocent bystanders, and, yes, cops. But Trump and Sessions advocate loosening what few restrictions still exist.

That is not law and order. That is lawlessness and disorder.

In the last days of the Obama administration, we finally began to see a more sensible policy toward illegal drugs: clemency for nonviolent offenders serving long prison terms, a move to end mandatory minimum sentences, a less aggressive stance on enforcing marijuana laws and the abolition of prison privatization on the federal level.

In his endless, thoughtless rush to undo all things Obama, Trump wants to roll all that back, to a failed policy that will only result in more suffering, more expense, and more death.

Thats a catastrophe.

Don Winslow is the author of The Cartel and The Force.

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Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions Drug War Is Bad | Time.com - TIME

When the United States first launched the War on Drugs nearly five decades ago, not even the cleverest conspiracy theorists could have imagined the far-reaching consequences the campaign would have around the world. From the CIA allowing drug traffickers to flourish in exchange for their assistance in toppling leftist leaders abroad to the deal made with an infamous Nazi, check out eight things you probably dont about the War on Drugs.

The CIA introduced LSD into the U.S. with the intention of developing the ability to control minds (as depicted in the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was based on a 1959 novel). Operation Midnight Climax, part of a mind control project (that ran for more than a decade, saw CIA-bankrolled prostitutes lure unwitting testers to a CIA safe house, where the unwitting participants would be dosed with the psychedelic drug and have their altered states observed through one-way glass.

Despite his brutal reign as The Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie became a CIA asset after World War II. Like many high ranking Nazi officers, Barbie fled to South America after the war, where he became chummy with some of the most-fearful drug lords in history, including Pablo Escobar and Roberto Surez Gomz, one of the inspirations of Scarface. With the complicity of the CIA, Barbie and a team of Nazi mercenaries (known as the Fiancs of Death) helped Surez Gomz in his goal to overthrow the Bolivian government and turn it into a narco state.

The term War on Drugs entered the public consciousness in 1971, when President Nixon fired one of the opening salvos. Featuring a press conference and an anti-drug message to Congress, Nixon stated that drug abuse was worse than communism, and called drugs public enemy number one.

In an incident that became a famous photo op, singer Elvis Presley met President Nixon in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. The crooner had asked for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (which later merged with other federal offices to become the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA). Elvis allegedly wanted the narc badge so he could bring his pharmacopoeia stash along on his travels.

According to legend, the late-19th century folk hero Jess Malverde was a Robin Hood-like figure, a generous bandit who stole from the rich and shared the bounty with the poor. Malverde was said to have been caught by authorities and hung. As punishment, his body was left hanging until his bones fell to the ground. He was adopted by drug traffickers as their patron saint to help spin the mythology that drug dealers were on the side of the peopletaking money from wealthy customers, and redistributing it amongst the poor.

Joaqun Guzmn Loera, aka El Chapo, started working in the Mexican poppy fields at the age of 9. He rose to become the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug lord in the world. In 2012, he was #1,153 on the Forbes Billionaires list (#10 in Mexico, and the next year he ranked 67th on Forbes Most Powerful People list.

The 2001 anti-terror law is more often used for drug prosecutions. With it, police can search and seize without probable cause or without your knowledge. Of the thousands of warrants issued under this act, less than one percent were for terrorism; over 75 percent were for drugs. Today, the Talibans largest source of funds is Afghanistans opium and heroin industry. The country is losing its battle against the makings of the powerful drugless than 1 percent of its staggering opium production is currently being seized. Every year since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, the production and monetary value of its opium crop has increased.

Around 2008, pain clinics dispensing synthetic opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and OxyContin began to pop up across the country. The American Pain Clinic, started by brothers Chris and Jeff George in South Florida, quickly became the nations largest pill mill (as they were known). These doc in a box sites, where doctor-patient consultations could last mere minutes, had lines around the block, and by 2009, nine out of 10 of their patients were from out of state. The stretch of I-75 leading from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to South Florida became known as Oxy Alley.

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8 Times America's War on Drugs Was Stranger Than Fiction - History

When Gary Webbs investigative series Dark Alliance came out in the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 alleging the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the importation of cocaine into South Central Los Angeles, many people in the Black community claimed the articles proved the CIA deliberately was out to destroy Black people, and a long-standing urban conspiracy theory was born.

Webbs story has since been removed from the Mercury News website, and resulted in a two-part CIA report released in 1998 on cocaine and the agencys involvement in drug trafficking investigations, it fueled deep distrust among the Black community that is still present today.

Anthony Lapp, an executive producer behind the History Channels new documentary series Americas War on Drugs, says that although these theories around federal agencies injecting drugs into the Black community have swirled for years, this new docu-series will reveal that theyre just not true.

Of course it wasnt any kind of genocidal experiment or anything like that, what it was is the CIA basically being the CIA, Lapp said. Theyre completely amoral and they dont really look at the long term blowback effects of their operations.

Americas War on Drugs four-part series beginning Sunday night comes as the U.S. fights a raging prescription opioid addiction crisis and increase in heroin use. The series also comes just a month after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he will instruct federal prosecutors to enforce so-called mandatory minimum sentences on gun and drug offenses. While Sessions says this is meant to help get criminals off of the streets, opponents say it will mean going back to the days of harsh sentencing that will likely have profound effects on people of color.

Related: Black Lives Matter Chicago Sues City, Seeks Court Oversight of Police Reform

Lapp, alongside Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami, spent a year conducting dozens and dozens of interviews with former CIA officers, Drug Enforcement Agency officers, historians and more. The crew takes viewers through an eight hour journey crisscrossing the world and deconstructing how the U.S. war on drugs truly began through interviews, old footage, and reenactments.

What they uncover is that Americas history with drugs is intertwined with fears of communism, rogue drug mobsters and warlords, the failed takedown of Fidel Castro in 1961, the Vietnam War, infighting between the DEA and CIA, and drugs -- including LSD, heroin and cocaine -- slowly making waves in communities.

Amado celebrates his rise to power at home. "America's War on Drugs" premieres Sunday, June 18 at 9PM ET/PT. Talos Films/HISTORY

But the documentary also makes the case that Blacks were victims caught in the melee of CIA operations and President Richard Nixons desire to have a law and order administration in the 1970s through the war on drugs.

Christian Parenti, a New York University professor interviewed in the documentary, said the trick with the war on drugs was to deal with a variety of things outside of the governments control.

The war on drugs brought together the peace movement, the hippies, the counterculture, African Americans, all of this stuff can be captured and addressed by force with law enforcement under the rubric of the war on drugs, Parenti said.

Toward the end of the first episode, the creators of the series include a taped conversation between John Ehrlichman, counsel and chief domestic advisor under President Richard Nixon and a Harpers Magazine journalist decades after the war on drugs is declared. Its there that Ehrlichman makes a chilling admission.

The Nixon campaign had two enemies, the antiwar left and Black people, Ehrlichman said. We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or Black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the 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.

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New Docuseries Aims to Fact-Check 'America's War on Drugs ... - NBCNews.com

In America's War on Drugs," beginning Sunday, History offers a four-part spin through the American government's complicated, often hypocritical, ultimately crazy relationship with narcotics over half a century its lofty motives, its ulterior motives. Fueled by the testimony of various scholars and journalists, reformed dealers, and former CIA and DEA officers whose agencies differently framed missions often put them into direct conflict, it's a thick, tortuous telling that runs some six hours with the commercials removed, exhausting but rarely dull.

The official declaration of the "War on Drugs" is seen as beginning with President Nixon's June 17, 1971, statement that "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse" a campaign that, we're told here, also served as legal cover for attacking the antiwar movement and black power movement. But the series runs back another decade to begin its story with the common cause made by the Mafia and the CIA in the early '60s attempt to rid Cuba of Castro, blurring lines that have stayed blurry since, and to the agencys accidental introduction of LSD into American society. (They had hoped to use it for mind control buying the worlds available supply from its manufacturer but it got out of their hands and something quite different happened.)

What's clear through this thicket of intersecting stories is that the American policy has often been made out of fear not necessarily manufactured, but often misplaced. Fear of communism, of terrorism, of crime in the streets.

Whether or not you believe that crack was a CIA plot to destroy the inner cities, "America's War on Drugs" indicates that the agency was not particularly concerned with the domestic upshot of deals it made with Latin American drug cartels deals that ultimately helped flood the United States with cocaine and transform it from a rich person's party drug to a poor person's quick high. The intelligence agency and the drug cartels might have had different, more and less noble goals patriotism on the one hand, money on the other but they share a certain amorality, a certain heartlessness.

Talos Films/History

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs."

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs." (Talos Films/History)

Many stops are made along the way Vietnam, Afghanistan, including the militarization of police (hello, Daryl Gates!), Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, Bill Clinton saying, "But I didn't inhale. There's a colorful, if almost wholly unlikable, cast of shady characters, underworld legends, criminal visionaries, corrupt politicians, dirty cops, mad scientists and paranoid nut jobs on both sides of the law. There are political coups and drive-by shootings. Comparatively little time is spent on the Oxycontin and methamphetamine epidemics and for that matter marijuana, which as a subject does not enter the story nearly until the end, when legalization threatens the cartels' profits which have less of an international profile, and no CIA subplot.

Each episode begins with an advisory "The following program contains intense drug imagery and violence," which you would do well to regard, and one that "In some instances events have been dramatized." "Many," or even "most," is closer to the mark. Such re-creations are common enough, but because the filmmakers have gone to some lengths to make them look technologically appropriate to period and "real" caught by surveillance cameras or home video they get mixed up with the actual documentary footage and photos (which flash by too quickly). They demean the record. They aren't history.

Scant attention is paid to drug use itself, interestingly, and to the extent that it is, the users arent judged. (Reporter: Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD? Ken Kesey: Not necessarily.") If anything, they are regarded as victims of both the problem and the supposed cure three-strike laws, sentencing minimums that has filled American jails and prisons past bursting and had a generations-long effect on the inner cities. Nor is there any moralizing about drug use itself, which most of the commentators regard as inevitable a feature of human existence, not a bug if potentially destructive. This lack of censure is refreshing, but the question of how society might better treat drug addiction is limited to a few observations at the series' very end.

It's undeniably the case that drug epidemics, even apart from the drug-taking, create crime. There is nothing inherently insincere either in Bill Clinton's vow to "take our streets back from crime and gangs and drugs" or George W. Bush's that "Illegal drugs are the enemies of ambition and hope ... and I intend to do something about it," however ineffective or incidentally calamitous the results. As "America's War on Drugs" asserts again and again, this is an unwinnable war, like the war on terror, defined by unintended consequences, backfiring schemes and collateral damage. The faces change, as do the trade routes and methods of delivery, but the drugs go on.

Americas War on Drugs

Where: History

When: 9 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DLSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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History examines the hazy history of 'America's War on Drugs' with exhaustive but engaging detail - Los Angeles Times

Today is the 46th anniversary of Americas War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Choose To Ingest or Sell Intoxicants Currently Proscribed by the Government, Which Will Put Users or Sellers in Cages if Caught, see todays previous post on CD here. To bring awareness to this immoral, failed, costly, and shameful war on the American people, heres some commentary below from Nobel economist Milton Friedman.

In 1991 Nobel economist Milton Friedman (pictured above giving a talk at AEI, exact year unknown) was interviewed by Emmy Award-winning drug reporter Randy Paige on Americas Drug Forum, a national public affairs talk show that appeared on public television stations. In the interview, Milton Friedman discussed in detail his views on Americas War on Drugs, legalization of drugs, the role of government in a free society, and his pessimistic view of Americas future if we continue moving in the direction of socialism. Videos of the entire 30-minute interview appears below in three parts, and here is the transcript of the interview.

Here are some of my favorite parts of the interview (emphasis added):

1. Paige: Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system?

Friedman: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which theres a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which theyre sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now.

Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.

2. Paige: For us to understand the real root of those beliefs, how about if we just talk a minute about free market economic perspective, and how you see the proper role of government in its dealings with the individual.

Friedman: The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individuals own good.

The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If its in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because theyll do you harm, why isnt it all right to say you must not eat too much because youll do harm? Why isnt it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because youre likely to die? Why isnt it all right to say, Oh, skiing, thats no good, thats a very dangerous sport, youll hurt yourself? Where do you draw the line?

3. Paige: Is it not true that the entire discussion here, the entire drug problem is an economic problem to

Friedman: No, its not an economic problem at all, its a moral problem.

Paige: In what way?

Friedman: Im an economist, but the economics problem is strictly tertiary. Its a moral problem. Its a problem of the harm which the government is doing.

I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year. Its a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people. Its a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I dont approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.

Now heres somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If hes caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think its absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. Thats the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

Of course, were wasting money on it. Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars a year, but thats trivial. Were wasting that much money in many other ways, such as buying crops that ought never to be produced.

4. Paige: There are many who would look at the economicshow the economics of the drug business is affecting Americas major inner cities, for example.

Friedman: Of course it is, and it is because its prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. Thats literally true.

Paige: Is it doing a good job of it?

Friedman: Excellent. What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free marketlets take potatoes, beef, anything you wantthere are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But its very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.

In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, lets say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? Hes got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. Its absolutely heaven.

Legalization is a way to stopin our forum as citizens a government from using our power to engage in the immoral behavior of killing people, taking lives away from people in the U.S., in Colombia and elsewhere, which we have no business doing.

5. Paige: So, you see the role of government right now as being just as deadly as if Uncle Sam were to take a gun to somebodys head.

Friedman: Thats what hes doing, of course. Right now Uncle Sam is not only taking a gun to somebodys head, hes taking his property without due process of law. The drug enforcers are expropriating property, in many cases of innocent people on whom they dont have a real warrant. Thats a terrible way to run whats supposed to be a free country.

6. Paige: What scares you the most about the notion of drugs being legal?

Friedman: Nothing scares me about the notion of drugs being legal.

Paige: Nothing.

Friedman: What scares me is the notion of continuing on the path were on now, which will destroy our free society, making it an uncivilized place. Theres only one way you can really enforce the drug laws currently. The only way to do that is to adopt the policies of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, which some other countries adopt, in which a drug addict is subject to capital punishment or, at the very least, having his hand chopped off. If we were willing to have penalties like thatbut would that be a society youd want to live in?

7. Paige: Last question. You have grandchildren.

Friedman: Absolutely. I have a two-year-old granddaughter named Becca.

Paige: When you look at Becca, what do you see for her and for her future?

Friedman: That depends entirely upon what you and your fellow citizens do to our country. If you and your fellow citizens continue on moving more and more in the direction of socialism, not only inspired through your drug prohibition, but through your socialization of schools, the socialization of medicine, the regulation of industry, I see for my granddaughter the equivalent of Soviet communism three years ago.

Part I (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

Part 2 (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

Part 3 (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

The rest is here:

The US War on Drugs started 46 years ago today. Some commentary from Milton Friedman on that failed and shameful ... - American Enterprise Institute

Today marks the 46th anniversary of President Richard Nixons declaration of Americas War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Choose To Ingest or Sell Intoxicants Currently Proscribed by the Government, Which Will Put Users or Sellers in Cages if Caught. On June 17, 1971, Richard Nixon delivered a Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control, and he appealed to Congress to give the highest priority to provide funding and authority to the federal government to destroy the market for drugs, with increased enforcement and vigorous application of the fullest penalties provided by law and to render the narcotics trade unprofitable.

Specifically, Nixon asked Congress to authorize and fund 325 additional positions within the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to increase their capacity for apprehending those engaged in narcotics trafficking here and abroad and to investigate domestic industrial producers of drugs.

In addition, Nixon asked Congress to provide $45 million in funding for Americas new war ($271 million in todays dollars) to enable the Bureau of Customs to develop the technical capacity to deal with smuggling by air and sea, to increase the investigative staff charged with pursuit and apprehension of smugglers, and to increase inspection personnel who search persons, baggage, and cargo entering the country. Funding of $7.5 million ($45 million in 2017 dollars) would permit the IRS to intensify investigation of persons involved in large-scale narcotics trafficking.

According to Nixon, These steps would strengthen our efforts to root out the cancerous growth of narcotics addiction in America. It is impossible to say that the enforcement legislation I have asked for here will be conclusivethat we will not need further legislation. We cannot fully know at this time what further steps will be necessary. As those steps define themselves, we will be prepared to seek further legislation to take any action and every action necessary to wipe out the menace of drug addiction in America. But domestic enforcement alone cannot do the job. If we are to stop the flow of narcotics into the lifeblood of this country, I believe we must stop it at the source.

Nixon concluded his special message with this prediction: The final issue is not whether we will conquer drug abuse, but how soon. Part of this answer lies with the Congress now and the speed with which it moves to support the struggle against drug abuse.

MP: Its been 46 years since Nixon declared a War on Drugs, and we know now that it has been a completely failed mission. We havent conquered drug abuse with an expensive, 46-year War on Drugs, just like Prohibition didnt conquer alcohol abuse. What the War has done is dramatically increase the number of Americans jailed for drug offenses, especially male offenders, as the chart above shows. As of the end of May, almost half (46.3%) of all inmates in federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses. Weve also exported our War on Drugs to other countries like Mexico, which has resulted in +60,000 drug-related murders there, more casualties than the U.S. experienced during the Vietnam War.

And even though we Americans take great pride in our +200-year history of economic and political freedom, we should be ashamed of our War on Drugs, and our status as the Worlds No. 2 Jailer, part of which is the result of our drug war. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the United States leads the world with an incarceration rate of 666 prisoners per 100,000 population, see table below and full list here. The US jails more of its people than Cuba (510 per 100,000) and Russia (430). In contrast, Canadas incarceration rate is 114 per 100,000 population, Germanys rate is 76, and Japans rate is 45.

So as much as we think of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave, our record of locking Americans in cages for using intoxicants not currently approved of by the government tarnishes Americas great legacy of freedom. Isnt it time to call a truce or cease-fire on our shameful, deadly, expensive and failed War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Choose To Ingest or Sell Intoxicants Currently Proscribed by the Government, Which Will Put Users or Sellers in Cages if Caught?

Excerpt from:

Today is the 46th anniversary of our shameful, deadly, failed and costly War on Drugs. Can we call a cease-fire? - American Enterprise Institute

Activists and family members of loved ones who died in the opioid/heroin epidemic march in a "Fed Up!" rally on the National Mall on September 18, 2016. (Credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

While much of the media is focused on Trumps Russian skullduggery, America has quietly found itself enmeshed in the worst drug epidemic in our history. Drug overdoses, mostly from increasingly lethal opioids, now kill more people than guns and traffic accidents. A recent investigation by The New YorkTimes of local and state authorities across the country came to a staggering conclusionthat somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016, a nearly 20% spike in a single year, the paper estimates.

2017 is gearing up to be just as bad, or worse.

In the face of this crisis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has re-declared the War on Drugs, a five-decade old boondoggle that civil-rights organizations, economists and even some law-enforcement groups believe to be discredited by years of failure. While its unclear exactly what Sessions is planning, so far hes called for a crackdown on marijuana and longer mandatory sentences for drug dealers, seemingly intent on a return to policies that historically have ravaged entire communities, corrupted police forces and destroyed trust in authorityall in the name of fighting a war that opinion polls show the majority of the public doesnt want.

But what most Americans dont know is that our War on Drugs isnt just a failed war; its one that was never designed to be won. To understand the true story of the origins of the War on Drugs is to understand why Trumps return to some of its most controversial policies is doomed to fail.

President Nixon kickstarted Americas war on drugs in 1971 (he called it an offensive) and created the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) two years later. Ironically, or perhaps not, the war on drugs was conceived by criminals. Four of the main architects of Nixons drug policyAttorney General John Mitchell, White House aide John Erlichman (who later allegedly admitted the war on drugs was really a war on hippies and black people), Egil Bud Krogh (who famously arranged for a drug-addled Elvis Presley to receive an honorary DEA badge) as well as Watergate break-in conspirator G. Gordon Liddywere all imprisoned over Watergate.

But by the time Nixon declared a war on drugs, the real fighting had begun a decade earlier during Americas effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. In 1961, the CIA conspired with mobsters in Miami to assassinate Castro, whose revolution had put an end to the lucrative drug and vice networks operating on the island. Although the CIA-planned Bay of Pigs invasion failed, many of the agencys Cuban assets survived; and after making their way back to Miami, they turned Southern Florida into an early epicenter of drug smuggling and drug-related violence.

Meanwhile, the CIA had simultaneously helped introduce LSD to the American populace via clandestine programs that dosed countless citizensall part of a Cold War mind-control operation titled MK-Ultra. In Southeast Asia, the CIA teamed up with Laotian general Vang Pao to help make Laos the worlds top exporter of heroin. By the time Nixon began ratcheting down U.S. troop presence in Vietnam to focus on the war against drugs, more troops were dying of heroin overdoses than actual combat, an epidemic that quickly found its way to the streets of urban America.

A decade later, as a result of turning a blind eye to cocaine smugglers funding the CIAs illegal war against the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the CIA unwittingly helped unleash a nationwide crack-cocaine epidemic. Most notably, cocaine kingpin Freeway Ricky Ross was able to take his South Central L.A.-based crack businesses nationwide thanks to his access to a cheap supply of coke from politically connected Nicaraguan suppliers.

Dark Alliance, Gary Webbs landmark 1996 newspaper series alleging CIA involvement in the crack-cocaine epidemic, created a firestorm of controversy that ultimately drove Webb out of journalism and into a spiral of depression that led him to take his own life. Although there were problems with Webbs reporting and the editing of his story that allowed it to be discredited by rival news organizations, it forced the CIA to reveal that for more than a decade it had protected its Nicaraguan allies from being prosecuted for smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

Veteran drug agents, including Phil Jordan, former director of the DEAs El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), say they were repeatedly called off cases involving CIA-tied drug rings.

We had three or four cases where we arrested CIA contract workers with cocaine, and I get a phone call that the charges have been dismissed, Jordan recalls in a new HISTORY series, Americas War on Drugs. You know, we are risking our lives, making cases against significant drug traffickers, then on the other hand you got another government agency allowing the drugs to come in . . . And were not talking about 100 pounds, were talking about tons. That introduction of white powder was killing black people.

The CIAs collusion with anti-communist drug smugglers beginning in the 1960s played a direct role in the drug epidemic of the 1980s that was used to justify President Reagans 1986 crime bill. The law introduced harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offenders, the legacy of which we are still dealing with today.

President Bill Clinton expanded on Reagans drug war by militarizing the nations police forces and introducing mandatory minimum sentencing. Although President Obama tried to revise this policy shortly before leaving office, President Trump seems intent on doubling down on the war on drugs. When Trump recently invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, he congratulated him for sending police death squads into the streets to kill drug dealers and addicts. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that, Trump reportedly said.

National polls in recent years have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe the war on drugs cannot be won. Given the fact that more than half of the United States have legalized medical marijuana, with several others set to join Colorado, Washington and California in approving recreational marijuana use, there has never been a stronger mandate for drug reform than now.

As a nation, we are tired of the drug wars endless cycle of crime, political corruption, mass incarceration and mayhemparticularly in Mexico, much of which is a war zone, while north of the border, we are mired in a highly politicized hysteria over immigration and border security. The war on drugs has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion and our nations jails, prisons and hospitals now overflow with the ranks of its combatants and victims. The stakes couldnt be higher, nor the timing better, for America to end this war, not expand it.

Nick Schou is author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIAs Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books, 2006) and also appears in the upcoming HISTORY limited series Americas War on Drugs, premiering June 18 at 9/8c.

Read more here:

America's War on Drugs Was Designed to Fail. So Why Is It Being ... - History

BUTLER COUNTY

As the opiate and heroin crisis continues to claim lives in Butler County, local experts are hoping to get some help from the pulpit to help deal with the issue.

Drug overdoses were the leading cause of deaths in 2016 in Butler County, according to Butler County Coroner Dr. Lisa Mannix.. She said that it is the third year in a row that drug overdoses claimed the top spot.

Kristina Latta-Landefeld, coalition coordinator for the Greater Hamilton Drug-Free Coalition, told the Journal-News that the effort to combat the issue is getting stronger, and churches can help in the fight.

It is really fascinating because we know that there is a system out there that works really well, she said. People in the field theologists, psychologists have tried to be able to link a system like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that does have a religious component to it, in order to determine what are the positive outcomes and how can that approach be used by churches

Latta-Landefeld added that any type of faith in a higher being or something similar can be an answer for some but not all.

But getting the churches involved speaks to a cultural approach that is important. People in Butler County are very involved in their churches, she said. It is just a part of looking for a solution just like getting health care, schools and law enforcement involved. We have to have a multi-faceted approach to dealing with this.

Kristy Duritsch of the Coalition for a Healthy Middletown said churches can pool resources and expertise within their congregations and focus on the community in which they live in or even a mile radius around their church. She feels this can help address the problem.

I definitely think they can have an impact - but more so on the prevention end of things, Duritsch said. For those in need of help, they can provide resources and even pay for programs for folks addicted. For those recovering they can provide a safe, supportive environment

She added that the problems of the world are now overwhelming, so starting small with the intention and focus aimed at the people they know in the community can make an impact.

Reaching the kids and families to help create a community who cares the simplest things can make a big impact, Duritsch said. For example, Jeri Lewis of Kingswell Ministries has adopted Sherman park to provide daily lunches and activities for the kids that come there.

Developing relationships and being consistent is key in addressing violence and drugs, according to Duritsch.

When there is trust, you can teach them a better way to react to resolve conflict, cope with disappointments, stress and dream for a better future and thus they are less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol as a way to cope or escape, she said.

James E. Wynn III is the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. He said pastors around the city have been meeting on regular basis, to discuss the drug issue and senseless violence.

We are trying to come up with a way to address these issues, Wynn said.

New Day Baptist Church Pastor Mike Pearl has already been keeping his congregation busy doing outreach that extends all-year. His church helps feed the hungry and doles out school supplies to the needy.

He figures the best approach is to stay consistent addressing the problem while not letting any of the youth fall through the cracks.

Pastor Dave Wess from New Life Community Church agrees that churches are ready and able to keep spreading Gods word, while also adding some tough love from the pulpit.

The rest is here:

Butler County experts feel churches can help in war on drugs - Hamilton Journal News

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a bill on Thursday that would allow state medical marijuana laws to supersede the current federal prohibition on weed. The bill is dubbed the CARERS Act, which stands for the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States Act.

"The fact is our marijuana laws in America are broken," Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said at the bill's unveiling at the Capitol. "They are savagely broken, and the jagged pieces are hurting American people."

The legislation would allow the varying laws legalizing some form of medical marijuana in 30 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam to stand. When it was introduced in 2015 it was the first ever medical marijuana bill introduced in the U.S. Senate. But times have changed since then.

For one, back then the bill only had three original sponsors: Booker, Democratic Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who has long supported medical marijuana as part if his libertarian platform. Now it has six, adding Democratic Sen. Al Franken and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mike Lee. The other big change from 2015: Donald Trump now occupies the Oval Office.

While running for president Trump said marijuana laws should be decided at the state level, but then he tapped marijuana-hating Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general.

It just came to lightthat Sessions privately sent a letter to congressional leaders in May asking them to undo a provision in federal law that bars his Justice Department from going after legal marijuana businesses.

"I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime," Sessions penned. "The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives."

But the new bill's proponents argue Sessions' thinking is misguided, especially when it comes to people gripped with epilepsy and those who suffer from seizures who report cannabidiol, or CBD as it's commonly known, is a miracle cure thatcuts their seizures down as much as 45 percent.

"I dare him to sit down with families and listen to their stories and then pursue a policy like he's advocating for now," Booker says of Sessions' letter going after medical marijuana businesses. The CARERS Act would take CBD off the list of controlled substances, which would allow children in states where medical marijuana isn't legal to access the life changing oil.

While the bill's proponents know their proposal faces an uphill battle, they also say they believe the effort is quickly picking up steam, especially because many red states have now passed some form of legal weed. "I believe things are changing and they're changing fast," Sen. Gillibrand tellsRolling Stone. "I think we will get the support we need."

The legislation also allows the nation's veterans to access legal weed by removing the current restriction that bars doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals from prescribing pot to their patients. But it doesn't go near the politically touchy subject of what to do with the nation's eight states and the District of Columbia that have opted to legalize weed for recreational use. But many of the bill's proponents say that effort will come later.

Correction: A previous version of this article listed one of the supporters as Steve Cohen. He is a supporter of the bill in the House, not the Senate.

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Medical Marijuana Bill Aims to Fight Jeff Sessions' Renewed War on Drugs - RollingStone.com

Do not let author Don Winslow get started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Beauregard, Winslow practically sneers, referring to the AG by his very Confederate-sounding middle name, wants to take us back to the good old days, when we were throwing two million people into prison. He thinks the war on drugs was a good idea, and that we were winning. But drugs are more plentiful, powerful, and cheaper than ever before. If thats victory, I would hate to see defeat.

Winslow is, of course, referring to Sessions recent order that all federal prosecutors pursue the strictest possible sentences, including for non-violent drug offenders. Winslow sees this as a return to a failed policy of mass incarceration, and hes one writer who knows what hes talking about. The critically acclaimed authors most famous worksThe Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Cartelare centered on drugs and drug policy. His new novel, The Force, is also drug-centered, examining corruption in the New York Police Department and featuring a crooked cop named Denny Malone who, along with his partners, steals millions of dollars worth of heroin after a major bust. Think of it as a cross between a hard-core New York tale by Richard Price and the classic 1981 Sidney Lumet film Prince of the City.

Its that readable, and that bleak.

Ive always wanted to write a New York cop book, says Winslow, 63, who was born in the city and raised in Rhode Island but whose best known books are set in California (where he now lives) and Mexico. Back when I was living in New Yorkwhere he worked for a chain of movie theaters, and as a private investigatorI would see classic crime films like Serpico, Prince of the City, and The French Connection, and theyre part of the reason I became a crime writer. So after I finished The Cartel [set mostly in Mexico, and soon to be filmed by Ridley Scott], I wanted to get back to New York.

The Force is so awash in corruption, from the lowest beat cop to the mayors office, that it seems hyper-unreal. But Winslow insists what hes writing about is the real deal, that every 20 years or so there is a major corruption scandal in the NYPD. He points to a recent bribes-to-obtain-gun-licenses probe involving crooked cops and prosecutors, but adds that its not just the NYPD, its Chicago, the LAPD, Baltimore. One of the points I was trying to make in the book, we always talk about cops being corrupt, but what about lawyers, judges, the mayors office? Its not worse in New York, its just largereverything is larger in New York.

Winslow is no hard-core cop hater. In fact, researching and writing The Force, which took several years, helped him sympathize with the extremely tough job the police have to do, and the harsh conditions they have to deal with.

The thing that surprised me a little bit about cops, he says, is how deeply they feel what they do. You tend to think they get jaded, and they do, and they come across as stoic, but when you talk to them about cases and stories, the work has an impact on them. When you watch TV shows, you see them joking about victimsand that happensbut when they talk about certain victims and crimes they have more empathy than you would be led to believe. I talked to veteran cops who sat there with tears streaming down their faces talking about their cases.

In fact, the cops in The Force, no matter how corrupt, believe they are fighting the good fight, taking down drug dealers, gangbangers, and murderers by any means necessary. Malone, who considers himself the king of Manhattan North, heads an elite squad of detectives given unrestricted authority to rid their area of human scum. The parallels with the Daniel Ciello character (played by Treat Williams) in Prince of the City are unmistakable, including the ultimate fall from gracepressed by the Feds, both men wind up informing on their partners.

Winslow says that if nothing else, his book shows how complicated a cops life can be, how complicated issues of right and wrong can be. This guy Malone gets himself into a trap where he has no good choices. Who do you betray?

But back to Jeff Sessions and Winslows other bte noire, The Wall. Winslow has long argued that the only way to break the cartels is to legalize all drugs, and has even written about it for The Daily Beast. He has said the drug war is unwinnable, that there is no end in sight. And the Trump administrations attempts to build a barrier across our southern border, accompanied by a hardline prosecutorial stance, have not changed his mind.

Trump and these guys claim to be businessmen, he says, but they dont understand economics. Lets assume you could build a wall, and it could be a deterrent, but it does not affect demand. Anything you do to make the supply more difficult, raises the supplies and raises the profits. Thats just basic high school economics.

Winslow believes that whatever gets builtThere will be something and they will call it a wall, he saysis a fantasy. Certain parts of the terrain make wall building impractical; some of the wall would have to pass through privately owned lands, which invites endless lawsuits; and part of the wall would have to pass through territory owned on both sides of the border by the Tohono Oodham tribe, creating even more legal issues.

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Besides, says Winslow, any wall would actually have huge gates, and they are called San Diego, El Paso, and Laredo. Most of the drugs come in by trucks, and everyone knows this, but it would be impossible to minutely inspect every truck crossing the borderover 2 million annually in Laredo alone.

So whats the end game? You have to wait it out, says Winslow. Towards the end of the Obama administration, they started to get realistic about drug and prison policies. Now we are going back to the old days, but I think there are people who are rational on this topic. Its an issue where right and left meet, but its a generational thing also. I think its a matter of waiting for some people to become extinct. Because they never change.

Read the original:

Don Winslow Artfully Demolishes the War on Drugs - Daily Beast

Congress is considering a bill that wouldexpand the federal government's ability to pursue the war on drugs, granting new power to the attorney general to set federal drug policy.

The bipartisan legislation, sponsored bypowerful committee chairs in both chambers of Congress,would allowthe attorney general to unilaterally outlaw certain unregulated chemical compounds on a temporary basis.It would create a special legal category for these drugs, the first time in nearly 50 years that the Controlled Substances Act has been expanded in this way. And it would set penalties, potentially including mandatory minimum sentences, for the manufacture and distribution of these drugs.

This bill provides federal law enforcement with new tools to ensure those peddling dangerous drugs, which can be lethal, are brought to justice, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is sponsoring her chamber's version of the bill with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), said in an emailed statement. It also explicitly exempts simple possession from any penalties, instead targeting those who manufacture and traffic these drugs and opioids.

The bill, introduced last week and known as theas the Stop the Importation and Trafficking of Synthetic Analogues (SITSA) Act of 2017, now moves to theSenate Judiciary Committee, which Grassley chairs and where Feinstein is the top-ranking Democrat. The House bill is listed as HR 2851.

Under current law,all psychoactive substances are placed in one of five schedules designating the drugs' risk of abuse and medical potential. Schedule 1 is the most restrictive, reserved for drugs such as LSD, heroin and marijuana. Schedule 5 is the least restrictive category, which includes medications such as low-dose codeine cough syrup.

Illicit-drug manufacturers wishing to avoid these designations often make subtle changes to a drug's chemistry, creating slightly different, and hence legal, substances that producesimilar psychoactive effects in users.

Illegal drug traffickers and importers are able to circumvent the existing scheduling regime by altering a single atom or molecule of a currently controlled substance in a laboratory, thereby creating a substance that is lawful, but often highly dangerous, addictive and even deadly, Grassley and Feinstein saidin a fact sheeton the Senate bill.

The SITSA Act would create a new schedule, Schedule A, for substances that are chemically similar to already-regulated drugs. The attorney general would be able to place new compounds in Schedule A for a period of up to five years. Critics say this amounts to giving the attorney general the power to unilaterally write federal drug policy.

The bill gives the attorney general a ton of power in terms of scheduling drugs and pursuing penalties, said Michael Collins, a deputy director at the Drug Policy Alliance. This is a giant step backwards, and really it's doing the bidding of Jeff Sessions as he tries to escalate the war on drugs.

Under current policy, an attorney general may temporarily schedule a substance for up to twoyears and only after demonstrating the drug's history and current pattern of abuse; the scope, duration and significance of abuse; and what, if any, risk there is to the public health.

The new bill extends the temporary scheduling duration to five years for Schedule A substances and eliminates the requirement for analyzing the drug's abuse record and its potential risk to public health.

The bill is partially a response to a spike in overdose deaths from the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl and chemically similar drugs in recent years. Fentanyl's uncontrolled synthetic analogues have come to represent the deadly convergence of the synthetic drug problem and the opioid epidemic, Feinstein and Grassley wrote. The billadds 13 synthetic analogues of fentanyl to Schedule A immediately.

But criticsare worried that the bill's language could be used to justify bans on all manner of substances that are not particularly lethal or dangerous. The drug known as kratom is one particular area of concern.Experts say the risks with using the drug are remarkably low, andpeople who take it say it has helped them quit using alcohol, opiates and other, much deadlier substances.

Because the drug's primarychemicals act in a fashion similar to some opioids, kratom advocates fear that the new bill would allow the Justice Department to outlaw the drug, as it triedunsuccessfullyto do last year.

Some experts say that the fentanyl epidemic is proving to be so lethal that it may be worthwhile to experiment with different legislative approaches, even if they come with drawbacks.

The fentanyls are so awful that I think it is entirely reasonable to try a fentanyl supply control strategy that has only a very modest chance of success, said JonathanCaulkins, a drug-policy expert at Carnegie-Mellon University. He added that it might be wise, however, to include automatic sunset provisions to such strategies in case they prove ineffective.

Link:

Congress is considering a bill that would expand Jeff Sessions's power to escalate the war on drugs - Washington Post

In March, rapper and activist Talib Kweli got so frustrated with Donald Trump news, he decided to make a visit to the US Capitol.

He spent about a week listening to anti-Trump figures and emerged with a manifesto for activism in the Trump era. Hashtags and RTs are cute and make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but without actual flesh on the ground, there is no movement, he wrote in Medium post that called for sustained protest and political engagement.

Its a theme he came back to several times in an interview with me earlier this month: There are people who really have convinced themselves that all they need to do is make a cool Facebook post, he said. That type of shit is really, really, extra corny.

Kweli, a fixture of the New York underground rap scene in the late 90s and early 2000s, has weaved activism into his music for his entire career. His collaborations with Mos Def, together called Black Star, and solo work have spawned multiple albums meditating on issues like mass incarceration, misogyny and police brutality. Throughout his career, hes advocated for social justice, protesting and speaking at Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests.

Today, Kweli runs the independent record label Javotti Media and continues to make music, his latest a collaboration record The Seven with rapper Styles P. He continues his political advocacy and vocally opposes the Trump administration.

I chatted with Kweli on the phone about the danger of a renewed war on drugs, why we need to engage with Twitter trolls, and fake woke-ness on social media.

Whats your reaction to the recent Jeff Sessions memo and the pullback of Obama-era criminal justice laws? Some are saying this will be the return of the worst days of the war on drugs.

The only thing I can say is that the people who support Trump and Sessions and sat before him knowing he said Elizabeth Warren is Pocahontas, grab them by the pussy doesnt bother them, all the Mexicans are rapists doesnt bother them all of these things that Trump has said, if none of those things bother them maybe when Sessions comes for their pot, theyll start to care. If humanity doesnt matter to you, accountability doesnt matter to you, bigotry doesnt matter maybe when it comes to you getting high, then maybe youll start to care.

So you feel like theres been a cultural shift in attitude toward drug use?

Oh, absolutely. Especially when it comes to weed, we shifted to a society of everyone smoking pot. We all smoke weed. We pretend we dont, but the whole society does. Even your hardcore racist KKK dude is smoking a big fat blunt.

Todays libertarians, I know many who are not racist, who are not bigots they just believe in certain things about the government. Theyre really about their freedoms. A lot of them overlap when it comes to government regulation and states rights with the Confederates and the Nazis. But a lot of them know people with meth habits or heroin habits that they have sympathy for. Thats been the shift and change, pretty recently. They see the effect of the drug war on these people directly.

Given that cultural change, do you think Obama went far enough in terms of trying to dismantle some of the worst war on drugs laws? Hes faced criticism that he should have done more.

Well, in order to be the United States president, you have to be certain things. You need to be a Christian. You need to be an imperialist. Before Obama, you needed to be white. At this point, you need to be a man. Obama was never going to be a revolutionary. He has always been a pragmatist and always been someone who has tried to work with both sides.

So when people say Obama didnt go far enough, from my perspective I think he did what he could do considering the crazy amount of obstructionism he faced. I think Obama being a black man and having that experience allows him to see things from a different perspective than most US presidents before him.

Now, intentions dont matter as much as results matter when it comes to policy. But I do think his intentions were to roll back mass incarceration he let out more prisoners out than any other recent president, and he told me personally that he wanted his legacy to be criminal justice reform. He said that to a room full of artists. I think Obama used what he thought could work to try to help more traditionally grassroots causes. But I think theres different ways to do it and his way was definitely working within the system. His way was not revolutionary, and I dont think he ever pretended to be.

Youve always been critical of consumer culture in your music. Do you think the more consumer elements of our culture and celebrity worship are all things that led to Trump?

We worship the dollar. Our holidays are Black Friday and Christmas. Our religion is consumerism and Trump is a patron saint of that religion. Anybody who was in New York City in the 80s knows the whole concept of greed is good, capitalism is good that was being sold as mainstream culture. We had yuppies, people celebrating capitalism, people celebrating credit. That was a big thing in the 80s you spent what you didnt have. And Trump, with his casinos and real estate, those were businesses all about spending what you dont have. And he sold that image. He put his name on anything. He was an empty suit.

And that image is one reason why Trump has been repeatedly name checked in lots of rap songs although youve never done this in your own music. What do you think about that switch from admiration to criticism for so many people in the hip-hop world during and after this election?

I hesitate to say that rapping about Trump, seen as a symbol of opulence or a symbol of decadent wealth, was necessarily admiration. When you hear him in music back in the day, it wasnt as much admiration as it was acknowledgement for what he represents.

In the 80s and early 90s, especially New York rap, you heard a lot of references to Trump. In 96 and 97, Raekwon was rapping Guess whos the black Trump. But they arent saying Im admiring him as a human being. They are saying hes the universal symbol of wealth. Its actually very dehumanizing of Trump. Its not about who he really is. Its not like theyre saying I admire the man for his politics or the way he treats women.

As far as the activist or the conscious community, Trump was always known as the guy trying to get the Central Park Five on death row. He took out a full-page ad in the New York Post saying they were guilty when they turned out to be innocent.

I was 15 when this happened. I was the same age as those kids when they got caught up in that. It was vivid. They were called the wolf pack by the media. So any random group of black kids was also called a wolf pack. I remember going to the mall and they made a rule at the mall that if theres more than four of yall, you cant walk together cause then you constitute a wolf pack. They wasnt happening to the white kids. The Central Park Five had a very real effect on my life.

Im really impressed by how much you engage with trolls online. But there is also a line of thinking on the left that engaging with them legitimizing them in some way or that that tactic isnt going to change any minds.

I would believe that if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were president. Id believe it if you said when you ignore the trolls, theyll go away. But racism is a disease, and what disease do you know of that, if you ignore it, it goes away? Nothing. So this whole ignore thing thats the result of an overly polite, nonconfrontational society, and thats from people, and some on the left as well, who benefit from the racist status quo.

The fact of the matter is, now theyre changing visa applications so they can look at your social media accounts. We have Senate congressional hearings with Republicans and Democrats saying that Russians bots have influenced the election with fake news. We got AI running around this motherfucker, and people are saying we can ignore the online space. That the online world isnt real. We dont have the luxury to say that.

If Im a guy whos only on Twitter, then you have every right to criticize me. But Im not that guy. When Twitters gone, Ill still be doing what I do in the flesh, whether its making music for the movement or physically putting my boots on the ground. But I agree that just tweeting or just posting on Facebook is wack. There are people who really have convinced themselves that all they need to do is make a cool Facebook post. That type of shit is really, really, extra corny.

Speaking of, I saw in a recent interview that you used scare quotes around the word woke.

People be like Im woke when they just arent. Others use it to disparage people of color. Some people think its a trendy word and dont want to use it just to be trendy. Its just become a meme.

Maybe when you hear the term woke, youre thinking of people who may have good intentions but who are not really going to marches or rallies or doing the actual work. But thats your association with the word. There is also a large number of people who are not maybe as savvy as a journalist or as a rapper. Who say woke and mean it sincerely. They dont know, theyve never been to a march.

But let me go further theres a lot of people who organize and rally, contribute money, and still use the term woke. Who are not knowing where the trend, where the culture has moved who are not as hip as you and I might be. Thats why I evoke the term at all because of them.

What are your thoughts on the debate over punching Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who got punched at the Trump inauguration protest in a viral video?

I am anti-violent. I dont believe that violence solves problems. But I am pro-karma. So when I see karma play itself out, I am not mad at it. Would I be the guy to punch Richard Spencer? That wouldnt be me. He would have to physically threaten me for me to want to punch him, me personally. But when I see a white boy going all out of his way to use his privilege that white boy who punched him knew that he wasnt going to get shot by the cops as quickly as a black dude I think, well the right calls us snowflakes all the time. Okay, this guy isnt a snowflake!

I am not crying for any ethno-nationalists or any guy who likes Pepe the frog to get punched in the face. Thats the consequence of that free speech theyre always talking about. Freedom of speech isnt freedom from consequence.

Whats the difference between the politically conscious rappers of today versus your generation?

The most glaring difference is with the hip hop that I listened to when I was growing up, the consciousness was more wear-it-on-your-sleeve. There were songs about blackness, wearing dashikis, all coming from a strong pro-black strain in our community.

As far as the music artists now that are pushing that pro-black message, theyre more in tune with the sonics and the frequencies of what the average person not as studied is on. So, I bring up Kendrick and J. Cole a lot. Those are artists that are making songs that are highly successful and when you hear them, you dont automatically think consciousness or activism. But when you listen to the layers, its like a Trojan horse.

These younger artists who are conscious, who are inspired by my generation, they have gotten better, as they should have, at the messaging to new audiences with the way that they are making their music.

Whats your message to progressives and activists today?

I cant really say that Im in a position to give a message to the activists. My job in that situation is to show solidarity with people doing the work and not tell them what to do. Its for me to listen, for them to tell me what to do. Thats the best way I can be an ally.

Everybody else you gotta put your flesh on the ground. Listen to what these front-lines activists are saying. Just posting isnt enough.

Read more:

Talib Kweli on the war on drugs, internet trolls, and how "woke" has become a meme - Vox

Earlier this month, the Philadelphia rock-and-roll band the War on Drugs announced the follow-up to 2014s Lost in the Dream, with Holding On, a six-minute American epic shimmering with rhythm and melody and delightful shades of early Springsteen. The song is from the forthcoming album A Deeper Understanding, and, yesterday, the band dbuted its new video, starring Frankie Faison, best known for his role as Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell, in David Simons The Wire.

The video, directed by Brett Haley, is a plainspoken, cinematic tribute to love, interracial marriage, and small-town American values. Faison appears as a widower struggling to break a cycle of boredom in his golden years. The concept was developed by the actress Krysten Ritter, who is dating the bands front man, Adam Granduciel. I went out to get our weekend coffees and when I came back Krysten had written up a whole treatment of her own and pitched me her idea, he wrote in an e-mail. I thought it was really great from the second she delivered it. Ritter had recently finished a movie with Haley, and she and Granduciel both suggested the director at the same time. They started shooting in Brewster, New York, just ten days later.

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Courts Loving v. Virginia decision, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in America. Interracial couples are celebrating the landmark case by sharing personal stories and testimonials online. The Holding On video, already a tearjerker, is a powerful addition to those contributions.

Follow this link:

Watch a Tribute to the Loving Decision by the War on Drugs - The New Yorker

The medical marijuana community in Maine is hoping that Trump will respect the 10th amendment (state's rights).

Whatever happened to the Republicans supposed enduringlove for states rights? This is a question worth asking because Jeff Sessions latest move to impede states from legal medical and recreational marijuana use demonstratesthe exact opposite. In May, he asked Congress to allow him lift the Rohrabacher-Farr amendmentin order to prosecute medical marijuana providers stating that it would inhibit (the Justice Departments) authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act. This will have a deleterious impact on a number of lawful marijuana growers and medical providers around the country. And in Maine, people are really worried.

If Congress supports the request from Sessions, thousands of medical marijuana providers and related businesses that support an estimated 50,000 medical marijuana patients in Maine could face federal criminal prosecution or other sanctions.

Waitin addition to this being federal overreach into states rights, arent Republicans supposed to be the party that supports local businesses? And the rights of patients to make their own medical decisions? Talk about hypocrisy. But none of that willstop Sessions. Hes still trying to make the case that this is about stopping illegal drug use and drug trafficking. Except it wont. Medical marijuana, in particular, has been helpful in stopping prescription drug abuse as well as helping to treat individuals with a number of chronic medical conditions. And marijuana advocates know that this is shameful and misguided.

[Catherine Lewis, chairwoman for the Medical Marijuana Caregivers of Maine] who called Sessions and the Trump administration uneducated for associating marijuana with the opiate addiction epidemic said Sessions request wasnt a surprise, but was met with dismay and disappointment by caregivers and patients with whom she has spoken.

Its downright frightening. Without us here, there are people who will suffer, there are children who will have untreatable seizures, she said. There will be parents and grandparents who could go to jail for doing nothing more than trying to saved loves ones.

Go here to see the original:

Medical marijuana industry in Maine prepares to fight Jeff Sessions' nonsensical War on Drugs - Daily Kos

I was driving taxi in the dead of night, five to 10 years ago, carrying several young men. One was telling about a party he had attended. It had "sex and any drug you wanted; the highest class party." The taxi fell silent, of course, as people reacted to such a confidence being voiced behind the ears of an unknown cabbie.

Do you recognize drug pushing when you see it? Like a Tupperware party or a Pampered Chef presentation, it has a multi-level retail structure. After he has partied often enough, the host asks him to start paying; or get free drugs by giving sex or bringing friends. These friends, in their turn, will give sex or bring friends. Friend-to-friend sales are the most effective kind.

There's a technique for recruiting beyond one's circles of influence. The gang will watch a target, and see who her friends are, and learn her interests. They'll befriend her, "We have so much in common!" Of course, they'll introduce a new interest - drugs. Friend-to-friend.

There's drug pushing in the legal market, too. Purdue Pharma marketed an addictive drug, saying it was non-addictive. Naive doctors prescribed too freely. Of course addictions happened.

That was bad enough, but then the drug warriors - rogue federal agents - did real damage by threatening to arrest the doctors, and forcing these new addicts out onto the black market: requiring sex, drug pushing and crime. And causing 59,000 overdose deaths in 2016.

The "war on drugs" increases the rates of new addictions, overdoses and crime; it's dirty, destructive and evil. Stop it.

Return the addicts to the doctor's office, to be stabilized, kept alive, and successful in their life pursuits.

More here:

Letter: War on drugs destructive and evil - Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Regina Reyes, head of ABS-CBN Integrated News and Current Affairs receives the SOPA 2017 award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting.

MANILA (UPDATE) - ABS-CBN News' six-part series on victims of the war on drugs in the Philippines took home the award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting at the Society of Publishers in Asia's (SOPA) 2017 Awards for Editorial Excellence.

The ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group's War On Drugs: The Unheard Voices bested entries from Channel News Asia and humanitarian news agency IRIN.

The report, developed for the web by ABS-CBN News Digital Media's multimedia unit, tells the stories of slain drug suspects and the families they left behind. It was published on October 27, 2016 on news.abs-cbn.com.

ABS-CBN Integrated News and Current Affairs head Regina Reyes received the prize during the SOPA Awards Gala Dinner at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Thursday night.

The series also received Honorable Mention for Excellence in Investigative Reporting.

SOPA was founded in 1982 to champion freedom of the press, promote excellence in journalism and endorse best practices for all local and regional publishing platforms in the Asia Pacific region, according to the organization.

It is a not-for-profit organization based in Hong Kong and representing international, regional and local media companies across Asia.

The annual SOPA Awards for Editorial Excellence serve as the world-class benchmark for quality journalism in the region, organizers said.

Continue reading here:

ABS-CBN report on drug war victims wins plum Asia journalism ... - ABS-CBN News

Jeff Sessions recently asked Congress to allow him to be able to prosecute medical marijuana providers, even though there are federal protections prohibiting that exact thing.

Heres what we know about Jeff Sessions: hes absolutely hell-bent on moving forward with a war on drugsdespite a lack ofevidence that itslinked to an uptick in crime and the fact that its incredibly unpopular with the American people. Sessions is particularly obsessed with marijuana, so much so that he has now asked Congress to allow him to prosecute medical marijuana providers, even though there are federal protections to prohibit the Justice Department from doing exactly that whichhave been in place since 2014.

The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment,prohibit the Justice Departmentfrom using federal funds to prevent certain states "from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana." [...]

Sessions argued that the amendment would "inhibit [the Justice Department's] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act." He continues:I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.

Lets get really clear on what Sessions is attempting to dohere. He is justifying his rabid obsession with drugs and locking up people of color by appealing to his fellow conservatives and their senseoflaw and order. Except none of this is based in any reality. The historic drug epidemic to which he refers is actually not an epidemic of marijuana abuse but instead of opioid abuse. The opioid epidemic is disproportionately affecting white America, and there is new research to suggest that its hitting nearly all age groups in rural and urban areas. This is a massive crisis. And there is no evidence whatsoever that focusing on medical marijuana will yield any kind of success in eliminating drug use in this country. Of course, it all depends on how one defines success. If you are defining success as the reduction of drug abuse and overdosesthen no, this absolutely will not work. But if your version of success is criminalizing marijuana, which we know sends more black and brown folks to prison and for longer, harsher sentences than it does white people (regardless of the fact that both blacks and whitesuse the drug at equal rates)then this plan is a home run.

See the article here:

Jeff Sessions continues his obsession with a war on drugs, this time targeting medical marijuana - Daily Kos