wbur COMMENTARY Mayor Dan Rivera's defense of an aggressive police officer, writes Alex Ramirez, is deeply troubling. Pictured: In this file photo, Luis Rivera, of Haverhill, is arrested by Lawrence Police Officers Carmen Purpora, front, and Eli Bernabe, in a supermarket parking lot in Lawrence on March 14, 2006. Rivera was charged in connection with shoplifting, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and possession of drug paraphernalia with intent to sell. (Steven Senne/AP)

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After college, in 2012, I moved back home to Lawrence, and nearly every dayI noticed unfamiliarcars, usually with New Hampshire plates, parked brieflyon the street outside my familys gray triple-decker.

I had grown up in that neighborhood, in that city, and I knew the occupants wereprobably buying drugs. My small street saw a lot of action it was a popular spot to abandon stolen cars. Unmarked police cars camped outside our home for drug busts a block or two away. Once, there was a murder in the neighborhood. During the manhunt, my dad and I were painting our garage. A man the suspect emerged from some nearby trees. Seconds later, a cop popped out of aminivan that had been driving down the street and aimed his gun at the man. My dad and I weredown-range from the cop's barrel. Dad told me to hide in the garage, but the man surrendered within moments.

So I had a gut-feeling about the (usually) white drivers and passengers fromNew Hampshire who parked outside our house,their car engines still running. That feeling was oftenconfirmed when I saw another vehicle pull up beside one of the cars, or a person walk over, and exchangesomething through the window.

My parents and even my grandmother, then in her late 80s, often confronted these strangers. Theyd ask who they were waiting for, call their bluff and tell them to leave. Sometimes theyd try to shout the customers away, bellowing from the porch or a window.My grandma a tough old Lithuanian whose parents were part of the early wave of European immigrants to Lawrence would grab her cane, shout and try to scare them off.

My grandma -- a tough old Lithuanian whose parents were part of the early wave of European immigrants to Lawrence -- would grab her cane, shout and try to scare them off.

These werent the wisest decisions. But my family felt they had to defend the block themselves. Sometimes they'd call the policewith descriptions of the cars outside our homeor ask for an occasional patrol down the street. Their requests went ignored.

Then, a few weeks ago, the Lawrence Police Department and the issue of outsiders buying drugs in the cityexploded. A video showed a Lawrence police officer dragging a young white man out of his carand forcing him to the ground. Locals have criticized the officers conduct, but Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera defended his actions in a now-deleted Facebook post.

The video is not pretty but, not inappropriate, he wrote. He said he understood why the cop got heated with the driver, and maintained that the vehicle had circled the neighborhood, clearly looking for drugs. It is necessary to let the outsiders know, they are not welcome, he added, ending on the all-caps rally cry that LAWRENCE WILL NOT BE YOUR DRUG MALL ANY MORE.

The text of the postcan still be found in a DigBoston column by Maya Shaffer, who also notes past incidents of LPDs questionable conduct. The driver, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, denied that he was searching for drugs.

Lawrence has problems with drug-related crimes, but a localized war on drugs wont solve that. Rather than scare white drug addicts away, it will send more young men of color into the prison system.

The content of Rivera's post isnt out of character. His campaign against Lawrences "drug mall" goes back to his early days in office. And his support for the police department was echoed in his initial opposition to Lawrences Trust Act, which prohibitedpolice from enforcing federal immigration law, fearingit would make itharderfor police to do their jobs. (The mayor now supports Lawrences "sanctuary city" status, and is suing Trumpto fightfederal funding penalties.)

However, the rhetoric about outsiders and his defense of the officers behavior is worrisome. Lawrence has problems with drug-related crimes, but a local war on drugs wont solve that. Rather than scare white drug addicts away, it will send more young men of color into the prison system.

Its hard to trust the idea of imbuing police with more reach, power and authority in a Latino-majority city. While there isnt much data nor media coverage on police brutality against Latinos, most information suggests its alreadya problem. In 2016, police killed 183 Latinos, 3.23 per million compared to 2.9 per million for whites. (In raw numbers, police kill more white people than anyone each year.) The numbers were higher in 2015 195 Latinos killed by police, or 3.45 per million. Given that some Latinos may identify as white or black, the toll could be even higher.Latinos who make up 17 percent of the population account for 23 percent of all traffic searches and nearly 30 percent of arrests.

Lawrence has always been a tough city. But being tough cant solve everything, including crime.

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Alejandro Ramirez Cognoscenti contributor Alejandro Ramirez is a freelance writer and the online editor of Spare Change News. He has an MFA in creative nonfiction.

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Why A War On Drugs In Lawrence Isn't The Answer And Could Create More Problems - WBUR

Lancaster Police Lt. Everett Moody on Thursday shows off the hidden compartment police found in a vehicle after an recent arrest. The compartment was in the center console. SENTINEL & ENTERPRISE PHOTOS/JOHN LOVE

LANCASTER -- On the surface, it looked like any other Pontiac G6. Inside the car, CD cases and articles of clothing were strewn about, animal hair from an unknown pet clung to the carpet, a child's doll sat forgotten on the back seat.

But there was something else among the clutter that immediately caught Lancaster police Sgt. Patrick Mortimer's attention.

The black sticky glue leaking from the car's center console was the first clue.

"I saw that, and I knew right away that it wasn't from something factory installed," said Mortimer. "The other officer I was with thought I was crazy, but I kept telling him that I knew there was something in there."

After finding a motor hidden deep within the car's dashboard, the officers were able to activate an aftermarket option. Turning on that hidden motor caused the lower half of center console to suddenly swing out from beneath the radio, revealing a hidden compartment containing $7,000 in cash.

What began as a fairly routine vehicle stop and felony warrant arrest became the Lancaster Police Department's first encounter with an electronically controlled secret compartment in a suspect's car.

As the opioid epidemic has carried on, the technology drug sellers and smugglers have used to make their living has continued to evolve. As a result, departments throughout the state are getting their officers trained to spot the hidden compartments or "drug hides" that are continuously found in the vehicles of suspects.

"This was very professionally done.

Just two days before officers in Lancaster made their discovery, police in Nashua, found a similar electronic compartment inside the car of a Lawrence man who was hiding roughly 130 grams of cocaine.

A closeup of the console area. SENTINEL & ENTERPRISE PHOTOS/JOHN LOVE

And 10 days earlier, police in Ipswich arrested a Boston man after finding large quantities of cocaine and fentanyl in the hidden compartments of his car.

"It almost seems like the more law enforcement learns, the more the criminals learn," said James Bazzinotti, whose company PACE New England offers the training course used by officers in Lancaster. "Everything the officers are learning now, the criminal element learned a few years ago. ... We're always a little bit behind."

Over the course of the training, Bazzinotti said officers learn all the clues to finding drug hides that range from the low-tech oil cans with false bottoms to the professionally installed electronic systems that cost more than the cars they're installed in.

Though extra spaces, or voids, can be found inside of any vehicle, and are frequently used by lower-level drug sellers, more complex ways of hiding illicit substances continue to be developed.

In many cases, compartments aren't opened by simply flipping a switch but by initiating a sequence of settings within the car, Bazzinotti explained. A single button on a dashboard might open a secret compartment, but the car might have to be in neutral, the heat might have to be dialed to a specific setting, and a single seat belt might have to be buckled in before that button can actually work.

"It's usually an owner-operator type of mechanic who does this kind of work," Bazzinotti said. "They might work on cars but supplement their income by doing this."

There's no law in Massachusetts against having a hidden compartment in your car, and no law against installing them either. However, mechanics can be arrested on a conspiracy charge if it can be proven that they knew what the hidden compartment was going to be used for, Bazzinotti said.

States like Ohio, California, Georgia, Illinois and Oregon have adopted prohibitions on vehicle compartments and attempts to pass similar legislation have been made in Massachusetts as well.

In 2008, a bill was submitted to the state Legislature that would have made it illegal to own or install a hidden compartment in a vehicle, though it never made it to the House floor.

Fitchburg Mayor Stephen DiNatale, who had sponsored the petition while serving as a state representative of the 3rd Worcester District, said he was inspired to file the bill after hearing about the prevalence of hidden compartments from local law enforcement officials.

"From what they showed me, it was pretty elaborate devices and modifications that were being made to these vehicles," DiNatale said. "These detectives have to go through a great deal of effort and work to find these things and yet there's no requisite penalty for having them."

He also explained that the bill had failed to gain any traction among other legislators largely because some felt its inclusion of vehicles such as aircrafts or boats was too broad.

"They didn't want the legislation to be so far-reaching that it would affect law-abiding citizens," DiNatale said.

The bill was refiled by current Fitchburg state Rep. Stephan Hay in January.

There is no way of measuring how many of these secret compartments are actually found and how many go unnoticed, but Mortimer estimates that a large majority of them go undetected.

However, the officers in Lancaster are undeterred.

"When you find one of these things it gets really exciting because it's not every day that you find one of these," he said. "Now everybody in the department wants to get trained."

Follow Peter Jasinski on Twitter and Tout @PeterJasinski53

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Hidden war on drugs - Sentinel & Enterprise

As Washington continues to wade through health care and immigration legislation, theres another battle on the horizon, with those in favor of marijuana legalization demanding answers from the administration on where it stands.

At times, Trumps position has shifted, though, as of late, hes claimed to be in favor of medical marijuana, stopping short of endorsing the full legalization of the drug or revealing whether hell interfere with state rights to do so. Meanwhile, newly installed Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been crystal clear about his own stance, infamously stating, Good people dont smoke marijuana

Now, Massachusetts and Maine, the latest states to legalize the drug, are left in limbo. Whereas the Obama administration had remained largely hands-off, allowing states to make their own laws regarding marijuana legalization and reducing sentences for a number of small drug offenses, under Sessions, the Justice Department may be poised to reverse that trend.

Last month, White House press secretary Sean Spicer alluded to such, telling reporters, I do believe that youll see greater enforcement. Theres a big difference between the medical use and recreational use, which is something the Department of Justice will be further looking into.

Since declaring drug abuse as enemy No. 1, the United States has doggedly pursued the failed War on Drug crusade, often at the expense of its own citizens. Coined in June 1971,the Nixon administration struck hard, increasing federal drug agencies and implementing harsh tactics that included mandatory sentencing. By 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy would admit that the global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.

They added, Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.

But, of course, we already knew that.

Even more disheartening, much of the drug war was by design, as revealed by John Ehrlichman, former Nixon domestic-policy chief and a key figure during the Watergate scandal. Ehrlichman admitted in a 1994 interview that, The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people.

He added, You understand what Im saying? 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 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.

The damage was devastating to the Black community. By disproportionately targeting Blacks and other minorities, prison rates exploded, each administration playing its own role. This includes President Clintonwho, despite being immensely popular, was directly responsible for increasing the prison population by over 673,000 during his presidency. Of that injustice, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker told ABCs This Week with George Stephanopoulos, We now have more African-Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850s.

A study by the Justice Policy Institute revealed, Under President Bill Clinton, the number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction doubled and grew more than it did under the previous 12 years of Republican rule.

At just 12 percent of the U.S. population, African-American men are now 13 times more likely to be sent to prison for drug charges than their white counterparts. And, despite using illegal substances at roughly the same rate, studies show that African-Americans are still apt to receive longer sentences. Human Rights Watch says, The disparities are particularly tragic in individual states where Black men are sent to federal prison on drug charges at 57 times greater than White men.

As Ava DuVernays critically acclaimed 13th illustrates, though the 13th amendment formally abolished slavery and indentured servitude, the U.S. has continued to profit from free labor, now supplied via mass incarceration. By enacting stiff penalties for minor drug offenses, the United States prison population has soared, boosted by millions of Black and brown bodies.

Its a reality that entrepreneur Wanda James, widely credited as the first African-American to own a dispensary in Colorado, knows all too well. After being jailed for weed possession, her own brother was sentenced to 10 years in prison and forced to pick cotton in Texas.

It was then that James first likened the prison industry to a repackaged version of slavery, later explaining to Official Black Wall Street, Well, the whole Black and Latino thing is mind-boggling and to understand whats happening, you have to understand the prison system and the prison industrial complex. America was built on slave labor. It always has been.

She added to High Times, To have a Black man picking cotton seemed ridiculous. Where I went to school the University of Colorado my friends and I would sit out on the front stoop of the dorm and smoke weed. Cops would walk by and be like, Hey, put that away. Wed put it away, and I had never known that people were actually arrested for pot. I always thought it was a ticket.

Using her brothers story as inspiration, James opened a dispensary in Denver, joining just one percent of Black entrepreneurs in the cannabis industry. But with a shift in administration, she and others like her may now face roadblocks of their own, thanks in part to Sessions staunch anti-legalization ideology.

Making it clear that he will not bend, Sessions recently told reporters, I dont think America is going to be a better place when people of all ages, and particularly young people, are smoking pot. I believe its an unhealthy practice and current levels of THC in marijuana are very high compared to what they were a few years ago and were seeing real violence around that.

He added, States, they can pass the laws they choose. I would just say it does remain a violation of federal law to distribute marijuana throughout any place in the United States, whether a state legalizes it or not.

With neighboring states, including Nebraska, currently waging their own war against Colorados marijuana boom and with Sessions at the helm, it may become even harder for African-American entrepreneurs like James to prosper in the industry.

In truth, America does have a drug problem, but its not weed. Rather, its the opioid and heroin epidemic currently ravishing the nations heartland, suburbs and elsewhere. Much like marijuana was used as a scapegoat during Nixons time, under the Trump administration, it may once again become a catalyst for funneling more Black and brown bodies into private prisons across the nation.

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Is AG Jeff Sessions Quietly Waging a Second 'War on Drugs'? - Atlanta Black Star

Among the first things that the Congress chief ministerial candidate in Punjab, Amarinder Singh, has promised to do after he assumes power is to tackle the drug menace by choking the supply of such intoxicants in four weeks. Anybody involved in the drug scourge will be dealt in accordance with law, howsoever powerful he may be. I have said within four weeks we will tackle this drugs problem," Singh told a crowded press conference in Chandigarh on Saturday. The increasing number of drug-abuse cases has been one of the poll planks of both the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The parties alleged that the drug menace and cases of drug abuse had seen a huge increase during the Akali regime under its patronage.

That apart, incidents of sacrilege, which hit several parts of the state, would also be investigated, he said.

Singh said his party had committed itself to providing good governance, besides focusing on health and education.

The Congress manifesto included the waiver of farm loans, a promise the new government will find tough to keep.

A farm debt waiver will have massive financial implications, particularly for an agrarian state like Punjab, and it will impact financial discipline, but given that in the last two years there has been a drought in North India, the new state government should consider such a relief but should keep it limited to small and marginal farmers, that is those who own less than two hectares, PK Joshi, South Asia director, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), told Business Standard.

Sanjeeb Mukherjee

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Punjab poll promises: War on drugs, farm loan waiver - Business Standard

Vigilio Mirano didnt stand a chance.On Sept. 27, 2016, Mirano received a letter from local government officials in the Manila slum where he lived with his wife and two children implicating him as a drug user and ordering him to appear at a mass surrender ceremony on Sept. 30.

Hours later, four armed men dressed in black and wearing face masks burst into his home, dragged him into the outside alley and shot him six times in full view of his horrified family. The killers then drove away unimpeded through a nearby police checkpoint. A police report stated that Mirano had drawn a gun on anti-drug police and died in an exchange of gunfire. Witnesses call that account false.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte holds a compilation of pictures of people involved in drugs, as he speaks during a meeting in Davao city, southern Philippines. February 2, 2017.

2017 Reuters/Lean Daval Jr.

Mirano is a victim of the war on drugs declared by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and which Philippine national police personnel and unidentified gunmen have mostly waged in Manilas poorest areas. Dutertes drug-war foot soldiers have been chillingly efficient: the anti-drug campaigns death toll surpassed 7,000 at the end of January when the police stopped issuing weekly updated kill statistics.

Duterte has consistently justified the 2,555 killings acknowledged by the police between July 1, 2016 and Jan. 31, as a legitimate police response to armed suspects who fought back. Dutertes government has repeatedly dismissedallegations that the police have deployed death squads in a campaign of summary killings under the guise of anti-drug operations.

But research by Human Rights Watch into the death of Mirano and 31 other individuals killed since Dutertes election exposes the governments narrative of its drug war as a blatant falsehood. Interviews with witnesses to killings, relatives of victims and analysis of police records expose a damning pattern of unlawful police conduct designed to paint a veneer of legality over summary executions.

While the Philippine national police have publicly sought to distinguish between suspects killed while resisting arrest and killings by unknown gunmen or vigilantes, Human Rights Watch found no such distinction in the cases investigated. In several cases, the police dismissed allegations of involvement and instead classified such killings as found bodies or deaths under investigation when only hours before the suspects had been in police custody. Such cases call into question government assertions that the majority of killings were carried out by vigilantes or rival drug gangs.

The cases analyzed by Human Rights Watch showed planning and coordination by the police and in some cases local civilian officials. These killings were not carried out by rogue officers or by vigilantes operating separately from the authorities. Research indicates that police involvement in the killings of drug suspects extends far beyond the officially acknowledged cases of police killings in buy-bust operations.

Efforts to get accountability for drug-war deaths have gone nowhere. Philippine national police Director-General Ronaldo Dela Rosa has slammedcalls for a thorough and impartial probe of the killings as legal harassment and said it dampens the morale of police officers. Duterte and some of his key ministers have praised the killings as proof of the success of the anti-drug campaign. Duterte and Secretary of Justice Vitaliano Aguirre III have justified the trashing of the rule of law and due legal process for drug personalities by questioning the humanity of suspected drug users and drug dealers. On Feb. 24 police arrested the highest profile critic of the drug war, Senator Leila de Lima, on politically motivated drug charges following a relentless government campaignof harassment and intimidation because of her outspoken criticism of Dutertes war on drugs and her demands for accountability.

As the death toll rises, even after an official suspension of police anti-drug operations in January following revelations of thebrutal killing of a South Koreanbusinessman by alleged anti-drug police, its clear that the Philippine government has no intention to investigate these unlawful killings.

Thats why Human Rights Watch is calling on the United Nations to establish an independent international investigation into the killings. Dutertes repeated calls for anti-drug killings could constitute acts instigating law enforcement to commit murder. His statements encouraging vigilantes could constitute incitement to violence. Duterte, senior officials, and others implicated in unlawful killings could be held liable for crimes against humanity committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population.

The killing of Vigilio Mirano and thousands of other victims of Dutertes drug war calls for an urgent international response. Turning a blind eye to these crimes will merely ensure that such abuses continue.

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Killing and Lies: Philippine President Duterte's 'War on Drugs' Exposed - Human Rights Watch

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) A little less than 500 policementhose belonging to the 'cream of the crop' are relaunching the drug war from scratch.

Undermanned and still without a formal office space, the newly-formed Philippine National Police Drug Enforcement Group (PNP DEG) is revalidating data on high-value targets with the help of local drug enforcement units, as well as its own counterintelligence group.

It has also conducted 103 operations in just three days, arresting 145 drug personalities and killing 9.

DEG chief and Senior Superintendent Graciano Mijares said the 477-member DEG will focus only on financiers, manufacturers, distributors, traffickers and protectors.

"The rest, at the regional level pababa, doon sila sa Tokhang reloaded portion," Mijares said in a media briefing Friday.

[Translation: Those on the regional level, down to the station level, will focus on the Tokhang reloaded portion.]

Mijares said they also organized regional police drug enforcement units in local levels.

"Pwede natin silang i tap, pwede natin silang magamit and we can also assist them if they have big operations involving high value targets," he said.

[Translation: We can tap them, we can use them and we can also assist them if they have big operations involving high value targets.]

The war on drugs is on its seventh month. President Rodrigo Duterte suspended it in late January over corruption claims against policemen.

This was after several members of the dissolved Anti-Illegal Drugs Group (AIDG) got involved in the killing of a South Korean businessman.

More than 2,500 were killed during police operations in the previous campaign. Including vigilante killings, the number of deaths can reach around 7,000.

The DEG is still looking for more than 420 members who will undergo strict scrutiny consisting of a background check "from birth up to their current status."

"(Nagrerecruit) tayo (from different parts of the region). Ang hinahanap lang naman natin is yung, of course, may integridad na kapulisan natin na may alam na rin sa trabaho na walang bahid ng mga kaso involving illegal drugs," Mijares said.

[Translation: We are recruiting from different parts of the region. We are looking for police officers with integrity who already have knowledge of the job and have no case involving illegal drugs.]

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PNP wants 'police with integrity' as it relaunches war on drugs - CNN Philippines

Attorney General Jeff Sessions says fighting violent crime is his top priority, and in a memo released Wednesday, the former Alabama Senator dropped a hint as to how hed like to achieve that through reviving the wildly unpopular and largely unsuccessful war on drugs.

During the Obama administration, politicians from both sides of the aisle conceded that the war on drugs had not, in fact, solved violent crime, and, rather, led to soaring prison populations, costing the federal government about $80 billion annually (an estimated $1 trillion when you account for the fiscal burden on welfare as a result of mass incarceration),disproportionately pulling poor, vulnerable or minority communities into the dragnet of the criminal justice system.

But that appears to be the focus of the Trump administrations Department of Justice. In a new memo released Wednesday, Sessions emphasized that addressing violent crime must be a special priority, and called for federal authorities and local law enforcement to crack down on drug trafficking as a means to reduce violent crime.

Disrupting and dismantling those drug organizations through prosecutions under the Controlled Substances Act can drive violent crime down, Sessions wrote. One way, he said in an appearance on conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitts show, would be by prosecuting marijuana. Asked whether he would pursue federal racketeering charges (or RICO charges) for dispensaries selling marijuana, he replied, We will enforce the law.

Its not clear exactly what Sessions has in mind; the memo merely promises further guidance and support in executing this priority. Legal experts consulted by Politico speculate that Sessions may be on the verge of throwing out policies set by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2010 and 2013, which instructed prosecutors to avoid pursuing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses a sentencing scheme that was seen as one of the primary drivers behind mass incarceration.

But Phil Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, says that the memo is just another example of grandstanding to create a moral panic and generally confuse the public. Stinson says, the memo left him scratching his head, mostly because federal, state and local law enforcement agencies already work together to crack down on violent drug-related crime.

It is more in the realm of political crime control rhetoric to make it look like the Attorney General has a new idea, Stinson said. He doesnt.

New ideas or not, criminal justice reform continues to have support in Congress.

And on both sides of the aisle. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill to create a National Criminal Justice Commission, which would be tasked with analyzing the criminal justice system and come up with ideas to reform it.

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Crime and punishment - VICE News

Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction? GEORGE PFROMM

Richard Nixon and Ronald and Nancy Reagan would be watching this White House with a smug sense of satisfaction. Not because of President Donald Trump's coziness with Russia, or his cavalier attitude about sexual assault, but because of the Trump administration's views on drugs and criminal justice. It's hard not to imagine all these old white people in a chorus line together celebrating locking people up for using cannabis.

Trump has not spoken explicitly about cannabis policy since he took office in January, but he told a joint session of Congress last week that "drugs" are "poisoning our youth." His administration has shaken the confidence of the legal weed industry with statements suggesting punitive action toward recreational weed. White House press secretary Sean "Spicy" Spicer told reporters two weeks ago that the Trump administration saw medical marijuana as a "very, very different subject" than recreational marijuana. Subsequently, he said the Department of Justice would start a "greater enforcement" of existing federal cannabis laws. Asked for specifics, Spicer referred reporters to the Department of Justice.

The head of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, spent his first two weeks as the nation's top law-enforcement official expressing an interest in restarting the war on drugs. He has reportedly told some senators in private that he won't crack down on legal weed, but his on-the-record statements have been consistently threatening toward states with recreational cannabis. He told attorneys general from around the country last week that he found it "troubling" that from 2010 to 2015, federal drug prosecutions declined by 18 percent. He promised that "under my leadership at the Department of Justice, this trend will end." He also said last week that "experts are telling me that there's more violence around marijuana than one would think" and that he was "definitely not a fan of expanded use of marijuana."

Let's be clear here: "Greater enforcement" of federal drug policy and a resurgent war on drugs means locking people up for drug use, including weed use. While states like Washington have spent the last two decades slowly relaxing weed laws, the Trump administration's views on weed have not advanced passed the Reagan era. Current federal law has a 15-day mandatory minimum jail sentence for someone convicted of their second misdemeanor possession charge. Get convicted of having one gram of cannabis twice, and a federal judge is forced to send you to jail for at least 15 days.

The effects of such policies, which Sessions praises with a small smile and his Southern drawl, are well documented. From 1980 to 2008, the US prison population quadrupledit went from about 500,000 inmates to 2.3 million. Our country's incarceration rate is not only the highest in the world, it's a statistical anomaly. We imprison people at five times the world's average incarceration rate, and African Americans are jailed at nearly six times the rates of whites. A study in 2012 showed that black people in Washington State use less marijuana than white people and yet are arrested for marijuana at 2.9 times the rate of white people.

There are still 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions and 10,765 felony cannabis convictions in the Washington State Patrol's database, according to records obtained by The Stranger.

Almost 30 years after Reagan left office, we are only just starting to dismantle the racist drug policy system's legacy. President Barack Obama's administration worked at the federal level to reduce drug chargeshence that drop in drug prosecutions that terrifies Sessionsand Washington State's passage of I-502 legalizing weed in Washington in 2012 certainly helped, eliminating future weed arrests in this state. But it did nothing to address the decades of harm caused by our state's cannabis laws of the past.

Some Washington State lawmakers are trying to change that, and they introduced a bill this year to make it easy for anyone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession conviction to clear their record of that crime. After all, misdemeanor possession is no longer against state law. Oregon passed a similar law two years ago, but Washington's version has an uphill fight in Olympia.

While the federal government appears emboldened by the idea of locking more people up for using cannabis, it's worth wondering: Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction?

***

Washington State governor Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson have put themselves on the national stage in their opposition to Trump's agenda. Their lawsuit against Trump's ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries effectively knocked out the president's executive order after it prevailed in US District Court and Appeals Court.

Inslee and Ferguson are also fighting to preserve local laws when it comes to cannabis. They sent the Trump administration a letter in February making the case for our state's legal pot industry. Within hours of Spicer's threat of "greater enforcement" of federal cannabis laws, Ferguson issued a statement vowing to "use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the federal government does not undermine Washington's successful, unified system for regulating recreational and medical marijuana." That's a strong statement from an attorney with a 20 record against the Trump administration, but the only problem is, this time the law is not on Ferguson's side.

If Sessions or Trump wanted to start enforcing federal weed laws today, they could immediately start charging the cannabis industry's growers, retailers, budtenders, bankers, accountants, and casual smokers with federal crimes.

US representative Adam Smith, who represents parts of Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma, said that fact is worrying. "In the plain language of the law, if the federal government wants to come in and start busting marijuana shops, we are somewhat at their mercy," he said. "And that is very, very concerning."

Obama's Department of Justice issued the Cole Memo and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a guidance, both aimed at placating nerves in the legal weed industry. The Cole Memo, signed by US deputy attorney general James Cole, told states with legal weed that the federal government would adopt a hands-off approach to federal cannabis laws if states followed a few guiding principles, namely keeping weed out of the hands of kids and profits away from organized crime. The FinCEN guidance, issued by the Department of Treasury, told the banking industry that banks would not be prosecuted for money laundering if they opened accounts with cannabis businesses, as long as those businesses were compliant with the Cole Memo.

But those are guidance memos, not laws. They establish no legal precedent and can be rescinded at any time by the current administration.

Sam Mendez, the former executive director of the University of Washington's Cannabis Law and Policy Project, said it would only take a simple injunction, a legal order to cease activity sent from Sessions to Washington State, to shut down the I-502 industry.

"They could just shut it down by legal means. This is an industry and state regulatory system that at its fundamental level is based on an illegality," Mendez said. "So that's their legal mechanism right there."

There is one law protecting medical cannabis businesses from federal action. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment to the federal budget bars the Department of Justice from spending any money investigating medical cannabis businesses, but a 2016 federal court ruling narrowed the protections of that amendment to strictly medical transactions. It's unclear whether it would apply to Washington's pot industry, where the medical and recreational systems have been combined into one.

"The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment doesn't offer much help to most 502-licensed businesses because few of those businesses are likely to be limiting their sales to medical purposes," said Alison Holcomb, the former ACLU attorney who wrote the text of the I-502 law. "As long as a business is selling cannabis to a person using it for nonmedical purposes, it is fair game for a DEA investigation."

Trump has the law behind him if he cracks down on legal pot, but there are still daunting challenges standing between Trump and a wholesale attack on our legal weed system. To start, weed has never been more popular in America than it is right now. A recent poll found that 71 percent of Americans think Trump should not go after states that have legalized cannabis, and 93 percent of Americans support medical cannabis laws.

Since Trump is already on the line to deliver an unpopular border wall and repeal an increasingly popular health-care law, most people don't see this as a fight he would want to pick.

"It's hard to predict what Trump does around politics and policies given how inexperienced he is, but we do know that he cares a lot about public image and public opinion. This is not going to be something that is going to look very good," Mendez said.

And weed's popularity has generated a huge industry around it. There are thousands of pot farms and pot retailers operating in the 28 states where weed has been either recreationally or medically legalized, and prosecuting that many individuals and firms would require an immense number of lawyers and law-enforcement personnel. The federal government relies heavily on local law enforcement to carry out drug-enforcement raids, but because cannabis is legal under state law, local cops can't be used to shut down the industry.

"Think of how many hundreds or even thousands of businesses are out there operating. If they were going to go after all of those businesses, that would take thousands of pages of paperwork," Mendez said.

It would be much easier for Sessions to investigate individual businesses that he believes have violated the parameters of the Cole Memo. Aaron Pickus, a spokesperson for the Washington CannaBusiness Association, said the trade group is advising its members to closely follow the state's laws.

"Right now, we are emphasizing how important it is to make sure you are following the rules as set by Washington State," Pickus said. "Make sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's and following best practices to make sure that minors aren't getting into your store."

Individual enforcement against certain businesses would be better than wholesale destruction of the industry, but the Department of Justice would still be picking a fight with some well-connected individuals. In this War on Drugs II, the dealers aren't marginalized people operating in the shadowsthey are mostly white, male, wealthy businesspeople. It's probably easier for Sessions to lock up a poor person who doesn't look like him than to lock up a bunch of rich guys with millions in their bank accounts. And Congress, never one to miss out on a wealthy constituency, recently created the nation's first Congressional Cannabis Caucus to stand up for common-sense weed laws.

Plus, if state leaders and industry leaders and weed's powerful allies in Congress can't team up to scare Sessions away from touching our legal pot, our state could push the button on the so-called "nuclear option." As we previously described in The Stranger, we could technically erase any mention of marijuana from our state's laws, effectively legalizing and deregulating pot, and giving Trump a huge nightmare when it comes to keeping drugs away from kids and cartels.

That's all to say, it's unclear what will happen. The path forward for Trump shutting down legal weed is as clear as Spicer's response to a follow-up question on what he meant about "greater enforcement" of cannabis laws. He said, and I quote: "No, no. I know. I know what II thinkthen that's what I said. But I think the Department of Justice is the lead on that."

Got that?

He added, "I believe that they are going to continue to enforce the laws on the books with respect to recreational marijuana."

***

If you ask Holcomb, who is often called the architect of I-502 because she wrote the successful initiative, why we need legal weed, she will point to one issue.

"The point of I-502 was to stop arresting people for using marijuana," Holcomb said. "And I-502 was the right vehicle at that time to move us in that direction, and depending on what happens now, we may have to move in an entirely new direction. But the North Star is the same North Star: Don't arrest people... because they use marijuana or grow it and want to share it with others."

Thanks to Holcomb's initiative, the state has spent the last five years doing exactly that: not arresting people for cannabis crimes. But bad laws take a long time to stop affecting people. Punitive Reagan-era laws still haunt people who were caught in the war on drugs dragnet, and I-502 was a proactive law, meaning it did not address any of the thousands of people who were previously charged with cannabis crimes. As for those 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions mentioned earlier, the ones still in the Washington State Patrol's database, each one of those drug convictions continues to haunt the people carrying them, according to Mark Cooke, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington.

"Criminal conviction records allow others to discriminate against that individual in different contexts, including employment, housing, and education," Cooke said.

It may seem like in this modern, weed-friendly world, a misdemeanor possession charge doesn't mean much, but that is not the case. The types of background checks that many employers or landlords use lack specificity. Applications often ask if you have been convicted of any drug charges, according to Prachi Dave, another attorney for ACLU-WA.

"Frequently the question is 'Do you have any drug related activity convictions?' So a prior marijuana conviction could certainly fall into that category, which means a lot of people could be excluded from housing or employment," Dave said.

Someone carrying a misdemeanor possession charge can ask a court to clear their record, but there are a number of different reasons a judge could deny that request. Representative Joe Fitzgibbon, who represents West Seattle and Vashon Island in the state legislature, wants to change that. He introduced a bill in Olympia this year that would require courts to automatically expunge a person's misdemeanor marijuana conviction upon request.

"Currently, there are a bunch of caveats, but even if they meet all of the caveats, the judge can still say no," Fitzgibbon said. "The bill would make it much easier for someone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession to vacate their record."

Oregon passed a similar law in 2015, but Fitzgibbon's bill failed to make it out of committee in Olympia this year. He's introduced a version of this bill every year since 2012, when voters legalized adult possession of cannabis here. The current bill won't get another chance until next year.

Fitzgibbon said he will keep fighting for the law. "I think it's about fairness and about second chances. The voters of the state very clearly said that they didn't think possession of marijuana should be a crime," Fitzgibbon said.

Kevin Oliver, executive director of the Washington chapter of NORML, said his organization plans to step up its lobbying for the bill. "We have a lobbyist on the ground full time, our new PAC is raising money and we're going to start throwing it at these legislators, and I think that might make a difference," Oliver said.

If they act quickly, they might be able to clean up the beach before this second war on drugs sweeps in.

Continue reading here:

Trump Signals That He Wants to Restart the War on Drugs - The Portland Mercury (blog)

The 18-member committee, headed by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, is divided into 4 clusters: enforcement, justice, advocacy, and rehabilitation

Published 7:41 PM, March 10, 2017

Updated 7:45 PM, March 10, 2017

BOOSTING DRUG WAR. President Rodrigo Duterte creates an inter-agency committee and task force focused on his drug war. Photo by Simeon Celi Jr/Presidential Photo

MANILA, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte created, through an executive order, an inter-agency committee and task force to spearhead the fight against illegal drugs.

Executive Order 15, signed on Monday, March 6, designates the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency as the chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs or ICAD.

The ICAD's membership a total of 18 agencies or departments (excluding PDEA) show how Duterte intends the war against drugs to be an all-government effort.

For example, aside from law enforcement agencies, departments like the Department of Agriculture and Department of Trade and Industry, are part of the committee.

All member agencies are ordered to designate a permanent representative, either an undersecretary or assistant secretary, to the ICAD.

The ICAD members are:

The ICAD is tasked with the "effective conduct of anti-illegal drug operations and arrest of high-value drug personalities downn to the street-level peddlers and users."

It is also ordered to cleanse the bureaucracy of "unscrupulous personnel involved in illegal drug activities," aside from implement the National Anti-Drug Plan of Action 2015-2020.

Read the entire Executive Order No 15 below:

Clusters

The ICAD will function based on a cluster system. Members are divided into 4 clusters.

The Enforcement Cluster spearheads the conduct of anti-illegal drug operations.

The Justice Cluster ensures the "expeditious prosecution of all drug cases." Their task includes providing legal assistance to law enforcers and public attorneys for the protection of individuals rights, for example, in cases of voluntary surrender or warrantless arrests during anti-drug operations.

The Advocacy Cluser is supposed to conduct a nationwide advocacy campaign for the govenment's anti-illegal drug policy.

The Rehabilitation and Reintegration Cluster is mandated to implement drug rehabilitation programs and make sure that former drug dependents and other drug personalities are reintegrated into society and become useful members of it.

The ICAD is instructed to meet regularly, with each member submitting periodic reports to their cluster heads.

All cluster reports are to be submitted to the Office of the President.

The same EO created the National Anti-Illegal Drug Task Force to be established by the PDEA. Its members are law enforcement agencies.

Duterte is supposed to designate the task force's commander who should be a "senior law enforcement officer." The commander reports directly to the PDEA Director General.

The formation of ICAD and the drug task force comes after President Duterte allowed the Philippine National Police to implement the drug war on a limited capacity, with the PDEA as the effort's overall head.

Duterte's decision to revamp his administration's drug war came after the murder of a South Korean businessman by police inside the PNP's national headquarters.

This had brought home to Duterte the extent of corruption in the police force, leading him to call for an internal cleansing.

Over 7,000 have died in incidents related to the drug war. Of these deaths, over 2,500 happened during police operations while over 3,600 deaths happened in incidents still being investigated. Rappler.com

See the original post here:

Duterte creates inter-agency body for war on drugs - Rappler

The Philippines has voted to introduce the free and lawful use of medical marijuana, just one day after it voted to reinstate the death penalty for certain drug offenses. Last week, President Duterte said he would restart the war on drugs, a movement that has caused the death of over 7,000 people as a result of extra-judicial killings.

House Bill 180 explains who and how medical marijuana should be used. It details who will be approved to prescribe itqualified medical cannabis physicians; who will be allowed to receive itcannabis patients with an ID card; and who can assist in its distributionqualified medical cannabis caregivers and qualified cannabis compassionate centers, according to the Asian Correspondent.

Rep. Seth Jalosjos proposed the bill and said that legalizing marijuana for medical use will benefit thousands of patients suffering from serious and debilitating diseases.

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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks before Philippine Councilors League in Pasay city, Metro Manila, Philippines, March 8. Despite Duerte's reinstatement of the death penalty for certain drug offenses, a bill proposing the legalizing of medical marijuana has been approved. REUTERS/Erik De Castro

I have high hopes under the Duterte administration that this measure would be enacted into law. Finally, there is hope for our people, especially our children, who suffer from medical conditions like epilepsy, cancer and multiple sclerosis, Jalosjos told the PhilStar.

As the mayor of Davao City, Duterte conceded cannabis might be useful medically, despite his strong opinions against its use as a recreational drug. If you just smoke it like a cigarette, I will not allow it, ever. It remains to be a prohibited item and theres always a threat of being arrested. If you choose to fight the law enforcement agency, you die.

Medicinal marijuana, yes, because it is really an ingredient of modern medicine now. There are drugs right now being developed or already in the market that (have) marijuana as a component.

Studies have shown that, in American states where medical marijuana is permitted, deaths by painkiller overdose have dropped by 25 percent, while research by the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the U.S. has found that cannabis is not a gateway drug.

Jalosjos urged Filipinos to open their minds and to shed your fear of the unknown regarding medical marijuana, the Asian Correspondent reported.

View original post here:

Philippines Votes to Legalize Medical Marijuana in Middle of Drug War - Newsweek

MANILA President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday again defended his controversial war on drugs, amid criticism that it is only targeting the poor.

Critics say majority of the victims of the governments war on drugs are from poor families.

Duterte, however, said killing the poor who get quick money from selling drugs is necessary in destroying the apparatus. Besides, he added, it does not make sense for moneyed people to get involved in street-level drug peddling.

Ang sabi nila, puro mahirap iyan, eh wala na tayong magawa eh. Naghihintay siguro silang mag-recruit ng mga milyonaryo. Wala namang mayamang mag-standby dyan sa lugar mo, sa munisipyo mo, Duterte said in a speech in Pasay City.

Iyung talagang mahirap, iyan nga ang problema. We have to destroy the apparatus. It needs people killed. Wala talaga tayong magawa thats just how it is. You cannot stop the movement of drugs in the entire country kapag hindi mo yariin lahat.

International non-government organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently released a report detailing police abuses in Dutertes war on drugs.

Among the groups findings is that the war on drugs seemed to have only targeted the poor, and that many of the victims in the cases it examined were mere drug users, not dealers.

Almost all of the victims were either unemployed or worked menial jobs, including as rickshaw drivers or porters, and lived in slum neighborhoods or informal settlements, HRW said.

Since of the most of the killings took place in the slums, suspected drug users most of the time find themselves defenseless when policemen, who are sometimes accompanied by plainclothes men, bang on their door and barge into their rooms, in violation of their basic rights.

The assailants would not identify themselves or provide warrants. Family members reported hearing beatings and their loved ones begging for their lives, HRW said.

The shooting could happen immediately behind closed doors or on the street; or the gunmen might take the suspect away, where minutes later shots would ring out and local residents would find the body; or the body wold be dumped elsewhere later, sometimes with hands tied or the head wrapped in plastic.

Local residents often said they saw uniformed police on the outskirts of the incident, securing the perimeter but even if not visible before a shooting, special crime scene investigators would arrive within minutes.

Read more:

Drug war only targeting the poor? That's how it is, says Duterte - ABS-CBN News

Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction? george pfromm

Richard Nixon and Ronald and Nancy Reagan would be watching this White House with a smug sense of satisfaction. Not because of President Donald Trump's coziness with Russia, or his cavalier attitude about sexual assault, but because of the Trump administration's views on drugs and criminal justice. It's hard not to imagine all these old white people in a chorus line together celebrating locking people up for using cannabis.

Trump has not spoken explicitly about cannabis policy since he took office in January, but he told a joint session of Congress last week that "drugs" are "poisoning our youth." His administration has shaken the confidence of the legal weed industry with statements suggesting punitive action toward recreational weed. White House press secretary Sean "Spicy" Spicer told reporters two weeks ago that the Trump administration saw medical marijuana as a "very, very different subject" than recreational marijuana. Subsequently, he said the Department of Justice would start a "greater enforcement" of existing federal cannabis laws. Asked for specifics, Spicer referred reporters to the Department of Justice.

The head of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, spent his first two weeks as the nation's top law-enforcement official expressing an interest in restarting the war on drugs. He has reportedly told some senators in private that he won't crack down on legal weed, but his on-the-record statements have been consistently threatening toward states with recreational cannabis. He told attorneys general from around the country last week that he found it "troubling" that from 2010 to 2015, federal drug prosecutions declined by 18 percent. He promised that "under my leadership at the Department of Justice, this trend will end." He also said last week that "experts are telling me that there's more violence around marijuana than one would think" and that he was "definitely not a fan of expanded use of marijuana."

Let's be clear here: "Greater enforcement" of federal drug policy and a resurgent war on drugs means locking people up for drug use, including weed use. While states like Washington have spent the last two decades slowly relaxing weed laws, the Trump administration's views on weed have not advanced passed the Reagan era. Current federal law has a 15-day mandatory minimum jail sentence for someone convicted of their second misdemeanor possession charge. Get convicted of having one gram of cannabis twice, and a federal judge is forced to send you to jail for at least 15 days.

The effects of such policies, which Sessions praises with a small smile and his Southern drawl, are well documented. From 1980 to 2008, the US prison population quadrupledit went from about 500,000 inmates to 2.3 million. Our country's incarceration rate is not only the highest in the world, it's a statistical anomaly. We imprison people at five times the world's average incarceration rate, and African Americans are jailed at nearly six times the rates of whites. A study in 2012 showed that black people in Washington State use less marijuana than white people and yet are arrested for marijuana at 2.9 times the rate of white people.

There are still 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions and 10,765 felony cannabis convictions in the Washington State Patrol's database, according to records obtained by The Stranger.

Almost 30 years after Reagan left office, we are only just starting to dismantle the racist drug policy system's legacy. President Barack Obama's administration worked at the federal level to reduce drug chargeshence that drop in drug prosecutions that terrifies Sessionsand Washington State's passage of I-502 legalizing weed in Washington in 2012 certainly helped, eliminating future weed arrests in this state. But it did nothing to address the decades of harm caused by our state's cannabis laws of the past.

Some Washington State lawmakers are trying to change that, and they introduced a bill this year to make it easy for anyone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession conviction to clear their record of that crime. After all, misdemeanor possession is no longer against state law. Oregon passed a similar law two years ago, but Washington's version has an uphill fight in Olympia.

While the federal government appears emboldened by the idea of locking more people up for using cannabis, it's worth wondering: Are we hearing the last yelps of the dinosaurs of the war on drugs, or the roars of a racist ideology coming back from the verge of extinction?

***

Washington State governor Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson have put themselves on the national stage in their opposition to Trump's agenda. Their lawsuit against Trump's ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries effectively knocked out the president's executive order after it prevailed in US District Court and Appeals Court.

Inslee and Ferguson are also fighting to preserve local laws when it comes to cannabis. They sent the Trump administration a letter in February making the case for our state's legal pot industry. Within hours of Spicer's threat of "greater enforcement" of federal cannabis laws, Ferguson issued a statement vowing to "use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the federal government does not undermine Washington's successful, unified system for regulating recreational and medical marijuana." That's a strong statement from an attorney with a 20 record against the Trump administration, but the only problem is, this time the law is not on Ferguson's side.

If Sessions or Trump wanted to start enforcing federal weed laws today, they could immediately start charging the cannabis industry's growers, retailers, budtenders, bankers, accountants, and casual smokers with federal crimes.

US representative Adam Smith, who represents parts of Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma, said that fact is worrying. "In the plain language of the law, if the federal government wants to come in and start busting marijuana shops, we are somewhat at their mercy," he said. "And that is very, very concerning."

Obama's Department of Justice issued the Cole Memo and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a guidance, both aimed at placating nerves in the legal weed industry. The Cole Memo, signed by US deputy attorney general James Cole, told states with legal weed that the federal government would adopt a hands-off approach to federal cannabis laws if states followed a few guiding principles, namely keeping weed out of the hands of kids and profits away from organized crime. The FinCEN guidance, issued by the Department of Treasury, told the banking industry that banks would not be prosecuted for money laundering if they opened accounts with cannabis businesses, as long as those businesses were compliant with the Cole Memo.

But those are guidance memos, not laws. They establish no legal precedent and can be rescinded at any time by the current administration.

Sam Mendez, the former executive director of the University of Washington's Cannabis Law and Policy Project, said it would only take a simple injunction, a legal order to cease activity sent from Sessions to Washington State, to shut down the I-502 industry.

"They could just shut it down by legal means. This is an industry and state regulatory system that at its fundamental level is based on an illegality," Mendez said. "So that's their legal mechanism right there."

There is one law protecting medical cannabis businesses from federal action. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment to the federal budget bars the Department of Justice from spending any money investigating medical cannabis businesses, but a 2016 federal court ruling narrowed the protections of that amendment to strictly medical transactions. It's unclear whether it would apply to Washington's pot industry, where the medical and recreational systems have been combined into one.

"The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment doesn't offer much help to most 502-licensed businesses because few of those businesses are likely to be limiting their sales to medical purposes," said Alison Holcomb, the former ACLU attorney who wrote the text of the I-502 law. "As long as a business is selling cannabis to a person using it for nonmedical purposes, it is fair game for a DEA investigation."

Trump has the law behind him if he cracks down on legal pot, but there are still daunting challenges standing between Trump and a wholesale attack on our legal weed system. To start, weed has never been more popular in America than it is right now. A recent poll found that 71 percent of Americans think Trump should not go after states that have legalized cannabis, and 93 percent of Americans support medical cannabis laws.

Since Trump is already on the line to deliver an unpopular border wall and repeal an increasingly popular health-care law, most people don't see this as a fight he would want to pick.

"It's hard to predict what Trump does around politics and policies given how inexperienced he is, but we do know that he cares a lot about public image and public opinion. This is not going to be something that is going to look very good," Mendez said.

And weed's popularity has generated a huge industry around it. There are thousands of pot farms and pot retailers operating in the 28 states where weed has been either recreationally or medically legalized, and prosecuting that many individuals and firms would require an immense number of lawyers and law-enforcement personnel. The federal government relies heavily on local law enforcement to carry out drug-enforcement raids, but because cannabis is legal under state law, local cops can't be used to shut down the industry.

"Think of how many hundreds or even thousands of businesses are out there operating. If they were going to go after all of those businesses, that would take thousands of pages of paperwork," Mendez said.

It would be much easier for Sessions to investigate individual businesses that he believes have violated the parameters of the Cole Memo. Aaron Pickus, a spokesperson for the Washington CannaBusiness Association, said the trade group is advising its members to closely follow the state's laws.

"Right now, we are emphasizing how important it is to make sure you are following the rules as set by Washington State," Pickus said. "Make sure you are dotting all your i's and crossing all your t's and following best practices to make sure that minors aren't getting into your store."

Individual enforcement against certain businesses would be better than wholesale destruction of the industry, but the Department of Justice would still be picking a fight with some well-connected individuals. In this War on Drugs II, the dealers aren't marginalized people operating in the shadowsthey are mostly white, male, wealthy businesspeople. It's probably easier for Sessions to lock up a poor person who doesn't look like him than to lock up a bunch of rich guys with millions in their bank accounts. And Congress, never one to miss out on a wealthy constituency, recently created the nation's first Congressional Cannabis Caucus to stand up for common-sense weed laws.

Plus, if state leaders and industry leaders and weed's powerful allies in Congress can't team up to scare Sessions away from touching our legal pot, our state could push the button on the so-called "nuclear option." As we previously described in The Stranger, we could technically erase any mention of marijuana from our state's laws, effectively legalizing and deregulating pot, and giving Trump a huge nightmare when it comes to keeping drugs away from kids and cartels.

That's all to say, it's unclear what will happen. The path forward for Trump shutting down legal weed is as clear as Spicer's response to a follow-up question on what he meant about "greater enforcement" of cannabis laws. He said, and I quote: "No, no. I know. I know what II thinkthen that's what I said. But I think the Department of Justice is the lead on that."

Got that?

He added, "I believe that they are going to continue to enforce the laws on the books with respect to recreational marijuana."

***

If you ask Holcomb, who is often called the architect of I-502 because she wrote the successful initiative, why we need legal weed, she will point to one issue.

"The point of I-502 was to stop arresting people for using marijuana," Holcomb said. "And I-502 was the right vehicle at that time to move us in that direction, and depending on what happens now, we may have to move in an entirely new direction. But the North Star is the same North Star: Don't arrest people... because they use marijuana or grow it and want to share it with others."

Thanks to Holcomb's initiative, the state has spent the last five years doing exactly that: not arresting people for cannabis crimes. But bad laws take a long time to stop affecting people. Punitive Reagan-era laws still haunt people who were caught in the war on drugs dragnet, and I-502 was a proactive law, meaning it did not address any of the thousands of people who were previously charged with cannabis crimes. As for those 226,027 misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions mentioned earlier, the ones still in the Washington State Patrol's database, each one of those drug convictions continues to haunt the people carrying them, according to Mark Cooke, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington.

"Criminal conviction records allow others to discriminate against that individual in different contexts, including employment, housing, and education," Cooke said.

It may seem like in this modern, weed-friendly world, a misdemeanor possession charge doesn't mean much, but that is not the case. The types of background checks that many employers or landlords use lack specificity. Applications often ask if you have been convicted of any drug charges, according to Prachi Dave, another attorney for ACLU-WA.

"Frequently the question is 'Do you have any drug related activity convictions?' So a prior marijuana conviction could certainly fall into that category, which means a lot of people could be excluded from housing or employment," Dave said.

Someone carrying a misdemeanor possession charge can ask a court to clear their record, but there are a number of different reasons a judge could deny that request. Representative Joe Fitzgibbon, who represents West Seattle and Vashon Island in the state legislature, wants to change that. He introduced a bill in Olympia this year that would require courts to automatically expunge a person's misdemeanor marijuana conviction upon request.

"Currently, there are a bunch of caveats, but even if they meet all of the caveats, the judge can still say no," Fitzgibbon said. "The bill would make it much easier for someone with a misdemeanor marijuana possession to vacate their record."

Oregon passed a similar law in 2015, but Fitzgibbon's bill failed to make it out of committee in Olympia this year. He's introduced a version of this bill every year since 2012, when voters legalized adult possession of cannabis here. The current bill won't get another chance until next year.

Fitzgibbon said he will keep fighting for the law. "I think it's about fairness and about second chances. The voters of the state very clearly said that they didn't think possession of marijuana should be a crime," Fitzgibbon said.

Kevin Oliver, executive director of the Washington chapter of NORML, said his organization plans to step up its lobbying for the bill. "We have a lobbyist on the ground full time, our new PAC is raising money and we're going to start throwing it at these legislators, and I think that might make a difference," Oliver said.

If they act quickly, they might be able to clean up the beach before this second war on drugs sweeps in.

Continue reading here:

Trump Signals That He Wants to Restart the War on Drugs - News ... - TheStranger.com

But on the night of his killing, his partner, Jennilyn Olares, hurried from their shared shack in the Pasay City neighborhood of Santo Nio.

Upon seeing his body she pushed aside police officers and curious onlookers and instinctively drew it to her chest.

The waiting gaggle of press photographers had their shot. The next morning the image of the grieving woman and her partner, seemingly shot by vigilantes, was splashed across the front pages of the nation's newspapers.

They called it the Philippines "Pieta" photo, a nod to Michelangelo's sculpture of the same name, in which Mary clasps the dying Jesus.

If not for the searing image, Siaron might have been forgotten. Olares moved away after their home -- which had perched on stilts precariously over a stinking, trash-filled canal -- was demolished.

But even without the notoriety of his death, his memory might have lived on in another way.

Members of a local rap group called One Pro Exclusive, whose cramped home studio is in a tenement in the neighborhood where Siaron once lived, have paid tribute to their slain friend with hip hop.

The song is called "Hustisya," the Tagalog word for justice.

"When I wrote the song ... I was thinking of my friend, who was just trying to earn a living as a pedicab driver, but became a victim of the war on drugs," says Justins Juanillas, the group's main rapper.

The group also hail from Santo Nio -- the same "barangay," or neighborhood -- as Siaron.

Just like in the early days of hip hop in the Bronx, rappers in the poor neighborhoods of Manila draw from their background -- its poverty, powerlessness and arbitrary injustices -- for inspiration.

And the deaths meted out in the name of the war on drugs, which critics say disproportionately targets the poor, are a target for the country's artists.

Juanillas, stage name Jay, is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word "Hustisya" and the hashtag #stopkilling.

The t-shirt uses the scales of justice as part of the typography, forming the "t" of the word. He says he decided to honor his friend in the most natural way for him as possible, through music.

"He's a close friend," the slight, wiry youth says from the group's makeshift studio, up a couple of narrow, rickety flights of stairs in a cramped neighborhood building.

The production desk is an old computer, and the tiny recording booth is lined with the amateur studio builder's best friend when it comes to soundproofing: egg cartons. When Jay steps inside the tiny, stifling room, no bigger than three or four square feet, sweat pours from his brows.

"Michael is good, he's not a pusher. He used drugs but he's not a pusher," he says, still referring to his friend in the present tense.

He died a pusher's death though, gunned down by an unknown assailant, a crude cardboard sign left by his side. It read: "drug pusher huwag tularan" "I am a drug pusher, don't imitate (me)."

It is an all-too common MO of the vigilantes who have added to the body count in Duterte's war on drugs. The killing remains unsolved.

Producer Stephen Bautista, who goes by the stage name Alek, says that Siaron was his friend's older brother.

"We weren't that close but I always (saw) him in the streets. It's really a common feeling when your friend is grieving for someone which is why I (produced) these songs."

As with the origins of hip hop in the west, the song goes some way to expressing the anger felt by poor youth.

They see their options as limited, and the outrage at what they see as unfair, discriminatory -- and often deadly -- policies visited upon their equally poverty-stricken peers.

The song, "Hustisya," which Jay wrote about Siaron, features lines like these:

Is this the new Filipino life?

I'm just a poor man, and I'm a man who lost someone

I'm still mourning, because what happened cuts deep

Is there still justice? No one can say

The lives were just part of a "quota"

Taken down because of links to drugs

They weren't given a chance to change

Killed, just like that, treated like animals

Duterte has mocked the "Pieta" image.

"Then you end up sprawled on the ground and you are portrayed in a broadsheet like Mother Mary cradling the dead cadaver of Jesus Christ. Well, that's very dramatic."

But for One Pro Exclusive, it's no joke.

"Hustisya" won't bring their friend back, and it's unlikely that their protest music will slow down Duterte's bloody campaign for even a second.

But, as has been seen time and again, the young and the poor turn to music to voice their anger at policies that ruin the lives of their friends and upend their communities.

Journalist Sara Fabunan contributed to this report.

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'Is this the new Filipino life?' Manila rappers blast Duterte's war on drugs - CNN

WATCH ABOVE: Police and council workers shut down a suspected drugs den in Devonport

Guns and drugs were found at the latest drug den uncovered in Plymouth - the latest in a string of grim houses and flats shut down by the police and council in recent months.

Plymouth City Council's Anti-Social Behaviour Team has been working with Devon and Cornwall Police as part of a crackdown aimed at ridding communities of their nightmare neighbours.

City chiefs have warned other drug users and anti-social tenants that nobody is safe as they continue to boot out the worst of Plymouth's households.

Councillor Dave Downie, the council's cabinet member for safer and stronger communities, issued the firing shot after a sex and drugs den in Grenville Road, St Judes, was shut down earlier this week.

Read next: These are the 12 most anti-social streets in Plymouth

He said: "We are pleased to have secured another successful closure order in the city this demonstrates that we are committed to tackling crime and anti-social behaviour and creating a safer Plymouth, working with our partners.

"Drug use and drug dealing, and the crime and anti-social behaviour associated with it, ruins people's lives and we will take tough action to address these issues.

"We will continue to work with Devon and Cornwall Police and landlords of all tenures to tackle this and we thank them for their continued support.

"We would also encourage any local residents suffering similar issues not to suffer in silence, but to report them, as we will take action you do not have to give your name."

You can report problems with anti-social behaviour anonymously by calling either Police 101 or our Anti-Social Behaviour Team on 01752 307047.

St Judes

Magistrates agreed to shut down this private flat described in court as a "shooting gallery" for drug addicts yesterday.

The three-month closure order was granted by Plymouth Magistrates after neighbourhood police and Plymouth City Council's Antisocial Behaviour Team put forward a host of evidence relating to the use of drugs, antisocial behaviour and weapons being kept at the property.

The councils ASB team, working with neighbourhood officers, initially applied to the court for a closure notice on February 20, and succeeded on gaining a full closure notice today on the ground floor flat of 172 Grenville Road in Prince Rock.

The court heard there had been months of antisocial behaviour at the property which made the lives of three young female Marjon students a misery.

The court heard the property was visited day and night by addicts who would hammer on doors and windows to gain access to the property. The court heard addicts would turn up to shoot-up heroin while prostitutes would use the flat for their own business.

The tenant Gary Steer did not contest the hearing at Plymouth Magistrates Court on Monday 6 March 2017.

Coxside

A city flat which was considered to be a magnet for drug users and antisocial behaviour will remain shut for now after a closure order is extended.

Plymouth City Council applied to District Judge Baker at Plymouth Magistrates Court on Tuesday to extend the closure order on 3E Teats Hill.

The original closure order was granted last November.

The application was heard in the tenant Stephen Edsel Ford's absence, who refused to come to court and was currently at Exeter prison on remand.

The Herald reported later how Edsel Ford faces a minimum three year jail term after pleading guilty to burgling a home in Lipson on December 31.

At that hearing magistrates were told Edsel Ford's flat was a magnet for troublemakers and drug users.

Greenbank

Late last year police and council chiefs shut down a drug house where late-night brawls erupted and dealers plied their trade all just yards from a children's playground and primary school.

Plymouth City Council's anti-social behaviour lawyer Tony Johnson told the bench at Plymouth Magistrates Court how council staff had worked with neighbourhood officers from Plymouth police and landlords Westward Housing Group to gather evidence about a whole host of incidents linked to 50 Hospital Road in Greenbank.

He explained how the occupant Stuart Clark lived in the property following the death of his parents who were the tenants.

The council had sought a closure notice, which was granted and had returned to court with a host of evidence, which included police bodycam footage taken during a drugs raid, to seek a three month closure order.

Mr Johnson noted evidence from police intelligence logs which suggested drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine were being used and sold from the property.

A Misuse of Drugs Act warrant was executed at the property by police and magistrates were shown footage which revealed needles, crack pipes, recently used foil, a home-made bong made to look like an asthma inhaler, an a number of Kinder egg plastic containers.

Devonport

Police and council chiefs shut down a Plymouth flat suspected to be linked to violence and drug use.

Neighbours had long complained about the property 86 Keat Street in Morice Town alleging it was home to considerable antisocial behaviour, violence, drug use and supply.

Officers interviewed locals who highlighted incidents of disorderly behaviour arising from the flat as well as several complaints in respect of drugs and noise over a prolonged period of time.

These were presented at a court hearing in May, when Plymouth City Council successfully applied for a closure order before city magistrates.

Devonport

A suspected drugs flat in Devonport was shut down as part of a double attack by the city's authorities.

Magistrates heard evidence and were shown photographs of 12b Duke Street, where anti-social behaviour and drug use was taking place blamed on Shane Beasley, who lived on the premises.

The property was subject to an eight-week closure order and Beasley was ordered to pay 100 court costs.

Devonport

The second of two properties in Devonport to be targeted at once after reports of criminal behaviour.

The orders were granted after brave neighbours and police gave evidence of criminal behaviour. The council then asked magistrates for the orders.

The magistrates' court heard that Mark Lewis, who lived at 14a Duke Street, had engaged in criminal behaviour and that the use of the premises had resulted in serious nuisance being caused to members of the public, much of which was attributable to groups of people attending the property, shouting, swearing and taking drugs.

The property is subject to a three month closure order and Lewis was ordered to pay 200 court costs.

Stoke

A flat where the body of a young man was found in a suspected drug-related death was 'shut down' last year.

The address 12 Valletort Flats in Valletort Place, Stonehouse was subject of a "temporary closure order" secured by by Plymouth City Council, meaning that only the tenant is allowed inside.

The property was the focus of a number of antisocial behaviour issues which plagued the block of flats. When police were called to the property on June 8, when the body of a 25-year-old man was found, officers discovered hundreds of needles in drawers and across the flat's rooms.

Prosecutors representing Safer Plymouth Partnership, made up of police and council, told magistrates there was a clear indication of drug use linked to antisocial behaviour connected to the premises. .

The deceased man was formally identified as David Sutton.

Read the original here:

How the police and council are winning the war on drugs in Plymouth - Plymouth Herald

Cagayan de Oro City Police vows 'less bloody' war on drugs - SunStar Sun.Star THE chief of the newly formed City Drug Enforcement Unit (CDEU) of the Cagayan de Oro City Police Office said Tuesday, March 7, police operatives will, ... and more »

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Cagayan de Oro City Police vows 'less bloody' war on drugs - SunStar - Sun.Star

John Harold Alcober (sitting), Marvin Haub (front) and Justine Juanillas (in recording booth) in Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines on Feb. 15, 2017. Photo supplied

The studio for the Filipino hip-hop group One Pro Exclusive is a low-budget affair. Located in Pasay City, southeast of Manila, it consists of a sound booth fashioned out of wood, with foam packed inside to help reduce ambient noise. The booth has a window that looks out onto a room no bigger than a closet, where producer John Harold Alcober, 22, sits at a computer, queuing up songs and apologizing for the stuffiness of the dark, cramped surroundings. Alcober, who goes by the name Couz John, built the setup in his home in 2014. A curtain separates the room from the kitchen. Down a hallway, his relatives watch TV. Im sorry, for my studio is not full of air con, he jokes.

Are you ready? he asks Justine Juanillas, the 25-year-old rapper in the booth whose emcee name is Jay. Lets get it on.

Jay, who has spiky hair and a raspy, Lil Wayne-style delivery, launches into a verse from Hustisya , which means Justice in Tagalog. They can act blind / Your Eyes / But that cannot numb what I feel. The songs backdrop is the war on drugs in the Philippines, which has killed more than 7,000 people since President Rodrigo Duterte came to power in July. But the somber, angry composition focuses on the death of one victim, Michael Siaron , a pedicab driver and friend of the group who was shot dead on July 23, soon after the killings started. He was 30.

Read More: 12 Photographers in the Philippines Reveal the Drug War Images That Moved Them Most

The photo of the crime scene stunned the world with its gut-wrenching intimacy. Siarons widow, Jennilyn Olayres, cradled his lifeless body in her arms and wailed into the night. A placard labelled "drug pusher" had been left behind by the killers. But Siarons friends say he wasnt into drugs. The image, which was compared to Michelangelos La Piet, went viral . Supporters of Duterte said it was staged. To this day, however, it remains one of the most iconic photos of the drug war. After it was published and circulated, the world moved on and the killings continued. But the rappers in the neighborhood could not forget. They knew Siaron. He was their friend. They lived there and they had to do something.

I saw Michael the night he was killed, Jay tells TIME. When he died, my instant reaction was to write the song. The chorus in the music video version online replays powerful news footage of Olayres giving interviews and talking about the murder. In a country where speaking up against the drug war is not popular, and where wrongful death legal cases are virtually nonexistent, the song is remarkable. It also had a special guest: Siarons brother contributed the first verse.

The music is part of a wave of artistic responses to the violence. Much of it is taking place under the umbrella of a group called RESBAK, which stands for Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings. In addition, a Medium-hosted blog called The Kill List Chronicles solicits protest literature in the time of Duterte. The list in the title refers to the collection of names authorities have used to arrest and target suspected drug users and dealers. One poem, published on Feb. 8 under the name Alma Anonas-Carpio, is called Dark Hours: "Sleep wont touch me now / Three men were shot dead outside / In the restive night," the first verse reads.

Siaron could sing, Jay says. Seriously, Michaels voice is like Adeles voice ... [He was] a very happy person. Joyful. Before releasing Justice on YouTube, One Pro Exclusive put out Yakap, or Embrace, which tells the story from the perspective of Michaels widow, Olayres, waiting for her husband to come home from driving his pedicab. The lyrics are poignant. Do you know/ The feeling of being left/ By someone you love/ Unexpectedly/ You said you will just take a ride/ For a while, raps Carlo, another member. The chorus, sung by a 16-year-old named Marvin Haub, or Vintrix, recalls the pain of the moment she found his body. Its as if my world shattered when I saw you/ Lifeless, I embraced you /Apparently that was the last night that I was with you.

Pasay City has been so deeply affected by the drug war that local media has dubbed it Patay or Dead, City. One of the victims was a five-year-old, shot dead alongside his father. Each night, residents fear more killings. After 12 a.m., the drug war starts, Jay says. Like many communities touched by the crackdown, Pasay is poor. As we walk to the studio through the local barangay, or township, we pass a social hall with an ongoing wake. Families who cant afford funerals hold wakes in the local social hall, because its cheaper. Siarons was here. We pass small food stands and a basketball court. Pedicab drivers line the street. Siaron lived nearby, beside a creek filled with trash and waste. The house, a shack without running water or a toilet, has been torn down and the remaining family have since moved away. It was as if his history had been erased.

Read More: This Photo Has Given the War on Drugs in the Philippines a Human Face

Raffy Lerma , the photographer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer who took the photo in July, has kept in touch with the family. One day a few months ago Olayres texted him about the group and their first song, Embrace. It was actually her telling her story, Lerma recalls. I felt like I was brought back to that night I also got emotional once I heard it, he tells TIME. I felt it again. Lerma contacted RESBAK, and in February, some of the members of One Pro Exclusive performed the songs at an anti-drug war concert and art exhibition in a slum neighborhood of Quezon City. Painters showed pieces that recreated crime scenes. Poets read from the stage. The rappers performed in blindfolds to signify the way, they say, many in the Philippines have turned their eyes away from the violence.

Though the songs have been posted to YouTube and Facebook and viewed thousands of times, One Pro Exclusive is not a household name in the Filipino hip-hop scene. Vintrix is in school while Jay and Alcober have day jobs. Asked if they were fearful about continuing to speak out, Jay says no. Im not scared. I think its scary to die. But [for me] its not an issue ... I want to be the voice of the masses.

Excerpt from:

Their Friend Was Killed in Duterte's Brutal Drug War. So These Rappers Responded in Verse - TIME

Updated: Mar 07, 2017 12:00 AM UTC | Originally published: Mar 06, 2017

A couple of weeks before Christmas, National Geographic's Ryan Duffy joined Filipino crime beat reporters on Manila's graveyard shift. On a tip, the American rides in a convoy of press cars to the scene of a vigilante killing.

So begins a new feature on the Philippines' drug war, which airs Monday. It shows the aftermath of the first of five deadly shootings reported that night; one of over 7,000 since Rodrigo Duterte began his so-called war on drugs on July 1.

Replete with footage of bagged bodies in rain-slicked slums and relatives weeping at wakes and overlaid with the Philippine President's brutal statements on killing millions of addicts Nat Geo captures in motion a world rendered by James Nachtwey in his series In Manila Death Comes by Night , and by local photographers on the frontlines of the war. Duffy's reporting from crime scene, to wake, to drug rehab center roughly follows the trajectory of Rishi Iyengar's The Killing Time .

But there's also footage of a little-shown aspect of the drug war: Operation Tokhang a portmanteau of the Visayan words for "knock" and "plead." A clip shows police sweeping through a neighborhood and apparently arbitrarily detaining residents. The film suggest that the list of "surrendered" people compiled under such operations which now counts more than 1 million members might just be a hit list.

"If you dont surrender they will kill you. But then again, even if you surrender they will also kill you, the father of a son who had surrendered and was later killed by police said in the first episode of Nat Geo 's Explorer series.

In a December survey conducted by Social Weather Station, 78% of Filipinos said they feared they or someone they knew would become a victim of extrajudicial killings yet 85% reported being satisfied with the ongoing operations to curb drugs. It's a contradiction captured neatly here. Drug addicts are not humans, one interviewee said in support of the killings. His is a popular refrain. It comes straight from the President himself: "Crime against humanity?" Duterte has memorably mused , "In the first place, Id like to be frank with you: are they humans?"

National Geographic 's Explorer returns Monday, March 6.

Read more from the original source:

National Geographic Airs Film on Rodrigo Duterte's Drug War | Time ... - TIME

After the U.S. State Department condemned the Philippine government for condoning the vigilante murders of drug dealers and users, a spokesman for the government has responded by making a distinction between extrajudicial killings and the execution of drug offenders.

Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes bloody war on drugs has claimed about 8,000 lives during its eight-month campaign. Around 2,555 of these deaths are counted as casualties in confrontations with police, but international rights groups claim that a large number of the deaths were assassinations to which police have turned a blind eye.

Philippine authorities dispute these claims, officially stating that police are required to follow the law and that extrajudicial killings are not tolerated. They instead blame the deaths on rival drug gangs or vigilantes working without anyones approval.

As it turns out, at least one person has explicitly condoned such assassinationsPresident Duterte himself: "Please feel free to call us, the police, or do it yourself if you have the gun you have my support," he said last June upon taking office. "Shoot [them] and I'll give you a medal."

When the State Departments annual Report on Human Rights Practices pointed out the hypocrisy by Philippine officials, Duterte spokesman Ernesto Abella argued that these killings are not in conflict with their position against extrajudicial killings.

"Vigilante or extrajudicial killings are unlawful and are therefore not sanctioned. The government condemns such practice," Abella said in a statement. "These are not to be confused with the government's war on illegal drugs, which is an urgent and critical domestic matter."

Abella asked for the support of the international community in their continuing noble crusade against drugs.

President Dutertewho says he used to kill drug criminals as his hometowns mayor just to show the [police officers] that if I can do it, why cant you?seems to have majority support among the Philippine people with a 91% trust rating as of July 2016.

Always at odds with Obama, Duterte claims to have found approval from President Donald Trump after a phone call between the two in December, even snagging an invite to the White House from the then-president elect.

Follow this link:

Duterte Administration: Human Rights Not as Important as War on Drugs - TheFix.com

7 Mar 2017, 1:05 p.m.

POLICE and the Aboriginal community will go on the front foot to tackle the illegal use of potent medications and the drug ice thats putting peoples lives in danger.

Use of methylamphetamine, or ice, and of fentanyl and other pharmaceutical drugs is on the rise, authorities report.

NSW Police havelaunched a statewide campaign aimed at raising awareness about the dangers the drugs pose.

Not Our Way has been developed by the NSW Police Drug and Alcohol Coordination team in conjunction with Aboriginal community liaison officers, key health industry stakeholders as well as Aboriginal elders and community members.

Two people who formerly used substances share their stories in videos that form part of the campaign.

Their real courage in speaking candidly about their recovery was applauded by NSW Police corporate sponsor on Aboriginal communities Assistant Commissioner Geoff McKechnie, who took part in the launch.

He emphasised the issue was serious, topical and really important.

Research shows that Aboriginal communities are at greater risk of developing harmful long-term drug use than the general population, and both ice and pharmaceuticals have shown the biggest spike more recently, he said.

The use and distribution of illegal drugs is not only against the law, but its incredibly harmful to your health and can lead to many serious consequences including the breakdown of families and local communities.The rise in recreational pharmaceutical usage also shows that drugs dont have to be illegal to be lethal

The campaign resources will be progressively rolled out across the state. Assistant Commissioner McKechnie said they wanted it to spread as widely as possible.

Importantly, this is an initiative for and by Aboriginal people, he said.

Its absolutely crucial that we work closely with one another to foster relationships and build stronger, safer communities that acknowledge key challenges while working collaboratively on solutions, he said.

Read more from the original source:

Allies in war on drugs - Narromine News

Khalid said the police would increase collaboration not only with neigbouring countries but the Asean region as well, to combat the scourge. File picGEORGE TOWN, March 7 Malaysia has declared an all-out war on drugs for 2017, says Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar.

He said the police would increase collaboration not only with neigbouring countries but the Asean region as well, to combat the scourge.

We will organise meetings and conferences, especially with Asean countries, in relation to drugs (in order to curb it)...for drugs we have bilateral and unilateral meetings which are held yearly, he told reporters after officiating the International Drug Enforcement Conference (IDEC) here today.

Khalid said in as far as the drug menace was concerned in Malaysia, it was under control.

Last year, the police uncovered 28 drug-processing laboratories and detained 130 members of drug syndicates.

Drugs worth about RM16.1 million were seized during the police operations.

The two-day IDEC which was attended by 71 participants from 17 member countries is aimed at creating a forum for the international community to share drug-related intelligence and develop operational strategies. Bernama

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IGP declares 'all-out war' on drugs - Malay Mail Online