We are in a period of post-mortem reflection following the time during which racial justice protests were at their most intense. We now must ask ourselves: What has changed and what hasnt? Have power and privilege truly been disrupted? Has oppression been alleviated? What will be the legacy of this moment?

The historic protests in the wake of George Floyds killing were met with high hopes and soaring rhetoric. The protests were called a racial reckoning, a long-overdue racial accounting.

We painted murals on the streets and took down some statues. Companies committed to changing the Black faces on a bottle of syrup and a bag of rice. Athletes were allowed to kneel and race car drivers held a racial solidarity parade.

There were television specials about injustice and expanded coverage of protests. Books about race rose to the tops of bestseller lists.

States like New York and California passed police reform legislation, and scores of individual departments banned or restricted chokeholds and strangleholds and required officers to intervene when their colleagues use excessive force.

But, national progress, even on the issue of police accountability and reform, remained elusive. The slate of police reforms passed by the House is now bogged down in the Senate.

Donald Trump called the Black Lives Matter mural painted in front of Trump Tower in New York City a symbol of hate. One of his personal lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, called the group a domestic terror group. And his Justice Department began targeting demonstrators as terrorists.

On the Democratic side, Joe Biden quickly batted down any support of the move to defund the police, which is simply an effort to better allocate funding between police departments and social service agencies. There are also efforts at police abolition, but the defund movement is not synonymous with that effort.

More than 50 civil-rights organizations sent Biden a scathing letter, chastising him for his involvement in mass incarceration and the war on drugs, and demanding that he:

Immediately incorporate the policies laid out by the Movement for Black Lives into your campaign platform, and announce the specific changes publicly. This includes their critical demands for interventions that will end state violence against Black people, end the economic exploitation of Black communities, advance reparations, and defund police, prisons and weaponry so we can fully fund health care, housing, education and environmental justice.

BLM co-founder and activist Patrisse Cullors spoke at the DNCs virtual party platform meeting in July and said: Without the sea changes our movement recommended for the 2020 Democratic platform, any claims to allyship and solidarity with our work to fight for Black liberation are for naught.

While national political progress appeared tentative, mired or weakened by intense opposition, it did feel like personal progress, on a national scale, was made in some ways.

A Pew Research Center report in late June found that 6% of American adults said they attended a protest or rally that focused on issues related to race or racial equality in the last month. Thats about 15 million people, an astounding number.

Furthermore, the movement had multiracial participation. The percentage of protesters who were white was nearly three times the percentage who were Black. The percentage of Hispanics taking part was higher than the percentage of Black people as well.

But even as support for Black Lives Matter grew, many Americans still opposed the things the movement demanded.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in mid-July found that while nearly 70% of Americans believed Black people and other minorities are not treated as equal to white people in the criminal justice system, most still generally opposed calls to shift some police funding to social services or remove statues of Confederate generals or presidents who enslaved people.

Barack Obama issued a statement that read in part:

It falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day to work together to create a new normal in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.

Im not sure that new normal is in the immediate offing. Much of what we saw in response to protests amounted to performative gestures, symbolism that cost nothing and shifted no power.

We must come to the conclusion that some of what we saw as a racial awakening was prone to whither. Some of what we saw was people cosplaying consciousness, immersing themselves in the issue of the moment.

I am very leery of tokenism, leery of the illusions of progress as the system holds fast. Im leery of appeasement, of being told that there is a change coming as a way of quieting me in the waiting.

America has a sterling track record of dashing Black peoples hopes.

Continued here:

OPINION EXCHANGE | George Floyd died, and what have we done? - Minneapolis Star Tribune

The red or pink pills usually aren't much larger than the fingernail on your pinky. They also don't cost too much - between two and four euros each. Nevertheless, they are among the most significant problems currently facing Bangladesh. Called Yaba, the drug is currently overwhelming the South Asian country.

Estimates hold that around 7 million of the country's 164 million residents are addicted to drugs. Fully 5 million of them are thought to be hooked on Yaba. A mixture of methamphetamines and caffeine, it makes users feel more confident and energetic. Users tend to forego sleep and eat very little, with many taking the drug to help them work longer hours and earn more money for their families. But others just take it to get high.

The pills are produced in industrial quantities next door in Myanmar before being smuggled into Bangladesh across the southern border. In 2018 alone, security personnel confiscated fully 53 million of the pills.

Officially, alcohol and drugs are prohibited in the Muslim country. Nevertheless, Bangladesh is no small part of the methamphetamine problem in South and East Asia, where confiscations of the synthetic drug rose by a factor of eight in the 10 years between 2007 and 2017 - to fully 82 tons according to the UN's most recent World Drug Report released in 2019. The total represents almost 45 percent of all such seizures around the world.

In an attempt to get the drug problem under control, the government in Dhaka has opted for severity over the last two years in its fight against both drug dealers and users. Violence has been a frequent outcome.

The anti-drug campaign carried out by the Bangladeshi government has been reminiscent of the brutal "War on Drugs" launched by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte after he rose to power in June 2016. Suspected drug criminals are essentially executed by Duterte's troops and the offensive has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.

Amnesty International alleges that the government in Dhaka has been similarly brutal in its treatment of alleged dealers and users. The human rights organization has accused Bangladesh of launching a "wave of extrajudicial killings," claiming that 466 people were killed in 2018 alone as part of the anti-drug campaign. That number, the Amnesty report claims, is three times higher than in 2017 and "the highest in a single year in decades."

In a 2019 report, the organization wrote that the victims were initially apprehended by police or simply disappeared. The authorities, according to the report, consistently tell family members that they have no idea where the suspected drug dealers might be. Later, when their bodies are found, the authorities frequently claim that the victim died in a "gunfight."

French photographer Olivier Jobard and investigative journalist Charles Emptaz have looked into the cases of two men who died in one of these alleged "gunfights" in southern Bangladesh. In the course of their reporting, they uncovered several inconsistencies and give credence to suspicions that the two men were executed by Bangladeshi security personnel.

The following photo gallery is a collection of images taken by Jobard showing the means used by the Bangladeshi authorities in their anti-drug campaign:

More:

Fighting the Yaba Pill: The Death Toll Mounts in Bangladesh's Drug War - DER SPIEGEL

When Maya Shaw first entered the world of recreational cannabis, she found an industry skilled at churning out Instagrammable content but unableor unwillingto confront its own problems.

"It's crazy that no one was really talking about the fact that we were openly profiting off cannabis and making it cute and making it fun and accessible," says the Richmond, Va., founder and namesake of online smoke shop Shaw. "And it's like, OK, that's cool, but can we have a conversation about what's happening behind the scenes? The War on Drugs?"

Shaw is now part of a group aiming to start those hardconversationsand put some money where the discussion is.

The 27-year-old entrepreneur is an inaugural member of the Floret Coalition, a business collective with the mission of bringing together small businesses in the weed space who are eager to become involved in the fight for restorative justice but might not be entirely sure how or where to start.

The Floret Coalition is a division ofBroccoli, a Portland arts and culture magazine centered on cannabis. It operates as a modified giving circle: Small cannabusinesses join the coalition, receive an onboarding packet and commit to a minimum monthly donation. When the group's board announces the charity of the month, all Floret Coalition members direct donations straight to the recipients.

The three-member board vets each charity, and the board changes yearly. For the coalition's first year, Shaw is joined by entrepreneur and podcaster Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey and cannabis advocate Kassia Graham.

Floret emerged as "both a response and a realization that we had some community power that we could activate beyond just what we could do individually," says Anja Charbonneau,Broccoli's editor in chief. "Seeing the way that people were willing to open their wallets during the first wave of this summer's protests really gave us the push to believe that people were ready to rally."

Shaw puts it another way: "It's time to tell your friends to pull up."

WW: Did the idea for the Floret Coalition arise in response to the George Floyd uprising or had it been in the works before then?

Anja Charbonneau:Floret getting started in June was not only a reaction to the recent Black Lives Matters uprisings but also addressing a longer-term need that we've seen in cannabis to find tangible, financial ways to give back.

Maya Shaw:It was pretty seamless. Anja sent a message to the three of us, and she was just like, "Here's what I want to create, and the three of you would be an awesome first team of board members." And I couldn't agree more. We're all pretty like-minded in the sense that we want to do the right thing and we want to make sure that we're making this the best that it can besetting the ground, setting the stakes, and showing up for our community.

What criteria do organizations need to meet in order to qualify to receive donations?

Shaw:We want to make sure that we are really choosing organizations that are going to use the money properly. We're focused on organizations created so that these communities can have the same resources already available within communities that haven't been affected as such by the War on Drugs. Knowing that the Black community, the Latinx community, and Indigenous people overall are affected most, there's so much opportunity there. It's not necessarily just one specific thing. There are so many pockets and different crevices where we can put the money knowing it's going back into communities in need that are affected.

What criteria must businesses meet to join the coalition, aside from being cannabis adjacent and donation consistency?

Charbonneau:That's pretty much it. The funniest example I have is a brand that makes catnip toys shaped like joints. They're like, "Does this count?" Of courseyou're making money off the idea of weed, so why not?

Can you explain the difference between performative allyship and, as Rihanna put it, "pulling up"?

Shaw:Brands just really need to be honest with themselves in terms of the long run. Silence speaks louder than anything.This industry is built on the backs of Black people, Latin people and Indigenous people, and anyone profiting off this industry needs to be finding a way to donate back to the communities that are affected negatively by the injustice in the industry. It's almost, in a sense, reparations, or reworking profit. If you're profiting, you also need to be giving back.

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The Floret Coalition Is Adapting the Giving Circle Model to Help Address the Damage of the War on Drugs - Willamette Week

As the President sends Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents to Chicago and other cities to conduct local law enforcement having nothing to do with drugs, Congress is advancing, within omnibus legislation, an appropriations bill that would increase DEA funding with essentially no strings attached. Before that package gets sent to the White House, legislators should take a closer look at the DEA and its history of abusing its power.

For 50 years, administrations of both parties have been telling us that drugs are an emergencythat we need to spend more money and give agents more tools and broader powers, all in a futile attempt to stop the flow of drugs. And in response, the federal agency and the drug war have grown exponentially.

When the DEA was created in 1973, its budget was less than $75 million. Today, the DEA has over 10,000 employees and a budget totaling more than $3.1 billion. It is the largest drug enforcement agency in the world, maintaining physical offices and agents stationed not only domestically throughout the United States, but also abroad. US taxpayers finance 90 foreign offices in 67 countries, where agents continually wage oftensecretive operations.

Imagine how the nations founders would have felt about federal drug enforcement officers searching homes and arresting people, day after day, on US soil. Now, imagine how they would feel about those officers snatching protesters from the streetsin some cases without even probable causefor allegations having nothing to do with the agencys stated mission.

For Americans of all political persuasions, it should be terrifying: a national police force with minimal restraint on its powers. For legislators with oversight responsibilities, it should raise major red flags and an obligation to investigate.

For too long, the agency has operated without meaningful oversight and has developed a culture of lawlessness.

On May 31, the Attorney General temporarily authorized the diversion of DEA personnel and equipment for law enforcement activities unrelated to drugs. To do so, the Department of Justice relied on a section of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 that lays out the powers of DEA personnel. Over the years, the Departments Office of Legal Counsel has taken conflicting positions on whether DEA agents can lawfully engage in non-drug-related policing, and the legislative history remains murky at best.

But what is clear is that for too long, the agency has operated without meaningful oversight and has developed a culture of lawlessness. Even before the recent protests, the DEA repeatedly stretched its mandate and misused its authority. The DEA has a history of human rights abuses, poorly tracked payments to informants, and misuse of subpoena power and surveillance capabilities.

Use of the DEA for general policing in Chicago, New York, Portland and other US cities pulls back the curtain on what the DEA has become: a federal, overfunded and overmilitarized police force. A behemoth propped up by the pretense that drug use can be stomped out by aggressive policing methods and harsh penalties.

Five decades after President Nixons launch of the modern drug war and the creation of that federal force, it has failed to achieve the intended results. There has been no decline in illicit drug supply, nor in demand. Instead, the US has led the world in incarceration, widened racial disparities, and poured billions of dollars down the drain.

This mindless routine of drug-war funding needs to be stopped. To start, we should get rid of the DEA, transfer its drug classification authority to the National Institutes of Health and decriminalize personal-use quantities of controlled substances. Legislation we proposed, the Drug Policy Reform Act, would do that and make a host of other changes in federal law to begin repairing the harms of the drug war.

The proposal to eliminate unnecessary law enforcement agencies is not without precedent in Congress. In past years Congressman James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, repeatedly introduced legislation to eliminate the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), stating that it would be one measure we can take to reduce spending, redundancy, and practice responsible governance.

A fair and objective analysis of the DEA renders the same conclusionthat it is duplicative, as well as abusiveand the practice of responsible governance requires leadership to reign in and ultimately shut down this bloated and unnecessary federal agency.

Its time for an honest look at the blank check we write for the drug war every year. Its time for meaningful hearings on how drug decriminalization has been successful in other nations and would work here.

The authors employer, the Drug Policy Alliance, has previously provided a restricted grant to The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, to support a Drug War Journalism Diversity Fellowship.

Photograph of a DEA agent conducting a pre-flight check at a National Guard base byMaster Sgt. Kendra M. Owen/Public Domain.

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As the DEA Swarms US Cities, Its Abolition Should Be Prioritized - Filter

By Francis A. Bethel III

Black Lives Matter doesnt have anything to do with the disapproval rating of Donald Trump (Frank Daniels question What is Black Lives Matter? July 24). If anyone is a Marxist and an anarchist (yes, I do know the meanings), its Trump and his enablers in the Senate who have, time after time, turned a blind eye to his autocratic, demagogic, authoritarian way of ruining this country.

I have the utmost respect for you, Mr. Daniels, for serving your country as a retired colonel. What is disappointing to me is the fact that you still support this man after hes used the military as a political stunt when he had them gas and clear out innocent protesters, just so he could do a photo op in front of a church. Trump has all but turned his back on not only the military itself by not taking the bounty attacks from Russia seriously, but hes also turned his back on us as Americans during the coronavirus, by not listening to the scientists or anyone in his administration who repeatedly tried to warn him of the coming pandemic as many as a dozen times between January and February. Even some military retirees are now putting ads out against Trump to get him out of office. He is the most dangerous, incompetent, ignorant and worst president this country has ever had in the whole history of the United States of America by far!

Black Lives Matter is not doing anything to Trump that hes not already doing to himself. So, lets not blame Trumps ineptitude on Black Lives Matter. He has single-handedly destroyed the moral fabric of this country and distanced us from our allies while continuing to sow the seeds of racism and division.

Joe Biden will not destroy our neighborhoods and suburbs like Trump claims. The truth of the matter is that the president is losing suburban white voters. This is why hes trying desperately to paint a picture of fear and trouble. However, that 2016 playbook of law and order and paranoia is not going to work on the majority of Americans who see Trump for what he really is: a shallow, weak and insecure man who has the attention span of a 3-year-old.

Trump has quit on this country at a time when we need real leadership. As of this writing, he still has no federal plan on how to combat the virus. Why doesnt he attack the coronavirus like he attacked the peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, or in other cities? He is a coward who will not accept responsibility for anything and blames everything and everyone else for things that happened on his watch.

At least Joe Biden has some sense. He is compassionate, he listens, and he understands the needs of the American people! He will unify us, not tear us apart, unlike Trump, who only cares about Trump and what will be best for Trump.

Hes already trying to sow seeds of doubt about the election, due to increased mail-in ballots. Now hes saying that he doesnt know if he will accept the results if he loses. So we need to make sure that we see what he will do when he loses. We need to completely destroy him at the polls or by mail-in ballots, so that there is no doubt that he has to go!

Although Im disappointed in the fact that a former military man like Mr. Daniels supports Trump, it doesnt really surprise me. It doesnt surprise me that the president still has his die-hard base standing by him no matter how racist and divisive he is. A lot of his base wants to go back to the good old days of the 50s and 60s, maybe even further.

Lets journey back so we can see why we are where we are today in regard to Black Lives Matter.

Theres a racial caste system thats been going on since slavery, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration today. The more times change, the more things stay the same for Black Americans. The structure and content of the original Constitution was to preserve slavery, while, at the same time, affording political and economic rights to whites, especially propertied whites. The Southern slaveholding colonies would agree to form a union only on the condition that the federal government would not interfere with the right to own slaves. Northern white elites were sympathetic to the demand for their property rights to be respected, so they wanted their property (slaves) protected. So, the Constitution was designed so the federal government would be weak, not only in its relationship to private property, but also in the relationship to the rights of states to conduct their own affairs. The language of the Constitution itself was deliberately colorblind. The words Negro or slave were never used. However, the document itself was designed for a compromise regarding the control of Blacks. Federalism (which is the division of power between the states and the federal government) was the device used to protect the institution of slavery and the political power of slaveholding states. Even identifying the winner of a presidential election (the Electoral College) was developed with the interest of slaveholders in mind.

Under the term of our countrys founding document, slaves (Blacks) were defined as three-fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being! Im making a point as to why Black Lives Matter exists now. Black lives didnt matter in the beginning, from 1619, through slavery, through the Jim Crow laws, and no, Black lives dont matter to some people even in 2020.

Just take a look at all the Black men in some kind of prison system today. The war on drugs has put more Black people behind bars than for all other reasons combined. Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. More than 31 million people have been arrested for a drug offense, the majority of them Black. Once released from prison, they are reduced to not even second-class status, but a permanent underclass status in life. No really good job opportunities, no voting rights or housing assistance or any kind of government benefits. Lets not even get into the countless acts of police brutality and violence against Blacks, which is one reason why Black Lives Matter formed. This is what it means to be Black in America.

Slavery defined what it meant to be Black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be Black (a second-class citizen). Todays mass incarceration defines the meaning of Blackness in America: Black people, especially Black men, are seen as criminals. This is what it means to be Black in America.

The good news is that the majority of our country is made up of people who really want change. The majority of our country realizes that all lives will never really matter until Black lives do really matter.

Those good old days are gone, arent they, Mr. Daniels?

Francis A. Bethel III is a veteran of the U.S. Army and a Kraft Foods retiree after 32 years. He resides in Dover.

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Commentary: If you have to ask what Black Lives Matter is, then you really don't care - Delaware State News - Delaware State News

The plummeting human rights situation in the Philippines got even worse this week as the government began considering bills to reinstate the death penalty. The move by the House Committee on Justice came a week after President Rodrigo Duterte used his State of the Nation Address to call for capital punishment by lethal injection for drug offenders.

For years, the Philippines put people to death, particularly in cases of so-called heinous crimes. But President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, under pressure from the Catholic Church, abolished the death penalty in 2006. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances because it is inherently cruel and irreversible.

In 2007, the Philippines ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires countries to abolish the death penalty. Countries that are parties to the covenant and the protocol cannot reinstate the death penalty without violating their obligations under international human rights law. Doing so would also likely result in more than just statements of concern from foreign trade partners such as the European Union.

The Duterte governments overwhelming majority in Congress and continuing efforts to promote its campaign against illegal drugs means the justice committee is likely to support death penalty bills. Dutertes war on drugs has resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 persons at the hands of the Philippine National Police and thousands more by unidentified gunmen. Accountability for these police killings, including those that victimized children, is practically nonexistent.

Adopting the death penalty will mean spilling more blood in the name of Dutertes drug war. It will lead the Philippines to descend further into a rights-violating abyss. And the government will lose credibility and leverage to negotiate on behalf of Filipinos who face execution abroad.

Along with the Philippines withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in March 2019 and its human rights disinformation campaign at the United Nations Human Rights Council, reimposing the death penalty would only serve to further cement the countrys growing reputation as an international human rights pariah.

Read the original here:

Death Penalty Danger in the Philippines - Human Rights Watch

This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeals collection of opinion and analysis.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we may finally be getting some effective criminal justice reform. On July 30, the New York Times reported that New Jersey is considering legislation that could release about 20 percent of its prison population because of fears about the coronavirus. Unlike most sentence-reduction bills in recent memory, this bill includes reductions for people convicted of violent crimes.

The New Jersey bill contrasts with coronavirus measures in places like California that only focus on releasing those convicted of nonviolent offenses. New Jerseys bill is an important step forward in reducing the overbearing harshness of the criminal system. Such sentence reductions, if expanded across the country, could increase public welfare and save the state money without endangering public safety.

As you may know, the United States has a mass incarceration problem. We have 2.3 million people incarcerated, and although we are only 5 percent of the world population, we have nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. People are waking up to this problem, and criminal justice reform is a regular policy discussion. Both of the major political party platforms include commitments to criminal justice reform.

Many of the proposed reforms focus only on nonviolent drug offenders. For example, the First Step Act, passed by Congress in 2018, reduces sentences for some drug offenders but does not release those convicted of violent crimes. The act, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, specifically expands a safety valve that allows courts to sentence low-level, non-violent drug offenders with minor criminal histories to less than the required mandatory minimum for an offense. This is a very narrow group.

As Fordham University law professor John Pfaff explains, the numbers in the prison population are largely influenced by the states sentencing people convicted of violent crimes. This point conflicts with the idea that the war on drugs is the real cause of mass incarceration. Pfaff says that, even if we released everyone in jail who is there because of a drug offense, it is likely we would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. The numbers back that up: About one-fifth of the people in jails or prison are there only for a drug offense. If we released all of them we would have approximately 1.8 million people locked up, while China, our next closest competitor has 1.5 million. If we really want to reduce mass incarceration, we need to reduce the number of people in jail because of violent offenses.

Long prison sentences also have deleterious effects on individuals and communities. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western has called incarceration a poverty trap that creates an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society. People who go to prison for long periods are released without strong employment prospects and with severed community ties. Instead of being out in the community working, they have been warehoused and isolated. This socioeconomic situation can lead them to return to criminal activity and prison.

Communities as a whole also suffer because of mass incarceration. The criminal system strikes at poor communities of color at higher rates than other places, and, therefore, incarcerates more people living and working there. Such incarceration leaves many children with only one parent who then struggles to take sufficient care of those children. Mass incarceration also destabilizes the economies of poor areas by removing workers on a regular basis. Additionally, as stated above, when people are eventually released from prison, they have been out of the traditional workforce and most likely have reduced job prospects. The unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people is much higher than the rate for the general population. People who remain unemployed after release are much more likely to commit further crimes.

Reducing sentence length would have the additional benefit of saving the government money. It costs an average of around $33,000 to incarcerate someone for a year, and state budgets are tight. If the states are locking up fewer of their residents, then they may be able to close some prisons and put that money into more important matters. I think most people can agree that they would rather the state pay teachers than maintain an expensive, ineffective prison system.

A typical defense of long sentences is that they have a deterrent effect. The idea is that people who are considering criminal action may not commit the crime because of the fear of a long prison sentence. However, increasing the severity of punishment has not been shown to be much of a deterrent. Much more relevant is the likelihood of getting caught and punished in some way. A low to moderate prison sentence seems to be enough to deter people; the specific length of punishment is not the deciding factor.

Therefore, reducing sentence lengths would be a major boon for a state because it would save money on incarceration. This reform would help poor and nonwhite communities by reducing how often the system abducts residents and returns them jobless, stigmatized, and unskilled. And it would do all of this without having a negative effect on public safety. In fact, reducing the number of people incarcerated could improve public safety, because fewer people would be traumatized by the effects of prison.

So, back to the New Jersey billthis seems like a good step forward. The state is making the leap to grace for those convicted of violent offenses. The motivation is the risk of the prisoners contracting COVID-19, which is an honorable reason, but the state could also be motivated by the reasons detailed above. Shortened sentences for those convicted of violent offenses makes the community safer and reduces the harm done to poor communities. It would also be nice if we took the U.S. off the world pedestal for mass incarceration. Lets use New Jerseys bill as an impetus for major, national change.

Ellison Berryhill is an assistant public defender in Tennessee.

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New Jersey COVID-19 Bill Could Help Reduce The Harshness Of The Criminal System - The Appeal

Amid talks of a deep recession, social unrest, and the global pandemic, cannabis legalization continues to be a relevant topic in the United States. While COVID-19 hampered many cannabis legalization and decriminalization efforts in the short term, criminal justice reform and social equity remain a driving force that keeps cannabis legalization at the forefront; it has been top of mind in states such as Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Virginia. As states continue on the road toward decriminalization and legalization, its important to take a look at where things stand at the federal level. With support for legalization stronger than ever, is marijuana decriminalization/legalization a prominent issue in the upcoming 2020 election?

In his recent discussion of cannabis reform, U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) remarked that democrats are ready to advance cannabis reform as soon as they have a majority in both chambers of Congress. Obtaining control of Congress would be a feat, but of course anything is possible. Senator Markey commented that when it comes to cannabis, he and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a contender for Vice President on the Democratic ticket, are confronted with this obstinate, obdurate opposition from the Trump administration. Despite that obstacle, Sen. Markey remains confident, I think well have votes to just move it, and the science has moved there. However, appetite for legalization from those running for the nations top job isnt strong as President Trump and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, indicated an opposition to adult-use legalization. There might evenbe a splintering within the Democratic party on this issue. According to PoliticoPRO, several high-profile Democrats voted against adding marijuana legalization to the Democratic party platform last Monday.

Perhaps the countrys precarious economic situation can change this outlook for whomever is ultimately in charge. I think whats going to happen on so many issues is that Congress is a stimulus-response institution, and theres nothing more stimulating to whats happening out thereon climate change, on cannabis. After this election we need to move on these policies and have our own 1933, our own New Deal, Sen. Markey pronounced. One need only look to the states to support this propositionOklahoma, Colorado, and Illinois have maintained record-breaking sales in recent months despite the pandemic and recession. As we discussed on our blog, Oklahomas medical sales hit $74 million in May. Likewise in May, Colorado dispensaries sold more than $192 million. Illinois retailers continue to set new records seemingly every month, hitting a high of $61 million in total sales in July. Since going live with adult-use in January 2020 (a mere seven months ago), Illinois has brought in $52 million in tax revenue from marijuana sales. And circling back to the criminal justice reform/social equity issue, Illinois is allocating 25% of that tax revenue for communities most impacted by mass incarceration and the war on drugs, another 20% on substance abuse and mental health, 8% to local crime-prevention programs, and the rest will go to the states general fund.

For now, it appears cannabis reform at the federal level will remain stagnant, but those in the cannabis industry know that things can change rapidly. Lets see what happens leading up to and after November 3, 2020.

Originally posted here:

Neither Party Ready To Cross The Rubicon When It Comes To Federal Cannabis Legalization - JD Supra

The three prosecutors in the ultra-liberal dense urban core consisting of Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax have broken with their Commonwealth-wide association which includes prosecutors from less liberal places. These three and their eight like-minded colleagues in other places in Virginia somehow believe they are more benighted than Virginia's 109 other commonwealth attorneys. But they are not lobbying for justice in this month's special legislative session -- they are lobbying for leniency. Some of the crimes for which they are seeking expungement, such as drunk/drugged driving, are serious crimes. Do we really want to hide this sort of information about an applicant for a truck-driving job?

These three young prosecutors have forgotten or ignored history. In the 1960s and 70s, courts and lawmakers were taken in by these same sorts of "justice" and "fairness" arguments and relaxed laws. Soon thereafter began a crime spike (tripling in under a decade), giving rise to a reaction which generated over a quarter century of reforms making laws stricter, with the consequence that crime levels returned to near pre-1960s levels. The "war on drugs'" legal reforms no doubt played a role in stanching these high crime rates.

Arlington and Fairfax's Commonwealths Attorneys ran on progressive platforms to defeat moderate Democrat incumbents. This progressivism has led to potential prosecutorial misconduct masquerading as discretion, to the point where judges had to reject Arlington's prosecutor's effort to set aside charges to assure the laws are faithfully executed rather than ignored. There are limits to how far progressive prosecutors can go in enforcing laws they don't like, but which are on the books because conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats in the legislature enacted them.

"Banning the box" and statutorily regulating how employers and landlords can consider elements of a criminal record are a more responsible way to handle criminal histories than engaging the courts in legal maneuvers to pretend it never happened by expunging or sealing records, which amounts to hiding them.

Dino Drudi

Alexandria

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Opinion: Letter to the Editor: Lobbying for Leniency? - Virginia Connection Newspapers

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Last week, in announcing a plan to overhaul Illinois juvenile justice system, state officials repeatedly used a term not often heard in discussions about criminal justice: love.

At the root, children and families want us to infuse love in our policies and practices, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who leads the states Justice, Equity and Opportunity Initiative, said at a press conference last Friday. Somehow along the way, we have forgotten the power of love as it pertains to government and how we treat our children.

That, in part, reflects why this plan is being described as a paradigm shift. It focuses on moving young people out of prison-like settings far from their homes and into dorm-like regional residential centers closer to family.

Illinois has embarked on juvenile justice reform before. First, more than a century ago, when Cook County established the first juvenile court in the country. And again in 2006, when the state created a stand-alone Department of Juvenile Justice. This 100-plus-year journey has seen significant reforms and staunch opposition, small victories and painful failures.

Heres the simple truth: Our current criminal justice system is too punitive, and its too ineffective at fulfilling its purpose: keeping Illinois families safe, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at the news conference. He lamented the antiquated theory of juvenile incarceration that the facilities were built upon and highlighted the racial disparities in the justice system.

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More than 70% of youths incarcerated by the Department of Juvenile Justice are Black, he said, though Black children make up only 15% of the states population.

None of this is new. Structural racism is baked into every corner of our criminal justice system, from policing to sentencing. The juvenile justice system is no different. But the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the racial reckoning that has swept across the country of late have highlighted just how problematic those disparities are.

Many people said they saw it in the story of Grace, the Michigan teenager who was sent to a juvenile detention center after she violated probation by failing to do her schoolwork during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Details of the Illinois plan havent been finalized, in part because officials said they want to hear directly from those affected, but Im told the new regional centers wont have the same stark cinder block rooms, metal doors with slits for food or fences topped with barbed wire. The four-year plan also emphasizes reducing the reliance on the department as a whole and investing in services where the teenagers, who are often victims of crimes themselves, live and will likely return after they are released.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about teenagers who committed murder as juveniles but were charged as adults. One young man I spoke to said he was 12 when he joined a gang in hopes of fitting in. He said he had been teased for his stutter and appearance.

Ive heard that sentiment a yearning to belong, to be accepted several times over the years, often from teenagers who have committed heinous crimes. Each time, Im struck by how childlike they sound.

As a reporter who has covered juvenile justice for years, the sweeping promises of reform reminded me of previous efforts to fix this system and made me wonder what will actually change.

For starters, its helpful to understand a fundamental difference between the two systems, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Juvenile Justice. It often boils down to a punitive approach for adults and a rehabilitative one for children and teens. Of course, its not that simple, but the ideas of rehabilitation and reduced culpability in children go back to the late 1800s.

Advocates and juvenile justice experts have long criticized Illinois for straying from those roots. That was especially true in the 1990s, when the war on drugs and the notion of youth as superpredators a new breed of violent and remorseless adolescents drove tough-on-crime laws. In an interview a few years ago, John DiIulio, the architect of the superpredator theory, said he had abandoned it by 1998. But it was too late. By then, the average daily number of juveniles in correctional facilities in Illinois surpassed 2,000.

Fueling the move toward reform was a growing body of research on adolescent brain development, which found that teenagers lack the ability to see the consequences of their actions, are vulnerable to peer pressure and have difficulty with impulse control. On the flip side, children possess a greater potential for rehabilitation.

In landmark juvenile justice decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty and life without parole for juveniles, with rulings that highlighted the vulnerability of juveniles and their capacity for change.

Those first years for Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice were rocky. Shedding the adult mentality of corrections wasnt easy. The department began implementing reforms around 2009. But three years later, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued the department for locking up juveniles in unsafe conditions, failing to provide adequate mental and education services and overusing solitary confinement. A federal judge approved a consent decree that called for the ACLU to monitor the department, which it continues to do.

The ACLU, advocates and lawmakers continued to fight for reform. They pushed to raise the age of juveniles in court to include 17-year-olds, keep the department from locking up teenagers who committed misdemeanors and change the law to make it more difficult for youths to be automatically transferred to adult court.

And for all the death and destruction that the coronavirus has wreaked, it also has allowed juvenile facilities in Illinois to continue what state officials have described as a successful experiment in incarcerating fewer youth. The number of children in Department of Juvenile Justice facilities now hovers around 100, down from more than 1,000 a decade ago.

This week, a group of young people, some of whom have been incarcerated, their families and advocates from Northwestern Universitys Children and Family Justice Center launched the Final 5 Campaign. The effort calls for shutting down the last five state juvenile facilities in Illinois and ensuring that families are provided transportation to visit their children weekly in the replacement facilities, which the group doesnt want to house more than 10 teenagers at a time.

State officials havent responded to the campaign. But during last weeks press conference, Pritzker, Stratton, Department of Juvenile Justice Director Heidi Mueller and others described the states plan as a new vision that will completely overhaul the states juvenile justice system in the next four years.

Whenever I hear that kind of categorical language, my reporter radar goes off. Is it really going to be a complete overhaul?

Three years ago, I wrote a story that illustrates the fragility of reform. Young men, disproportionately young Black men from Cook County, were being sentenced to lengthy terms in adult prison after committing offenses in a juvenile facility sometimes described in records as minor and that had previously been handled internally. The crackdown was linked, in part, to some employees feeling that restrictions on solitary confinement and other reforms hampered them from being able to safely do their jobs. Following the investigation, six of those young men were released from prison after then-Gov. Bruce Rauner commuted their sentences.

Mueller told me this week that some employees are worried about the impact of these latest changes and whether theyll still have jobs in a few years. She said the reform plan does not call for layoffs and that some of the juvenile facilities will be repurposed to house adult prisoners. Juvenile employees will have the option to stay on to work with the adult inmates.

When I spoke to Mueller, she was driving to the juvenile facility in Grafton, continuing her tour to speak to the workers about the plan. She pointed to several other states that had closed their youth prisons and opted for community-based programs. A 2018 report on New Yorks model, known as the Close to Home Initiative, found that moving teenagers from large, dangerous, geographically remote institutions to places near their families was far better since those connections hold the greatest potential to help youth build new skills and stay out of trouble in the long term.

I asked her about her use of the word love at the press conference.

If were serious about safety and what it really takes to rehabilitate youth, then we have the evidence of what works, Mueller said. What works is belonging and connectedness and relationships and opportunity and hope and love. Its not idealism. That is science.

Here is the original post:

Illinois Has Promised to Infuse Love in Its Juvenile Justice System, but What Will Actually Change? - ProPublica

Civil death is a form of punishment that extinguishes someones civil rights. Its a concept that has been reshaped and reinterpreted over many generations, persisting in the form of felony disenfranchisement, through which a citizen loses their right to vote due to a felony conviction.

There are an estimated 6 million Americans who cannot vote in the countrys elections because of some form of civil death. Depending on the state they live in, they might even lose their right to vote permanently, or for years after they are released from prison. While the US has come to see this form of civil death as status quo, it is actually rare for a democratic country to take away a citizens voting rights after they leave prison, let alone forever. Countries like Germany and Denmark allow prisoners to vote while incarcerated, while others restore their rights immediately after release.

The USs history of restricting the number of people who can vote in elections goes back to the colonies and its a history that has disproportionately affected black people. Here is the story of how civil death in the US came to be.

The roots of criminal disenfranchisement in the United States lie in ancient Athens, Rome and medieval Europe. Disenfranchisement, in these societies, was typically applied to individuals for particularly grave or election-related crimes, and resulted in civil death.

The principle of civil death was adopted into Anglo-Saxon law, and was then carried over to British colonies. The laws required people with some criminal offenses to forfeit property, inheritance and civil rights. Some of this was grounded in English philosopher John Lockes theory of the social contract, which some would later interpret as a justification for felon disenfranchisement.

Following the Revolutionary war and independence, the colonies wrote constitutions and became states. Eleven of these state constitutions established forms of criminal disenfranchisement, citing purity of the ballot box and claiming that convicted criminals could commit election fraud, or otherwise sully the democratic process. By 1790, 10 of the original 13 states held that voting was restricted to property owners who, at the time, were wealthy white men.

The prior justifications for restricting the vote to elite white men eventually lost influence due to social pressures such as inter-party competition for votes, war and the growth of masses who did not own property. States slowly abolished property ownership and taxpaying requirements for suffrage. But even while they extended voting rights to more white men, lawmakers cracked down on those with criminal convictions and a wave of criminal disenfranchisement followed, probably to restrict lower-income voters. Sixteen states adopted disenfranchisement measures between 1840 and 1865.

In the period following the civil war, at least 13 of the United States then 38 states enacted broad criminal disenfranchisement laws in rapid succession.

After the civil war the 1867 election marked the starting point of southern states tailoring criminal disenfranchisement laws to block black voters. Several southern states expanded their definitions of felony to incorporate property offenses previously defined as misdemeanors. The Mississippi Pig Law of 1876, for example, broadened the definition of grand larceny from a theft of anything valued at more than $25 to a value of $10.

Soon, with the rise of the Jim Crow era, black Americans right to vote would be systematically denied through the use of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, property tests, intimidation and literacy tests.

Civil death didnt only affect black Americans. Restrictions targeting immigrants, the poor and the urban working class began to appear in the late 19th century, and almost all states which previously granted voting rights to immigrants repealed those provisions.

Meanwhile, court cases continued to uphold this punishment. The Mississippi constitution prohibited persons convicted of particular petty offenses from voting. Those convicted and disenfranchised were almost exclusively black, while crimes committed by whites, including rape and murder, did not result in disenfranchisement. The Mississippi supreme court defended this provision by asserting that race influences the type of offense to which one is prone.

Southern politicians were open about their attempts to disenfranchise minority voters. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, the first woman to hold a Senate seat, told her supporters that rapes of white women will grow and increase with every election where white men equalized themselves at the polls with an inferior race.

In 1901, Alabamas new constitution disenfranchised anyone committing a crime involving moral turpitude, an argument often made for civil death on the basis of heinous crimes, and the president of the convention declared this an effort to establish white supremacy in this state. Moral turpitude continues to be a factor in determining voting eligibility in certain US states today.

Before the 1916 election in St Louis, Democratic party leaders dispatched about 20 attorneys to comb criminal court records and ultimately disenfranchise 3,000 black residents who had been convicted of a crime. This made up 25% of St Louiss registered black voters. At the polls, Democratic operatives aimed to intimidate black voters, threatening criminal penalties for ex-offenders who voted.

Three pieces of major legislation would later affect how felony disenfranchisement has been challenged. The Civil Rights Act authorized the US attorney general and justice department to sue to correct discrimination and intimidation of potential voters, especially black citizens. The 24th amendment was ratified, eliminating poll taxes, which constitute financial restriction to voting. And, after years of protest and organizing by black leaders, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which intended to enfranchise black voters by outlawing discriminatory tactics such as literacy tests.

But civil rights legislation didnt protect minority voters from the new era of mass incarceration. President Richard Nixon addressed Congress, calling for national anti-drug policy at the state and federal level, calling drug abuse a serious national threat.

This marked the beginning of the war on drugs, which would lead to a surge in arrests and incarceration of black Americans and other minorities due to often minor offenses. Over the next decades, millions lost their voting rights because of drug-related felony charges.

The war on drugs era made it difficult for civil rights groups to fight disenfranchisement. One supreme court case, Richardson v Ramirez upheld criminal disenfranchisement in California, ruling that that states are granted an affirmative sanction to disenfranchise those convicted of crimes. At this time, the state and federal prison population was around 200,000.

Though felony disenfranchisement disproportionately burdened people of color, the criminality aspect of civil death made it difficult for these laws to be ruled discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. One case, Hunter v Underwood, however, did stand out. The supreme court ruled that while states have the right to disenfranchise criminals, the 14th amendment did not protect provisions reflecting purposeful racial discrimination. The decision said Alabamas law disenfranchising those with misdemeanors on the grounds of moral turpitude was a violation of the law.

President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, appropriating $1.7bn to building new prisons, drug education and treatment. The bill created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses.The relationship between mass incarceration and civil death was further cemented and would continue through the 1990s, when policing communities of color for petty crimes meant taking away their voting rights.

The state and federal prison population reached 1.4 million, and an estimated 6.1 million people were disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction. Currently, about a fifth (450,000) of the people incarcerated in the US prison system are serving time related to drug charges, and the majority are people of color.

Florida passed amendment 4, restoring the right to vote to up to 1.4 million ex-felons.The ballot initiative would be one of the most significant voting rights victories for this population in decades.

But months after this ballot initiative was approved, Republican legislators passed a new law requiring ex-felons to pay court fines and fees in order to regain the right to vote. Critics of the law have called this payment requirement a modern-day poll tax.In July of 2020 the supreme court ruled in favor of the legislature, making it difficult for hundreds of thousands of Floridians to vote in the upcoming election.

Nevada restored the vote to about 77,000 ex-felons.

Washington DC is poised to enact a new measure allowing people in prison to vote. The district would join Maine and Vermont, the only two US states that do not disenfranchise people with felony convictions while they are in prison. If enacted, the DC measure will allow 4,500 people to vote in December.

***

US history shows us that voting wasnt simply withheld from black people during slavery and then granted after abolition.

In 1790, anyone who was not a property owner was barred from voting. With the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870, voting became formally accessible for black men, but remained exclusionary to all black people. Poll taxes, literacy tests, voter intimidation, mandatory minimum sentences and racialized policing have sustained voter suppression and civil death among black, poor Americans.

Disenfranchisement clearly has a deeper significance to the democratic systems formation that crimes should result in civil death, particularly for societys most oppressed populations.

Read the original:

Civil death: how millions of Americans lost their right to vote - The Guardian

OPINION: As a father of four children there are many reasons for me to be concerned about the upcoming cannabis referendum. If my children are to be exposed to cannabis, which inevitably they will be, with or without reform, then I want them to be as informed as possible.

Firstly, about the dangers of cannabis consumption. The dangers of driving or operating equipment whileimpaired, the dangers of smoking a joint lit by a butane lighter at 600 degrees Fahrenheitand the impact this heat and burned by-product has on the respiratory system.

I want them to be as informed as possible about the impact heavy consumption of cannabis at a very young age may have on some individuals' brain development.

I want them to be informed as possible about the risks of purchasing cannabis from a 'tinny house' or from those with gang affiliations. I want them to be as informed as possible as to what strain they are about to consume, as to its potency. I want them to know how to test for this.

READ MORE:* Cannabis referendum: how NZ's ex-illicit growers are poised to transform the proposed legal market* Cannabis referendum: how legalisation could change access for medicinal cannabis patients * The Detail: The two polarising referendums Kiwis will soon vote on

I want them to be fully conversant with the law and to understand their rights and the risk of consuming cannabis through a legal lens.

But I also want them to be informed as to the positive health and wellbeing benefits that cannabis can provide. I want them to be informed about the very real differences of being "stoned"at a party with other consumers of cannabis and being drunk at a party with other consumers of alcohol.

I want them to be informed about the chemical construct of this complex plant, with its different terpenes and flavonoids and thepositive benefits they have in assisting with nausea, inflammation, digestion, depression, anxiety and weight-loss.

UNSPLASH

"I have already made up my mind. I started smoking cannabis at 14 years of age and have continued to do so for 35 years."

I want them to be informed as to where cannabis sits on the drug harm scaleaccording toresearch, andthat alcohol and tobacco causemore social harm than cannabis.

I want them to understand and reject the violence that occurs every weekend in this country by alcohol-fuelled adults. I want them to understand that it is very rare for this behaviour to be elicited from someone who has consumed cannabis only.

I want them to listen to both sides of the debate for and against and make up their own minds.

I have already made up my mind. I started smoking cannabis at 14 years of age and have continued to do so for 35 years. For me, cannabis has not been a "gateway"drug.

As aGrammar boy, I went on to Auckland University and subsequently had a very successful career in the corporate world in senior executive roles for some of the world's largest corporations. My last role was as a Chief Executive Officer of one of New Zealands largest businesses for eightyears before retiring at 50.

My partner of 25 years and I have lived and travelled around the world, put our children through private schools, supported our local communities, attended every sports fixture or dance lesson/concert that our children have participated in, paid large amounts of taxes and been highly productive members of society.

STUFF

What are the main arguments for and against legalising cannabis in New Zealand?

At the same time, in NZ currently at least, my regular consumption of cannabis makes me a criminal.

At least I have the wherewithal to engage the best legal counsel possible should I be caught with a small amount of cannabis and therefore with my background, character and ability to engage the best legal mind would more than likely receive a mild warning or a pat on the wrist.

This would likely be very different if I was Mori or Pasifika. This is not right and must change. The nonsense of a war on drugs is just that - a nonsense. The "war on drugs"was designed to re-elect presidents and help providers of correctional facilities profiteer.

I want to live in a NZ where people can consume cannabis without fear of being ripped off, have an idea what strain or potency it is that they are consuming and not feel like or be treated like criminals.

I want my children to be informed and educated as to the risks and positive benefits of cannabis and then be able to choose whether or not to partake, all within a supply chain controlled and monitored by central government rather than the criminal underworld.

Go here to read the rest:

Cannabis referendum: I want my kids to be informed to make their own decision - Stuff.co.nz

While recent right-wing attacks on the free press here in the US have rightly been sounding alarm bells, in a global context they are merely wake-up calls. Sure, Trump deeming the lamestream media fake news is dangerously juvenile, but its also a far cry from, say, the Duterte administration finding the founder and CEO of the Philippiness top online news site Rappler guilty of cyber libel a travesty of justice that happened just this past June. And the politically orchestrated verdict comes with both a hefty fine and potential prison time for 2018 Time Person of the Year Maria Ressa along with a former colleague.

Though its not hard to see why Ressa, a superhumanly dogged journalistic force (with a default mode set to unbridled optimism), might get under a murderous strongmans skin. Whats less immediately apparent is how Ressa has even managed to survive for this long within a system determined to sentence dissent to death by a thousand cuts, as the title of award-winning director Ramona S. Diazs latest documentary suggests.

Fortunately, Diaz, a Filipino-American filmmaker, has been a longtime observer of the complicated country and its culture from 2004s Imelda to 2017s Motherland so shes able to shine a big-picture light on both Ressa and the wider context that her team of investigative journalists are forced to operate in. Indeed, A Thousand Cuts goes beyond providing an intimate journey alongside Ressa and her heroic Rappler reporters as they relentlessly battle to expose Dutertes corrupt war on drugs for the war on poor drug addicts that it actually is (even while they themselves serve as targets of the governments highly effective, social media disinformation campaign). Smartly, Diaz also turns her lens to the politically savvy, pro-Duterte side, by tagging along as government secretary Mocha Uson, a onetime pop star, and General Ronald Bato dela Rosa, a retired Police General, spread a message of intolerance and hate online and on the stump in the most upbeat, crowd-pleasing ways. Which renders the dark side even darker.

So to learn more about documenting the heart of Dutertes Philippines, and what her lead characters recent guilty verdict means for both Ressa and the future of Diazs filmmaking there, Filmmaker reached out to the director a few days prior to the August 7th virtual release of A Thousand Cuts (through PBS Distribution and Frontline).

Filmmaker: I actually saw Marc Wieses We Hold The Line at this years virtual CPH:DOX, which made me wonder if you had to navigate around a German film crew during production! So how long was the shoot with Maria and Rappler, and what are some of the challenges when filming with a famous, in-demand lead character?

Diaz: We started filming Maria on July 23, 2018, to be exact, during President Dutertes third State of the Nation address. We returned in October and November to continue filming. By then Id decided to make the midterm elections the backdrop of the film, and set principal photography to begin in February and to continue all the way to election month in May.

When we started filming Maria in 2018, she had not been named Time Person of the Year yet, her arrests were still in the future, and she wasnt the in-demand character that she eventually became. In those early days in 2018, television crews came around to film short pieces about Maria and we just incorporated them into our shooting; we filmed them videotaping her. Included in this was the German crew, and it was my understanding that they were filming more of the drug war than Maria.

All of them came and went, and we stayed. Also, at this time, she was not the lead of the film. I was still envisioning an Altmanesque-like ensemble cast made up of Maria, and allies of the president and opposition leaders. Very much likeShort Cuts,and the medfly was Duterte. That was my pitch. So we filmed equally with the other characters, like Duterte allies Mocha Uson and General Bato dela Rosa, in 2018.

I arrived in Manila to prep on February 12, 2019. My crew were arriving the next week. The very next day I get a text from Maria asking me to please come to Rappler headquarters if I wasnt busy because she was about to get arrested. Of course I dropped everything and, realizing Id never make it to Rappler, I decided to go directly to the National Bureau of Investigations (like the Philippines FBI).

Due to some blessing from the documentary gods, we actually caught up with the convoy that was taking Maria to the NBI, so we just inserted ourselves into the stream. I fought my way to the front of the crowd when we arrived at the NBI and said I was with Rappler, so they let me inside the room where she was being held. And then that was that, we never left her side. (I hired a local crew for the few days before my crew arrived.)

And as she obviously became the center of gravity of the film, and it shifted from my original idea, one unit was assigned exclusively to Maria. So by the time everyone else came around to film her, we were already deeply embedded with her. We were the only ones allowed to film her intimately (gosh I hate that word, but you know what I mean), to travel with her, meet her family, etc. We were the first ones in and the last ones out.

I film immersively; thats why Ive never gone after breaking news. I dont know how to navigate that world. Actually, when I first got to Manila at the end of 2017, with this vague notion of making a film about the drug war, I discovered that there were so many people already making films about the drug war. I had to pivot, and thats how I discovered Maria and honed in on her. Gaining access is hard enough as it is, but to fight other film crews? Nothing good ever comes from that.

Filmmaker: Besides Maria and her colleagues, you also follow those two other compelling characters, Mocha Uson, the former pop star who became a government secretary, and General Ronald Bato dela Rosa both politically ambitious and adamantly pro-Duterte. So how exactly did you meet them, and why did they agree to appear in the doc? Were they aware you were also filming with Maria and Rappler?

Diaz: I was very transparent with everyone. Mocha and Bato knew I was filming Maria, and vice versa. Also, whenever Maria got arrested we were all over the news with her. It was hard to miss us. We werent hiding. The president himself was aware of us because I had to get permission to film his speeches at the political rallies up close, and not just from the media box. I had to meet with theSecretary of the Presidential Communications Officeto acquire permission. I think being above radar actually made us safer than if we had shot secretly. Being visible was our protection.

I met Mocha and Bato through the formal channels. I wrote them a letter and would call their office every day for a response. Im also not an unknown entity in the Philippines. Ive done other films in the past that have gotten major play, most particularly Imelda, about former First Lady Imelda Marcos, which was my very first film back in the early aughts. They were familiar with this film and with my other work. They also understood that my audience went beyond the Philippines because my films are produced in the US.

Mocha and Bato intrigue me. No one ever sees themselves as anti-heroes in their own narratives. I didnt want to be an apologist for them by any means, but I always pursue characters with the idea that they have a story to tell. What was Mochas? What was Batos? Its not about the gotcha moment and dismissing them as mere pawns of the Duterte administration, which is not productive and doesnt make for a compelling story. Nuance is my goal. Sometimes I get there and sometimes I dont, but that is always the intention.

Filmmaker: It struck me that both you and Maria share a similar heavy responsibility in having to look out for the safety of others she for her Rappler colleagues and you for your local crew. What measures did you take, and what recommendations might you have for other filmmakers faced with such a life-and-death burden?

Diaz: I would recommend hiring local fixers experienced in navigating uncertain situations. They assess danger and present it to you, and you have to figure out what is everyones risk tolerance. Be very transparent with the crew, because these are highly personal decisions. Most of all, hire fixers who know how to get you in and out of places quickly and can provide security when needed. And dont freak when they use the word extraction.

I clearly understood that for the local crew the consequences were far greater because they would stay long after we wrapped. When I realized that Maria was becoming the focal point of Dutertes ire, I gave them an out and made it clear that I wouldnt think badly of them if they decided to walk away. Not one person left. They felt it was the right story to tell.

I also offered anonymity in the end credits, but all wanted to be named. They believed in the project and were proud to be allied with it. The shoot bonded us like no other Id been on. One thing production did was provide housing for everyone, which avoided hours-long commutes at dawn and (sometimes) midnight. For as long as I had control over their safety, I would do something about it.

The bottom line is you have to be realistic and acknowledge the danger and decide if youre in or out. Personally, my imagined regret had I not pursued the story outweighed the fear. What am I a documentary filmmaker for if I dont step up at moments like these?

Filmmaker: As a Filipino-American documentarian whos spent much of your career shooting in the Philippines, what changes have you seen over the years in terms of the difficulties of filming in the country? Have you had to make specific adjustments with Duterte now in charge?

Diaz: Its not so much because of Duterte, or which administration is in charge. I think the difficulties, like ridiculous and costly permits, have to do with more films being shot on the streets and in public spaces commercials, fiction, nonfiction. When the police see a camera theyre all over you immediately. That wasnt the case in the early days. I felt like I could film anywhere.

Filmmaker: Now that Maria has been convicted of cyber libel (whatever that is) and could seriously face some prison time, do you plan to resume filming? Could doing so affect the final outcome, for better or worse, in any way?

Diaz: Cyber libel is what it sounds like libel that occurs on the internet. Ha. But yes, Ive been asked whether Id do a part two. I think if there wasnt a pandemic I probably would be entertaining the thought more seriously. Or perhaps Id already be on the ground shooting. Who knows?

But because the Philippines has been under strict lockdown for 20 weeks now, theres really nothing to be filmed except Maria in her condo doing Zoom calls back-to-back. Now maybe theres a film there, perhaps. Actually now that I think about it, it would be a very different film. But there is something about Maria in her condo day in and day out, having to deal with whats being thrown her way by the government, thats interesting. Will it change the final outcome? I think the presence of a camera always changes the situation or person being filmed. I think in this case, itll keep danger at bay longer but not forever. We can all be collateral, right? So grim. I didnt mean to end that way.

Read more:

Very Much Like Short Cuts, and the Medfly was Duterte That Was My Pitch: Ramona S. Diaz on A Thousand Cuts - Filmmaker Magazine

The establishment of the terrorist groups al-Shabab and the Islamic State with claims to establish the Islamic Law, the corporate interests of the oil industry and the lobby of Erik Prince, a former operative of the American military elite, now at the head of a private business proposal to pacify Cabo Delgado, are considered so far by academics, press and the civil society as the motivations explaining the armed insurgency in the potentially richest province of Mozambique.

By far, heavy drug trafficking and the illegal extraction of resources are framed in the equation. However, as documented by international reports and frequent police seizures, the coast of Cabo Delgado has been an important drug corridor in East Africa since the 1990s, a position recently expanded after Tanzania and Kenya repressed the trafficking networks, pushing them into Mozambican waters.

One of the largest drug seizures in the countrys history occurred in that province in 1997, when 12 tons of hashish were seized, part of it on the beach and another container on the way to Nacala. In December last year, in the middle of the insurgent war, two ships carrying two tons of heroin were intercepted by the Navy and the Defense and Security Forces after being stranded at sea, resulting in the detention of 25 foreigners.

Cabo Delgado, on its more than thirty islands, is a transit point, but also uses cabotage and land transport system to drain drugs to Nampula, the distribution hub for strategic destinations.

The Mozambique Financial Information Office (GIFIM) uses independent research calculations estimating that the drug that passes through Mozambique is worth US$600 million per year, an economy higher than the amount disbursed by the cooperation partners, as well as the revenues from some of the main export commodities. Of this amount, $100 million is left on the web of corruption in Mozambique, composed of influential politicians linked to Frelimo, local drug lords and state officials assigned to the Police, Migration and Customs.

More than religious fundamentalism and the dispute of oil multinationals, it is quite obvious that today drug cartels are the ones who profit most from the war in Cabo Delgado, as the already weak sea surveillance has become practically non- -existent, with all the forces focused on halting the increasingly concerted and regular advance of the Islamic state and al-Shabab terrorists.

For several years now, the Navy, for lack of means, has been the branch of the armed forces with more men on land than at sea. That is why, for three years, armed gangs have been entering the sea, destroying and plundering the districts along the coast of the province, with the state unable to stop them.

While trying to resolve the war on the battlefield, the area of the Indian Ocean along Cabo Delgado has strengthened its role as a viaduct for the smuggling of narcotics and the consequent illicit enrichment of mafia elites and networks of traffickers. In addition to drugs, the war has diverted attention from the illegal extraction of natural resources, a criminal practice associated with illegal immigration in the north of the country.

Smuggling paradise

Cabo Delgado province is located in the northern region of Mozambique and corresponds to 10.34% of the national surface with about 4,760 km of inland waters. Its limits are, to the north, the Rovuma River which serves as the natural border with the United Republic of Tanzania, with a territorial extension of about 250 Km; to the south the Lrio River; to the west the Lugenda, Luambeze, Ruaca and Mewo Rivers separate it from Niassa Province and to the east it has the Indian Ocean, which bathes its entire eastern coast with a length of 430 km.

The border with Tanzania is the gateway for illegal immigrants from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, who are attracted by the illegal extraction of timber and precious stones, especially gold and ruby. The illegal mining network enters Cabo Delgado from the Inamoto area, in the administrative post of Quionga, in Palma district, a depopulated piece of land, with several entry and exit areas that are uncontrolled by Migration and Customs authorities.

Illegal immigrants cross the Rovuma River by small boats. On land, they take public transport or rent cars, predominantly Toyota Land Cruiser, and go to Palma-sede, a distance of about 45 kilometers. From here the groups split according to interests, going mainly to Montepuez and Nampula, areas with valuable gemstones and informal commerce respectively.

Another window of entry into Mozambique from Tanzania is the historic district of Mueda, but poor access roads, the long distance from the mining areas, and the tight control at the border discourage illegal immigration, placing Inamoto as the favourite route for foreigners seeking easy wealth.

Used by networks that facilitate the transport of foreigners fleeing war and famine on their land in search of security and work, Cabo Delgado province is also a gateway to South Africa. Migration authorities often neutralize groups of illegal immigrants, and it is estimated that more than six thousand were expelled last year in Cabo Delgado alone.

Military instability in the province has made the entry of illegal immigrants and the illegal extraction of natural resources easier, as the attention of the authorities, press and society in general is focused on armed conflict. The United Nations estimates that the war has displaced 211 000 persons and there are reports of insurgents and illegal immigrants camouflaged as victims of the war.

The Indian Ocean: The drug viaduct

If in the fresh waters of the Rovuma River the entrances to Mozambique are marked, even if the infiltration of immigrants is not controlled, the same cannot be said of the dozens of access points that the Indian Ocean gives to the province of Cabo Delgado. These access points have been transformed by drug cartels into warehouses that link the producer to the consumer.

The province is divided into seventeen districts Ancuabe, Balama, Chire, Ibo, Macomia, Mecfi, Meluco, Metuge, Mocmboa da Praia, Montepuez, Mueda, Muidumbe, Namuno, Nangade, Palma, Pemba and Quissanga. Part of these districts is crossed by the sea, making up the Quirimbas archipelago with more than thirty islands, which serve as areas of call and ports of cabotage taking the drug to land.

The coastal area of Cabo Delgado is long and has no state control. The beaches are calm and are crossed by dunes, which allows drugs to be hidden and drained by small boats. The biggest seizures occur on the island of Ibo, at the beaches of Quissanga and in Pemba, but the inability to monitor does not allow to measure whether seized drug is more than that which passes in disguise.

The port of Nacala is pointed out as one of the outflow centres, with heroin being the main drug in Mozambique, coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Typically, the drug travels in containers mixed with other goods.

The southern route of the drug produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan seems a very long and expensive diversion, but 10 kilos of heroin can cost five dollars at production sites and yield up to 20 000 dollars when sold in a modern world capital.

The drug is also taken to South Africa, from where it leaves to the destinations of consumption, namely Europe and the United States of America. Over and over again, South African authorities make seizures at their border after the drug passes through the Ressano Garcia border post in Maputo.

One of the major seizures was in May 2019, when three Mozambicans were arrested on the N4 road in Kaapmuiden, near Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga. They possessed heroin valued at R60 million, about four million US dollars.

In June this year, two Mozambican truck drivers who had passed the Ressano Garcia border were intercepted soon afterwards on the South African side with more than 200 kilograms of heroin.

The regularity with which the seizures occur is indicative that drug trafficking is a routine business in Mozambique, but often finds no protection in the neighboring country.

Nampula: The habitat of drug lords

Various publications on drug trafficking note that from Cabo Delgado the goods follow, by small boats or vehicles, to the province of Nampula, the real centre of the heavy drug business in Mozambique and home to drug lords and drug traffickers.

The United States of America and England, according to GIFIM, have drawn the attention of the Mozambican authorities to the distortions of the economy in the north of the country, mainly in Pemba and Nampula, mentioning that organized crime introduces dirty money into the national financial system.

The hustle and bustle at Pemba Airport, the connections to rich districts such as Montepuez and Palma and the dynamics in Nacala and Nampula City seem to find no justification in their basic economic structures, namely agriculture, fishing and trade.

Mozambique is not a market for heavy drug consumption, as it is a low-income country. The Annual Drug Report, published last week by the United Nations, highlights that heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are consumed in developed, high-income countries with purchasing capacity.

Drugs and the insurgency

Mozambiques influence on organized crime and drug trafficking led the United Nations to open its office dealing with the problem in Maputo in 2019 at the request of the Mozambican government. Csar Guedes, a Peruvian-Canadian with 20 years of work experience at the United Nations, was made head of the office in Maputo. He had headed the office in Pakistan and Bolivia, two major unions for the industrial production of heroin and hashish.

The opening of the United Nations Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Mozambique is a sign that the dynamics of drug trafficking, institutional promiscuity and money laundering are significant and lack a more structural and international approach.

This office confirms the view that heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe is one of the main reasons for the conflict in Cabo Delgado. Information obtained by the organization indicates that drug production has practically tripled in the last ten years, and Mozambique fits into one of the trafficking corridors that passes through the east coast of Africa.

Lets look at recent statements to the Lusa Agency from the UN Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Mozambique: Here, they apparently find a country that has a unique strategic location to facilitate drug trafficking. What these countries offer is ease of passage. Its not a sophisticated thing, but they have huge borders and the authorities are not at every point. And the traffickers know this Its an outside situation with undercover groups that want to do harm to countries that have always lived together peacefully. They have a dangerous agenda, not in line with the reality of the countries; it is a criminal and illegal agenda to do their own business in a difficult situation. It is in times of crisis that traffickers and those who are connected to the illegal economy are best prepared to develop their illegal businesses. Ships large and small, outside the cyclone season, arrive little by little. It is a long but safe journey where a lot of money is made.

Uncontrolled borders

The statements of the representative of the UN Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking show weaknesses in controlling Mozambique sea space, a situation that makes it (sea space) permeable not only to drug trafficking, but also to the development of piracy actions and plunder of its sea resources.

There are many situations that show the vacuum that the coast of Cabo Delgado is in. In 2010, a national flagship vessel called Vega 5 was hijacked at the bank of Sofala, six hundred miles off the coast of Inhassouro in Inhambane province, and for days it sailed the Mozambican waters undisturbed towards Somalia with no State means to stop it. The vessel was refitted but recovered by the Indian military authorities a year after it was taken over by the pirates.

Domestic and international illegal fishing is another factor revealing lack of surveillance capacity. The Ministry of Fisheries estimates that illegal fishing on the Mozambican coast causes an annual loss of US$ 60 million to the public purse. There are often reports of international vessels invading Mozambican waters for fishing and waste disposal.

Major sea surveillance has been carried out irregularly through joint military missions with several partner countries, but the flimsiness of the action does not allow an intervention capable of containing the disorder in Mozambican waters.

The seizures that have occurred are fortuitous, resulting from inadvertent traces along the drug value chain in Mozambique. For example, the two boats seized in December last year ran aground at sea in Pemba a situation that awakened the authorities. In Nampula, there are cases of drugs found in homes and with local fishermen.

This points to lack of responses capable of identifying traffic routes at their origin, which would allow more effective combat and dismantling of groups that facilitate the movement of drugs.

Covid-19 transfers drugs to Cabo Delgado

The Annual Drug Report warns that Covid-19 has increased the use of sea transport for heroin trafficking as the countries restriction measures to prevent the disease have included the suspension of flights and closure of land borders, as well as tightening up on migration control.

These factors have shifted drugs from air and land to sea, with the sea taking on the role of a bridge between areas of production, passage and consumption. As a result of the pandemic, more farmers in Pakistan and Afghanistan have adopted illicit cultivation, either because state authorities may be less able to exercise control or because more people may have to resort to illegal activities due to the economic crisis.

The UN document points out the southern route and the Indian Ocean that passes through Mozambique, as areas to which drug cartels have turned. The trafficking route is defined according to the porousness of the borders and the inability of the countrys authorities to monitor them.

This change may mean that drug trafficking flows along the coast of Cabo Delgado may have increased, which is evidenced in part by the two seizures in a span of one week in December last year of two vessels containing two tonnes of hashish.

Conclusion

Lack of means for sea surveillance, as described above, leaves an important part of the Mozambican coast bare, which is used as a highway by drug trafficking networks. Coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan, drug bypasses the countries with the tightest control and searches for empty routes even if the distances are long.

This is an established pattern in the Mozambican coastal area, which has made it a drug corridor since the 1990s. It is a public concern that there is not a strategic intervention to prevent and fight sea and land border fragilities.

With the intensification of the war in Cabo Delgado, which took on the appearance of guerrilla warfare and became more difficult to contain, migration and border control and surveillance became more fragile. This opened space for traffickers to bolster their action, all the more so because Covid-19 led to the disruption of air transport and restricted the movement of people, pushing drug onto sea routes.

Just like drugs, illegal extraction of natural resources, i.e. precious stones and wood, is now carried out unhampered, encouraging illegal immigration and the deterioration of State power in the country.

Drug business in Mozambique only works because there is a State sheltering power, which orders free passage and has no interest in consolidating the institutions of defense and security.

Republished with permission from the Centro para Democracie e Desenvolvimento (CDD). The original article can be found here.

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The hidden face of the war in Cabo Delgado - defenceWeb

RVA Mag spoke with Virginia State Senator and candidate for governor Jennifer McClellan about her plan for Virginia, from renewable energy and Citizen Review Boards to marijuana legalization and the Green New Deal.

Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia State Senator representing the Richmond-based 9th District, has declared her candidacy in the 2021 race for governor. If successful, she would be the first Black woman elected governor in United States history, and the second woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. An attorney by trade, McClellan was also the first member of the Virginia House of Delegates to participate in a legislative session while pregnant. After Donald McEachins election to the House of the Representatives, McClellan won her current seat in the state senate in a special election.

A former vice chair of the Virginia DNC, McClellan has moved to the left of other prominent Virginia Democrats who have facilitated widely criticized energy contracts and pipelines in collaboration with energy giants such as Dominion. Below, McClellan presents a platform that includes fighting Dominion, demilitarizing the Virginia State police, and decriminalizing all drugs.

RVA Mag: Senator McClellan, thank you for taking the time to sit with us. Lets start with the main thing on everyones mind right now: policing. As a candidate for Governor, how do you view police reform on a state-wide level?

Jennifer McClellan: Starting with special session, its shifting a couple of different ways. Theres accountability, transparency, and consequences around police misconduct whether its use of force, corruption, the whole nine yards. We need independent investigations from either a Civilian Review Board (CRB) or, at the state level, just a separate entity outside the police. They need to have subpoena power, to be able to recommend, if they find a wrongdoing, that there are consequences and that that is transparent. And that you dont have a system where a police officer can be found to have done something wrong in one place, and just get transferred and go on as if nothing happened.

Police have been used as the first responder for too many issues that are not crime issues. Its not just mental health, but mental health is a big part of it. Im carrying a bill to allow localities to do Marcus Alerts and have the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Department of Behavioral Health to provide guidelines around that. Ghazala Hashmi and I are working together on the CRB, but well also have broad police reform [legislation] no chokeholds, no no-knock warrants.

Its not just the action of police and the community; its also what happens once youre in the criminal justice system. Making sure that we provide more of what Ill call prosecutor mercy getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences so that if there is a crime, the penalty for it is proportionate to the injury, and allowing prosecutors to do deferred disposition for certain things.

RVA Mag: Would you be interested in the CRB being a full-time, paid job for citizens? How do you conceive of the makeup of that board, and how do we give people enough training, confidence, and support to do that job, and do it seriously?

JMC: From the states level, we are [structuring] broad guidelines that localities could use to tailor-fit their areas. Having said that, I do think having, if not full-time, at least members who are fully trained so that they fully understand the nature of what law enforcement does on a day-to-day basis, so that they understand the training that law enforcement has.

RVA Mag: If we only put in place broad legislative guidance that municipalities need to have a CRB, arent we leaving undue leeway for racially-biased municipalities to not take it seriously? Arent we allowing them to make it toothless?

JMC: Im not ready to share the full details of [Senator Hashmis] bill, but we are talking with Princess Blanding and a lot of the advocates here. We are including their feedback in the draft we have.

We want to make sure that if a locality has a CRB, it has teeth and its independent: that it is not beholden to the police that theyre investigating. Boards of Supervisors or City Councils could have bias, and were trying to account for all of that. Were focusing on enabling legislation, because its probably going to take more time to figure out all the best practices that we can put in place going forward.

RVA Mag: Lets talk about defense contracts and the Navy. Previous governors have seemed somewhat uncritically beholden to these contracts. Its been said implicitly, and perhaps explicitly, that the economy of Virginia hinges on these contracts. How do you feel about the critical centrality of defense contracts to Virginias economy?

JMC: If youre dependent on mechanisms of war, thats just wrong. We shouldnt be dependent on war for people to eat. Our number one business is Agribusiness. Our number two industry is Forestry. We should be working to strengthen those, and working to strengthen small businesses to not be as dependent on defense contracting, because then how well our economy does is dependent on if were in a state of war, or a state of [war] readiness, or not. Thats contradictory to the view of a beloved community.

RVA Mag: For the past two months, we have witnessed firsthand the intersection of the police and military in the streets of Richmond. That extends to the Virginia State Police, which you as governor would have control of. State police have arrived in the streets of Richmond with military vehicles and artillery. What is going on, and how are we going to address that?

JMC: I do not think police should be militarized. They do not need militarized weapons, and I think we should begin to demilitarize them. A lot of equipment is paid for through grant programs. Rather than using funding to buy military grade equipment, we should be using funding to address the root causes of crime, like mental health issues, and, to a certain extent, poverty: lack of access to economic opportunity. I dont think you need military grade equipment.

RVA Mag: We already have the military grade equipment. Would you commit to selling off the stock of military equipment?

JMC: I would be open to that.

RVA Mag: And what about the formerly-known-as Robert E. Lee Monument, now known as Marcus-David Peters Circle? Are you for VSP fully standing down and staying out of that circle?

JMC: Unless someone is actively threatening someone else, I dont know why theyd be there.

RVA Mag: Kim Gray has taken issue with the Black, community-based security that has been there ostensibly to protect black protesters from white supremacists. Do you agree with Kim Gray that we should disallow the carrying of AR-15s by these security personnel who have the legal right to carry them?

JMC: Right now open carry is legal for anybody, and you cant pick and choose who can carry and who cannot. There are a lot of people who want to have a conversation about whether anybody can open carry in a public park space, and I think thats a conversation worth having. But I dont think you can pick and choose: these people can, and these people cant.

RVA Mag: Lets discuss marijuana policy. Why, under the new state law, are police still being given enforcement discretion over a petty issue such as possessing a small amount of marijuana, an issue that disproportionately criminalizes Black and brown people? Why decriminalization and not full legalization?

JMC: It needs to be full legalization for both possession and distribution. Unfortunately, the reason its just decriminalization now is that we couldnt get the votes to go farther than that this year, but were pushing to go farther as soon as possible. I would have preferred full legalization of possession now. Were doing a study on how to do distribution in a way so that the new market is not just the folks who have medical cannabis licenses now who are mostly white, upper middle class, and have a leg up. I have the resolution to have JLARC study how we do that distribution piece equitably, while also dealing with expungements and unraveling the War on Drugs, and giving people who have been arrested for what is going to be legal a path forward. We need to do both as quickly as possible. Youll see, come January, were going to have legislation to do both.

RVA Mag: What about harder drugs? For example: heroin, cocaine, crack, crystal meth. We are incarcerating people for a health issue, and it does the opposite of providing rehabilitative care. Do you think its possible that sending someone to jail for substance abuse is ever a rehabilitative gesture by the government?

JMC: I dont think we should send somebody to jail just for using drugs, let me be clear on that. Whether its drugs or anything that is a crime, how we deal with it should be proportionate to the injury caused. There are a lot of crimes where the punishment is too harsh, and we should change that.

For example, there are no gradations of assault on a police officer. If you throw an onion ring at a police officer and it hits him, you can get the same sentence as if you beat him over the head with a sledgehammer. That doesnt make sense.

Im open to looking into all crimes to say, Whats the social benefit of making this a crime? Does it still exist? If it does, is the punishment proportionate? Thats the direction we should be moving in. They shouldnt just punish you because you did something wrong and then warehouse you, throw away the key, and assume youre never getting out. It should be: what is going to be a deterrent and a proportionate punishment, and how do we focus on rehabilitation and reentry?

RVA Mag: One of the ways people approach drug abuse as a health issue is talking about harm reduction during drug use, since people cant necessarily just stop using drugs because the state says so. Do you think it would be a good idea to help facilitate safer drug use practices as we treat people for their drug addiction, like providing access to safe supplies of needles?

JMC: Yes, I do. We should be looking at the underlying reasons of what made you turn to drugs in the first place. If its a mental health issue thats gone untreated, lets get you into the treatment you need so that you wont turn back to drugs. That has to be part of the process.

RVA Mag: How do you feel about energy exploration off the coast of Virginia? How do you see Virginias energy independence moving forward, and how do you feel about Dominion colonizing that area?

JMC: Broadly, electric generation needs to shift away from fossil fuels to renewables. We are going to need more solar and more wind, regardless of who provides it. It would be better to have more wind provided by a third party, separate companies from Dominion. I dont see how we get to 100 percent carbon-free without wind. We cant get there with solar only. Wind is much better for the climate than natural gas or coal.

We did not have the votes in the General Assembly to get the full Green New Deal. The Clean Economy Act, which we did pass, does make a huge shift away from carbon into renewable, but its a first step. We need to push to try to get there faster.

RVA Mag: Do you take money from Dominion?

JMC: I do not.

RVA Mag: How do you feel about the Mountain Valley Pipeline?

JMC: I oppose it.

RVA Mag: Can you commit for the people of Virginia to make going against Dominion, and speaking out against the Mountain Valley Pipeline and offshore colonization, a central platform in your campaign for Governor?

JMC: Yes. I am focused on addressing climate change and shifting our energy policy so that it is less harmful to the environment, reducing energy demand through energy efficiency projects in a way that does not cause rate shock and allows the lights to stay on. I am fighting for the policy, and whoever stands in the way, I will fight against them.

RVA Mag: SoBig T [Terry McAuliffe] is running again. Is he the right person?

JMC: I cant explain what he does either. Im running because Virginia is ready for a new generation of leadership who will build a recovery in a way that addresses 400 years of inequity, and Im ready to do that. Im not running against anybody else. Im just running for the future of Virginia that I want to see, that comes to terms with our past. Im focused on talking to the community and talking to voters directly, and not on what other candidates are doing.

Top Photo via Jennifer McClellan/Facebook

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Dominion, Decriminalization, and Demilitarizing the Police: An Exclusive Q&A With Jennifer McClellan - rvamag.com

New device to help war on drugs

Floyd County police use device to detect drugs before they see them.

FLOYD COUNTY, Ga - Floyd County police have a new tool in their battle against the opioid crisis.Investigators saidit's an efficient way to find drugs that are not in plain sight.

"It's called a Viken detection x-ray imager. It sees through surfaces, car panels, walls, in the search for, in our case, illicit contraband," said Floyd County Police Officer Baker Harbin.

Police said it works like a handheld X-ray machine and can detect contraband hidden in a car or building.

Police will use the device to scan a portion of a vehicle, like a door panel or seat, where something illegal might be stashed. During training, the device picked up an image of a large amount of meth hidden in a compartment above the rear tire of an SUV.

The device can pick up drugs, bundles of cash, even guns.

"Most guns have some bit of plastic, like our Glock, so it's going to show," said Harbin.

Officer Harbin saidbecause it is similar to an X-ray, it will not be used on people or cars with people inside.

"Roadside if we were to use this machine, it would be a vehicle we have consent to search or probable cause to search," said Officer Harbin.

Police will also use it while searching a home or building with a search warrant.

The Floyd County Police Department was oneof only fivedepartments across the country to receive a grant for the imaging device.Officers saidthey've been particularly impacted by the opiod crisis.

"In the past twoyears, we've had an exponential growth of opiod deaths. With the number of state highways, corridors that are being used to traffic drugs to Rome, away from Rome or through it.," said Harbin.

Officer Harbin says this will make a tremndous difference when it comes to keeping drugs off the streets.

More:

Police in Floyd County have new tool to fight the war on drugs - FOX 5 Atlanta

Signs posted at a Libertarian Party campaign event in New Orleans on Sunday asked supporters to keep six feet of distance from each other, so we can have the government leave us alone!

The request nodded to politicking in the coronavirus era and to the principles of a party that usually trails a distant third or fourth in presidential elections.

As storm clouds threatened a park across from City Hall, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen made her pitch for why the dwindling cohort of voters who havent decided on Donald Trump or Joe Biden should choose her instead.

For those who are in traditionally blue or red states, I say your vote is wasted, Jorgensen said. Vote for what you really want.

Jorgensen, a psychology instructor at Clemson University and a longtime party activist, ran as the Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 1996, claiming 0.5% of the popular vote. In 2016, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson took about 3% nationally and 2% in Louisiana.

Jorgensen doesnt have the same name recognition as Johnson, who was previously the Republican governor of New Mexico. Perhaps her biggest media bump has been for canceling a Saturday campaign event for an unusual reason.

I will be getting a rabies vaccine as a precaution after having been bitten by a bat near the start of this campaign tour," she explained on Twitter.

But she was still greeted with cheers from the 130 people who gathered in Duncan Plaza. Some wore face masks and kept the requested six feet from each other. Others did not.

Brian Dorminy, 43-year-old from Baton Rouge, opted for a pelican print to cover his nose and mouth. He said he gradually grew alienated from the two major parties and started voting Libertarian in 2012.

Its definitely a different feeling Dorminy said of attending a campaign event during the pandemic. It actually feels more important now than ever. We need to be having these communal conversations about the direction of our country.

Jorgensen argued that Libertarians have something to offer voters who are concerned about the two issues that have dominated 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and police violence.

The death of Breonna Taylor during a police raid in Louisville showed why no-knock warrants should be banned, Jorgensen said. She also called for an end to the racist war on drugs. We cannot claim to be the land of the free when we lead the world in incarceration, Jorgensen said.

When it came to public health, she argued that early on in the outbreak, the FDA got in the way of stopping the coronavirus by preventing private tests from being offered. She also spoke out against single-payer health care. The alternative to our current big government failure isnt an even bigger big government failure, Jorgensen said.

Some of Jorgensens most enthusiastic applause from the crowd, however, came for proposals that have been Libertarian goals since long before 2020: dismantling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and eliminating the personal income tax.

The event was cut short when rain started pouring. Jorgensen strolled back to her bus for a campaign tour of Texas as her supporters dashed for their cars.

Continue reading here:

Libertarians gather to hear presidential candidate make pitch: 'Vote for what you really want' - NOLA.com

Brigadier General Ghasem Rezaei made the announcement on Sunday evening, saying that following thecomprehensive intelligence operations, the police forces of the country have successfully confiscated 400,000 kilograms of different kinds of illicit drugsacross the country during the four months.

The figure indicates a 45 percent growth as compared to the last yearscorrespondingperiod, he added.

Stating that the war on drug tradehas claimed the lives of nearly 3,500 Iranian police officers over the past four decades, he said thatthe fight against drugs traffickingis being also pursued vigorously this year.

Iran is at the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking and thousands of Iranian forces have been so far martyred to protect the world from the danger of drugs.

Despite high economic and human costs, the Islamic Republic has been actively fighting drug-trafficking over the past decades.

The country has spent more than $700 million on sealing its borders and preventing the transit of narcotics destined for European, Arab, and Central Asian countries.

ZZ/4994549

Originally posted here:

400 tons of illicit drugs busted in Iran in 4 months - Mehr News Agency - English Version

To the editor:

It seems strange to me that our major media, both print and video, advertise that these demonstrators we see on TV are peaceful. Trying to burn down buildings and the occasional looting are deemed to be non-violent is going against common sense.

If you are the taxpayer who built these buildings or are the owner of the shop which is looted, these are not non-violent! How rioting in the streets night after night is going to change the laws over night is beyond me. It is Congress, the state legislators, city representatives who created the laws. The police get the defamation from trying to enforce these laws.

Take, for instance, the War on Drugs. Addiction is a medical problem. Our powers to be mandated that this addiction be a criminal offense. Who gets the blame for incarcerating a huge number of our citizens? The police and justice system. Who is really responsible, our Congress!

Now we have our demonstrators thinking that if they burn down enough buildings, our congress is going to change their thinking overnight. No, I think the people behind these demonstrators wish to bring down the whole U S of A so they can impose their intolerant socialistic view on our Republic. Ask those in Russia, China, or Venezuela how much liberty they have to express themselves.

JAMES WHITESIDE

Midland

Read more:

Reader doesn't think any protestors are peaceful - Midland Daily News

Crawfords work on healthism was published before some major public health crises and panics in the U.S. It was published just before the AIDS crisis began, and queer and trans people watched one another die at astronomical rates, with a delayed government response that many LGBTQ+ people experienced as indifference to our very lives. It was published before obesity was declared an epidemic, and before we declared a war on obesity, often fighting that war by stigmatizing fat bodies. And it was published before health became, in a sense, a moral imperativeand one that nearly all of us feel compelled to enforce at one moment or another.

As a fat person, my health is one of the primary grounds offered by those who mock, harm, and reject me as a fat person. Cruel and judgmental behavior is often justified with an off-handed Im just concerned about your health. As if my health were their responsibility. As if I owed it to them, a debt Id never taken out and could never repay.

And often, as many fat people know, trolling often masquerades as genuine concernthats what makes it so insidious, and what can make it so cutting. But underneath its explicit message of caring concern, theres a clear implicit judgment. Youre doing it wrong. You have failed. I have been monitoring your health. I know your body better than you.

And healthism isnt just a problem for fat peopleits a tool used to further anti-fat bias, yes, but also ableism, transphobia, misogyny, racism, and more. Healthism shows up when we joke about getting diabetes from a single dessert, or refer to a rich meal as a heart attack on a plateimplying that those health conditions are caused by failures of a perceived personal responsibility to be healthy, not by structural forces that disproportionately harm the health of people living on the down side of power. Healthism shows up when we suggest that trans people should be more worried about the side effects of long-term hormone therapy than their own lived experience of their gender.

Healthism isnt just an individual problem, eitherits present in many of our systems and institutions. Until the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, U.S. insurers routinely (and legally) denied health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Paradoxically, we had a system where people were not healthy enough to qualify for health care coverageand countless patients were unable to meet their most basic needs as a result. Healthism even shows up in the war on drugs, when we culturally and politically respond to drug dependencystrongly linked to environmental factors like poverty, stress, and traumaas a personal responsibility to just say no. And it shows up in the worlds of fertility, pregnancy, and lactation, all of which pressure expecting parents to become pregnant, be pregnant, and give birth in one or two right ways.

To be clear, healthism isnt the root cause of transphobia, ableism, racism, anti-fatness, or misogynybut it can be a tool to enforce all of them. Thats in part because healthism assumes a playing field that simply isnt there. And when it stubbornly attributes societal and community outcomes to individual choices, it reinforces the biases facing marginalized communities. If health is a personal responsibility, and so many marginalized communities have such bad health outcomeswell, they must just be less responsible. Its an insidious and powerful kind of bias, and one that many of us perpetuate every dayeven if we dont know it, and even if we dont mean to.

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Healthism Is the Bias Many of Us Already Have - SELF