Daily Archives: April 2, 2017

What looks like a split personality in drug policy is really just the Trump administrations racialized approach to enforcement.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks during an opioid and drug abuse listening session with President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, the White House issued an executive order to establish a commission on combating drug addiction, and we now know that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will head it. The Christie appointment seems to signal a soft approach to handling drug problems, given his own experience addressing it in New Jersey. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that this new commission has created a split personality within the administrations drugs policy, given that it seems to clash with Attorney General Jeff Sessionss more punitive approach.

Reads the WSJ:

The tug of war in the new administration reflects its two different constituencies: traditional conservatives, who favor a crackdown on crime that the president frequently links to illegal immigration and urban areas, and the white, working-class and rural communities who welcome a compassionate focus on the opioid epidemic that has ravaged their neighborhoods.

Translation: White people will get rehabilitation. Black and Latino people will get incarceration.

Or, as the Drug Policy Alliance deputy director Michael Collins said in the WSJ article: Were seeing the beginning of a new war on drugs.

Attorney General Sessions would like to see those numbers keep going up. We know that Sessions thinks medical marijuana is stupid, really fancies that old Nancy Reagan motto, just say no, and is willing to crack heads to show he means business. Doing this would, of course, reverse the headway the federal government has made in recent years to alleviate the mass incarceration crisis created, in part, by the inaugural War on Drugs. Decades of research and testimonies from law enforcement officials profess that the lock em up approach doesnt work, but medical rehabilitation does.

Such treatment-over-incarceration findings are likely understood in the White House, as well as in Sessionss Justice Department, and it will probably be applied accordinglyin white, working-class and rural communities, just not in urban areas.

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A Return to the War on Drugs (Which Never Went Away) - CityLab

MANILA A Philippine youth theater club staged a musical at a Manila park on Sunday, challenging President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody war on drugs.

The 20-minute show features a casket salesman whose funeral parlor is doing brisk business as corpses pile up.

But the salesman and his friends end up as statistics, falling to vigilante-style killings that have gripped the Southeast Asian nation and alarmed the international community.

"The play talks about the problem in the community with the war on drugs and the irony of it, that a few earn money amid this war and all the killings," artistic director Jessie Villabrille told Reuters.

More than 8,000 suspected drug addicts and dealers have been killed since Duterte took office on June 30, some in police operations but many others in mysterious circumstances.

The authorities vehemently deny wrongdoing and blame vigilantes and drug gangs for the killings.

Criticism of the war on drugs does not sit with Duterte or his supporters. The brash leader chastised the United Nations and former U.S. president Barack Obama numerous times or criticizing his anti-drugs program.

Duterte won the presidency by a wide margin on the promise of wiping out drugs and criminality.

The theater group plans to take the musical to schools and stage a longer version next month.

(Reporting by Ronn Bautista; Writing by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Kim Coghill)

YANGON Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party won nearly half of the seats contested in by-elections on Sunday, the first vote since it swept to power a year ago and an early indication of support for her administration amid increased fighting with ethnic armed groups and slower economic growth.

BRUSSELS The week Britain filed for divorce from the European Union brought relief in London and Brussels that crockery was not smashed - far from it - but negotiators fear tantrums or even a breakdown once talks start.

More:

Filipino youth stage musical against Duterte's deadly drugs war - Reuters

The Indian Express

War on drugs: Captain Amarinder Singh's one-month deadline seems a tall order for now The Indian Express The shortage of psychiatrists and other health specialists will prove to be major obstacle in the Punjab government's ambitious plan to root out the drug menace from the state. When it took office on March 17, the Congress government reiterated its ... and more »

See more here:

War on drugs: Captain Amarinder Singh's one-month deadline seems a tall order for now - The Indian Express

The chief enforcer of Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs acknowledged the difficulty in halting a surge in methamphetamine imports from China despite a campaign that has claimed thousands of lives.

We do not guarantee that we will win this war, Philippine National Police chiefRonald dela Rosa said in an interview in his Manila office Thursday. Win or lose, at least we have done something to address the problem.

Photographer: Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg

Duterte has faced strident criticism from the U.S., the United Nations and the European Union since being sworn in last June over his efforts to tackle drug addiction -- a policy that has proved popular at home. The Philippine police say about 2,600 people have been killed in police operations against drug traffickers, while human-rights groups label some 4,700 other murders as extra-judicial killings.

In a speech Thursday, Duterte again rejected international criticism of the drug war, demanding the EU not impose your, whatever it is, your values and everything because we hate you for being a hypocrite.

Despite being a key source of drugs, China has used the issue to draw closer to Duterte and improve ties with the Philippines. Policy makers in Beijing have supported the drugs war and offered to help, with anti-narcotic cooperation among agreements reached during Dutertes trip to China last year.

Dela Rosa said on Thursday that police in the Philippines are coordinating with counterparts in China. Most of the five clandestine laboratories dismantled in Dutertes first six months in office involved Chinese citizens, he added.

For a QuickTake Q&A on the countrys drug war, click here.

Recent data provided by the Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency showed that the largest quantities of methamphetamine seized had been trafficked directly from China, according to Jeremy Douglas, regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Methamphetamine imports into the Philippines rose to 2,495 kilograms in 2016, more than four times the amount in 2015, he said.

While better law enforcement had contributed to the rise seen in the data, other factors like treatment admissions, price, and purity trends related to methamphetamine indicated a growing demand for the drug in the Philippines, Douglas said.

As long as market demand is not addressed, increases in law enforcement activities at a street level alone wont be able to improve the situation, he said. We recommend addressing the market through treatment and prevention, and addressing organized crime targeting those that run the business.

Dela Rosa, 55, rose from the police ranks in Davao City, where Duterte served as mayor for more than two decades. He said the campaign targeted both street-level pushing as well as high-value targets like drug lords, drug traffickers, financers and protectors.

He rated the drug war a success on the basis that police so far had accounted for 1.3 million people involved in the drug trade across the country, around 70 percent of 1.8 million target set by the Dangerous Drugs Board.

On the demand side, we can say we have a passing grade of 70 percent, Dela Rosa said. Another measure of success, he added, was that methamphetamine prices had almost quadrupled to as much as 4,000 pesos ($80) a gram.

Dela Rosa rejected claims by international groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international that the drug war had resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings.

Photographer: Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg

I just want to set the record straight," Dela Rosa said. The 7,000 extrajudicial killings being reported by some sectors is wrong. We dont want to propagandize, we dont want to deodorize ourselves, we just want to set the record straight so that the public will not be mislead by this false reporting.

Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phelim Kine said in an email that thousands of victims never saw a lawyer or had a proper trial.

This is an evisceration of constitutional guarantees of due legal process that has inflicted profound harm on the judicial and social fabric of the Philippines," Kine said.

Excerpt from:

Duterte's Drug War Chief Can't Stop Meth Flowing in From China - Bloomberg

PortCityDaily.com is your source for free news and information in the Wilmington area.

Authors note:This series has explored questions about the opioid epidemic. It has focused on the basics: what are opioids, who are the people using them? Some questions remain: what is at the root of epidemic? Why is this epidemic hitting our area so hard harder than nearly anywhere else in the nation? What can we do?

Those questions wont have easy answers. But the picture will be clearer for those who understand the current efforts to address the epidemic. Again, a complicated picture emerges. Every group involved agrees our area is facing a crisis without parallel. Not everyone agrees on what to do about it.

This part of our series will show you the crisis through the eyes of the people fighting it. These are the manyfront lines against the opioid epidemic. By knowing where these groups stand now, we hope to provide a better sense of where the fightcan go next.

The opioid crisis, despite its complexity, is often painted with a broad brush on the national stage.

Congressman David Rouzer told Port City Daily last month he was in favor of a war on drugs again in American just like Nancy Reagan did in the 1980s with the Say No to Drugs campaign.

Rouzers drug-abstinence policy was echoed by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions this month. As part of his prepared remarks for a March 15 speech, Sessions called for criminal enforcement, treatment and prevention. But these issues werent treated equally: Sessions glossed over the issue of treatment and instead called for a return to Reagan-era abstinence, saying [i]n the 80s and 90s, we saw how campaigns stressing prevention brought down drug use and addiction.

As the nations top law-enforcement agent, Sessions sets the tone for the national conversation on drugs. He rejected outright ideas like decriminalization and legalization.

I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another thats only slightly less awful. Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life, Sessions remarks read.

At the local level, however, a different conversation is going on. Education and prevention is still key, but leading law enforcement agents are quick to say that the scare tactics of the D.A.R.E. programs of 1980s are badly outdated. Another difference is the focus on mental health over criminal enforcement.

To be clear, there is a war on drugs going on. In Brunswick County, the Sheriffs Office fights a trafficking war on two fronts, according to Sheriff John W. Ingram V.

On our northern border with New Hanover County, were seeing heroin and other drugs shipped down from Newark and New York. And on our southern border, with Mrytle Beach and South Carolina, thats a very different and unique situation were dealing with state jurisdictional boundaries. Theres heroin coming up from Atlanta, and quite often we see dealers camped out just miles past the North Carolina border, Ingram said.

Early in the heroin epidemic, Ingram along with New Hanover County Sheriff Ed McMahon formed a task force with the State Bureau of Investigation.

The goal was to knock down some of those jurisdictional boundaries. As things progressed we had the FBI come to us and ask if wed be interested in turning our task force into a federal task force. We agreed that was the way to go, it could extend our reach, Ingram said.

But while Ingram said Brunswick Countys resources are stretched thin fighting drug dealers and traffickers, its not the fight he thinks will win the war on opioids.

We could arrest every single drug dealer in New Hanover County and Brunswick County today, and there would be replacements for each one of them tomorrow, Ingram said.

Its a common refrain, but an important one. Local law enforcement agencies know, as Wilmingtons Deputy Police Chief Mitch Cunningham put it, we all say this, because it is verifiably true, we cant arrest our ways out of this. It goes way beyond a law enforcement issue.

Whats beyond law enforcement? The need for mental health and substance abuse treatment. From Ingrams sprawling county to the tiny beach town of Carolina Beach, law enforcement officials point to mental health as the root of the opioid crisis.

The defunding of mental health in the 1990s and early 2000s just simply dumped people suffering with mental health issues into our local confinement facilities into our jails. Thats the real issue were dealing with, Ingram said.

Cunningham, Ingram and Carolina Beach Police Chief Chris Spivey all highlighted the need for more beds in treatment centers for people struggling with addiction. This is especially true in Brunswick County, where transportation is a real issue.

Ingram sees both a lack of facilities and a lack of access, but he made it clear that a deeper issue was the type of treatment offered.

We need to be providing these people with real treatment, Ingram said. Yes, we need funding for detox, but detox on its own does absolutely nothing. Short-term treatment does next to nothing. Those 30-day [programs] arent worth the time you spend in them. We need to provide, serious, long-term treatment.

I think if we educate the public about what were really facing, the support will come. Sheriff John Ingram V.

Despite the collapse of efforts of Republicans in Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act, state and federal funding for mental health and substance abuse as well as Medicaid funding that covers detox and treatment services is still at risk. Treatment, especially long-term treatment for substance abuse, is expensive. As Ingram said, a lot of people, and lets be honest about this, just dont have the money for that kind of treatment.

So where would the money for treating mental health and substance abuse come from?

I want to believe in our fellow man, I want to believe that there is good in the world, even though we face evil every day. I think if we educate the public about what were really facing, the support will come, Ingram said.

Spivey had a similar optimism, citing recent bipartisan efforts to address the crisis.

Seeing legislators and law enforcement and city officials come together on this, it does give me hope. Which maybe people arent used to hearing when this issues comes up. But weve got a unified science, were on the same page, Spivey said. I think things like funding for mental health in the STOP Act and harm reduction bills, I think were moving in the right direction.

All of the law enforcement leaders we spoke with the local level agreed with the need to continue the conversation between communities, law enforcement and lawmakers. They also agreed on the need to educate the next generation but, emphatically,not in the this is your brain on drugs style of the 1990s. Ingram was the most direct on this point.

D.A.R.E. programs have changed a lot since the late 80s. Were not using scare tactics, because, for one that just puts people off, he said. Our children are intelligent, were raising them and teaching them to think intelligently, so they know when someones trying to ram an agenda down their throats. Our goal is just to give them as much information as possible, we cant just give them outdated or one-sided material.

Next week: As we conclude our series, a look at the cost of the epidemic.

Part IV Mental health and opioid abuse

Part V The power and potential risk of harm reduction

Part VI Opioid demand, the fear of detox and the path to treatment

Part VII-Killing with kindness where are prescription opioids coming from?

Part VIII Taking babies from mommies Opioids impact on families

Part IX Do the right thing, local and state government response

Opioids: An appendix for readers

Just Say No, This is your brain on drugs, Brunswick County Sheriff John Ingram, Carolina Beach Police Chief Chris Spivey, drugs, heroin, Nancy Reagan, opiates, opioids

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Beyond a 'war on drugs' law enforcement's modern options in the ... - Port City Daily