Category Archives: War On Drugs

The Former Mexican Official Who Oversaw His Nation's War on Drugs Went on Trial in the ... - Latest Tweet  LatestLY

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More than 61% of women doing time in federal prison are behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses.

Women are now a fast growing segment of the U.S. prison population, largely because of draconian drug laws. More than 61% of women doing time in federal prison are behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses.

Women, and particularly women of color, are disproportionately affected by social stigma, by a plea bargaining system that punishes those unable or unwilling to inform on others, by regulations that bar people with a drug conviction from obtaining (or that require a drug test to receive) public assistance, and by a drug treatment system designed for men.

Black women are almost twice as likely and Latinas are 20% more likely to be incarcerated than white women. Native American women are incarcerated six times the rate of their white counterparts.

Drug use occurs at similar rates across racial and ethnic groups, but racialized women are far more likely to be criminalized for drug law violations than white women. Black people are no more likely than white people to use illicit drugs during pregnancy, but they are far more likely to be reported to child welfare services for drug use. Learn more about pregnancy and the drug war.

Roughly 60% of women in state and federal prisons are mothers of minor children, many of them sole caregivers. Removing a parent (perhaps the only parent) from a household is immediately destabilizing, and over the long-term, its devastating. Children with a parent in prison are several times more likely than other children to end up in foster care, to drop out of school and to become involved in the criminal legal system themselves.

Parents, once released from prison, may be barred from public assistance and housing and face significantly reduced employment opportunities. Even women who do not use drugs may be required to submit to invasive and embarrassing monitored drug testing in order to obtain public assistance.

Under the drug war logic that has infiltrated our child welfare system, any drug use is equivalent to child abuse, regardless of context and whether or not there is actual harm to the child. This has resulted in formalized policies that demonize parents, testing them for drugs (often without their consent), relentlessly investigating them, and routinely removing their children without any reason other than supposed drug use.

Learn more about how the drug war breaks up families at UprootingTheDrugWar.org.

Conspiracy charges represent one of the most egregious examples of the drug wars inequitable treatment of women. Although conspiracy laws were designed to target high-level members of illicit drug organizations, they have swept up many women for being guilty of nothing more than living with or not cooperating as an informant against a partner or family member involved in some level of drug sales.

Harsh mandatory minimum sentencing may keep them behind bars for 20 years, 30 years, or life, even if they were never directly involved in drug sales or distribution.

Susan Burton is the founder and executive director of A New Way of Life, an organization that provides support and resources for women recently released from prison. After her son was killed by the Los Angeles Police Department, Susan medicated her grief with alcohol and drugs. Instead of receiving the support and services she needed, she cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for nearly fifteen years.

In 1998, Susan gained her freedom and sobriety and founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project, which has served over 800 women and is a national leader in the struggle to break the cycle of addiction and incarceration.

The Drug Policy Alliance is working to reduce the devastating effects of the drug war on women, particularly women of color. We advocate for:

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Women and the Drug War | Drug Policy Alliance

A University of Pennsylvania seminar looks at the contrast between the War on Drugs, which devastated Black and Latino communities through mass incarceration, and todays public health approach to opioids in white communities.

A University of Pennsylvania seminar on Racial Justice in National Drug Policy opened with a nod to Michelle Alexander, JD, author of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,and a quote about racialized drug policy attributed to John Ehrlichman, former White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs in the Nixon Administration.

As she opened the panel discussion, moderator Eugenia South, MD, MSHP, LDI Senior Fellow, and Faculty Director of the Penn Urban Health Lab, explained: When we think about what fueled mass incarceration, what laws and policies were created that led to both the ballooning of the prison population and the racial disproportionality of who is there, the War on Drugs is really front and center.

South then read the controversial Ehrlichman quote that appeared in the April2016 issue of Harpers magazine in an article about the failure of the War on Drugs originally launched by President Nixon in 1971:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,Ehrlichman said. You understand what Im saying? We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Leading up to the first question to a panelist, South emphasized: In this discussion, I really want to explicitly name mass incarceration and the War on Drugs for what it is: a stark example of structural racism.

The event was co-hosted by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) and Bold Solutions, a Penn initiative aimed at addressing the effects of interpersonal, structural, and institutional racism on health, and co-sponsored by the Urban Health Lab.

The three panelists were Michael Botticelli, MEd, former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) during the Obama Administration; Kassandra Frederique, MSW, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance; and Helena Hansen, MD, PhD, Professor and Chair, Research Theme in Translational Social Science and Health Equity, and Associate Director of the Center for Social Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

A major theme throughout the discussion was how the issues of equity and anti-racism were, or were not, part of the federal governments drug policies in the 1980s and 90s versus the todays raging opioid epidemic. The panelagreed that the earlier War on Drugs criminalized drug use for Black and Latino communities while the current opioid epidemic policy has veered dramatically toward a public health approach to the problem.

Panelist Helena Hansen, who has been studying racialized aspects of U.S. drug policy for a decade, noted that the opioid crisis came to be seen as white.

The popular press and politicians have been circulating images of Black, brown and even Asian people as addicted and dangerous for over 100years and these racialized images built political support for prohibitionist criminalizing drug policies, Hansen continued. Back in 1914, newspapers like the New York Times were reporting that cocaine-crazed Negroes were attacking their white supervisors and raping white women. A couple of decades later in the 1930s, newspapers had stories of Mexican marijuana madness and Mexican workers sleeping on the job under the influence of marijuana. These images led to more and more stringent narcotics laws and enforcement policies in Black and Brown communities which live with us even today.

All the while, middle-class white people throughout the past century have enjoyed full access to medical narcotics prescribed by private doctors in such large volumes that, by the 1940s and 50s, white Americans were dying from barbiturate overdose rates that rival todays opioid overdose rates, said Hansen.

In the 1990s, corporate marketing campaigns flooded Oxycodone and other prescription opioids through the health care system, addicting large numbers of white middle-class people in suburbia and rural regions. When new controls such as drug monitoring laws, tightened prescribing, and tamper-resistant drug formulations were put in place, white drug userswere cut off from their prescription pharmaceuticals and began turning to street heroin as a substituteand overdosing in ever-larger numbers, creating the current crisis.

This put heroin in a really unprecedented position, said Hansen. It was not a popular political response to criminalize white, middle-class opioid users. The surprising new face of addiction was reported in the media with lots of humanizing stories of college athletes, housewives, and schoolteachers who were unwittingly addicted to pills, and ultimately heroin. This publicity built support for local decriminalization of heroin and other opioids in white, largely affluent neighborhoods whose empowered residents collaborate with local law enforcement and district attorneys to divert people arrested on low-level drug charges to sentencing in treatment and, in some cases, peer support.

So, Hansen continued, we get Good Samaritan laws protecting people who call 911 in case of an overdose. Out of this moment of selective racialized decriminalization, we get bipartisan national support for the medicalization of heroin as well as opioid addiction by clinically maintaining patients on the opioid Buprenorphine. White patients with opioid use disorder are three to four times as likely as Black patients with opioid use disorder to get Buprenorphine. And those white patients who get it are most likely to pay out of pocket for very expensive patented medication or with private insurance.

Were talking about a middle-class and affluent market for Buprenorphine and, therefore, middle-class, white, and affluent constituency for selective medicalization of addiction, said Hansen. None of this disparity was accidental in any way. It was deliberate. The medicalized alternative response to an emerging white heroin problem was crafted to handle the anomaly of the racial crossover of heroin and the image of heroin after a century of drug policy that separated illegal Black and Brown drug useand drug use from legal white medications.

Michael Botticelli pointed to the difference between policies related to methadone and buprenorphine. One of the things that came out of the Nixon administration was a tremendous expansion in the use of methadone, he said. In keeping with those policies, its no surprise that methadone is probably one of the most highly restricted medications to ever exist. Its highly regulated and highly stigmatized. Many, including myself, have talked about the racial underpinnings of those methadone regulations. And I think at the federal level, its one of the things we could really focus on. Methadone regulations havent been updated in close to 60 years and its really a time for an overhaul of those regulations, because it could have an immediate impact.

Kassandra Frederique, who has been with the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) for 11years, works to create coalitions focused on changing various drug policies. But a big issue in the current opioid epidemic is that communities of color have difficulty engaging in drug policy discussions or getting their issues recognized.

Lets be really clear, said Frederique, the overdose crisis is being exacerbated by structural issues of economic immobility and other barriers. Theres a lot of unlearning that has to happen when were doing advocacy around policymaking and the opioid crisis. Some people who are impacted now are saying, look, what happened in the past is hard and terrible but were here now. Lets move forward. Theyre coming with their pain and their trauma. But communities of color are asked to to come in as if were in an equitable placebut were not. Whats being ignored is that we have that long trauma.

A major rising issue in drug policy is the class-action court settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies that will sendmoney into the states for uses related to drug addiction and treatment.

I am often in places where people are talking about the opioid settlement, and the advocacy around it is white, said Frederique. The conversation is that the communities with the most need are white ones. They say, opioid impacted us most, we are the ones most hurt and we deserve the money. So, were in this moment when some think that only white families lost people to overdoses. At the same time, because of the historical inaccuracies and stigma, it makes it hard for families of color to say but I lost my kids to overdose, too because they dont get the same compassion back. Its a different level of scrutiny on that family of color than on white, upper middle-class suburban families.

Hansen pointed out: The current opioid class action lawsuits really do use a logic of reparation. Predominantly white, suburban and rural residents were hard hit early on in the opioid epidemic, but we know the demographics are changing. We know Black people have the fastest rising overdose rate in the country right now. And there are several states actually in which they have a higher absolute overdose rate than white Americans.

Nevertheless, the impression that the opioid overdose crisis was a white one continues to lead to a logic of reparations for white communities, Hansen said. And thats what flows out of the discourse around Depths of Despairthe fact that people are overdosing because they are largely in white communities that have been abandoned by manufacturing, mining companies, and other industries. Left out of that logicare Black and Brown people who have long suffered from all kinds of repressive narcotics policies, and so I do think if were going to take on a logic of reparations, we actually have to look at the history of who has been very much harmed by drug policies as well as pharmaceutical marketing, and apply that logic in a way thats very conscious of racial justice. That is exactly what has been missing from that discourse in the class action opioid lawsuits: a racial justice frame. We would have to insert that and look at investing not only in classical treatment and medications, but actually in all of the social structural drivers of overdose and the individual and community harms of opioid and narcotics use.

Another major focus for Frederiqueand the DPA, a non-profit that works to ground national drug policy around evidence, compassion, justice, and health, is the decriminalization of drug use and an end to using prisons and jails as major addiction treatment facilities.

The change we need to move forward, Frederiquesaid, is to reduce the role of criminalization when it comes to issues of health, Frederique said. We are pushing back on the concept that the criminal justice system is an appropriate vector for health care. Some of the largest facilities for either mental health or drugs are local jails and prisons. That is a failure, not an innovation.

Providing a historical inside-policymaking view, former ONDCP Director Botticelli remembered that the Obama administration effort was to move away from a War on Drugs approach and really focus on drug policy as a health-related issue and not as a criminal justice issue. It really was the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and its mandate to include substance use disorder treatment as an essential benefit, where we really saw, and even tried to approximate, parity between demand-reduction approaches, public health strategies, and law enforcement supply-reduction strategies.

Botticelli said he also recently went back and looked through our drug control strategies to see if there was particular mention in terms of equity-based or anti-racist strategy and there wasnt. Certainly, there was an acknowledgement of policies that had a disproportionate impact on people of color. But really, unfortunately, it didnt include specific goals and specific strategies that dealt squarely with this issue. Thats regrettable for me.

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The War on Drugs as Structural Racism - Penn LDI

He is comfortable telling precartel narco anecdotes that he uncovered in dusty archives, but he skims over some messy details of recent atrocities. For instance, he does not identify Cardinal Posadas by name but refers to the shooting of the popes representative in Mexico, apparently confusing the cardinal with Geronimo Prigione, the papal nuncio whom Posadas was reportedly meeting the day he was killed.

Smith makes a strong case that the awful escalation of violence is not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade. For decades, Mexican authorities treated narcotics as a source of revenue. As early as 1915, Esteban Cant, the appointed governor of Baja California, collected a 3.5 peso tax on every kilogram of opium imported from China and demanded a share of protection racket payments, using the money to build roads, parks and a functioning postal service.

Such a morally questionable approach was considered justifiable because, until recently, Mexico had no drug-addiction problem of its own. So long as the drugs went north, what was the harm? In the 1940s, freethinkers got the Mexican government to experiment with legalizing marijuana and permitting dispensaries to give addicts morphine, until the United States quickly forced a reversal.

But as profits increased, competition for protection schemes intensified and eventually engulfed the federal government. The corruption and violence described in the books final section, Into the Abyss, 1990-2020, is apocalyptic. By early 1997, even the Mexican Army general in charge of the nations war on drugs was taking payments to protect the cartels.

It didnt stop there. The biggest drug lords now run their own rackets, unleashing their armed wings against opposing gangs that try to muscle in on their territories. Mexicos murder rate more than doubled during the tough-on-drugs presidency of Felipe Caldern. The cartels spread their infection to car theft rings, kidnappers and illegal loggers, and then demanded protection payments from legitimate businesses. They even stalked Mexican elective politics. Just this past June, 35 candidates for local office were killed as cartels ensured that their own candidates won.

Smith ends not with policy recommendations but with the bleakest of predictions: A century and counting, the Mexican drug trade shows no signs of slowing.

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The Phony War on Drugs - The New York Times

A demonstrator waves a marijuana-themed flag in front on the White House. President Biden is pardoning thousands of Americans convicted of "simple possession" of marijuana under federal law. Jose Luis Magana/AP hide caption

A demonstrator waves a marijuana-themed flag in front on the White House. President Biden is pardoning thousands of Americans convicted of "simple possession" of marijuana under federal law.

President Biden announced this month an executive order to pardon federal, simple marijuana possession charges for thousands of Americans an important first step, advocates say, to reversing decades of uneven drug enforcement policy that has historically burdened Black communities.

"Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit," Biden said in a statement last week.

"And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates."

These are the long-term effects of the United States' War on Drugs, pioneered by the administration of disgraced former-President Richard Nixon, which purported to help rein in the interstate trade and use of illegal drugs.

The war's ultimate outcome, however, was the overpolicing of Black communities, leading to massive arrest rates for accused Black drug users.

"The failed policies on drug criminalization have ensnared many on nonviolent, marijuana offenses," said Patrice Willoughby, vice president of policy and legislative affairs at the NAACP.

"And this has derailed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people for conduct which is legal and which is disproportionately applied to the African-American community."

The executive order, announced late last week, will cover more than 6,500 citizens and lawful permanent residents convicted between 1992 and 2021 of simple marijuana possession charges under federal law or D.C. statute.

There are not currently any individuals in federal prison solely for simple marijuana offenses, so the order is not expected to lead to the release of any federal prisoners.

"We've seen since the 1970s that marijuana policy was intentionally and malevolently constructed to target the African American community," Willoughby said. "And too many people have been caught up as a result of that and have been denied jobs, opportunity, housing and other benefits of this country because of a malevolent policy."

"This is a step towards restorative justice," she said.

Biden drew praise for the order, which tracks a campaign promise to seek cannabis decriminalization and seek expungements for those with prior marijuana convictions.

But the order's narrow scope left some advocates calling for more to be done to address marijuana charges on the state level, where a majority of offenses occur.

"These pardons certainly have an impact of removing some of these collateral consequences for individuals," said Eliana Green, senior policy advisor at the Hood Incubator, a nonprofit organization for cannabis justice reform. But, she continued, "we definitely, at the state levels, need to be creating more record cleaning remedies for folks and avenues for folks to be able to remove these collateral consequences that are imputed on them."

Currently, 19 states have legalized recreational marijuana use and 38 states have provisions for medical use. Five additional states have legalization measures on their midterm ballots.

Biden's new pledge, coupled with the White House's recent announcement to forgive student debt for millions of borrowers, highlight his effort to court young and Black voters two key Democratic voting blocs ahead of hotly contested midterm races.

While the move was praised by a number of Democrats, who have long sought institutional changes on the nation's marijuana policies especially as more than three dozen states have legalized weed in some capacity some Republicans decried the order as executive overreach and little more than a hollow ploy to attract voters in November.

"In the midst of a crime wave and on the brink of a recession, Joe Biden is giving blanket pardons to drug offenders many of whom pled down from more serious charges," Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican, said on Twitter.

"This is a desperate attempt to distract from failed leadership."

Despite persistent negative perceptions among Republican leadership, a November 2021 Gallup survey found that a record 68% of Americans support legalizing marijuana, including 50% of Republican respondents.

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Biden pot pardon to help with War on Drugs' harms to Black people : NPR

Big Pharma and health agencies cry"Don't take ivermectin!" A media storm follows.Why then, does the science say the opposite?

Ivermectin is a dirty word in the media. The drug has been derided and declared useless. Doctors have earnestly recorded pleas asking those afflicted with COVID-19 not to take the drug. But why?

Despite these barriers, Dr. Kory and his colleagues' efforts led to what is now twenty-three countries containing 25 percent of the world's population to have partially or fully adopted ivermectin into their COVID-19 treatment guidelines. Although numerous studies and epidemiologic data have shown that many millions of lives were saved globally with the systematic use of ivermectin, many more millions perished as the result of what he eventually discovered to be the deep, long-standing, pervasive, and corruptive power of the pharmaceutical industry in its decades long-wars on generic medicines. They can't make money on ivermectin like they can on so many other drugs and vaccines, so why would they promote it? Due to Big Pharma's consistent lies and gaslighting about this incredibly effective drug, the war on ivermectin has led to one of the greatest human death tolls in history.

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War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have ...

MANILA, Philippines (84th UPDATE) Exasperated by the illegal drugs menace in the country, President Rodrigo Duterte has waged an all-out campaign against it since he assumed office.

True to the Presidents word, the war on drugs has been bloody more than 5 years into his administration.

Here are the numbers in the anti-illegal drug campaign according to the government, and from other sources that keep track of these statistics.

This page will be updated regularly.

Noticeable is the huge disparity between official statistics and numbers cited by human rights groups that have contact with people on the ground.

6,191

Drug suspects killed in police operations as of August 31, 2021, based on Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency figures in the #RealNumbersPH campaign

6,600

Drug suspects killed as of May 31, 2019, as reported by the Philippine National Police (PNP) on June 18, 2019

7,884

Drug suspects killed as of August 31, 2020, as counted by the PNP in September 2020

8,663

Drug-related deaths since the start of the anti-drug campaign, as reported in June 2020 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, based on official figures

27,000 to 30,000

Estimated deaths by human rights groups (up to December 2018) and the International Criminal Courts Office of the Prosecutor (up to March 2019)

Based on the governments official count through its #RealNumbersPH campaign, only 6,191 drug personalities have been killed in legitimate police operations as of August 31, 2021.

Before that, however, the Philippine National Police (PNP) itself reported higher numbers: 6,600 drug suspects killed as of May 31, 2019, then 7,884 as of August 31, 2020. Given delays in reporting of data, these figures could be higher as of late 2021.

Meanwhile, a report by the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2020 said that around 8,663 drug-related killings have occurred: 5,601 deaths in police operations from July 2016 to January 2020, plus 3,062 deaths under inquiry which are drug-related from July 2016 to February 4, 2019.

Human rights organizations said that as of December 2018, the death toll could reach as high as 27,000, to include those killed outside police operations.

Citing news reports and human rights groups, the International Criminal Courts Office of the Prosecutor in its June 2021 request to open a probe into President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs said there have been estimates ofbetween 12,000 to 30,000 deaths from July 2016 to March 2019.

The PNP and the #RealNumbersPH campaign previously included statistics for deaths under investigation (DUI) or homicide cases under investigation (HCUI) which were broken down into 3 categories of cases: drug-related, non-drug-related, and those with motives still undetermined.

These HCUI figures are no longer included in the governments latest releases, with a presidential communications official explaining that theyve decided on this to avoid these figures being mangled with other numbers.

Based on data that Rappler obtained in June 2018, heres a breakdown of HCUIs, as recorded by the PNP:

From July 1, 2016 to June 11, 2018:

23,518

total homicide cases under investigation

2,668

drug-related cases

10,712

non-drug-related cases

10,138

cases with motive to be determined

In March 2019, Rappler got updated data, showing that as of March 18, 2019, there have been a total of 30,145 homicide incidents or cases, but of the number, 11,098 were under investigation because the remaining 19,047 were tagged as cleared, with at least one suspect identified. The March 2019 data did not contain the 3 categories earlier listed for HCUIs.

[Editors Note: Rappler previously reported at least 7,000 deaths in the #WarOnDrugs as of April 2017, based on figures from the PNP. Read our explanations on the changing figureshere and here, as well as view a timeline of the PNPs use of the term deaths under investigation.]

The government has also released the following statistics related to the drug war.

These were recorded from July 1, 2016 to August 31, 2021 through its #RealNumbersPH campaign.

Anti-drug operations

213,504

anti-drug operations conducted

307,521

drug personalities arrested

3,922

minors rescued

875

drug dens dismantled

18

clandestine laboratories dismantled

P64.09 B

total value of drugs seized

8,374.29

kilos of shabu seized

P52.96 B

value of shabu seized

22,858

barangays declared as drug-cleared

High value targets arrested in anti-drug ops

13,244

total high value targets arrested,broken down as follows:

5,692

arrests from high-impact operations

3,696

listed as targets

1,353

drug den maintainers

791

drug group leaders/members

498

government employees

390

elected officials

322

foreign nationals

283

listed as wanted

120

uniformed personnel

75

armed group members

24

celebrities or PRC license holders

Heres a timeline of the changes in the governments manner of reporting its war on drugs statistics to the media since the start of the anti-drug campaign.

As of 6 am of September 14, 2016, the number of suspects killed in police operations reached 1,506. But during a Senate probe on extrajudicial killings that day, then PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa said that after validation by its Directorate for Operations, the figure was corrected to only 1,105 deaths.

As of October 15, 2016, the number of policemen killed during operations stood at 13, while there were 40 wounded.

On October 19, 2016, deaths among police personnel rose to 15, while the number of wounded was revised to 36 after validation. The PNP broke down the casualties into drug-related and non-drug-related incidents, then reported only the drug-related casualties afterwards (7 dead, 24 wounded).

On October 26, 2016, the PNP launched Phase 2 of Oplan Double Barrel. After this, the statistics that the PNP started sending to media were reset to zero. However, on November 2, the PNP returned to its cumulative count from July 1.

On November 7, 2016, the PNP returned to reporting the total casualties, doing away with its categorization the month before.

Police involvement in the war on drugswas temporarily suspended on January 30, 2017, when Duterte instructed the PNP to first rid its ranks of corrupt personnel. This was after some policemen reportedly got involved in the kidnap and murder of a South Korean businessman in October 2016.

Weeks later, on February 27, 2017, the President allowed the PNP back into the war on drugs campaign, but with limited participation through smaller task forces.

On March 6, 2017, the PNP officially relaunched its participation in the war on drugs, in a campaign dubbed Oplan Double Barrel Alpha Reloaded.

The PNP initially started keeping track of Double Barrel Alpha Reloaded statistics from March 6, based on messages sent to the media. But in its data update on March 30, 2017, the PNP readjusted the start date earlier, to March 1.

Around March 2017, the PNP changed the term, deaths under investigation. In a report that Rappler requested, the PNP used the term homicide cases under investigation or HCUI, which were further classified into 3 types of incidents: drug-related, non-drug-related, and those whose motives had yet to be determined.

On May 2, 2017, the government launched its #RealNumbersPH campaign, its new manner of disseminating statistics related to the war on drugs. Compared to past media releases, it no longer included figures on the number of houses visited as part of Oplan TokHang.

Starting in its August 2017 update, the #RealNumbersPH social media graphics also no longer included the number of surrenderers.

In October 2017, the PNPs role in the war on drugs was suspended a second time, after President Duterte made the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) the sole agency in charge of the anti-illegal drug campaign. The PNP resumed providing active support to PDEA in December 2017.

The #RealNumbersPH figures that were released showed complete HCUI figures from March to June 2017 only. From January to March 2018, only drug-related homicide cases were announced. Since then, #RealNumbersPH figures totally excluded HCUI statistics.

In an August 17, 2018 press briefing on #RealNumbersPH, Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) Assistant Secretary Ana Marie Banaag explained that they stopped presenting HCUI figures because it gets mangled with other numbers; it gets confused with other numbers, so we chose not to.

Banaag said, however, that HCUI figures can be requested from the PNP Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management (DIDM). Rappler.com

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IN NUMBERS: The Philippines' 'war on drugs' - RAPPLER

View the entire Punitive Excess series

This essay is part of theBrennan Centers seriesexaminingthe punitive excess that has come to define Americas criminal legal system.

I have a long view of the criminal punishment system, having been in the trenches for nearly 40 years as an activist, lobbyist, legislative counsel, legal scholar, and policy analyst. So I was hardly surprised when Richard Nixons domestic policy advisorJohn Ehrlichmanrevealed in a 1994 interview that the War on Drugs had begun as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize Blacks and the anti-war left.

We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did, Ehrlichman said.

Before the War on Drugs, explicit discrimination and for decades, overtly racist lynching were the primary weapons in the subjugation of Black people. Then mass incarceration, the gradual progeny of a number of congressional bills, made it so much easier. Most notably, the 1984Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Acteliminated parole in the federal system, resulting in an upsurge ofgeriatric prisoners. Then the 1986Anti-Drug Abuse Actestablished mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, including the infamous 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine sentences.Its expansionin 1988 added an overly broad definition of conspiracy to the mix. These laws flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses.

During the early 1990s, I walked the halls of Congress lobbying against various omnibus crime bills, which culminated in the granddaddy of them all theViolent Crime Control and Safe Streets Actof 1994. This bill featured the largest expansion of the federal death penalty in modern times, the gutting of habeas corpus, the evisceration of the exclusionary rule, the trying of 13-year-olds as adults, and 100,000 new cops on the streets, which led to an explosion in racial profiling. It also included the elimination of Pell educational grants for prisoners, the implementation of the federal three strikes law, and monetary incentives to states to enact truth-in-sentencing laws, which subsidized an astronomical rise in prison construction across the country, lengthened the amount of time to be served, and solidified a mentality of meanness.

The prevailing narrative at the time was tough on crime. It was a narrative that caused then-candidate Bill Clinton to leave his presidential campaign trail to oversee the execution of a mentally challenged man in Arkansas. It was the same narrative that brought about the crackpowder cocaine disparity, supported the transfer of youth to adult courts, and popularized the myth of the Black child as superpredator.

With the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentences during the height of the War on Drugs, unnecessarily lengthy prison terms were robotically meted out with callous abandon. Shockingly severe sentences for drug offenses 10, 20, 30 years, even life imprisonment hardly raised an eyebrow. Traumatizing sentences that snatched parents from children and loved ones, destabilizing families and communities, became commonplace.

Such punishments should offend our societys standard of decency. Why havent they? Most flabbergasting to me was the Supreme Courts 1991decisionasserting that mandatory life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense was not cruel and unusual punishment. The rationale was ludicrous. The Court actually held that although the punishment was cruel, it was not unusual.

The twisted logic reminded me of another Supreme Courtcasethat had been decided a few years earlier. There, the Court allowed the execution of a man despite overwhelming evidence of racial bias because of fear that the floodgates would be opened to racial challenges in other aspects of criminal sentencing as well. Essentially, this ruling found that lengthy sentences in such cases are cruel, but they are usual. In other words, systemic racism exists, but because that is the norm, it is therefore constitutional.

In many instances, laws today are facially neutral and do not appear to discriminate intentionally. But the disparate treatment often built into our legal institutions allows discrimination to occur without the need of overt action. These laws look fair but nevertheless have a racially discriminatory impact that is structurally embedded in many police departments, prosecutors offices, and courtrooms.

Since the late 1980s, a combination of federal law enforcement policies, prosecutorial practices, and legislation resulted in Black people being disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for possession and distribution of crack cocaine. Five grams of crack cocaine the weight of a couple packs of sugar was, for sentencing purposes, deemed the equivalent of 500 grams of powder cocaine; both resulted in the same five-year sentence. Although household surveys from the National Institute for Drug Abuse have revealed larger numbers of documented white crack cocaine users, the overwhelming number of arrests nonetheless came from Black communities who were disproportionately impacted by the facially neutral, yet illogically harsh, crack penalties.

For the system to be just, the public must be confident that at every stage of the process from the initial investigation of crimes by police to the prosecution and punishment of those crimes people in like circumstances are treated the same. Today, however, as yesterday, the criminal legal system strays far from that ideal, causing African Americans to often question, is it justice or just-us?

Fortunately, the tough-on-crime chorus that arose from the War on Drugs is disappearing and a new narrative is developing. I sensed the beginning of this with the 2008Second Chance Reentrybill and 2010Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I smiled when the 2012 Supreme Court ruling inMiller v. Alabamacame out, which held that mandatory life sentences without parole for children violated the Eighth Amendments prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2013, I was delighted when Attorney General Eric Holder announced hisSmart on Crimepolicies, focusing federal prosecutions on large-scale drug traffickers rather than bit players. The following year, I applauded President Obamas executiveclemency initiativeto provide relief for many people serving inordinately lengthy mandatory-minimum sentences. Despite its failure to become law, I celebrated theSentencing Reform and Corrections Actof 2015, a carefully negotiated bipartisan bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015; a few years later some of its provisions were incorporated as part of the 2018First Step Act. All of these reforms would have been unthinkable when I first embarked on criminal legal system reform.

But all of this is not enough. We have experienced nearly five decades of destructive mass incarceration. There must be an end to the racist policies and severe sentences the War on Drugs brought us. We must not be content with piecemeal reform and baby-step progress.

Indeed, rather than steps, it is time for leaps and bounds. End all mandatory minimum sentences and invest in a health-centered approach to substance use disorders. Demand a second-look process with the presumption of release for those serving life-without-parole drug sentences. Make sentences retroactive where laws have changed. Support categorical clemencies to rectify past injustices.

It is time for bold action. We must not be satisfied with the norm, but work toward institutionalizing the demand for a standard of decency that values transformative change.

Nkechi Taifa is president of The Taifa Group LLC, convener of the Justice Roundtable, and author of the memoir,Black Power, Black Lawyer: My Audacious Quest for Justice.

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Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs

Every once in a while, a voice emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world: Vijay Prashad on Colombian President Petros speech at the U.N.

scar Muoz, Colombia, Lnea del destino or Line of Destiny, 2006.

ByVijay PrashadTricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Each year, in the last weeks of September, the worlds leaders gather in New York City to speak at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. The speeches can usually be forecasted well in advance, either tired articulations of values that do not get acted upon or belligerent voices that threaten war in an institution built to prevent war.

However, every once in a while, a speech shines through, a voice emanates from the chamber and echoes around the world for its clarity and sincerity. This year, that voice belongs to Colombias recently inaugurated president, Gustavo Petro, whose briefremarksdistilled with poetic precision the problems in our world and the cascading crises of social distress, the addiction to money and power, the climate catastrophe and environmental destruction.

It is time for peace, Petro said. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.

Heriberto Cogollo, Colombia, Carnival Los Cabildos de Cartagena or The Carnival of Cartagenas Cabildos, 1999.

Colombia has been gripped by violence since it won its independence from Spain in 1810. This violence emanated from Colombias elites, whose insatiable desire for wealth has meant the absolute impoverishment of the people and the failure of the country to develop anything that resembles liberalism.

Decades of political action to build the confidence of the masses in Colombia culminated in a cycle of protests beginning in 2019 that led to Petros electoral victory. The new centre-left government has pledged to build social democratic institutions in Colombia and to banish the countrys culture of violence. Though the Colombian army, like armed forces around the world, prepares for war, President Petrotoldthem in August 2022 that they must now prepare for peace and must become an army of peace.

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When thinking about violence in a country like Colombia, there is a temptation to focus on drugs, cocaine in particular. The violence, it is often suggested, is an outgrowth of the illicit cocaine trade. But this is an ahistorical assessment.

Colombia experienced terrible bloodshed long before highly processed cocaine became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards. The countrys elite has used murderous force to prevent any dilution of its power, including the 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitn, the former mayor of Colombias capital of Bogot, that led to a period known asLa Violencia or The Violence.

Liberal politicians and communist militants faced the steel of the Colombian army and police on behalf of this granite block of power backed by the United States, which has used Colombia to extend its power into South America. Fig leaves of various types were used to cover over the ambitions of the Colombian elite and their benefactors in Washington. In the 1990s, one such cover was the War on Drugs.

Enrique Grau Arajo, Colombia,Prima Colazione a Firenze or Breakfast in Florence, 1964.

By all accounts whether of theUnited Nations Office on Drugs and Crimeor the U.S. governmentsDrug Enforcement Agency(DEA) the largest consumers of illegal narcotics (cannabis, opioids and cocaine) are in North America and Western Europe. A recent U.N.studyshows that cocaine use in the United States has been fluctuating and increasing after 2013 with a more stable trend observed in 2019.

The War on Drugs strategy, initiated by the United States and Western countries, has had a two-pronged approach to the drug crisis: first, to criminalise retailers in Western countries and, second, to go to war against the peasants who produce the raw material in these drugs in countries such as Colombia.

In the United States, for instance, almost 2 million people disproportionately Black and Latino are caught in theprison industrial complex, with 400,000 of them imprisoned or on probation for nonviolent drug offences (mostly as petty dealers in a vastly profitable drug empire).

The collapse of employment opportunities for young people in working-class areas and the allure of wages from the drug economy continue to attract low-level employees of the global drug commodity chain, despite the dangers of this profession.

The War on Drugs has made a negligible impact on this pipeline, which is why many countries have now begun todecriminalisedrug possession and drug use (particularly cannabis).

Dbora Arango, Colombia, Rojas Pinilla, 1957.

The obduracy of the Colombian elite backed by the U.S. government to allow any democratic space to open in the country led the left to take up armed struggle in 1964 and then return to the gun when the elite shut down the promise of the democratic path in the 1990s.

In the name of the war against the armed left as well as the War on Drugs, the Colombian military and police have crushed any dissent in the country. Despiteevidenceof the financial and political ties between the Colombian elite, narco-paramilitaries and drug cartels, the United States government initiated Plan Colombia in 1999 to funnel $12 billion to the Colombian military to deepen this war (in 2006, when he was a senator, Petrorevealedthe nexus between these diabolical forces, for which his family was threatened with violence).

As part of this war, the Colombian armed forces dropped the terrible chemical weapon glyphosate on the peasantry (in 2015, the World Health Organizationsaidthat this chemical is probably carcinogenic to humans and, in 2017, the Colombian Constitutional Courtruledthat its use must be restricted).

In 2020, the followingassessmentwas offered in The Harvard International Review: Instead of reducing cocaine production, Plan Colombia has actually caused cocaine production and transport to shift into other areas. Additionally, militarisation in the war on drugs has caused violence in the country to increase. This is precisely what Petro told the world at the United Nations.

Sandra Vsquez de la Horra, Chile, Los Vientos or The Winds, 2016.

The most recent DEAreportnotes that cocaine use in the United States remains steady and that deaths from drug poisoning involving cocaine have increased every year since 2013. U.S. drug policy is focused on law enforcement, aiming merely to reduce the domestic availability of cocaine. Washington willspend45 percent of its drug budget on law enforcement, 49 percent on treatment for drug addicts, and a mere 6 percent on prevention.

The lack of emphasis on prevention is revealing. Rather than tackle the drug crisis as a demand-side problem, the U.S. and other Western governments pretend that it is a supply-side problem that can be dealt with by using military force against petty drug dealers and peasants who grow the coca plant. Petroscryfrom the heart at the United Nations attempted to call attention to the root causes of the drug crisis:

According to the irrational power of the world, the market that razes existence is not to blame; it is the jungle and those who live in it that are to blame. Bank accounts have become unlimited; the money saved by the most powerful people on Earth could not even be spent over the course of centuries. The empty existence produced by the artificiality of competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to possessions has another face: the drug addiction of people who lose the competition in the artificial race that humanity has become. The sickness of loneliness is not cured by [dousing] the forests with glyphosate; the forest is not to blame. To blame is your society educated by endless consumption, by the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of the powerful to fill with money.

The War on Drugs, Petro said, is a war on the Colombian peasantry and a war on the precarious poor in Western countries. We do not need this war, he said; instead, we need to struggle to build a peaceful society that does not sap meaning from the hearts of people who are treated as a surplus to societys logic.

Fernando Botero, Colombia, La Calle or The Street, 2013.

As a young man, Petro was part of the M-19 guerrilla movement, one of the organisations that attempted to break the chokehold that Colombias elites held over the countrys democracy. One of his comrades was the poet Mara Mercedes Carranza (19452003), who wrote searingly about the violence thrust upon her country in her 1987 bookHola, Soledador Hello, Solitude, capturing the desolation in her poem La Patria or The Homeland:

In this house, everything is in ruins,in ruins are hugs and music,each morning, destiny, laughter are in ruins,tears, silence, dreams.The windows show destroyed landscapes,flesh and ash on peoples faces,words combine with fear in their mouths.In this house, we are all buried alive.

Carranza took her life when the fires of hell swept through Colombia.

A peace agreement in 2016, a cycle of protests from 2019, and now the election of Petro and Francia Mrquez in 2022 have wiped the ash off the faces of the Colombian people and provided them with an opportunity to try and rebuild their house.

The end of the War on Drugs, that is, the war on the Colombian peasantry, will only advance Colombias fragile struggle towards peace and democracy.

Vijay Prashadis an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor ofLeftWord Booksand the director ofTricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, includingThe Darker NationsandThe Poorer Nations. His latest books areStruggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialismand, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article is fromTricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those ofConsortium News.

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The Irrational War on Drugs - consortiumnews.com

People of color experience discrimination at every stage of the criminal legal system.

The drug war has produced profoundly unequal outcomes across racial groups, manifested through racial discrimination by law enforcement and disproportionate drug war misery suffered by communities of color.

Many different communities of color bear the impact of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws. This impact may vary across cities and regions. Nationwide, some of the most egregious racial disparities can be seen in the case of Black and Latinxpeople.

Higher arrest and incarceration rates for these communities are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use, but rather of law enforcements focus on urban areas, lower income communities and communities of color.

Disparities in arrests and incarceration are seen for both drug possession law violations as well as low-level sales. Those selling small amounts of drugs to support their own drug use may go to jail for decades. This unequal enforcement ignores the universality of drug dependency, as well as the universal appeal of drugs themselves.

Watch DPA's Executive Director Kassandra Frederique speak abouthow drug policy and the Black Lives Matter movements intersectat our2015International Drug Policy Reform Conference.

We believe that the criminalization of people of color, particularly young Black people, is as profound a system of racial control as the Jim Crow laws were in this country until the mid-1960s.

This video from hip hop legend Shawn Jay Z Carter and acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple depicts the drug wars devastating impact on the Black community from decades of biased law enforcement.

The video traces the drug war from President Nixon to the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws to the emerging aboveground marijuana market that is poised to make legal millions for wealthy investors doing the same thing that generations of people of color have been arrested and locked up for.

Misguided drug laws and draconian sentencing have produced profoundly unequal outcomes for communities of color.

Other racial groups are also impacted by the drug war, but the disparities with these highlighted groups are particularly stark and well documented.

Learn about how the drug war has affected Latinx communities.

Despite the recent emergence of fentanyl in the illegal market, lengthy sentences have been on the books for decades. They have not stopped the spread of fentanyl. At the federal level, pre-existing penalties range from a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense to life without parole for a third conviction. With the majority (75%) of those currently federally sentenced for fentanyl trafficking being people of color, these laws threaten to only exacerbateracial disparities in the criminal legal system.

See our fentanyl report to learn about health-centered solutions to the overdose crisis.

For noncitizens, including legal permanent residents, any drug law violation can trigger automatic detention and deportation often without the possibility of return.

People deported for drug law violations are sent back to their countries of origin, where they may no longer have any ties to family or community. They may lack basic survival needs like food, housing and health services, and may face serious threats to their security. They are usually barred from reentering the United States, often for life. The result is thousands of families broken and communities torn apart every year.

Irrational and racist logic rooted in the drug war falsely associates Latinx and Black immigrants with drug use and drug activity. As a result, the U.S. has created the largest immigrant exclusion, detention, and deportation structure in the world.

Learn more about how the drug war invades immigrant communities at UprootingTheDrugWar.org.

Punishment for a drug law violation is not only meted out by the criminal legal system, but is also perpetuated by policies denying child custody, voting rights, employment, business loans, licensing, student aid, public housing and other public assistance to people with criminal convictions.

These exclusions create a permanent second-class status for millions of Americans. Like drug war enforcement itself, they fall disproportionately on people of color.

The Drug Policy Alliance is committed to exposing discrimination and disproportionate drug law enforcement, as well as the systems that perpetuate them. We work to eliminate policies that result in the unfair criminalization of communities of color by rolling back harsh mandatory minimum sentences and by addressing on the rampant over-policing of these communities.

We advocate for:

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Race and the Drug War | Drug Policy Alliance