Free Republic

Note: The following text is a quote: DEA Mourns the Loss of Three DEA Special Agents in Afghanistan OCT 26 - WASHINGTON, DC – The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) today confirmed that three Special Agents were killed during a counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan. “Today, the Drug Enforcement Administration mourns the tragic loss of three DEA Special Agents and seven U.S. service members killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan,” said Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. “The incident occurred during the early morning hours of October 26, when these heroic individuals were returning from a completed, joint counternarcotics mission.”...

ARCATA, Calif. — Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico. Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as...

CLINTON — When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs. Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing. “This is a very traumatic experience,” Harpold said. Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of...

In the summer of 1996, California’s Maxine Waters publicly accused the United States government of introducing crack cocaine into mostly black South Central L.A. She said the government was complicit in destroying the inner city. Thirteen years later, at the hands of the above, we are witnessing the U.S. actually abetting a drug dealer, Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez wanted to expand membership in his “Friends of Hugo” club and needed money to retain power. Oil prices were down but cocaine trafficking could fill the gap. It was becoming difficult to export drugs to the US from Venezuela, Cuba, etc., so...

In a ruling with broad implications for computer privacy, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal investigators went too far when they seized the digital records of a drug testing company and kept the results of confidential drug tests performed on all Major League baseball players during the 2002 season. According to published reports, 104 players tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The names of four of them — Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and (now retired) Sammy Sosa — were leaked to the press by an anonymous source or sources. The court...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Baby boomers, now well into middle age, are still turning on to illegal drugs, doubling the rates of illicit drug use for the older generation, according to U.S. government statistics released on Wednesday. The rates of people aged 50 to 59 who admit to using illicit drugs in the past year nearly doubled from 5.1 percent in 2002 to 9.4 percent in 2007 while rates among all other age groups are the same or decreasing, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported. "These findings show that many in the Woodstock generation continue to use...

A bill to tax and regulate marijuana in California like alcohol would generate nearly $1.4 billion in revenue for the cash-strapped state, according to an official analysis released Wednesday by tax officials. The State Board of Equalization report estimates marijuana retail sales would bring $990 million from a $50-per-ounce fee and $392 million in sales taxes. The bill introduced by San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano in February would allow adults 21 and older to legally possess, grow and sell marijuana.

Late last month, Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo took the unusual step of filing a civil rights lawsuit against the police department of his own county. The suit stems from a 2008 SWAT team raid on Calvo's house that resulted in the shooting deaths of his two black Labrador retrievers. In pushing back against the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Prince George's County police department, the mayor is helping expose a more widespread pattern of law enforcement carelessness and callousness throughout the state of Maryland. Prince George's police originally obtained a warrant to search Calvo's home...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

One of the most dangerous places on earth is our own 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Our southern border is a drug-war zone, and we’re losing. Know it. Before she became secretary of Homeland Security, former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano declared a state of emergency along the Arizona/Mexico border because of drug trafficking, shootouts and an increasing illegal immigration invasion. The Justice Department stated that Mexican drug cartels are the “largest threat to both citizens and law enforcement agencies in this country” with gang members loose in nearly 200 U.S. cities.” This in the big, bad, brave United States of America!...

DENVER -- Admitting that it may be "political suicide" former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo said its time to consider legalizing drugs. He spoke Wednesday to the Lincoln Club of Colorado, a Republican group that's been active in the state for 90 years. It's the first time Tancredo has spoken on the drug issue. He ran for president in 2008 on an anti-illegal immigration platform that has brought him passionate support and criticism. Tancredo noted that he has never used drugs, but said the war has failed. "I am convinced that what we are doing is not working," he said.

Andrew Leonard was watching television with his wife not long after returning from Ash Wednesday services when police burst through the front door of his North Baltimore home. He was handcuffed, plunked in a chair and told to keep quiet as officers rifled through the house and interrogated him for 15 minutes about drugs and a dealer he knew nothing about. As it turned out, police had the wrong house. The man they were looking for lived two doors down. Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist who has no criminal record, said he and his wife, a 29-year-old credit analyst, were frightened...

DEA dissenter Sandy Gonzalez reveals the drug war's complicity in torture and murder south of the border. Sandalio “Sandy� Gonzalez spent 27 of his 32 years in law enforcement with the Drug Enforcement Administration, working in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C., and eventually taking charge of the agency’s operations for all of South America. In 2001, while Gonzalez was working as a high-ranking agent in Miami, there was a raid by a team of DEA and Miami–Dade County narcotics agents on a suspected major drug distributor. Several kilograms of cocaine were mysteriously missing by the time the evidence...

During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on...

We have recently heard many shocking stories of brutal killings and ruthless violence related to drug cartels warring with Mexican and US officials. It is approaching the fever pitch of a full blown crisis. Unfortunately, the administration is not likely to waste this opportunity to further expand government. Hopefully, we can take a deep breath and look at history for the optimal way to deal with this dangerous situation, which is not unprecedented. Alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s brought similar violence, gangs, lawlessness, corruption and brutality. The reason for the violence was not that making and selling alcohol was inherently...

Associated Press Federal officials and members of a special border crime detail are busy looking for powerful weapons that could fall into the hands of dangerous drug cartels operating in Mexico. --snip-- Of the more than 7,700 weapons recovered from those crimes, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced 90 percent back to the U.S.

Hitlery's Latest: MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - An "insatiable" appetite in the United States for illegal drugs is to blame for much of the violence ripping through Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday. Clinton acknowledged the U.S. role in Mexico's drug cartel problem as she arrived in Mexico for a two-day visit where she will discuss U.S. plans to ramp up border security with President Felipe Calderon. Dateline, 1920s, Chicago - and virtually every other city in America. Prohibition. Did we stop people from drinking, even though it was against the law? Nope. Did we fuel criminal...

Hillary Clinton, speaking in Mexico City yesterday: We believe that we have announced a plan to use every tool at our current disposal through administrative actions to track illegal guns, to arrest and punish those who are trafficking in illegal guns, to share more information with the Mexican Government so that they can also track and seize these guns. Obviously, I am someone who supported the assault weapons ban which was passed in 1994, but it was passed with an expiration date and it expired ten years later. I, as a senator, supported measures to try to reinstate it. Politically,...

Drug War Doublespeak By Laura Carlsen | March 9, 2009 Through late February and early March, a blitzkrieg of declarations from U.S. government and military officials and pundits hit the media, claiming that Mexico was alternately at risk of being a failed state,1 on the verge of civil war, losing control of its territory, and posing a threat to U.S. national security.2

ON A SWELTERING July afternoon in 2007, Officer Jeffrey Cujdik and his narcotics squad members raided an Olney tobacco shop. Then, with guns drawn, they did something bizarre: They smashed two surveillance cameras with a metal rod, said store owners David and Eunice Nam. The five plainclothes officers yanked camera wires from the ceiling. They forced the slight, frail Korean couple to the vinyl floor and cuffed them with plastic wrist ties. "I so scared," said Eunice Nam, 56. "We were on floor. Handcuffs on me. I so, so scared, I wet my pants." The officers rifled through drawers, dumped...

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of a landmark scientific studyTen years ago today, the use of medical marijuana went from fringe to mainstream. March 17, 2009 marks the 10-year-anniversary of the publication of the Institute for Medicine's landmark study on medical cannabis: Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. At the time this report was commissioned, in response to the passage of California's Compassionate Use Act of 1996, many in the public and the mainstream media were skeptical about pot's potential therapeutic value. The publication of the Institute for Medicine's findings—which concluded that marijuana possessed medicinal properties to treat and control...

WEST MICHIGAN -- The family of injured shooting victim Derek Copp has hired a lawyer who is questioning why the Grand Valley State University student was shot by police and the basis of a search warrant to look for marijuana in his off-campus apartment. "We have some very important questions about what appears to be some shocking police activity," Grand Rapids attorney Fred Dilley said Monday. Dilley questioned the safety and necessity of raiding a student's apartment, entering through a rear slider, and the "manner in which it was served and executed." "The question is, is that a sufficient basis...

In the story of the emperor with no clothes, it took someone whose observations are rarely heeded -- a child -- to point out the obvious fact that no one else could acknowledge. In the case of drug policy, it takes people who are usually ignored by Washington policymakers -- Latin Americans -- to perform the same invaluable service. Last week, a commission made up of 17 members, from Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to Sonia Picado, the Costa Rican who heads the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights, did nothing but admit the truth: The war on drugs is a...

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — Federal agents raided a medical marijuana dispensary in South Lake Tahoe on Thursday. At about 11 a.m., five agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency — joined by members of the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, the South Lake Tahoe-El Dorado County Narcotics Enforcement Team and the South Lake Tahoe Police — served a federal search warrant on Patient to Patient Collective, located at 2314 Lake Tahoe Boulevard. Agents seized between five and 10 pounds of processed marijuana and a “small amount” of U.S. currency from the collective, said DEA Special Agent Gordon Taylor. Police made...

Drug prohibition militarizes our police, enriches our enemies, undermines our laws, and condemns our sick to suffering. At around 6pm on January 27 of last year, 80-year-old Isaac Singletary spotted a couple of drug dealers attempting to do business on his front lawn. It wasn’t the first time. Singletary, described by relatives as territorial and a bit crotchety, did what he’d done in the past. He grabbed his gun, and walked out on to his lawn to scare them off. Problem is, this time the men weren’t drug dealers. They were undercover Jacksonville, Florida police posing as drug dealers. They...

San Diego County filed papers this week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to erase California's medical marijuana law, arguing that federal prohibitions outlawing the substance supersede California's law allowing sick people to use it. The county is asking the nation's highest court to overturn a state appellate court's July decision upholding the voter-approved law legalizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes. "You have a conflict here between federal and state law, and we are in the middle," 5th District Supervisor Bill Horn said Friday. "What we have been asking all along is which takes precedence here. We will take it as...

A jury sentenced a Lakeview man to 10 years in prison for growing nearly 7,500 marijuana plants. Andrew Stever, 40, was sentenced on Monday after a three-day trial in the Federal District Court in Medford.Ten years is the mandatory minimum sentence for anyone convicted of growing 1,000 or more pot plants. In July 2007, officers from several local, state and federal agencies found 7,459 plants growing on Stever's Lakeview property, which bordered Forest Service land. Two men fled the scene, leaving behind personal property and three firearms, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Portland. Physical evidence and testimony linked...

With the help of CIA spotters,the Peruvian air force shot down 15 small civilian aircraft suspected of carrying drugs, in many cases without warning and within two to three minutes of being sighted, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday. It is the first public disclosure of the number of planes shot down between 1995 and 2001 as part of the Airbridge Denial Program,a CIA counternarcotics effort that killed an innocent American missionary,Veronica Bowers, and her infant daughter in 2001. A State Department investigation into the incident at the time said the Peruvian fighter jets forced another...

Obama talking about decriminalizing drugs

All officers involved were fired or quit The raid on Russell's Tire Shop had the look of a successful garden-variety drug bust. Acting on an informant's tip, police stormed the building on North Galvez Street and hauled out three suspects, a bag of heroin, a quarter-ounce of crack cocaine and more than $4,000 in cash. Police say they found the evidence in plain sight. But 11 months after the August 2002 bust, prosecutors dropped the charges. And this June, attorneys for the city offered the men accused of dealing the drugs $85,000 to settle a lawsuit that alleged the four...

<p>THE DRUG raid by Prince George's County law officers on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo last week was a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.</p> <p>Acting on a tip that a 32-pound package of marijuana had been sent by Federal Express from Arizona to Mr. Calvo's home (addressed to his wife, Trinity Tomsic), Prince George's police swung into action. Which is to say they got on the phone, calling law enforcement agencies to see who might have a SWAT team available to bust the unsuspecting Calvo family. (It seems the police department's own team was tied up.) After being turned down at least once, they finally struck a deal with the Prince George's Sheriff's Office, whose track record with domestic disputes is extensive but whose experience with drug busts is slight. And it showed.</p>

After being caught twice with a "baggie" of marijuana, 23-year old Rachel Hoffman was reportedly told by police in Tallahassee, Florida that she would go to prison for four years unless she became an undercover informant. The young woman, a recent graduate of Florida State University, was murdered during a botched sting operation two months ago. "The idea of waging a war on drugs is to protect people and here it seems like we're putting people in harm's way," said Lance Block, a lawyer hired by Rachel's parents. The Florida Attorney General's office says it is reviewing the procedures and...

What prompted Pembroke Pines police to conduct a dawn paramilitary raid that ended with the June 12 shooting death of homeowner Vincent Hodgkiss? In its application for a narcotics search warrant, police cited an anonymous complaint of drug dealing, surveillance of high-turnover visitors and two searches of Hodgkiss' trash by detectives, who found scraps of paper with handwritten numbers and trace amounts of "green, leafy substance" that tested positive for marijuana. Police conducted the raid with its Special Response Team (similar to SWAT) two days after Broward Circuit Judge Dale Cohen approved the search warrant. As a result of the...

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence. Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by...

High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It, by Joseph A. Califano Jr., New York: Public Affairs, 270 pages, $26.95 The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture, by Richard DeGrandpre, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 294 pages, $24.95On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain “how substance abuse ravages America,� Joseph Califano declares that “chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation’s largest religion.� Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano’s meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed,...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — The Dutch government will ban the sale of hallucinogenic mushrooms, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry said Friday, rolling back one element of the country's permissive drug policy after a series of well-publicized negative incidents.< >— A British tourist, 22, ran amok in a hotel, breaking his window and slicing his hand badly. — An Icelandic tourist, 19, thought he was being chased and jumped from a balcony, breaking both his legs. — A Danish tourist, 29, drove his car wildly through a campground, narrowly missing people sleeping in their tents.< >

'Bordergate' by Darlene Fitzgerald June 2, 2007 My name is Darlene Fitzgerald and I have over 20 years of combined law enforcement experience in the military, private industry and as a Special Agent, and in 1999 I resigned in protest because I refused to work for an agency that is worse than the people I put in jail. In 1998 I was in charge of a U.S. Customs task force operating an extensive investigation called Operation Rite Rail. We uncovered tons of narcotics and contraband being facilitated into the U.S. from Mexico via railroad tanker cars - with the apparent...

The urge of lawmakers amid the unthinkable is to entertain the feel-good notion of legislation that could have prevented the awfulness.     The inclination to legislate the worst impulses out of the human condition is understandable in the wake of the horror at Virginia Tech that left 32 dead at the hand of a gun-toting sicko, who then shot himself. But as we know only too well, if only from anecdotal experience, laws have their limits.     To take the principle of gun-control measures to the ultimate level, let's say America decided in the coming weeks that it no longer could tolerate...

The government will retry a prominent marijuana advocate on cultivation charges even though he faces no punishment if convicted, beyond the one day in jail he's already served, a federal prosecutor said today. Prosecutors decided on a second trial for Ed Rosenthal after a "thorough and careful review,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney George Bevan told U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer... Defense lawyer Shari Greenberger said she would ask Breyer to order the government to reimburse Rosenthal for the time his lawyers spent getting the new charges dismissed.

Leon Nunn stepped out his front door one recent afternoon only to be waved back by a squadron of drug agents using a battering ram on a neighbor's home. The half-million dollar home in the quiet subdivision was stuffed with high-grade marijuana, plants covering nearly every square foot. The bust is one example of a phenomenon that has come to light recently in subdivisions around the state's capital. Marijuana growers with suspected ties to Asian organized crime have been buying suburban homes — many in newer developments — because of the anonymity the drug dealers believe the neighborhoods afford. They...

Anti-drug campaigners today attacked the makers of a soft drink who have called their product cocaine. The high-energy drink is being billed as a "legal alternative" to the class A drug, using a massive hit of caffeine instead of cocaine. Its maker claims the title is "a bit of fun" but critics slammed the technique as a cynical ploy which could tempt young people into using drugs. The drink's inventor, Jamie Kirby, said: "It's an energy drink, and it's a fun name. As soon as people look at the can, they smile." He claims Cocaine is "350 percent stronger than...

Two years ago, my 23-year-old brother became addicted to painkillers after breaking his leg and undergoing several operations to repair it. Last year, while he was checking into rehab for abusing OxyContin, I was drafting a chapter in my new book calling for drug legalization. It was a difficult moment to believe in individual liberty: I felt firsthand the effects of what it's like when people make bad decisions. I saw how hard my brother struggled to get clean, first moving forward and then backsliding again into substance abuse. One of the more compelling arguments for the war on drugs...

Finders Keepers: Couple Get Cash They Found In Ditch Sheriff's Office Wanted To Keep Cash Under Drug Forfeiture Laws OKANOGAN, Wash. -- It's a case of finder-keepers and then some. An Oroville, Wash., couple can keep the more than half million dollars in cash they found along a highway. Jane Gerth spotted a backpack in a ditch not far from her home. When they found $507,000 inside, her husband Dan called deputies. The sheriff's office seized the cash and wanted to keep it under drug forfeiture laws. But a judge has ruled the couple gets the money. Local authorities said...

On monday, the Supreme Court ruled that if people want to smoke marijuana for medicinal reasons... they ought to write their Congressman..... The ruling in the case, Gonzalez v. Raich, comes as an obvious defeat for marijuana activists and Phish cover-band tours, when not mutually exclusive.... However, this issue has created quite a conundrum among the conventional wisdom of liberal/conservative and activist/constructionist justice.........

In my thankfully limited experience with observing addiction it has always seemed to me that the true "gateway drug" is not marijuana, or even California Coolers, but lying. First comes the nervous exaggeration, then the covering-up of various misdemeanors... and by the time those lies start sounding true, the main barrier to destructive behavior is access to the poison itself. Well, the Supreme Court just gave the Drug War addicts in Congress and the White House the constitutional equivalent of a lifetime supply. No longer will the Commerce Clause present even a tiny weak spot on the dragon of national...

Let those poor sick folks inhaleBy James Lileks We now have an answer to the question of whether U.S. agents should knock down doors and bat the reefer from the fingers of cancer patients. Yes! By all means, yes. The Supremes have ruled that federal anti-weed laws must trump individual states' laws on medicinal marijuana. So much for the idea that the states are the laboratories of democracy. Of course, this doesn't mean they can be the meth labs of democracy. But is medical marijuana such a threat? We'll get to that. First, consider the rationale the court employed: our...

......snip.......... A raging street war between two Hmong gangs has left three dead since Thanksgiving and spread hundreds of rounds of ammunition throughout Sacramento. In response, gang detectives have more than doubled their presence on the streets, to as many as 30 some nights. With nightly warrant sweeps and probation searches, they're trying to get inside information on some of the most notoriously closed-mouth criminals in the area. And Asian gangs are not the only concern. In the past 12 months, other gang attacks have claimed the lives of a Sheldon High School student, a 21-year-old North Sacramento man and...

Suit filed over family killed by arson BALTIMORE, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- A young Maryland woman who lost her family in a drug-related firebombing has filed suit claiming that city, state and federal agencies failed to protect them. Lakeesha Bowell and four other relatives are seeking $14 million in damages and a court order that the city provide better protection for residents who report criminal activity, the Baltimore Sun reports. Bowell's parents, Angela and Carnell Dawson, and five of their children died in the fire that raced through their Baltimore home two years ago. The man who set the fire,...

The Supreme Court gave police broader search powers Monday during traffic stops, ruling that drug-sniffing dogs can be used to check out motorists even if officers have no reason to suspect they may be carrying narcotics. In a 6-2 decision, the court sided with Illinois police who stopped Roy Caballes in 1998 along Interstate 80 for driving 6 miles over the speed limit. Although Caballes lawfully produced his driver's license, troopers brought over a drug dog after Caballes seemed nervous. Caballes argued the Fourth Amendment protects motorists from searches such as dog sniffing, but Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed, reasoning...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) ruled on Monday that police do not violate the constitutional right to privacy when a dog sniff of a vehicle during a lawful traffic stop turns up contraband.   The justices by a 6-2 vote, in a majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens (news - web sites), set aside an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that such searches required reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. "In our view, conducting a dog sniff would not change the character of a traffic stop that is lawful at its inception and otherwise executed...