May 13, 2012

Source: Daily Mail

Britain has become a nation of sleeping pill addicts since the start of the  economic downturn, figures revealed yesterday.

Stress-related insomnia has been blamed for a sharp increase in the number of people prescribed powerful drugs to help them sleep.

The annual cost to the NHS of handing out the pills has risen by a sixth in the past three years to nearly £50million.

But there are fears that strong medication is being given out too readily and patients are becoming hooked.

Many of the most commonly used pills have potentially dangerous side effects including liver problems, headaches and nausea.

Read More…

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April 17, 2012

Source: RawStory

Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal has signed House Bill 861 into law, a controversial measure which will require drug testing of all applicants for public assistance, according to the Associated Press. The Social Responsibility and Accountability Act was passed by the state’s deliberative bodies in votes that broke down along party lines, then signed by Governor Deal on Monday night.

Similar bills in other states have been struck down by judges as unconstitutional. Georgia state legislator John Albers (R-Roswell), one of the original sponsors of the bill that became The Social Responsibility and Accountability Act, said the he crafted the legislation specifically to elide constitutional concerns such as the ones raised in a Florida challenge to that state’s drug testing law.

“Drug testing is so commonplace,” he said, “We worked very closely with folks in other states and attorneys’ general offices to address all of the concerns.”

When contacted by email, Georgia’s Department of Human Services told Raw Story, “The Department is aware that Governor Deal signed HB 861 into law. Policy and program experts are currently reviewing the legislation to understand the full impact of the law on the Department of Human Services.”

Read More…

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March 18, 2012

By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie

On the morning of September 29, 2011, around 8 AM, the Butte Interagency Narcotic Task Force (BINTF) out of Butte, California, forced their way into the home of Jayme Walsh and his wife Daisy Bram.

The officers then arrested the two parents and with the help of Child Protective Services (CPS) and the Child Services Division of Butte County, seized their children.

Zeus, a 3-week-old suckling newborn was forcibly removed from the arms of his mother, and along with his 15-mont-old brother Thor, they were both placed in the home of a stranger, where they remained for four months.

You can hear the disturbing audio of the arrest in the video below. You can hear Jayme Walsh trying to calm Daisy Bram down while they are taking her children, which is clearly quite distressing to her for obvious reasons.

To clarify a bit of the audio, Walsh says that the charge of possession of ammunition by a felon was the result of police discovering a single old shotgun shell which was left on the property by the occupants. Walsh says that the charges were dismissed and that he is being regarded as a “felon” for a prior conviction some 12 years ago.

Walsh contends that prior to this quite disturbing incident, he “had not even gotten so much as a speeding ticket in years.”

Neither Thor nor Zeus had ever spent time away from their parents, so one can assume that this was likely quite a traumatic experience for the two children.

On September 7, 2011, three weeks before the BINTF and CPS burst into their home and stole their children, two deputies from Butte County Sheriff’s Office trespassed onto a clearly marked private road.

This came after Bram and Walsh had witnessed sheriff’s helicopters fly over their area all summer.

The deputies made their way around a locked and gated driveway and then onto the property of Bram and Walsh’s remote home located somewhere on a mountain in Concow, California.

The deputies claimed they were there for a so-called “compliance check” – which is a nice way to make an end run around probable cause and the entire Fourth Amendment in order to illegally “access to private homes to investigate legal medicinal cannabis gardens for potential arrest and prosecution,” according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Legislation (NORML).

During this “compliance check” one of the deputies assured Walsh that “everything looks okay” and wished him luck with his baby since all of the necessary and appropriate medical records were in order.

Now Bram and Walsh are facing a whopping eight class A felonies, six of which deal with cannabis and two of which relate to alleged child abuse.

While Walsh represented himself and his wife during a preliminary hearing, they are now being represented by Michael Levinsohn and Jen Reeder.

Both charges related to child abuse were dropped, along with one of the charges dealing with cannabis.

This leaves the couple facing five criminal charges in relation to cannabis, although on March 13, Butte County Assistant District Attorney Jeff Greeson re-filed the felony child abuse and misdemeanor child endangerment charges against Bram.

“Considering the felony and misdemeanor charges were dropped, and are now being re-filed after public outcry and the filing for a Grand Jury Investigation, we can come to no other conclusion except this is a retaliatory measure, from the Butte County DA’s office,” Tamara Lujan, NORML Women’s Alliance Community Leader for Butte County, said in a statement.

At no point has there been an attempt by the prosecutors to verify the validity of the couple’s status as qualified medical marijuana patients in the state of California.

Walsh and Bram both have recommendations for medical marijuana from a doctor which are legally recognized in the state of California.

With the federal government continuing to wage a war against medical cannabis and trample all over state’s rights in the process, some individuals at the state level have begun to succumb to the pressure.

This is seen in the case of dispensaries in Los Angeles (which are completely legal under state law, but not federal law), as well as in the case of the University of California, San Francisco kicking out an unimaginably sick patient for using her desperately needed medication, which just happens to be medical marijuana.

After the suffering of Bram, Walsh and their children emerged, other local residents have come forward with their own complaints which are quite similar to those of Bram and Walsh.

These complaints also focus on the BINTF and the Child Services Division of Butte County, which currently leads in the percentage rate of permanent removal of children from parents throughout all California counties.

In response to this trend, the NORML Women’s Alliance (NWA) filed an official request calling for an investigation, including a financial audit, by the Grand Jury in Butte County.

On March 9, the NWA and Butte County residents issued a complaint to the Grand Jury of Butte County requesting that they investigate the County Children Services Division for alleged widespread misconduct and malfeasance.

In the request, which was detailed in a recent press release they cited multiple testimonials directly from people who had been affected by the agency’s actions, as well as various detailed account of the Child Services Division’s questionable activities.

“We thank the Grand Jury for its time, consideration and diligence in pursing our request. Only when government agencies have proper oversight can we as a community rest assured that corruption, abuse and other misdeeds are kept in check and deterred,” Lujan said.

“Together We the People of Butte County and the Grand Jury can make these necessary strides of investigation and oversight to ensure all Butte families are truly served well, and are safe and secure at home,” Lujan added.

Hopefully the Grand Jury will actually do their job and hold these agencies to account while actually serving the people of Butte County.

Unfortunately, in some cases when individuals actually try to do their job – like New York City Police Department Officer Adrian Schoolcraft – they are targeted for harassment and abuse.

INS LINKIf this popular movement in Butte County is successful, I will consider it a major victory (even though it is a relatively small-scale one) and hopefully it will encourage people to become more active at the local level in order to bring more transparency and accountability to government.

Acting at the local level can also be much more effective in pushing back against the increasingly tyrannical federal government, so I will continue to follow the case of Bram and Walsh closely and keep my readers updated.

Please do whatever you can to support their battle and if you happen to be a resident of Butte County, I encourage you to get directly involved in any way possible, even if it is just signing your name to a petition.

If you know of similar battles in your local area, please contact me so I can bring your struggle to a wider national and international audience and hopefully strengthen your cause.

If you would like to inform me of such a situation, submit an original story of your own or correct a mistake of mine, please email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com

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January 26, 2012

Source: AFP

Bags containing 16 kilogram of cocaine that Mexican drug traffickers recently lost has turned up in an unlikely place – the United Nations in New York.

Two fake UN bags containing the drugs – which experts said had a street value of about $US2 million ($1.9 million) – set off a security alert when they were delivered, apparently by accident, to the global body’s headquarters.

The bags, which had the UN symbol printed on them, were shipped from Mexico through the DHL delivery company’s centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, deputy commissioner Paul Browne of the New York Police Department said.

But the bags had no address on them, nor any return to sender details.

“It is my understanding that because there was no addressee, the DHL just thought, well, that’s the UN symbol so we should ship it on to UN headquarters and let them figure out who it was supposed to go to,” deputy commissioner Browne said.

Read More…

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January 14th, 2012

Via: AFP:

Production of opium and the illicit crop’s value soared in Afghanistan last year, the United Nations said in a report released Thursday.

According to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime, farmer income derived from Afghanistan’s opium crop in 2011 was $1.4 billion (1.09 billion euros), representing nine percent of GDP.

“Opium is therefore a significant part of the Afghan economy and provides considerable funding to the insurgency and fuels corruption,” Yury Fedotov, executive director of the UN office, said in a statement.

Afghanistan grows about 90 percent of the world’s opium. The UN said poppy-crop cultivation covered more than 131,000 hectares in 2011, up seven per cent from the previous year.

The overall opium crop increased by 61 per cent, from 3,600 metric tons in 2010 to 5,800 metric tons in 2011.

The value of the opium yield rose 133 percent from 2010, when plant diseases killed much of the Afghan crop.

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January 12, 2012

Source: BBC

Mexican officials say nearly 13,000 people were killed in violence blamed on organised crime between January and September last year.

This means there have been 47,515 drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown on drug traffickers in late 2006.

Officials said the 11% rise in murders was far slower than in previous years.

But with presidential elections in July, violence is set to be a key issue for voters, correspondents say.

On Wednesday, Mexico’s Federal Attorney General’s office (PGR) released figures showing that 12,903 people had been killed in drug-related violence during the first nine months of 2011.

It was the first time official statistics had been released since January 2011 and came in response to a series of freedom of information requests over several months.

Read More…

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January 10, 2012

Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post

Pharmaceutical painkillers are now responsible for more deaths in the United States than heroin and cocaine combined.

These pharmaceuticals are responsible for more than 15,000 deaths conservatively in 2008 alone. With no sign of slowing down, the painkiller industry is becoming wildly popular among Americans — as a result, so is the high rate of painkiller abuse.

Classified as dangerous by the U.S. government, cannabis (even in THC-free form, or free of psychoactive effects) has been identified as a powerful pain reliever in more than 80 peer-reviewed studies.

You may be aware of the fact that marijuana is usually quite high in THC (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the compound responsible for the psychoactive effect of cannabis.

In contrast, it is also low in CBD (cannabidiol) content. Both THC and CBD are known as cannabinoids, however, which interacts with your body in a very unique way.

In fact, cannabinoids are key when it comes to pain relief. While this information alone is enough to shatter the traditional beliefs on government marijuana regulation, the relationship between CBD and THC is even more revealing.

What you may not be familiar with is how CBD has been shown to block the effect of THC in the nervous system. This allows for marijuana to be used with little or no psychoactive effects. Hemp, on the other hand, is high in CBD and low in THC. This is due to the fact that it is bred to maximize its fiber, seeds, and oil. Of course these key properties are what it is most commonly used for.

Trials Indicate Cannabis as an Effective Treatment for Chronic Pain

In a 2011 study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, researchers examined the effects of cannabinoids on chronic pain and proper sleep. What they found in their trials challenges federal government claims that cannabis has ‘no accepted medical use’. The researchers conducted 18 trials using cannabinoids in the treatment of chronic pain, and found that cannabinoids demonstrated a significant painkilling effect as well as noticeable improvements in sleep in 15 of trials. Compared, to placebo, the cannabinoids were extremely effective.

Most importantly, there were no adverse effects.

Another study, performed in 2002, reached similar conclusions. Finding cannabis to aid in pain relief as well as quality of sleep, researchers from the McGill University Health Centre stated in summary that cannabis can be used as an effective way of improving pain, mood, and sleep in some patients with chronic pain.

There are many forms of the cannabis plant, many without mind-altering properties, many of which can be utilized without adverse reactions, as detailed in the peer-reviewed research. It is also quite clear that the painkiller industry simply cannot continue to wreak havoc on the lives of many, and a natural alternative must soon emerge to prevent another 15,000 plus deaths this year.

Why is the federal government refusing to admit the medicinal properties of cannabis and the unique ability of this substance to curb pain, insomnia, and impaired mood? This is only one example of how the government decides what is and what is not good for your health.

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January 2, 2012

Source: Disinfo – Huffpo

The late, lamented Gary Webb never really received the credit he deserved for his investigative journalism blowing open the CIA-Contras drug trafficking scandal. Now Ryan Grim sets the record straight in this article for Huffington Post, ostensibly about Ron Paul and conspiracy theories, but really an opportunity to plug his new book, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America:

…Earlier this week, I looked into [Ron] Paul’s claim … that the war on drugs had racist origins and that the medical community played a role in lobbying for drug prohibitions. That charge was more or less accurate.

So is Paul’s claim about the CIA and drug trafficking, a connection I explore in the book “This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.” (An excerpt of the chapter on the CIA appeared in The Root.) The following is drawn from my book.

Since at least the 1940s, the American government has organized and supported insurgent armies for the purpose of overthrowing some presumably hostile foreign regime. In Italy, the United States helped pit the Corsican and Sicilian mobs against the Fascists and then the Communists. In China, it aided Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in its struggle against Mao Zedong’s communist forces. In Afghanistan, it once backed the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union and today backs warlords in opposition to the mujahedeen.

All of these and other U.S.-supported groups profited, or still profit, heavily from the drug trade. One of the principal arguments made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in support of the global drug war is that the illegal drug trade funds violent, stateless organizations. The DEA refers specifically to al Qaeda and the Taliban, but the same method of fundraising has long been used by other violent, stateless actors whom the United States befriended.

AN ‘UNCOMFORTABLE’ STORY

Douglas Farah was in El Salvador when the San Jose Mercury News broke a major story in the summer of 1996: The Nicaraguan Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by exporting cocaine to the United States. One of their best customers was a man nicknamed “Freeway Rick” — Ricky Donnell Ross, then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the Wal-Mart of crack dealing.”

“My first thought was, ‘Holy shit!’ because there’d been so many rumors in the region of this going on,” said Farah 12 years later. He’d grown up in Latin America and covered it for 20 years for the Washington Post. “There had always been these stories floating around about [the Contras] and cocaine. I knew [Contra leader] Adolfo Calero and some of the other folks there, and they were all sleazebags. You wouldn’t read the story and say, ‘Oh my god, these guys would never do that.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, one more dirty thing they were doing.’ So I took it seriously.”

The same would not hold true of most of Farah’s colleagues, either in the newspaper business in general or at the Post in particular. “If you’re talking about our intelligence community tolerating — if not promoting — drugs to pay for black ops, it’s rather an uncomfortable thing to do when you’re an establishment paper like the Post,” Farah told me. “If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done.”

In the mid to late 1980s, a number of reports had surfaced that connected the Contras to the cocaine trade…

[continues at Huffington Post]

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December 27, 2011

Source: RawStory

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December 20, 2011

Source: Reason

If you are a medical marijuana patient in one of the 16 states (plus the District of Columbia) that allow for it, you’ve got reason to believe lately that the government has it in for you.

You’ve got federal raids on the places where you can conveniently buy your medicine, the governor of Arizona trying to overturn in court her citizens’ choice to institute a medical marijuana system, and Michigan’s attorney general trying to make life as hard as he can for those using the system his state’s voters approved by 63 percent in 2008. And while it isn’t directly the government’s fault, doctors are taking people off liver transplant waiting lists for using medical pot.

It isn’t just that the government on both the federal and state level doesn’t want you to be able to legally and conveniently obtain your medicine, if that medicine is pot. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) insists you inherently lose a key constitutional right merely by letting your state know you might want to take pot medicinally.

Read More…

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December 13, 2011

Source: RawStory

Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death.

“Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”

“I would love to have a discussion with him on the fact that he smoked pot, and under the wrong set of circumstance he proposed the death penalty for, potentially, something that he had committed. I have troubles with that,” he added.

Johnson, a former New Mexico governor who has advocated for marijuana legalization since 1999, is at least partially correct about Gingrich’s position.

As Speaker of the House, Gingrich introduced the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”

The bill would have required a “sentence of death for certain importations of significant quantities of controlled substances.” It would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of carrying 100 doses — or about two ounces — or marijuana across the border. Defendants would have had a window of 18 months to file their one and only appeal.

Read More…

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Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims Of Violent Crime

November 25, 2011

Source: Huffington Post

…

MISPLACED PRIORITIES

Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

“The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,” said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

And this problem is on the rise all over the country. Last year, police in New York City arrested around 50,000 people for marijuana possession. Pot has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, but displaying the drug in public is still a crime. So police officers stop people who look “suspicious,” frisk them, ask them to empty their pockets, then arrest them if they pull out a joint or a small amount of marijuana. They’re tricked into breaking the law. According to a report from Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, there were 33,775 such arrests from 1981 to 1995. Between 1996 and 2010 there were 536,322.

Read More…

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November 22, 2011

Source: Danger Room

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.

The sprawling contract, ostensibly designed to stop drug-funded terrorism, seeks security firms for missions like “train[ing] Azerbaijan Naval Commandos.” Other tasks include providing Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopter training “for crew members of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.” Still others involve building “anti-terrorism/force protection enhancements” for the Pakistani border force in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.

The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

CNTPO quietly solicited an umbrella contract for all the security services listed above — and many, many more — on Nov. 9. It will begin handing out the contract’s cash by August. And there is a lot of cash to disburse.

The ceiling for the “operations, logistics and minor construction” tasks within CNTPO’s contract is $950 million. Training foreign forces tops out at $975 million. “Information” tasks yield $875 million. The vague “program and program support” brings another $240 million.

That puts CNTPO in a rare category. By disbursing at least $3 billion — likely more, since the contract awards come with up to three yearlong re-ups — the office is among the most lucrative sources of cash for private security contractors. The largest, from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, doles out a $10 billion, five-year deal known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract.

CNTPO is “essentially planning on outsourcing a global counternarcotics and counterterrorism program over the next several years,” says Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, “and it’s willing to spend billions to do so.”

Continue Reading “Pentagon’s War on Drugs Goes Mercenary” »

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November 16, 2011

Source: TownHall.com

The Arizona Daily Star’s Tim Stellar is reporting the federal case file against illegal Mexican bandits accused of killing Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, has disappeared.

The case against the alleged killers of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has disappeared from federal court records, apparently sealed by a federal judge.

In May, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Manuel Osorio-Arellanes and others, and they announced it with a press release. Only Osorio-Arellanes’ name was visible in the indictment, but there were blacked-out words where other defendants’ names go.

Osorio-Arellanes was charged with second-degree murder and was not considered the likely shooter. He had been wounded during the gunfight that left Terry dead.

But in the ensuing months, the case disappeared from court records.

Why? Nobody is saying.

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November 8, 2011

Source: New York Times

Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in Honduras. A heavily armed ground crew was waiting for it — as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two drug traffickers lay dead.

Several news outlets briefly reportedthe episode, mentioning that a Honduran official said the United States Drug Enforcement Administration had provided support. But none of the reports included a striking detail: that support consisted of an elite detachment of military-trained D.E.A. special agents who joined in the shootout, according to a person familiar with the episode.

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.

 Read full report here

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