四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

The public turns against the war on pot

Over the last 30 years, federal spending to fight drugs has risen seven times over, after inflation. Since 1991, arrests for possession of pot have nearly tripled. [The war on drugs is a jobs program for over paid cops! In addition to being a war on the American people and a war on the "Bill of Rights"]

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On weed: Dazed and confused no more

The public turns against the war on pot

Steve Chapman

October 20, 2011

Candidates running for president can easily wreck their campaigns with one serious misstep. Back in 1976, one Democrat said he favored getting rid of criminal penalties for marijuana use. Can you imagine how Americans of that primitive era reacted to his blunder? They elected him.

Once in office, Jimmy Carter didn't abandon his temperate approach to cannabis. He proposed that the federal government stop treating possession of small amounts as a crime, making a sensible but novel argument: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."

Nothing came of it, of course. Carter's logic was unassailable even 35 years ago, but it has yet to be translated into federal policy. The American experience with prohibition of alcohol proved that we are capable of learning from our mistakes. The experience with prohibition of marijuana proves that we are also capable of doing just the opposite.

The stupidity and futility of the federal war on weed, however, has slowly permeated the mass consciousness. This week, the Gallup organization reported that fully 50 percent of Americans now think marijuana should be made legal. This is the first time since Gallup began asking in 1969 that more Americans support legalization than oppose it.

The shift has shaped drug policy at the state level. Seventeen states have approved medical use of pot, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and 14 have decriminalized possession of small amounts for personal use — including such staunchly conservative places as Mississippi and Nebraska.

Changes in a permissive direction may bring casual use out of the closet, but they don't elicit the disasters that anti-drug zealots fear. In fact, research indicates that decriminalizing cannabis has only a tiny effect on consumption, if any.

For that matter, hardly anything has an effect. Over the last 30 years, federal spending to fight drugs has risen seven times over, after inflation. Since 1991, arrests for possession of pot have nearly tripled. But all for naught.

As a report last year by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy noted, more high school students and young adults get high today than 20 years ago. More than 16 million Americans smoke dope at least once a month. Pot is just as available to kids as it ever was, and cheaper than before.

If we had gotten results like this after reducing enforcement, the new policy would be blamed. But politicians who support the drug war never consider that their remedies may be aggravating the disease. They follow the customary formula for government programs: If it works, spend more on it, and if it fails, spend more on it.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration for overriding states on medical marijuana."What I'm not going to be doing," he vowed, "is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue."

For a while it seemed like he meant it. Early on, the Justice Department said it would not waste resources going after sick people who were using cannabis as allowed by states. But recently, federal prosecutors in California have been mobilizing to shut down the state-approved dispensaries that supply those patients.

It's like George W. Bush never left. William Panzer, co-author of the medical marijuana initiative approved by California voters, told The Los Angeles Times, "The Obama administration has been incredibly disappointing on this issue."

The effort to combat marijuana has served to punish Americans for using a substance that is far less harmful than legal ones. It has enriched organized crime, while fueling endless slaughter by drug cartels in Mexico. It has prevented clinical research on the therapeutic use of cannabis. Its results run the gamut from pathetic ineffectuality to outright harm.

Those facts account for the growing support for legalization, despite ceaseless government propaganda against marijuana. It may seem impossible that cannabis will ever be permitted, regulated and taxed like beer or cigarettes. But when public opinion moves, public policy is bound to follow.

In 1930, the author of the constitutional amendment establishing Prohibition said, "There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail." Three years later, it was gone.

Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman

schapman@tribune.com

Arizona 1 gram marijuana tax stamps

It's safe to travel in Mexico?

30,000+ civilians have been murdered in Mexico's drug war, which on the low end is just as many civilians that have been murdered in Iraq.

I suspect the main problem with traveling in Mexico is if you happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, you could get killed in a turf war between two rival drug cartels. But other then that it probably is a safe country.

Remember you can trust ANYTHING our government rulers say. Or at least that's what our government masters want us to believe.

Of course hate monger Mike Renzulli will probably try to say I actually believe that. No I don't believe that, I don't I am just joking.

That old joke about how you can tell a politician is lying when his lips are moving probably has a lot of truth in it. You can't trust a politician any more then you can trust a used car salesman. And used car salesmen are probably more honest then politicians.

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$30 million ad campaign says Mexico is safe

by Kitty Bean Yancey - Oct. 21, 2011 10:50 AM

USA Today

The Mexico Tourism Board is fighting U.S. perceptions that it's unsafe to travel there with a new $30 million ad campaign.

Part of the campaign will feature TV ads -- due to premiere in the next couple of weeks -- that will feature real-life vacationers arriving back from South of the Border getaways. The idea: "Americans talking to Americans to communicate that it is a great place and a safe place," tourism board chief marketing officer Gerardo Llanes says.

He says those picked for the "Mexico Taxi Project" are offered a ride home at the airport and don't know they're being filmed in vehicles driven by actors. The driver asks about their stay, including safety, then cameras are revealed and riders sign papers giving permission for their comments to air. So far, respondents have been positive about their stays, Llanes says. "Most of the people say, 'Anything we can do for Mexico,' " when asked to give permission, he says. He thinks having Americans tout Mexico is more effective than "an institution" saying good things.

"We don't deny there are some spots in the country that have issues," Llanes continues, such as drug cartels run amok and crime. But he says tourist areas such as Cancun shouldn't be considered treacherous.

A website due to be up and running soon, mexicotaxiproject.com, will have ad clips and more. And Llanes says the campaign will include a social media blitz and even billboards in places such as Times Square showing vacationers having fun in the sun, live.

Feds force banks to close medical marijuana accounts???

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Bank of Denver to close all medical marijuana accounts: Cherry Top Farms bust a factor?

By Michael Roberts Fri., Oct. 21 2011 at 1:21 PM

​One of the biggest issues for medical marijuana entrepreneurs is the shortage of banks willing to take their money. Most used Colorado Springs State Bank until September 30, when its MMJ accounts were dropped. And now, The Bank of Denver, where other businesses had found refuge, is doing likewise -- and a dispensary owner says the decision was prompted by the recent raid at Cherry Top Farms.

The owner, who asks that his name not be used, says The Bank of Denver was the sixth that's "kicked me out" -- the previous one being Colorado Springs State Bank. He understands that such facilities are anxious about working with MMJ operations, since marijuana remains against federal law, and banks are federally regulated. Nevertheless, "I've never made up any stories," he stresses. "I've told them exactly what I do, because my goal is to be 100 percent forthright about this legal business."

So why did The Bank of Denver decide it didn't want his moolah anymore? From what he's heard, the move was connected to "the bust that happened at Cherry Top Farms."

As we've reported, the Cherry Top Farms dispensary was raided last week by Drug Enforcement Agency officers, among other law-enforcers, with more than 2,500 plants and many other products taken. Why? The feds had been conducting surveillance operations on Nathan, Ha and Hai Do over an unlicensed, permit-free grow facility the feds had already taken down once before. Just as search warrants were about to be executed, a truck filled with plants left the grow, and agents followed it to Cherry Top Farms. And while CTP wasn't the target of the investigation, agents were required to seize all of the marijuana there in addition to what was in the truck.

"Cherry Top Farms was one of The Bank of Denver's biggest depositors," the anonymous owner says. "And their feeling was, if this is what can happen to one of their biggest depositors... well, they got very scared."

​Which explains the phone call the owner received yesterday, informing him that The Bank of Denver had decided to close all its medical marijuana-related accounts.

Rumors that the accounts would be shut down as of October 31 don't jibe with what the owner was told during that conversation: He was informed he's got until January 3, 2012. But that's still a short amount of time to get his financial house in order somewhere else.

What to do? Some dispensaries are going cash only, but he doesn't see this approach as a viable option. "If we want to be 100 percent transparent, how can you be transparent in a completely cash business? I'm a little leery of that. I don't want to be in a situation where my credibility can be second-guessed."

With that in mind, he'll likely make an arrangement with "an online bank" as a stopgap. In the meantime, though, he's been in contact with Senator Pat Steadman, who'd tried to get language about investment funds into HB 1043, the so-called medical marijuana cleanup bill. (This passage was removed even before U.S. Attorney John Walsh raised objections to it.) "He has agreed to sponsor a bill to get a bank chartered specifically for the medical marijuana industry," he says.

In the short term, though, he describes The Bank of Denver's decision as, quite simply, "a disaster."

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Banks Bail On Medical Marijuana Shops

No Colorado Banks Will Openly Work With Dispensaries

LINDSAY WATTS

KRDO NewsChannel 13

UPDATED: 10:33 pm MDT October 1, 2011

Medical marijuana shops are about to get a lot greener. As of Friday, there are no banks in the state that will openly work with dispensaries, forcing some shops to go cash only.

"We're not going to cut a hole in our mattress and keep thousands of dollars of cash in (there)," said Brandy Bowen, owner of Natural Remedies MMJ in Colorado Springs. "It's going to be difficult, and we're still not sure what we're going to do."

On Saturday, Bowen hung a hand-written sign near her register that said, "Cash Only." She's worried the new policy will make her shop, and others like it, even more of a target for thieves. Bowen has already had to beef up her security after her shop was burglarized twice in the last three weeks.

She said the dispensary will find a way to keep large amounts of cash out of the shop, but she worries what the perception will with criminals.

"My biggest concern is the safety of my patients and my employees as they stand in here with people thinking there's a ton of cash on site," said Bowen.

Bowen had an account with Colorado Springs State Bank, the last bank in the state that would openly work with dispensaries. That is, until Friday when it officially closed down medical marijuana accounts.

Dispensary owner Lono Ho'ala said his bank told him it had been pressured by the federal government to stop working with him.

"My banker told me they threatened him that he would be held as a co-conspirator in a felonious crime of conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs if his bank continued to work with me," said Ho'ala.

He pointed out that the government may not benefit from a group of profitable businesses that deal only in cash, especially when it comes to auditing.

"Now it's untraceable and what good does that do the government?" Ho'ala said.

He said his bank is one of the few that continue to quietly work with dispensaries. Even some of the shops with banks have found that their credit card processing services have recently been shut off.

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Banks close MMJ business accounts

by Kelly Werthmann

Posted: 10.02.2011 at 6:59 PM

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Despite the fact medical marijuana is legal in Colorado, banks across the state are refusing to do business with dispensary owners.

As of Sept. 30, there are no banks in the state that will openly work with local medical marijuana dispensaries. Banks that once worked with such businesses have closed hundreds of accounts in fear of being prosecuted by federal regulators. Even though the sale and distribution of medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, as well as Washington, D.C., it is also a federal offense.

It's that grey area of federal versus state regulation that has some medical marijuana dispensary owners in Colorado Springs feeling like their business is being targeted.

"We are a very regulated industry," Jesse Vriese, general manager of Green Love Wellness, said. "We have more regulation that a brothel, than alcohol, almost than nuclear industries. It doesn't seem right that we are being so targeted through our banking."

When he learned of state banks closing their doors to businesses like his, Vriese knew it would be yet another hurdle for the medical marijuana industry.

"We're trying to stay transparent," he said. "We're trying to be compliant with the law, but that's very hard to do when someone says you have to go all cash."

Green Love Wellness had an account with Colorado Springs State Bank before they closed all medical marijuana accounts Friday. After applying to dozens of banks in Colorado and outside the state, Vriese was able to find another bank to accept his deposits. However, he would not reveal which bank, in fear the publicity would prompt them to close his account.

"We're meeting in secret with our bank," he said. "That shouldn't happen."

Vriese said many local dispensaries have become cash-only businesses, which he believes is a dangerous business model for both owners and customers. With large amounts of cash on-site, Vriese said the dispensary would be an even bigger target for criminals, forcing the business owner to install "bank-like security."

"We have patients that come in here in wheelchairs," Vriese said. "We can't have them come in and navigate a bank teller window. This is ridiculous."

Vriese said he runs a legitimate business and thinks banks need to provide him and businesses like his the opportunity to do so.

"We're following every single law that we can follow, and the banking industry needs to step up and say, 'They're following the laws, so are we.'" Vriese said.

In a report with Fox Business, John Whitten, Senior Vice President of Colorado State Bank, said they did not want to have to close their medical marijuana accounts, but until the differences between the federal and state policies on cannabis are reconciled, dispensaries will continue to encounter difficulties finding a banker.

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Marijuana Dispensaries Are Buying Safes to Store Cash After Feds Scare Away Banks

by David Borden, October 03, 2011, 12:30pm

Rep. Jared Polis at National Cannabis Industry Association press conference, April 2011 We've reported this year on moves taken by the feds this year in California and Colorado putting pressure on banks with regard to doing business with medical marijuana dispensaries. This has taken its most serious toll so far in Colorado, a dire article from the Denver Post last weekend suggests:

On Friday, the last bank in Colorado to openly work with the medical-marijuana industry -- Colorado Springs State Bank -- officially closed down the accounts of dispensaries and others in the state's legal marijuana business over concerns about working with companies that are, by definition, breaking federal law.

The feds, as journalist Clarence Walker wrote for us last spring, have not told banks they cannot handle dispensaries' funds. Rather, they've instructed the banks to carefully monitor dispensary accounts for irregularities. This (perhaps intentionally, one wonders) has spooked the banks about the whole thing. Credit card processing companies have also been pulling out of the medical marijuana sector.

The industry isn't taking things sitting down. They are lobbying the state legislature for permission to open a credit union, according to the Post, although it would likely be unable to procure depositors insurance. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Boulder) in May introduced the Small Business Banking Improvement Act, H.R. 1984, to address the dispensary banking problem. (Click here to write Congress supporting this and other pro-medical marijuana bills that are active this year.)

In the meanwhile, one has to ask whether the DOJ officials who've created this situation understand how crime works or if they care:

The owner of the Colorado Springs dispensary [interviewed by the Post] -- who didn't want his name or the name of his business used for fear of attracting thieves -- said he will have to stick money in there instead of depositing it into a bank account. He's also planning to take a class this weekend to get a concealed-weapons permit, for protection outside the store.

"Any way you plan it out," the owner said, "there's going to be a large amount of cash around. And that's extremely scary."

He's also buying a "really big safe."

Ironically, just last month a RAND study on medical marijuana dispensaries and crime found they don't increase neighborhood crime, and that crime actually may have increased in Los Angeles in the vicinity of former dispensaries after the council closed down a majority of them last year. It's only one study and we shouldn't leap to conclusions, but it's a good sign. The feds may be on their way to creating more crime where there isn't already, though, if someone doesn't put the brakes on.

Pro/con: Medical marijuana in Arizona

I suspect hate monger Mike Renzulli is making up lies and telling people I am want to keep drugs illegal. But that is 100 percent BS. I want to legalize ALL drugs.

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Pro/con: Medical marijuana in Arizona

by Mary K. Reinhart - Oct. 23, 2011 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

The state has given more than 13,000 Arizonans permission to use medical marijuana to treat chronic illness and other debilitating conditions since the program took effect in April, and nearly 11,000 have the state's OK to grow pot.

But a system to license up to 126 dispensaries this summer, a key piece of the voter-approved law, has been tied up in court and never enacted. At least two so-called "compassion clubs" have been raided and would-be dispensary owners are carefully watching a federal crackdown on medical pot dispensaries in California.

The state faces six lawsuits over the medical-marijuana law, approved in 2010 as Proposition 203, including its own case against the federal government that asks the U.S. District Court to determine whether Arizona's law conflicts with federal drug statutes prohibiting the use, sale or cultivation of marijuana. A hearing in that case is scheduled Dec. 12.

The Republic asked two leading voices on either side of the medical marijuana debate to offer their opinions on where this confounding issue may be headed.

Pro: Public demand shows support for medical marijuana

Joe Yuhas is with the Arizona Medical Marijuana Association and helped write the ballot measure. His group is a defendant in the federal lawsuit filed by Gov. Jan Brewer.

Question: Does marijuana have a legitimate medicinal purpose? If so, how can the drug be used legally and effectively to treat pain, nausea and other health problems?

Answer: Over the past 10 years there have been dozens of peer-reviewed university studies regarding the safety and efficacy of marijuana.Prior to passage of Prop. 203 and largely today, patients are forced to turn to the black market for their marijuana. Under a regulated industry, a variety of products can be produced . . . edibles, tinctures, creams, in measured doses where patients know exactly what they're receiving.

The issues with dosage or quality or cost, the answer is to simply allow a regulated industry to develop so that those concerns can be put to rest.

Q: How can state and federal governments clarify the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws?

A: The solution is defederalization: Allowing states to enact their own laws and regulations . . . similar to alcoholic beverages. State and local jurisdictions have their own authority to regulate alcohol. (U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Ron Paul, R-Texas, are co-sponsoring a bill to remove marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.) [He didn't cite the 10th Amendment, but the 10th Amendment says the Feds don't have the power to regulate marijuana, because the Constitution doesn't give then that power. And 14th Amendment says the same thing about the states.]

Ultimately, the pharmaceutical industry and others are going to embrace the medicinal value of cannabis, and these laws will change.

Q: Will Arizonans ever see full implementation of Prop. 203?

A: Yes . . . At some point the piecemeal implementation of Prop. 203 is going to be recognized as adverse to the overall interest of patients and the community.

The pace of it is debatable. But our marijuana laws are changing in this country, and they're changing as a result of public demand.

Home cultivation was never meant as the sole source. This creates the environment where it can be grown literally next door. Arizonans would prefer to have a dispensary in their community that's regulated (by the state and local law enforcement) than to have an unlimited number of people growing it themselves.

Con: Pro-legalization crowd's efforts bring de facto legislation

Carolyn Short heads Keep AZ Drug Free, the chief opponent of Prop. 203. She believes Arizona's law and medical measures in 15 other states will ultimately be overturned. [Hey there isn't anything wrong with Carolyn Short that a bullet wouldn't fix]

Question: Does marijuana have a legitimate medicinal purpose? If so, how can the drug be used legally and effectively to treat pain, nausea and other health problems?

Answer: I think it could. They've produced marinol (a synthetic form of marijuana's active ingredient). It does have some uses, and it's prescribed by doctors, and it's dispensed at pharmacies.

I don't think there is any future whatsoever for crude marijuana. No medicines are smoked. Until we grapple with that, we won't get anywhere. You can't dose it. [Yea they love to use that as an argument, if you have to smoke it, it isn't a medicine. But that's 100 percent BS. Smoking is a very effective way to deliver drugs. Millions of people wouldn't be smoking tobacco, marijuana and opium if smoking wasn't an effective way of delivering drugs to your body.]

The bottom line is doctors are tired of being used in this legalization debate. It is a ruse. The whole medical-marijuana angle was a ruse used by pro-legalization people to get de facto legislation. Sick people are tired of being used, too. And they are the people who have been caught in the crossfire. [So doctors and sick people are both being forced to make up lies that say marijuana cures the pain of sick people?]

Q: How can state and federal governments clarify the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws?

A: I think they're doing it.

The U.S. attorneys in California made it very clear that they're going to shut it down. (Earlier this month federal prosecutors gave dispensaries 45 days to shut down or risk criminal charges and confiscation of their property.)

I think states have a responsibility to do what our leaders are doing and put it in court . . . State governments should step in and protect their citizenry. Otherwise they're inviting the (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the U.S. attorneys and the IRS . . . and all those federal agencies to walk into their state and prosecute their citizens.

Q: Will Arizonans ever see full implementation of Prop. 203?

A: Not a chance. Pretty much everybody thinks that.

What people are hoping is they can use the political process to convince people that this is a popular thing. (But) we can't use our political process to ignore laws.

If people want to have marijuana in this country for recreational use, then they're going to have to change federal law. And I don't think that's going to happen.

Brewer and Horne of playing politics with medical marijuana

I have long said that the "war on drugs" is a "jobs program for cops". And in this case Brewer and Horne are against any laws that would end this "jobs program for cops".

Currently about two thirds of people in American prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes which involve either the use, possession or sale of drugs.

In theory if you ended the "drug war" two thirds of the overpaid and under worked cops would not be needed.

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Marijuana club's lawyer accuses governor, AG of playing politics

Posted: Saturday, October 22, 2011 12:30 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services | 1 comment

The lawyer for one of the state’s medical marijuana clubs accused the governor and state attorney general on Friday of conspiring to undermine the voter-approved initiative making the drug legal for some ill people.

“We believe that there’s a clear and blatant pattern that has transpired over the last few months,’’ said Thomas Dean. He said that directly includes both Gov. Jan Brewer and Attorney General Tom Horne.

“There’s plenty of evidence that was done in a way that was conspiratorial, fraudulent,’’ Dean told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Dean Fink.

In a bid to prove his point, Dean told the judge he wants to question both officials under oath.

But Assistant Attorney General Lori Davis told the judge that’s not going to happen — at least not in the way Dean envisions.

Davis said she’s willing to provide stipulations verifying the accuracy of public statements both have made about the issue.

“But if they’re wanting to get into political leanings and whether they oppose it or support it, I don’t think that’s appropriate for this,’’ she told the judge. Davis said the only issue before the court is whether the clubs can legally operate, making the views of the two elected officials irrelevant.

And she called Dean’s request “a political, media move.’’

Dean, however, argued that what he hopes to discover will show that the state officials trying to shut down his client’s club and several others have acted improperly.

That would allow the clubs to argue the pair have “unclean hands,’’ a legal concept that can be used to ask a court to declare that the state is not legally entitled to the relief it seeks, meaning shutting down the clubs.

Hanging in the balance is whether the marijuana clubs that have sprung up around the state during the last year can keep their doors open.

Proposition 203 spells out that those who have a doctor’s certification they have certain medical conditions can obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks. The law envisioned a network of dispensaries where those with medical marijuana cards could purchase the drug.

But Brewer, after consulting with Horne, blocked the state health department from even taking applications for the dispensaries.

That led to formation of the clubs where people can go to get free marijuana from those who have donated their excess or signed over their right to grow their own.

The state responded with a lawsuit seeking to shutter the clubs.

Davis said Friday that the clubs essentially are selling marijuana, something that remains illegal for anyone who is not a dispensary. She said the monetary exchange occurs at the door, as the only way for someone to get in the club is to pay a membership fee or a one-time admission.

Dean and attorneys for other clubs who the state wants to shutter say they fit within the exception allowing the person-to-person transfer if no money changes hands for the drug.

Fink, who will have to decide who is right and whether the clubs can remain open, seemed unconvinced that the views of the two elected officials is relevant to the question.

“For sake of argument, assuming that the governor and the attorney general’s office are so against this law that they’re willing to do whatever it is you think they’re doing, that’s not going to make what’s happening at the clubs either legal or illegal,’’ the judge told Dean. And he brushed aside the attorney’s claims that politics has entered into the issue.

“There are clearly political issues in almost everything we deal with,’’ Fink said.

“But the fact of the matter is, the politics part of it isn’t what I have to focus on,’’ the judge continued. “It’s the law: What did the voters pass and what is happening in the clubs, and is that consistent or inconsistent with what the voters have allowed?’’

Both Brewer and Horne brushed aside any contention they are conspiring to thwart the will of the voters.

“That’s probably one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard of,’’ the governor said. She said her administration was in the process of administering the terms of Proposition 203 but decided not to issue dispensary permits after there were indications the federal government might prosecute state employees for facilitating the purchase of marijuana, which remains illegal under federal law.

Horne poked fun at the accusation, saying those who see a conspiracy here are the same people “who see black helicopters from Mars.’’

A trial is not likely to occur before next year.

Obama Tries to Hack Medical Marijuana Off at the Knees

For those of you who want to end the unconstitutional drug war, which really is a war on the Constitution and a war on the American people your only hope is to vote Libertarian.

Obama, who many Democrats thought to be their savior is just as much as a drug war tyrant as his predecessor George W. Bush.

Why? I suspect Obama is after the law enforcement vote in 2012? Almost all city governments hire more police officers then then all other employees combined. And the drug war is a jobs program for these cops. And when you have voter turnout of 10 percent in a large number of elections it is fairly easy for the cops to swing the elections when all of then show up and vote, not because they are patriotic, but because voting for the drug war means money in their pockets.

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In a Strange About-Face, the President Tries to Hack Medical Marijuana Off at the Knees

By Ray Stern Thursday, Oct 20 2011

The new federal crackdown on medical marijuana announced on October 7 by California's four U.S. Attorneys sent chills through the industry. It was a stunning reversal by the Obama administration.

Only two years ago, Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden wrote his infamous "Ogden Memo," announcing that the feds wouldn't bother businesses in compliance with their own state laws. It proved a dose of Miracle-Gro to California, where pot-selling stores had multiplied since voters approved the state's 1996 medical-marijuana law. By late last year, California reportedly had more dispensaries than Starbucks outlets.

Colorado also made it legal in 2000, seeing a similar explosion of new storefronts. The same thing was happening to varying degrees in 16 states, from Arizona to Washington, New Jersey to Delaware.

But the feds' tolerance wasn't quite what it seemed. While legal weed grew to an estimated $10 billion to $100 billion industry — no one's quite sure of the exact figure — activists noticed an alarming undercurrent to the rhetoric: Raids on growers and dispensaries actually increased under President Barack Obama.

As hundreds of thousands of state-approved, doctor-recommended patients happily bought their medicine in well-lighted stores from knowledgeable "budtenders," the ire of cops and prohibitionists rose.

The first sign of Obama's subterfuge came in late 2010, as California prepared to vote on a ballot proposition that would have legalized growing and possessing small amounts of marijuana for anyone over age 21. Under pressure from teetotalers — nine former Drug Enforcement Agency chiefs begged Obama to oppose the measure — Attorney General Eric Holder said it didn't matter what Californians thought. The feds would continue to bust people regardless of the election.

The measure got 46 percent of the vote, but not enough to pass. Yet the medical side of things kept going strong — too strong for Obama.

When the Oakland City Council prepared to authorize large-scale cultivation centers, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag of California's Northern District issued the first in what would become a series of letters from her fellow attorneys general. She reminded residents — in no uncertain terms — that marijuana was still criminalized under federal law, considered equal to heroin or meth, irrespective of its medicinal value.

Nor did she care what the California law said. Her "core priority" would be to prosecute "business enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana" under federal law.

Over the next few months, U.S. Attorneys from Maine to Washington wrote their own increasingly menacing letters. In Washington, the feds even threatened to arrest state workers who helped facilitate the industry.

Then the Obama administration released a new letter to "clarify" Ogden's memo. Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole verified the about-face: The only people safe from arrest were the "seriously ill" patients and their caregivers.

Everyone else? Be forewarned.

The letter didn't just target those directly involved in the trade. Cole also threatened supporting industries (read: banks) with money-laundering charges for dealing in the proceeds from marijuana. Obama had launched a full-on attack on the industries essential to any functioning enterprise.

Banks responded by canceling their weed-related accounts. "Perhaps there may be a few financial institutions here or there that are still accepting accounts," says Caroline Joy, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Bankers Association. "Those facilities don't want to reveal who they are."

The president's push grew louder last month. The U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms bureau warned medical-marijuana patients that they couldn't legally use pot and own or buy guns.

Then came a one-two punch.

On October 5, the IRS ruled that one of the largest California dispensaries, Harborside Health Center, owed $2.5 million in taxes because federal law precluded standard deductions for businesses engaging in illegal activity.

In other words, Obama not only was blowing off state laws. He was declaring that legal businesses were now nothing more than criminal rackets. And he was carving away every tool they needed to function.

Harborside's owner said he'd go out of business if the IRS didn't reverse course. Dispensaries nationwide saw it as a crippling decision.

Then came another blow two days later: The bombshell dropped by California's four U.S. Attorneys.

They now were going after people who leased stores and land to the pot industry. Violators were given 45 days to close doors, uproot plants, and kick out renters. The penalty for not acting: seizure of property and arrest.

U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy of California's Southern District went so far as to threaten media with prosecution for taking pot advertising. (Disclosure: This newspaper accepts such ads.)

There was no doubt about it: Obama was intent on killing an entire industry — in the middle of a depression, no less. Left unexplained was why, especially since he was giving the finger to voters in 16 states just a year before he would face them in his own election.

Democratic strategists were perplexed. Roger Salazar, a California party consultant, believes the president may be trying to reach out to a broader base. But that doesn't explain the attack on his own base; Democrats support medical marijuana at high percentages. It doesn't even make sense in luring conservatives. With the country in economic tatters, no one has weed high on their radar.

Except one group, says Salazar: "It's a mystery . . . where the pressure is coming from. My sense is it's coming from law enforcement."

Certainly, Obama's threats are real. He may be loath to jail landlords, bankers ,or even dispensary owners. Arresting non-violent, state-sanctioned businesspeople wouldn't be popular. But his quieter war of chopping merchants off at the knees through credit and leasing would ravage the trade.

Still, the president has thrown himself into an uphill fight. There is reason to believe medical marijuana will persist, despite his betrayal.

Earlier this month, in a timely coincidence, the California Medical Association's board voted to encourage the feds to legalize marijuana.

Though spokeswoman Molly Weedn emphasizes that the decision by the doctors' group hinges on a call for more research, a report studied by the CMA board before its decision makes it clear that — at the least — marijuana shows promise as a medicine.

The CMA's Council on Clinical and Scientific Affairs "has also concluded that components of medical cannabis may be effective for the treatment of pain, nausea, anorexia, and other conditions."

The report goes on to say:

"Cannabinoids are presently thought to exhibit their greatest efficacy when implemented for the management of neuropathic pain, which is a form of severe and often chronic pain resulting from nerve injury, disease, or toxicity."

The University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research reported recently to the California Legislature the results of a number of studies. Four studies involved the treatment of neuropathic pain; and all four demonstrated a significant improvement in pain after cannabis administration."

The doctors note that using marijuana may contain risks, such as addiction, but they argue that its prohibition may be more dangerous than the drug itself:

"Under the current prohibition of cannabis, public health is also affected by increased rates of crime surrounding cannabis cultivation, sale and use. The California Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that the incarceration and parole supervision of cannabis offenders costs the state tens of millions of dollars annually."

Nationally, prohibition burns through billions of dollars in lives lost to the violence inherent in the black market, the incarceration of thousands of productive, non-violent Americans, and the lack of access to a beneficial medicine.

Are lots of people using weed without suffering from a medical problem? Absolutely. But just because you've heard that half or more of patients take the drug for "severe and chronic pain" doesn't mean they're all faking it.

In June, the Institute of Medicine estimated that 116 million Americans suffer from significant, chronic pain.

As more research comes in showing that pot can be an effective treatment, and with America's elderly population exploding in the coming decades, interest in its medicinal qualities apparently will only rise.

Ignorance, false propaganda, and rank political posturing tend to be the foundation of the anti-marijuana argument. (Throw in bureaucratic turf protection, as well. The DEA, for example, would need fewer agents if pot was decriminalized nationwide.)

A new Gallup poll shows that a record 50 percent of Americans believe marijuana — and not just the medical kind — should be legalized. The poll follows a continuing trend over the past several years of increasing support for legalization.

Obama has chosen to swim against the tide. But there's reason to believe his fight is about politics, not public safety. If this were about safety, alcohol would be his primary target.

Politics cause both sides to fudge the truth. Yet prohibitionists and the government have been particularly egregious. The government is using taxpayer dollars to prop up its side, with the U.S. Justice Department's 64-page booklet, "Speaking Out About Drug Legalization," being a prime example.

Distributed in print and online, the booklet states that "smoked marijuana is not scientifically approved medicine." Forget that by labeling it a drug on par with heroin, the DEA is curtailing the proper study of marijuana, since it prevents even scientists from possessing it for research. The publicly funded propaganda also flies in the face of the opinions of doctors, who see pot's potential as medicine.

It's a strategy that's trickled to states with functionaries unhappy about executing the voters' will. Last December in Arizona, Will Humble, the state's Department of Health Services director, held a proposed-rules-on-medical-marijuana news conference about the state's new Medical Marijuana Act. He took a moment to remind reporters that more than 1,000 Arizonans died last year from accidental overdoses of prescription drugs.

But when asked how many of them died from marijuana, Humble refused to answer — to chuckles from the audience. He referred the question to his chief medical officer, Laura Nelson, who would only say she'd "have to do the research on that" before she could answer.

Then Nelson began stammering about the danger of marijuana related to "car accidents" — though she had done no research on that, either.

The CMA's new report, interestingly enough, sheds light on statements like Nelson's. It says that prohibitionists often make unsubstantiated claims about car crashes or other purported harms. Studies disagree on its risks to motorists, though there's no question that alcohol increases the chances of a crash, the report says. Moreover, simulated driving tests reveal that pot smokers overestimate their degree of impairment and "compensate effectively."

A cynic might also view U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy's threat to target advertising as a less than subtle threat to control the debate.

True: Federal law prohibits advertising illegal drugs. Google, for example, agreed to pay a $500 million fine this summer for taking online ads promoting rogue Canadian pharmacies.

But pot dispensaries are legal businesses within their states. Under Duffy's threat, the feds will have their say, while the pro-pot message would be erased from public view.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the conservative Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, tells New Times that Duffy's threat gave him the willies.

"They're on much thinner ice going after the newspaper," says Scheidegger, who otherwise believes the feds should enforce its own laws against marijuana. "Maybe there is a political strategy."

It's called the "shut them up" strategy.

Federal law is, for now, on the side of the prohibitionists.

Scheidegger downplays the state victories handed to medical marijuana. He says that if the American people want to change the law, they need to encourage Congress to do so.

Yet that ignores a basic political reality: It's extremely difficult for any politician to stand up for marijuana. He or she will be quickly painted as pro-pothead.

Like women's suffrage, the medical-marijuana movement has — in 10 states, anyway — benefited by the direct democracy of citizens initiatives. These elections have taken the pulse of voters in a way that congressional elections cannot.

In six other states and Washington, D.C., medical marijuana was legalized by local lawmakers. Other states are bound to vote in favor of decriminalizing pot in the next few years in spite of federal laws.

Phoenix attorney Ty Taber sees it as a major states' rights issue. "Basically, the citizens of these states . . . want marijuana legalized," he says. If Obama wants to play hardball, he says, "You're going to get pushback."

Taber represents Compassion First, a company that helps set up dispensaries. The firm sued Arizona after Governor Jan Brewer, in blatant defiance of voters' wishes, derailed the dispensary portion of Arizona's new law by instructing the Department of Health to reject applications. She simultaneously sued the federal government, asking a judge to rule on whether the state's new law was legal. (Ironically, the U.S. Justice Department is defending against the lawsuit — and if the feds win, Arizona might just get its first dispensaries.)

Compassion First wants the program implemented as Arizonans intended, and to remove blockades Brewer has thrown in its path. For instance, Arizona requires dispensary owners to have been residents for at least three years.

But the point isn't so much whether the company will win its lawsuit — it's that it's fighting back, and it's not alone.

Across the country, advocates are returning fire of their own in the court system. Which means Obama won't be able to do battle by the relatively cheap means of letters and threats. He'll have to burn through millions of dollars in litigation – money he doesn't have.

Taber thinks the president may have underestimated his foe. "The people behind this marijuana movement — they're committed. They are zealots. And these are smart people — not stoners saying, 'Hey, dude, pass another slice of pizza.'"

The latest crackdown will be bad for the pot business. No question. But Obama could be doing much, much more.

He could go after patients. Over the summer, a federal judge ruled that the DEA could peek at the names on Michigan's patient registry. Because marijuana is illegal under federal law, said Judge Hugh Brenneman Jr., patients can't expect privacy.

The feds could also hit pot-tolerant cities. The law doesn't allow municipal workers to be jailed in such prosecutions, but cities or counties could be heavily fined just for setting up zoning requirements for dispensaries.

There's a huge downside to that, of course. Obama only will appear mean and small for having sickly grandmas arrested. And fining cities just enrages residents picking up the tab — the very people the president will need a year from now.

All of which leaves him fighting at partial speed. That, in turn, leaves the "zealots" Taber mentions betting their money and freedom that even if the feds throw the book at some, it won't be them.

Last week, the feds raided several growing operations in California and Oregon, including one in Mendocino County that appeared to be playing by state rules. But it seems safe to assume that few of the hundreds of other growers in Mendocino County did not uproot their crops in response — just as the hundreds of dispensaries in California did not immediately close their doors after the feds' ominous warning on October 7.

The industry seems to be practicing a form of civil disobedience. And it has tens of thousands of seriously sick people behind it, who will holler loudly if they're forced back to the black market.

Indeed, there are some signs that Obama's crackdown will be what SF Weekly's Chris Roberts calls a "passive aggressive" strategy. Rather than offend Americans with news footage of police raids, Obama has launched a war of attrition.

Landlords, worried the feds will steal their property, will tell dispensaries to move out. Banks won't handle money for pot-themed businesses. Dispensaries will be taxed so heavily they won't be to cover the payroll or pay the electric bill.

Yet it remains to be seen whether federal prosecutors, who undoubtedly have even more serious criminals with which to contend, are willing and able to carry out the threat. When Jack Gillund, Melinda Haag's spokesman, was asked whether her office had the resources to go after every dispensary or grower who doesn't comply with the 45-day deadline, he responded: "No comment."

Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in California's Eastern District, says Wagner's goal isn't to shut down everything. He's focusing on "large, professional, money-making operations — the commercial operations."

Horwood also says it's wrong to call it "Obama's crackdown." She says the California U.S. Attorneys decided to take action on their own because the situation has grown out of control among recreational users. But she acknowledges that they received Obama's blessing.

It's classic political strategy: Send the underlings out to take the heat, while the bosses hide under their skirts.

Either way, the end result casts Obama as even more zealous than George W. Bush. Bush threatened owners of dispensary properties in 2007 but never followed up. Meanwhile, Colorado and other states have seen no similar crackdowns. Only time will tell whether Obama plans to destroy the entire medical-marijuana industry or merely smack California around for a while.

"I'm willing to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt," says Blair Butterworth, a Democratic consultant in Seattle, where about 100 dispensaries operate. "In California, they may be sitting on uncontrollable drug sales. They need to slap some wrists."

It's easy to pick on California, a state known for its excesses. But "the last thing Obama needs right now is to go to war nationally with the medical-marijuana community," Butterworth says.

Leniency for marijuana users, medical or otherwise, continues to be a popular Democratic stance, he says. Butterworth is helping the campaign put outright legalization on the Washington state ballot next year. He thinks it's got a good chance.

Of course, a successful election could just tick off the feds even more.

An estimated one million people in California have obtained a doctor's recommendation to grow and use marijuana legally.

More than 150,000 medical-marijuana patients had registered in Colorado, as of July. Tens of thousands of patients are registered in the other weed-friendly states.

If the feds shut down every dispensary in the country, all these people will still be able to legally possess marijuana — no matter where they bought it — under their state laws.

The only difference is they'll be forced to go back to buying their weed from Mexican drug cartels, rather than from Americans who provide jobs and pay taxes.

It's akin to the feds saying that Anheuser-Busch can no longer sell beer; they'd prefer that people only buy from Al Capone.

Hey, wait — didn't something like that happen?

If the feds shut down every dispensary in the land, medical-marijuana patients still can possess pot legally under state laws — they'll just have to go back to buying it from Mexican drug cartels rather than from taxpaying and job-providing Americans.

Judge blocks Florida's welfare drug-testing law

Source

Judge blocks Florida's welfare drug-testing law

Oct. 24, 2011 12:36 PM

Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. - A federal judge has blocked Florida's controversial new law requiring that welfare applicants pass a drug test to receive benefits.

Judge Mary Scriven issued the temporary injunction Monday. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed a lawsuit against the state last month calling the law unconstitutional. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a 35-year-old Navy veteran and single father who is finishing his college degree.

Nearly 1,600 applicants have refused to take the test since it began in mid-July. They aren't required to explain why.

Applicants must pay $25 to $35 for the test and are reimbursed by the state if they pass.

The ACLU said Florida was the first to enact the law since Michigan tried more than a decade ago.

Obama wants $240 million police welfare program?

"Last month, the COPS office announced that it wanted $240 million in grants to help cities and municipalities hire or retain about 1,000 officers"

Source

Poor economy threatens police jobs, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says

October 24, 2011 | 1:24 pm

Years of recession and a slow economic recovery could lead to a decrease in the number of police officers, the first such drop in a quarter of a century, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. warned Monday.

The dire prediction, contained in a Department of Justice report, comes on the heels of a Federal Bureau of Investigation report that the overall crime statistics for 2010 had dropped, continuing a recent trend. Violent crime fell 6% from 2009 to 2010, the fourth consecutive year of such declines, and property crime fell 2.7% from 2009, marking the eighth consecutive annual decrease, the bureau said.

Holder noted the drop in his prepared remarks to the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, which is holding its annual conference in Chicago.

“Because of your efforts, national crime trends are heading in the right direction. In our inner cities, rural areas and tribal communities, neighborhoods have been transformed. Countless lives have been improved and saved. And, despite growing budget constraints and increasing demands, so many of your precincts and departments are not simply surviving. They are thriving.”

But Holder also warned that the latest report by the Justice Department's Community Oriented Policing Services office, or COPS, showed that nearly 12,000 police officers and sheriff’s deputies will be laid off because of budget cuts this year. In addition, police agencies have nearly 30,000 unfilled vacancies.

“In 25 years of collecting data, we are now seeing the first ever national decrease in law enforcement positions,” Holder said.

According to the COPS report, an estimated 28,000 officers and deputies have been forced off the job in weeklong furloughs in 2010 as cash-starved agencies tried to make ends meet. More than one-third of the agencies applying for federal grants reported a budget drop of greater than 5% between 2009 and 2011. Nearly a quarter of U.S. cities have made a cut to public safety budgets.

“Of course -- as cities, states and counties confront once-in-a-century financial constraints -- this has never been more difficult,” Holder said of continuing progress against crime. “Across the country, mayors, sheriffs and chiefs have been asked not only to do more with less, but also to make painful budgetary cuts.”

Holder urged the chiefs to support the Obama administration’s jobs package with which Congress is wrestling. Last week, the Senate was unable to pass a $35-billion jobs package for teachers and first responders, as Republicans and Democrats continued to spar over spending cuts and possible revenue increases from taxes.

Last month, the COPS office announced that it wanted $240 million in grants to help cities and municipalities hire or retain about 1,000 officers in 238 agencies and municipalities.

“While I’m excited to see what many of you will be able to accomplish with these investments -- we have not, and will not, forget about the remaining 2,300 agencies that also submitted worthy grant applications. In fact, total requests for COPS hiring dollars were over $2 billion -- a staggering demand when compared to the funds allocated this year,” Holder said.

Of the $4 billion for law enforcement hiring that the Obama administration is seeking, the Senate, controlled by Democrats, has backed $200 million, while the Republican-led House of Representatives has allocated no new funds, according to Holder.

“That is a drastic and unacceptable gap -- one that can't be closed without your immediate attention and assistance,” Holder said.

Rand retracts report on pot clinics and crime

Rand retracts report on pot clinics and crime

By John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times

October 24, 2011, 10:38 p.m.

In a rare move for one of the nation's most highly regarded research institutions, Rand Corp. on Monday retracted a controversial report on crime around Los Angeles medical marijuana dispensaries after realizing that it failed to include any crimes reported by the city's Police Department.

Researchers with the Santa Monica-based think tank used crime data compiled by a firm that collects information from about 1,200 law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, but not the LAPD.

"They made mistakes," said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president and director of the infrastructure, safety and environment division. "What we're wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected."

The extraordinary lapse has the esteemed institution closely examining how it reviews its research. The discredited report went through an internal and an external peer review.

"This is not something we take lightly," Knopman said. "This is a rare event, but it's happened, and it's absolutely leading us to take a renewed look at the procedures we follow."

Rand issues about 300 reports a year, and Knopman said she could recall only one other report that has been withdrawn in the last decade. She said Rand seriously considers all complaints about its research and added, "It's pretty rare that it leads to a retraction, very rare."

The study of crime data near dispensaries published last month led Rand researchers to suggest that the stores, which usually have guards and surveillance cameras, may help reduce crime in their neighborhoods.

Lawyers in the city attorney's office were outraged. They have been struggling to reduce the number of pot outlets and have argued that they are a threat to public safety. Special Assistant City Atty. Jane Usher and Assistant City Atty. Asha Greenberg complained that the report had "critical flaws," one of which was failing "to obtain or accurately report the available crime statistics."

"This is the right outcome," Usher said Monday. "Putting information that's not credible in front of the public and in front of policymakers does a disservice to everyone."

Medical marijuana advocates hoped to use the report to dispute allegations that dispensaries cause crime and had blasted Rand for buckling to political pressure when it took the report off its website two weeks ago while it reviewed the criticisms.

The Rand researchers relied on data posted by CrimeReports.com, which they mistakenly believed included LAPD data. Knopman said Rand was not blaming the website. She said Rand reviewers, digging deeply into the data, only recently discovered that it did not include LAPD reports.

Greg Whisenant, the Web company's chief executive, said he had never spoken with anyone from Rand, but would have told the researchers they didn't have the data they needed. "I think if they were going to cite us, they probably should have contacted us first," he said.

He said he could understand how the researchers might have made the mistake, but also said they ought to have noticed the lack of crime reported in Los Angeles as compared to other cities. "I think they should have been able to figure it out by seeing a huge pocket of no crime data," he said.

The researchers, led by Mireille Jacobson, a health economist, reviewed crime reports from the 10 days before the city's medical marijuana ordinance took effect on June 7, 2010, with the 10 days after, when at least some of the more than 400 illegal dispensaries shut down.

They found a 59% increase in crime within 0.3 of a mile of a closed dispensary compared to an open one. They did acknowledge that those results were subject to a large margin of error.

Usher and Greenberg criticized the researchers for not relying on LAPD crime data, but also questioned the short time frame and the assumption that dispensaries actually closed.

Knopman said Rand will obtain LAPD data and recalculate the analysis. She said Rand reviewers are still weighing the other criticisms and have not reached any conclusions. "We're going to take advantage of the chance to have a do-over here," she said.

Usher said she believes Rand will run up against the problem of not being able to determine whether dispensaries were open or closed in that period. "Without a fixed hand on that data point," she said, "we're not able to illuminate any crime trend."

john.hoeffel@latimes.com

Drug war makes Mexico a dangerous place for journalists

UN report: Mexico 5th most dangerous place in world for journalists

By Associated Press, Published: October 24

MEXICO CITY — Mexico is the fifth most dangerous country in the world for journalists with 70 killed since 2000, according to a joint assessment released Monday by the United Nations and the Organization of American States.

The report said that 13 journalists have been killed so far in 2011 in Mexico. While motives vary in journalists’ killings, one factor is the bloody drug cartel violence in Mexico.

The U.N. Human Rights Council’s investigator on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, did not specify which four countries were considered more dangerous, but other press groups have ranked Mexico third, behind only nations like Pakistan and Iraq. The Central American nation of Honduras has seen a spike in journalist killings.

Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights also lists 70 journalists killed in Mexico since 2000. In addition, it says 13 have disappeared.

Other press freedom groups consider the 70 figure high and differ on the definition of who is a journalist in Mexico’s homicide figures. For example, the Committee to Protect Journalists says since 2000 there have 48 journalists killed and disappeared in Mexico, including three newspaper distributors.

OAS representative Catalina Botero called on Mexico’s government to implement a plan to protect journalists.

Mexico’s Assistant Foreign Relations Secretary Felipe de Jesus Zamora said the government has taken steps to help protect reporters.

But Roberto Rock, the editorial director Mexico’s El Universal newspaper, said the protection decree implemented by the Mexican government in 2010 hasn’t accomplished much.

“This mechanism doesn’t have the necessary guidelines to even know how it will work,” Rock said.

According to official figures, at least 35,000 have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown on organized crime. Other sources, including local media, say the number is closer to 40,000. The federal government has not released an update of its numbers since December.

DEA: Any Individual Growing or Distributing Pot Can be Target of Investigation

DEA: Any "Individual" or Group Growing or Distributing Pot for "Recreational Use" Can be Target of Investigation

By Ray Stern Thu., Oct. 6 2011 at 11:36 AM

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to make it clear that it's not just going after kingpins.

Any "individual" or organization involved in growing or distributing pot for recreational use can be a target of an investigation, the DEA warns through a U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman.

As we mentioned on Tuesday, the DEA blew us off -- and therefore, you, dear readers -- when we sought information last week about the raid of a Tempe cannabis club. We had questions about the political ramifications of the raid, including why the DEA seems to be enforcing Arizona law in this case. The state Attorney General, Tom Horne, has asked the court system to rule on whether cannabis clubs are legal or not under the 2010 Medical Marijuana Act, but it appears the DEA -- a biased agency that uses taxpayer funds to advertise against pot legalization -- couldn't wait to bust one.

Yesterday, U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney finally got back to us -- with a strong message for Arizonans bent on supplying "recreational" users with weed.

The DEA publishes a political pamphlet called "Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization." Are busts of cannabis clubs serving state-approved patients a form of "speaking out?" ​ Here's what Sweeney said:

"While I'm not going to comment on any particular pending matters, in general, consistent with the Department guidance, DEA continues to identify and investigate any criminal organization or individual who unlawfully grows, markets or distributes marijuana or other dangerous drugs for recreational use.

"As always, the Department is committed to enforcing the federal Controlled Substances Act in all states, and will focus its resources on significant drug traffickers, not individuals with serious illness or their immediate caregivers who are in compliance with applicable state medical marijuana statutes."

By that rationale, the DEA must believe that James Chaney, the owner of the Arizona Go Green Compassion Club arrested last Thursday, is a "significant drug trafficker." True, Chaney is accused of possessing 50 pounds of marijuana at his home and another 10 to 20 at the Tempe business, and that's a lot of dope. Perhaps even, arguably, a "significant" amount.

But Chaney, whatever his shortcomings, (the DEA also says Chaney had an active arrest warrant on a meth charge), there seems to be no argument that he was selling his marijuana to state-approved patients.

Theoretically, Arizona voters wanted those patients to have marijuana. So this is more complicated than the average pot-dealer bust.

Horne, not the federal government, is prosecuting Chaney -- meaning that the state's medical pot law must be considered.

Even if Chaney didn't follow the new state law precisely -- and that'll be determined in the court system, obviously -- the public should keep in mind that the DEA isn't just a public safety agency.

It's a lobbying group.

Obama to jail newspapers owners that run medical pot ads?

Obama Administration Now Plans to Target Advertisements for Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in California

By Ray Stern Wed., Oct. 12 2011 at 3:31 PM

What's Obama smoking? After declaring years ago he wouldn't expend federal resources on medical-marijuana users, his administration's now waging a full-scale assault on weed.

President Obama doesn't just want to seize the property of California medical-marijuana dispensaries and hit them with huge tax bills.

Now the Obama Administration plans to prosecute people who place ads for dispensaries -- and possibly the newspapers that print them.

One of the four U.S. Attorneys in California, Laura Duffy, told online news site California Watch and California radio station KQED that she intends to move against the dispensary industry's advertisements, California Watch reported today.

Duffy told reporters:

"I'm not just seeing print advertising ... I'm actually hearing radio and seeing TV advertising. It's gone mainstream. Not only is it inappropriate -- one has to wonder what kind of message we're sending to our children - it's against the law."

The article further states:

Duffy said her effort against TV, radio or print outlets would first include "going after these folks with ... notification that they are in violation of federal law." She noted that she also has the power to seize property or prosecute in civil and criminal court.

...

Duffy said she believes the law gives her the right to prosecute newspaper publishers or TV station owners.

"If I own a newspaper ... or I own a TV station, and I'm going to take in your money to place these ads, I'm the person who is placing these ads," Duffy said. "I am willing to read [the law] expansively, and if a court wants to more narrowly define it, that would be up to the court."

California Watch talked to an attorney who said media outlets could face trouble because of federal law that prohibits the advertising of illegal drugs.

Newspapers, which have seen declining ad revenue in recent years, have benefited from the ads related to the medical marijuana industry. Many ads don't deal directly with dispensaries, instead advertising doctors, grow-lights, or other ancillary businesses. Dispensaries themselves do place prominent ads in California and Colorado -- even on TV.

It seems like Obama's doing his best to shore up the moralistic teetotaler vote.

Uncle Sam wants to know what you googled for today!!!

Source

U.S. government requests for Google user data jump

October 25, 2011 | 11:20 am

The U.S. government wants your information.

It's flooding Google with requests for personal information about users for criminal investigations, according to a so-called transparency report the Internet search giant released Tuesday.

The number of such requests jumped 29% in six months, Google reported.

U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests during the first half of 2011 compared with 4,601 requests during the last six months of 2010. Google complied in part or completely with 93% of those requests which can include court orders and subpoenas.

The number of users and accounts affected: 11,057.

"For the first time, we're not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we're showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. We also recently released the raw data behind the requests. Interested developers and researchers can now take this data and revisualize it in different ways, or mash it up with information from other organizations to test and draw up new hypotheses about government behaviors online," Dorothy Chou, a Google senior policy analyst, wrote in a blog post.

Google said it also received 92 requests to remove 757 pieces of content from its services including YouTube. Google complied in part or completely with 63% of those requests.

Google has an agenda here. It wants to spread this kind of information -- albeit incomplete as it does not include certain terrorism-related requests -- to push for reform of federal laws that give law enforcement unfettered access to online communications without a judge's order.

"We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago -- long before the average person had ever heard of email," Chou wrote.

Medical marijuana foes want state to stop issuing cards

Medical marijuana foes want state to stop issuing cards

Posted: Thursday, October 27, 2011 12:04 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

One of the major foes of the state’s medical marijuana law wants Gov. Jan Brewer to order the state health department to stop issuing cards allowing patients to obtain and grow the drug.

But the governor has no interest in doing that, though her press aide says she has a good reason.

Carolyn Short noted that Brewer has blocked the agency from processing applications from those who want to run the dispensaries that the 2010 voter-approved initiative requires to be set up to sell the drug. Brewer said she feared that state workers could be charged under federal law with being involved, even peripherally, with distributing marijuana.

Yet the governor has allowed state Health Director Will Humble to continue to certify certain individuals as legally able under Arizona law to possess the drug. So far, more than 13,000 such cards have been issued.

Short, who chairs Keep AZ Drug Free, said she fails to see the difference.

In both cases, she said, state workers are involved in helping people obtain marijuana. And Short, who is an attorney, pointed out that the possession, sale and distribution of the drug remains illegal under federal law.

“We have our state employees violating federal law,’’ she said.

Gubernatorial press aide Matthew Benson did not dispute Short’s legal analysis of federal drug statutes.

But he said Brewer has a good reason to keep issuing those cards: It would not have made a difference had she ordered a halt to the practice.

The voter-approved measure spells out that those who get a doctor’s recommendation are entitled to state-issued ID cards that permit them to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks. It is those cards that Short wants halted.

Benson said that would do no good.

“The patient cards are self-executing,’’ he said. Benson pointed to a provision in Proposition 203 that says the failure of the health department to issue a card within 45 days of a valid application means it is presumed to be approved.

Complicating matters is that the law says patients can grow their own marijuana if they are not within 25 miles of a state-regulated dispensary. And with the health department refusing to even accept applications, there are no dispensaries — essentially meaning all users can become marijuana cultivators.

“In essence, we would have the same number of individuals out there

self-growing’’ as now, Benson said. But the difference would be that, absent state-issued ID cards, giving the health department information on each user, there would be “no means for the state to keep track of who is legitimate and who is not.’’

Anyway, Benson said, the risk of state employees being prosecuted for processing cards for individual users appears to be minimal. He said the U.S. Department of Justice has indicated it is more interested in going after those who distribute marijuana than patients who use it.

Attorney General Tom Horne, who is asking a federal judge to determine whether state workers have liability, said the distinction Brewer is making is justified.

“The letter from the U.S. Attorney said they would vigorously prosecute anyone involved in the distribution of marijuana and that compliance with state (medical marijuana) law would be no excuse,’’ he said. Horne said that means the state has to be “very wary’’ in anything expediting the ability to set up dispensaries that, by definition, are involved in distributing marijuana.

Issuing cards to individuals permitting them to use marijuana for medical reasons, Horne said, has nothing to do with distribution.

Short agreed that individual users are not being given permission to distribute marijuana. And she even acknowledged that just because marijuana possession is a federal crime does not preclude Arizona from deciding the medical use of it cannot be prosecuted in state courts.

“But our state employees still can’t issue licenses to smoke it,’’ she said.

Short brushed aside the self-executing feature of the ID cards.

She believes that a federal judge eventually will rule in Horne’s lawsuit that the Arizona law having the state license dispensaries conflicts with federal statutes. And while the lawsuit does not ask for a ruling on those patient ID cards, Short said the court will have no choice but to void the entire Proposition 203.

“The judge is not going to piecemeal this law that was approved by voters,’’ she argued.

Short said voiding the part allowing licensing of dispensaries would leave the state with a system where thousands of marijuana users are entitled to grow their own drugs, in their own homes, in the middle of residential neighborhoods. She said that’s a far cry from the plan that voters approved, which included a system of well-regulated dispensaries.

Horne’s marijuana lawsuit heads back to federal court in December when Judge Susan Bolton considers a motion by the American Civil Liberties Union and others to throw it out.

Finally a 10th Amendment lawsuit on medical marijuana!!!!

Medical marijuana advocates sue prosecutors over crackdown

October 27, 2011 | 2:52 pm

A medical marijuana advocacy group has sued the U.S. attorney general and the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, asking a federal court to halt recent raids and threats of prosecution that have significantly stepped up the Obama administration’s assault on the state’s 15-year-old program.

Americans for Safe Access, an advocacy group based in Oakland, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that accuses the Obama administration of violating the Constitution’s 10th Amendment by using coercive tactics to interfere with powers that are delegated to the states.

The four U.S. attorneys in California have dramatically ramped up prosecutions against medical marijuana operations and have advised cities and counties that they cannot adopt regulations that, in effect, authorize the distribution of the federally controlled substance.

“They’re not just enforcing marijuana laws, they are doing something extremely unusual in an effort to quash the medical marijuana programs in the various states,” said Joe Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access. “They’re not allowed to commandeer the lawmaking functions of the state.”

Tracy Schmaler, spokeswoman for U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, could not be reached for comment. Jack Gillund, spokesman for Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for Northern California, said, “We have no comment.”

The 17-page lawsuit takes aim at resolving one of the most critical legal issues that remains unsettled even though voters approved medical marijuana in a ground-breaking initiative in 1996. Because marijuana remains illegal for all uses under federal law, municipalities and states have struggled with how to regulate it for medical use. The federal prosecutors in California have now insisted that cities and counties cannot do anything that actively allows marijuana use, such as permitting dispensaries. A recent California appellate court ruling reached the same conclusion, but other appellate courts in the state have instead ruled that federal law does not trump state medical marijuana laws.

“The federal government has instituted a policy to dismantle the medical marijuana laws of the state of California and to coerce its municipalities to pass bans on medical marijuana dispensaries,” the lawsuit says. “To this end, the government has pursued an increasingly punitive strategy, which has involved criminal prosecutions of medical marijuana providers with Draconian penalties and letters threatening local officials if they implement state law.”

The lawsuit cites several recent examples of U.S. attorneys telling cities and counties that officials could face federal prosecution. It notes that Chico voted to rescind its recently adopted ordinance after a federal prosecutor met with the city attorney, city manager and police chief. City officials in Eureka received a letter saying that its plan to license large-scale cultivation violates federal law. And a federal prosecutor’s warning to Arcata officials led the city to suspend medical marijuana dispensary permits.

Federal agents this month also raided a collective in Mendocino County that has cooperated with a program to regulate growers, cutting down 99 plants. The lawsuit notes that Mark Perillo Sr., a 48-year-old member of the collective who suffers from chronic pain from a degenerative joint disease, was deprived of his share of the harvest. “He will be impeded from obtaining his medicine because no other delivery service provides medical marijuana at the same low cost,” the suit says.

Elford said that his organization would probably seek a preliminary injunction and expects the issue will eventually reach the state Supreme Court. “I do think this is going to move pretty quickly,” he said.

Colorado issues state licenses for medical marijuana dispensaries

October 27, 2011 | 2:02 pm

Colorado has issued the first state-level business licenses for medical marijuana operations in the nation, even as the Obama administration has toughened its stance toward cannabis dispensaries.

Home to some of the nation’s most thorough cannabis regulations -- and an alternative weekly with a medical marijuana reviewer -- Colorado has issued 11 licenses to marijuana-related businesses around the state, the Denver Post reports.

Seven other operations have been told that they’re likely to receive a license, the paper said. State officials have also asked local officials whether 467 more dispensaries and cannabis product-makers have gained local approval, among the last steps in a yearlong application process.

Access to marijuana is among Colorado’s most hotly debated issues, with a group attempting to gather 86,000 signatures by January to place a partial-legalization measure on the ballot, the Post reported. (Among the foes of Colorado's Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol are legalization supporters who say the measure isn’t strong enough.)

Voters in California, the first state to decriminalize medical marijuana in 1996, defeated a similar measure last year.

This month, federal prosecutors in California sent letters to dispensary landlords telling them to stop selling marijuana within 45 days or risk the seizure of their property and criminal charges, a move that stunned the state’s legal-cannabis advocates.

Chicago Aldermen weigh decriminalizing small amounts of pot

Source

Aldermen weigh decriminalizing small amounts of pot

By John Byrne Tribune reporter

2:37 p.m. CDT, October 27, 2011

Chicago aldermen will introduce an ordinance to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, which supporters said will free up police to chase more serious criminals and raise revenue for the city.

Under a proposal Ald. Daniel Solis, 25th, will introduce at next week's City Council meeting, people caught in Chicago with 10 grams or less of marijuana would get a $200 ticket, and up to 10 hours of community service.

Appearing at a news conference with Solis and other aldermen, Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey said several states have already decriminalized small amounts of cannabis.

Chicago police make about 23,000 arrests each year for marijuana possession, which is currently a class b misdemeanor in the city punishable by up to 6 months in jail and a $1,500 fine, Fritchey said. Police and court personnel get tied up dealing with those arrestees, he said. "It is not time to act tough on crime, it is (time) to be smart on crime. We need our resources spent somewhere else," Fritchey said.

Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, pointed out people arrested for marijuana possession are disproportionately minorities, who now end up with arrests on their criminal records even though the vast majority of the cases are thrown out of Cook County court.

"I had the opportunity to go to Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, and I think I got contact high being at all those events," Burnett said. "Police there, everything. It wasn't predominantly African American, and guess what? No one got arrested at those events. If that was an African American event, the jails would probably be filled up. I think it's almost a discrimination issue."

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has mentioned the possibility of issuing tickets for marijuana possession as a way to keep his officers on the streets rather than tying them up processing people.

Solis said he believes members of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration "think it makes sense."

"They haven't given us any indication, strong indication, they would support it, but I think enough is enough," Solis said.

Marijuana possession is already a ticketable offense in several suburbs and in areas of Cook County patrolled by the Cook County Sheriff's Department.

jebyrne@tribune.com

ACLU: Chat-downs escalate a flawed TSA program

ACLU: Chat-downs escalate a flawed TSA program

By Jay Stanley

It has been several years since the Transportation Security Administrationintroduced its Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program. Since then, the program has been subject to withering critique and failure — yet now the TSA is escalating it. At Boston's Logan airport, the agency is subjecting every traveler in one terminal to questioning by a SPOT officer. These "chat-downs" are what you call throwing good money after bad.

The chat-downs — and the SPOT program overall — are based on searching for supposed "signs of terrorism" that are vague and commonplace. The result is that officers can basically pick anyone they want for extra screening, and that inevitably devolves into crude racial profiling. The SPOT officers at Newark Liberty airport, for example, engaged in profiling so regularly that colleagues called them "Mexican hunters," according to an internal government report.

A 2010 Government Accountability Office study found the SPOT program had no scientific basis, wasn't subject to independent expert review and had not undergone cost/benefit analysis. All of that applies to the "chat-downs" as well. USATODAY OPINION

The fact is, airports are high-stress environments. People are running late. They are mad at the airlines, or their cab driver or their boss. They're upset because they are going to a funeral or are terrified of flying or are saying goodbye to their lover or are flying off to start a new life. The idea that the roiling complexity inside our heads can be analyzed through simple external signs is naive and simplistic.

Decades of peer-reviewed scientific work by psychologists "does not provide support for the premise of the SPOT program," psychologist Maria Hartwig told a congressional hearing last spring.

In short, this misguided program has been built on nothing but hocus-pocus. We'd be safer spending our limited security dollars on more effective measures, such as better cargo screening and better training for screeners who still frequently miss contraband. It's time to forget the small talk and focus on old-fashioned police work to stop terrorists before they get to the airport.

Jay Stanley is the senior policy analyst for the ACLU's Speech, Policy and Technology Project.

Pot laws should be eased

Pot laws should be eased

Mary Schmich

October 28, 2011

One day this summer, I had two experiences that made me grasp how fast attitudes toward marijuana are changing.

I pulled into the parking lot of a small shopping strip in the heart of Eugene, Ore., and noticed a cute storefront with a green awning and freshly painted salmon-colored walls. Clothing boutique? Massage spa? Juice bar? I walked up to the gleaming display windows.

It was a brand new medical marijuana dispensary.

Later that day, a report came on the radio about an amazing occurrence in Denver. In the Mile High City, medical marijuana dispensaries now outnumber Starbucks, such a profusion that a local alternative weekly employs a pot critic to review them.

It's not just in California anymore, Toto.

Here in Illinois, marijuana still comes with a strong whiff of the illicit.

Plenty of people smoke it — in living rooms, on decks, in parks, behind bars — but it remains against the law, despite the fact that, according to a recent Gallup poll, a record-breaking half of Americans think it should be legal. In May, the Illinois Legislature voted down a bill to authorize it for medical purposes, although two-thirds of Americans think that use should be allowed.

But attitudes are shifting even on our cautious Midwestern shores.

Not long ago, Toni Preckwinkle, the new president of the Cook County Board, had the guts to state the obvious: The war on drugs has failed. Substance abuse should be treated as a public health problem, not a crime.

She went a bold step further: Let's stop arresting and incarcerating people for possessing small amounts of weed.

Preckwinkle points out that even if the charges are eventually dropped, as they usually are in Chicago, people who can't make bail get stuck in jail, at a cost of $143 per day. That's our tax money. Why not fine offenders instead?

Such an approach frees up jail space, frees officers to stay on patrol instead of processing paperwork, and raises money.

Now some Chicago politicians are following Preckwinkle's lead. Next week, Ald. Daniel Solis, backed by several other aldermen, will introduce a proposal to change how people caught with 10 grams or less of marijuana are treated. Instead of being arrested, they'd get a $200 ticket and have to perform up to 10 hours of community service.

The idea is overdue.

I say this even though I don't enjoy marijuana. I hated it when I tried it in college. I hated it when I used it a couple times afterward. It made my brain feel like a giant mothball. It made conversation stupid. Inhaling wasn't worth the work.

But it's time to put marijuana into perspective. Decades of prohibition haven't reduced its use. More people than ever smoke it, some for pure pleasure, some as a cure for pain.

For some, it turns into addiction. But those who grow addicted — like people addicted to cigarettes, Percocet or pinot gris — have a health problem. Treating them as criminals doesn't solve their problem or society's.

Of course, many people who smoke dope already do it with impunity. Lollapalooza, anyone?

In Chicago, punishment falls with appalling disproportion on black men. For a thorough analysis of that disturbing truth, read the excellent July piece by Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky in the Chicago Reader: http://tinyurl.com/the-grass-gap.

We've demonized marijuana for so long that it's hard to shift attitudes and laws. But they're shifting anyway.

Chicago may not need as many marijuana shops as Starbucks, but it does need laws that deal more squarely with reality.

mschmich@tribune.com

U.S. push to make lying a policy raises concern

The ACLU's solution isn't that great - "We interpret all or part of your request as a request for records which, if they exist, would not be subject to the disclosure requirements of FOIA ... and we therefore will not process that portion of your request"

Source

Plan to allow agencies to lie about papers' existence decried

U.S. push to make lying a policy raises concern

by Erin Kelly - Oct. 29, 2011 12:00 AM

Republic Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Open-government groups are fighting a proposed Justice Department rule to allow federal law-enforcement agencies to lie about the existence of government documents being sought by the public.

The proposed regulation applies to certain documents that members of the public may request under the Freedom of Information Act. Some sensitive records, including information about FBI informants, are already excluded from the requirements of the act because revealing them could tip off criminals or threaten public safety.

However, instead of just denying a request under those situations, Justice Department officials would be instructed under the rule to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist," even when they do.

"The government should never lie to the American people," said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now the senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "To actually have it codified in a regulation that the government is allowed to lie is just untenable."

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said the proposed rule does not represent a change in the agency's policy. She said a 1987 memo by then U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese already instructs officials to deny the existence of certain sensitive records even when those records exist.

"The provision has been implemented for the past 25 years," Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said.

She said the policy has been in place for certain records that are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA. Those exclusions include records about a law-enforcement investigation in which the target may be unaware he or she is being investigated, records about informants whose identities have not been made public, and specific national-security information maintained by the FBI.

"(The policy) is to ensure that our responses to a FOIA requester don't reveal the existence of excluded records," she said.

For example, she said, if someone asks for informant records about a specific person and is told those records exist but cannot be released, it could endanger the informant by confirming that he is providing information to federal agents.

But the ACLU and other open-government groups say there are easy ways to protect sensitive information without deceiving the public. In a letter to the Justice Department, the ACLU, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and OpenTheGovernment.org, offered a suggestion for how government officials can respond without lying.

"The agency should simply respond that, 'We interpret all or part of your request as a request for records which, if they exist, would not be subject to the disclosure requirements of FOIA ... and we therefore will not process that portion of your request,' " the groups wrote.

Anne Weismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said, "We all recognize that there are legitimate reasons at a particular point of time that an agency may not want to disclose that it has certain documents. But there are ways to handle it short of lying."

Open-government groups said it's disturbing that the Justice Department has already been operating with a policy of deception.

"They shouldn't be proud of the fact that they've been lying to the press and the public since 1987," said Ken Paulson, president and CEO of the nonpartisan First Amendment Center, which educates the public about free-expression rights.

Creating a federal regulation would make the situation even worse by giving a bad policy the force of law, said Paulson, an attorney and former editor of USA Today.

"The insidious thing about this is that you never know when you've been lied to by the government, so how do you challenge them?" he said. "If they say a document doesn't exist, then what's your recourse? You're not going to file suit for a document that you've been told doesn't exist."

The current policy also distorts the intent of Congress when it passed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act in 1986, Weismann said.

"There was discussion about this in Congress at the time, and they did not authorize the agency to lie, regardless of what Ed Meese wrote in his memo," she said.

German and Paulson said they think the Obama administration deserves some credit for at least letting people know about the policy and allowing public comment.

The Justice Department, which came out with its proposed rule in March, reopened the public-comment period this fall at the request of open-government groups who wanted to weigh in once they realized what was happening. Reopening the comment period, which was supposed to end in April, was "an extraordinary step," Justice's Talamona said.

The public-comment period closed Oct. 19. The Justice Department is expected to come out with a final rule by the end of the year. If the controversial provision is not removed, it will be challenged in court, German said.

"We are grateful that they did reopen the comment period after we understood what they were doing," German said. "I would hope that they would be open-minded and see our recommendation as a solution. If not, I think it will completely destroy the integrity of the Department of Justice."

The war on drugs is a war on the American people, a war on the Constitution and a war on the Bill of Rights!

Source

Scottsdale SWAT team gets extra layer of protection with new armored vehicle

Police use federal grant to buy armored truck

by Ofelia Madrid - Oct. 24, 2011 12:14 PM

The Arizona Republic

The Scottsdale Police Department has used federal grant money to purchase a $435,000 armored vehicle intended to give SWAT members and the community an unprecedented level of protection.

Scottsdale police officials say the armored truck - called a BEAR, for Ballistic Engineered Armored Response - is made to withstand bullets from high-powered rifles.

"It's already proven its worthiness to us and increased dramatically officer safety," said Sgt. Rich Slavin, a Scottsdale police SWAT team leader.

The armored vehicle, which towers over other vehicles, is not used on routine calls, but has been used several times since it joined the Scottsdale fleet in September.

"We're always going to err on the side of caution," Slavin said. "They don't just call SWAT for any reason. There's a threat assessment threshold that must be met."

The BEAR was used a few weeks ago when the Scottsdale SWAT team, along with 10 other law-enforcement agencies, assisted Phoenix police in a massive drug sweep that targeted cocaine and gangs. More than 40 arrests were made that day.

On that mission, the Scottsdale team served a search warrant at a Phoenix business near 14th and Washington streets, where 75 pounds of marijuana was found, Slavin said. The team used a ramrod on the BEAR to push through a metal gate. A turret at the top of the vehicle gave an officer a high vantage point to see what was going on. Inside, they found the suspect with a rifle and shotgun.

The vehicle provides protection for SWAT members, who often enter a situation not knowing who or what is on the other side of the wall, Slavin said.

One example was a recent Scottsdale murder investigation in which two men were accused in the shooting death of a man at a Scottsdale apartment complex. As the officers closed in on a suspect, they found he had a precision rifle. The BEAR vehicle provided officers with a powerful layer of protection had the suspect opened fire on police.

The money used to buy the armored vehicle comes from the Urban Area Security Initiative grants program. The federal money is part of more than $92 million in UASI grants awarded to Valley cities since the program started in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

About five years ago, Scottsdale police purchased a smaller armored vehicle called a BEAR CAT, also with federal money.

"The BEAR CAT is great, but I'm unable to get my entire team and equipment into it," Slavin said.

Before the federal government started offering grants, Scottsdale police would buy armored vehicles through military surplus, Slavin said. The vehicles were frequently unreliable and sometimes costly to repair.

The new BEAR vehicle is covered for five years by the manufacturer, said Sgt. Mark Clark, a Scottsdale police spokesman. After that, police officials estimate it will cost about $1,500 per year to maintain.

Without these grants, Scottsdale could not have afforded a vehicle like this, Slavin said.

SWAT teams use both vehicles when officers must cover more than one side of a house. For example, when the Police Department's Repeat Offender Program serves search warrants, the SWAT team is called to assist. The program targets career criminals who many times are violent.

Still, for most residents, the sight of a large armored truck barreling down a neighborhood street can be intimidating.

"I hope people recognize that this is in the hands of the good guys," Slavin said. "That helps the feeling they get when they see it." Yea if this were Nazi Germany Sgt. Rich Slavin would be calling the Gestepo and SS the good guys. Of course Sgt. Rich Slavin almost certainly considers the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security and TSA the "good guys", something most American now identify with the Gestepo, SS, and KGB and anything but the "good guys".

More on this topic

Homeland security grants

The money used to buy the armored vehicle comes from the Urban Area Security Initiative grants program. The money is part of the more than $92 million in federal UASI grants awarded to Valley cities since the program started in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

That money has declined during the past five years. This year, nearly 30 cities around the country, including Tucson, lost funding altogether.

Scottsdale began receiving money in 2007 and to date has received about $1.2 million in UASI grants. In 2010, the city used $500,000 to buy specialized hazardous-materials equipment and a chemical-decontamination vehicle known as a C-BRN, which stands for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear. The vehicle is kept at Scottsdale's Fire Station 5 on Shea Boulevard, near 74th Street, where the hazmat team is based. BEAR vehicle

• Features armor that provides protection in barricaded and active shoot scenarios.

• Is designed for larger SWAT teams, with room for 15 fully equipped officers.

• Has an on-board oxygen tank system that allows SWAT members to refill their air tanks from inside the vehicle.

• Is built with a freight-liner chassis.

• Has a turret on roof to provide a high vantage point for SWAT members.

• Has a ram device that allows SWAT members to breach doors, windows and fences.

• Fits 25 to 30 people inside in an evacuee situation.

U.S. northern border checks scaled back

Source

U.S. northern border checks scaled back

Oct. 28, 2011 02:36 PM

Associated Press

SEATTLE - The U.S. Border Patrol has quietly stopped its controversial practice of routinely searching buses, trains and airports for illegal immigrants at transportation hubs along the northern border and in the nation's interior, preventing agents from using what had long been an effective tool for tracking down people here illegally, The Associated Press has learned.

Current and former Border Patrol agents said field offices around the country began receiving the order last month - soon after the Obama administration announced that to ease an overburdened immigration system, it would allow many undocumented people to remain in the country while it focuses on deporting those who have committed crimes.

The routine bus, train and airport checks typically involved agents milling about and questioning people who appeared suspicious, and had long been criticized by immigrant rights groups. Critics said the tactic amounted to racial profiling and violated the civil liberties of travelers.

But agents said it was an effective way to catch unlawful immigrants, including smugglers and possible terrorists, who had evaded detection at the border, as well as people who had overstayed their visas. Often, those who evade detection head quickly for the nearest mass public transportation in hopes of reaching other parts of the country.

Halting the practice has baffled the agents, especially in some stations along the northern border - from Bellingham, Wash., to Houlton, Maine - where the so-called "transportation checks" have been the bulk of their everyday duties. The Border Patrol is authorized to check vehicles within 100 miles of the border.

The order has not been made public, but two agents described it to the AP on condition of anonymity because the government does not authorize them to speak to the media. The union that represents Border Patrol agents planned to issue a press release about the change Monday.

"Orders have been sent out from Border Patrol headquarters in Washington, D.C., to Border Patrol sectors nationwide that checks of transportation hubs and systems located away from the southwest border of the United States will only be conducted if there is intelligence indicating a threat," the release says.

Those who have received the orders said, agents may still go to train and bus stations and airports if they have specific "actionable intelligence" that there is an illegal immigrant there who recently entered the country. An agent in Washington state said it's not clear how agents are supposed to glean such intelligence, and even if they did, under the new directive they still require clearance from Washington, D.C., headquarters before they can respond.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman, Bill Brooks, repeatedly insisted that any shift in enforcement tactics does not amount to a change in policy as local commanders still have authority to aggressively pursue illegal immigrants near the border and at transportation hubs.

"It's up to the local commander to position his agents the way he wants to position them. What we've done is gone to a risk-based posture," he said.

In a separate statement, the agency said, "Conducting intelligence-based transportation checks allows the Border Patrol to use their technology and personnel resources more effectively, especially in areas with limited resources."

Shawn Moran, vice president of the union that represents agents, was outraged at the changes.

"Stated plainly, Border Patrol managers are increasing the layers of bureaucracy and making it as difficult as possible for Border Patrol agents to conduct their core duties," the National Border Patrol Council's statement said. "The only risks being managed by this move are too many apprehensions, negative media attention and complaints generated by immigrant rights groups."

The Border Patrol has dramatically beefed up its staffing in the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, doubling to more than 20,000 agents nationally. Along the northern border, the number has jumped from about 300 in the late 1990s to more than 2,200.

Until receiving the new directive, the Bellingham office, about 25 miles from the Canadian border, kept agents at the bus-and-train station and at the local airport 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now, the agents have little work to do, according to a Washington state-based Border Patrol agent who has been with the agency for more than 20 years and spoke to the AP.

The situation is similar in upstate New York, where an agent told the AP - also on the condition of anonymity - that a senior manager relayed the new directive during a morning roll call last month. Since then, instead of checking buses or trains, agents have spent shifts sitting in their vehicles gazing out at Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, where few illegal immigrants cross.

"They're already bored," the agent said. "You grab the paper every day and you go do the crossword."

The change was immediately obvious to Jack Barker, who manages the Greyhound and Trailways bus station in Rochester, N.Y. For the past six years, he said, Border Patrol agents boarded nearly every bus in and out of the station looking for illegal immigrants.

Last month - one day after the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 and all of the hype that surrounded it - the agents stopped coming. They haven't been back since, Barker said.

"What's changed that they're no longer needed here?" Barker asked. "I haven't been able to get an answer from anybody."

Doug Honig, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, welcomed the news.

"If the Border Patrol is indeed not boarding buses and trains and engaging in the random questioning of people, that's a step in the right direction," he said. "People shouldn't be questioned by government officials when there's no reason to believe they've done anything wrong."

Kent Lundgren, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, said the transportation checks have been a staple of the agency for 60 years. His organization has heard from agents around the country complaining of the change, he said.

"From the tactical point of view, the Border Patrol is no longer checking transportation unless there's a specific threat," he said.

Gene Davis, a retired deputy chief in the Border Patrol's sector in Blaine, Wash., emphasized how effective the checks can be. He noted that a check of the Bellingham bus station in 1997 yielded an arrest of Palestinian Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer. Abu Mezer skipped out on a $5,000 bond - only to turn up later in Brooklyn, where New York police shot him as he prepared to bomb the city's subway system. Davis also noted that would be millennium bomb suspect Ahmed Ressam was arrested at the border in late 1999 when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia to Washington in a rented car full of explosives.

"We've had two terrorists who have come through the northern border here - to put these restraints on agents being able to talk to people is just ridiculous," Davis said. "Abu Mezer got out, but that just shows you the potential that's there with the transportation checks."

The Border Patrol informed officials at the Bellingham airport on Thursday that from now on they would only be allowed to come to the airport "if there's an action that needs their assistance," said airport manager Daniel Zenk.

"I'm shocked," Zenk said. "We welcome the security presence the Border Patrol provides."

Officials arrest 70 in major Arizona drug bust

Source

Officials arrest 70 in major Arizona drug bust

Reuters

7:17 p.m. CDT, October 30, 2011

(Reuters) - Law enforcement officials in Arizona seized thousands of pounds of narcotics and arrested at least 70 suspected drug smugglers with apparent ties to a violent drug cartel in Mexico, an official involved with the investigation in the U.S. Southwest told Reuters on Sunday.

The operation, which included three raids conducted jointly by local, state, and federal officials over 17 months, led to the arrests of Mexican and American nationals working with the notorious drug cartel based in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Authorities confiscated drugs, money, weapons, ammunition, and bullet-proof vests, cracking a "sophisticated network" of international drug smuggling in one of the largest such operations conducted in the Southwestern United States, the official said.

Drugs were smuggled from Mexico into Arizona by car, plane, on foot, and through tunnels.

"This is one of the more substantial drug-smuggling operations going on right now. This is a billion-dollar drug trade organization linked to the cartel," the official said.

The cartel is headquartered in the northwestern state of Sinaloa on Mexico's Pacific coast, an area home to big marijuana and opium poppy plantations and considered the cradle of Mexican narcotics trafficking since the 1960s.

The cartel is believed to handle 65 percent of all drugs illegally transported to the United States, drug experts say.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in drug-related violence since Mexican PresidentFelipe Calderon launched his military campaign against the cartels after he took office in late 2006.

Further details of the operation will be released at a press conference at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration field office in Phoenix on Monday. The raids were overseen by the DEA, Arizona state officials, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The official said the operation will shed light on elaborate drug smuggling into the United States and said the contraband confiscated in the raids was "jaw-dropping."

Officials captured some of the key players in the smuggling operation, the source said, adding that the suspects will be prosecuted at the state level.

The official said law enforcement officials are still looking for dozens of people in connection with the operation.

(Reporting by Eric Johnson in Chicago; Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington; Editing by Eric Walsh)

The Patriot Act is just a camouflaged version of the "War on Drugs"

Sneak and peek search warrants are hardly ever being used to fight terrorism. Out of the 3,970 warrants issued, only 37 pertained to a terrorism investigation. That accounts for less than 1 percent of the warrants issued.

This abusive "anti-terrorism tool" is really being used to fight the war on drugs (76 percent).

While the number of sneak and peek search warrants has dramatically increased over the years, the percentage of warrants issued for terrorism investigations has never even reached 1 percent.

Source

A Tool in the Government's War on Privacy? Absolutely. But in Its War on Terror? Not So Much…

3,970. That is how many times between October 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010, federal judges let the government avoid telling someone that their home or office had been searched, and that law enforcement officers rifled through and potentially even seized their personal belongings. We contacted the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to obtain up-to-date numbers on how frequently the government uses the "sneak and peek" searches (also called delayed-notice searches), a government surveillance tool authorized by the Patriot Act. The report (which we've made available on our website) shows that in 2010, sneak and peek warrants were issued more than twice as often as in 2009, and more than three times as often as in 2008.

Federal laws usually require the government to notify you if it searches your property. This notification serves as an essential protection for the exercise of your rights, since it lets you know if you need to protect yourself against unlawful government searches. But, sneak and peek search warrants allow investigators to enter and search an individual's business or dwelling and delay notification for up to 30 days or longer 'if 'the facts of the case justify' it, and then obtain an indefinite number of 90-day extensions.

Delaying notice to an ever-growing number of people that their homes and businesses have been searched opens the door for law enforcement to conduct secret searches of individuals without any concerns for accountability, since the subject of their searches will be completely in the dark about what has happened for an indefinite period of time, and essentially unable to exercise their rights.

The fact that the government's use of this purported anti-terrorism authority has been increasing significantly in the last few years is one part of the much larger problem of abusive government surveillance practices authorized under the guise of national security.

FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that sneak and peek search warrants are an "invaluable tool to fight terrorism." Indeed, that was the stated purpose for including them in the Patriot Act in the first place. But, sneak and peek search warrants are hardly ever being used to fight terrorism. Out of the 3,970 warrants issued, only 37 pertained to a terrorism investigation. That accounts for less than 1 percent of the warrants issued. This abusive "anti-terrorism tool" is really being used to fight the war on drugs (76 percent) and to investigate other crimes that have nothing to do with protecting national security. While the number of sneak and peek search warrants has dramatically increased over the years, the percentage of warrants issued for terrorism investigations has never even reached 1 percent. Congress had the chance to rein in this abuse when it reauthorized portions of the Patriot Act earlier this year, but not surprisingly, it did not do so. Many of our political leaders seem immune to rational arguments about the need for limits on government surveillance authority.

After 10 years of abuses, and 10 years of questionable government statements about how "invaluable" these anti-terrorism tools are, the 10 year anniversary of the passage of the Patriot Act is no time to celebrate. It is a time to demand that our government respect our privacy rights again. The government's next attempted power grab for abusive surveillance authorities in the name of national security will be over cybersecurity. This time the government is proposing that communication providers be allowed to routinely turn over our private information to the Department of Homeland Security. Don't let the government hide behind the excuse of security to once again erode our privacy rights. Let's use the 10-year anniversary of the Patriot Act to tell Congress to oppose cybersecurity legislation that violates our freedom.

5 years in prison for 5 grams of crack

On the other hand if you are a racist Congressman who wants to screw Black people the law works just great. I suspect that is why the law was passed, to railroad Black folks into the prison system.

Source

Change in crack sentencing means early releases

Posted 11/1/2011 1:11 PM ET

By Jessica Gresko, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Darryl Flood thought he would have to wait until 2013 to get out of prison, more than a decade after he pleaded guilty to being part of a conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

But if all goes as planned this week, the 48-year-old will walk out of a Kentucky prison two years early and take a bus back to his sister's home in Virginia. Flood is one of thousands of federal inmates who will benefit from a change that goes into effect Tuesday reducing recommended sentences for crack cocaine crimes so they are more in line with the penalties for powder cocaine.

Flood's sister, Susan Cardwell, said she cried after getting a phone call from his defense attorney Monday saying his release has been approved by a Virginia judge.

"He wants to get out, get a job and get his life back together," said Cardwell, a resident of Haymarket, Va. "He says he'll work two jobs if he has to."

The disparity in sentences for crack versus powder cocaine had long been criticized as racially discriminatory because it disproportionately affected black defendants. Under a law passed in the 1980s, a person convicted of crack possession got the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the amount of powdered cocaine. Five grams of crack, about the weight of five packets of Sweet N'Low, brought a mandatory five years behind bars; it took 500 grams of powdered cocaine to get the same sentence.

The law was seen as racially unfair since blacks made up the majority of people convicted of crack crimes, while whites were more likely to be found guilty of offenses involving powdered cocaine.

The Fair Sentencing Act passed by Congress in 2010 and signed by President Barack Obama reduced the disparity in prison sentences for future cases. This summer the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing policy, decided to apply the act to inmates already serving time.

The commission estimates about 12,000 inmates could benefit overall. The effect of the change will largely be spread out over the next several years, with inmates getting an average of three years shaved off. But nearly 1,900 prisoners are estimated to be eligible for immediate release Tuesday.

It's not clear how many individuals will go free on the first day inmates are eligible.

Chris Burke, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said Monday that officials had already received hundreds of orders for early release from judges and the number has been going up daily, "if not hourly." Prison officials have been given a grace period of several days to release certain inmates.

Those releases and others are the result of months of work by prosecutors, public defenders and judges across the country. Some public defender offices reviewed hundreds of files of potentially affected inmates.

In some districts, defense attorneys and prosecutors agreed that certain individuals' sentences should be reduced to time served based on Tuesday's new guidelines and asked judges to enter orders that go into effect the same day.

The number of affected inmates varies in each federal district.

In San Antonio, Texas, the federal public defender's office had about 15 to 20 cases where the inmate is eligible for immediate release, according to assistant federal public defender Kurt May. In St. Louis, public defender Lee Lawless said his office reviewed a list of 400 people who might be affected and ultimately submitted between 30 and 50 petitions asking for inmates' immediate release. In the eastern district of Virginia, which has the highest number of affected inmates anywhere in the country, public defender Michael Nachmanoff said that by Monday evening judges had ordered the immediate release of approximately 75 people for Tuesday.

Jim Wade, the federal public defender for Harrisburg, Pa., said he canceled vacation for his 10 attorneys until the first wave of releases is over.

"We're trying to make sure you don't serve one more day than necessary. That's the goal," Wade said.

For families who have loved ones affected by the change, days make a difference. Susan Cardwell said the last time she saw her brother was the day he went to prison. She can't wait to see him, she said, and has already promised an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner to celebrate his return.

"After jail food for all those years, I'm sure he's going to pig out," she said.

Uncle Sam doesn't like doctors who help sick and injured people stop pain!

Deaths from painkiller overdose triple in decade

Posted 11/1/2011 9:11 PM ET

By Stephanie Nano, Associated Press

NEW YORK — The number of overdose deaths from powerful painkillers more than tripled over a decade, the government reported Tuesday -- a trend that a U.S. health official called an epidemic, but one that can be stopped.

Prescription painkillers such as OxyContin, Vicodin and methadone led to the deaths of almost 15,000 people in 2008, including actor Heath Ledger. That's more than three times the 4,000 deaths from narcotics in 1999.

Such painkillers "are meant to help people who have severe pain," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which issued the report. "They are, however, highly addictive."

The report shows nearly 5 percent of Americans ages 12 and older said they've abused painkillers in the past year -- using them without a prescription or just for the high. In 2008-09 surveys, Oklahomans reported the highest rate of abuse; the lowest was in Nebraska and Iowa.

The overdose deaths reflect the spike in the number of narcotic painkillers prescribed every year -- enough to give every American a one-month supply, Frieden said.

Prescriptions rose as doctors aimed to better treat pain and as new painkillers hit the market.

Frieden and White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, who joined him at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, said states need to take sharp actions to reverse the long-running trend.

States oversee prescription practices and can rigorously monitor prescriptions and crack down on "pill mills" and "doctor shopping" by patients, Frieden said.

Doctors should limit prescriptions -- giving only a three-day supply for acute pain, for example -- and look for alternative treatments, he said.

"For chronic pain, narcotics should be the last resort," he added.

A federal drug plan announced this year calls for state programs to track prescriptions. All but two states -- Missouri and New Hampshire -- have approved them, said Kerlikowske. But a number of states don't have them in place yet or doctors aren't using them enough to check on their patients' past prescriptions, he said.

"America's prescription drug abuse epidemic is not a problem that's going to be solved overnight, but at the same time, we're not powerless," said Kerlikowske, who urged parents to get rid of unneeded or expired painkillers so they aren't misused.

Some states are taking action. Earlier this month, a doctor in Southern California was sentenced to prison for illegally selling tens of thousands of prescriptions for painkillers and sedative. Ohio now requires pain clinics to be licensed by the state, and limits the amount of pills that can be dispensed at clinics. Florida also has cracked down on so-called "pill mills."

Overall, there were 36,450 fatal overdoses in 2008, including accidental cases and suicides involving illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine along with prescription medicines. About three-quarters of the deaths from prescriptions involved narcotic painkillers.

That's the year Ledger died from an accidental overdose of painkillers and sedatives. A few months later, a 12-year-old girl from suburban New York overdosed on methadone she bought from a 15-year-old boy.

Narcotics also played a role in the recent deaths of a 27-year-old model at the mansion of an Anheuser-Busch heir and of former hockey player Derek Boogaard.

Other findings of the CDC report:

_ New Mexico had the highest overdose death rate (27 per 100,000) and Nebraska had the lowest (5.5). The national rate was 11.9.

_ Fatal overdoses were more likely in men, middle-aged adults and whites and American Indians.

_ Sales of prescription painkillers are highest in the Southeast and Northwest.

Frieden noted the wide differences between overdose death rates among states. For example, West Virginia's rate is about 26 per 100,000 while neighboring Virginia's rate is only 9.

"This highlights the importance of states getting policies right on preventing drug abuse," he said.

__

Online:

CDC report: http://cdc.gov/mmwr/

Arizona widow sues over deadly SWAT raid

And yes the medical experts are right pot has never caused a death. It's the unconstitutional laws against marijuana and other drugs that have caused governments to murder thousands of people for using, making and selling the drugs.

Source

Arizona widow sues over deadly SWAT raid

Nov. 2, 2011 07:31 AM

Associated Press

TUCSON - The widow of a Tucson-area man killed when members of a SWAT team rushed his home in May has filed a lawsuit against Pima County and the officers who killed her husband.

The Arizona Daily Star reports the lawsuit also names the towns of Marana, Sahuarita and Oro Valley, as defendants in the lawsuit, which says negligence and gross negligence led to the death of 26-year-old Jose Guerena.

Vanessa Guerena's attorney filed the lawsuit Monday in Superior Court. It says the defendants had 20 days to respond before taking the case to trial.

The lawsuit did not named a dollar figure, however Guerena's attorney filed a $20 million claim against the county and other law-enforcement agencies in August, but those agencies never responded, prompting the lawsuit.

Chandler police steal $66,718 from pot dealers!

Who says crime doesn't pay. The Chandler police routinely offer to sell large quantities of marijuana to dope dealers and then after selling them the dope, they steal the dope and the money back.

Source

Chandler police make arrests in marijuana sting

by Alex Ferri - Nov. 2, 2011 11:57 AM

The Arizona Republic- 12 News Breaking News Team

Police informants helped arrest three men after they allegedly bought 135 pounds of police-supplied marijuana.

Chandler police provided informants with around 200 pounds of marijuana for them to pose as sellers in an investigation. The informants sold 135 pounds of the marijuana Tuesday for $66,718.

One of the men contacted the informants Oct. 18 and set up the meeting with the two buyers, according to court documents. The buyers reportedly planned to buy 175 pounds of marijuana, but only brought enough money for 135 pounds.

After the informants completed the sale and left, police arrived and arrested three men in connection with the drug sale. Johnny Earl Course, 38, and Michael Dwayne Thomas, 26, are suspected of buying the marijuana.

Jaime Alejandro Balderas, 32, is suspected of setting up the meeting. Police arrested all three on suspicion of possessing marijuana for sale and money laundering.

Got Cash? The BP thinks you are a criminal!!!

According to the Border Patrol, anyone carrying more than $10,000 when crossing a border needs to declare the money at the U.S. Port of Entry and prove why they have it and how they obtained it.

I suspect this checkpoint was NOT on the Arizona Mexican border, but on Interstate 8, 78 miles east of the California border.

Source

Border agents find $176,000 in undeclared cash

Nov. 2, 2011 09:56 AM

Associated Press

YUMA - Border Patrol agents never know what they will find. Saturday agents working an Interstate 8 checkpoint near Yuma seized more than $176,000 of undeclared currency.

Agents conducting checkpoint operations referred the driver of a Buick sedan to a secondary inspection after a dog team alerted agents. After the driver consented to a search, agents discovered cash stuffed in a duffel bag.

The money was found sorted into bundles. A vacuum sealing machine was also found.

The driver and the cash were turned over to state police.

According to the Border Patrol, anyone carrying more than $10,000 when crossing a border needs to declare the money at the U.S. Port of Entry and prove why they have it and how they obtained it.

Source

Yuma agents seize large sum of undeclared cash

November 01, 2011 8:35 PM

BY JAMES GILBERT - SUN STAFF WRITER

Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents conducting checkpoint operations on Interstate 8 on Saturday seized $176,380 of undeclared currency that was found hidden inside a duffel bag.

According to a news release issued by the Yuma Sector Communications Division, the money was found sorted into bundles. A vacuum sealing machine was also found.

Wellton Station agents conducting checkpoint operations at the checkpoint, which is near milepost 78, referred a tan Buick sedan to secondary inspection after a canine team alerted positively to the vehicle. Border Patrol service dogs are trained to detect the odors of narcotics, concealed people and other substances.

After the driver consented to a vehicle search, agents discovered a duffel bag filled with bundles of cash as well as a vacuum sealing machine.

The suspect and currency were turned over to an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer assigned to the Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force.

According to the Border Patrol, anyone carrying more than $10,000 when crossing a border needs to declare the money at the U.S. Port of Entry and prove why they have it and how they obtained it.

James Gilbert can be reached at jgilbert@yumasun,com or 539-6854.

Cash-strapped Chicago mulls easing marijuana law

It sounds like this issue is about raising revenue which will be used to pay the overpaid and under worked Chicago piggies.

Source

Cash-strapped Chicago mulls easing marijuana law

Posted 11/3/2011 12:24 AM ET

By Don Babwin, Associated Press

CHICAGO — A Chicago alderman says he's found a way for the city to raise desperately needed cash that will also keep more police officers on the street: Marijuana.

Alderman Danny Solis introduced an ordinance to the City Council on Wednesday that would make possession of small amounts of marijuana a ticketable offense with a $200 fine rather than a misdemeanor that carries jail time. He estimates the change would generate $7 million a year and, since the vast majority of such cases are dismissed, would save police and courthouse workers money and time.

"In these trying times of the economy, we could really use the revenue generated by fines versus arrests," Solis said. "And each (arrest) means police officers are spending an inordinate amount of time outside the neighborhoods, inside the district offices doing paperwork."

Similar laws exist around the country, but unlike in other states and cities where the debate has often focused on marijuana use, the discussions in Chicago have centered almost entirely on money and wasted resources.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has not endorsed the ordinance, but said recently that a member of the police department's gang unit made a similar suggestion, and he had passed the idea on to Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and his first deputy.

"I asked them to look into it and that's what they are doing right now," Emanuel told reporters.

McCarthy also has not endorsed the ordinance, but while some law enforcement organizations elsewhere in the U.S. have opposed such measures, he has signaled he's open to it -- for some of the same reasons Solis cited.

"With minor possession, it would be in everybody's interests to free up officers, keep them in the field (where they) effectively enforce the law," department spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton said.

Solis' plan would levy a ticket for someone in possession of 10 grams or less of the drug -- roughly the equivalent of 10 marijuana cigarettes -- that could be cleared with a $200 fine and up to 10 hours of community service. Currently, the offense is a misdemeanor that carries up to six months in jail and a $1,500 fine.

The ordinance would still be stricter than some elsewhere in the U.S. In California, for example, possession of as much as an ounce of marijuana, or 28 grams, is an infraction no more serious than a speeding ticket. Under a more than 30-year-old state law in New York, people caught with 25 grams are only ticketed as long as the drug is out of public view.

Supporters of the proposed change in Chicago argue that arrests for such infractions add up to a colossal waste of time. Of the 8,625 misdemeanor marijuana cases between 2006 and 2010, about 87 percent were dismissed, according to statistics from the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court.

Citing the high dismissal rate, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle recently recommended that Chicago police stop making arrests for small amounts of marijuana. She noted that the county, whose financial picture is as grim as the city's, spends $78 million a year on costs related to marijuana arrests.

Chicago Alderman Willie Cochran, who spent 25 years as a city police officer, backs the ordinance.

"I support it because people are getting arrested, going into court and judges are ... dismissing (the cases) and releasing them all anyway," Cochran said.

Alderman Richard Mell said that under the present law, people who are arrested but not convicted are seeing their lives damaged.

"If you're a young kid with no record, all of a sudden you're arrested and then the case is thrown out, that arrest is going to follow you unless you go in and get it discharged -- and it can affect your schooling, it can affect where you live and it can affect your job possibilities," he said.

Solis and others said they were also concerned about whether the current law was being enforced fairly. Solis presented statistics showing thousands more arrests in predominantly black and Hispanic wards in the last decade than in affluent and predominantly white neighborhoods.

The 23,000 arrests on misdemeanor charges in the city last year, he said, added up to at least 84,000 hours that police spent driving suspects out of neighborhoods where they were arrested, doing paperwork, inventorying evidence and handling other chores that take them off the street.

And that doesn't include the hours when officers are appearing in court or the time that county workers at the jail and courthouse devote to such cases.

Medical marijuana law doesn't affect teens' use

Marijuana law doesn't affect teens' use

By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

November 2, 2011, 2:40 p.m.

Questions on the impact of medical marijuana laws on teenagers' illicit use of the drug have been raised repeatedly by public health officials. One study suggests that allowing marijuana to be sold for medical purposes doesn't harm teens.

Researchers compared teens in Rhode Island, where medical marijuana was legalized in 2006, with adolescents in Massachusetts, which doesn't allow medical marijuana sales. The analysis included 32,570 teens who completed surveys on drug use between 1997 and 2009. The study showed no statistically significant differences regarding marijuana use between the two states in any year.

This study is one among many analyses on the effects of medical marijuana laws and proposals to legalize all marijuana use. It's unclear, however, whether the experience in two small Eastern states would apply to places like California, where, for a time, it seemed as if there were more marijuana dispensaries than fast-food restaurants.

The study was presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Assn. by Dr. Esther Choo, an emergency medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital.

Return to Booster Shots blog.

Follow me: twitter.com/LATShariRoan

Zero percent of the of politicians support legalizing marijuana

Source

Gary Johnson 'the marijuana guy' takes 2012 pitch to L.A.

By Kate Linthicum

November 3, 2011, 2:29 p.m.

The International Drug Policy Reform Conference in downtown Los Angeles might not seem like a sensible campaign stop for a Republican presidential hopeful. There was reggae music blasting, little lapel pins shaped like marijuana leaves, and a speech by California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the uber-liberal former mayor of San Francisco who is famous for granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But on Thursday, Gary Johnson stood there before an audience of drug decriminalization activists, drawing cheers for his promise that if he wins the Republican nomination and is elected president, he will issue a full pardon for anyone serving prison time for a non-violent marijuana crime.

What Johnson’s shoe-string presidential campaign lacks in resources and media attention—which is a lot -- it has made up for in quirkiness. Consider last month, when the former New Mexico governor showed up to talk economics with protesters at Occupy Wall Street. Or his announcement that he had forgone campaigning in Iowa in order to focus on New Hampshire, where he hopes to make a good showing in the January primary – and surprise those who have dismissed him as a long-shot.

An advocate of small-government and tax reform that would tax consumption, instead of income, Johnson’s libertarian leanings have drawn comparisons to Ron Paul, whom he endorsed for president in 2008.

But he is best-known nationally for his stance on marijuana.

Johnson has been calling for the legalization of the drug since 1999, during his second term as governor. He says he smoked marijuana recreationally when he was younger, and used it more recently to help with the pain after a paragliding accident in 2005. Wherever he goes, Johnson says, people point and say: “That’s the marijuana guy.”

But he says he’s OK with that, since many Americans support looser drug policies. In a recent magazine interview, Johnson said marijuana smokers may be “the largest untapped voting bloc in the country.”

On Thursday, Johnson told the crowd about a Gallup poll last month that found that 50% of Americans favor legalizing marijuana. “Fifty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, “ he said. “But zero percent of the universe of politicians support this.” He assailed his Republican rivals, whom he said have overlooked the effect of the so-called war on drugs on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“They all talk about border violence and adding guns to the equation instead of looking at the root of the problem, which is prohibition,” he said.

With the exception of Paul, who believes states should decide whether to outlaw marijuana use, Johnson’s stance on the drug is in stark contrast to most of his Republican rivals. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has said that he would not support the decriminalization of marijuana, even for medicinal purposes.

And Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, has sought to expand prosecution of drug-related offenses. In 1996, Gingrich sponsored a bill called the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act,” which called for life in prison or even the death sentence for those convicted of trafficking large amounts of drugs.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

White House lies on the issue of legalizing marijuana

The first lie in the article is - "our concern about marijuana is based on what the science tells us about the drug's effects" [ Lets face it the "drug war" is a jobs program for overpaid cops, prosecutors and other government nannies! ]

Of course the lies get worse after that. And there ain't no science backing any of this article up, it's all politics and bullshit.

"marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease" [ You mean pot is addictive just like heroin and tobacco? ]

"Simply put, it [marijuana] is not a benign drug." [ Could you please tell us how many recorded deaths marijuana has cause in the last 100 or even 1,000 years? ]

"we ardently support ongoing research into determining what components of the marijuana plant can be used as medicine" [ that is 100 percent BS! Uncle Sam had made it almost impossible and illegal to do any medical research on marijuana. ]

"We also recognize that legalizing marijuana would not provide the answer to any of the health, social, youth education, criminal justice, and community quality of life challenges associated with drug use" [ Translation - the minds at the White House are closed like a bear trap and not open to any ideas that the drug war might be the biggest mistake the American government has made in the last 100 years! ]

Source

Official White House Response to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol. and 7 other petitions

What We Have to Say About Legalizing Marijuana

By: Gil Kerlikowske

When the President took office, he directed all of his policymakers to develop policies based on science and research, not ideology or politics. So our concern about marijuana is based on what the science tells us about the drug's effects.

According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health- the world's largest source of drug abuse research - marijuana use is associated with addiction, respiratory disease, and cognitive impairment. We know from an array of treatment admission information and Federal data that marijuana use is a significant source for voluntary drug treatment admissions and visits to emergency rooms. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled over the past 20 years, raising serious concerns about what this means for public health – especially among young people who use the drug because research shows their brains continue to develop well into their 20's. Simply put, it is not a benign drug.

Like many, we are interested in the potential marijuana may have in providing relief to individuals diagnosed with certain serious illnesses. That is why we ardently support ongoing research into determining what components of the marijuana plant can be used as medicine. To date, however, neither the FDA nor the Institute of Medicine have found smoked marijuana to meet the modern standard for safe or effective medicine for any condition.

As a former police chief, I recognize we are not going to arrest our way out of the problem. We also recognize that legalizing marijuana would not provide the answer to any of the health, social, youth education, criminal justice, and community quality of life challenges associated with drug use.

That is why the President's National Drug Control Strategy is balanced and comprehensive, emphasizing prevention and treatment while at the same time supporting innovative law enforcement efforts that protect public safety and disrupt the supply of drugs entering our communities. Preventing drug use is the most cost-effective way to reduce drug use and its consequences in America. And, as we've seen in our work through community coalitions across the country, this approach works in making communities healthier and safer. We're also focused on expanding access to drug treatment for addicts. Treatment works. In fact, millions of Americans are in successful recovery for drug and alcoholism today. And through our work with innovative drug courts across the Nation, we are improving our criminal justice system to divert non-violent offenders into treatment.

Our commitment to a balanced approach to drug control is real. This last fiscal year alone, the Federal Government spent over $10 billion on drug education and treatment programs compared to just over $9 billion on drug related law enforcement in the U.S.

Thank you for making your voice heard. I encourage you to take a moment to read about the President's approach to drug control to learn more.

1 in 7 NYC arrests are for marijuana possession

I think this article proves my point.

The article says one out of every seven arrests in New York City is for the victimless crime of possessing marijuana.

The article also says that a large number of the arrests are not even legal under New York law. Cops are not supposed to arrest people for possession of marijuana unless it is in plain sight.

Most of these arrests occur with the cops illegally search somebody and find marijuana in their pockets, and then arrest the people, even if the post wasn't in plain sight.

Source

NYC makes 50K low-level pot busts a year

by Colleen Long and Jennifer Peltz - Nov. 5, 2011 12:50 PM

Associated Press

NEW YORK - As the nation's biggest city deals with threats of terrorism and a variety of violent crimes, carrying a little bit of marijuana is still a big deal.

There are more arrests for low-level pot possession in New York City -- about 50,000 a year -- than any other crime, accounting for about one of every seven cases that turn up in criminal courts.

It's a phenomenon that has persisted despite more leniency toward marijuana use -- the state loosened its marijuana-possession laws more than 30 years.

Critics say the deluge has been driven in part by the New York Police Department's strategy of stopping people and frisking those whom police say meet crime suspects' descriptions. More than a half a million people, mostly black and Hispanic men, were stopped last year -- unfair targets, critics say. About 10 percent of stops result in arrests.

The department says that the strategy's main goal is to take guns off the street and prevent crime, and that the tactic is a life-saving tool. But critics say officers looking for guns in pockets more often find pot and -- though state law says the drug is supposed to be in open view to warrant an arrest -- lock up the possessor anyway.

In response, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently reminded officers they can't make arrests for small amounts of pot in people's pockets or bags -- and can't trigger an arrest by searching people or telling them to empty their pockets.

"No one has showed me any evidence that this is how a large number of arrests are being made," he said. "But the allegation was made. So, in order to clear up any confusion that may exist, we put that order out to make certain that officers know that they cannot be the reason for someone displaying (marijuana) publicly."

Kelly said the vast majority of pot arrests come from undercover officers who witness hand-to-hand drug transactions or people smoking pot in public. And, the department says, as low-level arrests have risen, violent crime has decreased dramatically.

But many New Yorkers, mostly black and Hispanic men, say they're being targeted in the name of keeping the city safe.

Bronx community organizer Alfredo Carrasquillo, 27, estimated he's been arrested on marijuana possession charges more than 20 times, starting when he was 14 and police ordered him to empty out his pockets outside his high school. He says he was arrested, but was never was found smoking the drug or holding it out in the open -- though a 1977 state law says those with 25 grams of the drug or less in their pockets or bags should only be ticketed. Legally, it's a violation that doesn't result in a criminal record.

"We weren't stupid enough to smoke it in the middle of the day," he said.

Gabriel Sayegh, the New York director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group critical of the national war on drugs, said the department benefits from the arrests.

"Every year, they're bringing 50,000 people into their system," he said. "A significant portion of whom have not been arrested before.

Even if the cases ultimately get dismissed, as most first-time marijuana-possession arrests do, police net names, fingerprints and other information for law-enforcement databases, he noted.

New York's lowest-level marijuana-possession charge -- criminal possession of marijuana in the 5th degree, a misdemeanor -- has been the most common arrest charge in the city for much of the past decade, and the numbers have been steadily rising. So far this year there have been 38,359 reported arrests. Last year, there were 50,377 arrests citywide, up from 46,492 in 2009, according to statistics from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. That represents about 616 arrests per 100,000 city residents.

Police officials say the studies done by the New York-based Drug Policy alliance others are flawed, and also ignore the context of what has been happening in the city as these arrests continue to rise. Overall, they cite significant decreases in murder and major crimes -- the last decade has seen the four lowest annual murder totals since at least 1962.

"Drug use advocates ignored both the very high incidents of violent crime when low-level offenses were enforced far less vigorously than today, and the steep decrease in violence crime that occurred when less serious offenses, like marijuana, were consistently addressed," said Paul Browne, the department's chief spokesman.

Comparing different cities' arrest data is difficult because drug laws and data-keeping differ. In Chicago, possessing even 2.5 grams of marijuana is a crime that warrants arrest, and possessing up to an ounce is considered a misdemeanor. Chicago logged 22,291 arrests on that and other misdemeanor marijuana possession charges in 2009 and 22,764 last year, or about 826 arrests per 100,000 people, according to data from the Chicago Police Department provided to The Associated Press.

Earlier this week, a Chicago politician proposed to make possession of up to 10 grams of marijuana a summary offense, like a parking ticket, with a potential $200 fine, rather than a misdemeanor that carries possible jail time.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy didn't endorse the ordinance but has signaled he's open to it.

"With minor possession, it would be in everybody's interests to free up officers," said department spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton.

In California, possession of up to an ounce of marijuana was a misdemeanor until last Jan. 1; now it's a non-criminal infraction. The City of Los Angeles had 3,465 such arrests in 2010 and 4,714 in 2009 -- about 90 arrests per 100,000 residents, according to data from its police department.

In New York, two state lawmakers have proposed a similar measure: to make possession of less than 25 grams -- 7/8 of an ounce -- a violation, whether it's in the open or not.

It's difficult to put a price tag on the city's arrests. They add to already-busy arraignment court dockets; many cases are put on track to be dismissed quickly. Others take longer to resolve, sometimes because defendants have prior criminal records.

A report done earlier this year for the Drug Policy Alliance concluded it cost an estimated $75 million in 2010 to process, jail and prosecute the low-level arrests in New York. That figure was a compilation of estimated court costs, police manpower and jail time, averaging about $1,500 per arrest -- a cost shared by the state and city. The city budget alone is $65 billion.

The arrests can carry a heavy personal cost. An arrest alone can prompt a child-welfare inquiry, jeopardize job licenses and turn up in a background check.

Chino Hardin, 31, has been busted on marijuana charges more times than she can remember, most recently in 2003.

For each arrest, she pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession and was released, sometimes with a community-service sentence, Hardin said.

"At the time, I didn't really have a good grasp of the laws around possession of marijuana," she said, and after hours in custody, "all I wanted to do was just get out and go home."

She now has a job at a juvenile-justice group that entails telling teens about their rights in a police stop.

Homeland Security gets more drones to spy on us

The article seems to say the only reason the drones were purchased was for what seems like a corporate welfare program for the companies that manufacture the drones. I guess Congressmen get bribes, opps, I mean campaign contributions from the folks that make the drones and in turn purchase the drones after receiving the bribe, opps, again I mean campaign contribution.

Source

Homeland Security adding 3 drone aircraft despite lack of pilots

By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau

October 27, 2011

Reporting from Washington— The Homeland Security Department is adding three surveillance drone aircraft to a domestic fleet chiefly used to patrol the border with Mexico even though officials acknowledge they don't have enough pilots to operate the seven Predators they already possess.

The new drones are being purchased after lobbying by members of the so-called drone caucus in Congress, many from districts in Southern California, a major hub of the unmanned aircraft industry.

"We didn't ask for them," said a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

Officials said the Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine, which operates the drones, has enough pilots to fly the current fleet only five days a week.

Congress approved $32 million to buy the new drones last August. But the authorization did not include money to train or hire new pilots or crews, or to buy spare parts, officials said.

Every unmanned aircraft requires not just a ground-based pilot, but a platoon of surveillance analysts, sensor operators and a maintenance crew.

Homeland Security officials say they ultimately hope to deploy 18 to 24 drones along the borders.

For now, however, they say that they must shift money from other programs to buy the satellite bandwidth required to fly the seven drones they use.

"That is year-by-year, hand-to-mouth living," said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Customs and Border Protection has paid $240 million to manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., a private company in San Diego, for drones and maintenance since 2005, according to government contract data.

Since 2005, the company's political action committee has given $1.6 million to campaigns of members of Congress, including some in the drone caucus, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization in Washington that tracks political fundraising. Some privacy watchdog groups suggest the contributions are driving the policy, a charge lawmakers deny.

"This is a symptom of how surveillance technology is spreading around the U.S.," said Jay Stanley, a senior analyst on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union. "A lot of times it is not being pulled by people on the ground. It is being pushed from above by people who want to sell it."

The newest Predator B was scheduled to arrive in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday night. Another Predator was slated for delivery to Sierra Vista, Ariz., before the end of the year.

A third drone, a version of a Predator B called a Guardian that is designed to fly over the open ocean, will be based at Cape Canaveral, Fla., early next year to help track boats used by drug runners.

The drone caucus, officially the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, has 50 members, including 10 representing Southern California. They seek to expand the government's use of unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace.

"I would rather use technology to patrol the border than use a 14th century technology like a fence," Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said in a telephone interview Wednesday. Cuellar leads the bipartisan caucus with Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Santa Clarita).

Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-Carlsbad) says the CIA's use of armed Predators against militants in Pakistan has made the drone a kind of folk hero for many Americans. General Atomics is headquartered in his district.

"If you could register the Predator for president, both parties would be trying to endorse it," he said.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

How much of the 4th Amendment is null and void???

Source

Exhibit A in 4th Amendment privacy cases: technology

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

November 7, 2011

Sunset Strip bookie Charlie Katz suspected the feds had bugged his apartment, so he would amble over to a pay phone outside where Carney's hot dog joint now stands to call in his bets to Boston and Miami.

It was 1965, a time when phone booths had four glass walls and a folding door, allowing Katz to seal himself off from eavesdroppers. Or so he thought.

FBI agents planted a recording device at the booth and taped his dealings, leading to his conviction on eight illegal wagering charges. But two years later, Katz became a legal trailblazer when the U.S. Supreme Court tossed his conviction and expanded the 4th Amendment's guarantee of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure to include a citizen's "expectation of privacy."

The ruling in Katz vs. United States may have been a high-water mark, though, for recognition of individuals' right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects."

Court rulings since then have significantly limited what people can expect to keep private. This shift has accelerated as new technologies — including smartphones and GPS — have emerged.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will take up another hot-button 4th Amendment issue: whether GPS surveillance without a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search. The case, United States vs. Jones, will decide the law on GPS tracking across the country.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a decision by the usually liberal-leaning U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that an Ontario police sergeant's privacy had been violated when the city's police chief read through private text messages sent from his pager. The high court said public employees — who number 20 million nationwide — didn't have an expectation of privacy when sending personal messages on company devices.

Recent federal court rulings still making their way through the appeals process have condoned police seizure in the course of an arrest of everything stored on a suspect's smartphone — photos, banking records, email and Internet traffic — regardless of its relevance to the offense prompting the arrest.

The aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has resulted in even more government access to personal records. Courts have upheld the broad powers that the 2001 Patriot Act granted national security agents to access email, wiretap telephones or track a suspect's Internet use, all without a warrant and in secret, preventing the targets from knowing they are under surveillance.

The Supreme Court review of privacy rights and GPS tracking comes a year after the 9th Circuit ruled that federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents didn't violate an Oregon man's rights when they entered his driveway at 4 a.m. to clandestinely install a global positioning device on his car. Authorities used the data on his movements over four months to build a case that Juan Pineda-Moreno was illegally growing marijuana.

A ruling in United States vs. Jones — a case involving the use of a car-mounted GPS device to track a drug-trafficking suspect in the Washington, D.C., area — could settle the law in the Pineda-Moreno decision and in other challenges to such warrantless monitoring by government agencies. The 4th Amendment restrictions have been harshly lamented by 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a libertarian who tends to side with the court's progressives on privacy and 1st Amendment issues.

"The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory," Kozinski wrote in an impassioned objection to the Pineda-Moreno ruling by a three-judge panel of Republican appointees, like himself.

Writing for the panel, Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain said Pineda-Moreno couldn't expect to have privacy in his driveway because it had no gate, no sign against trespassing and was regularly used by letter carriers, delivery services and visitors. Furthermore, the judge noted from an earlier 9th Circuit ruling, "a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another."

Legal experts say the government now has much greater search and seizure powers than it did when Charlie Katz entered that Sunset Boulevard phone booth.

"This has become a huge issue, far beyond police putting GPS on your car, because we are all carrying around portable GPS devices," Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the tens of millions of cellphones and locating gadgets in Americans' cars and pockets.

Since the Patriot Act expanded government agents' clandestine access to individuals' communications records, the use of so-called national security letters seeking the information has increased astronomically, the ACLU said in a report earlier this year. It detailed the roadblocks encountered in three lawsuits it has brought challenging the intelligence services' right to clandestinely search or wiretap virtually any communications user.

California Gov. Jerry Brown has also followed the national trend of aiding law enforcement over individual rights. Last month, Brown vetoed a bill passed by the Legislature with a unanimous bipartisan vote prohibiting police from searching an arrestee's cellphone without a warrant. The governor cited a January California Supreme Court decision allowing such searches in saying that the question of whether police should have access is best left to the courts.

Prosecutors hail the courts' protection of their access to data that can be a major crime-fighting tool.

"In gang cases and in drug cases, the way cellphones are used today — whether you're talking about Twitter or Facebook or texting or use of the phone — it's just such a part of how things are being done, how things are planned, that getting immediate access to those things at the time of arrest is becoming more critical to preventing further violence and criminal conduct," said W. Scott Thorpe, head of the California District Attorneys Assn.

Michael Scott, a professor of privacy and technology law at Southwestern Law School, said he feared the state of 4th Amendment protection is "not too far from police being able to download phones during a traffic stop." But what appear to some analysts to be the erosion of privacy protections, Scott said, are actually the courts updating the Katz test of whether individuals can expect privacy in the changed circumstances of the digital era. Techniques like the use of GPS don't give police access to information that isn't already available to them if they physically follow a suspect, Scott noted.

Jesse Choper, a UC Berkeley constitutional law professor, sees conservative shifts on the two most influential courts in the country as the reason for the narrowing privacy definition. The Supreme Court's 5-4 majority of Republican-appointed justices tends to support law enforcement over privacy protection, and the 9th Circuit, although still dominated by appointees of Democratic presidents, has seen its liberal majority diluted by more moderate nominations by President Clinton and stalwart conservatives named to the court by President George W. Bush, Choper said.

The courts' redefinition of what can be considered private has been brought on by both technology and youthful communities willingly sharing thoughts, photos and intimate details with strangers on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, said Gerald Uelmen, a Santa Clara University professor of criminal law.

"They've created a culture of exposing everything on the Internet, including their private parts," said Uelmen. "We're seeing a whole generation for whom privacy is not important."

carol.williams@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Reefer Madness

Emperor Obama is a "drug war" terrorist, just like Emperor Bush

Source

Reefer Madness

By ETHAN NADELMANN

Published: November 6, 2011

MARIJUANA is now legal under state law for medical purposes in 16 states and the District of Columbia, encompassing nearly one-third of the American population. More than 1,000 dispensaries provide medical marijuana; many are well regulated by state and local law and pay substantial taxes. But though more than 70 percent of Americans support legalizing medical marijuana, any use of marijuana remains illegal under federal law. [I am for legalizing ALL drugs, not just marijuana. But the last poll I saw said that 50 percent, not 70 percent of Americans favored legalizing marijuana. I would sure like to see where that 70 percent number came from]

When he ran for president, Barack Obama defended the medical use of marijuana and said that he would not use Justice Department resources to override state laws on the issue. [Obama lied] He appeared to make good on this commitment in October 2009, when the Justice Department directed federal prosecutors not to focus their efforts on “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.”

But over the past year, federal authorities appear to have done everything in their power to undermine state and local regulation of medical marijuana and to create uncertainty, fear and confusion among those in the industry. The president needs to reassert himself to ensure that his original policy is implemented. [I think Obama has spoken with his actions and said he is against legalization and decriminalization of marijuana and that he wants to continue the drug war full speed ahead!]

The Treasury Department has forced banks to close accounts of medical marijuana businesses operating legally under state law. The Internal Revenue Service has required dispensary owners to pay punitive taxes required of no other businesses. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently ruled that state-sanctioned medical marijuana patients can not purchase firearms. [Obama could stop this, but he hasn't. Obama's police is to continue the drug war]

United States attorneys have also sent letters to local officials, coinciding with the adoption or implementation of state medical marijuana regulatory legislation, stressing their authority to prosecute all marijuana offenses. Prosecutors have threatened to seize the property of landlords and put them behind bars for renting to marijuana dispensaries. The United States attorney in San Diego, Laura E. Duffy, has promised to start targeting media outlets that run dispensaries’ ads. [Obama could stop this, but he hasn't. Obama's police is to continue the drug war]

President Obama has not publicly announced a shift in his views on medical marijuana, but his administration seems to be declaring one by fiat. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Michele M. Leonhart, a Bush appointee re-nominated by Mr. Obama, has exercised her discretionary authority to retain marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” And the pronouncements on marijuana, medical and otherwise, from Mr. Obama’s top drug policy adviser, R. Gil Kerlikowske, have been indistinguishable from those of Mr. Bush’s.

None of this makes any sense in terms of public safety, health or fiscal policy. Apart from its value to patients, medical marijuana plays an increasingly important role in local economies, transforming previously illegal jobs into legal ones and creating many new jobs as well, contributing to local tax bases and stimulating new economic activity. Federal crackdowns will not stop the trade in marijuana; they will only push it back underground and hurt those patients least able to navigate illicit markets.

Perhaps not since the civil rights era has law enforcement played such an aggressive role in what is essentially a cultural and political struggle. But this time the federal government is playing the bully, riding roughshod over states’ rights, not to protect vulnerable individuals but to harm them.

At the federal level, there have been few voices of protest. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill shy away from speaking out. Republicans mostly ignore the extent to which anti-marijuana zealotry threatens core conservative values like states rights, property rights and gun ownership.

Mr. Obama briefly showed a willingness to challenge the drug-war mind-set that permeates the federal drug-control establishment. He needs to show leadership and intervene now, to encourage and defend responsible state and local regulation of medical marijuana. [But Obama, won't, because Obama is a drug war terrorist just like George W. Bush]

Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

D.E.A. Squads Extend Reach of Drug War

From this article it seems that the "drug war" which started out as a American police war against drug users has turned into an American military war against drug users.

I wonder how soon police thugs trained by the American military will be killing suspected "drug war" criminals on American soil?

I have made comments asking when the "drug war" will start using drones with missiles to murder suspected drug dealers in the USA. I suspect these "drug war" actions could lead to that.

Source

D.E.A. Squads Extend Reach of Drug War

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: November 6, 2011

WASHINGTON — 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 reported the 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.

“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate effectively and safely in environments like this,” said Michael A. Braun, a former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program. “The D.E.A. is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation counterparts.”

The evolution of the program into a global enforcement arm reflects the United States’ growing reach in combating drug cartels and how policy makers increasingly are blurring the line between law enforcement and military activities, fusing elements of the “war on drugs” with the “war on terrorism.”

Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor who specializes in Latin America and counternarcotics, said the commando program carries potential benefits: the American teams could help arrest kingpins, seize stockpiles, disrupt smuggling routes and professionalize security forces in small countries through which traffickers pass drugs headed to the United States.

But there are also potential dangers.

“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” he said. “If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t exist in Central America.”

Because the presence of armed Americans on their soil raises sensitivities about sovereignty, some countries that have sought the assistance of the United States will not acknowledge it, and the D.E.A. is reluctant to disclose the details of the commando teams’ deployments. Others — like Mexico, which has accepted American help, including surveillance drones — have not wanted the commando squads.

Federal law prohibits the drug agency from directly carrying out arrests overseas, but agents are permitted to accompany their foreign counterparts on operations. The Americans work with specially vetted units of local security forces that they train and mentor. In “exigent circumstances,” they may open fire to protect themselves or partners.

The firefight in Honduras last March, described by officials of both countries, illustrates the flexibility of such rules. The Honduran minister of public security at the time, Oscar Álvarez, said that under the agreement with the D.E.A., the Americans normally did not go on missions.

But in that case, he said, a training exercise went live: an American squad was working with a Honduran police unit in La Mosquitia rainforest when they received word that a suspicious plane from Venezuela was being tracked to a clandestine landing strip nearby.

After the plane landed, the Honduran police identified themselves and the traffickers opened fire, officials of both countries said. After a 20-minute gunfight, the Hondurans and Americans seized the cocaine and withdrew to evacuate the wounded officer.

“I don’t want to say it was Vietnam-style, but it was typical of war action,” said Mr. Álvarez; he declined to say whether the Americans took part in the shooting, but another person familiar with the episode said they did.

The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.

The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.

In 2000, when the United States expanded assistance to Colombia in its battle against the narcotics-financed insurgent group called FARC, the trainers were military, not D.E.A. But after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration assigned Mr. Braun, a veteran of the earlier effort, to design a new program.

Begun in 2005, the program has five squads, each with 10 agents. Many are military veterans, and the section is overseen by a former member of the Navy Seals, Richard Dobrich. The Pentagon has provided most of their training and equipment, and they routinely fly on military aircraft.

The deployments to Afghanistan have resulted in large seizures of drugs, and some tragedy: two of the three D.E.A. agents who died in a helicopter crash in October 2009 were with FAST. Last week, an agent was shot in the head when his squad came under fire while leaving a bazaar where they had just seized 3,000 kilograms, about 6,600 pounds, of poppy seeds and 50 kilograms, about 110 pounds, of opium. Airlifted to Germany in critical condition, he is expected to survive, an official said.

The commandos have also been deployed at least 15 times to Latin America. The D.E.A. said some of those missions involved only training, but officials declined to provide details. Still, glimpses of the program emerged in interviews with current and former American and foreign officials, briefing files, budget documents and several State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

For example, an American team assisted Guatemalan forces in the March 2011 arrest of Juan Alberto Ortiz-López, whom the D.E.A. considered a top cocaine smuggler for the Sinaloa cartel, an official said. Videos of the raid show masked men in black tactical garb; it is unclear if any are Americans.

A diplomatic cable describes another mission in Guatemala. On July 21, 2009, seven American military helicopters carrying D.E.A. and Guatemalan security forces flew to the compound of a wealthy family, the Lorenzanas — four of whom were wanted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

After a “small firefight” in which a bullet grazed a Lorenzana family member, agents found “large numbers of weapons and amounts of cash” but not the targets, who may have been tipped off, according to the cable. The Guatemalan news media documented the failure, portraying the joint operation as a “D.E.A. raid.”

A former head of Guatemala’s national security council, Francisco Jiménez, said in an interview that American participation in such operations was an “open secret” but rarely acknowledged.

In October 2009, another official said, the agency deployed a squad aboard a Navy amphibious assault ship, the Wasp, off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where it focused on planes used for smuggling.

Cables also show the agency has twice come close to deploying one of its units to the Darién region of Panama, where FARC incursions have established cocaine smuggling routes. But both missions were aborted, for fears that it was too unsafe for the Americans or that their involvement could escalate the conflict.

FAST has repeatedly deployed squads to Haiti, helping to arrest three fugitives this year and train 100 Haitian counternarcotics officers this fall. Mario Andresol, the Haitian police chief, says he needs such help. “We know the smuggling routes,” he said, “but the problem is we don’t have enough people to go after them.”

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Honduras and Haiti, and Ginger Thompson from Washington.

Bullhead City Strip-club manager, dancers accused of selling pot

Strip-club manager, dancers accused of selling pot

by Brittany Noble - Nov. 7, 2011 01:25 PM

The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team

The manager of Bullhead City strip club and three dancers are accused of selling marijuana at the business, authorities said.

Mohammed Omar Mahfouz, 41, manager at Dream Girls, was selling marijuana from his vehicle outside the business, according to the Bullhead City Police Department. A small amount of marijuana, a digital scale and a handgun were found inside his vehicle during a search Saturday by the Mohave Area General Narcotic Enforcement Team, police said.

Mahfouz was arrested on suspicion of possession of marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale, sales of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and misconduct involving weapons, police said.

Also arrested were dancers Sandra Jacqueline Barajas, 30, Jessica Lynn Christensen, 19, and Koco Corinne Frederick, 35, who are accused of possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and sales of marijuana.

All three dancers had sold the drug to undercover narcotic detectives during a yearlong undercover investigation at Dream Girls, police said

Another dancer, Rebecca Ellen Welch, 27, was arrested for an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for failure to pay fines and possession of drug paraphernalia at the time of the search, according to officials.

All suspects were being held at the Mohave County Jail in Kingman

Dr. Conrad Murray was railroaded by the criminal justice system

Source

Nov. 7, 2011 5:01 PM ET

Jackson doctor convicted in star's 2009 drug death

LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Michael Jackson's doctor was convicted Monday of involuntary manslaughter after a trial that painted him as a reckless caregiver who administered a lethal dose of a powerful anesthetic that killed the pop star.

The verdict against Dr. Conrad Murray marked the latest chapter in one of pop culture's most shocking tragedies — the death of the King of Pop on the eve of the singer's heavily promoted comeback concerts.

Members of Jackson's family, including his sister LaToya, wept quietly after the verdict was read.

"Michael was looking over us," LaToya said on the way out of the courtroom. Jackson's mother, Katherine Jackson, said she was confident the trial's outcome would be a guilty verdict.

Murray sat stone-faced during the verdict and was handcuffed and taken into custody without bail until sentencing on Nov. 29. He appeared calm as officials led him out of the courtroom.

There was a shriek in the courtroom when the verdict was read, and the crowd erupted outside the courthouse.

The jury deliberated less than nine hours. Murray, 58, faces a sentence of up to four years in prison. He could also lose his medical license.

Murray's attorneys left the courtroom without commenting.

In Las Vegas, a former Murray patient and current friend, Donna DiGiacomo, sobbed and said she thought the jury was under "overwhelming pressure to convict."

Jackson died on June 25, 2009. The complete story of his death finally emerged during the six-week trial. It was the tale of a tormented genius on the brink of what might have been his greatest triumph with one impediment standing in his way — extreme insomnia.

Testimony came from medical experts, household employees and Murray's former girlfriends, among others.

The most shocking moments, however, came when prosecutors displayed a large picture of Jackson's gaunt, lifeless body on a hospital gurney and played the sound of his drugged, slurred voice, as recorded by Murray just weeks before the singer's death.

Jackson talked about plans for a children's hospital and his hope of cementing a legacy larger than that of Elvis Presley or The Beatles.

"We have to be phenomenal," he said about his "This Is It" concerts in London. "When people leave this show, when people leave my show, I want them to say, 'I've never seen nothing like this in my life. Go. Go. I've never seen nothing like this. Go. It's amazing. He's the greatest entertainer in the world.'"

Throughout the trial, Jackson family members watched from the spectator gallery, fans gathered outside with signs and T-shirts demanding, "Justice for Michael," and an international press corps broadcast reports around the world. The trial was televised and streamed on the Internet.

Prosecutors portrayed Murray as an incompetent doctor who used the anesthetic propofol without adequate safeguards and whose neglect left Jackson abandoned as he lay dying.

Murray's lawyers sought to show the doctor was a medical angel of mercy with former patients vouching for his skills. Murray told police from the outset that he gave Jackson propofol and other sedatives as the star struggled for sleep to prepare for his shows. But the doctor said he administered only a small dose on the day Jackson died.

Lawyers for Murray and a defense expert blamed Jackson for his own death, saying the singer gave himself the fatal dose of propofol while Murray wasn't watching. A prosecution expert said that theory was crazy.

Murray said he had formed a close friendship with Jackson, never meant to harm him and couldn't explain why he died.

The circumstances of Jackson's death at the age of 50 were as bizarre as any chapter in the superstar's sensational life story.

Jackson was found not breathing in his own bed in his rented mansion after being dosed intravenously with propofol, a drug normally administered in hospitals during surgery.

The coroner ruled the case a homicide and the blame would fall to the last person who had seen Jackson alive — Murray, who had been hired to care for the singer as the comeback concerts neared.

Craving sleep, Jackson had searched for a doctor who would give him the intravenous anesthetic that Jackson called his "milk" and believed to be his salvation. Other medical professionals turned him down, according to trial testimony.

Murray gave up his practices in Houston and Las Vegas and agreed to travel with Jackson and work as his personal physician indefinitely.

For six weeks, as Jackson undertook strenuous rehearsals, Murray infused him with propofol every night, the doctor told police. He later tried to wean Jackson from the drug because he feared he was becoming addicted.

Jackson planned to pay Murray $150,000 a month for an extended tour in Europe. In the end, the doctor was never paid a penny because Jackson died before signing the contract.

During the last 24 hours of his life, Jackson sang and danced at a spirited rehearsal, reveling in the adulation of fans who greeted him outside. Then came a night of horror, chasing sleep — the most elusive treasure the millionaire entertainer could not buy.

Testimony showed Murray gave Jackson intravenous doses that night of the sedatives lorazepam and midazolam. Jackson also took a Valium pill. But nothing seemed to bring sleep.

Finally, Murray told police, he gave the singer a small dose of propofol — 25 milligrams — that seemed to put him to sleep. The doctor said he felt it was safe to leave his patient's bedside for a few minutes, but Jackson was not breathing when he returned.

Witnesses said he was most likely dead at that point.

What happened next was a matter of dispute during the trial. Security and household staff described Murray as panicked, never calling emergency services but trying to give Jackson CPR on his bed instead of the firm floor.

A guard said Murray was concerned with packing up and hiding medicine bottles and IV equipment before telling him to call emergency services. Prosecutors said Murray was distracted while Jackson was sedated, citing Murray's cell phone records to show he made numerous calls.

Authorities never accused Murray of intending to kill the star, and it took eight months for them to file the involuntary manslaughter charge against him. It was the lowest possible felony charge involving a homicide.

There was no law against administering propofol or the other sedatives. But prosecution expert witnesses said Murray was acting well below the standard of care required of a physician.

They said using propofol in a home setting without lifesaving equipment on hand was an egregious deviation from that standard. They called it gross negligence, the legal basis for an involuntary manslaughter charge.

The defense team countered with its own expert who presented calculations suggesting that Jackson gave himself the fatal dose.

In closing arguments, the prosecutor said the mystery of what happened behind the closed doors of Jackson's bedroom on the fatal day probably would never be solved.

___

Associated Press writers Anthony McCartney in Los Angeles and Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this story.

California Dispensaries Moving to Block U.S. Marijuana Crackdown

California Dispensaries Moving to Block U.S. Marijuana Crackdown

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: November 7, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for the medical marijuana industry said on Monday that they would seek court orders to halt a threatened federal crackdown on marijuana dispensaries, their landlords and marijuana growers.

In legal motions to be filed on Tuesday, marijuana distributors and some medical patients will ask federal judges in four districts to issue temporary restraining orders to prevent federal prosecutors from taking action, lawyers and a lobbyist for the industry said at a news conference here on Monday.

“The government’s irrational policy has reached a breaking point,” said Matthew Kumin, one of the lawyers. “The federal government said it will not prosecute patients, and yet they want to shut off their supply. This doesn’t make sense.”

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, though its use is allowed for medical purposes in California and some other states. But federal prosecutors and drug agents say that behind the mask of meeting medical needs, much of California’s burgeoning marijuana industry is engaged in large-scale illegal sales.

In letters sent out in late September, the prosecutors warned numerous dispensaries to shut down or face serious civil or criminal charges, including possible seizure of the property of their landlords. Recipients of letters were given 45 days to halt illegal sales, a period that for many ends on Saturday.

Mr. Kumin said that if a restraining order was not quickly granted by the federal judges, he expected some dispensaries to shut down.

The courts could issue an immediate restraint, schedule hearings on whether to grant a preliminary injunction or deny the requests, which the plaintiffs argue are based on a variety of constitutional and state rights.

Tensions between California and the federal government over medical marijuana have been building since the state became the first to authorize public sales, in 1996. Now, 15 other states and the District of Columbia also allow sales of marijuana to patients with a doctor’s prescription.

A thriving industry of growers and storefront dispensaries has emerged in California that pays substantial sums in state and local taxes, but that federal drug officials see as largely illegal. The Internal Revenue Service has also started a crackdown, denying some sellers the right to deduct marijuana-related business expenses.

Asked to comment on the suits, Benjamin B. Wagner, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, issued this statement: “Unless and until ordered otherwise, we will continue to do our duty in enforcing federal narcotics laws.”

FDA is blocked from requiring graphic warnings on cigarette labels

On the other hand I don't see how an ethical moral person or business can try to convince someone to start smoking so they can make money selling them cigarettes which will cause them to have bad health and possibly kill them.

Source

FDA is blocked from requiring graphic warnings on cigarette labels

By Alexa Vaughn, Los Angeles Times

November 8, 2011

Reporting from Washington— A federal judge has blocked the government from requiring tobacco companies to begin placing images of diseased lungs and cadavers on cigarette packages, saying the health warnings violated the firms' 1st Amendment rights.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, in a 29-page ruling Monday, granted the preliminary injunction because he believed there was a "substantial likelihood" the cigarette companies ultimately would win "on the merits of their position that these mandatory graphic images unconstitutionally compel speech."

He also said that the images went beyond disseminating "purely factual and uncontroversial information" and ventured into advocacy.

The Food and Drug Administration rule, authorized by Congress in 2009 and slated to go into effect in September, now is likely to be embroiled in a legal dispute for months or years.

The images include an infant in an incubator, a man breathing through a respirator and a man breathing through a hole in his throat. Warnings such as "Tobacco smoke can harm your children" appear next to the images.

The cigarette makers suing the FDA are R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Lorillard Tobacco Co., Commonwealth Brands Inc., Liggett Group and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co.

James Wheaton, a 1st Amendment expert who teaches at UC Berkeley and who has sued tobacco companies over what he says are inadequate warnings, agreed with the judge.

"You can't force a company to carry the government's opinion on an issue," Wheaton said. "These images are clearly not limited to a statement of fact. They're designed to evoke an emotional response."

But Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, opposed weakening the warnings.

"There's an overwhelming case that these are constitutional and factually supportable," he said. "The judge was wrong on science, wrong on fact and ignored scientific evidence."

Myers cited studies, such as one completed by Canada's University of Waterloo in May, showing that large, graphic images are most effective at getting the attention of young people and thus should be a permissible way to inform the public.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat, expressed confidence that the FDA ultimately would be permitted to require the graphic warnings.

He said that Congress, in giving the FDA the go-ahead on its plan to require the images, "considered the 1st Amendment issues involved and carefully tailored the legislation to ensure the FDA could act" as it proposed. He predicted the FDA rule would "be affirmed and permitted to go into effect next year."

The FDA declined to comment on the ruling.

Wheaton said some of the FDA labels — such as one with pictures of healthy lungs next to diseased lungs — might be considered to be based on fact and therefore would have a better chance of passing constitutional muster.

Besides the images themselves, the tobacco companies are unhappy about the amount of space the warnings would take up on their packaging.

"You have to draw the line somewhere," Wheaton said. "You can't tell them the whole box will be a warning label with a logo in the corner. The smoking companies don't come into this with clean hands either, but that doesn't mean you can take away their constitutional rights."

alexa.vaughn@latimes.com

Don't these pigs have any criminals to hunt down????

If these pigs are hanging out at malls and senor centers asking people to turn in their unused prescription drugs, instead of hunting down criminals maybe they are not needed and should be laid off.

Source

3 tons of unwanted medicine collected in Arizona

Nov. 8, 2011 05:58 AM

Associated Press

PHOENIX - Three tons of expired or unwanted prescription drugs were collected at 92 sites across Arizona as part of the state's third Drug Take-Back Day.

More than 50 law enforcement agencies in Arizona took part in the collection effort that was launched on Oct. 29.

The goal of the disposal effort is to prevent drug abuse.

More than three tons of prescription drugs were collected at 90 sites at a similar event in April.

8 years in prison for 30 stinking pounds of weed?

Source

Douglas man sentenced in pot case

by Angela Piazza - Nov. 8, 2011 10:15 PM

The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team

A Douglas man has been sentenced to eight years in prison for selling marijuana, according to Pinal County sheriff's officials.

Julio Cesar Morales, 31, was arrested in June 2010 near Elloy. The Pinal County Sheriff's Office discovered that Morales was attempting to transport over 30 pounds of marijuana from Douglas to Phoenix.

He was convicted of a Class 2 felony at the Superior Court in Florence.

Morales had prior felony convictions that contributed to his sentencing Monday, officials added.

What drugs should be legal to murder people with?

And if we go to the "drug war" Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has refused to obey the Arizona medical marijuana laws which allows medical marijuana dispensary to open because she claims that Arizona government employees might be prosecuted by the Feds for using an illegal drug.

Sadly Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has not stopped any Arizona executions because of the same excuse that Arizona employees might be prosecuted by the Feds for using an illegal drug to murder people with.

Source

Execution drug claim expands

by Michael Kiefer - Nov. 9, 2011 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

The Federal Public Defender's Office in Phoenix filed documents in U.S. District Court furthering allegations that the Arizona Department of Corrections repeatedly violated its own rules in executing death-row prisoners and knowingly obtained its execution drugs illegally.

In July, Public Defender's Office attorneys sued Arizona on behalf of Thomas West, who was executed two days later, and five other death-row inmates. The lawsuit asks for an injunction to prevent the state from performing executions until it can prove it is in compliance with the established protocol for performing them.

The state has asked the court to throw out the claim that its execution drugs were not legal because none of the named plaintiffs will actually be executed using those drugs.

Monday's response by public defenders to that state motion details how the state Department of Corrections ignored advice to steer clear of a certain British drug exporter because it was not licensed to export the specific drugs used in executions. In fact, at the time, foreign sources of one of the drugs was not approved.

A former U.S. Food and Drug Administration attorney who now advises companies on FDA procedures offered testimonial for the public defenders, saying the drugs were unapproved and illegally brought into the country, and that a local FDA official had advised the department to split the drugs into smaller shipments so that they would pass through U.S. customs with little or no scrutiny.

The Arizona Republic first reported last year that the drugs used to kill an inmate in October 2010 had been imported from England. Several other states had imported drugs from the same pharmaceutical firm. State Department of Corrections officials and their counsel at the Arizona Attorney General's Office insisted the drugs had been obtained lawfully. But in April, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration began confiscating them in some states and ordering others -- including Arizona -- not to use the imported drugs they had in store.

Monday's filing noted that medical personnel carrying out Arizona executions have repeatedly disregarded a written protocol approved by federal court stating that execution drugs are to be introduced into the condemned person's body through an arm catheter, not in a "central line" catheter that is surgically implanted in the person's groin.

It also said the department kept its promise to conduct background checks of the medical team members.

Monday's motion states that in September 2010, as the state prepared to execute murderer Jeffrey Landrigan, state Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan learned of the British pharmaceutical distributor from Corrections personnel in Arkansas. At issue was the drug sodium thiopental, which had become unavailable in the United States, but was a crucial sedative used for executions in Arizona and elsewhere.

Ryan's former chief deputy, Charles Flanagan, contacted the distributor and wrote, "Anything and everything you can do to expedite the shipment is both necessary and appreciated."

Flanagan also contacted the medical director of the department's usual supplier, who told him that the British company was a "gray" marketer, meaning the reputation of the distributor and the quality of the pharmaceuticals was questionable. She further informed Flanagan that the distributor was not licensed to export the drug to the U.S.

Nonetheless, the filing alleges, Flanagan ordered the drugs and then asked his department's procurement officer to split a later shipment into smaller batches to qualify for "informal entry," meaning the drugs were less likely to be scrutinized.

Make police get a warrant for GPS tracking

Editorial: Make police get a warrant for GPS tracking

Should government agents be allowed to plant a GPS device in your car and track your movements wherever you go? In fact, should they be allowed to do the same to every citizen, every day, without even bothering to prove the need to a judge?

The government's answer, recited by one of its attorneys to a skeptical Supreme Court on Tuesday, is yes. Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the court that, according to its own precedents, police could secretly track the justices themselves.

The case is an unusually pointed example of the way advances in technology are eroding principles that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution 224 years ago to protect citizens for onerous government intrusion — in this instance the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures."

No so long ago, police who wanted to follow someone had to mount a difficult and expensive surveillance operation, which inherently limited the practice. Now they can plant a GPS device and monitor it on a computer, which is what police in Washington, D.C., did to track a suspected cocaine dealer. They put a Global Positioning System tracker in his car and followed his movements for 28 days, tying him to a stash house where they recovered drugs, weapons and cash.

The dealer was arrested and convicted, but an appeals court overturned the conviction because the police's search warrant had expired and didn't cover Maryland, where police had finally managed to stick the device on his Jeep.

The government wants the conviction reinstated, but if the court agrees, the principle won't apply just to cocaine dealers. It will apply to everyone. And the tactic could be used not just by police but by other government authorities.

The justices seemed appropriately skeptical of the government lawyers. "So if you win," said Justice Stephen Breyer, "you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984," George Orwell's classic novel in which an all-seeing "Big Brother" watches all citizens all the time.

The government's argument is that police don't need a warrant when they track people on public roads where they can be watched by cameras and other drivers — and where police could physically tail them without a warrant.

But of course, the technology changes everything. Even with speed cameras, red-light cameras and a squadron of pursuers, authorities would have a very hard time amassing a record of every place someone travels for 28 days.

The idea is, indeed, Orwellian, not to mention downright "creepy and un-American," to use the words of the chief justice of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At a minimum, police should first have to convince a judge that there's probable cause to issue a search warrant — and use it properly.

The Founding Fathers, brilliant though they were, could not possibly have envisioned GPS technology. But they certainly understood the principles of personal freedom, and two centuries later those haven't changed a bit.

First and foremost, the Constitution they wrote guarantees individual rights against unnecessary government intrusion. Let's hope that when the Supreme Court rules in this case, it does the same.

Court Casts a Wary Eye on Tracking by GPS

Court Casts a Wary Eye on Tracking by GPS

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: November 8, 2011

WASHINGTON — In an argument studded with references to George Orwell’s “1984” and the possibility that rapid advances in technology would soon allow the government to monitor everyone’s movements, the Supreme Court on Tuesday struggled to articulate how the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures should apply to the tracking of cars using GPS devices. The fit between 18th-century principles and 21st-century surveillance seemed to leave several justices frustrated.

The lawyers in the case did not help settle matters, with each adopting what at least some justices characterized as extreme positions.

The case concerned Antoine Jones, who was the owner of a Washington nightclub when the police came to suspect him of being part of a cocaine-selling operation. They placed a tracking device on his Jeep Grand Cherokee without a valid warrant, tracked his travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned his conviction, saying the sheer amount of information that had been collected violated the Fourth Amendment.

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said there might be a constitutional difference between discrete pieces of data and the collection of vast amounts of information. “You’re talking about the difference between seeing the little tile and seeing a mosaic,” he said.

But Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy United States solicitor general, said there were no constitutional limits to the government’s ability to track people’s movements in public. He said a device surreptitiously attached to clothing would be permissible so long as it did not convey information from inside a home. He added that the police could track the movements of the justices’ cars without a warrant.

On hearing those statements, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the “endpoint” of the government’s argument was that “an electronic device, as long as it’s not used inside the house, is O.K.”

Mr. Dreeben said that was correct regarding people’s movements in public. Other forms of monitoring — of conversations inside cars, say — were subject to different rules, he said.

That means, Justice Stephen G. Breyer told Mr. Dreeben, that “if you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” And that, Justice Breyer said, “sounds like ‘1984.’ ”

Mr. Dreeben said, “The court should address the so-called ‘1984’ scenarios if they come to pass, rather than using this case as a vehicle for doing so.”

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor indicated that the scenario might have already arrived. “It wouldn’t take that much of a budget, local budget, to place a GPS on every car in the nation,” she said.

Mr. Dreeben said law enforcement officials have used GPS tracking sparingly. At the federal level, he said, “It’s in the low thousands annually.”

Like Mr. Dreeben, Stephen C. Leckar, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, also took a categorical position, saying that in “no circumstances should a GPS be allowed to be put on someone’s car.” He added, “If you want to use GPS devices, get a warrant.”

Chief Justice Roberts, noting that the court had pressed Mr. Dreeben “to the limits of his theory,” asked Mr. Leckar for the limits of his. Would three minutes of GPS tracking violate the Fourth Amendment?

Yes, Mr. Leckar said. Later, he offered some other possible limits: “One day. One trip. One person per day or a trip.”

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia said such arbitrary limits should be imposed by legislatures rather than a court.

Some of the justices seemed inclined to decide the case on a narrow ground, that of whether the police had acted unlawfully simply by attaching the device. That approach would leave the broader issues in the case, United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, for another day.

DEA opera en la región comandos antidroga

DEA opera en la región comandos antidroga

Martes 08 de noviembre de 2011 El Universal

NUEVA YORK (Notimex).— La Agencia Antidrogas de Estados Unidos (DEA) tiene escuadrones tipo comando que ha estado desplegando discretamente en años recientes en cinco países de Centroamérica y el Caribe para combatir el narcotráfico, publicó ayer The New York Times.

Con base en entrevistas con funcionarios involucrados, el diario afirmó que el programa se llama Equipo Asesor de Apoyo en el Extranjero (FAST, por sus siglas en inglés), y que fue creado durante el gobierno del hoy ex presidente George W. Bush. El objetivo original del programa era investigar a los narcotraficantes vinculados con el movimiento Talibán en Afganistán. Pero desde 2008 y ahora bajo el gobierno del presidente Barack Obama, el programa se ha extendido fuera de la zona de guerra.

Actualmente opera comandos en Haití, Honduras, República Dominicana, Guatemala y Belice, añadió el rotativo. De acuerdo con el periódico, “la evolución del programa para convertirse en un arma para hacer cumplir la ley globalmente refleja el creciente alcance del combate de Estados Unidos contra los cárteles de la droga”. Refleja también “cómo los políticos borran cada vez más la línea entre las actividades policiales y militares, fusionando elementos de la ‘guerra contra las drogas’ y de la ‘guerra contra el terrorismo’”, añadió. “Uno tiene que tener capacidades y equipos especiales para operar efectivamente y con seguridad en ambientes como éste. La DEA trabaja hombro con hombro y en la línea de fuego con sus contrapartes en las naciones anfitrionas”, dijo Michael A. Braun, ex jefe de operaciones de la agencia y uno de los diseñadores del programa.

El diario citó a académicos que opinan que aunque el programa comporta beneficios potenciales, como ayudar a detener capos del narcotráfico, no pararía “de manera permanente” el flujo de drogas porque ello requiere que un país cuente con fuertes instituciones, “lo que a menudo no existe en América Central”. Indicó que “debido a que la presencia de estadounidenses armados en su territorio despierta sensibilidades acerca de su soberanía, algunos países que han buscado asistencia de Estados Unidos no lo reconocen”. “Otros, como México, que ha aceptado asistencia estadunidense, incluyendo sobrevuelos de aviones no tripulados, rechazan la presencia de comandos”, añadió.

EEUU tiene cinco comandos antidrogas en Latinoamérica

EEUU tiene cinco comandos antidrogas en Latinoamérica

09/11/2011 publicado por Luz Mendoza

Washington | La agencia antidroga estadounidense tiene cinco comandos operativos que llevan a cabo misiones secretas en países de Centroamérica, Sudamérica y el Caribe, según reveló ayer el diario The New York Times.

Ese pequeño Ejército de operaciones especiales se creó hace seis años para combatir el cultivo de opio por parte de los talibanes en Afganistán, pero en los años recientes, y en el contexto de la oleada de muertes que han provocado en México la actividades de los cárteles de la droga, la Casa Blanca ha autorizado que se envíe al cuerpo en misiones a países vecinos.

Hasta la fecha, y según ha revelado el diario citando fuentes anónimas de la Administración norteamericana, estos soldados han llevado a cabo misiones en Honduras, Haití, La República Dominicana, Guatemala, y Belize, entre otras naciones.

Fue el expresidente de EEUU, George W. Bush, quien creó los cinco comandos secretos bajo el nombre de Equipo de Apoyo y Asesoramiento de Despliegue Extranjero (FAST, por sus siglas en inglés). Cada escuadrón cuenta con 10 soldados.

En 2005, el entonces jefe de operaciones de la agencia antidroga (DEA, por sus siglas en inglés) Michael A. Braun, admitió la existencia de ese programa ante la Cámara de Representantes.

“Cada uno de los cinco grupos de FAST estará compuesto por un agente especial que es el supervisor, cuatro agentes especiales, y un especialista de investigación en inteligencia. Los grupos FAST, que recibirán formación especializada, serán desplegados en Afganistán, dos grupos simultáneamente y rotarán cada 120 días”, dijo.

Fue el actual presidente Barack Obama quien autorizó, después de su llegada al poder en 2009, el despliegue de esos cinco escuadrones de la DEA en Latinoamérica, más allá de las zonas de cultivo de opio en Afganistán.

Algunos países se han negado a la presencia de tropas estadounidenses en su suelo nacional. Ese el caso de México, que, sin embargo, sí ha aceptado otro tipo de asistencia, como el espionaje de narcotraficantes a través de aeronaves no tripuladas, o “drones”.

Ya en los años 80 del siglo pasado, bajo la supervisión del expresidente Ronald Reagan, la DEA protagonizó misiones en alianza con Gobiernos en países como Bolivia o Perú.

Latinos llaman a protestar

La comunidad latina en Estados Unidos debe ejercer una mayor presión sobre la administración federal y mostrar su inconformidad con el sistema político y económico nacional, comentó ayer el diario californiano La Opinión.

En este país, una "minoría ruidosa", que hable fuerte puede, muy a menudo, tener una influencia mucho mayor que su tamaño, como mismo ocurre con el movimiento de protestas Ocupar Wall Strett (OWS) en varias ciudades del país, estimó el rotativo.

Este lunes, latinos de Nueva York marcharon junto a afroamericanos, a fin de denunciar los efectos de la crisis económica y financiera provocada por Wall Street en sus comunidades.

A menudo parece que la política estadounidense está en manos de una "dictadura de las minorías", donde un puñado de congresistas puede detener un proyecto de ley que favorece, sin embargo, a la mayoría de la población, indicó el periódico.

Puso como ejemplo el caso del Tea Party, ala conservadora del Partido Republicano, reconocido por su activismo a favor de severos recortes públicos y a la privatización de los seguros médicos, medidas impulsadas por el presidente Barack Obama.

Agentes de la DEA participan en operativos en Centroamérica

Agentes de la DEA participan en operativos en Centroamérica

Prensa Web RNV/La Jornada

8 Noviembre 2011, 09:27 AM

Agentes de la administración antidrogas estadounidense (DEA) participan con armas en operativos contra narcotraficantes en cinco países de Centroamérica y el Caribe, entre ellos Honduras, República Dominicana y Guatemala, reveló el New York Times. Los comandos de la DEA han realizado operaciones "al menos 15 veces en América Latina", aseguró el rotativo.

"Otros (países), como México, que han aceptado asistencia estadounidense, incluidos sobrevuelos de aviones no tripulados (drones), rechazan la presencia de comandos", añadió el diario.

Según el periódico estadounidense, agentes de la DEA participaron este año en un operativo antidrogas en Honduras llevado adelante por fuerzas de seguridad hondureñas, que incluyó un enfrentamiento armado con los narcotraficantes y en el que un policía hondureño murió.

Citando documentos y entrevistas con funcionarios de seguridad, el New York Times afirmó que la DEA tiene cinco equipos estilo comando creados en 2005, que han estado actuando en los últimos años en naciones occidentales como Honduras, República Dominicana, Guatemala, Belice y Haití.

Cada comando consta de 10 agentes, muchos militares veteranos, que son supervisados por Richard Dobrich, un agente de los llamados Seal de la marina estadounidense. Los agentes fueron entrenados y equipados con aeronaves por el Pentágono.

El programa Fast (Foreign Deployed Advisory Support Team) fue creado por George W. Bush durante su gobierno para investigar los vínculos entre los talibanes y los narcotraficantes en Afganistán, y continuó bajo el mandato de su sucesor Barack Obama, ampliando su zona de acción.

"Uno debe tener capacidades y equipos especiales para operara efectivamente y con seguridad en ambientes como éste. La DEA trabaja hombro con hombro y en la línea de fuego con sus contrapartes en las naciones anfitrionas", dijo al periódico Michael A. Braun, ex jefe de operaciones de la agencia y uno de los diseñadores del programa.

De acuerdo con el periódico, la evolución del programa como arma global capaz de reforzar la ley refleja el creciente alcance de Estados Unidos contra los cárteles de la droga.

Sin embargo, refleja también "cómo los políticos borran cada vez más la línea entre las actividades policiales y militares al fusionar elementos de la guerra contra las drogas y la guerra contra el terrorismo", añadió.

El diario citó a académicos que opinan que aunque el programa aporta beneficios potenciales, como ayudar a detener a capos del narcotráfico, decomisar cargamentos, combatir rutas de tráfico de drogas y profesionalizar a las fuerzas de seguridad de los países involucrados, también existen riesgos como el de fragmentar a las organizaciones al capturar a sus capos, lo que provocaría mayor violencia.

Asimismo, no detiene "de manera permanente" el flujo de drogas, ya que ello requiere de que un país cuente con instituciones fuertes, "lo que a menudo no existe en Centroamérica", señalaron al diario expertos en la región.

También indicó que "como la presencia de estadounidenses armados en su territorio despierta sensibilidades acerca de su soberanía, algunos países que han buscado asistencia de Estados Unidos no lo reconocen".

El periódico también destaca que, según las leyes federales estadounidenses, los agentes de la DEA no pueden llevar a cabo detenciones en forma directa fuera de Estados Unidos, aunque sí están autorizados a participar en operaciones junto con fuerzas de seguridad locales; no obstante, "bajo condiciones difíciles", pueden abrir fuego para protegerse o proteger a sus compañeros.

Los comandos de la DEA han realizado operaciones "al menos 15 veces en América Latina", aunque la agencia afirma que algunas de esas misiones "involucraron sólo entrenamiento", señaló el diario, y añadió que algunas de sus misiones han sido reveladas por los cables diplomáticos sacados a la luz por el sitio Wikileaks.

Una fue la ocurrida en marzo de 2011 en Guatemala para arrestar a Juan Alberto Ortiz López, narcotraficante del cártel de Sinaloa, en la que un comando de la DEA ayudó a las fuerzas de seguridad guatemaltecas para concretar su aprehensión. Videos de la persecución muestran a hombres vestidos de negro y enmascarados, aunque no queda claro si son agentes estadounidenses, añadió el New York Times.

A sane voice from Mexico City on the drug war??

Source

Mexico City mayor calls drug policy 'schizophrenic'

November 9, 2011 | 1:01 pm

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard says that if elected president he would remove his nation's military forces from the fight against violent drug cartels and seek a dialogue with policymakers in the United States over narcotics laws in both countries, which he called "schizophrenic."

"If the United States is legalizing marijuana and we're over here killing ourselves on the street over marijuana, that does not make sense," Ebrard said Tuesday, referring to U.S. states, such as California, that have sought to decriminalize the sale and use of cannabis.

In Mexico, Ebrard noted, drug consumption is legal in small amounts, while production and distribution is not.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug war since the conservative President Felipe Calderon sent the armed forces to battle the cartels in late 2006. But his government, in 2009, also proposed the law decriminalizing drug use.

"The law is very confusing and very inefficient," Ebrard said. "We need to have a common policy with the United States, because if not, we have a schizophrenic scheme that is very costly for Mexico."

Ebrard made the comments during a lengthy round-table interview with foreign media reporters at City Hall. The event marked the release of a glossy book published by the city government that hails the accomplishments of Ebrard's term as mayor in areas such as transportation and the environment.

Ebrard, a leftist who has proven popular in Mexico City, is seeking to position himself as electable on a national level, where he is largely unfamiliar to outside voters.

His chief hurdle to capture the nomination of the Democratic Revolution Party is the former Mexico City mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The PRD presidential candidate from 2006 still commands a passionate base of support nationwide, despite being marginalized after refusing to recognize Calderon's government.

To solve the split, both men said they would honor a poll asking voters who they would prefer to represent Mexico's left in the 2012 race. The results of that poll -- the elements of which were carefully negotiated between the two camps -- could come by the end of the week.

Pressed about his drug and security policy if elected president, Ebrard said he would remove the military from the streets and seek to build up state police forces that could tackle trafficking and corruption locally. He'd also seek to reform the judicial system.

Calderon has said the military should stay on the job until Mexico has cleaned up its graft-laden police forces, which are most troubled at the state and local levels. He won approval of a judicial reform bill in 2008 that, among other things, would bring U.S.-style oral trials to Mexico. Other reform proposals have been held up by a slow and sometimes uncooperative Mexican Congress.

-- Daniel Hernandez

Mexican security forces commit serious abuses, group reports

Mexican security forces commit serious abuses, group reports

November 9, 2011 | 2:44 pm

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- In a comprehensive report released Wednesday, New York-based Human Rights Watch documented 234 cases which the group says represent serious abuse by marines and other security forces in several Mexican states.

The 220-page report, more than a year in the making, paints a tableau of murder, torture and sexual assault of detainees; “forced disappearances” (i.e., kidnappings where the victim never appears again); efforts by armed forces to hide their crimes by tampering with evidence; intimidation of families of victims if they complain or speak out; virtually no serious investigations by civilian or military authorities of the allegations. (See footage below.)

The decision by President Felipe Calderon in December 2006 to deploy troops, who now number more than 50,000, against powerful drug cartels has not succeeded in reducing violence but instead led to a “dramatic increase” in human rights atrocities, Human Rights Watch concluded.

The behavior by marines has “only exacerbated the climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear that exists in many parts of the country,” the report said.

After a 2 1/2-hour meeting with representatives of the human rights group, Calderon' s office issued a statement saying the biggest threat to Mexicans is not the government troops, but the criminals. Troops are being trained in human rights and working closely with state human rights officials, the statement said.

Representatives of Human Rights Watch said Calderon, in the sometimes tense meeting, agreed to examine the cases presented.

“We made him see the statistics,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of Human Rights Watch’s Americas section, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Wouldn't it be nice to boot Sheriff Joe

And of course for the flushing the will of the people down the toilet on the medical marijuana issue it would be nice to recall Arizona governor Jan Brewer.

Source

After successful Pearce recall, groups may target other polarizing Arizona politicians

Posted: Thursday, November 10, 2011 5:22 pm

By Garin Groff, Tribune

One group behind the recall of state Senate President Russell Pearce says the victory has emboldened it to begin a campaign against Sheriff Joe Arpaio because of his strong support for Pearce.

And another group says the recall’s outcome has created a new generation of Hispanic activists that will target other lawmakers it deems out of ouch with mainstream Arizona voters.

Randy Parraz, a Democrat and key figure in the recall, said the election shows that it’s possible to oust politicians who’ve handily won past elections. When the politics get too extreme, he said, it can fire up people who run the kind of energetic campaign that ousted Pearce.

The Republican Arpaio is up for re-election in November 2012, so Parraz said his Citizens for a Better Arizona would criticize Arpaio in a general election rather than opt for a recall.

“A lot of folks are tired of some of the extremism out of Arpaio,” Parraz said. “We’re definitely looking to hold him more accountable.”

Parraz said his organization’s members will meet in December and January to draft more specific efforts that could involve other groups that worked to recall Pearce.

Arpaio said he’s not worried after surviving nearly two decades of criticism.

“They will not intimidate me. They will not threaten me because I’m still going to do my job,” Arpaio said Thursday. “Nothing has changed one bit with Pearce leaving.” [ But it sure would be nice if they get you fat pig *ss booted out of office ]

Arpaio said if critics don’t like the immigration laws like SB 1070 that Pearce introduced, they should try to change the laws. [ But Arizona law allows the people to recall government tyrants and a recall is one effective way to change the laws, by booting out tyrants like Russell Pearce, Sheriff Joe and Governor Jan Brewer. ] He said he only enforces what’s law, [ which includes the laws he makes up, like the law that having brown skin is a crime ] and that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office will operate the same way unless state or federal immigration policies change.

Arpaio noted he’s amassed a campaign war chest of $6 million. He said Parraz should meet with him if he has concerns instead of launch a campaign. Apraio said he’s met with critics who are local and national figures. [ Talking to Sheriff Joe will only get you a bunch of hot air. Recalling the thug is a much better way to go. ]

“The Reverend (Al) Sharpton, when he led 10,000 people against me, I talked to him,” Arpaio said. “I talk to everybody.” [ You never shut up! You fool! ]

Parraz said the Pearce recall unearthed a groundswell of support for Citizens for a Better Arizona and other organizations that will fight what they describe as too conservative.

The campaign finance reform organization Public Campaign will work to defeat some Republican lawmakers in 2012, said John Loredo, a Democrat and former state House minority leader. Public Campaign believes several lawmakers are vulnerable next year based on polling information about what motivated voters to defeat Pearce, Loredo said.

“The issue that polled the highest for Republicans was money in politics and corruption,” Loredo said. “And there are a whole lot of Republican legislators who are in the same boat.”

Lawmakers who oppose Arizona’s Clean Elections system, who take substantial donations from lobbyists or who alienate Hispanics are vulnerable, he said.

New legislative districts will be in place in 2012, which will weaken the power of incumbency because so many voters will find themselves in new districts, he said.

“There are going to be people who are sitting ducks and we are intending to take full advantage of that,” Loredo said.

He said the Pearce recall has spawned a big group of Hispanics who will remain politically active through their lives. They’re energized by their success and have learned how to cobble together various groups into a larger cause, he said.

“It is a model that we intend to duplicate in 2012 at every level,” he said. “We are intending to take full advantage of that.”

• Contact writer: (480) 898-6548 or ggroff@evtrib.com

California court rules cities, counties can ban pot stores

California court rules cities, counties can ban pot stores

By John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times

November 11, 2011

In a decision that could have immediate fallout for medical marijuana dispensaries, a state appeals court has ruled that California law allows cities and counties to ban the stores.

The contentious issue has bounced through the state courts for years, but the opinion issued Wednesday is the first published one that directly tackles it and does so in unambiguous language. The decision, which upholds Riverside's ban, could embolden more cities and counties to enact their own. It also could spur those that have bans to be more aggressive about seeking court orders to close defiant dispensaries.

"I think its impact will be significant throughout the state," said Jeffrey Dunn, an attorney who argued the case for Riverside. "It's not wishy-washy. It squarely addresses it. And it makes it very clear."

In the case, a three-judge panel in the 4th District Court of Appeal in Riverside rejected an appeal from Inland Empire Patient's Health and Wellness Center and concluded that the state's medical marijuana laws do not prevent cities and counties from passing regulations on dispensaries, including bans. The judges also issued a nearly identical unpublished opinion Wednesday, upholding Upland's ban.

The decisions closely follow another appellate court ruling that said Long Beach could not adopt any regulations that amount to authorizing dispensaries because marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That decision has left officials throughout the state puzzled about what rules they can impose. Together, the two decisions could lead more cities and counties to put bans in place.

Joe Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, said he fears that could happen, but added, "I would hope that they would do the responsible thing and continue to regulate dispensaries."

Long Beach, which had used a lottery to select the dispensaries it would allow, will now consider a ban.

Paul Chabot, founder of the Coalition for a Drug Free California, said he hoped that the decision would spell the end for pot shops.

"This really puts the green light out to all city attorneys that they can take action immediately to shut them down," he said. "The tide is turning against so-called medical marijuana in California."

Americans for Safe Access says 168 cities and 17 counties ban dispensaries, while Chabot's group puts it at 225 and 15. Both organizations say that more than 80 cities and about 10 counties have moratoriums, while a few more than 40 cities and about 10 counties have ordinances that allow dispensaries.

The recent decisions could give the state Supreme Court an opportunity to address critical issues that remain unsettled 15 years after voters made California the first state to allow medical use of marijuana. Despite the state's groundbreaking status, its medical marijuana program is the most tumultuous. The state's four federal prosecutors have ramped up enforcement to shut down dispensaries and growers.

Long Beach City Atty. Robert Shannon said the city filed its appeal to the Supreme Court on Thursday. "The law is in total disarray," he said. "There is no clarity and consistency."

And the founder of the Riverside dispensary, Lanny Swerdlow, said he expects the collective will also appeal.

"We think that it's wrong that a city can ban a state-permitted activity by zoning it out of existence," he said. "By allowing cities to ban, it just makes a crazy-quilt pattern across the state."

Riverside now plans to take action against an estimated 15 dispensaries violating its ban. "We will be immediately moving to shut them down," City Atty. Gregory Priamos said. "We're extremely pleased that the court recognized and respected local land use and zoning authority."

john.hoeffel@latimes.com

LAX passengers arrested over gun, marijuana in luggage

Of course I don't think the government should be arresting people for victimless "drug war" crimes which hurt no one.

Source

LAX passengers arrested over gun, marijuana in luggage

November 10, 2011 | 2:59 pm

Los Angeles International Airport

Passengers were arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in two separate incidents Wednesday after security officials found a gun in one passenger's carry-on bag and two large bags of marijuana in another passenger's checked bags.

Transportation Security Administration officers found a .45-caliber handgun along with two loaded magazines with eight rounds inside a carry-on bag as the passenger went through security screening in Terminal 1 on Wednesday afternoon.

The passenger, who was bound for Tucson on Southwest Airlines Flight 2894, told officers he forgot the weapon was in his bag, officials said. He was arrested on suspicion of possession of a concealed firearm without a permit, and police confiscated the gun and ammunition.

That evening, TSA officers found two packages of marijuana in Christmas wrap, weighing about 50 and 70 pounds each, inside checked baggage. Officers searched the bags manually after the screening equipment was unable to determine what was inside them.

The owner of the bags, who was waiting to board Continental Airlines Flight 1579 to Cleveland, was arrested.

[Updated, 4:27 p.m.: Airport officials Thursday afternoon identified the passenger who allegedly had marijuana in his checked bag as Derik Dwayne Neely, 32, of Flint, Mich. He was arrested on suspicion of transporting marijuana for sale. Airport Police Sgt. Belinda Nettles said the two checked bags contained a total of 34.48 pounds of marijuana.

The passenger who allegedly had a gun in his carry-on bag was identified by airport police as Keith Dinicola, 55, of Tucson.]

L.A. Fire Captain Arrested in Heroin Sting

Of course the real problem is the unconstitutional "war on drugs". Legalize drugs and these problems will go away over night.

Source

L.A. Fire Captain Arrested in Heroin Sting

KTLA News

3:55 a.m. PST, November 11, 2011

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (KTLA) -- A sting operation by the LAPD resulted in the arrest of a Los Angeles City fire captain.

Authorities say Mike Phillipsen was arrested on suspicion of attempting to purchase heroin.

The 52-year-old was arrested around noon Wednesday near Avenue 61 and Figueroa Street during a sting operation, about one block from the fire station. The sting was conducted by the LAPD's narcotics unit.

According to police, Phillipsen was apprehended while attempting to buy several balloons of simulated heroin from an undercover officer.

Phillipsen was booked on suspicion of intent to possess heroin and was held on $10,000 bail. Phillipsen has since bailed out of jail. KTLA reporter David Begnaud tried to contact Phillipsen at his home, but he was unavailable.

Los Angeles fire officials did not comment on the specifics of the arrest but issued a statement:

"The Los Angeles Fire Department has recently learned that a member of the department was arrested on Wednesday November 9th 2011 in the Northeast section of Los Angeles for a narcotics violation," the statement said.

"The matter is currently under investigation by the LAPD. The Los Angeles Fire Department's professional standards division has been notified and will be conducting an investigation concurrent with any criminal investigation."

Phillipsen is a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department. He had told neighbors he planned to retire in three years.

Mexico's #2 drug warrior dies in helicopter crash

Source

Top official in Mexico, 7 others killed in copter crash

Nov. 11, 2011 12:43 PM

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY - The country's top Cabinet secretary, Francisco Blake Mora, a key figure in the Mexico's battle with drug cartels, died in a helicopter crash Friday with seven others, including the pilot, the government said.

The Presidency spokeswoman, Alejandra Sota, said authorities located the bodies of the secretary and seven others. They included Interior Undersecretary Felipe Zamora, said agency spokesman Jose Alfredo Garcia.

Calderon appointed Blake Mora as interior secretary in July 2010.

Blake Mora was traveling to a prosecutors' meeting in the neighboring state of Morelos when the helicopter went down in a mountainous area of Mexico state southeast of Mexico City. Officials said they did not immediately know the cause of the crash.

The secretary of the interior is the country's top official after the president, overseeing internal political affairs and security, making him a key figure in directing the battle against drug cartels, as well as negotiating with opposition political parties and with the legislature.

President Felipe Calderon lost Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino in the crash of a Learjet in Mexico City on Nov. 4, 2008. Despite widespread speculation that that accident, which killed 14, was caused by sabotage, investigators eventually ruled that out and blamed pilot error.

One of Blake's last postings on his Twitter account commemorated the loss of Mourino

"Today we remember Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his death, a person who was working to build a better Mexico," Blake tweeted on Nov. 4.

Blake Mora, 45, started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana and served as a federal congressman through the 2000s, as well as interior secretary of Baja California.

Like Mourino, he was Calderon's point man in the government's war against organized crime, frequently traveling to the country's most dangerous places for meetings with besieged state and local security officials.

He was an embodiment of the Mexican government's get-tough attitude, publicly pledging to bring the fight to the traffickers instead of backing down.

"Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," he said.

He also oversaw response to disasters, such as flooding and the massive oil pipeline explosion that laid waste to parts of the central city of San Martin Texmelucan last year, killing at least 28 people.

He led the creation of a new national identity card for youths under 18, with modern features including digitalized fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.

An interesting Mexican drug war web site

Source

Facts also fall victim in Mexico 'social media' killings

November 11, 2011 | 10:57 am

REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- Four people have been killed in gruesome fashion in Mexico since September for posting about drug cartels on social-media websites, the headlines and news reports say.

Trouble is, the reports could be wrong.

Information is the latest battleground in Mexico's drug war, as a string of brutal deaths in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo has produced alarming reports that social networks are under attack by the infamous Zetas cartel.

Most of the reports, however, are not built on verifiable facts. And facts have become a rare commodity in many regions of Mexico that are dominated by drug cartels.

In each case, such as a man found decapitated near a monument in Nuevo Laredo on Wednesday, the victims have been left with hand-lettered messages suggesting that they were using Twitter and the local chat board Nuevo Laredo En Vivo to report on cartels.

In each case, the messages have warned against cooperating with the Mexican military and have been signed with multiple Zs, presumably referring to the Zetas.

But how can anyone know for sure?

Drug-war experts have long warned that the messages found on bodies, often called narcomantas, are used as propaganda tools by competing criminal groups, and that their contents, unless independently verified, cannot be trusted.

At the same time, traditional news outlets report less on cartel activity or killings out of fear of being targeted, and local authorities often keep everyone in the dark when it comes to crime.

So citizens in Nuevo Laredo and other violence-plagued cities have turned to social networks to keep abreast of dangerous goings-on in their communities. Using local hash tags such as #ReynosaFollow, people tweet the precise locations of shootouts, for example.

In Nuevo Laredo, criminals have responded to the crowd-sourced reporting with chilling warnings: dumping bodies in public.

The first case came in early September, when the bodies of a man and a woman were found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo along with signs saying they were killed for posting messages on the Internet related to criminal activities.

Then, in late September, a woman was found decapitated alongside a poster purportedly signed by the Zetas claiming she was killed for the same practice. That woman was identified as Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro by the Tamaulipas state government, which also said she was a journalist at a local newspaper. As The Times reported, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo identified Macias as fellow user "Nena de Laredo" and mourned the loss.

Then, on Wednesday, word spread about the man who had been found decapitated with yet another message warning social-media users.

With each case, facts remain elusive.

Two months after their deaths, the first two victims have yet to be properly identified. No names have been released, no exact ages given, and no independent verification has been made that they were, in fact, social-media users and were killed in retaliation for their online activity.

Several calls to authorities in Nuevo Laredo inquiring about the two victims were met with evasive responses Thursday. Municipal, investigative and public affairs officials reached on the phone declined to offer information on the case.

As for Elizabeth Macias, it remains unclear whether she was really a journalist or held another type of position at the Primera Hora newspaper, as some reports said. A woman who answered a call at the newspaper Thursday said Primera Hora was turning down all inquiries related to the case.

The man found Wednesday also has not been properly identified. Once again, there is no independent proof yet that he used social media to share information about criminal activity in Nuevo Laredo.

So who benefits from reports that say so? Cartels? Corrupt government or military forces? That isn't clear either.

Nonetheless, "tuiteros" across northeastern Mexico released a "manifesto" Tuesday demanding justice for the four victims in Nuevo Laredo. Reached by The Times via email, a leading user known as @NarcoNewsMX said that fellow Twitter users are as much in the dark the about the identifications of the victims as journalists or anyone else.

"We are tired of the impunity of the homicides and the horror that they sow in the population," wrote @NarcoNewsMX. "We also don't have exact information. That is exactly the point."

Border Patrol case sealed in federal court

The "drug war", which is really a war on the American people and a war on the Bill of Rights will just get worse if Uncle Sam starts sealing cases like these.

Source

Brian Terry case sealed in federal court

by Dennis Wagner - Nov. 12, 2011 12:29 AM

The Arizona Republic

The case of the people accused of killing U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is completely sealed in federal court, so Americans cannot learn how justice is being conducted in a matter with intense public interest and serious political implications.

"Yes, the case is sealed," Debra Hartman, spokeswoman from the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego, said in an e-mail.

When a case is sealed, the public and the media cannot see evidence, hear testimony or learn about court rulings and arguments.

Terry and members of his tactical unit got into a midnight shootout on Dec. 14 with a group of suspected banditos near Rio Rico. Terry died. A suspect named Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, who suffered a gunshot wound, was arrested at the scene.

Here is what has been made public to date:

Osorio-Arellanes was charged initially with illegal entry in a case that is published on PACER, an online database of federal court filings. But that case was terminated when Osorio-Arellanes and several unidentified co-defendants were secretly indicted April 20 for murder by a federal grand jury.

Three weeks later, a judge temporarily unsealed the indictment, which lists co-defendants whose names were blacked out because they had not been apprehended. Since then, the entire case has been invisible. A clerk at the federal court in Tucson confirmed that the file is sealed, including the judge's reason for closing it. Even the docket is hidden from public view, so a search for U.S. vs. Osorio-Arellanes turns up no record of the homicide prosecution.

Peter Scheer, a lawyer-journalist who is executive director at the non-profit First Amendment Coalition for open government, said blacking out a high-profile case is an "extraordinary step" that pre-empts the public's right to monitor America's legal system.

"The risks of abuse are very high," he said.

Got money? Uncle Sam thinks you are a criminal

Source

$118,000 seized from vehicle at Arizona border

Nov. 11, 2011 02:59 PM

Associated Press

YUMA - U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Yuma Sector say they've seized more than $118,000 in cash from a suspicious vehicle.

Agents were conducting roving patrol duties Thursday and noticed a car being driven erratically. They followed the vehicle and pulled it vehicle.

Two U.S. citizens were in the car and consented to a vehicle search.

Agents found a bag in the trunk containing neatly folded bed linens. Inside the bag were multiple stacks of cash bundled together with rubber bands.

They say $118,187 was seized. It was unclear whether the two citizens were arrested in the case.

A vote for PRI is a vote for Peace?

Source

Mexican democracy tested by drug lords in politics

Nov. 12, 2011 11:07 AM

AP

MORELIA, Mexico -- Three major political parties are campaigning in the Mexican president's home state, but it's the groups that aren't on Sunday's ballot that have everyone worried: the drug cartels.

In hilly, rural Michoacan, a state known for its avocados, marijuana and meth, the mobsters are putting Mexico's halting democracy to a test, using violence and bribes to influence elections for governor, the legislature and all 113 mayors.

While many other Mexican states have been penetrated by narco-politics, nowhere is that influence as overt as in Michoacan, where the electoral season so far has featured the kidnapping of nine pollsters, the gunning down of a mayor, and the withdrawal of at least a dozen candidates frightened off the campaign trail by organized crime.

"Organized crime is getting involved in discouraging candidates, to force (elections) with only one candidate," said Fausto Vallejo, gubernatorial candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. "And that is happening not only to the PRI, but in all the three political parties."

The stakes in Sunday's vote are heightened by the fact that President Felipe Calderon is from Michoacan, and made his home state the launch pad for his war against the drug cartels five years ago. His sister, Luisa Maria "Cocoa" Calderon, is running for governor and pledges to deepen her brother's offensive.

She is running for Calderon's conservative National Action Party, and is leading in most polls on what is seen as a highly symbolic race, the last state election before the presidential ballot next July.

So far, the reigning Knights Templar cartel, along with the remnants of the La Familia cartel, have threatened candidates, run for office themselves, and sponsored protests, sometimes paying residents in return for their loyalty.

The PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until it was unseated in 2000, is running an energetic campaign to reclaim the presidency next year, and a victory in Michoacan would be a huge boost. Calderon accuses the PRI of promising to make deals with drug cartels in exchange for peace.

Accusations that some candidates are cartel members in disguise have prompted many candidates to ask federal prosecutors for letters stating there are no criminal charges or investigations against them - a sort of 'proof of purity' letter now in fashion.

Michoacan both produces drugs and is a key trafficking route, and the cartels have focused much of their attention on mayoral offices, notes political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio.

The traffickers "have understood that it costs less, and guarantees them more, to control local politics and local police," he said.

Given the cartels' power, it is hard to see why anyone would risk being a mayor in Michoacan.

When the mayor of Apatzingan was pressed by local media about a string of kidnappings in his town, he practically broke down.

"I want to go away, I want to resign this job, because I wasn't made for this. I can't even ensure the safety of my own children, who are also in danger," Mayor Genaro Guizar said in an emotional interview with the Milenio television station.

On Nov. 2, Ricardo Guzman, mayor of La Piedad, was gunned down outside a fast-food restaurant while handing out fliers for Luisa Maria Calderon, the gubernatorial front-runner. Four candidates for local posts immediately asked for increased protection.

Those who knew him say Guzman resisted the cartels and paid a price for it. In March, gunmen killed La Piedad police chief Jose Luis Guerrero, just a couple of months after he took the job.

His successor, Miguel Angel Rosas Perez, was recruited from the better trained federal police, but he too came under attack, when more than 40 men drove to his police station in a 10-vehicle convoy in July, sprayed it with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and then lobbed grenades at it. Rosas Perez survived.

Protected only by underpaid, poorly armed local police, mayors make easy targets. Nationwide, 25 have been killed in the past five years.

German Tena, leader of the National Action party in Michoacan, says six of his party's candidates have dropped out of mayoral races.

"In those six, there were some threats, warnings not to run, and in others, fear ... . In all six cases there was fear of drug cartels," Tena said. "The criminals are supporting PRI candidates. In some towns and cities they are protecting them, supporting them, and inhibiting our candidates and those of the PRD," the leftist Democratic Revolution Party which currently holds the governorship of Michocoan.

The PRD has seen two mayoral candidates drop out. "They resigned for personal and health situations, but of course there is a version that it could have been because of pressure from these organized crime groups," said the party's state leader, Victor Baez.

The PRI denies its candidates are the favorites of drug cartels, and Vallejo, the party's candidate for governor, says all the PRI state and municipal candidates hold new 'proof of purity' letters.

But such letters are no guarantee of anything. Saul Solis, a former police chief in Michoacan, had one when he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2009 as a Green Party candidate despite being an alleged cartel lieutenant. Solis is now under arrest, accused of various attacks, one of which killed an officer and four soldiers.

Julio Cesar Godoy Toscano of Michocoan was elected to Congress in 2009, only to turn fugitive after being charged with aiding drug trafficking and money laundering.

Federal efforts to arrest narco-politicians here in the past have been an embarrassing failure. In 2009, prosecutors ordered the arrest of 12 Michoacan mayors and 23 other state and local officials on allegations that they had protected the La Familia cartel. But by April, every one of them had been acquitted. Prosecutors filed a complaint against one judge for improperly acquitting the officials, but mayors say the charges were weak and often based on a single informant.

Average citizens don't see the federal government making much headway in Michoacan. "Safer? Every day we feel less safe, but we can't even talk about it, because they're always listening," said a mechanic named Josue sitting at a small restaurant in Maravatio, a farming town. Josue asked his last not be used for fear of reprisals.

The remote mountain town of Arteaga is the hometown of Servando Gomez, alias "La Tuta," founder of the Knights Templar cartel, a pseudo-religious drug gang known as a major trafficker of methamphetamine. But residents here know Gomez as a former grade-school teacher and a humble man who is said to have helped people pay their medical bills.

Vallejo, the PRI candidate, says Michoacan cartels try to win over residents by casting themselves "in the social angle, like Robin Hood."

"Sometimes they will punish a guy who beats his wife," Vallejo said. "They'll tell they money lender, even 'you're charging too much, it's not fair what you're charging. And you, lime grower, pay your workers better.'"

In places like Apatzingan the cartel is so strong it has rallied hundreds of supporters to demand the withdrawal of federal police, ostensibly for abusing townspeople with unjustified shootings and searches. Some marchers painted "Templars 100 percent" on their clothing.

Gen. Manuel Garcia, Michoacan's public safety secretary, said the cartels paid people to protest. Their control, he said, "is by money, or fear, or both."

Angry over spying, Muslims say: 'Don't call NYPD'

Yes everybody hates criminals, but in this case the police have turned into criminals that abuse and violate the rights of the people they pretend to protect.

Source

Angry over spying, Muslims say: 'Don't call NYPD'

Posted 11/14/2011 6:01 AM ET

By Eileen Sullivan And Chris Hawley, Associated Press

NEW YORK — Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.

Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to a lawyer before speaking with the authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. Some members of the community have planned a demonstration for next week.

Some government officials point to this type of outreach as proof that Muslims aren't cooperating in the fight against terrorism, justifying the aggressive spy tactics, while many in the Muslim community view it as a way to protect themselves from getting snared in a secret police effort to catch terrorists.

As a result, one of America's largest Muslim communities -- in a city that's been attacked twice and targeted more than a dozen times -- is caught in a downward spiral of distrust with the nation's largest police department: The New York City Police Department spies on Muslims, which makes them less likely to trust police. That reinforces the belief that the community is secretive and insular, a belief that current and former NYPD officials have said was one of the key reasons for spying in the first place.

The outreach campaign follows an Associated Press investigation that revealed the NYPD had dispatched plainclothes officers to eavesdrop in Muslim communities, often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Restaurants serving Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated, and dozens were infiltrated. Police used the information to build ethnic databases on daily life inside Muslim neighborhoods.

Many of these programs were developed with the help of the CIA.

At a recent "Know Your Rights" session for Brooklyn College students, someone asked why Muslims who don't have anything to hide should avoid talking to police.

"Most of the time it's a fishing expedition," answered Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York. "So the safest thing you can do for yourself, your family and for your community, is not to answer."

New York Republican Rep. Peter King said this kind of reaction from the Muslim community is "disgraceful."

Muslim groups have previously organized educational programs around the country describing a person's legal rights, such as when they must present identification to a police officer and when they can refuse to answer police questions. A California chapter of a national Muslim organization produced a poster that warned Muslims not to talk to the FBI. The national organization ultimately asked the California branch to take down the poster.

In New York, the AP stories about the NYPD and internal police documents have outraged some Muslims and provided evidence of tactics that they suspected were being used to watch them all along. These disclosures have intensified the outreach campaigns in New York.

A recently distributed brochure from the City University of New York Law School warns people to be wary when confronted by someone who advocates violence against the U.S., discusses terror organizations, is overly generous or is aggressive in their interactions. The brochure said that person could be a police informant.

"Be very careful about involving the police," the brochure said. "If the individual is an informant, the police may not do anything ... If the individual is not an informant and you report them, the unintended consequences could be devastating."

Sweeping skepticism of police affects community relations with all levels of law enforcement on a wide range of issues, not just the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. Interactions with a real terror operative could go unreported to law enforcement out of an assumption that the operative is actually working for the NYPD. A victim of domestic abuse or street violence may not trust the police enough to call for help.

Retired New York FBI agent Don Borelli said intelligence gathering is key to police work, not just in terrorism cases. But he said it can backfire when people feel their rights are being violated.

"When they do, these kinds of programs are actually counterproductive, because they undermine trust and drive a wedge between the community and police," said Borelli, now a security consultant with the Soufan Group.

Since the 2001 terror attacks, the NYPD, city government officials and federal law enforcement have spent years building relationships with the New York Muslim community, assuring many Muslims that they are considered partners in the city's fight against terrorism. But in some cases, community members who have been hailed as partners and even dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg were secretly followed by the NYPD or worked in mosques that the department had infiltrated, according to secret NYPD documents obtained by the AP.

"There's not a reference here to the fact that New York is the No. 1 target of Islamic terrorists, that the NYPD and the FBI have protected New York," King said, referring to one of the recent brochures about detecting police informants.

King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held a series of hearings about the threat of radicalization within American Muslim communities and the level of cooperation members of the community provide to law enforcement. Muslim and civil rights advocacy groups have decried the hearings and pointed to terror cases around the country in which members of the Muslim community helped law enforcement foil plots.

New York Muslim community groups say they've held dozens of meetings for people who are worried about police surveillance and the NYPD's counterterrorism programs. In one instance, an audience of college students watched as a law student played out the role of a police informant and another played the role of the person the informant was targeting. The goal was to teach people to spot informants.

"Stay away from these people. That's one of the most powerful things you can do," said Robin Gordon-Leavitt, a member of an advocacy organization Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility.

At another meeting, organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, students watched a film of two actors portraying FBI agents talking their way into a young Muslim's home and interrogating him. At the meeting, students were warned not to speak with police even if their parents, imams or Muslim clerics urge them to cooperate.

"You'll even hear imams saying, 'As long as I obey the law, I have nothing to worry about.' But that's not how it plays out on the ground," said Cyrus McGoldrick, CAIR New York's civil rights manager.

CAIR has had a strained relationship with law enforcement and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case.

The Muslim community wants an independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations in the Muslim community.

___

Sullivan reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman contributed to this report from Washington.

It's legal, it just looks and feels like a bribe!

Source

Police-supply firms give big to museum project in D.C.

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – The list of the most generous donors to the planned $80 million National Law Enforcement Museum is packed with corporate powerhouses — Motorola, DuPont, Verizon and Panasonic, among others.

The companies or their related foundations have poured millions of dollars into developing the new attraction, set to open here in late 2013. For their generosity — Motorola and DuPont each contributed at least $3 million — museum officials have bestowed glowing honorary titles on the companies and the right to affix their names on exhibits throughout the building.

Besides being the museum's largest contributors, some of the companies share another affiliation: They are the recipients of millions of dollars in contracts from law enforcement agencies across the nation. The companies provide cops with everything from guns and body armor to cellphones and computer software.

Since it was authorized by Congress in 2000, the museum project has become the centerpiece of a lucrative relationship in which public safety companies have aligned themselves with virtually every aspect of law enforcement.

They are ubiquitous sponsors of national and local policing conferences that draw chiefs and other key department purchasing officers. They sponsor events that raise money for local scholarship funds. And they shower money on families of officers killed while working for the agencies whose business the companies seek.

There is nothing illegal about the contributions, nor is there any indication that police agencies have purchased inferior equipment based on these financial relationships.

Some, including national Police Foundation President Hubert Williams, a member of the museum board, say there has never been a suggestion that corporate charity amounted to a "quid pro quo," or an obligation to do business with major donors.

"Corporate America contributes to a variety of different causes in law enforcement," Williams says. "But it doesn't commit them to doing business."

Even so, the millions in donations, sponsorships and pledges are part of a vast money stream that — largely because it operates outside of elective politics — churns on mostly unnoticed throughout the public safety industry, some law enforcement analysts say.

"If I'm a company that sells millions of dollars in law enforcement equipment, the possibility of using charitable donations to support the interest of business is something that people should think about," says David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who has written extensively on law enforcement operations and ethics.

"The question is this: Are companies doing this out self-interest, to get a better hearing when it comes to selling a new product? You see this in a number of industries, but what's different here is that (public safety) involves public, taxpayer money. You want to make sure that there are appropriate safeguards in place."

While donating $2 million to the museum last month, Glock, a leading provider of firearms to police agencies, offered a less-than-subtle reminder of its public safety business interests.

"Glock," Vice President Gary Fletcher said in the company's donation announcement, "continues to provide over 65% of law enforcement agencies in the United States with the confidence to know that when they draw their weapon, it is ready to be fired."

"Anybody trying to promote their brand is looking for a way to promote goodwill," says William Weber, vice president of DuPont Protection Technologies, which provides bullet-resistant vests and other equipment to public safety agencies through its Kevlar products.

Weber, appointed to the museum's 19-member managing board in September along with executives from Target and Motorola, says DuPont is careful to keep its business decisions with law enforcement separate from its philanthropy. But he says there is "no doubt " the charitable donations assist in "furthering the brand."

Craig Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which is building the museum, says there has "never been any concern" that such corporate support could create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Yet Floyd also acknowledged a basic truth related to the corporate involvement: "We are very limited in what we can accomplish without corporate America," he said. "There is no way in the world we could build a museum without corporate America, short of Bill Gates writing us a check."

Cozy ties between vendors, police

For years, corporate vendors and police agencies have enjoyed comfortable relationships.

In 2005, a USA TODAY review found that hundreds of police officers were on the payrolls of companies that supplied equipment to departments across the nation, including their own departments.

The companies included Armor Holdings, a maker of protective equipment; ASP, a police baton manufacturer; PepperBall Technologies, a supplier of non-lethal weapon products; and Taser International, the nation's leading maker of stun guns.

For the most part, the firms were paying the officers to train other police to use the companies' products.

Joseph Estey, then-president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and chief of the Hartford (Vt.) Police Department, says such arrangements represent "a kind of minefield" for police officials.

Estey, now a consultant for iXP, a security services and technology company whose clients include municipal police departments, says dealings between vendors and public safety agencies should be "clear."

"You have to be very careful, even when you take somebody you know to lunch, that you can't be perceived as trying to sway things," Estey says. "I have to be very careful."

The annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) may represent one of the most open displays of warmth between corporate vendors and public safety agencies.

Each year, the conference draws thousands of law enforcement officials for several days of networking, professional development and exposure to a vast exhibit hall filled with vendors hawking everything from gun belts to helicopters.

There also are corporate-sponsored receptions, entertainment outings and dinners. At this year's conference held last month in Chicago, delegates could pay $40 for a motorcycle ride and tour of The Harley Davidson Museum in Milwaukee.

The next day, delegates were invited to participate in a golf tournament at the Cog Hill Golf and Country Club for a $160 fee.

Both events were sponsored by Motorola Solutions to benefit the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation. Lockheed Martin, a supplier of public safety communications systems, was the headline sponsor for the IACP Foundation's Gala dinner at the Chicago Hilton.

Outgoing IACP Executive Director Dan Rosenblatt says the group is "very comfortable" with its relationship with corporate sponsors, who have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IACP Foundation.

The foundation funds training for police executives and provides scholarships to dependents of officers disabled or killed in the line of duty.

Rosenblatt says the group's dealings with sponsors and vendors are "transparent," and that there is a "prohibition against commercial endorsements" of products and services.

'No expectation of a benefit'

Brian Kingshott, a criminal justice professor at Grand Valley State University and adviser to the Center on Law Enforcement Ethics, says the sponsorships and charitable contributions are "all about bolstering (the companies') public images."

"It's just wrapped up in a different way," Kingshott says. "The agenda is increased sales."

Chuck Wexler is executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), whose studies on violent crime, immigration enforcement, gun crime and the impact of the faltering economy on law enforcement have been funded by the Motorola Solutions Foundation. Wexler says the communications giant has not had any involvement in the research or issues related to it.

PERF's research findings have been cited extensively by USA TODAY and other national news organizations.

"If there are strings attached," Wexler says, "we don't do it. Period. People know us and wouldn't ask us to compromise our independence and our reputation."

Matt Blakely, director of the Motorola Solutions Foundation (the company's philanthropic arm), which provided $3.2 million to public safety interests last year, says the foundation's work has no connection to the company's business and marketing efforts.

Blakely says donations to the museum and funding for things such as PERF's "Critical Issues in Policing Series" is "pure charitable giving."

"We have no expectation of a benefit," he says.

Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, says there are "genuine motives" related to the giving, especially involving companies such as Motorola that have a long history in the public safety industry.

"A large part of it, though, is building goodwill for the business," he says, adding that the "payoff" may not approach the amount of the donation.

Depending on corporate donations

When it is completed in late 2013 or early 2014, the National Law Enforcement Museum will be the first national museum dedicated to the history of policing in the United States.

Floyd, the main fundraising force behind the project, calls it "a gift of appreciation from the American people to law enforcement."

So far, though, nearly half of the money raised for the project — $13.8 million — has come from 93 corporate donors. Another $14.8 million has been raised by 1,042 law enforcement organizations. Although the project was authorized by Congress as a national museum, funding is dependent on private donations.

Up to $18 million more is needed in the fundraising effort; Floyd says he expects and needs corporations to carry much of that load.

"Corporate America has to come on in a big way," he says.

Although Floyd said it has been "made clear" that corporate sponsors would have no influence on the museum's content, representatives of three major donors — DuPont, Motorola and Target — were added to the museum's 19-member managing board in September.

The expansion marked the first time that corporate representatives cracked the National Law Enforcement Memorial Foundation's Board of Directors.

Floyd said the board was expanded to take advantage of unique "resources and wisdom," not to impose corporate influence on the museum's content.

Hours after speaking with USA TODAY, Floyd sent a memo to the entire board, alerting them to the newspaper's inquiries about the "appropriateness of sponsorship … by companies that have a business interest in law enforcement."

A copy of the memo, which contained a detailed set of talking points for board members, was obtained by USA TODAY.

"Companies that do business with law enforcement have a much better appreciation for the value of law enforcement in our society, and understand the importance of honoring the service and sacrifice of our officers with a national memorial and museum," Floyd advised in the Oct. 7 memo.

"This is not of any real concern," he said the of fundraising questions. "(If anything, should focus some national attention on the museum project and the many corporate sponsors who have stepped-up — hopefully, will encourage others to follow!), but I wanted you to be aware in case you get a call."

If it breaths Congress can regulate it???

“The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life”

If Founders really meant this I am sure the would have stuck a clause in the Constitution that said something like "if it breathes or for that matter even exists Congress can regulate it"

Source

Health Law Puts Focus on Limits of Federal Power

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: November 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — If the federal government can require people to purchase health insurance, what else can it force them to do? More to the point, what can’t the government compel citizens to do?

Those questions have been the toughest ones for the Obama administration’s lawyers to answer in court appearances around the country over the past six months. And they are likely to emerge again if, as expected, the Supreme Court, as early as Monday, agrees to be the final arbiter of the challenge to President Obama’s signature health care initiative.

The case focuses on whether Congress overstepped its constitutional authority in enacting parts of the law. Lower courts have reached divergent conclusions.

Even judges in lower courts who ultimately voted to uphold the law have homed in on the question of the limits of government power, at times flummoxing Justice Department lawyers.

“Let’s go right to what is your most difficult problem,” Judge Laurence H. Silberman, who later voted to uphold the law, told a lawyer at an argument in September before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “What limiting principle do you articulate?” If Congress may require people to purchase health insurance, he asked, what else can it force them to buy? Where do you draw the line?

Would it be unconstitutional, he asked, to require people to buy broccoli?

“No,” said the lawyer, Beth S. Brinkmann. “It depends.”

Could people making more than $500,000 be required to buy cars from General Motors to keep it in business?

“I would have to know much more about the empirical findings,” she replied.

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who ended up in dissent, then jumped in. “How about mandatory retirement accounts replacing Social Security?” he asked.

“It would depend,” Ms. Brinkmann replied.

Ms. Brinkmann was cut off before she could elaborate on her answers. In other settings, she and other administration lawyers have described what they see as the constitutional limits to government power, though not typically using concrete examples.

They have said, for instance, that laws authorized by the Constitution’s commerce clause must be economic in nature, must concern interstate commerce and must address national problems.

They have also said that the health care market is unique. And they have suggested that questions about constitutional limits can miss the point. The only question actually before the courts, they said, is whether the particular law under review was within Congress’s authority. Other cases, they said, can be decided as they arise. But there is reason to think that at least some Supreme Court justices will want to hear what a ruling in favor of the health care law implies and what precedent it sets.

In 1995, when the court struck down a federal law that prohibited people from carrying firearms in school zones, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that “we pause to consider the implications of the government’s arguments” in defending the law — that stopping activities that could lead to violent crime relates to interstate commerce because it affects “national productivity.”

Under that reasoning, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, “It is difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power,” adding that “if we were to accept the government’s arguments, we are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without power to regulate.”

Chief Justice Rehnquist died in 2005, but three of the justices who joined his majority opinion — Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — are still on the court.

The concerns expressed by Chief Justice Rehnquist amount to what lawyers call the slippery slope. Many judges are reluctant to issue rulings without some sense of what their consequences will be in other cases.

But defenders of the health care law say that such concerns are not a reason to doubt its validity.

“Slippery slope arguments are themselves often slippery,” Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the administration of President Bill Clinton, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. He gave an example. “If it is within the scope of regulating commerce to set a minimum wage,” he said, “one might argue, then Congress could set the minimum wage at $5,000 an hour.” But that would never happen, he said, for practical, political and legal reasons.

When a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, struck down in August the mandate that individuals purchase and maintain health insurance from private companies, slippery slopes were very much on the minds of the judges in the majority.

“The government’s position amounts to an argument that the mere fact of an individual’s existence substantially affects interstate commerce, and therefore Congress may regulate them at every point of their life,” Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina and Judge Frank M. Hull wrote.

On Tuesday, on the other hand, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the law. Judge Silberman, who had grilled Ms. Brinkmann so aggressively, wrote the majority opinion, and his discussion of the limits of Congressional power may have handed the administration a bigger victory than it wanted, because it presumably did not want to win on the grounds that Congress could do anything at all.

Judge Silberman said he remained troubled by what he called “the government’s failure to advance any clear doctrinal principles limiting Congressional mandates that any American purchase any product or service in interstate commerce.”

Then he adopted a version of Mr. Dellinger’s argument.

“That a direct requirement for most Americans to purchase any product or services seems an intrusive exercise of legislative power,” Judge Silberman wrote, “surely explains why Congress has not used this authority before — but that seems to us a political judgment rather than a recognition of constitutional limitations.”

Judge Silberman said there were Supreme Court decisions on issues like regulating the use of medical marijuana that had endorsed broad Congressional power to legislate in the name of commerce.

“It certainly is an encroachment on individual liberty,” he wrote of the health care law, “but it is no more so than a command that restaurants or hotels are obliged to serve all customers regardless of race, that gravely ill individuals cannot use a substance their doctors described as the only effective palliative for excruciating pain, or that a farmer cannot grow enough wheat to support his own family.”

In dissent, Judge Kavanaugh praised the majority for its honesty in describing what followed from its ruling.

“The majority opinion here is quite candid — and accurate,” he wrote, adding: “The majority opinion’s holding means, for example, that a law replacing Social Security with a system of mandatory private retirement accounts would be constitutional. So would a law mandating that parents purchase private college savings accounts.”

Within hours of the decision on Tuesday, opponents of the health care law were issuing statements, and their theme was predictable. “Like the government,” said Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown, “the majority could identify no limit to an unprecedented power of Congress.”

Buying a used car could get you life in prison.

Source

Chrysler van comes fully loaded -- cocaine included

By Tracey Kaplan and Sean Webby

tkaplan@mercurynews.com

Posted: 11/13/2011 07:12:10 PM PST

The used Chrysler minivan came fully loaded, with power steering, foldaway seats, tinted windows -- and half a million dollars' worth of cocaine.

San Jose psychologist Charles Preston had no clue there was a cellophane-wrapped stash of "snow" hidden inside the frame when he bought the pristine-condition, 2008 van last year from Thrifty Car Sales in Santa Clara. True, the windows wouldn't roll down all the way. But he had no reason to suspect it was because the door panels were crammed with kilos of coke.

He found out 15 months later when he went to a mechanic to get his brakes checked, and immediately turned the contraband over to police. Now, he's terrified a drug cartel still may be gunning for it.

"People make jokes -- oh, you should have sold it," Preston said of the cocaine. "But honestly, I've never been so scared in my life, even when I was mugged in New York."

San Jose police said Preston's worries about the unusual discovery are warranted.

"It's absolutely dangerous," said Sgt. Jason Dwyer, a police spokesman. "If somebody is motivated to track down that van and doesn't want any witnesses, then some physical harm could come to the owner. That's a lot of dope to be misplaced."

Preston bought the van in May 2010 for what he figured was a bargain -- $14,000 in cash -- and uses it to haul food he pays for out of his own salary to feed people living on the street.

The moment he drove the white van off the lot, he noticed the window on the driver's side wouldn't quite go down all the way and the passenger's side window also stuck a little. But he figured he could live with it since the Town and Country van had an excellent air-conditioning system. He also said he'd never bought a used car before, so he didn't realize he might have been able to bring it right back to the dealer for a free repair.

'My hands went numb'

About 15 months later, in August, the brakes started making funny noises, so he brought the van to DHT Collision & Service Center in downtown San Jose to have it checked.

When he went to pick it up, one of the managers said he noticed the window problem and offered to check it out.

"This insulation isn't supposed to be here," the manager said, digging behind the panel. But it soon became clear that the tablet-sized objects wrapped in purple and clear cellophane weren't installed by the manufacturer.

"I'm, like, dumbfounded," said Preston, who works at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. "Honest to God, my hands went numb."

Police quickly arrived and found 14 packages of cocaine hidden in the doors. After impounding the van for closer examination, they found five more above the back wheels, Preston said.

"They told me, 'You're so lucky, you'd be in jail for the rest of your life if you got searched in a traffic stop and they found this.' "

But they also told him something chilling: Take the van back in to the repair shop to check for tracking devices because somebody is probably looking for it. Then get rid of it.

When Preston tried to return the coke-mobile to Thrifty Car Sales this summer for one without drugs, he said a manager was anything but solicitous. She told him he could trade in the van, but only for the current Blue Book value -- about $4,000 less by his estimation than he originally paid. He had put about 6,000 miles on the van.

Preston refused to take a loss on the vehicle.

"It took me a long time to save the $14,000 for the van," he said. "I should get what I paid for it in trade-in value."

Ron Battistella, the owner of Thrifty Car Sales, said that's not what he wanted conveyed to Preston, and he's now willing to replace the van with a drug-free ride.

Preston can't wait.

"I just want to get rid of the van. I don't want it in front of my house," he said. "Somebody could just come and want the car and run me off the road. When I drive now, I'm always looking around."

Origin unknown

Police have been unable to track down the cocaine's history or identify the dealers. It previously had been owned by a rental car agency so it's conceivable someone who rented it packed it with cocaine.

"The way it was packaged is indicative of a long-distance transport, perhaps across state lines or from Mexico to the U.S.," Dwyer said. "It could even be from one side of town to the other, depending on how paranoid the dealers are. They might do that in the off chance they got pulled over."

If there's one silver lining, Preston said, it's that the story could be an asset in social situations.

"When someone says, 'Tell me about yourself,' " he said, "I'll finally have something interesting to talk about."

Contact Tracey Kaplan at 408-278-3482.

Pot raids souring state's dispensaries on Obama

Pot raids souring state's dispensaries on Obama

Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, November 14, 2011

Another slice of President Obama's liberal base has become frustrated and disappointed with him: a growing number of leaders in California's $1.5 billion medical cannabis community.

Supporters of the state's network of medical pot businesses, like some members in the gay and environmentalist voting blocs, think Obama has not lived up to his campaign promises.

In 2007, then-candidate Obama said in New Hampshire that he "would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It's not a good use of our resources." A 2009 Justice Department memo seemed to confirm as much.

It was welcome news to many people in California, where voters passed a pioneering law in 1996 legalizing marijuana for medical use. After years of federal raids, many people in the state's medical cannabis community felt they had a friend in the White House.

But their perspective began to change in June when a Justice Department memorandum expressed concern about a recent "increase in the scope" of medical marijuana operations and warned industry leaders that they were in violation of the federal Controlled Substances Act, "regardless of state law."

Federal prosecutors say they believe the state's law has become a cover for an increasing number of illegal, large-scale growers and dispensaries to develop for-profit operations that are beyond the original intent of the state law, which was to provide relief to the sick and frail.

On Oct. 7, the four regional U.S. attorneys in California announced that they would begin cracking down on commercial dispensaries. The prosecutors said they are not singling out patients but are concerned about bad actors in a loosely regulated industry with an estimated 500 to 2,500 or more collectives statewide.

Since then, federal officials have threatened property owners across the state with forfeiture and criminal charges for letting pot dispensaries rent office space from them. Restraining order sought

The crackdown is confusing to many marijuana cooperative leaders in the state. While many of them believe the regional prosecutors are taking the lead, some wonder why Obama hasn't tried to stop them.

Last week, attorneys for medical cannabis operators asked a federal judge for a restraining order to stop the crackdown, saying it will have an effect on thousands of ill people who depend on the drug for palliative relief.

"I'm perplexed as to why they're doing this. It seems shortsighted," said California State Board of Equalization member Betty Yee, a Democrat. She estimates that the medical cannabis industry contributes $100 million a year in sales taxes to the state.

"Politically, I don't see the upside of this," Yee said. "There's a lot of other tax scofflaws we could be going after."

Nationwide, support to legalize marijuana reached a record 50 percent in a Gallup Poll last month - including 62 percent support in the 18- to 29-year-old demographic, which Obama needs to help secure his re-election.

But political analysts say it is unlikely that medical marijuana advocates can do much to dent Obama's strong support in California.

"Who are they going to vote for, Romney?" asked Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA who is a former Justice Department analyst and prolific author on marijuana issues. [Of course you can vote Libertarian! The Libertarian is the only political party that wants to legalize ALL drugs, not just marijuana]

Switching allegiances

But among the 16 other states where medical cannabis is legal are swing states such as Michigan and Colorado.

"The medical cannabis community everywhere is outraged, and I plan to be in Colorado to campaign against" Obama, said Steve DeAngelo, executive director of Oakland's Harborside Health Center, the state's largest dispensary, with 95,000 patients and 120 employees. DeAngelo was an Obama supporter and contributor in 2008.

Harborside has also felt heat from federal officials in recent months. In September, the Internal Revenue Service said the center owed $2.5 million in taxes for 2007 and 2008. The IRS said Harborside could no longer deduct business expenses such as rent or payroll because it is involved in what the feds view as illegal drug trafficking.

Harborside could close if it loses its legal fight with the IRS, DeAngelo said.

Federal response

Jack Gillund, a spokesman for the Justice Department's Northern California district office, declined to comment on the crackdown.

A White House spokesman said that its position on medical marijuana "has been clear and consistent."

"While the prosecution of drug traffickers is a core priority, targeting individuals with cancer and serious illnesses is not the best allocation of federal law enforcement resources," said the spokesman, Adam Abrams.

Supporters of medical marijuana say the feds are trying to send a message by hitting some of California's most prominent operators, including Lynnette Shaw.

Shaw runs the Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana. The 14-year-old, $1 million-a-year business is the state's longest-standing licensed dispensary. In late September, federal officials said they will prosecute the dispensary's landlord unless the dispensary is evicted.

While federal officials said the dispensary is too close to a park, the Fairfax Town Council doesn't seem to mind its presence. On Nov. 4, the council passed a resolution lauding the "humane services" the dispensary provides to communities and its "financial contributions to local government."

Breaking ranks

The council, in the heart of one of the most politically liberal areas of the nation, opposes the Obama administration's crackdown and asked the U.S. attorneys to reconsider.

Shaw, a longtime Libertarian Party member and the party's 2006 candidate for lieutenant governor, broke ranks in 2008 by voting for Obama and organizing a small fundraiser for him.

But "if he doesn't change, I'm going to tell everyone I know to vote for Ron Paul," the Republican representative from Texas who is running for president, Shaw said.

The Marin Alliance isn't the only high-profile dispensary under fire. At 6 a.m. on Oct. 13, agents with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration raided Northstone Organics, a Redwood Valley (Mendocino County) dispensary, taking 99 plants and computers from the collective.

Mendocino supplier raided

Run by Executive Director Matthew Cohen, it was one of the first dispensaries in Mendocino County to sign up for a pioneering license program. Last summer, Cohen was featured on PBS' "Frontline" series.

Now his business lies in ruins after federal agents destroyed his only crop of the year, which he grows and delivers to Northstone's 1,700 patients.

"Whatever the intent of federal authorities," Mendocino County Supervisor John McCowen wrote in an open letter Oct. 31, "enforcement actions against legally compliant medical marijuana providers like Matt Cohen will have the effect of driving medical marijuana back underground, keeping it illegal and dangerous, and insuring maximum profit for the black marketeers."

While Cohen tries to figure out why federal officials singled him out when he was trying to comply with local law, he said he will have a hard time supporting Obama again. "This is his problem," Cohen said. "It's happening on his clock."

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com

Border Patrol thugs now terrorize Americans along the northern border.

Source

Beefed-up Border Patrol jolts farmers, cows

FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL, Whatcom County — Larry DeHaan loves his country, loves his family, loves his land. But he probably never would have started raising middle-finger salutes to those government helicopters if not for a different lifelong passion.

"I love my cows," he says, without a hint of sarcasm, explaining how he's become the unofficial spokesman for the local Please-Call-Off-The-Border-Patrol movement.

"I guess it's because I spend so much time with them."

It's a serious relationship.

"I make my entire living off what my cows produce," DeHaan says. "When my cows are upset, I'm upset."

And when he is upset, it just might become an international incident.

DeHaan and the 500 easily excitable Holsteins of Storm Haven Farm don't just live near the U.S. border. They live on it. Given the prevailing southerly winds, every time a DeHaan cow passes gas, a British Columbian ends up holding his nose.

But a stink of another kind has been simmering here for months — what DeHaan and others call "harassment" by a swelling force of U.S. Border Patrol agents.

"Harassed" is in the eye of the harassed, of course.

But before judging, consider the setting: Rural Whatcom County is almost all farmland, with raspberry vines outnumbering people about a half-million to one. Moonless nights are still ink-black out here. It's often so quiet that the symphony of a flock of trumpeter swans taking flight can be heard a mile away.

That calm has been jarred by a bursting paramilitary force. The Border Patrol's Blaine sector, which stretches from the North Cascades to the Olympic Peninsula and south into Oregon, has swelled to 327 agents today from 45 agents in 2000.

Border Patrol officials say they're seeking ways to make their workforce blend in better with the community. But that's a big task. These agents are hard to miss — and even harder to ignore.

A fleet of white SUVs rolls down local dirt roads daily, often parked for hours, engines running, the agents shielded by dark, tinted windows.

The government is constantly watching — through video feeds from 32 remote-control cameras atop a string of 50-foot posts. Ground sensors monitor comings and goings near the border, which, except for some recently installed metal obelisks, is marked in most places here only by a lightweight farm fence or a simple ditch.

Farmers — most of whom don't want to be quoted publicly — complain about white-SUV traffic becoming so heavy that their farm roads need repair. Others say they've been left shaken and confused when agents swarmed onto their property in some mystery operation, only to withdraw without telling residents why they were there.

Most conspicuous of all is a military Blackhawk helicopter that patrols the border and, until recent months, routinely flew late-night, low-elevation sorties that not only rattled windows, but scared the bejeebers out of farm animals and farmers alike.

"We were strafed repeatedly until last summer," DeHaan says. When the Blackhawk swooped in over his property, his entire farmhouse rattled.

So, in a sense, was his sense of security on his own property.

"Our homes are private," DeHaan says. "The government does not have the right to intrude without a warrant."

Federal law gives agents authority to cross private property in pursuit of official business in a 25-mile band adjacent to the border. Residents say they don't mind that — as long as they know it's necessary, not just some sort of make-work exercise.

On the plus side, the aerial "strafings" have mostly stopped, DeHaan says — a likely outcome of a dust-up last year involving his next-door neighbor. Wayne Groen was charged by federal authorities after he was arrested for shining a spotlight at the Blackhawk as it hovered low over his property one night in September 2010.

Prosecutors said the light temporarily blinded the pilot, who the government maintains nearly lost control of the craft because — apparently unbeknown to Groen — he was wearing night-vision goggles.

Groen, arrested in his pickup, in his underwear, was acquitted of the more serious of two charges brought by U.S. attorneys in Seattle, but convicted of interfering with the operation of an aircraft. He was sentenced to two months, which he currently is serving at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac.

Groen declined to comment. He still fears reprisals by agents, says his attorney, Jeffrey Lustick.

Neighbors of Groen, 42, who runs a manure-hauling business, have rallied around him, calling the federal prosecution an overreaction — or, worse, a chilling warning to others tempted to make trouble.

Lustick says he was shocked when prosecutors insisted on a trial, rather than a plea arrangement that might have helped soothe tensions in the community.

"The government told me they wanted to make an example of Mr. Groen," Lustick says.

A hint of that is found in government sentencing papers, where prosecutors cited "a genuine and pressing need for deterrence in this case" because Groen seemed "emboldened" by community support. Arguing for a 10-month sentence, they portrayed Groen as a man with "anger-management" problems who never showed remorse. They also cited what they called a disturbing pattern of verbal "harassment" of agents, much of which Groen disputes.

A pair of community meetings in the wake of Groen's arrest drew hundreds of residents, many of whom said they now are fearful of a law-enforcement presence that seems to treat everyone as suspicious.

Border Patrol officials insisted they got the message, and reached out to the community in small ways, such as establishing a 24-hour telephone hotline for residents. Since then, a sort of uneasy truce has settled across the Nooksack Valley — aided, in some cases, by residents drawing their own figurative lines in the sand.

DeHaan installed a twine "gate" across the main gravel road through his back pasture. The gate post holds a sign bearing what he considers something between a warning and a plea:

"NO GOVERNMENT VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT."

"So far, they're honoring it," he says.

DeHaan confesses he may have accidentally mowed off a government ground-sensor antenna or two out here while clearing brush. But he insists he would never dream of interfering with legitimate Border Patrol work.

"I always felt that it was a privilege to live near the border and be the first line of defense," he says. His father often told stories about bootleggers skulking along dirt roads in the area. And he's seen plenty of foot traffic on or near his property for years.

"If we saw anything out of the ordinary, we would call," he recalls. "I knew the Border Patrol because there were only five or six of them. Now, there are so many new ones, they treat me as some common criminal."

Beyond that, he and others question the steady surge in agent numbers in a sector where actual Border Patrol interceptions have noticeably decreased in recent years. He's still willing to be charitable to the green-shirted agents, he says, "but it has to go both ways. They could at least wave."

Unfortunately, the new world order dictates a different approach, suggests Richard Sinks, the Border Patrol's local community liaison.

"Our agents are aware that the community would like a little more friendliness shown by agents," he says. "Hopefully agents are smiling and waving more frequently." But, he adds, waving is usually the last thing on your mind when you're dealing with drug-runners or illegal border crossers.

Still, Sinks says the agency is aware of its image problem, and Homeland Security is responding by beefing up public-relations budgets. That might enable agents to spend more time meeting with community groups. The service understands it needs locals on its side, Sinks says.

One stereotype about the flood of new recruits — that most are military veterans who arrive with a gung-ho attitude after serving on the more-frenetic southern border with Mexico — is based at least in part in fact, Sinks says: All new agents spend at least a year down south before they can move to other posts.

When they arrive up north, they get a little indoctrination about the need to apply the brakes. "A lot of the same tactics are used," Sinks says. "It's just a lot slower pace" in the north.

Agents, DeHaan says, "need to realize, OK, these are normal people. Let's not keep aggravating them. I do believe they are coming to that conclusion. It just takes a while." He tries to stay in good humor about it all.

Sometimes, if he sees the nearby remote camera aimed for long stretches straight at his home, DeHaan will call the hotline and give them some business: "Would you please get that damn camera off our house?"

Then, watching out the window, he and wife Cheryl will see it sheepishly sweep away in another direction.

DeHaan likes to think that eventually, America will grasp its own overreaction, and things will ebb back the other way.

He plans to be here to see that. If he can't beat the big new Border Patrol, he may well outlast it. It's not like he has much choice.

"You don't just pick up a 500-cow dairy farm and move it away."

Ron Judd, a third-generation Washingtonian, scours the Northwest for stories about its people, places, traditions and endangered icons. Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com

Cities seek an antidote to medical marijuana

I feel exactly the opposite. The tyrants that are attempting to run these pot store out of town with their unconstitutional laws should be forced to pay for the cost of these lawsuits they lose out of their own pockets instead of getting the taxpayers to fund their irrational war on pot smokers.

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Cities seek an antidote to medical marijuana

Costly lawsuits do not always succeed, many municipalities have discovered.

By Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times

November 15, 2011

Three years ago, Garden Grove enacted a ban on medical marijuana dispensaries.

But the city's crackdown didn't go the way officials planned. Dealing with one marijuana case cost $200,000 in attorney's fees, leaving city leaders with sticker shock. Then they began to wonder whether their ban would even withstand legal challenge, given the contradictory case law.

So Garden Grove stopped enforcing its ban and this summer required dispensaries to register with the city.

Now there are about 60 pot shops in Garden Grove, selling products with names like Porn Star and Super Lemon Haze. City Manager Matt Fertal said he believes it's more shops per capita than any other city in California.

"Everybody is just so frustrated with this," Fertal said. The state, he noted, allows medical marijuana but doesn't give clear direction on how cities and counties should regulate it. Federal law says it is illegal in all circumstances.

And as for the dispensaries, Fertal said, some do not hesitate to sue cities that try to regulate them: "They've got more money than everybody to throw at this, and they are just determined to sue on every matter.... We feel like we are caught in the middle."

As the medical marijuana business booms, cities are finding that regulating it is expensive. That's especially true of small and medium-sized California cities like Garden Grove, which don't have the in-house legal departments of Los Angeles and San Francisco and instead pay outside attorneys by the hour.

"Cities are either wringing their hands about the fact that they are going broke trying to deal with marijuana or they are just stuck," said Thomas Brown, an attorney at Burke Williams & Sorensen who has advised numerous cities on the issue. "It's paralyzing a lot of cities."

There are no hard figures on how many cities and counties have been involved in litigation over medical marijuana. But The Times identified at least 40, and many experts say the number is probably much higher.

As cities struggle with the dire financial problems, many dispensaries are feeling anything but a budget crunch. Although the dispensaries are prohibited by law from operating for profit, some generate enough revenue to defend themselves in court.

Medical marijuana activists say they are fighting on behalf of patients who need the drug to cope with pain and other ailments.

"People who want to suppress it are going to be victims of litigation," said Kris Hermes, spokesman for Americans for Safe Access. "There are patients in these communities that fight back."

Backers point out that California voters permitted medical marijuana and that polls show they support it.

But opposition remains in some communities, where residents may view the dispensaries as blights.

Down the road from Garden Grove in Lake Forest, officials saw an influx of dispensaries, including several within 600 feet of a Montessori school.

Officials spent nearly $1 million on lawyers trying to shut down more than a dozen dispensaries. But they got nowhere: Even when an Orange County Superior Court judge issued injunctions shutting dispensaries down, owners filed appeals, and the state's 4th District Court of Appeals allowed them to stay open while the cases moved through the courts.

In desperation, officials this spring appealed to the federal government, writing U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. to ask for aid in combatting store-front marijuana dispensaries in Lake Forest.

This fall, Birotte answered them, writing a letter pledging help on the same day he and three other U.S. attorneys in California announced they would go after large-scale growers and dispensary owners in the state. The strategy worked for Lake Forest. Three weeks after the crackdown was announced, officials said, all but one dispensary has left the city.

Gilroy City Councilman Perry Woodward calls what happened in his city, which enacted a ban in 2009, a cautionary tale.

He said a group of local business people had been working with the city to open a dispensary, only to have the project go off the rails after community opposition. The dispensary opened anyway. The town sued and won, but not before City Hall racked up $200,000 in legal costs.

"We spent a lot of money," Woodward said, at the same time it was laying off police officers and firefighters. "Anyone who thinks that as a consequence, marijuana is no longer being sold in Gilroy is living in a fantasy land."

Hemet spent approximately $100,000 to shut down a single dispensary this year whose owner refused to leave in a local zoning dispute; it was more than 10% of the city's projected budget for legal fees for the year. In Temecula, a suit over a dispensary has cost $140,000 and counting (the matter is still before the court) in a city that budgets less than $1 million a year for legal costs.

Much of the legal activity involves cities trying to ban or use zoning laws to restrict the number of dispensaries. But at least one town, Isleton in Sacramento County, spent tens of thousands in legal fees to try to get into the marijuana business.

The little city, so broke that it has relied on volunteer police officers, entered a deal last fall to let an abandoned housing development be used as a marijuana growing operation, with the city getting a cut of the profits as well as other sweeteners like surveillance cameras and an upgraded computer system. The project fell apart after the U.S. attorney and the Sacramento County Grand Jury objected, but not before the city incurred $100,000 in legal costs.

David Larsen, the city's attorney and city manager, said those costs would ultimately be paid by the grower. But the debacle "has diverted a lot of resources.... Any time you have to drag the whole council and everyone else up to the grand jury, that is an interruption of scarce resources," he said.

California voters approved the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1996 with the passage of Proposition 215. In 2003, the state Legislature passed the Medical Marijuana Program Act, the cheekily named Senate Bill 420, a slang reference to smoking marijuana.

But the legality of medical marijuana operations has long been murky. The federal government continues to view marijuana use as a crime. Then in the early days of the Obama administration, U.S. Atty. Gen Eric Holder announced that prosecutors would not target medical marijuana users and caregivers as long as they followed state laws.

Last week, an appeals court upheld a dispensary ban in Riverside. Other cities hope the ruling places their bans on firmer legal footing. Medical marijuana activists vow to fight on but say the law needs to be clarified.

"I would have to agree that this is a mess," said Joe Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access. "People should be entitled to know what the law is, and the law is not clear enough for people to know what it is."

jessica.garrison@latimes.com

Things are going bad for pot smokers in Holland!

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Smoked out? Holland moves closer to pot ban for tourists

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Under a policy announced by the country's justice ministry last week, pot-selling shops will become members-only clubs restricted to Dutch residents over age 18. The new policy is being rolled out regionally, taking effect Jan. 1, 2012 in the southern border provinces of Limburg, North-Brabant and Zeeland and scheduled to extend nationwide - including Amsterdam - in 2013.

In a pilot program launched October 1 and aimed at reducing drug tourism from nearby France, cannabis cafes in the border city of Maastricht have been allowed to serve only Dutch, Belgian, and German customers. The Daily Telegraph says the move will cost the city about $41 million a year in revenue, the equivalent loss of 345 full-time jobs.

The city of Amsterdam, meanwhile, is fighting the measure because it says it discriminates against foreigners and could lead to a sale of soft drugs on the streets.

"The Dutch government has decided upon this for the whole of the Netherlands. Amsterdam doesn't want it," Machteld Ligtvoet, a spokeswoman from the Amsterdam tourism board told CNN this summer.

"Coffee shops are not actively promoted by our organization and are not used in order to attract tourists," Ligtvoet added. "However, the mere idea that one can buy and use soft drugs here is an attractive aspect of Amsterdam and its famous spirit of freedom."

Marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but coffee shop customers can buy up to five grams of cannabis.

Amsterdam's pot 'coffee shops' could go up in smoke

Amsterdam's pot 'coffee shops' could go up in smoke

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Updated 12/17/2010 7:33 AM

A new ruling by Europe's highest court may help pave the way for a ban on foreign tourists buying marijuana at free-wheeling "coffee shops" in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities.

The European Court of Justice announced Thursday that the mayor of Maastricht -- a southern town near the German and Belgian borders and not far from France -- was right to close down a coffee shop that had been selling cannabis to non-residents, says Reuters.

Flooded by pot-smoking foreigners arriving at the rate of 10,000 a day, Maastricht passed a law in 2005 to prohibit marijuana-selling selling coffee shops from admitting non-residents.

The Dutch supreme court asked for an EU ruling after a coffee shop owner sued when he was forced to close for breaking the "no foreigners" rule.

The ruling is seen as an important precedent because a new Dutch government is planning to use the model to restrict the sale of marijuana and hashish by creating a "grass pass" that will be only be given to Dutch adults, reports the London Telegraph.

While marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, it has been sold openly for decades in designated cafés and police make no arrests for possession of small amounts.

Marc Josemans, owner of the Easy Going coffee shop in Maastricht who initiated the legal fight, told the Associated Press that coffee shops are a successful way of regulating the drug market and preventing marijuana users coming into contact with drugs like heroin.

"All these people who visit coffee shops, they want to use and buy cannabis in a safe haven where they are not being contacted with hard drugs or hassled for other things," he said. "That place is called the coffee shop."

Will Mendocino County become the Napa Valley of marijuana?

Will Mendocino County become the Napa Valley of marijuana?

Updated 10/8/2010 4:44 AM

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

MENDOCINO, Calif. — Swap the Dungeness crab cakes and peasant skirts for lobster rolls and L.L. Bean khakis, and this snug seaside hamlet a few hours north of San Francisco could be a dead ringer for a New England village. (It was a stand-in for Cabot Cove, Maine, in the long-running TV series Murder She Wrote.)

But if California voters approve a controversial ballot proposition in November to tax and legalize marijuana for recreational use — and it's ahead in several polls — some local growers say Mendocino, pop. 900, might become better known as the tourist capital of a "Napa Valley of cannabis."

The notion of opening marijuana-tasting rooms, meet-the-grower tours and ganja-friendly "bud and breakfasts" in Northern California's pot-farming "Emerald Triangle" is like "tearing down the Berlin Wall. It's not going to happen overnight," says Matthew Cohen of MendoGrown. His 12-member association promotes a "sustainably grown medical cannabis industry" in the county, where legal and illicit pot — sanctioned for medical use by California residents since 1996 — fuels an estimated half to two-thirds of an economy once anchored by fishing and timber.

PHOTO GALLERY: This bud's for you? MEXICO: California pot vote shows hypocrisy in drug policy

Still, he says, passage of Proposition 19 would mobilize entrepreneurs and help jump-start a sluggish tourism industry by putting "Mendocino County on the map as a vision of what cannabis country could look like. The vibration is already here, and if you love (marijuana) enough to smoke it in a coffeehouse, why wouldn't you want to come out and enjoy it at the source?"

Efforts to prevent legalization "are like trying to put your finger in a 100-foot wave," adds longtime resident Tim Blake. Host of an annual Emerald Cup cannabis competition that drew 100 entries last year, the medical marijuana producer wants to turn Area 101, his 150-acre "spiritual and retreat center" near Laytonville, into a springboard for hemp burgers and public hayrides through his heavily guarded (and legal) collection of OG Kush and Sour Diesel plants.

'Entering uncharted territory'

Hemp shakes and cannabisseries? They're pipe dreams, counter many Mendocino tourism promoters, law officials and business owners.

While 14 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana use in some form, California's groundbreaking Prop 19 would authorize any adult 21 and older to possess, share or transport up to 1 ounce regardless of jurisdiction, and let each city and county decide whether to approve and tax commercial sales.

Proponents say legalization would weaken criminal activity by Mexican drug cartels and funnel as much as $1.4 billion a year into the state's dangerously depleted coffers.

But opponents, including most state officeholders and candidates, the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Police Chiefs Association, argue it would create a hodgepodge of enforcement, boost the ranks of impaired drivers and keep cartels underground to avoid paying taxes.

What's more, they say, it would be in direct conflict with — and superseded by — federal law.

Famous for its dramatic headlands, redwood groves and down-home wineries producing world-class Pinot Noirs, Mendocino County draws about 2 million visitors a year, mostly from Northern California, to an area that's bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined but home to just 90,000 residents.

Despite its reputation as a refuge for "back-to-the-landers" who took advantage of the rugged terrain and skimpy population to grow high-quality and highly profitable strains of pot, "I'd hate to see people coming up here because of what they think we are, instead of who we really are," says Lark Melesea. She sells hemp clothing at a Mendocino shop called Twist and wants the "sacred herb" used for healing rather than "getting blotto."

If Prop 19 passes, Melesea adds, "the last thing we want to be is a pot-based Disneyland."

Marijuana "is part of the social fabric of our nation, one way or another," says Sheriff Tom Allman, and "the days of sending people to prison for a seed are over. It's the green rush of the new millennium." But he says Prop 19's inconsistencies and loopholes doom it to failure, and it wouldn't stem a growing wave of cartel-related violence that has included multiple armed raids in the vast, deceptively scenic reaches of Mendocino National Forest.

"We're entering uncharted territory," says Visit Mendocino County's Scott Schneider, digging into a Thai burrito with organic tofu at the Mendocino Café. "But we're certainly not going to promote something that's still illegal at the federal level." Weed aficionados "are not our target audience," he says.

Pot at the end of the rainbow?

Right on cue, diner Matt Kotlarczyk lowers his fork to join the debate. A Cincinnati-based sculptor who's winding his way up the California coast, Kotlarczyk didn't choose Mendocino for its counterculture, ganja-friendly ambience. But, he says, "it's definitely an enhancement."

Mendocino isn't the only California destination calculating whether, and how, to attract similar-minded travelers.

Joey Luiz, a winery sales manager who's running for city council in neighboring Lake County, says marijuana tourism could be a plus: "We've struggled to find any kind of industry, and the more bodies you can bring in, the better." Farther north in Siskiyou County, Dunsmuir Mayor Peter Arth has been nicknamed "Mayor Juana" for his support of a downtown pot garden, across from the sheriff's substation, to draw visitors and provide organic marijuana to patients.

And in a hardscrabble swath of downtown Oakland dubbed "Oaksterdam," Segway tours already cruise by Oaksterdam University (a trade school that has trained more than 12,000 students in how to grow marijuana), medical dispensaries stocked with pot-laced Belgian chocolates, and a souvenir store that peddles ganja-themed boxer shorts.

But marijuana doesn't always translate to a tourist pot of gold: Though Amsterdam's laissez-faire coffeehouses have drawn smokers for decades, the Dutch border city of Maastricht recently voted to ban sales to foreigners in a bid to stave off an influx of weed-seeking backpackers.

Along Mendocino County's Anderson Valley wine trail, Raul Touzon of Miami and Andree Thorpe of Bermuda sip glasses of Pinot Noir rosé on a sun-dappled lawn at Goldeneye Winery. Would they return for a few tokes along with their liquid relaxers?

Not likely. "There's a mystique to sitting here, enjoying the experience: the land, the scenery, the grapes," Touzon says. "No one is going to come here to smoke a joint."

Adds Milla Handley, owner of the nearby Handley Winery: "How do you deal with driving and smoking? We try to be conscientious (in limiting wine samples) because our kids are on these roads. You add another drug, and it's a cause for concern."

But Mendocino County fisherman, construction worker and pot grower Tyler Kidwell begs to differ. "When I went to Hawaii," says Kidwell, "I got two questions: Have you ever surfed Point Arena (a famous county break), and did you bring us any pot?"

Whether or not it's legalized for recreational use, "Mendocino is known around the world as a pot mecca," adds Kidwell. "And if you're going to get stoned, the redwoods are a great place to do it."

Can tobacco be the next miracle drug?

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Can tobacco, the weed with a killer reputation, be the next miracle drug?

On Maryland tobacco farms, turning a tradition into potential health benefits

By Ann Gerhart, Published: November 14

Warning: The subject of this exploration will constrict your blood vessels, choke your windpipe and dispatch you to an early grave, 5 million of you a year. The most lucrative crop the Americas have ever seen, it kept the British at bay, kept the enslaved entrapped, kept Hollywood sexy. Until it didn’t anymore.

Stipulation: Deep bows to the great public health triumph of wrestling Big Tobacco to the mat and changing human behavior. Never before were millions persuaded to give up a highly pleasurable, relatively cheap habit because it was bad for them. And never since.

But: Tobacco itself refuses to die. It’s stubborn. It’s meant to grow here. The seeds are tiny as a flea and germinate like crazy. In less than a month, you can have a robust green crop that’s good for much more than smoking. You can grow vaccines in it. Extract protein from it. Make drugs from it.

Ten years after Maryland became the only state to use its tobacco settlement money to pay hundreds of farmers to quit growing the evil sot-weed, it’s turning out that tobacco has redemptive virtues. Nobody needed to bother exploiting them before; the stuff was so fabulously successful for 400 years as a vice. Even nicotine, the natural and highly addictive chemical in tobacco, has its benefits.

People smoked in part because a cigarette could calm you down and pep you up. Now research studies are exploring exactly how nicotine may safely halt cognitive decline and help those with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, schizophrenia and attention problems. The pure nicotine in the smoking cessation patch used in these studies is extracted from an American product that American farmers know how to grow.

If you drive around Southern Maryland, you can still spy it. Amid the corn mazes and alpaca petting opportunities, the pick-your-own peppers and the thick crop of McMansions, there’ll be a couple acres of plants that look like soldiers — upright, sturdy, tall as a man, with bushy leaves bigger than the blade on a ceiling fan.

You’ll come upon a weathered barn, with some of its boards missing. But on closer examination, you’ll see the slats are opened with a precise symmetry. They let in the air that cures the tobacco hung on its stalks up in the rafters.

Inside the barn, the sheaves, as it has been said, feel like velvet and smell like money.

The sticks that Sylvester Brady uses to spear up the cut stalks in the field and hang them in the barn — some of them are 100 years old. Brady is 39, and some of the 161 / 2 acres of burley tobacco he tends are off Route 4, right behind the library with its exhibit showing how Calvert County wouldn’t have existed without tobacco, which is why the leaf is so prominent on the county flag. He’s one of a handful of growers who didn’t sign up for the state’s tobacco buyout program. Nearly 900 in the state did, and the first to sign up got their last checks this year.

Like tobacco, Brady is stubborn. He grows the crop under contract with Philip Morris. It’s old-style farm life. There are no computers, no mechanized harvesters. Handle the plant when it’s wet, and it makes you sick as a dog, feverish, cold, shaky. It took researchers some time to determine that was “green tobacco sickness” and to teach workers how to avoid being poisoned by the oil. Among its many attributes, tobacco is a potent natural pesticide.

“You’ve got to love to fool with it to fool with it,” Brady says. “It can try your patience.”

Slaves built the great tobacco fortunes of North Carolina and Virginia and worked the plantations of Southern Maryland. After emancipation, blacks and whites worked as sharecroppers and field laborers. It continued to flourish because of voracious demand. World War I Gen. John J. Pershing pleaded from France in 1918: “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets.”

Fifty years later, the lawsuits over the health hazards started.

Gary V. Hodge was finishing up a long stint as executive director of the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland as then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening was thinking about what to do with Maryland’s share of the billions in tobacco money won through court settlements in the late 1990s.

Tobacco was “part of this deep cultural heritage of one of the dozen oldest counties” in the nation, Hodge says. Its dominance was ending just as bedroom-community development was expanding. He helped come up with an innovative plan to pay Maryland farmers a stipend each year for a decade to tide them over while they looked for other crops. To participate, a farmer had to pledge to quit the crop, unless — and here was the forward-looking loophole — he were to grow tobacco for beneficial purposes. Hodge had some ideas for that.

Tobacco is often called the white mouse of the plant world, and Nicotiana tabacum has been turned inside out for study. The first studies of nicotine, in which researchers watched how a chicken’s leg twitched when exposed to the drug, were conducted in the late 1800s. They led to the discovery — and naming — of nicotinic receptors in the brain that play a key role in neurotransmitting.

The plant itself has relatively few genes, so it’s easy to manipulate to maximize any trait — low or high nicotine, faster maturity, slower burn rate, tougher leaves for finer cigar-wrapping.

It has a density of high-quality protein, and extracting, purifying and exploiting the value of that protein is where Hodge saw opportunity for Maryland growers. So a team of University of Maryland researchers also have been fooling with tobacco for the past several years.

Agronomist Robert Kratchovil grows a new varietal, hybridized for very low nicotine and very high protein and leaf mass, at a small test plot at the university’s Upper Marlboro farm. This tobacco is harvested several times a growing season, like spinach, and carted off to College Park, where food science professor Martin Lo throws it into a whirring grinding machine that resembles a giant blender. He has experimented with when to harvest for highest protein content and what else might be done with the pulp.

Lo grew up in Taiwan, where, he says, tobacco smoke is used in some non-Western medical applications and where his grandparents always told him to finish his rice. Both inform his quest for new benefits from tobacco. “My belief in science is that we have to be humble,” Lo says. “We only know a little. One development triggers a few new ideas that may lead to something else.”

So far, the project has identified industrial applications for the extracted protein, such as binding agents in paint. The cellulose could be dried and converted into biofuel.

Left over in the plant pulp are dozens of compounds. One of them is solanesol, a precursor of coenzyme Q10, necessary for cell functioning. CoQ10 declines, like nearly everything, with age, sending the middle-aged from the cardiologist to the drugstore. “One bottle at Costco is 32 or 33 dollars!” says Lo, who theorizes that the enzyme could be produced faster and cheaper from tobacco. He brews tea from the pulp, hunts for fermentation possibilities and looks “to use [the tobacco plant] down to the very last drop.”

The next challenge is to build a small bioprocessing facility in the heart of what was tobacco country. Hodge and his partner, Neil Belson, are trying to raise money from investors for that.

Not just in Maryland is bioprocessing seen as the great hope for tobacco farming. North Carolina, the leading state for production, has a venture underway. And other companies are farther along.

Kentucky BioProcessing in Owensboro got a $17.9 million grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for a project dubbed Blue Angel — to see whether the firm could develop the capacity to fast-track vaccine production in case of pandemic.

Tobacco is under study as a way to fight measles and tooth decay and as a medium for personalized vaccines. “You take a biopsy of a tumor,” explains Kentucky BioProcessing chief executive Hugh Hayden, build a construct to fight it, and tobacco grows so fast that “you go to having a finished [medicine] in a number of weeks.”

Few of these pioneers argue that the virtues of tobacco will replace its cash value as a vice. Reputation reclamation is hard work.

“You can take a crop that once was non-healthy, and still is, and turn it into an alternative that still allows people to make money. It has a lot of promise,” says Ben Beale, the Maryland extension agent in St. Mary’s County, where dozens of Amish and Mennonites still grow tobacco for the cigarette companies.

Meanwhile, a stubborn plant still rewards its stubborn farmer.

Bobby Anderson is 71, and he refused the buyout. “I didn’t want to sell my heritage, simple as that,” he says. He doesn’t smoke, dip or chew, and neither does his grandson, Lee Pilkerton.

“But tobacco has been very good to me,” Anderson says.

It paid off his house, and it bonded him to Pilkerton, whose daddy died when he was 6. The boy tagged along after his grandfather in the fields and got his own plot at 8, and kept that first money, too.

Pilkerton, who is 30, farms tobacco after he commutes back from his day job, tending the manicured vistas of the federal city as an employee of the National Park Service. He has a handsome house that tobacco helped build, and a wife, Sara, who’s a veterinarian, and a smart 2-year-old named Cora whom he calls the boss, and a set of Belgian horses he takes to compete in tractor pulls.

This is his time of year. Inside the barn, where the fading light glints through those slats and the air is rich with the mellow, roasted smell of drying tobacco, he checks on his crop.

“I love stripping,” he says. “All your hard work, it’s right there.”

The "drug war" is a jobs program for overpaid cops?

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Maricopa County workers earned $7 mil in overtime in '10

by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Matt Dempsey - Nov. 16, 2011 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

An undercover narcotics investigator earned $61,549 in overtime pay last year, nearly doubling his salary as an employee with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

The investigator was paid more overtime than any other employee in the county, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of government payroll and overtime data from fiscal year 2010.

• Search salaries for publicly-funded employees

More than 4,300 county employees earned nearly $7 million in total overtime pay, representing slightly more than 1 percent of the county's total $631 million in payroll. The county's payroll increased about $4 million from fiscal year 2009 to fiscal year 2010.

The Republic's analysis found that about a third of the county's workforce earned extra pay, mostly in 24-hour operations that work with difficult populations, such as the Sheriff's Office and Correctional Health Services, the department responsible for treating inmates.

Eighty-three workers earned more than $10,000 in overtime last year, but county officials said overall, overtime expenses remained about the same year to year.

Only 28 county employees earned more money in 2010 compared with a year earlier, with the median pay increase $3,548.48. County budget officials said that in many cases, employees were paid more in an effort to recruit and retain employees.

Most county workers haven't seen raises in four years amid the recession. The stagnant pay coupled with rising contributions to the state's pension system have left some within the county's 13,200-person workforce frustrated.

Deputy County Manager Sandi Wilson said county leaders recognize the sentiment.

"We certainly understand the frustration, but we are also very cognizant of the fact that we need to keep our taxes as low as we can to stimulate the county."

She pointed out that the county has programs to pay for employees' school tuition, ideas that help save the county money and a popular vacation buy-back program.

Wilson acknowledged there have been high-level discussions about potentially offering certain workers a "one-time bonus or something like that" next year but said "it's a little early for me to tell you" what the program could look like.

Wilson and other county officials said they closely monitor overtime but leave it to department directors to determine when to approve overtime pay.

David Trombi, a deputy chief with the Sheriff's Office, said overtime is the answer to budget pressures and demands for service.

Trombi attributed much of the overtime to officers who work on federal task forces, homicide investigators, dispatchers, SWAT teams and other specialized crime units.

"We can't just shut down after we've hit our 40 when you're short manpower," he said. "We don't not send out our homicide investigators just because they've hit their 40-hour workweek," he said.

Thomas Tegeler, director of correctional health, said the overtime payments are not only justified but necessary. The second-highest earner of overtime hours was a medical assistant with that department, who more than doubled her salary.

Tegeler said it's more cost-effective to pay overtime to employees rather than hire from a nurse registry, which can be more expensive. Also, he said, costs can climb because many employees work in areas of the jails that never shut down, such as the inpatient mental-health unit, a 64-bed infirmary, and central intake.

"Those are true numbers, there's no disputing that," said Tegeler, who said he performed his own review after an interview request by the newspaper. "But I would say that we are doing a better job controlling overtime today than we were a year ago."

In equipment services, which manages the county's fleet of vehicles, mechanics have been working overtime to keep cars, trucks and tractors on the road. John Cantu, director of the department, said that when the Board of Supervisors decided in recent years to cut back on big purchases such as vehicles, that meant more work for county mechanics, Cantu said.

Layoffs also boosted overtime in some areas of the office of the medical examiner, where one crime-scene specialist earned more than $7,000 in extra money to respond to crime scenes.

In the case of the narcotics investigator, his total salary of $136,533 made him among the highest-paid county employees. It also made him an extreme example of how Maricopa County officials doled out overtime last year to some of its employees.

The investigator, who has been on loan to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to work complex narcotics cases, was paid for 1,107 hours of overtime at time and a half. Because the investigator speaks Spanish as part of his assignment, he earned an extra $1.50 for each of the overtime hours through the county's multilingual pay program.

A county spokesman said that shortly after the investigator was hired in 1999, he was loaned to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"He's not even really answerable to us in terms of day-to-day reporting relationship," said Jerry Cobb, the spokesman for the County Attorney's Office. "We are responsible for his salary, but his salary is, I think completely covered by a grant."

Reach the reporter at yvonne.wingett@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4712.

Uncle Sam is searching thru your cargo

This article didn't say it but, Uncle Sam tells us these searches are necessary to catch terrorists, but in reality all most all the criminals that have been arrested by these "Patriot Act" searches have been drug dealers, not terrorists.

Source

U.S. still grappling with 100% air cargo screening

By Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

More than a year after the deadline Congress set for screening all air cargo on passenger planes, the Transportation Security Administration still isn't checking all the cargo arriving aboard international flights.

The TSA hasn't certified equipment to screen whole containers yet.

The gap in screening increasingly alarms lawmakers because bombs have been smuggled aboard planes, including explosives found a year ago in printer cartridges heading for Chicago synagogues in two air shipments from Yemen.

"America's aviation system is at the top of the terrorist target list," says Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who wrote the law with the cargo-screening deadline. "TSA must close the gaping loophole that leaves billions of pounds of air cargo unscreened on passenger planes entering our country from overseas."

TSA Administrator John Pistole says all domestic cargo is being screened and that TSA is negotiating screening agreements with 20 countries that send 80% of the cargo heading to the USA.

"The question is: What can they practically do that doesn't put a halt to the global supply chain?" he says.

In 2007, Congress set a deadline of August 2010 to screen all cargo. But amid the complexity of dealing with other governments and their security systems, TSA missed the deadline for screening all in-bound international flights carrying 44% of that cargo. The agency set a goal of Dec. 31 for screening in-bound cargo, then alerted industry groups to an indefinite postponement.

Shipping companies and airlines warn that striving for 100% screening of cargo at airports will divert limited resources from hunting the most dangerous packages. The Yemen printer cartridges were screened and not caught — but were found through an intelligence tip.

Instead, business groups advocate a system of electronic documentation assuring that nobody tampered with cargo as it moved from manufacturer to shipper to aircraft. Companies would be certified for trustworthiness at each link in the supply chain.

"Physical screening of 100% of air cargo throughout the world is, I believe, impractical," says Tony Tyler, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, which represents airlines. "Things do need to be screened at some point, but in the airport environment — you just can't do it."

The challenge of screening cargo is that different packages from different locations are lumped together in large containers before being loaded on a plane. That means screening the material before it gets lumped together — or tearing apart a container to check something suspicious. TSA hasn't certified equipment such as X-ray machines to screen whole containers yet.

"You can screen a load of bananas, but if you throw some sneakers in there, game over," says Brandon Fried, executive director of Airforwarders Association, a trade group for shippers. "This is a real-estate issue. There's not enough space at the airports to spread these boxes out and screen them individually."

Business groups such as the airlines and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warn that screening 100% of all cargo at airports is an unrealistic goal. The key is to identify trusted shippers — and then focus screening on suspicious packages.

But then there's the cost. TSA estimates it would cost $26.8 million over five years to run background checks on an estimated 650,000 shipping workers. The agency proposes to charge shippers $31 to $51 for each background check.

Many shipping companies and industry groups oppose the fee and argue that the government should share the cost. FedEx called the fees "a significant burden" when applied across hundreds of thousands of workers. And DHL says that company "disagrees in the strongest terms possible with the proposal."

Most of the attention so far has focused on cargo aboard passenger planes, But the Yemen printer cartridges were aboard all-cargo planes of FedEx and U.S.

Markey proposed legislation in the last Congress — and plans to introduce it again soon — requiring TSA to expand screening to all cargo on cargo-only planes, not just passenger flights.

Despite the concerns, TSA maintains that cargo security continues to improve. The agency estimates it now is screening about 80% of inbound international cargo. Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman says all cargo on flights departing U.S. airports and all inbound international cargo identified as high-risk is screened.

"Air cargo," he says, "is more secure than it has ever been."

Feds raid Washington state medical marijuana dispensaries

Feds raid Washington state medical marijuana dispensaries

By Laura L. Myers | Reuters

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Federal agents and police raided state-sanctioned medical marijuana dispensaries across western Washington on Tuesday, targeting storefronts deemed to be engaged in illegal drug trafficking and money laundering.

The dispensaries singled out by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were essentially operating under the state's medical marijuana law to conceal criminal activity, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan said in a statement.

Federal officials did not immediately disclose the number of suppliers shut down in the sweep.

But the Cannabis Defense Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group for marijuana, said on its website that 15 "medical cannabis access points" in at least six western Washington cities -- Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Puyallup, Lacey and Rochester -- were raided on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for Durkan's office, Emily Langlie, said one person was arrested by federal agents, and that additional arrests had been made by sheriff's deputies in separate raids across three counties although she could not say how many.

Search warrant affidavits unsealed in federal court cited evidence that the dispensaries targeted in the sweep were involved in large-scale drug distribution and money laundering.

Storefront cannabis shops are neither explicitly permitted nor banned under a 1998 voter-approved state law that legalized pot in Washington for medical purposes, but they have widely proliferated nevertheless.

State law does allow collective medical marijuana gardens of up to 45 plants, or a maximum of 15 plants per patient.

Although cannabis is still listed as an illegal narcotic under federal law, 16 states and the District of Columbia have statutes decriminalizing marijuana for medical reasons, according to the National Drug Policy Alliance.

NOT GOING AFTER PATIENTS

Tuesday's sweep marked the first major federal crackdown on pot shops in western Washington since Governor Christine Gregoire in April vetoed most provisions of a bill that would have established a new regulatory system for medical marijuana.

Gregoire has said she was swayed by a legal opinion from U.S. prosecutors threatening to target not only dispensary owners but state regulators who would enforce the proposed new law.

Federal prosecutors said they were not going after patients who have a legitimate medical need for pot.

"We will not prosecute truly ill people or their doctors who determine that marijuana is an appropriate medical treatment," Durkan said. [I suspect that means the Feds think anybody who smokes medical marijuana is a healthy person who is faking their illness and thus subject to prosecution. And of course that is backed up by the Feds position which classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug which has no accepted medical use in the USA. I don't believe this rubbish and am for legalizing ALL drugs, not just marijuana]

Federal agents had raided more than seven dispensaries in the eastern Washington city of Spokane in May and April after facility operators there refused to shut down.

Last month, federal prosecutors announced a get-tough stance against dispensaries in California that were found to be engaged in drug trafficking under the guise of supplying medical marijuana patients.

The raids on Tuesday appeared to take dispensary operators by surprise, said Seattle defense attorney Aaron Pelley, who told Reuters that two pot dispensary clients were "served with pre-indictment paper" by law enforcement but not jailed.

"In eastern Washington and California, they fired a shot over the bow. Here in western Washington, it looks like the feds put boots on the ground and started kicking down doors."

In July, Seattle's mayor signed into law a city licensing system for medical marijuana distribution, requiring suppliers to comply with city codes that govern public nuisance complaints, plumbing and food-handling, for example.

Three of the facilities that Cannabis Defense Coalition said were raided are in Seattle.

(Editing by Steve Gorman and Cynthia Johnston)

No guns for anybody that admits to smoking pot

The act would redefine a person who is considered a drug user to include anyone who admits "to using or possessing a controlled substance unlawfully within the past 5 years."

The 2nd Amendment was intended, not to give people the right to shoot rabbits and go target shooting, but to allow the people to deal with government tyrants who pass laws like this one. And of course those tyrants are the one who want to make it illegal for you to keep and bear arms.

I think the "drug war" is the number one thing that has turned America into a police state over the years. And of course if this law is passed America will become an even bigger police state.

This law should have some interesting side effects. None of which will be enforced. Will Emperor Obama and the other politicians who have admitted to smoking pot become criminals for their admissions? I doubt it.

Since a huge percentage of Americans have admitted to smoking marijuana most police departments allow new cops to be hired who have admitted to smoking pot. Will these cops be booted off the force? I doubt it. Will these cops be forced to turn in their guns? I doubt it.

Source

Tucson shooting hero urges tougher gun laws

by Uriel J. Garcia - Nov. 16, 2011 12:00 AM

Cronkite News Service

WASHINGTON - A Tucson resident who was hailed as a hero in the Jan. 8 shooting that killed six people and seriously injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords called on Senate lawmakers Tuesday to pass stricter gun laws.

Patricia Maisch urged members of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee to pass the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 to help prevent another attack like the one near Tucson in which six died and 13 were wounded.

"Imagine the headlines you've seen, but now with the name of a loved one instead," Maisch told lawmakers.

Maisch was one of several bystanders credited with subduing Jared Loughner, the man accused in the shooting . Maisch grabbed an ammunition clip.

"Their courage and heroism gave me the opportunity to take an ammunition magazine from the shooter," she testified Tuesday.

Several of the survivors came to Washington to support the Fix Gun Checks Act, which would toughen National Instant Criminal Background checks on people looking to buy guns. The database is supposed to flag drug users, the mentally ill and people with felony convictions.

But a report released Tuesday by Mayors Against Illegal Guns said most states are not registering drug users in the NICS database and many federal agencies are not complying either. The U.S. mayors' group was formed in response to the shooting near Tucson.

The report ranked Arizona 15th in the number of mental-health records it provides federal officials and said that all but three of the state's counties regularly send in records.

The act would redefine a person who is considered a drug user to include anyone who admits "to using or possessing a controlled substance unlawfully within the past 5 years."

According to news reports, Loughner had admitted to military recruiters in 2008 that he had used drugs but was still able to buy a gun legally.

But Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, did not appear to be moved by Tuesday's testimony. Grassley, who said he was sitting in on the committee for Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said the bill would infringe on the Second Amendment rights of veterans, among others.

Grassley argued that a veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder could be barred from buying a gun under the bill, which he said would be "ironic."

"We just honored and celebrated Veterans Day," Grassley said. "Yet, we are here debating new legislation to restrict the Second Amendment right of citizens."

But Maisch and others said the current system needs to be fixed.

"The shooting in Tucson brought Americans together," she said. "Please honor that unity by putting politics aside and working together to fix our broken background-check system."

Also at the hearing was Bill Badger, another person cited as a hero for helping subdue the gunman.

Badger was shot in the head but survived the injury. He believes that if the bill can become law it would save lives in the future.

"It's not a political issue," Badger said. "It's about saving lives."

Probation officer busted with 8 pounds of marijuana

Hitler would be proud of this 11 year old snitch who turned in his mom for smoking pot

In this case Heidi Christine Siebenaler, a Minnesota Dakota County probation officer supervisor, was busted with 8 pounds of marijuana in her house.

Sadly the woman's 11 year old son snitched on his mom. Hitler would have been proud of the child, who probably has been brainwashed by our government masters that government rulers are more important then parents.

Source

11-year-old Dakota County boy turns in mom, stepdad over pot stash

Article by: HERÓN MÁRQUEZ ESTRADA , Star Tribune

Updated: November 15, 2011 - 9:21 PM

The woman, a Dakota County probation supervisor, put on leave.

After months of fuming over marijuana smoke in his home, an 11-year-old Dakota County boy decided enough was enough.

The boy snapped pictures of a couple of pounds of marijuana on a dresser in the bedroom of his mother and stepfather, police say, then had the cellphone images forwarded to the Dakota County Drug Task Force.

The task force raided the Ravenna Township home and, as a result, Heidi Christine Siebenaler, 40, a Dakota County probation supervisor, is on paid administrative leave and charged with fifth-degree possession of marijuana, according to a criminal complaint filed last week by the Washington County attorney's office.

Also facing charges is her husband, Mark Siebenaler, 40, the alleged owner of the marijuana, who told police the weed is for medicinal purposes, although that still doesn't make it legal in Minnesota. He is being charged with possession and intent to distribute.

"These allegations raise moral concerns and legal concerns," said Washington County Attorney Pete Orput. "It's disappointing when someone in law enforcement gets caught breaking the law. In this case it is particularly disappointing."

The marijuana was found in the couple's home near Hastings during a raid by the drug task force on Oct. 25.

"The home regularly smells of burnt marijuana smoke," sheriff's deputy Dan Bianconi wrote in the search warrant after interviewing the 11-year-old boy. "Often times he [said he] is unable to escape the smell without going outside."

The 11-year-old lives in the house as does his 8-year-old brother.

Court documents indicate that the marijuana smoking has been an issue for months and possibly even years.

In the search warrant, Bianconi noted that the boy complained to his mother several times about the odor and that "she has told him that marijuana use is 'not that bad.'"

The boy's biological father also told investigators that, within the past three years, his son had taken some of the marijuana from the home to school.

Bianconi said that school authorities were not notified but that the dad confronted the mother about the incident "before other schoolchildren were exposed to the marijuana."

Pot medicinal, couple say

Heidi Siebenaler was hired by Dakota County in 1996 as a probation officer and promoted to supervisor last year.

She was placed on leave on Nov. 2, and county officials said there is no internal investigation. That could change once the criminal matter is resolved, officials said.

Calls to the couple were not returned Tuesday, but in a TV interview with KMSP, they said the dope was for medicinal purposes because the stepfather suffered a brain injury about 20 years ago.

"I smoke marijuana and I'm not ashamed to say it," Mark Siebenaler said on camera.

The couple also said that the marijuana was kept away from the kids and that Heidi Siebenaler did not know it was in the house.

"I live in this house and I've never smelled marijuana in the house," Heidi Siebenaler said.

Those statements are at odds with the criminal complaint and the search warrant filed by the drug task force.

In the criminal complaint, investigators say that Mark Siebenaler "admitted that his wife ... knew of the marijuana in the home."

During the raid, task force members said they found scales and drug paraphernalia, weapons and about 8 pounds of marijuana.

Officers also said they went to a spot where the stepfather grew marijuana, according to the search warrant.

Authorities were alerted to the marijuana about three weeks ago when the boy complained about the smoke to his biological father while talking to him on his cellphone.

The father had the boy photograph what the son described as a leafy substance he saw stuffed into Wal-Mart bags in the bedroom, then the boy forwarded the photos to his dad, who contacted the Dakota County Sheriff's Office.

Investigators said the photos showed about 2 pounds of marijuana, an amount more than what would be typical for personal use.

"Larger quantities," Bianconi wrote in the search warrant, "are more commonly found with those who distribute for profit or to sustain addiction."

Heron Marquez • 952-746-3281

Source

Boy fed up with pot at home turns in mom

Nov. 16, 2011 09:36 AM

Associated Press

HASTINGS, Minn. -- An 11-year-old boy who said he was fed up with marijuana smoke in his house took pictures of the drug which led to a raid by authorities and sent his mother and stepfather to jail in Dakota County.

Drug agents served a search warrant on the house in Ravenna Township near Hastings last month and arrested Heidi Siebenaler, a Dakota County probation supervisor, and her husband, Mark Siebenaler. Both face charges in the case.

A criminal complaint says the boy told investigators he had complained numerous times to his mother about the smell of the marijuana. He finally took the matter to his biological father who told his son to take pictures of the marijuana. The father then forwarded the photos to authorities.

Heidi Siebenaler tells KMSP-TV that her husband smokes marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Source

Photo of suspected marijuana leads to drug charges filed

By: Chad Richardson, The Hastings Star-Gazette

The Dakota County Sheriff’s Department has charged Hastings resident Heidi Christine Siebenaler, 40, with one fifth degree count of aiding and abetting drugs for possessing marijuana.

According to the criminal complaint, an individual contacted the Sheriff’s Department over concerns related to two minor children living in the residence. The individual had received a photograph of possible controlled substance – a green leafy substance in a large shopping bag. The individual claimed the photo had been taken by one of the children in the residence.

A search warrant was obtained, then executed for the residence. While executing the search warrant, officers found a large quantity of suspected marijuana in a bedroom, drug paraphernalia and a black digital scale.

All suspected marijuana was sent to the St. Paul Crime lab for testing. All tested positive for marijuana. The total weight was more than 3,609 grams or close to eight pounds.

Siebenaler told FOX 9 news that the boy's stepfather uses marijuana for medical reasons, and insisted that she keeps it away from her children.

Drug tunnels found in San Diego & Nogales

Source

Major drug tunnel found in San Diego

Nov. 16, 2011 02:20 PM

Associated Press

SAN DIEGO -- An estimated 14 tons of marijuana were seized after the discovery of a cross-border tunnel that authorities said Wednesday was one of the most significant secret drug smuggling passages ever found on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The tunnel discovered Tuesday stretched about 400 yards and linked warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana, authorities said.

U.S. authorities seized an estimated nine to 10 tons of marijuana inside a truck and at the warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa area, said Derek Benner, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. Mexican authorities recovered about five tons south of the border.

Photos taken by Mexican authorities show an entry blocked by bundles that were likely stuffed with marijuana, Paul Beeson, chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector, told The Associated Press. Tunnel walls were lined with wood supports, and power cords led toward the Mexican entrance, suggesting lighting and ventilation systems.

The depth and width of the tunnel were unknown. Several arrests were made. Benner declined to elaborate in an interview.

Cross-border tunnels have proliferated in recent years, but the latest find is one of the more significant, based on the amount of drugs seized.

Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 50 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border, two of the largest pot busts in U.S. history. Those secret passages were lined with rail tracks, lighting and ventilation.

As U.S. authorities tighten their noose on land, tunnels have emerged as a major tack to smuggle marijuana. Smugglers also use single-engine wooden boats to ferry bales of marijuana up the Pacific Coast and pilot low-flying aircraft that look like motorized hang gliders to make lightning-quick drops across the border.

More than 70 tunnels have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years. Many are clustered around San Diego, California's Imperial Valley and Nogales, Ariz.

California is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig with shovels. In Nogales, smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.

San Diego's Otay Mesa area has the added draw that there are plenty of warehouses on both sides of the border to conceal trucks getting loaded with drugs. Its streets hum with semitrailers by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.

After last November's twin finds, U.S. authorities launched a campaign to alert Otay Mesa warehouse landlords to warning signs. Landlords were told to look for construction equipment, piles of dirt, sounds of jackhammers and the scent of unburned marijuana.

U.S. authorities linked the November finds to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, headed by that country's most-wanted drug lord, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Benner said the sophistication of the latest tunnel suggests that a major Mexican drug cartel was involved, but no link has been established.

"This is where the work, in earnest, begins," said Benner. "We need to find them and shut them down."

Source

Drug tunnel found in Nogales rental house

by Daniel González - Nov. 16, 2011 04:18 PM

The Arizona Republic

A sophisticated tunnel being used to smuggle drugs under the border into the United States was discovered Wednesday in Nogales, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

Federal officials have seen an increase in tunnels this year as drug smugglers look for ways to circumvent beefed-up fencing along the border.

The entrance to the latest tunnel was concealed under the front porch of a home about a half mile west of the DeConcini Port of Entry on the west side of Nogales, ICE officials said.

The 70-foot tunnel ran south into Mexico and connected with a drainage tunnel that runs parallel to the U.S.-Mexico border, the officials said.

The tunnel was 3 feet wide and 2 feet high and extended 25 feet into Mexico. It had wood support beams, similar to a mine shaft.

"This latest tunnel discovery shows that our ongoing collaborate enforcement efforts to combat drug and contraband smuggling along the Southwest border are having a significant impact," Kevin Kelly, assistant special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations, said in a news release.

Wednesday's tunnel is the first discovered since the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, said Mario Escalante, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's in Tucson. Through August of the last fiscal year, 12 tunnels were found, compared with seven in all of the the previous year, he said.

More articles on the evil American Drug War