Tag: Illegal Drugs

Closing Thought–29May18

This is a story that appeared while I was on my walk about…..something kinda scary if you think about it…..the drug culture takes hold in the military…….just what we need a bunch of strung out dipsticks in control of our nukes……

It was a story but it did not to be a big deal at the time……

One airman said he felt paranoia. Another marveled at the vibrant colors. Meet service members entrusted with guarding nuclear missiles that are among the most powerful in America’s arsenal. Air Force records obtained by the AP show they bought, distributed, and used the hallucinogen LSD and other mind-altering illegal drugs as part of a ring that operated undetected for months on a highly secure military base in Wyoming. A slipup on social media by one airman enabled investigators to crack the drug ring at FE Warren Air Force Base in March 2016, details of which are reported here for the first time. Fourteen airmen were disciplined. Six of them were convicted in courts martial of LSD use or distribution or both. None of the airmen was accused of using drugs on duty.

The service members accused of involvement were from the 90th Missile Wing, which operates one-third of the 400 Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles that stand “on alert” 24/7 in underground silos scattered across the northern Great Plains. Documents obtained by the AP tell a sordid tale of off-duty use of LSD, cocaine, and other drugs in 2015 and 2016 by airmen who were supposed to be held to strict behavioral standards because of their role in securing the weapons. For the inexperienced members of the drug ring, Airman 1st Class Nickolos Harris, the ringleader, had set out several “rules” for LSD use. Rule No. 1: “No social media at all.” But social media proved their undoing. In March 2016, one member posted a Snapchat video of himself smoking marijuana, setting Air Force investigators on their trail. The AP has much more, including testimony from the airmen at their court martial proceedings, here.

Busted by Social Media……dumb asses.

Once again it shows just how stupid the American people have become….placing everything on social media is STUPID!

The Dog Ate My Homework!

Still a good Saturday all around……my day in the garden is lovely….the wine is tasty……and the cheeses are magnificent…..

As usual I try to find interesting or humorous stuff to post on weekends to save my sanity from the circus we call our government…….I found a good one for today……..

We all have heard the story of the excuse for not having your homework….”my dog ate my homework”….right?  I actually used that excuse in high school and of course the teacher rolled her eyes….but I produced the shredded document with all the holes my dog had left when he had his way with the paper….the teacher was amazed that she had actually found a time when that excuse was accurate and not  con job…..

I recently read an article of something along those lines but instead of homework it is drugs……

“The mice ate the marijuana” was an excuse no more believable than “the dog ate my homework” for authorities in Argentina, where eight police officers have been fired over the disappearance of around 1,200 pounds of pot. The officers in Pinar, roughly 40 miles west of Buenos Aires, argued that the missing drugs had been “eaten by mice” in the warehouse for impounded drugs, the Guardian reports. Some 13,220 pounds of marijuana had been registered there two years earlier and investigators found that the total was more than half a ton short. Forensic experts testified that it was very unlikely that even a large number of rodents could have consumed so much marijuana.

A spokesperson for the judge said, “Buenos Aires University experts have explained that mice wouldn’t mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse.” The shortfall was noticed by the new police commissioner, who notified the internal affairs division. In a hearing next month, a judge will try to determine whether the marijuana went missing because of negligence. USA Today notes that although the internal affairs investigators in Argentina decided that rodents could not have consumed the missing pot, police in Wichita in 2013 said mice had managed to chew through evidence bags containing marijuana.

Really Chief….rats ate the weed…..

Yep sounds like a con job…the same as it was when you were in high school…..

Public Enemy Number One: Opioids!

We have a new president and a new number one problem in this country….with Trump it is the opioids abuse.

He has put Kelleyanne Conway as the Opioid Czar and her take on preventing the abuse is for addicts to eat ice cream or french fries…..a sound medical advice from another Trumpian that has NO clue about the world around them.

I read an article written in “The Cipher” on this problem…..

Americans are facing one of their deadliest foes in recent history: not ISIS, but opioids, painkillers that are highly addictive and killing thousands of Americans annually. Drug overdoses took the lives of 64,000 people in 2016, with two-thirds related to opioids.

Congress has taken a good first step, providing the federal government an additional $3.3 billion to fight the opioid crisis in its fiscal year 2018 spending bill with a focus on public health efforts. Most of the money, $1.4 billion, will go to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for a new State Opioid Response Grant program and also for the Mental Health Block Grant, according to Vox. The second highest chunk of funding, $500 million, is for the National Institutes of Health for more opioid addiction research.

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column/expert-view/targeting-one-americas-deadliest-foes-opioids

Interesting thoughts from an agent of the DEA….I would like to hear from my readers on their ideas on the opioid abuse situation.

I agree that abuse is on the rise but on the same token opioids do good for people that suffer with chronic pain.

This Is Your Brain On Drugs

Back in the 1980’s I recall a commercial about Reagan’s War on Drugs….it was a frying pan with an over easy egg cooking with sound…..”This is you brain on drugs”……all this ad did was increase the profits of the Waffle House….it was a worthless waste of air time for it did NOTHING to curb the abuse of drugs…..

Well I bring up this bit of nostalgia because our well informed president has weighed in on the newest war on drugs…..this time it will be zeroing in on the opioid crisis this country is facing……..

The White House has rolled out the “more nuanced” response to the opioid crisis it promised after President Trump talked about executing drug dealers earlier this month. The revised plan White House officials discussed Sunday still involves the death penalty, but officials say they don’t plan to make trafficking in fentanyl a capital crime, let alone launch a Rodrigo Duterte-style bloodbath. Instead, the administration says it will seek capital punishment for drug traffickers where appropriate under existing federal law, the Washington Post reports. Federal law allows the death penalty in four kinds of drug-related crime, all of which also involve murder, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Andrew Bremberg, Trump’s domestic policy director, says the president also wants Congress to pass legislation lowering the minimum amount of fentanyl and other strong opioids needed to trigger mandatory sentences for dealers, the AP reports. The administration says it also has a plan to reduce opioid prescriptions by one-third by 2021. “The opioid crisis is viewed by us at the White House as a nonpartisan problem searching for bipartisan solutions,” adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters, per Politico. Trump is expected to discuss the plan on a Monday visit to New Hampshire, one of the states hardest-hit by the crisis that he has declared a national public health emergency.

Trump’s speech on the crisis was something to behold……he even mentioned the making of bad ads like the frying pan of days gone by………

In a speech officially unveiling his administration’s plan to combat the nation’s ongoing opioid epidemic, President Donald Trump on Monday saod he would fight the crisis with “toughness”, the creation of “very…very…bad commercials” aimed at children; and—as expected—proposed that the death penalty be applied to drug dealers.

However, as drug policy reform advocates feared, he showed little understanding of the origins of the crisis and neglected to mention numerous measures public health experts have advocated for to stop the deadly epidemic.

A key tenet of Trump’s plan to combat the crisis, which killed nearly 64,000 Americans in 2016, is to launch an advertising campaign showing the effects of opioid use.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/03/19/full-war-drugs-scare-fest-trump-proposes-death-penalty-and-very-very-bad-commercials

Trump’s plan is more about some sort of vengeance than solutions to the crisis…..

Vengeance is not a public health policy. But it’s implicit in a policy measure coming out of the White House, which would attempt to solve the opioid crisis with a plan that includes sentencing some high-intensity traffickers to death. It may feel good, and for some segment of the population, vengeance may even look good.

The death of those deemed to be problematic is how some strongmen leaders that President Donald Trump has embraced keep their hold on power — such as Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, who is following through on his pledge to kill every drug dealer he can find. But adding to the number of lives lost at the hands of the opioid crisis is not what the United States needs.
This whole policy thing smells like an utter failure…..kinda like the failure from the 1980’s.

IST’s Afghan Report–Dec 2017

First, I need to report that the Taleban is losing people to ISIS in northern Afghanistan…..

ISIS has held territory in the Jawzjam Province for months, and that appears to be continuing to grow with reports that top Taliban commanders in the province have defected to their side, allowing them to expand their hold across multiple districts.

Throughout the 16+ year US occupation, Jawzjan has been relatively stable, with only limited Taliban influxes that rarely amounted to more than skirmishes. The presence of ISIS, though well documented, had mostly flown under the radar too, with ISIS elsewhere in the country considered a bigger priority.

This seems to have changed with the new defections, as US officials are now calling attention to the ISIS growth in the area, and commanders are saying an anti-ISIS offensive across the north is to be launched in the next few days.

Such offensives have accomplished little in other parts of the country, with large body counts claimed, and Afghan officials repeatedly declaring ISIS “wiped out” only for the group to reassert itself within a matter of days after the fighting dies down.

(antiwar.com)

Plus the Northern region is teeming with crime and corruption…..

Escalating US airstrikes across northern Afghanistan have pushed Taliban forces away from the key city of Kunduz, which Taliban have actually captured at times in recent years. Officials are trying to brag about this as a big victory.

It doesn’t look like it from within Kunduz, however, as locals report that the city is every bit as troubled, and even if it doesn’t seem like the city is facing imminent takeover, crime and corruption are soaring.

Instead of fearing Taliban, locals now fear random gunmen, who rob anyoe they think has any money, and routinely kidnap people, holding them for ransom, a tactic previously common with the insurgency.

The Taliban isn’t so far from the city either, so traveling much of anywhere risks being caught in the cross-fire of ongoing military operations in nearby villages, leaving Kunduz residents effectively trapped in an increasingly insecure “secured” city.

(antiwar.com)

The Taleban has a great source of income even in poverty ridden Afghanistan….POPPIES!

Afghanistan just produced a record poppy crop despite massive $7.6 billion in U.S. counternarcotics spending since the war there began, a new report from an independent watchdog found.

The value of opium poppy produced in Afghanistan spiked from $2 billion to $3 billion from 2012 to 2013, according to a brief released Tuesday from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/21/afghan-poppy-crop-reaches_n_6021814.html

The logical reaction to this source of revenue for the Taleban would be to use Agent Orange and wipe out their crops, right?  War on Drugs 101…eliminate the source.  And then just recently I read a story about this problem…..

Opium unifies the enemies of American interests in Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation feeds power to the Taliban, drug lords, and corrupt officials. That power grew dramatically in 2017 — with production up 87 percent in one year to 9,000 metric tons, according to the latest report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

On Aug. 21, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. policy in Afghanistan will now serve American interests without pre-established time or troop limits. “Conditions on the ground — not arbitrary timetables — will guide our strategy from now on…. We will fight to win.” However, he also noted: “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country. But strategically applied force aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.”

Kill All the Poppies

Now it would seem that somewhere in the Pentagon there was one little guy that  raised his hand and said…”why not eliminate their crop”?

I cannot believe that after 16 years and the Afghans are still capable of raising a record crop of poppies….does anyone in the Pentagon have a brain?

And then there is China and their role in Afghanistan……..

Soon after his inauguration as President of Afghanistan in 2014, Ashraf Ghani paid a trust-building visit to China. During his trip, Ashraf Ghani maintained that China is a “strategic partner of Afghanistan in the short term, medium term, long term and very long term.”

Three years later, President Ghani met his Chinese counterpart on the sideline of 17th Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan privately for fifteen minutes. A confident Xi Jinping assured Ghani that the People’s Republic of China decided to send Wang Yi; the foreign minister to Kabul in order to talk upon bilateral issues, including peace with Pakistan. Utilizing its unique regional geopolitical leverage on all actors, China is trying to take all the credit in the Afghan peace process.

China’s Winning Role In Afghanistan – OpEd

Honey is always better than vinegar…..maybe the Chinese should stop by DC some time and give a lesson or two….God knows what we are doing is not working…..

There is more disturbing news…….

Americans are rightly outraged over revelations that Congress spent $17 million since 1997 to pay off and muzzle victims of congressional sexual misconduct and other abuses. But the U.S. government has spent vastly more effectively bankrolling far more worse sexual atrocities in Afghanistan — in brazen violation of U.S. law.

Since 2002, the U.S. has spent more than $70 billion financing Afghan security forces, including the Afghan military and police. A law sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) prohibits the Pentagon from bankrolling any foreign military units if there is “credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”

Your tax dollars fund Afghan child rape

Come on!  It is time to admit that Afghanistan is a f*cked up mess and come home!

Closing Thought–07Aug17

The Smuggler’s Life

Smuggling use to be a noble gig….you would run American beer or cigs into a country and make a killing off the product.  Then came the drugs.

Drug smuggling became a lucrative occupation as well as a dangerous one.

Have you seen the movies and some TV shows about how the CIA was involved in the drug smuggling trade?  Movies like “Air America” and TV shows like “Snowfall”……

How about the top 10 drug smugglers of the CIA?

The Central Intelligence Agency, created in 1947, oversaw the distribution of many of the billions the US spread around. This paper trail was clandestine, its secrecy justified by supposed national security concerns. But the reality was that the CIA’s aims aligned easily with brutal figures worldwide. Public awareness of its feats would have embarrassed the agency.

One result is that huge drug syndicates have emerged; another is that countries have transformed into major drug producers. Because drugs are illegal, traffickers use some of their ill-gotten riches to pay law enforcement to look the other way, if not get in on the action. Corruption and criminality corrode governments. Civilians suffer.

Source: Meet the CIA’s 10 Favorite Drug Traffickers | Alternet

Hope you learned something today…..It has been a joy imparting the info to my readers…..have a day….chuq

Closing Thought–19Jun17

A magical day in the garden…..serene and soothing……and one f*cking weed that is a bitch……..

Disclaimer:  I am NO way suggesting that anyone should attempt to partake in illegal drug use…..this is solely an FYI post.

I admit it….back in the 60’s I was a bit of a Hippie and yes I tried a wide array of illegal drugs…..weed, uppers, downers and acid but the best of the lot was the tea made from those mushrooms that grow in cow crap.

Now that weed is slowly becoming legal there is a turn to more “daring” drugs….the Magic ‘Shrooms…..and guess what?  They are safer than you think….or so says some research……

A massive drug survey has labeled hallucinogenic mushrooms as the safest recreational drug in the world—though ensuring you’re consuming a psychedelic variety of fungi, rather than some poisonous version, is rather important. This year’s Global Drug Survey, with 120,000 participants in 50 countries, found that 0.2% of more than 12,000 people who reported taking magic mushrooms in 2016 ended up in the emergency room, per the Guardian. That’s compared to 0.6% of cannabis users, 1% of LSD and cocaine users, 1.2% of people who took MDMA or ecstasy, 1.3% of alcohol consumers, 3% of people who took synthetic marijuana or “spice,” and nearly 5% of people who took methamphetamine, labeled the most dangerous recreational drug.

Drugs like LSD are more potent than magic mushrooms, so “it’s easy to take too much and have an experience beyond the one you were expecting,” says survey founder Adam Winstock. That’s why users should “always take a tiny dose to start.” But in the case of magic mushrooms, “death from toxicity is almost unheard of, with poisoning with more dangerous fungi being a much greater risk in terms of serious harms,” Winstock says. Magic mushrooms, with the active ingredient psilocybin, do carry risks, though. Users may experience accidental injury, confusion, disorientation, panic attacks, and negative flashbacks, reports Inverse. Winstock adds that risk of harm increases when the drug is taken with alcohol or in “risky or unfamiliar settings.” (Here’s what happened when cancer patients took mushrooms.)

Please I am not suggesting that you run out and start doing illegal drugs….only that if for some reason you do…..try the safer of the bunch…..NEVER do as I have done!

So ends another day……ENJOY…….TTFN….chuq

Drug War Has Failed

Policy choices have consequences.

Trump made many many promises during his “glorious” campaign but the one failed policy that he seem to overlook was that of the Drug War….after 35+ years of wasted money this war is far from won…..

This whole war thing needs to be reconsidered….we keep wasting billions upon billions of dollars and NO substantial results can be found.

The opiate epidemic has reached an all-time high in the United States, with drug-related deaths now surpassing deaths from vehicle accidents. Statista’s Niall McCarthy wrote, “drug-induced deaths (have) reached 49,714 while road crash deaths fell to 32,675,” in 2014. Opioid- and heroin-related deaths have reached epidemic levels. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Since 2000, the rate of deaths from drug overdoses has increased 137%, including a 200% increase in the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids (opioid pain relievers and heroin).”

With over 1 million heroin users in the U.S., heroin-related deaths are skyrocketing, made possible in part, as McCarthy says, by the cheap supply of heroin, governmental regulations, and Fentanyl-infused heroin (50 times more potent than heroin).

Source: Drug War Fail: Drugs Now Kill More People Than Car Crashes | Alternet

If Trump wants to impress more people then he needs to attack this policy and do something that will address the problem and save some taxpayer dollars……

Just a thought.

The War on Drugs Failed, So Why Isn’t It Over?

With all the interests in the legalized marijuana trade we need to talk about the War On Drugs……

Could the US use a trillion dollars?  Or how about $15 billion a year?

That is the approximate cost of the war on Drugs a year….$15 billion and over 1 trillion has been wasted over the past 40 years with little evidence that the War is being won.

I have been a verbal critic of this “War” for the last 40 years…In the beginning I said it would be waste of money and resources….and NOTHING that has happened in those years has changed my opinion….I am shown the “busts” over the years and they are substantial…..i the same period the flow into this country has not dried up….with that equation one can only surmise that it is a FAILURE!

What could be the benefit by ending this worthless “War”?

Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard who studies drug policy closely, has suggested that legalizing all illicit drugs would produce net benefits to the United States of some $65 billion a year, mostly by cutting public spending on enforcement as well as through reduced crime and corruption. A study by analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California research organization, suggested that if marijuana were legalized in California and the drug spilled from there to other states, Mexican drug cartels would lose about a fifth of their annual income of some $6.5 billion from illegal exports to the United States.

If there are such benefits then why keep the fight going?

Why are politicians so far behind, even as calls for legalization go mainstream?

At the request of Latin American leaders who have grown weary of bloody battles over drugs, the United Nations held a summit last week on the “world drug problem” at its headquarters in New York City. For a moment, it seemed as if the global war on drugs was beginning to crumble under its own weight.

Before the summit even began, the UN officials were under fire for making concessions to powerful countries with harsh drug control regimes and failing to push the global discourse beyond the decades-old treaties that laid the foundation for international drug prohibition. Hundreds of political leaders and policy groups condemned the summit’s guiding statement for refusing to recognize that decades of prohibition have done more harm than good, fueling mass incarceration, organized crime, infectious diseases and general bloodshed across the world while failing to reduce supply or demand.

Source: The War on Drugs Failed, So Why Isn’t It Over?

I said 40 years ago and I feel the same today…..legalize, tax and be done with the waste…..there are worthy programs that could use an infusion of funds.

Could Not Resist This International Story

There are times when the news hands you a story that is just too good to pass up…..and early this morning I got just one of those ………

First there is this piece which I think is an excellent idea……

Pope Francis has created a commission to advise him on priest sex abuse, but it’s unclear whether the group will wield any power against abusers and bishops who cover up for them, report the Daily Beast and the AP. The commission consists of four men, three of whom are priests, and four women, all laity, one of whom was sexually abused by a priest and advocates for child safety in the Catholic Church. Another woman, French psychologist Catherine Bonnet, has written at length about child sex abuse. But it’s not clear exactly what the commission will do—Pope Francis preferred to let its members work out the details, the Boston Globe reports. Broadly speaking, the commission will advise on policies that safeguard children, keep abusers from becoming priests, and train members of the church. Francis created the commission after remarks he made defending the church’s record on abuse led to a political firestorm, with one group accusing him of stonewalling on five alleged abuse cases as archbishop in Buenos Aires. And critics are still skeptical: “They do not need yet another ‘Study Commission,'” said a victim advocacy group. “The pope must take strong steps right now to protect kids, expose predators, discipline enablers, and uncover cover-ups.” (For more, see why Francis called some priests “little monsters.”)

A good idea……but that is not the freebie of which I spoke……this is the one I could resist…….a smile and a chuckle are always nice on Mondays…………..report in UK’s Guardian newspaper…..

German customs officials have intercepted a package addressed to the Vatican containing 14 condoms filled with cocaine.

A government spokesman said a box packed with 340 grammes of the drug, valued at €40,000 (£33,470), was seized in January at the international airport in the eastern city of Leipzig.

The cocaine, posted from an unnamed South American country, was in liquid form. It had been poured into the condoms and placed in the package addressed to the main postal centre at the Vatican.

Authorities handed the parcel to a Vatican police officer with the aim of laying a trap.

But the box was not claimed. German investigators believe the intended recipient, who remains unknown, was tipped off about the interception.

The Vatican office of Interpol is working on the investigation with the Leipzig prosecutor’s office, which could not be reached for comment.

A bit ironic……if anyone knows anything about coke…..a condom is the last thing you would be using…..it lays unclaimed……it had better or there is more explanations that need to be said…………this brings up so many questions that it boggles the mind…….I am sure that there is a logic explanation….but I am still searching for it…….

Any thoughts?