Tag: police state

The War on Drugs Has Failed And It’s Time to Decriminalise, Scotland Says

The Scottish government wants to legalise drug possession for personal use and potentially the entire drug market as part of a massive change in the way addiction is tackled. 

Scottish ministers want to reform drug laws to enable people with drug problems to be better supported instead of being criminalised. They want to address record drug death rates in the country, which are 15 times more likely to affect the poorest 20 percent, and are the highest in Europe. 

Currently the Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party with the Scottish Greens, has no power to change the laws in this way. VICE News has contacted the UK Home Office for a response to the proposals.

In 2021 the crisis prompted a £250m investment by the Scottish government into the country’s addiction services, with former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon admitting her government had “failed” every person who had died as a result of drug addiction.

A policy paper outlining the plans published Friday, entitled A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland, called for the decriminalisation of personal drug possession, the expansion of harm reduction tools such as heroin assisted treatment, supervised drug consumption facilities and drug checking, and a roadmap to explore legal regulation of drugs. 

“We want to create a society where problematic drug use is treated as a health, not a criminal matter, reducing stigma and discrimination and enabling the person to recover and contribute positively to society,” said Scotland’s drugs policy minister Elena Whitham. 

She said that as a strategy to reduce drug use, “the global war on drugs has failed in its objectives”.

“To improve and save lives, we must be innovative, bold and radical. We are clear that nothing should be considered off the table. We must start by recognising that no country, anywhere in the world, has succeeded in eliminating drug use. A fairer, safer and healthier country must care about all its citizens and be inclusive of those with health conditions such as drug dependence.”

In order to achieve these objectives, which Witham said were supported by the public, the UK government needed to change its half a century old drug laws to enable Scotland “to appropriately tailor policy decisions to our unique challenges”.  

The paper said decriminalising small amounts of drugs for personal use “could provide a framework within which we can better pursue our existing policies to help, treat and support people rather than criminalise, stigmatise and fail them”.

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Florida Bans Medical Marijuana in All State-Licensed Rehabs and Sober Living Houses

Last week, Florida legislators passed a law that will narrow the state’s medical marijuana eligibility. While the change might seem marginal, it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading contender in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, signed S.B. 210 into law. The bill pertains to substance abuse treatment programs licensed by the state, like rehabs or sober living residences. It adds language to Florida law that beginning in 2024, licensed treatment facilities must enforce “a prohibition on the premises against alcohol, marijuana, illegal drugs,” and prescription medications not prescribed to the person taking them. The text further clarifies that it “includes marijuana that has been certified by a qualified physician for medical use.”

Medical marijuana use in an addiction treatment or sober living facility is controversial. Cleveland House, a South Florida sober house, states on its website that if one resident is smoking pot, it could negatively impact another resident’s recovery. But studies increasingly suggest that marijuana can help alleviate symptoms of opioid addiction. Men’s Tribal House, a sober living facility in Utah, actively incorporates medical marijuana use into the recovery plans of half its residents.

In 2016, more than 70 percent of Florida’s voters chose to expand the state’s medical marijuana program. Under previous state law, only patients with “cancer or a physical medical condition that chronically produces seizures or severe and persistent muscle spasms” qualified, and only for doses low in THC, the principal psychoactive component in cannabis. The 2016 ballot measure, later passed into law as S.B. 8, expanded eligibility to include a variety of conditions like Crohn’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anything that caused “chronic nonmalignant pain.”

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After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs

“COCAINE UNIQUELY FITS THE FAST-PACED AMERICAN LIFESTYLE,” reads a caption for an exhibit at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Museum in Arlington, Virginia. “The Federal Bureau of Narcotics considered cocaine a nearly defeated drug,” it continues. “However, cocaine use rebounded, reaching its highest use level ever at the end of the 20th century.” It’s an oddly candid observation to find in a place you’d expect to celebrate the federal agency whose mission is to “enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States.”

The DEA is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, marking half a century of abject mission failure. During five decades as a bottomless money pit that has destroyed countless lives while targeting Americans for personal choices and peaceful transactions, the agency’s annual budget has ballooned from $75 million to $3.2 billion. The DEA currently operates 90 foreign offices in 67 countries. It has seized billions of dollars in drugs, cash, vehicles, and real property. Since 1986, it has arrested more than 1 million people for manufacturing, distributing, or possessing illegal drugs. Yet in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counted more than 107,600 drug-related deaths—an all-time high. The DEA’s own data show a steady, gradual decline in price and rise in purity for most street drugs since the 1980s. The DEA’s 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment notes that methamphetamine “purity and potency remain high while prices remain relatively low,” and cocaine availability remains steady.

While there are some reasons to believe Americans may finally have tired of the DEA’s oversized role in their lives, the agency remains a powerful force. To understand what went wrong—and why it will keep going wrong—you have to go back to the agency’s origins.

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10 Alleged Ultra Top Secret Shadow Government Projects

The idea of “secret projects” such as MKUltra were once considered complete fiction and nothing but conspiracy theories. As were secret projects to influence the weather or the use of remote viewers by such intelligence agencies as the CIA. However, we now know that these efforts existed, at least on an initial research and experimental level.

If these top secret and once-denied projects were more factual than authorities would have originally had us believe, then what should we make of some of the other, albeit bizarre, allegations of top secret projects and programs that operate in the shadows of governments, funded by the “black budget?” Here are ten such programs. Some are more believable than others, no doubt, but all are intriguing to the max.

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Chicago police investigating whether cops had improper sexual contact with immigrants, including teen who was allegedly impregnated

Chicago police are investigating accusations that a group of officers had improper sexual contact with newly arrived immigrants.

One of the officers, assigned to the Ogden District, covering Lawndale and Little Village, has been accused of impregnating a teenage girl, law enforcement sources said Thursday.

Multiple other officers are accused of engaging in sexual acts with immigrants.

A police spokesperson said the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability are investigating. 

As the city has struggled to accommodate an influx of new arrivals being sent from the southern U.S. border, controversy has brewed over the decision to temporarily house many of them at police stations.

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Police Officer Sparks Outrage, Investigation After Shooting Family’s Dog

The owners of a “lovable” 3-year-old dog named Dixie, who was fatally shot by a local police officer, opened up to Newsweek about the confusion and heartbreak their family is facing following the pet’s death.

The officer said he had no choice but to shoot the dog to “stop the threat” as he feared for his safety in the July 2 incident.

Tammie Kerns, 52, of Lorain, Ohio, and her 25-year-old daughter Mellenie told Newsweek in an interview over Facebook Messenger that their dog Dixie was “lovable, playful, sneaky, and mischievous” golden Labrador mix. The Kernses said they had to watch their beloved pet bleed to death on the sidewalk in front of their home on Sunday after Dixie was shot multiple times by a Lorain Police Department (LPD) officer.

Just a few months ago, a CBS poll showed that “large bipartisan majorities believe at least some policing changes are necessary”, including 61 percent of Democrats, 47 percent of independents, and 29 percent of Republicans, who all say that it should be a “high priority.” It’s a trend shown in polls by ABC News and Pew Research as well, dating back to 2020.

Tammie said Dixie and three other dogs rushed out the door when she was leaving the house that afternoon. As she was wrangling the pups with her daughter, a police officer pulled up in front of her house in the Northeast Ohio suburb.

Lorain police Lieutenant Jacob Morris told Newsweek in an email that the department’s office of professional standards is currently investigating the shooting.

At roughly 1 p.m. on July 2, LPD Officer Elliot Palmer was on patrol when he saw several large dogs roaming “at large” near a home on the corner of Eighth Street and Oberlin Avenue, according to the incident report provided to Newsweek by Morris.

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Police will be allowed to spy on suspects by remotely activating their phones’ camera, microphone and GPS under new French laws dubbed a ‘snoopers’ charter’

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late Wednesday.

Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only ‘dozens of cases a year’.

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail.

Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organised crime.

The provisions ‘raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties,’ digital rights group La Quadrature du Net wrote in a May statement.

It cited the ‘right to security, right to a private life and to private correspondence’ and ‘the right to come and go freely’, calling the proposal part of a ‘slide into heavy-handed security’.

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Eric Adams’s Fallen Cop Photo Is a Fake

Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly shown off a picture of a murdered police officer, saying he has kept the picture in his wallet for decades. In reality, the picture was a Google printout that Adams aides altered last year to make it look like “the mayor had been carrying it for some time,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

Adams has used the picture to tout his image as tough on crime, saying last year that the killings of two police officers “reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable,” according to the Times report. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet,” Adams said. One week later, the mayor posed for a picture in which he held up the photo of Venable. He has “repeated the moving anecdote”—and held up the Venable photo—multiple times since.

But the photo “had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet,” the Times reported. Adams had, in fact, instructed City Hall employees to print out a Google image of the fallen officer and make it look older, “including by splashing some coffee on it.” Two former City Hall aides confirmed that “they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.”

This is far from the first time Adams has faced accusations of manipulating the truth. The mayor, who claims to be a vegan, was caught ordering fish only days after he ordered New York City schools to serve only vegan food on Fridays, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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A Post-Clemency Prosecution Shines a Light on a Broken System

A month before he left office, then-President Donald Trump freed Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home operator who had served nearly five years of a 20-year sentence for bilking Medicare and Medicaid. Despite that commutation, the Justice Department plans to retry Esformes for the same conduct that sent him to prison in the first place.

Critics of that unprecedented move say it undermines the pardon power and violates the Fifth Amendment’s ban on double jeopardy. As witnesses at a recent congressional hearing emphasized, the case also illustrates the sorry state of the federal clemency system, which in recent decades has become increasingly stingy, inefficient, and haphazard.

Esformes was arrested in 2016 and charged with numerous crimes related to a scheme that prosecutors said involved bribes, kickbacks, and medically unnecessary treatments, all of which helped fund a “lavish lifestyle.” After an eight-week trial in 2019, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. directed the jury to acquit Esformes of six charges, including two counts of health care fraud, deeming the evidence underlying them insufficient as a matter of law.

The jury convicted Esformes of 20 other charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, payment and receipt of kickbacks, and obstruction of justice. But it failed to reach verdicts on six counts, including the central charge of conspiring to commit health care fraud.

Based on the 20 convictions, Right on Crime Executive Director Brett Tolman noted in his congressional testimony, “Mr. Esformes was facing 5 years in prison.” But prosecutors successfully urged Scola to sentence Esformes as if he had been convicted of health care fraud, which “increased Mr. Esformes’ sentence by 15 years.”

Although it defies conventional notions of justice, federal judges are allowed to punish defendants for crimes that have not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In this case, Scola explicitly said he considered the six undecided counts in determining Esformes’ sentence.

The Justice Department nevertheless wants to take another stab at convicting Esformes of those crimes. It argues that the commutation Esformes received does not preclude another prosecution, because it says nothing about the unresolved counts.

Trump explicitly left in place three years of post-release supervision, plus restitution and forfeiture totaling about $44 million. But it is hard to believe he thought he was leaving the door open to a trial that could send Esformes back to prison. That prospect instead seems to be the result of a mistake that could have been avoided if Trump had been better advised.

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Circle the Wagons: The Government Is On The Warpath

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”—Harry S. Truman

How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?

Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician translate them for you—and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and keeping the government’s nose out of your private affairs.

In an age of overcriminalization, where the average citizen unknowingly commits three crimes a day, and even the most mundane activities such as fishing and gardening are regulated, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do.

Yet it was not always this way.

It used to be “we the people” giving the orders, telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the government are “no,” “not” and “nor.”

Compare the following list of “don’ts” the government is prohibited from doing with the growing list of abuses to which “we the people” are subjected on a daily basis, and you will find that we have reached a state of crisis wherein the government is routinely breaking the law and violating its contractual obligations.

For instance, the government is NOT allowed to restrict free speech, press, assembly or the citizenry’s ability to protest and correct government wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the government continues to prosecute whistleblowers, persecute journalists, criminalize expressive activities, crack down on large gatherings of citizens mobilizing to voice their discontent with government policies, and insulate itself and its agents from any charges of wrongdoing (or what the courts refer to as “qualified immunity”).

The government may NOT infringe on a citizen’s right to defend himself. Nevertheless, in many states, it’s against the law to carry a concealed weapon (gun, knife or even pepper spray), and the average citizen is permitted little self-defense against militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later.

The government may NOT enter or occupy a citizen’s house without his consent (the quartering of soldiers). Nevertheless, government soldiers (i.e., militarized police) carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids on private homes every year, while maiming children, killing dogs and shooting citizens.

The government may NOT carry out unreasonable searches and seizures on the citizenry or their possessions, NOR can government officials issue warrants without some evidence of wrongdoing (probable cause). Unfortunately, what is unreasonable to the average American is completely reasonable to a government agent, for whom the ends justify the means. In such a climate, we have no protection against roadside strip searches, blood draws, DNA collection, SWAT team raids, surveillance or any other privacy-stripping indignity to which the government chooses to subject us.

The government is NOT to deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process. Nevertheless, the government continues to incarcerate tens of thousands of Americans whose greatest crime is being poor and not white. The same goes for those who are put to death, some erroneously, by a system weighted in favor of class and wealth.

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