Tag: the war on (some) drugs

New York City Wants People to Call 911 on Someone Smoking Cannabis

Somebody peacefully getting high without bothering or harming anybody else is listed together with “a disorderly person or small or large group, including protestors, causing a hazardous or dangerous condition right now” and “an emergency situation or condition that might cause danger to life or personal property” as reasons to call 911 instead of the 311 Citizen Service Management System.

According to the Observer, this is “yet another example of how police resources are used—and perhaps misused—in New York City for lack of any better alternatives, as there’s simply no one else to call.”

New York City has long held the unglamorous title as the most inhospitable city in the United States for cannabis users, with possession being most frequent reason why a New Yorker would be arrested.

And while cannabis possession was decriminalized in New York State last August the act of smoking weed is still a crime. 

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Drug War-Addicted Cops Suing to Overturn Vote That Legalized Cannabis in South Dakota

In the historic election cycle that took place earlier this month, multiple states made their voices heard in regard to the prohibition of cannabis and they voted to legalize it. As we reported last week, in many of these states, the ballot measures to legalize cannabis received more votes than both Biden and Trump. South Dakota was one of these states. Now, despite the overwhelming support for legalization by the people, drug war-addicted cops are challenging the popular vote.

Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom and South Dakota Highway Patrol Col. Rick Miller are not okay with the citizens of South Dakota having access to the devil’s lettuce, so they have filed a lawsuit challenging the voter referendum that legalized cannabis.

Thom and Miller are nitpicking the vote to legalize by challenging what is little less than a strawman they created. They say the vote to legalize cannabis which required a constitutional amendment to do so — was done so illegally — because semantics.

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How Joe Biden’s privatization plans destabilized Latin America and fueled the migration crisis

While campaigning for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, former Senator and Vice President Joseph Biden has touted the crucial role he played in designing US mega-development and drug war campaigns that transformed the socio-political landscape of large swaths of Latin America.

“I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,” Biden boasted in a July 5 interview with CNN, referring to the multibillion-dollar US effort to end Colombia’s civil war with a massive surge of support for the country’s military. According to Biden, the plan was a panacea for Colombia’s problems, from “crooked cops” to civil strife.

But Biden’s plan for Colombia has contributed directly to the country’s transformation into a hyper-militarized bastion of right-wing rule, enhancing the power and presence of the notoriously brutal armed forces while failing miserably in its anti-narcotic and reformist objectives.

More than 50 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the first four months of 2019, while coca production is close to record levels. And as Colombian peace activists lamented in interviews with The Grayzone, the US is still in complete control of Bogotá’s failed anti-drug policy, thanks largely to Plan Colombia.

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US: Disastrous Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use

The massive enforcement of laws criminalizing personal drug use and possession in the United States causes devastating harm, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a joint report released today. Enforcement ruins individual and family lives, discriminates against people of color, and undermines public health. The federal and state governments should decriminalize the personal use and possession of illicit drugs.

The 196-page report, “Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States,” finds that enforcement of drug possession laws causes extensive and unjustifiable harm to individuals and communities across the country. The long-term consequences can separate families; exclude people from job opportunities, welfare assistance, public housing, and voting; and expose them to discrimination and stigma for a lifetime. While more people are arrested for simple drug possession in the US than for any other crime, mainstream discussions of criminal justice reform rarely question whether drug use should be criminalized at all.

“Every 25 seconds someone is funneled into the criminal justice system, accused of nothing more than possessing drugs for personal use,” said Tess Borden, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU and the report’s author. “These wide-scale arrests have destroyed countless lives while doing nothing to help people who struggle with dependence.”

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