Category Archives: War On Drugs

In America's War on Drugs," beginning Sunday, History offers a four-part spin through the American government's complicated, often hypocritical, ultimately crazy relationship with narcotics over half a century its lofty motives, its ulterior motives. Fueled by the testimony of various scholars and journalists, reformed dealers, and former CIA and DEA officers whose agencies differently framed missions often put them into direct conflict, it's a thick, tortuous telling that runs some six hours with the commercials removed, exhausting but rarely dull.

The official declaration of the "War on Drugs" is seen as beginning with President Nixon's June 17, 1971, statement that "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse" a campaign that, we're told here, also served as legal cover for attacking the antiwar movement and black power movement. But the series runs back another decade to begin its story with the common cause made by the Mafia and the CIA in the early '60s attempt to rid Cuba of Castro, blurring lines that have stayed blurry since, and to the agencys accidental introduction of LSD into American society. (They had hoped to use it for mind control buying the worlds available supply from its manufacturer but it got out of their hands and something quite different happened.)

What's clear through this thicket of intersecting stories is that the American policy has often been made out of fear not necessarily manufactured, but often misplaced. Fear of communism, of terrorism, of crime in the streets.

Whether or not you believe that crack was a CIA plot to destroy the inner cities, "America's War on Drugs" indicates that the agency was not particularly concerned with the domestic upshot of deals it made with Latin American drug cartels deals that ultimately helped flood the United States with cocaine and transform it from a rich person's party drug to a poor person's quick high. The intelligence agency and the drug cartels might have had different, more and less noble goals patriotism on the one hand, money on the other but they share a certain amorality, a certain heartlessness.

Talos Films/History

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs."

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs." (Talos Films/History)

Many stops are made along the way Vietnam, Afghanistan, including the militarization of police (hello, Daryl Gates!), Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, Bill Clinton saying, "But I didn't inhale. There's a colorful, if almost wholly unlikable, cast of shady characters, underworld legends, criminal visionaries, corrupt politicians, dirty cops, mad scientists and paranoid nut jobs on both sides of the law. There are political coups and drive-by shootings. Comparatively little time is spent on the Oxycontin and methamphetamine epidemics and for that matter marijuana, which as a subject does not enter the story nearly until the end, when legalization threatens the cartels' profits which have less of an international profile, and no CIA subplot.

Each episode begins with an advisory "The following program contains intense drug imagery and violence," which you would do well to regard, and one that "In some instances events have been dramatized." "Many," or even "most," is closer to the mark. Such re-creations are common enough, but because the filmmakers have gone to some lengths to make them look technologically appropriate to period and "real" caught by surveillance cameras or home video they get mixed up with the actual documentary footage and photos (which flash by too quickly). They demean the record. They aren't history.

Scant attention is paid to drug use itself, interestingly, and to the extent that it is, the users arent judged. (Reporter: Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD? Ken Kesey: Not necessarily.") If anything, they are regarded as victims of both the problem and the supposed cure three-strike laws, sentencing minimums that has filled American jails and prisons past bursting and had a generations-long effect on the inner cities. Nor is there any moralizing about drug use itself, which most of the commentators regard as inevitable a feature of human existence, not a bug if potentially destructive. This lack of censure is refreshing, but the question of how society might better treat drug addiction is limited to a few observations at the series' very end.

It's undeniably the case that drug epidemics, even apart from the drug-taking, create crime. There is nothing inherently insincere either in Bill Clinton's vow to "take our streets back from crime and gangs and drugs" or George W. Bush's that "Illegal drugs are the enemies of ambition and hope ... and I intend to do something about it," however ineffective or incidentally calamitous the results. As "America's War on Drugs" asserts again and again, this is an unwinnable war, like the war on terror, defined by unintended consequences, backfiring schemes and collateral damage. The faces change, as do the trade routes and methods of delivery, but the drugs go on.

Americas War on Drugs

Where: History

When: 9 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DLSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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Direct-to-consumer drug ads: A bad idea that's about to get worse

Original post:

History examines the hazy history of 'America's War on Drugs' with exhaustive but engaging detail - Los Angeles Times

Activists and family members of loved ones who died in the opioid/heroin epidemic march in a "Fed Up!" rally on the National Mall on September 18, 2016. (Credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

While much of the media is focused on Trumps Russian skullduggery, America has quietly found itself enmeshed in the worst drug epidemic in our history. Drug overdoses, mostly from increasingly lethal opioids, now kill more people than guns and traffic accidents. A recent investigation by The New YorkTimes of local and state authorities across the country came to a staggering conclusionthat somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016, a nearly 20% spike in a single year, the paper estimates.

2017 is gearing up to be just as bad, or worse.

In the face of this crisis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has re-declared the War on Drugs, a five-decade old boondoggle that civil-rights organizations, economists and even some law-enforcement groups believe to be discredited by years of failure. While its unclear exactly what Sessions is planning, so far hes called for a crackdown on marijuana and longer mandatory sentences for drug dealers, seemingly intent on a return to policies that historically have ravaged entire communities, corrupted police forces and destroyed trust in authorityall in the name of fighting a war that opinion polls show the majority of the public doesnt want.

But what most Americans dont know is that our War on Drugs isnt just a failed war; its one that was never designed to be won. To understand the true story of the origins of the War on Drugs is to understand why Trumps return to some of its most controversial policies is doomed to fail.

President Nixon kickstarted Americas war on drugs in 1971 (he called it an offensive) and created the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) two years later. Ironically, or perhaps not, the war on drugs was conceived by criminals. Four of the main architects of Nixons drug policyAttorney General John Mitchell, White House aide John Erlichman (who later allegedly admitted the war on drugs was really a war on hippies and black people), Egil Bud Krogh (who famously arranged for a drug-addled Elvis Presley to receive an honorary DEA badge) as well as Watergate break-in conspirator G. Gordon Liddywere all imprisoned over Watergate.

But by the time Nixon declared a war on drugs, the real fighting had begun a decade earlier during Americas effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. In 1961, the CIA conspired with mobsters in Miami to assassinate Castro, whose revolution had put an end to the lucrative drug and vice networks operating on the island. Although the CIA-planned Bay of Pigs invasion failed, many of the agencys Cuban assets survived; and after making their way back to Miami, they turned Southern Florida into an early epicenter of drug smuggling and drug-related violence.

Meanwhile, the CIA had simultaneously helped introduce LSD to the American populace via clandestine programs that dosed countless citizensall part of a Cold War mind-control operation titled MK-Ultra. In Southeast Asia, the CIA teamed up with Laotian general Vang Pao to help make Laos the worlds top exporter of heroin. By the time Nixon began ratcheting down U.S. troop presence in Vietnam to focus on the war against drugs, more troops were dying of heroin overdoses than actual combat, an epidemic that quickly found its way to the streets of urban America.

A decade later, as a result of turning a blind eye to cocaine smugglers funding the CIAs illegal war against the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the CIA unwittingly helped unleash a nationwide crack-cocaine epidemic. Most notably, cocaine kingpin Freeway Ricky Ross was able to take his South Central L.A.-based crack businesses nationwide thanks to his access to a cheap supply of coke from politically connected Nicaraguan suppliers.

Dark Alliance, Gary Webbs landmark 1996 newspaper series alleging CIA involvement in the crack-cocaine epidemic, created a firestorm of controversy that ultimately drove Webb out of journalism and into a spiral of depression that led him to take his own life. Although there were problems with Webbs reporting and the editing of his story that allowed it to be discredited by rival news organizations, it forced the CIA to reveal that for more than a decade it had protected its Nicaraguan allies from being prosecuted for smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

Veteran drug agents, including Phil Jordan, former director of the DEAs El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), say they were repeatedly called off cases involving CIA-tied drug rings.

We had three or four cases where we arrested CIA contract workers with cocaine, and I get a phone call that the charges have been dismissed, Jordan recalls in a new HISTORY series, Americas War on Drugs. You know, we are risking our lives, making cases against significant drug traffickers, then on the other hand you got another government agency allowing the drugs to come in . . . And were not talking about 100 pounds, were talking about tons. That introduction of white powder was killing black people.

The CIAs collusion with anti-communist drug smugglers beginning in the 1960s played a direct role in the drug epidemic of the 1980s that was used to justify President Reagans 1986 crime bill. The law introduced harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offenders, the legacy of which we are still dealing with today.

President Bill Clinton expanded on Reagans drug war by militarizing the nations police forces and introducing mandatory minimum sentencing. Although President Obama tried to revise this policy shortly before leaving office, President Trump seems intent on doubling down on the war on drugs. When Trump recently invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, he congratulated him for sending police death squads into the streets to kill drug dealers and addicts. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that, Trump reportedly said.

National polls in recent years have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe the war on drugs cannot be won. Given the fact that more than half of the United States have legalized medical marijuana, with several others set to join Colorado, Washington and California in approving recreational marijuana use, there has never been a stronger mandate for drug reform than now.

As a nation, we are tired of the drug wars endless cycle of crime, political corruption, mass incarceration and mayhemparticularly in Mexico, much of which is a war zone, while north of the border, we are mired in a highly politicized hysteria over immigration and border security. The war on drugs has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion and our nations jails, prisons and hospitals now overflow with the ranks of its combatants and victims. The stakes couldnt be higher, nor the timing better, for America to end this war, not expand it.

Nick Schou is author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIAs Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books, 2006) and also appears in the upcoming HISTORY limited series Americas War on Drugs, premiering June 18 at 9/8c.

See the original post:

America's War on Drugs Was Designed to Fail. So Why Is It Being Revived Now? - History

BUTLER COUNTY

As the opiate and heroin crisis continues to claim lives in Butler County, local experts are hoping to get some help from the pulpit to help deal with the issue.

Drug overdoses were the leading cause of deaths in 2016 in Butler County, according to Butler County Coroner Dr. Lisa Mannix.. She said that it is the third year in a row that drug overdoses claimed the top spot.

Kristina Latta-Landefeld, coalition coordinator for the Greater Hamilton Drug-Free Coalition, told the Journal-News that the effort to combat the issue is getting stronger, and churches can help in the fight.

It is really fascinating because we know that there is a system out there that works really well, she said. People in the field theologists, psychologists have tried to be able to link a system like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that does have a religious component to it, in order to determine what are the positive outcomes and how can that approach be used by churches

Latta-Landefeld added that any type of faith in a higher being or something similar can be an answer for some but not all.

But getting the churches involved speaks to a cultural approach that is important. People in Butler County are very involved in their churches, she said. It is just a part of looking for a solution just like getting health care, schools and law enforcement involved. We have to have a multi-faceted approach to dealing with this.

Kristy Duritsch of the Coalition for a Healthy Middletown said churches can pool resources and expertise within their congregations and focus on the community in which they live in or even a mile radius around their church. She feels this can help address the problem.

I definitely think they can have an impact - but more so on the prevention end of things, Duritsch said. For those in need of help, they can provide resources and even pay for programs for folks addicted. For those recovering they can provide a safe, supportive environment

She added that the problems of the world are now overwhelming, so starting small with the intention and focus aimed at the people they know in the community can make an impact.

Reaching the kids and families to help create a community who cares the simplest things can make a big impact, Duritsch said. For example, Jeri Lewis of Kingswell Ministries has adopted Sherman park to provide daily lunches and activities for the kids that come there.

Developing relationships and being consistent is key in addressing violence and drugs, according to Duritsch.

When there is trust, you can teach them a better way to react to resolve conflict, cope with disappointments, stress and dream for a better future and thus they are less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol as a way to cope or escape, she said.

James E. Wynn III is the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. He said pastors around the city have been meeting on regular basis, to discuss the drug issue and senseless violence.

We are trying to come up with a way to address these issues, Wynn said.

New Day Baptist Church Pastor Mike Pearl has already been keeping his congregation busy doing outreach that extends all-year. His church helps feed the hungry and doles out school supplies to the needy.

He figures the best approach is to stay consistent addressing the problem while not letting any of the youth fall through the cracks.

Pastor Dave Wess from New Life Community Church agrees that churches are ready and able to keep spreading Gods word, while also adding some tough love from the pulpit.

Read this article:

Butler County experts feel churches can help in war on drugs - Hamilton Journal News

Do not let author Don Winslow get started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Beauregard, Winslow practically sneers, referring to the AG by his very Confederate-sounding middle name, wants to take us back to the good old days, when we were throwing two million people into prison. He thinks the war on drugs was a good idea, and that we were winning. But drugs are more plentiful, powerful, and cheaper than ever before. If thats victory, I would hate to see defeat.

Winslow is, of course, referring to Sessions recent order that all federal prosecutors pursue the strictest possible sentences, including for non-violent drug offenders. Winslow sees this as a return to a failed policy of mass incarceration, and hes one writer who knows what hes talking about. The critically acclaimed authors most famous worksThe Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Cartelare centered on drugs and drug policy. His new novel, The Force, is also drug-centered, examining corruption in the New York Police Department and featuring a crooked cop named Denny Malone who, along with his partners, steals millions of dollars worth of heroin after a major bust. Think of it as a cross between a hard-core New York tale by Richard Price and the classic 1981 Sidney Lumet film Prince of the City.

Its that readable, and that bleak.

Ive always wanted to write a New York cop book, says Winslow, 63, who was born in the city and raised in Rhode Island but whose best known books are set in California (where he now lives) and Mexico. Back when I was living in New Yorkwhere he worked for a chain of movie theaters, and as a private investigatorI would see classic crime films like Serpico, Prince of the City, and The French Connection, and theyre part of the reason I became a crime writer. So after I finished The Cartel [set mostly in Mexico, and soon to be filmed by Ridley Scott], I wanted to get back to New York.

The Force is so awash in corruption, from the lowest beat cop to the mayors office, that it seems hyper-unreal. But Winslow insists what hes writing about is the real deal, that every 20 years or so there is a major corruption scandal in the NYPD. He points to a recent bribes-to-obtain-gun-licenses probe involving crooked cops and prosecutors, but adds that its not just the NYPD, its Chicago, the LAPD, Baltimore. One of the points I was trying to make in the book, we always talk about cops being corrupt, but what about lawyers, judges, the mayors office? Its not worse in New York, its just largereverything is larger in New York.

Winslow is no hard-core cop hater. In fact, researching and writing The Force, which took several years, helped him sympathize with the extremely tough job the police have to do, and the harsh conditions they have to deal with.

The thing that surprised me a little bit about cops, he says, is how deeply they feel what they do. You tend to think they get jaded, and they do, and they come across as stoic, but when you talk to them about cases and stories, the work has an impact on them. When you watch TV shows, you see them joking about victimsand that happensbut when they talk about certain victims and crimes they have more empathy than you would be led to believe. I talked to veteran cops who sat there with tears streaming down their faces talking about their cases.

In fact, the cops in The Force, no matter how corrupt, believe they are fighting the good fight, taking down drug dealers, gangbangers, and murderers by any means necessary. Malone, who considers himself the king of Manhattan North, heads an elite squad of detectives given unrestricted authority to rid their area of human scum. The parallels with the Daniel Ciello character (played by Treat Williams) in Prince of the City are unmistakable, including the ultimate fall from gracepressed by the Feds, both men wind up informing on their partners.

Winslow says that if nothing else, his book shows how complicated a cops life can be, how complicated issues of right and wrong can be. This guy Malone gets himself into a trap where he has no good choices. Who do you betray?

But back to Jeff Sessions and Winslows other bte noire, The Wall. Winslow has long argued that the only way to break the cartels is to legalize all drugs, and has even written about it for The Daily Beast. He has said the drug war is unwinnable, that there is no end in sight. And the Trump administrations attempts to build a barrier across our southern border, accompanied by a hardline prosecutorial stance, have not changed his mind.

Trump and these guys claim to be businessmen, he says, but they dont understand economics. Lets assume you could build a wall, and it could be a deterrent, but it does not affect demand. Anything you do to make the supply more difficult, raises the supplies and raises the profits. Thats just basic high school economics.

Winslow believes that whatever gets builtThere will be something and they will call it a wall, he saysis a fantasy. Certain parts of the terrain make wall building impractical; some of the wall would have to pass through privately owned lands, which invites endless lawsuits; and part of the wall would have to pass through territory owned on both sides of the border by the Tohono Oodham tribe, creating even more legal issues.

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Besides, says Winslow, any wall would actually have huge gates, and they are called San Diego, El Paso, and Laredo. Most of the drugs come in by trucks, and everyone knows this, but it would be impossible to minutely inspect every truck crossing the borderover 2 million annually in Laredo alone.

So whats the end game? You have to wait it out, says Winslow. Towards the end of the Obama administration, they started to get realistic about drug and prison policies. Now we are going back to the old days, but I think there are people who are rational on this topic. Its an issue where right and left meet, but its a generational thing also. I think its a matter of waiting for some people to become extinct. Because they never change.

See the original post:

Don Winslow Artfully Demolishes the War on Drugs - Daily Beast

In March, rapper and activist Talib Kweli got so frustrated with Donald Trump news, he decided to make a visit to the US Capitol.

He spent about a week listening to anti-Trump figures and emerged with a manifesto for activism in the Trump era. Hashtags and RTs are cute and make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but without actual flesh on the ground, there is no movement, he wrote in Medium post that called for sustained protest and political engagement.

Its a theme he came back to several times in an interview with me earlier this month: There are people who really have convinced themselves that all they need to do is make a cool Facebook post, he said. That type of shit is really, really, extra corny.

Kweli, a fixture of the New York underground rap scene in the late 90s and early 2000s, has weaved activism into his music for his entire career. His collaborations with Mos Def, together called Black Star, and solo work have spawned multiple albums meditating on issues like mass incarceration, misogyny and police brutality. Throughout his career, hes advocated for social justice, protesting and speaking at Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests.

Today, Kweli runs the independent record label Javotti Media and continues to make music, his latest a collaboration record The Seven with rapper Styles P. He continues his political advocacy and vocally opposes the Trump administration.

I chatted with Kweli on the phone about the danger of a renewed war on drugs, why we need to engage with Twitter trolls, and fake woke-ness on social media.

Whats your reaction to the recent Jeff Sessions memo and the pullback of Obama-era criminal justice laws? Some are saying this will be the return of the worst days of the war on drugs.

The only thing I can say is that the people who support Trump and Sessions and sat before him knowing he said Elizabeth Warren is Pocahontas, grab them by the pussy doesnt bother them, all the Mexicans are rapists doesnt bother them all of these things that Trump has said, if none of those things bother them maybe when Sessions comes for their pot, theyll start to care. If humanity doesnt matter to you, accountability doesnt matter to you, bigotry doesnt matter maybe when it comes to you getting high, then maybe youll start to care.

So you feel like theres been a cultural shift in attitude toward drug use?

Oh, absolutely. Especially when it comes to weed, we shifted to a society of everyone smoking pot. We all smoke weed. We pretend we dont, but the whole society does. Even your hardcore racist KKK dude is smoking a big fat blunt.

Todays libertarians, I know many who are not racist, who are not bigots they just believe in certain things about the government. Theyre really about their freedoms. A lot of them overlap when it comes to government regulation and states rights with the Confederates and the Nazis. But a lot of them know people with meth habits or heroin habits that they have sympathy for. Thats been the shift and change, pretty recently. They see the effect of the drug war on these people directly.

Given that cultural change, do you think Obama went far enough in terms of trying to dismantle some of the worst war on drugs laws? Hes faced criticism that he should have done more.

Well, in order to be the United States president, you have to be certain things. You need to be a Christian. You need to be an imperialist. Before Obama, you needed to be white. At this point, you need to be a man. Obama was never going to be a revolutionary. He has always been a pragmatist and always been someone who has tried to work with both sides.

So when people say Obama didnt go far enough, from my perspective I think he did what he could do considering the crazy amount of obstructionism he faced. I think Obama being a black man and having that experience allows him to see things from a different perspective than most US presidents before him.

Now, intentions dont matter as much as results matter when it comes to policy. But I do think his intentions were to roll back mass incarceration he let out more prisoners out than any other recent president, and he told me personally that he wanted his legacy to be criminal justice reform. He said that to a room full of artists. I think Obama used what he thought could work to try to help more traditionally grassroots causes. But I think theres different ways to do it and his way was definitely working within the system. His way was not revolutionary, and I dont think he ever pretended to be.

Youve always been critical of consumer culture in your music. Do you think the more consumer elements of our culture and celebrity worship are all things that led to Trump?

We worship the dollar. Our holidays are Black Friday and Christmas. Our religion is consumerism and Trump is a patron saint of that religion. Anybody who was in New York City in the 80s knows the whole concept of greed is good, capitalism is good that was being sold as mainstream culture. We had yuppies, people celebrating capitalism, people celebrating credit. That was a big thing in the 80s you spent what you didnt have. And Trump, with his casinos and real estate, those were businesses all about spending what you dont have. And he sold that image. He put his name on anything. He was an empty suit.

And that image is one reason why Trump has been repeatedly name checked in lots of rap songs although youve never done this in your own music. What do you think about that switch from admiration to criticism for so many people in the hip-hop world during and after this election?

I hesitate to say that rapping about Trump, seen as a symbol of opulence or a symbol of decadent wealth, was necessarily admiration. When you hear him in music back in the day, it wasnt as much admiration as it was acknowledgement for what he represents.

In the 80s and early 90s, especially New York rap, you heard a lot of references to Trump. In 96 and 97, Raekwon was rapping Guess whos the black Trump. But they arent saying Im admiring him as a human being. They are saying hes the universal symbol of wealth. Its actually very dehumanizing of Trump. Its not about who he really is. Its not like theyre saying I admire the man for his politics or the way he treats women.

As far as the activist or the conscious community, Trump was always known as the guy trying to get the Central Park Five on death row. He took out a full-page ad in the New York Post saying they were guilty when they turned out to be innocent.

I was 15 when this happened. I was the same age as those kids when they got caught up in that. It was vivid. They were called the wolf pack by the media. So any random group of black kids was also called a wolf pack. I remember going to the mall and they made a rule at the mall that if theres more than four of yall, you cant walk together cause then you constitute a wolf pack. They wasnt happening to the white kids. The Central Park Five had a very real effect on my life.

Im really impressed by how much you engage with trolls online. But there is also a line of thinking on the left that engaging with them legitimizing them in some way or that that tactic isnt going to change any minds.

I would believe that if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were president. Id believe it if you said when you ignore the trolls, theyll go away. But racism is a disease, and what disease do you know of that, if you ignore it, it goes away? Nothing. So this whole ignore thing thats the result of an overly polite, nonconfrontational society, and thats from people, and some on the left as well, who benefit from the racist status quo.

The fact of the matter is, now theyre changing visa applications so they can look at your social media accounts. We have Senate congressional hearings with Republicans and Democrats saying that Russians bots have influenced the election with fake news. We got AI running around this motherfucker, and people are saying we can ignore the online space. That the online world isnt real. We dont have the luxury to say that.

If Im a guy whos only on Twitter, then you have every right to criticize me. But Im not that guy. When Twitters gone, Ill still be doing what I do in the flesh, whether its making music for the movement or physically putting my boots on the ground. But I agree that just tweeting or just posting on Facebook is wack. There are people who really have convinced themselves that all they need to do is make a cool Facebook post. That type of shit is really, really, extra corny.

Speaking of, I saw in a recent interview that you used scare quotes around the word woke.

People be like Im woke when they just arent. Others use it to disparage people of color. Some people think its a trendy word and dont want to use it just to be trendy. Its just become a meme.

Maybe when you hear the term woke, youre thinking of people who may have good intentions but who are not really going to marches or rallies or doing the actual work. But thats your association with the word. There is also a large number of people who are not maybe as savvy as a journalist or as a rapper. Who say woke and mean it sincerely. They dont know, theyve never been to a march.

But let me go further theres a lot of people who organize and rally, contribute money, and still use the term woke. Who are not knowing where the trend, where the culture has moved who are not as hip as you and I might be. Thats why I evoke the term at all because of them.

What are your thoughts on the debate over punching Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who got punched at the Trump inauguration protest in a viral video?

I am anti-violent. I dont believe that violence solves problems. But I am pro-karma. So when I see karma play itself out, I am not mad at it. Would I be the guy to punch Richard Spencer? That wouldnt be me. He would have to physically threaten me for me to want to punch him, me personally. But when I see a white boy going all out of his way to use his privilege that white boy who punched him knew that he wasnt going to get shot by the cops as quickly as a black dude I think, well the right calls us snowflakes all the time. Okay, this guy isnt a snowflake!

I am not crying for any ethno-nationalists or any guy who likes Pepe the frog to get punched in the face. Thats the consequence of that free speech theyre always talking about. Freedom of speech isnt freedom from consequence.

Whats the difference between the politically conscious rappers of today versus your generation?

The most glaring difference is with the hip hop that I listened to when I was growing up, the consciousness was more wear-it-on-your-sleeve. There were songs about blackness, wearing dashikis, all coming from a strong pro-black strain in our community.

As far as the music artists now that are pushing that pro-black message, theyre more in tune with the sonics and the frequencies of what the average person not as studied is on. So, I bring up Kendrick and J. Cole a lot. Those are artists that are making songs that are highly successful and when you hear them, you dont automatically think consciousness or activism. But when you listen to the layers, its like a Trojan horse.

These younger artists who are conscious, who are inspired by my generation, they have gotten better, as they should have, at the messaging to new audiences with the way that they are making their music.

Whats your message to progressives and activists today?

I cant really say that Im in a position to give a message to the activists. My job in that situation is to show solidarity with people doing the work and not tell them what to do. Its for me to listen, for them to tell me what to do. Thats the best way I can be an ally.

Everybody else you gotta put your flesh on the ground. Listen to what these front-lines activists are saying. Just posting isnt enough.

Link:

Talib Kweli on the war on drugs, internet trolls, and how "woke" has become a meme - Vox

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a bill on Thursday that would allow state medical marijuana laws to supersede the current federal prohibition on weed. The bill is dubbed the CARERS Act, which stands for the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States Act.

"The fact is our marijuana laws in America are broken," Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said at the bill's unveiling at the Capitol. "They are savagely broken, and the jagged pieces are hurting American people."

The legislation would allow the varying laws legalizing some form of medical marijuana in 30 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam to stand. When it was introduced in 2015 it was the first ever medical marijuana bill introduced in the U.S. Senate. But times have changed since then.

For one, back then the bill only had three original sponsors: Booker, Democratic Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who has long supported medical marijuana as part if his libertarian platform. Now it has six, adding Democratic Sen. Al Franken and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Mike Lee. The other big change from 2015: Donald Trump now occupies the Oval Office.

While running for president Trump said marijuana laws should be decided at the state level, but then he tapped marijuana-hating Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general.

It just came to lightthat Sessions privately sent a letter to congressional leaders in May asking them to undo a provision in federal law that bars his Justice Department from going after legal marijuana businesses.

"I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime," Sessions penned. "The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives."

But the new bill's proponents argue Sessions' thinking is misguided, especially when it comes to people gripped with epilepsy and those who suffer from seizures who report cannabidiol, or CBD as it's commonly known, is a miracle cure thatcuts their seizures down as much as 45 percent.

"I dare him to sit down with families and listen to their stories and then pursue a policy like he's advocating for now," Booker says of Sessions' letter going after medical marijuana businesses. The CARERS Act would take CBD off the list of controlled substances, which would allow children in states where medical marijuana isn't legal to access the life changing oil.

While the bill's proponents know their proposal faces an uphill battle, they also say they believe the effort is quickly picking up steam, especially because many red states have now passed some form of legal weed. "I believe things are changing and they're changing fast," Sen. Gillibrand tellsRolling Stone. "I think we will get the support we need."

The legislation also allows the nation's veterans to access legal weed by removing the current restriction that bars doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals from prescribing pot to their patients. But it doesn't go near the politically touchy subject of what to do with the nation's eight states and the District of Columbia that have opted to legalize weed for recreational use. But many of the bill's proponents say that effort will come later.

Correction: A previous version of this article listed one of the supporters as Steve Cohen. He is a supporter of the bill in the House, not the Senate.

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Medical Marijuana Bill Aims to Fight Jeff Sessions' Renewed War on Drugs - RollingStone.com

Congress is considering a bill that wouldexpand the federal government's ability to pursue the war on drugs, granting new power to the attorney general to set federal drug policy.

The bipartisan legislation, sponsored bypowerful committee chairs in both chambers of Congress,would allowthe attorney general to unilaterally outlaw certain unregulated chemical compounds on a temporary basis.It would create a special legal category for these drugs, the first time in nearly 50 years that the Controlled Substances Act has been expanded in this way. And it would set penalties, potentially including mandatory minimum sentences, for the manufacture and distribution of these drugs.

This bill provides federal law enforcement with new tools to ensure those peddling dangerous drugs, which can be lethal, are brought to justice, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is sponsoring her chamber's version of the bill with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), said in an emailed statement. It also explicitly exempts simple possession from any penalties, instead targeting those who manufacture and traffic these drugs and opioids.

The bill, introduced last week and known as theas the Stop the Importation and Trafficking of Synthetic Analogues (SITSA) Act of 2017, now moves to theSenate Judiciary Committee, which Grassley chairs and where Feinstein is the top-ranking Democrat. The House bill is listed as HR 2851.

Under current law,all psychoactive substances are placed in one of five schedules designating the drugs' risk of abuse and medical potential. Schedule 1 is the most restrictive, reserved for drugs such as LSD, heroin and marijuana. Schedule 5 is the least restrictive category, which includes medications such as low-dose codeine cough syrup.

Illicit-drug manufacturers wishing to avoid these designations often make subtle changes to a drug's chemistry, creating slightly different, and hence legal, substances that producesimilar psychoactive effects in users.

Illegal drug traffickers and importers are able to circumvent the existing scheduling regime by altering a single atom or molecule of a currently controlled substance in a laboratory, thereby creating a substance that is lawful, but often highly dangerous, addictive and even deadly, Grassley and Feinstein saidin a fact sheeton the Senate bill.

The SITSA Act would create a new schedule, Schedule A, for substances that are chemically similar to already-regulated drugs. The attorney general would be able to place new compounds in Schedule A for a period of up to five years. Critics say this amounts to giving the attorney general the power to unilaterally write federal drug policy.

The bill gives the attorney general a ton of power in terms of scheduling drugs and pursuing penalties, said Michael Collins, a deputy director at the Drug Policy Alliance. This is a giant step backwards, and really it's doing the bidding of Jeff Sessions as he tries to escalate the war on drugs.

Under current policy, an attorney general may temporarily schedule a substance for up to twoyears and only after demonstrating the drug's history and current pattern of abuse; the scope, duration and significance of abuse; and what, if any, risk there is to the public health.

The new bill extends the temporary scheduling duration to five years for Schedule A substances and eliminates the requirement for analyzing the drug's abuse record and its potential risk to public health.

The bill is partially a response to a spike in overdose deaths from the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl and chemically similar drugs in recent years. Fentanyl's uncontrolled synthetic analogues have come to represent the deadly convergence of the synthetic drug problem and the opioid epidemic, Feinstein and Grassley wrote. The billadds 13 synthetic analogues of fentanyl to Schedule A immediately.

But criticsare worried that the bill's language could be used to justify bans on all manner of substances that are not particularly lethal or dangerous. The drug known as kratom is one particular area of concern.Experts say the risks with using the drug are remarkably low, andpeople who take it say it has helped them quit using alcohol, opiates and other, much deadlier substances.

Because the drug's primarychemicals act in a fashion similar to some opioids, kratom advocates fear that the new bill would allow the Justice Department to outlaw the drug, as it triedunsuccessfullyto do last year.

Some experts say that the fentanyl epidemic is proving to be so lethal that it may be worthwhile to experiment with different legislative approaches, even if they come with drawbacks.

The fentanyls are so awful that I think it is entirely reasonable to try a fentanyl supply control strategy that has only a very modest chance of success, said JonathanCaulkins, a drug-policy expert at Carnegie-Mellon University. He added that it might be wise, however, to include automatic sunset provisions to such strategies in case they prove ineffective.

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Congress is considering a bill that would expand Jeff Sessions's power to escalate the war on drugs - Washington Post

Earlier this month, the Philadelphia rock-and-roll band the War on Drugs announced the follow-up to 2014s Lost in the Dream, with Holding On, a six-minute American epic shimmering with rhythm and melody and delightful shades of early Springsteen. The song is from the forthcoming album A Deeper Understanding, and, yesterday, the band dbuted its new video, starring Frankie Faison, best known for his role as Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell, in David Simons The Wire.

The video, directed by Brett Haley, is a plainspoken, cinematic tribute to love, interracial marriage, and small-town American values. Faison appears as a widower struggling to break a cycle of boredom in his golden years. The concept was developed by the actress Krysten Ritter, who is dating the bands front man, Adam Granduciel. I went out to get our weekend coffees and when I came back Krysten had written up a whole treatment of her own and pitched me her idea, he wrote in an e-mail. I thought it was really great from the second she delivered it. Ritter had recently finished a movie with Haley, and she and Granduciel both suggested the director at the same time. They started shooting in Brewster, New York, just ten days later.

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Courts Loving v. Virginia decision, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in America. Interracial couples are celebrating the landmark case by sharing personal stories and testimonials online. The Holding On video, already a tearjerker, is a powerful addition to those contributions.

Excerpt from:

Watch a Tribute to the Loving Decision by the War on Drugs - The New Yorker

The medical marijuana community in Maine is hoping that Trump will respect the 10th amendment (state's rights).

Whatever happened to the Republicans supposed enduringlove for states rights? This is a question worth asking because Jeff Sessions latest move to impede states from legal medical and recreational marijuana use demonstratesthe exact opposite. In May, he asked Congress to allow him lift the Rohrabacher-Farr amendmentin order to prosecute medical marijuana providers stating that it would inhibit (the Justice Departments) authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act. This will have a deleterious impact on a number of lawful marijuana growers and medical providers around the country. And in Maine, people are really worried.

If Congress supports the request from Sessions, thousands of medical marijuana providers and related businesses that support an estimated 50,000 medical marijuana patients in Maine could face federal criminal prosecution or other sanctions.

Waitin addition to this being federal overreach into states rights, arent Republicans supposed to be the party that supports local businesses? And the rights of patients to make their own medical decisions? Talk about hypocrisy. But none of that willstop Sessions. Hes still trying to make the case that this is about stopping illegal drug use and drug trafficking. Except it wont. Medical marijuana, in particular, has been helpful in stopping prescription drug abuse as well as helping to treat individuals with a number of chronic medical conditions. And marijuana advocates know that this is shameful and misguided.

[Catherine Lewis, chairwoman for the Medical Marijuana Caregivers of Maine] who called Sessions and the Trump administration uneducated for associating marijuana with the opiate addiction epidemic said Sessions request wasnt a surprise, but was met with dismay and disappointment by caregivers and patients with whom she has spoken.

Its downright frightening. Without us here, there are people who will suffer, there are children who will have untreatable seizures, she said. There will be parents and grandparents who could go to jail for doing nothing more than trying to saved loves ones.

Originally posted here:

Medical marijuana industry in Maine prepares to fight Jeff Sessions' nonsensical War on Drugs - Daily Kos

The following editorial appeared in the Orange County Register on June 9:

SANTA ANA, Calif. (Tribune News Service) While American foreign policy has for years fixated on the conflict in Syria and the Middle East, just across the border in Mexico and throughout Central America tens of thousands of people lost their lives last year because of the conflict between drug cartels competing to deliver illicit drugs into the United States.

According to a recent report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, whereas approximately 50,000 lives were lost in Syria last year, approximately 39,000 were killed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, much of which is attributable to drug-war violence.

Mexicos homicide total of 23,000 for 2016 is second only to Syrias, and is only the latest development in a conflict that stretches back to 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed the military to combat drug cartels.

Although the exact number of people killed because of the drug war in Mexico is unlikely to ever be known, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service cited estimates from 80,000 to more than 100,000 in that country alone.

The cause of this violence is obvious, and it is a direct, predictable consequence of our failed policy of drug prohibition. In the near-half century since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed in conflicts fueled by a lucrative illicit drug trade made possible by our prohibition of drugs.

This is an insight a certain New York developer possessed 27 years ago. Were losing badly the war on drugs, Donald Trump said in 1990. You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.

While Trump may have since lost this insight, the fact remains that the war on drugs does more harm than drugs themselves.

Last year, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to call for a rethink of the drug war, which contributed to decades of conflict in Colombia that killed hundreds of thousands.

Rather than squander more lives and resources fighting a War on Drugs that cannot be won including in our inner cities the United States must recognize the futility and harm of its drug policies.

Visit the Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.) at http://www.ocregister.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. 2017 Orange County Register.

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Orange County Register: 'War on drugs' is costing thousands of lives - WatertownDailyTimes.com