Dutertism: I Will Kill You If You Destroy My Country And The Youth Of My Land

WaPo |  A further, related point needs to be made: Duterte has been careful to lay out a case to the public and his subordinates for a “just war” through the use of dossiers containing lists of officials and others he insists are drug lords, which he waves around during speeches. Some of these are explicitly identified; others are mentioned obliquely, suggesting that he is giving them a chance to mend their ways. And always, he warns: If you do not surrender or stop, do not be surprised by what happens to you.

This method provides an alibi not only for himself but also for all officialdom. Here is political will in spades: assuming responsibility, reiterating the justness of his war, assuring everyone implicated that the president has their backs. Whether shocked or awed by the outcome, the country is assured of one thing: their collective innocence in what has transpired. And so the country can applaud the liquidations with a clear conscience.

The day after Tillerson left, having dispensed with the looming expectation of foreign criticism, Duterte was triumphant and uncompromising. Addressing the police during their anniversary celebrations, he said: “Find me a law … that says it is illegal to say those words, ‘I will kill you if you destroy my country and the youth of my land.’ “

rappler |   Early this month, he threatened to expose Inquirer's majority owners, the Prieto-Rufino families. Two weeks later, on July 17, the Prietos sold their stake to business tycoon Ramon Ang, a close associate of the President. (READ: Meet Ramon Ang, Filipino billionaire and Dutert's friend)

In targeting Rappler, he cited Article 16, Section 11 of the Constitution. "The ownership and management of mass media shall be limited to citizens of the Philippines, or to corporations, cooperatives or associations, wholly-owned and managed by such citizens,"reads the charter.

Rappler has debunked this claim on foreign ownership, which was first circulated by Duterte's online defenders. (READ: Debunking lies about Rappler)

Rappler is 100% Filipino-owned even if the company uses Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs) to allow foreign partners to have commercial interests.

Omidyar Network and North Base Media, groups composed of international journalists and investors, have economic interests but own no part of Rappler.

 

PDRs are financial tools that individuals or entities can use to have a stake in a company they believe in. Their involvement is limited to potential commercial benefits. They neither get voting rights on the Board nor have a say in the management or day-to-day operations of the company.

Another Democratic Turd Drug Warrior In Need Of a Repeated Flushing: Joe Biden

Counterpunch |  I will never forget an encounter I had back in the ‘90s with then-Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. I was working as the house photographer for Widener University, which is just south of the Philly airport and just north of the Delaware line. Biden was then working hard in the Senate to fund more cops and prisons. He came to Widener to speak on the topic, and I was assigned to photograph him. After taking a few shots, I decided to stay to listen to the man and his pitch for the Drug War, something that personally interested me, beyond my job as a flak photographer.

I forget exactly what the beloved working-class senator from the corporate state of Delaware said. But it didn’t sit right with me. I had been spending my vacation time as a photographer in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, in the middle of the Reagan Wars. I’d also been photographing addicts on the street through a needle exchange program in inner city Philadelphia and had been reading on Harm Reduction research. Later, I become aware, from a book by Ted Gest called Crime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order, that when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Democrats were freaked out: they feared they were finished politically. 

According to Gest, it was Joe Biden who saved the day by saying, “‘Give me the crime issue and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election.’” Crime bills were the way for Democrats to stay in the political game.

“How did so much crime legislation pass during the partisan 1980s?” Gest asks. “A key element was important personal relationships in the Capital, especially between Biden and the new Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.” This is the famous racist Dixiecrat who, following the Nixon Strategy, had changed his party affiliation to Republican, keeping his Senate seniority. It was the beginning of a fruitful political friendship — “fruitful” that is, if you were a politician willing to pander and fuel the Drug War fears of the time. The result was money for more cops and more prisons. It was part and parcel with what Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim Crow,” where the stigma of being a felon replaced the old stigma of being a nigger. Bill Clinton went on to pursue a similar strategy to stay in the political game.

It was thus that I encountered Senator Biden in a Widener University auditorium shilling for the Drug War. I was in the second row and raised my hand. Biden called on me, stepping toward me as I stood up. We were maybe ten feet apart. My question focused on why he seemed to dismiss addressing the demand problem in the United Stares. I mentioned Harm Reduction. The important word I used was decriminalization. My point was why couldn’t we try something other than using the military and police and prisons to address our very real drug problem?

I might as well have said something about his children. He knew I was there as some kind of working PR person, and he lit into me with vicious glee. He turned to address the audience, avoiding both me and my question.

“This fellow thinks he’s smart. He cleverly uses the term ‘decriminalization’ — when he really means legalization. He wants to make drugs legal, folks.” He went on some more. All the time I wanted to  say: “Listen — SIR! — would you answer my question.”

It was personal. But it made the man’s huge investment in the Drug War very clear. He knew very well that decriminalization and all the very reasonable Harm Reduction research was the Achilles heel of the Drug War. If the well-respected Ted Gest is correct, the Drug War virtually made Joe Biden’s political career; working with Strom Thurmond to put away black people made him who he is today. Is this unfair to Joe Biden? No doubt, his bi-partisan cooperation with Thurmond to some degree mitigated the South Carolina senator’s Old South racism. It did nothing, however, to ease up the trend that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans; and some would add it did nothing to mitigate the current dysfunctional national bruise caused by the ideological struggle between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements.

We all know Joe Biden’s well-nourished public persona as the working man’s politician, the guy all of us want to sit down and have a beer with. The fact is, I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with Joe. I’d ask him to answer the question he parried away in that auditorium. What do we have to do now to undo what you and your bi-partisan allies created back in the ’80s? We all may have the opportunity to ask him these questions, since it feels like he’s running for 2020. But let’s hope the Democrats get their act together and do better than running good ol’ Joe.

The History Channel America's War on Drugs Documentary

theintercept |  That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.

On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.

Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV.

That’s why “America’s War on Drugs” is a genuine milestone. We’ve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo — for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for America’s Dad — can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind one of the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history.

The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami, and Anthony Lappé, is a standard TV documentary; there’s the amalgam of interviews, file footage, and dramatic recreations. What’s not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reporters is Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief and author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”)

There’s no mealy mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.”

Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.”

Next, New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.”

For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with heroin, hallucinogen, and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is.

The History Channel America's War on Drugs 

Dictatorship of Celebrity: Manager, Coach, Director, Psychiatrist, Cheerleader, Manipulator [and] Guide

salon |  More than three decades ago, as I was winding up a major investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its leader Huey Newton, I received a call from Abbie Hoffman, the antic anti-Vietnam War activist, then a fugitive from criminal charges for selling cocaine to a nark. Abbie and I had been friends and fellow street-fighting buddies on the Lower East Side in numerous demonstrations of the antiwar Yippies. His purpose, he said, was to talk me out of publishing that 1978 investigation in New Times. It would hurt the left and the struggle for black justice, he warned.

 

My story exposed Newton’s bizarre leadership (for a time he carried a swagger stick à la Idi Amin). Far worse was the extortion racket he presided over that shook down pimps, drug dealers, after-hours clubs and even a theater owner. Non-compliance left one club owner dead and undiscovered for days in the trunk of his car, which was parked at the San Francisco airport. The theater owner, Ed Bercovich, declined the tithe and refused to give jobs to Panther thugs. The theater burned down — it was arson. Murders of rivals were also carried out on orders from above for perceived disloyalty to the Panthers; vicious beatings of lower-rank Panther males were regular punishments, along with turning out Panther women as prostitutes in the Panther-owned bar and restaurant the Lamp Post. The Panthers always needed cash for themselves and their programs. Paranoia was rampant, with internal schisms fanned by the FBI and local red squads of the police but also anchored in the egos and fear of rivals.

Newton had a way of being tough on the streets, the mean streets of Oakland he grew up in, but he managed to conceal it from his respectable friends, black and white. He cultivated liberal politicians such as U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums and state Rep. Tom Bates; a host of celebrities, including Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Dennis Hopper; and opinion leaders such as Yale president Kingman Brewster, author Jessica Mitford and conductor Leonard Bernstein, all of whom became supporters of the Panthers.

At first, I was puzzled as to why Abbie would call me from the underground after a long silence — he was a fugitive, after all. Suddenly, in a flash, I knew: “Did Bert put you up to this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he admitted sheepishly. Bert Schneider, I already knew, had underwritten Abbie’s fugitive existence, just as he had for Huey Newton. I turned Abbie — and Bert — down: The Panther investigation would run.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Coming to Take Your Isht!

theatlantic |  “President Trump has directed this Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use every lawful tool that we have to do that,” he said at a gathering of law-enforcement officials on Wednesday. “We will continue to encourage civil-asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet.”

The directive revives the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, a controversial process through which state and local police agencies can seize assets, then transfer those seizures to federal control. In doing so, local agencies can skirt some state-level regulations limiting forfeitures. Under the program, the federal government pools the funds derived from the assets and sends 80 percent of them back to the state or local department itself, sometimes evading state laws that say seized assets should go into a state’s general fund.

Civil forfeiture has existed in some form since the colonial era, although most of the current laws date to the War on Drugs’ heyday in the 1980s. Law-enforcement officials like Sessions defend modern civil forfeiture as a way to limit the resources of drug cartels and organized-crime groups. It’s also a lucrative tactic for law-enforcement agencies in an era of tight budgets: A Justice Department inspector general’s report in April found that federal forfeiture programs had taken in almost $28 billion over the past decade, and The Washington Post reported that civil-forfeiture seizures nationwide in 2015 surpassed the collective losses from all burglaries that same year.

In its report, the inspector general’s office also raised concerns about how federal agencies take funds, after it found almost half of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s seizures in a random sample weren’t tied to any broader law-enforcement purpose. “When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution,” the report concluded.

What Do You Expect When Your Drug Czar For The Drug War Is A General?

The drug-connected crime problem isn't all about the junkies - it's about the dealers. Especially the violent crime problem. The key to dealing with drug crime is drying up the profits of the illegal market. Reliance on incarceration has only made the power of organized criminal gangs stronger. It hasn't broken a single gang. A lawless marketplace staffed entirely by criminals who protect their inventory and personal safety with arsenals of weaponry and enforce and regulate business disputes with gunfire is a pretty unique business model. A global business that ranks third in revenues after arms and oil and hides its profits with sophisticated money laundering techniques that allow the top players access into corridors of political power while providing unparalleled liquidity advantages in business competition is a pretty unique business model.

Nixon's early 1970s globalization of the War on Drugs was ostensibly aimed at enlisting all UN members in a united effort to shut down drug supplies at their source. What resulted instead was much closer to a U.S. imperial protection racket for drug kingpins, with the US holding the power to confer a status of impunity on politically favored players overseas. In return, those who benefited were able to target internal law enforcement efforts at culling their business competition, which typically worked to produce results sufficient to bolster their anti-drug credibility.

In Dark Alliance the late investigative journalist Gary Webb documented connections that led through multiple Latin American countries- El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Mexico- to drug rings operating in several regions in the US. He wasn't alone in his investigations, either.

The big picture that results when that research is reviewed is that the political and military leaders of a great many Central American and Caribbean nations during the Cold War era were provided with protected status in the transshipment of cocaine in return for maintaining pro-US policies in their countries.

General Bueso Rosa in Honduras; Hugo Banzer in Bolivia; the Salinas brothers in Mexico, and other Mexican governments before and since; Sandoval Alarcon in Guatemala; Trujillo and Noriega in Panama; the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, in the 1970s; Uribe in Colombia, Cedras/Emmanuel Constant FRAPH junta in Haiti; the JLP in Jamaica - this US policy is blatantly in effect right now in Afghanistan, the top source nation for opium and heroin in the world. It has been in effect from the outset of US intervention in Central Asia. It has become standard U.S. necropolitical operating procedure.

But back to Dark Alliance, Danilo Blandon, the Contra-connected supplier who furnished most of Rick Ross's cocaine, offered him an unprecedented deal soon after establishing that he could move large retail quantities on the street: consignment, no money down, at a kilo price that worked out to less than $20/gram.

Ross was able to move 200 kilos a month. That's over 2 tons a year, at a time when the DEA was estimating the annual US supply at 70 tons. Blandon was a true drug kingpin. Up until the Blandon-Ross connection was dismantled, with the help of Danilo Blandon, who received immunity from prosecution and earned around $200,000 as a paid FBI informant for providing testimony to take down a huge LA cocaine ring that he.was instrumental in enabling to boom to an unprecedented level.

Danilo Blandon's supplier was Norwin Meneses, who had been identified as an even bigger kingpin by US Federal law enforcement since the 1970s. Meneses was the brother of the Somoza-era chief of police, and at least one other general in Somoza's Guardia Nacionale, which eventually became the largest Contra faction, the FDN, under military commander Enrique Bermudez. Meneses also benefited from some sort of arrangement with US authorities, remaining free of prosecution, residing in the US and traveling back and forth between there and Central America without interference.

Blandon was not Meneses' only wholesaler and Meneses was not the only person involved with Contra resupply who had a long history as a major drug supplier and transporter into the USA. The Contra effort made use of a network of long-time Cold War era US intelligence/covert operations agents including a nucleus of Cuban exiles drawn from the ranks of Bay of Pigs battle veterans.

Some 8% of the 1500 Bay of Pigs veterans, about 120 of them, had been identified as kingpins as early on as the late 1960s. Mostly heroin, at that point- supplying the NYC market out of Union City, NJ. They later showed up everywhere from Southeast Asia to the Argentine Dirty War, and eventually as field operators in the Contra effort.

Speaking of the neofascist junta-era Argentine military, they became the first overseas liason to the formation of the Contras in the Reagan era, offering them a safe haven and working to train and equip the Somocista Guardia Nacionale in exile in 1981.

In the previous year, the Argentines had provided the principal base of support for the military coup in Bolivia that put the Cocaine Junta into power, in July 1980. DEA agent Michael Levine, the top field agent in the Southern Cone of Latin America at the time, contends that this was done in collaboration with the local CIA faction down there, who were bitterly opposed to Jimmy Carter's "human rights" foreign policy, which had brought pressure to bear on right-wing President Col. Hugo Banzer Suarez to relinquish his martial law "autogolpe" rule and hold elections. The Cocaine Coup successfully derailed the ascension of a civilian government to power.

Banzer had long-standing connections to the US, having been trained at the School of the Americas, Ft. Hood's armored cavalry school, and as a US diplomatic liason in DC. He was also affiliated with the Falange Socialista Boliviana, and the Latin American Anti-Communist League affiliated with WACL; with the international right-wing assassination program known as Operation Condor, along with his ideological allies in Pinochet's Chile and the Argentina junta. Banzer's family relations and associates were also busted repeatedly in the US and Canada for smuggling cocaine; one case involved his son-in-law and another his chauffeur, iirc. And one of Banzer's cousins was Luis Arce Gomez, one of the chief plotters of the Cocaine Coup.

The Drug War Has Profoundly Compromised Prosecutorial Integrity

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is probably the single greatest disappointment for me with 45's administration. His anti-drug stance is retrograde cover for reinstituting the prosecutorial savagery which resulted in mass incarceration over the past forty years.  AG support for harsh or mandatory minimum sentences, coupled with the claim that it provides a vital service in making cases as leverage to flip people to inform on their associates, was the essential recipe for transforming America into the incarceration nation.

Even when it's used as prosecutors claim it is intended to convict ringleaders, the threat of harsh or mandatory minimum sentences to intimidate people into betraying their friends and family members is ethically suspect and legally corrupt. Claiming that it's used to dismantle illegal drug networks is at best historically suspect. In terms of practical results, this policy is has wreaked havoc and proven corrosive in terms of breaking down any pre-existing structures of social trust, community, and friendship that might have been built over time.  The explicit message of this policy is that treachery and betrayal is an act worthy of reward. The worst punishment is reserved for those who demonstrate loyalty and integrity. Drug Warriors justify this policy by asserting that Drug Dealers are already lower than murderers or violent rapists, and thus have no integrity to preserve, because they deal Drugs. But that isn’t the worst of it. What’s really ethically indefensible is the difference between the way the policy is described by politicians and prosecutors to the general public, and the way that it’s actually employed. 

Prosecutors routinely tout their use of the tactic as the use of informants to “bust up the ladder”- that is - to flip low-level retailers to snitch on the people above them in the hierarchy.  That's what's always depicted in the movies and on the teevee crime procedurals. Using snitches this way, the prosecutor claims he is working his way toward the “kingpin” at the top of the hierarchy.  The "kingpin" is finally made vulnerable to criminal conviction through informant testimony, or by having a snitch facilitate a transaction with government agents, as if there’s an ultimate "kingpin" whose conviction will lead to final victory in the Drug War. 

This simple plot line may hold a deep psychological appeal to children, buybull buddies, or people addicted to purely fictional crime procedurals - but there's no practical or historical reason to believe it's ever really happened, ever. Too many cases show that  drug selling organizations were dismantled in exactly the opposite manner.  The "kingpin" is the one who gets caught right up front and then receives lenient sentencing for informing on all his subordinates. 

Nicky Barnes is a name which comes to mind for buying leniency for himself and/or close relatives by ratting out everyone beneath him in his organization. Rayful Edmond is another prime example of the top-down snitching effect. 

Examining the stories of prisoners documented by FAMM and the Marshall Project shows cases where the heaviest time landed on the people at the bottom - people who literally had no one available to betray, no “substantial information” to provide to aid prosecutors. So all the time landed on the lowest underlings..  This is fine from the perspective of the harsh prosecutions system, because that System requires someone as a sacrifice to keep the numbers looking good and providing the image of an effective law enforcement campaign. (not to mention the profit motivation for the private for-profit prison-industrial complex itself)

People have been subjected to mandatory minimum sentences simply as a result of having once provided their residence or business as the location for a drug transaction. Mandatory minimums have been handed down for driving buyers and/or sellers to and from a transaction.  One instance of driving a buyer to the home of a seller is formally an overt act in furtherance of an illegal drug sale, and therefore all that’s required to convict someone of one count of “felony drug conspiracy.” 

Strictly speaking, millions of Americans have committed at least one felony in their lives. Anyone who’s gotten far enough into illegal drug use to purchase their own stash of weed and have acquaintances involved in the same activity has done the above at least once. From the prosecutor's perspective, conspiracy is conspiracy, no matter how minor.

Driving a friend over to a dealer’s apartment to buy a $15 bag of weed is taking part in a drug sales conspiracy, and conspiracy is a felony. Of course rendezvous like these take place daily in the underground marketplace. Most of the time the risk of getting arrested is negligible. In the event that someone is swept up in a raid and busted for that participation, felony conspiracy offers a lever for the prosecutor seeking people to snitch for them. This, notwithstanding the fact that someone who simply drives their friend over to a house and waits outside in the car while they do a deal may have no information of value to bargain with.

Meanwhile, those same ball-busting prosecutors reward those who have risen high enough in the hierarchy of a drug conspiracy to have detailed knowledge of its working and who can offer critical testimony against their companions with reduced sentences, comfortable confinement settings, or witness protection.

How Much Police Corruption Would There Be Without a Drug War?

Speaking of dysfunctional culture is only stereotyping when it's applied to all members of the group and/or if the claim isn't grounded by evidence - which is why it's imperative to dig deeper into how a given dysfunctional culture got to be so dysfunctional. 

I am now firmly convinced that the core of the problem is the political economy of the trade in forbidden substances. The trade in forbidden substances provides a broad-based source of economic sustenance that no other criminal activity can match.

The trade in forbidden substances provides advantages - or at least the appearance of advantages - that grant it the power to present an alternative path to upward mobility.  The dope game provides instant economic gratification without the lengthy effort and remote reward process linked with academic achievement. The dope game eliminates the uncertainty around future employment in the  non-criminal economy.  Honestly, without our current zero-tolerance drug laws, outside the trade in forbidden substances,  how many career opportunities exist in crime?  

Doing what, as muggers, burglers, bank robbers, car thieves?

Political discussion of the drug war/drug prohibition focuses exclusively on the phenomenon of forbidden drug use rather than on the economic dynamics of markets for mind-altering substances.

Think about that for a minute. 

Political discussion of the drug war/drug prohibition focuses exclusively on the phenomenon of forbidden drug use rather than on the economic dynamics of markets for mind-altering substances.

But the cost and consequences to society are not so much rooted in the use of forbidden substances, as they are in the existence and proliferation of a complicated multi-generational criminal supply chain operated by career criminals servicing a lucrative , high-demand market. Those socially corrosive consequences are concentrated in impoverished communities, and they don't assume the same level of significance in economically stable or affluent ones.

The appearance, growth, and maintenance of illegal drug markets in the present day begins in the middle schools and high schools; across the board, rich or poor, it's been that way for around 40 years. But there are crucial differences, the main one being that in economically stable communities the teenagers dealing the drugs don't view it as a means of upward mobility, a career path, or a means of supplementing household income.  They don't have to. 

The more affluent the community, the more this tends to be the case. Because necessity doesn't play the same role that it does in a low-income or impoverished community, there's much less violence associated with the illegal drug trade. There are many fewer pretexts for feeling the need to engage in violence when there are no issues about customer payment, minimal threat of holdups, or home invasions by rivals. There's no need to form organized self-protection syndicates to contend with those sorts of problems.

Drug dealing money is side money, and middle-class or upper-class retail dealers are mostly in it for status and access to free supplies of product. Because problems of theft and violence so seldom arise, drug dealing in more affluent communities receives less notice from the police. And because drug dealing is nearly always viewed as a sideline, most middle class retail drug dealers give up the business at some point between their notice of admission to college and their graduation. There are problems, occasionally serious ones, but they mostly center on teenage drug use, not gun play in the streets associated with drug sales. The drug trade doesn't just take over, and run the neighborhoods.

Is this because middle-class drug dealers are inherently virtuous? Of course not. Is it a function of economic privilege? Almost entirely.

In a community in economic stagnation or decline, it's usually a much different story. Dealing illegal drugs presents itself as a multilevel marketing scheme that holds out the promise of a pathway to economic success. Like practically all multilevel marketing schemes, that promise is realized in only a handful of cases. But it still works more reliably than any legal multilevel scheme I can think of, especially in the short run. 

Age is no barrier to employment. In fact, in this dope game, minor status has distinct advantages. So it's easy for teenage kids to view illegal drug dealing as a career path. Except that it's a gravely serious business, with perils and implications that teenagers- particularly teenage males - have trouble appreciating. The risks are of an entirely different magnitude than they are in wealthier parts of town. 

By the time a teenage drug dealer turns 18 and becomes eligible for adult criminal penalties, it's often too late to get out of the business. Too many bridges have been burned to simply reset the counters to zero. At that point, jail and prison enter into the mix in a big way. And if you don't think there's any such thing as dysfunctional culture, consider the prevailing effects of jail and prison. The culture of confinement, violence, paranoia, mistrust, and anti-sociality tends to move out into the streets after a lot of people experience it firsthand. 

When these carcerally corrupted and now thoroughly dysfunctional people have children, the children assimilate that prison-culture dysfunction - just like children do everywhere else. That's a whole lot of multi-generational ugliness concentrated within a community. (and no Bee Dee, it's not the result of IQ-75 limitations)

Is this state of affairs racist? Yes. Because it didn't have to happen. 

Now that the rural white majority in this country are beginning to truly experience the same combined stresses from criminal syndicates, prison culture, street criminals, punitive policing, and the courts - as the law-abiding majority in low-income black majority neighborhoods have experienced over the last 40 years - there is a glimmer of hope that the drug prohibition may have to give.

Bottom line, however, this isn't a race-related problem. I'm not talking about a "Black thing" or a "Mexican thing." At least not since the bottom dropped out of a lot of majority-white regional economies in this country. Economically stressed white neighborhoods and rural small towns now deal with the same problems related to the political economy of the illegal drugs trade: 

• breakdown of social trust
• theft among neighbors
• violence
• family abuse
• high rates of incarceration
• loss of employment eligibility due to criminal convictions or addiction
• increasing rates of self-harming behavior

The problems of having a huge chunk of the local economy reliant on drug money- and, yes, the type of welfare that advantages non-working people at the expense of their employed neighbors- begin to merge with harder and harder drugs use over time, as those communities, schools, and families spiral into dysfunction and desperation.  White kids are now increasingly subject to the same impacts - all of which works to put them in the same deplorable corner - as long as they can see and think clearly enough to suss out the analogous experience across race lines.

Oops, I almost forgot about the police corruption problem.  Severe police corruption has existed as long as the Drug War/Drug Prohibition. Matter of fact, police corruption has been a rapidly growing and metastasizing aspect of the larger societal dysfunction, and it threatens to dismantle the social contract between authorities and the communities whom they were formerly sworn to protect and serve.

This is an 11-year weekly archive.

So far it's 67 very long pages, with new stories added every week. Coast to coast. City and country. Judges, DEA, FBI, city police chiefs, county sheriffs, entire "elite" drug squads, small-town police officers, forensics scientists, prison guards... this list of stories is far from complete, and, it doesn't take into account the corrupt law enforcement people who never got caught, or who haven't been caught yet.

Drug Prohibition/War is the Dry Rot Within the American Body Politic

The corruption, dishonesty, social and ethical cannibalism within the sphere of forbidden substance users and those who prey on forbidden substance users -  has done more than any other single factor to bring on the climate of political malaise in this country.  Its still largely third rail status as a subject for national political consideration is a crucial indication of its importance. If Prohibition/War isn't the most important factor, it's certainly the most important unmentioned factor in the increasing antipathy of Americans to both traditional political parties.

For most of my lifetime, it's been out of bounds to broach the notion of drug law reform in a large public forum.   That decades-long evasion of honest debate on the relevant issues has enabled the Drug War- with its combination of unchallenged rationale and array of actual consequences - to exert a profoundly destructive effect on both official and unofficial institutions of this society. We're dealing with a corrosive situation that's been allowed to grow and fester for at least 40 years. Not drug use - but the illegal drug markets and the consequences to society of those markets. The society nurtured by that underground economy, which advantages hardened criminals over those who aren't as willing and able to resort to deceit and violence, has routinely exported the psychotic and antisocial values from jails into our communities.

We don't give nearly enough consideration to the negative consequences engendered by mass incarceration and what that has brought back to our communities from the bedlam(s) of the prison industrial complex. It is the criminal marketplace rather than the effect of forbidden substances which has acquired a hegemonic influence over our communities and popular culture. Who among us is factoring in the current state of most of our jails and prisons and what these contagiously export into our communities?  Who is factoring in the personal and public health problems and socially corrosive mentalities bubbling up out of prisons - which factors are incontestably worse than the worst impacts even of forbidden substance addiction, per se.

Race obsessives think that the main problem in America is drawn along racial lines. I disagree. The big problem in America is the long-term result of nearly a half-century of a profoundly and deceptively metastasizing Drug War. This dry rot has spread throughout our society corrupting banks, schools, police, courts, jails, politicians, professions, rents, housing, social welfare programs, the public health system, big pharma. 

The problems of forbidden substance misuse and abuse are dwarfed by the problems of Greed, Punitive Morality, Stigmatization, and Deception on both sides of the crooked line irrationally drawn by the forbidden substance criminal statutes.  The country would see a noticeable improvement within two years of effective drug law reform that worked to minimize the economic demand in the criminal marketplace: cannabis legalization, opioid addiction maintenance, a liberalized prescription and/or registry regime for some of the other substances, all while retaining laws against illegal sales operations.

In less than ten years, we might even get many of our worst schools and neighborhoods back on the path to recovery from that long-standing condition of beleaguered competition with the burdens imposed by the illicit economy.

Prohibition Has Been An Epic Policy Failure

Illicit drug markets were flourishing in white communities in the 1970s, and they continue to flourish in white communities to this very day. The crucial difference between affluent white drug markets and gritty black urban drug markets is the drive-through customer service provided to strangers in mostly black ghetto neighborhoods. 

White neighborhoods feature a drug market staffed by affluent teenagers doing it as a sideline for free drug supplies, social-peer status, and disposable income with a customer base of similarly well-heeled schoolmates and friends. Black and brown ghettos feature a market run in deadly earnest by poor and marginalized people viewing it more like a career choice- as their best chance at earning good money, fast money, and possibly even a boost to long-term upward mobility.

Open-air street markets are riskier all around, and much more criminogenic. But that's principally a function of the illegal marketplace, not the underlying commodity "drugs" being bought and sold. Prohibition has been an epic policy failure. Instead of success in curbing the use of officially forbidden drugs, 50 years of get-tough criminalization, zero tolerance, and mandatory minimums have resulted in;

1. a state of perpetual civil conflict
2. an unregulated supply of a wider array of harder and harder drugs
3. diverse harder drug abuse by younger and younger people
4. broad-based antagonism against police and government
5. unparalleled levels of police corruption

Unfortunately, the respectable negroes of impoverished black ghettos made the same mistake as the morally upright but deeply hypocritical WW2 generation of adults in more affluent white communities.  Faced with an unfamiliar phenomenon (the newfound popularity of some legally prohibited drugs among the youth), they imagined that a law enforcement crackdown would solve the problem and reset their status quo back to more familiar conditions, back before the kids were smoking pot and experimenting with drugs. 

Let's be clear- the initial 1960s-era domestic "illegal drug problem" related almost entirely to marijuana; the heroin market was confined to "bad neighborhoods" in a handful of large cities, and it took years for the cocaine market to develop a significant consumer base anywhere in the country.

Instead, the resulting Drug War only made matters worse, across the board. Including problems of police brutality and the impression that a coercive regime was being imposed upon urban black neighborhoods by outsiders. Which is, yes, what the citizens originally asked for. But the source of the folly was the naive idea that "drugs" were the primary source of the breakdown of civic order, rather than the illicit markets empowered by a simplistic prohibition regime that was- and still is- rationally indefensible.

Even the most responsible black American parents of teenagers are in much the same position as practically every other ethnic population- there's only so much they can do to counteract negative peer group influence on their adolescent children, given the circumstances of the modern world. And the stance that "studying is a white thing" would have a lot less social currency in the absence of the attractions of economic success provided by opportunities in the retail illicit drugs trade. "Studying is a white thing" is part of a narrative of fake resistance promulgated by criminals and delinquents. It's an excuse proffered by nihilistic elements of the black lumpenproletariat - pornographically promoted by Madison Avenue - not by "black culture".

The source of the problem- the basis for the appeal of the story that tells boys to kick school to the curb and go for fast money and instant gratification- isn't the inherent criminality of "black culture", or black people. It isn't ethnically based. It's mostly about Pinocchio Pleasure Island. The real-life Pleasure Island of the drug dealing game. In the absence of a lucrative underground market in prohibited drugs, criminality is a pretty pathetic career path.  In the presence of that avenue of opportunity, it's a glamor profession. Or at least it contains enough glamorous aspects to make it a very attractive occupation, especially for teenage males at the outset. Remember what eventually happens to the boys on Pleasure Island.

The useless not-see narrative blames the dysfunctions of poor black communities on a lack of moral character - a deficiency purportedly inherent to lower racial IQ or some allegedly monolithic "black culture." The useless BLM narrative blames the problems in impoverished black ghettos on some all-pervading, amorphous, undifferentiated, supposedly rampant white racism, i.e., an inherent moral deficiency of monolithic "white culture." 

Neither of those stories address the actual source of the problem.

A Turnkey Operation For A Totalitarian Society

The Federal government put policies in place that practically mandated a criminal monopoly over the trade in a wide array of illegal substances, while criminalizing the entire population with which users/dealers were most closely identified.  Leaving aside marijuana for a moment, and fast forwarding to the crack cocaine epidemic - while cocaine/crack can still be found as a street drug in this country; it's just that not as many people want it. They've seen how it can derail someone's life. Although both the supply and the numbers of cocaine users remain many times what they were 45-50 years ago. 

The criminalization and stigmatization of prohibited drugs users works to pre-emptively wall them off from most avenues of participation in legitimate society.  Their permanent stigmatization in the mainstream economy, effectively encourages them to confine their energies to participating in the criminal economy.  As for trends in urban violence, they're probably destined to cycle through for some time.

45 years of Drug War has made gangsterism dynastic. Furthermore, it has entrenched it through the prison systems. Alcohol prohibition only lasted 13 years and firmly established organized crime for two or three generations thereafter. What would the mafias have become if the "noble experiment" of alcohol prohibition hadn't been put to an end after only 13 years?  Along with Mass Incarceration, this is a crucial difference between the current Drug War and the Prohibition Era.

Then, when that situation eventually gets out of hand, the government steps in with well-funded militarization of the police, paramilitary tactics, and mass incarceration policies. It's a turnkey operation for a totalitarian society, and the justification for it appears entirely rational as long as the population thinks of it solely in terms of fear reactions and their relief, and never questions the flaws in the original premise that led to the breakdown of civic order in the first place. (Nixon's declaration of war on the left and on blacks for opposition to the Vietnam War)

Drugs, Mental Illness, Terrorism...,

thenews |  Terrorism, drugs-for-arms and money laundering are intrinsically linked and pose a considerable threat to global peace and security. They destabilise the political and financial stability of many nation-states. They were accelerated in the wake of 9/11. Militants and extremists have a nexus with criminal networks involved in dealing drugs and arms.

Evidence available with intelligence agencies confirms that from Al-Qaeda to Daesh the real challenge involves the free flow of legal and illegal funds. Until today, the international community has failed to sever their financial lifeline.

It is an open secret how the drug trade in post-Taliban Afghanistan was institutionalised through the puppet regime in Kabul and the patronising attitude of war lords in many provinces of the country. Once opium started being processed at a mass scale into morphine and heroin in Afghanistan, it brought tonnes of money for commanders on the ground.

Since 2004, the controlled democracy in Afghanistan has been playing into the hands of more sophisticated narco-enriched commanders. It is no longer a secret that the Taliban – with whom the US and its allies have always been in negotiation since 2004 – knew how to buy or muscle a vote which would protect their opium interests in every election.

Even Afghanistan’s neighbours have been making profits from the windfall: criminal groups from Central Asia, says the UN, have made profits worth $15.2 billion from the trafficking of opiates in 2015. Tajikistan is, by far, the worst affected by the drug plague owing to a combination of history, poverty and geography.

In the late 1990s, the drug trade was believed to be a source of finance for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) – a terrorist group which had bases in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. After the war in Afghanistan, the IMU lost most of its influence. But the drugs trade continued with organised criminals taking the place of political or religious activists. In a survey conducted by the Open Society Institute, eight out of 10 of those polled said – hardly surprisingly – that “the main reason to turn to drug trafficking was to make big money”.

bell¿ngcat

wikipedia  |  Bellingcat (also spelled bell¿ngcat) is an investigative search network founded by the British network activist Eliot Higgins. It uses open source and social media investigation to investigate a variety of subjects ranging from Mexican drug lords to conflicts fought around the world. Bellingcat brings together contributors who specialise in open source and social media investigation, and it creates guides and case studies so others can learn to do the same.^[1] Bellingcat began as an investigation of the use of weapons in the Syrian civil war. It first received international attention with its analysis of forged data on satellite images of the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 during the still ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Fake Virtue-Signalling By The Corporatocracy

oftwominds |  The Left is morally and fiscally bankrupt, devoid of coherent solutions, and corrupted by its embrace of the Corporatocracy.

History often surprises us with unexpected ironies. For the past century, the slide to fascism could be found on the Right (conservative, populist, nationalist political parties). 

But now it's the Left that's descending into fascism, and few seem to even notice this remarkable development. By Left I mean socialist-leaning, progressive, internationalist/globalist political parties. 

What is fascism? There is no one tidy definition, but it has three essential elements:

1) State and corporate elites govern society and the economy as one unified class.

2) This status quo (i.e. The Establishment) seeks to impose a conformity of values and opinion that support the dominant narratives of the status quo via the mass (corporate) media and the state-controlled educational system.

3) Dissent from any quarter is suppressed via mass-media ridicule, the judicial crushing and silencing of whistleblowers, and all the other powers of the central state: rendition, extra-legal imprisonment, political gulags (in our era, disguised as drug-war gulags), character assassination, murder by drone, impoverishing dissenters via firings and blacklists, and on and on. 

The Left is now the political wing of the corporatocracy. As Phillipe Poutou, a Ford factory mechanic from Bordeaux who is the sole working-class candidate in France's presidential election, so deliciously pointed out, the Left and Right status quo candidates are indistinguishable in terms of their self-serving corruption and elitism: Mechanic-Candidate Bursts French Political Elite's Bubble (NY Times) 

Here in the U.S., the self-serving Democratic Party elites operate within the Corporatocracy structure, in which the state protects and funds private-sector cartels; the two intertwined and self-reinforcing elites manifest and enforce state policies.

Jeff Sessions Will Reinstate the War on Black Men Drugs

WaPo  |  Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.

The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing and made retroactive the law that reduced the large disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) supported it as well. The path to passage seemed clear.

But then people such as Sessions and Cook spoke up. The longtime Republican senator from Alabama became a leading opponent, citing the spike in crime in several cities.

“Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing,” said Sessions, one of only five members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted against the legislation. “It is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill . . . to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in federal prison.”

Cook testified that it was the “wrong time to weaken the last tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents.”

After Republican lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to even bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

“Sessions was the main reason that bill didn’t pass,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort.”

Now that he is attorney general, Sessions has signaled a new direction. As his first step, Sessions told his prosecutors in a memo last month to begin using “every tool we have” — language that evoked the strategy from the drug war of loading up charges to lengthen sentences.

And he quickly appointed Cook to be a senior official on the attorney general’s task force on crime reduction and public safety, which was created following a Trump executive order to address what the president has called “American carnage.”

“If there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook’s appointment was a fire hose,” said Ring, president of FAMM. “There simply aren’t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook’s vision for America.”

Mass Incarceration: The Problem With the Standard Story

newyorker  |  So what makes for the madness of American incarceration? If it isn’t crazy drug laws or outrageous sentences or profit-seeking prison keepers, what is it? Pfaff has a simple explanation: it’s prosecutors. They are political creatures, who get political rewards for locking people up and almost unlimited power to do it.

 Pfaff, in making his case, points to a surprising pattern. While violent crime was increasing by a hundred per cent between 1970 and 1990, the number of “line” prosecutors rose by only seventeen per cent. But between 1990 and 2007, while the crime rate began to fall, the number of line prosecutors went up by fifty per cent, and the number of prisoners rose with it. That fact may explain the central paradox of mass incarceration: fewer crimes, more criminals; less wrongdoing to imprison people for, more people imprisoned. A political current was at work, too. Pfaff thinks prosecutors were elevated in status by the surge in crime from the sixties to the nineties. “It could be that as the officials spearheading the war on crime,” he writes, “district attorneys have seen their political options expand, and this has encouraged them to remain tough on crime even as crime has fallen.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors grew more powerful. “There is basically no limit to how prosecutors can use the charges available to them to threaten defendants,” Pfaff observes. That’s why mandatory-sentencing rules can affect the justice system even if the mandatory minimums are relatively rarely enforced. A defendant, forced to choose between a thirty-year sentence if convicted of using a gun in a crime and pleading to a lesser drug offense, is bound to cop to the latter. Some ninety-five per cent of criminal cases in the U.S. are decided by plea bargains—the risk of being convicted of a more serious offense and getting a much longer sentence is a formidable incentive—and so prosecutors can determine another man’s crime and punishment while scarcely setting foot in a courtroom. “Nearly everyone in prison ended up there by signing a piece of paper in a dingy conference room in a county office building,” Pfaff writes.

In a justice system designed to be adversarial, the prosecutor has few adversaries. Though the legendary Gideon v. Wainwright decision insisted that people facing jail time have the right to a lawyer, the system of public defenders—and the vast majority of the accused can depend only on a public defender—is simply too overwhelmed to offer them much help. (Pfaff cites the journalist Amy Bach, who once watched an overburdened public defender “plead out” forty-eight clients in a row in a single courtroom.)

Meanwhile, all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor’s political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case, for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy.

"Truth" is Whatever Those in Authority Say It Is

consortiumnews |  On Nov. 20, the Times published a lead editorial calling on Facebook and other technology giants to devise algorithms that could eliminate stories that the Times deemed to be “fake.” The Times and other mainstream news outlets – along with a few favored Internet sites – joined a special Google-sponsored task force, called the First Draft Coalition, to decide what is true and what is not. If the Times’ editorial recommendations were followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What to Do About ‘Fake News.’”]

On Thanksgiving Day, the Post ran a front-page story citing an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, blacklisting 200 Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important sources of independent journalism, because we supposedly promoted “Russian propaganda.”

Although PropOrNot and the Post didn’t bother to cite any actual examples or to ask the accused for comment, the point was clear: If you didn’t march in lockstep behind the Official Narrative on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria, you were to be isolated, demonized and effectively silenced. In the article, the Post blurred the lines between “fake news” – stories that are simply made up – and what was deemed “propaganda,” in effect, information that didn’t jibe with what the U.S. State Department was saying.

Back then, in November, the big newspapers believed that the truth was easy, simple, obvious, requiring only access to some well-placed government official or a quick reading of the executive summary from some official report. Over the last quarter century or so, the Times, in particular, has made a fetish out of embracing pretty much whatever Officialdom declared to be true. After all, such well-dressed folks with those important-sounding titles couldn’t possibly be lying.

That gullibility went from the serious, such as rejecting overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels were deeply involved in drug trafficking, to the silly, trusting the NFL’s absurd Deflategate allegations against Tom Brady. In those “old” days, which apparently ended a few weeks ago, the Times could have run full-page ads, saying “Truth is whatever those in authority say it is.”

Real War on Drugs = War on the Deep State

The situation is this: PhDs in the Philippines flip hamburgers, and they are very lucky to get even that job.  Ten elite families basically control 90% of the country's wealth, and the entire economy is based on sending workers(probably 20% of the population), to foreign countries, to wire money back home. (like Mexico?)

How long before economic conditions in the U.S. mirror this state of affairs?

Instead of fueling our own street violence and funding the drug cartels in Mexico and the Opium farmers in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle (Intelligence Community Drug Dealing). Executing high-level drug dealers, manufacturers and traffickers is the only way to wage a "war on drugs". No nation has ever successfully fought drug manufacturing and importation without a death sentence for the perpetrators. (This would literally entail specifically targeted extrajudicial war against the Intelligence and Banking Communities)

Drug pushing and manufacture, like any other business, is a network. A loosely hierarchical network. If you are going to carry out what essentially amount to extra-judicial killings, then there needs to be targeted executions.

This is the major problem in developing countries, and in a place like the Philippines.

The system is so utterly disorganized, that there is a large amount of [ultimately unacceptable] collateral damage.

The number of executions in this case is extremely high, and is focused primarily on the deterrent effect of slaughtering lowest level peasant drug-addicts and pushers. If such a policy is carried out over an extended period of time, and the underlying (Manufacture/Import/Money Laundering) supply chains remain intact, then public malaise can set in - without ever damaging the root cause network underlying the problem.

This is dangerous, as the policy can in the future be rolled back, with re-distribution beginning rather quickly [the growth in demand will more than pay back for any lost earnings for the real drug-supplier networks].

So the policy must be short, sharp, and to-the-point. Head shots, and head shots only - taking out the thought and profit leadership of the supply networks.

This requires a lot of research and planning.

This latter aspect is totally missing from the Philippines scenario.

Hence the exorbitant body count.

Better to cut off the specific, high-level nodes on the supply and profit-chains of the network, than to blindly shoot at anything in sight, totally missing the key networks and causing a LOT of collateral damage.

Anything else is merely window dressing for low information political followers.

The low-level drug-war in the U.S. is a perfect long-term example of the exact failure to wage real war against the top-level nodes on the drug supply and profit chain.

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109. 

Low-information "Just say no" Drug Warriors refuse to process these facts.

The American Drug War has been the most intractable, anti-science exercise in all-pervading State Oppression in American history. At best, an entirely inappropriate over-reaction targeting the low-hanging fruit users and dealers; at worst, a fear-driven witch-hunt driven by superstition, corruption, and cynically partisan fascist political advantage.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

Presidential Agent II (1944), ISBN 1-93131-318-0 

I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more effective and responsive for the Philippine universal health care system (yes, they have one) to simply provide the methamphetamine users with prescriptions for Dexedrine or Desoxyn, to pull them out of the street life of chasing shabu on the black market and replace it with a stable daily regimen under medical supervision.

It's entirely possible that most of the shabu users have undiagnosed ADD; it's a rarely discussed fact that the vast majority of "normal people" don't like the effects of psychostimulants, particularly when taken over a protracted period of time (except for Nazis)

Although the way it plays out in the USA, once someone has a meth conviction or rehab on their record, their physicians are strongly discouraged from prescribing amphetamines to them- because that would mean they're "using" again. So while they might have been effectively self-medicating undiagnosed ADD with an illegal stimulant (albeit without medical supervision, in a criminal environment, and very often overusing the substance while concommitantly abusing alcohol)- once they get pulled into the criminal justice system or mandated rehab, thereafter, as a rule, they're practically forbidden from ever receiving a similar substance from a physician as an ADD treatment.

Battlefield America: The War on the American People

rutherford |  Here’s a truth few Americans want to acknowledge: nothing has changed (at least, not for the better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of the police state to Donald Trump.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, relentless pace under President Trump as it did under President Obama.

Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield.

Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.

For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.

Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests. They have run the gamut from suppressing free speech activities and justifying suspicionless strip searches to warrantless home invasions and conferring constitutional rights on corporations, while denying them to citizens.

Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.

The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking you.

The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.

Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Is the DHS capable of plotting and planning to turn the national guard into a federalized, immigration police force? No doubt about it. Remember, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining.