According to Mexico's government, from 2006-2012, 26,121 peopledisappeared in Mexico, with the missing including police officers, bricklayers, housewives, lawyers, students, businessmen and more than 1,200 children under age 11. Not only are authorities failing to investigate the missing, they are often directly involved in the disappearances, so families continue to suffer the anguish of not knowing what happened to a loved one.
“Human Rights Watch has documented nearly 250 such “disappearances” that have occurred since 2007. In more than 140 of these cases, evidence suggests that these were enforced disappearances—meaning that state agents participated directly in the crime, or indirectly through support or acquiescence. These crimes were committed by members of every security force involved in public security operations, sometimes acting in conjunction with organized crime. In the remaining cases, we were not able to determine based on available evidence whether state actors participated in the crime, though they may have.
In nearly all of these cases, authorities failed to promptly and thoroughly search for the victims or investigate the cases. Prosecutors rarely carried out basic investigative steps crucial to finding missing persons, too often opting instead to blame the victims and, reflecting the low priority they place on solving such crimes, telling families to conduct the searches on their own. When prosecutors did investigate, their efforts were undermined by
delays, errors, and omissions. Searches and investigations were further hindered by structural problems such as overly narrow laws and the lack of critical tools like a national database of the disappeared.
The inept or altogether absent efforts of authorities to find people who are taken add to the suffering of victims’ families, for whom not knowing what happened to their loved ones is a source of perpetual anguish. Many relatives put aside everything else in their lives to search for the missing, a quest they feel they cannot abandon until they learn the truth. Making matters worse, victims’ families may lose access to basic social services and
benefits—such as healthcare and childcare—tied to the victim’s employment, forcing them to fight costly and emotionally-draining battles to restore the benefits.
The Mexican people are truly at the mercy of these cartels and their government.
COAHUILA STATE, Mexico — The federal government says 26,000 people have been reported missing across Mexico since 2006, and yet just two states have a local prosecutor's office dedicated to the investigation of such cases.
Even there, those who have disappeared are rarely found. Some have been caught up in the drug trade; others forcibly recruited to work for the gangs. Cases of mistaken identity are also common, and some are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Across the country, very few cases are properly investigated, and reports of the involvement of authorities are frequent.
The following is an excerptfrom Anabel Hernández's new book Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers
“My introduction to the life of Joaquín Guzmán Loera began at 6:30 in the morning of June 11, 2005. That is when I boarded a bus that would take me and photographer Ernesto Ramírez to Guadalupe y Calvo, a small, storm-prone municipality in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, deep in the “golden triangle” spanned by the towering Sierra Madre Occidental. It was the start of a five day voyage to the land of drug kingpins: Ismael El Mayo Zambada, Eduardo Quintero Payán, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, a.k.a. El Azul—and Joaquín El Chapo (Shorty) Guzmán, the man Forbes magazine has called “the biggest drug lord of all time” (and in their latest ranking, the fifty-fifth most powerful person in the world). I still have the notebook in which I recorded the journey. It was one that was to change forever my view of the drug trade, which is today the backbone of organized crime in Mexico.
Most of the road to Guadalupe y Calvo runs through a dreamlike landscape of serried pinewoods. The sky was that intense blue you can sense in a black-and-white photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo. At 10:50 in the morning we arrived at the town of Rio Verde, where they hang meat on the line like washed socks. Unfortunately it’s no longer just beef, but also the bodies of victims from the “war on drugs.”
The winding road began to climb as steeply as a big dipper. The driver was an old hand. He threw the bus round the bends entrusting our fates to Pope John Paul II, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and St. Juan Diego, whose pictures were stuck on the windscreen. At one stop a newspaper vendor called Federico Chávez got on. The youngster exchanged greetings with almost all of the passengers; we were the only outsiders. Before we left Mexico City, Iván Noé Licón, a Chihuahua education official, had warned me on the phone to be discreet about our identity. “People are cagey with strangers, because they think they’re police,” he told me. So when some of the travelers took Ernesto for a priest, we didn’t say anything. It seems teachers and priests are the only outsiders who are greeted without suspicion in those parts.
After eight hours, we finally reached our destination: the municipal capital of Guadalupe y Calvo. From there we planned to tour the surrounding villages—although that is a manner of speaking, because on the bumpy tracks that link these hamlets it takes five or six hours to get anywhere. We met up with Chava, a local official who would be our guide and friend in this world we knew so little of. It was impossible not to be moved by the majestic beauty of the place, and the tragedy of its inhabitants. They were five unforgettable days.
As a journalist I had come to investigate the story of child exploitation in the area, where minors are put often to work by their parents on the poppy and marijuana harvests. These are kids who become criminals without even realizing it. Many, from the age of seven upwards, die of poisoning by the pesticides used on the plantations. Those who survive into adolescence are already carrying AK-47s, or “goat’s horns” as these weapons are popularly known.
We entered this mountain world along its narrow dirt tracks and cattle trails, learning of its customs, dreams, and legends, as well as its poverty. We visited remote places like Baborigame, Dolores, El Saucito de Araujo, and Mesa del Frijol, where more than 80 percent of the population grow drug crops. In these communities, long forgotten by federal or state social programs, you nonetheless see four-wheel-drive Cadillac Escalades, satellite dishes, and men with walkie-talkies and a pistol in their belt.
Here I met Father Martín, a Peruvian priest with a dark, glossy complexion, an extraordinary sense of humor and a great heart, who had chosen to stay in Guadalupe y Calvo rather than accept a transfer to the safety of El Paso, Texas. He carried out his pastoral work with matchless energy, even if his sermons against the wrong kind of seeds fell on deaf ears. Talking to him helped me to understand the human dimension of the problem, as opposed to the perspective of military and police operations.
People have been doing this for decades. They don’t know any other way of life, and no one has shown them an alternative. No doubt in these humid ravines you could grow guava, papaya, or other fruits, but the lack of decent roads makes it impossible to transport such produce. To make matters worse, residents say some places here, like Baborigame, didn’t get electricity until 2001. Many illegal plantations have been supported by the Mexican and US governments. But the authorities don’t understand that being nurtured here are not just drug crops, but future drug traffickers. Kids don’t want to be firemen or doctors when they grow up; they want to become drug barons. That’s the only measure of success they know.
Stories abound of El Chapo roaming the streets of Guadalupe y Calvo, flanked by bodyguards dressed in black. People have embraced the myth of the generous godfather figure, the sponsor of baptisms, first communions, and weddings.
I climbed to the top of Mohinora, in the south of the Tarahumara range. At 3,307 meters, it’s the highest peak in Chihuahua. Below, in season, you can see the green valley flooded with red poppies. Its beauty is enough to make you cry—and so are the consequences of this trade. I had gone to research a story about child labor, but I came back with much more: the knowledge of a way of life which for these people is as necessary as the blood that runs in their veins—and that now increasingly runs in the streets.
At the end of 2005, the lawyer Eduardo Sahagún called me at the Mexico City offices of La Revista, the magazine of El Universal, the newspaper where I was working. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in the story of a client of his, Luis Francisco Fernández Ruiz, the former assistant warden of the Puente Grande maximum security prison, in the state of Jalisco. Fernández wanted to talk to me about his case. He was being tried along with sixty-seven other public employees who had been working at Puente Grande’s Federal Center for Social Rehabilitation Number 2 on the night of January 19, 2001, the night El Chapo Guzmán went missing from the prison. They were all accused of taking bribes and facilitating El Chapo’s escape. Fernández had already spent nearly five years in jail, and he still hadn’t been sentenced. “The state prosecutor’s office has always refused an on-the-spot inspection and a reconstruction of the escape, to establish how El Chapo got away and who was responsible,” the lawyertoldme.All I’d heard about the affair were the Hollywoodesque stories circulating afterwards, of how the drug baron had fled in a laundry cart. This improbable version of events was repeated so often in the domestic and international media that it had become an unquestionable truth; the same thing happened with many other stories of Mexico’s drug trade.
I finally met Fernández in the visiting rooms of Mexico City’s Reclusorio Oriente detention center. It was a short encounter, during which he expounded his innocence. The former assistant warden of Puente Grande told me of his dealings with the drug baron, and gave me his impressions of the man: “He was introverted, with a serious, withdrawn manner, not at all overbearing or rude, and he was intelligent, very intelligent.” There was no admiration in Fernández’s words, but a certain respect for the drug trafficker, who was in his custody from 1999 until the day he was sprung from Puente Grande.
“After the alarm was raised following the escape, the Federal Police took control of the prison, we were all shut into the hall, and armed personnel in balaclavas moved in,” recalled Fernández. Two years later this fact would prove crucial.
Soon after I published my interview with Luis Fernández in La Revista, he won his appeal and was released. Today there is almost no one still behind bars for what the authorities call “El Chapo’s escape.” Even the warden of the maximum security prison, Leonardo Beltrán Santana, whose path I crossed a couple of times in the VIP dormitory of the Reclusorio Oriente, was freed in 2010.
In May 2006, at the Nikko Hotel in Mexico City, I met a DEA agent who confirmed my growing conviction that Joaquín Guzmán and the drug trade were essential to understanding a key aspect of corruption in Mexico, perhaps the most important aspect of all: the one that involves top government figures putting prices on the country’s millions of inhabitants, as if they were head of cattle.
According to this agent, DEA informers infiltrated into the organization of drug lord Ignacio Coronel Villarreal had told him that El Chapo Guzmán left Puente Grande penitentiary after paying a multimillion-dollar bribe to the family of President Vicente Fox, of the National Action Party (PAN). And that the deal included systematic protection by the federal government of him and his group, the all-powerful Pacific cartel. Fox is now a leading advocate for the legalization of not only the consumption, but also the production, distribution, and sale of every class of drug.
***
I read avidly the thousands of pages of evidence in the case of “El Chapo’s escape.” Through the dozens of statements given by cooks, laundry workers, inmates, detention officers, and prison police commanders that make up the proceedings of penal case 16/2001, I learned of Guzmán’s passion for painting landscapes, how much he missed his mother, his “romantic” side, his brutality as a rapist, his need for Viagra, his taste for candy and volleyball, but above all his infinite capacity to corrupt everyone and everything in his path. Similarly, hundreds of sheets of official documents allowed me to confirm that in 2001 El Chapo did not escape from Puente Grande in that famous laundry cart: instead, high-ranking officials took him out, disguised as a policeman.
I also obtained recently declassified CIA and DEA documents on the Iran-Contra affair—something nobody seems to remember anymore—which is what turned Mexican drug traffickers from humble marijuana and poppy farmers into sophisticated international dealers in cocaine and synthetic drugs. I retrieved files eliminated from the archives of the federal prosecutor’s office, referring to the businessmen who, in the early 1990s, sheltered in their hangars the planes of El Chapo, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Héctor El Güero Palma. Today, these eminent entrepreneurs are the owners of hotel chains, hospitals, and newspapers. I found a different account of the air crash that killed the former interior secretary, Juan Camilo Mouriño, on November 4, 2008, which suggests that the crash was not an accident but an act of revenge by drug barons for agreements not kept.
In similar fashion, I discovered the identity of the businessmen who appear as the owners of a company supposedly run by Ismael El Mayo Zambada, which operates out of a hangar in Mexico City International Airport and transports drugs and money, with both the knowledge and consent of the Communications and Transport Secretariat and the airport administration.
The story of how Joaquín Guzmán Loera became a great drug baron, the king of betrayal and bribery, and the boss of top Federal Police commanders, is intimately linked to a process of decay in Mexico where two factors are constant: corruption, and an unbridled ambition for money and power.
Semi-illiterate peasants like El Príncipe, Don Neto, El Azul, El Mayo, and El Chapo would not have got far without the collusion of businessmen, politicians, and policemen, and all those who exercise everyday power from behind a false halo of legality. We see their faces all the time, not in the mug shots of most wanted felons put out by the Attorney General’s Office, but in the front page stories, business sections, and society columns of the main papers. All these are the true godfathers of Narcoland, the true lords of the drug world.
Often the protection given to drug barons continues until they commit a major blunder, are ratted out by others anxious to take their place, or simply cease to be useful for business. Now there also exists the option of voluntary retirement, like that taken by Nacho Coronel or Edgar Valdez, La Barbie. There will always be substitute candidates for support to continue the criminal enterprise. Many have seen their time come in this way: Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Joaquín Guzmán Loera alone will quit when he feels like it, not when the authorities choose. Some say he is already preparing his exit.
The current war on drugs, launched by the government of Felipe Calderón, is just as fake as that undertaken by the administration of Vicente Fox. In both cases, the “strategy” has been limited to protecting the Sinaloa cartel. The continuity of such protection has been underwritten by the shady police chief and Calderón’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna, and his team of collaborators: the previously unpublished documents presented here are irrefutable proof of this. García Luna is the man who aimed to become, with Calderón’s support, the single head of all the country’s police forces. He has even stated, with complete impunity, that there is no option but to let El Chapo operate freely and “bring to heel” the other criminal organizations, since it would be easier for the government to negotiate with just one cartel, rather than five. The bloody results of war between opposing cartels we know only too well.
Currently, all the old rules governing relations between the drug barons and the centers of economic and political power have broken down. The drug traffickers impose their own law. The businessmen who launder their money are their partners, while local and federal officials are viewed as employees to be paid off in advance, for example by financing their political campaigns. The culture of terror encouraged by the federal government itself, as well as by the criminal gangs through their grotesque violence, produces a paralyzing fear at all levels of society. [...] They have tried to convince us that the drug barons and their cronies are immovable and untouchable. [But] as citizens or as journalists, we must never allow the state and the authorities to give up on their duty to provide security, and simply hand the country over to an outlaw network made up of drug traffickers, businessmen, and politicians, allowing them to impose on all Mexicans their intolerable law of “silver or lead.” Pay up or die.
Below are a few photos of an attack on a family (June, 2010), who was traveling on the Casas Grandes Highway (the interstate highway that connects the state of Chihuahua to the West coast of Mexico) by award winning photographer Javier Manzano
As Manzano pulled up to the scene both of the rear side windows of the vehicle had been shot in. Inside the car, a 3-year old girl was holding the hand of her fatally wounded mother, and standing outside the car, the girl’s 4-year old brother, stained with the blood of his parents looked toward the highway. The assailants took the children’s father. It took an hour for the ambulance to arrive and the mother died en route to the hospital. Soon after, the decapitated body and head of the children’s father was found 20 kilometers down the road.
4-year old boy stares off into the highway as soldiers stand guard next to the
vehicle where the boy and his family were driving a few minutes earlier.
3-year old girl holds the hand of her mother as they wait for the ambulance.
The mother died en-route to the hospital
The 4-year old boy and 3-year old girl look on as the ambulance takes their mother away.
The head of 32-year-old Mario Alberto Iglesias, the father to the two young children
and husband of Maria de Jesus was located on the 70km marker of the same highway in
which the initial attack was reported.
Smuggling and Trafficking Routes Into and Through Texas
At the end of 2012, the reported number of Mexican citizens violently murdered was estimated much higher than the mainstream media stated, the real death rate is between 120,000 - 130,000. However, in truth, the Mexican government doesn't really know, so it could be twice that number. To be sure, it's not less as governments, if anything, under report such statistics for the simple reason it does not reflect well.
“Mexican cartels continue to use gangs in Texas as they smuggle drugs, people, weapons, and cash across the border. [...]
Gangs’ Relationships with Mexican Cartels
(U) One of the most serious issues facing Texas is the fact that many gangs have developed relationships with Mexican cartels. Gangs working with the Mexican cartels are involved in a level of crime that affects the entire state. Their criminal activity is no longer just a problem for a specific city or region. In certain instances, these gangs are contracted to commit assassinations, kidnapping, and assaults in Texas and Mexico on behalf of the cartels.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 47,515 killed in the last 5 years alone from Mexican drug cartel violence, and they are expanding into U.S. cities at an alarming rate, yet, there is no alarm. Gosh, the Mexican drug cartels shot the White House, shattering one of its windowswith an AK47, leaving a nice little note telling President Obama, “Aquí está uno de los nuestros, no la suya necesitan.” That is, “Here’s one of ours, we don’t need yours,” yet, all the alarm bells toll for "so-called" terrorists clear across the world.
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Three beheadings in two different states and they happened here in the United States, not Mexico.
Former DEA supervisor Phil Jordan says all three beheadings have cartel written all over them. They happened in Arizona and Oklahoma in the past year.
A murder mystery is now unraveling on a stretch of North Reservation Road in Tucson, Ariz. County workers found a headless man lying on the side of the road Jan. 6. The man's hands and feet were reportedly missing, too.
"It would lead me to believe the message wanted to be sent. This is one of the ways they do it in Mexico, Colombia and other places," says Jordan.
Jordan says the cartels are getting bolder in carrying out their beheadings across the border. He says we only used to see these crimes in Mexico.
"They don't have any borders," says Jordan.
More than 600 miles from the border, a 19-year-old human trafficking victim was found beheaded in Oklahoma. Carina Saunders was stuffed into a bag and left in a grocery store parking lot.
"People know if they get on the wrong side of the fence, they'll be dealt with," says Jordan.
The police chief in the area says two men running the trafficking ring killed Saunders to send a message to the other victims. Jordan says the cartels' calling card is all over this case. Trafficking and smuggling are their top moneymakers. Revenge is the price of doing business.
"Definitely a cartel hit," says Jordan.
Investigators in Chandler, Ariz., say cartel operatives came from Mexico to kill 38-year-old Martin Alejandro Cota Monroy. His beheaded body was found in his apartment.
"One is too many; two is too many. Three should send an alarm," says Jordan.
He says investigators were too late to stop the killings three times in the last 12 months. Jordan says agents are trying to develop more informants to get to the cartels before they can commit the crimes. He says the cartels will only specifically target their victims and aren't interested in random beheadings.
Since the Nixon presidency, the U.S. government has poured almost a trillion dollars into the “war on drugs,” and what has it produced? More drugs. More inner-city violence, and the largest prison population in the world. Since Mexico's former President Felipe Calderon initiated a large scale "war on drugs" in 2006 funded by millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in U.S. aid, the death toll in Mexico is believed to have reached at least 60,000, possibly even $80,000, with more than 26,000 people missing. As the murder rate has dramatically increased, with Ciudad Juárez on the northern border recognised, not too long ago, pinpointed as the most dangerous city on the planet, the supply of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine from Mexico continues to increase.
So, without doing much research, it's easy to answer questions such as these when it comes to the "war on drugs," Although, to be sure, research will most definitely support the answers we can see right in front of our eyes: escalated race and class warfare--in effect, a new Jim Crow; mass incarceration of American citizens (1100% increase for drug law violations); unimaginable violence, especially in Mexico; more drugs than ever before; wealthier than wealthy banksters, politicians, CEOs, multinational corporations, etc.; unprecedented wealth and power, and the list goes on and on.
In other words:
Cui bono?Who benefits? Why, the capstone elite, of course. No, I'm not talking Illuminati, I'm just referring to those few special people who reside at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid.
Cui patitur?Who suffers? The people who reside at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid.
Another question you might want to ask yourself is, which kills more people? Marijuana? War on drugs? To my knowledge, pure marijuana has never killed anyone, while the war on drugs is responsible for millions of deaths. In fact, marijuana has numerous health benefits, but that's another story.
Let's take a look at Mexico for a clear cut example. Not only who gets what, that's fairly obvious; but are the results of this "war on drugs"-- that just so happens to coincide with neo-liberal "reform"--purely an accident, making the "war on drugs" a complete failure? Or, was/is the "war on drugs" really quite successful when you dig a little deeper and discover the true motive/agenda? Remember, Mexico's war on drugs is using the same model used in Columbia: Plan Columbia.
Warning: If you believe everything is a coincidence, and that the predator ruling class, no matter what political party they attach themselves, are mostly benevolent creatures, who are only looking out for our best interest, there is no need to read any further.
While Carlo Slim Helu, world's richest man according to Forbes, takes in $27 million per day--yes, that's per day--half of all Mexican citizens barely take in $2 per day. In fact, it's so bad in Mexico-- innocent people are kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered, then displayed for public consumption by viscous rivaling drug cartels on a daily basis--right now that many of its citizens have two choices: sneak into America, or work for what's turned Mexico into the the horrific war zone that it is: the drug cartels. The cartels have gained so much power, they could be considered a de facto and/or "parallel government." After all, in too many areas throughout Mexico, the heavily armed cartels are implementing their own brand of law and order.
As for defending oneself in this living hell, it's almost impossible because legally owning a gun is nearly impossible, and most of law enforcement/military/government are corrupt, or indistinguishable from the cartels, leaving Mexican citizens to live their daily lives like pop-up figures in a shooting gallery.
Now if Mexico were solely responsible for this unimaginable tragedy, one could argue, "it's their problem...let them deal with it," and tough immigration laws might make sense. However, not only are most of the drugs sold to Americans, and not only is America providing 90% of the estimated 15 million illegal assault weapons--an arsenal of highly sophisticated weaponry-- the U.S. participated in setting up the conditions that would facilitate the drug cartels' slaughter of Mexican citizens...from the very beginning--and conditions we continue to facilitate
While Mexico most certainly took part, the Clinton administration, and other western imperial powers pushed NAFTA, which accelerated the neo-liberal "reforms" widening the already huge wealth gap in Mexico, pauperizing the working class, and pushing the already poverty-stricken Mexicans into even deeper poverty. Of course, this ensured that the drug cartels would have a vast population from which to recruit foot soldiers
Moreover, Clinton refused to allow the subject of narco-trafficking, in relation to NAFTA, into public debate, even though, for example, the DEA, voiced its concerns that by improving infrastructure (road/rail system, removal of tariffs for goods going northwards), for the increased trade from Mexico into the U.S. would make it that much easier for drug traffickers.
Clinton can't say he didn't know of the consequences NAFTA would create for the Mexican people because he had already created and implemented Operation Gatekeeper, aimed at halting illegal immigration at the United States–Mexico border. He knew NAFTA would not only impoverish Mexicans, but it could be said the U.S. government was well aware of the war-zone it would create. In fact, it could be said that is exactly what they wanted.
Crazy? Not so much. There is no doubt that preparing Mexico and laying the foundation for NAFTA were in the works a long time ago. In the 1980s, as Mexico was coerced to implement a more neo-liberal approach toward politics and government, abandoning the social arena, and creating, more or less, a social vacuum that the cartels were/are more than happy to fill, that is, along with the brutal violence.
“From 1980 to 1991, Mexico received thirteen structural adjustment loans from the World Bank, more than any other country. It also signed six agreements with the IMF, all of which brought increased pressure to liberalize trade and investment.”-- Tom Barry, Zapata’s Revenge.
NAFTA reshaped Mexico's land ownership laws, slashed tarrifs on U.S. imports, and allowed subsidized U.S. corn to flood the country, devastating Mexico's agricultural sector. Ironically, lured by the promise of work, border towns like Ciudad Juarez, now murder capital of the world, attracted many of the Mexicans who could no longer find work after NAFTA was implemented. The factories located there that provided cheap labor (equivalent of approximately $5/day) to foreign manufacturers offered employment, albeit, at slave wages.
The violence the drug cartels and the Mexican government have created is a bonus as it controls workers and displaces communities from territories of interest, that is, with valuable resources, to transnational corporate expansion. Corporatized conflict or disaster capitalism, where people are the collateral damage to keep capital moving through the feudal system.
"This notion of “security” calls up the Colombia model: paramilitarization in the service of capital. This model includes the formation of paramilitary death squads, the displacement of civilian populations, and an increase in violence. In the commercial sector, it is workers, small businesses and a sector of the local elite who are hit hardest by drug war policies.
Consider the links between the drug war and struggles around areas with natural resources:
• Residents of Ciudad Mier, a small community in Tamaulipas, left en masse because of paramilitary violence. The town sits on top of Mexico’s largest gas field, as does a large portion of the violence-ridden state.
• In the Juárez Valley, considered the most dangerous place in Mexico, killings and threats have forced many to leave, just as a new border crossing between the U.S. and Mexico is being constructed.
• In Santa Maria Ostula, a small Indigenous Nahuatl community in coastal Mexico, at least 28 people have been killed (and four others disappeared) by paramilitary and state violence since 2009. Their territory is in a mineral rich and strategically located area.
• In the Sierra Madre mountain range in northern Mexico, Canadian mining companies operate in areas where even government officials fear to enter because of the presence of armed narcotraffickers.
• In Petén, Guatemala, government officials militarized the area and declared a state of emergency because of the presence of Zetas that lasted eight months, ending in early 2012. Recent announcements indicate that a new oil rush is taking place in the same region.
The "war on drugs" is not about drugs; rather, it's a smokescreen. It "may be better understood as being about increased social and territorial control over lands and people, in the interest of capitalist expansion."
“In this context, the current offensive follows the neo-liberal manual on indigenous territories. It is about sowing terror with a baseline of murders and disappearances until families abandon their lands…”--columnist and indigenous rights activist Gloria Munoz Ramirez
An estimated 70,000 people have died in drug related violence since former Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on the country’s drug cartels in 2006. Up until recently, the violence seems to be contained in Mexico, but that may be changing according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office to Congress, entitled "Southwest Border Security,." The report claims that it's virtually impossible to get valid numbers on stateside drug war violence and crime.
"FBI officials cautioned that drug cartel related crimes, such as kidnappings and home invasions, are highly underreported and are not captured in national crime statistics.
For example, law enforcement officials with whom we spoke stated that individuals who may have been assaulted or robbed in the course of drug trafficking and other illicit activities are hesitant to report their involvement to the police
"Law enforcement agencies have few efforts to track spillover crime. No common federal government definition of such crime exists, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ) components, including those with a definition, either do not collect data to track spillover crime, or do not maintain such data that can be readily retrieved and analyzed.
Officials from the San Diego office of the California Highway Patrol stated that in 2012 their field office began tracking how often they respond to calls from CBP’s Office of Field Operations to investigate incidents at the port of entry.
However, the officials noted that the data could not be a measure for spillover crime because the incident may not always result in a crime or an arrest and may not be related to cartel activity or involve Mexican nationals.
The US shares nearly 2,000 miles of border with Mexico, a country that has witnessed over 100,000 drug-related murders in the last six years alone. The "war on drugs" continues to fuel this violence, and it is America's silence on the matter that allows cartel activity to cross the border into at least 1,300 of our cities. To be sure, drug cartels are now a dangerous presence on the U.S. side of the border.
Despite our political leaders constant reminders of the dangers lurking around every corner from terrorists in countries--Iran, China, Pakistan-- half a world away, they never mention the very real danger that is literally in our own backyard. American citizens--especially in rural areas-- along the border from California to Texas are experiencing a slow but steady rise in drug-related violence and intimidation.
The obvious answer is to legalize drugs and de-fund the cartels, thereby reducing their enormous power, however, that will never happen, because it will also de-fund our ruling class.
The 2008 global financial collapse exposed our parasitic financial "casino" system that hugely profits off the backs of we, the people for the exclusive benefit of global elite/international banksters. However, many still do not realize the criminal nature of the entire financial system. People fail to realize that the grisly drug- and gang-related violence in Mexico responsible for the death of at least 50,-60,000 Mexicans is allowed to occur simply because it lines the already lined pockets of the wealthiest people in the world. People fail to realize that being poor, or unemployed, is a crime in and of itself. The recent resurgence of debtor's prison (legal in one-third states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin) for the victimsof these elitist perpetrators, who, despite their heinously criminal behavior, continue to enjoy record breaking profits of their crimes, gives full expression to the Orwellian society we now inhabit.
This ACLU report presents the results of a yearlong investigation into modern-day "debtors' prisons," and shows that poor defendants are being jailed at increasingly alarming rates for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford. The report details how across the country, in the face of mounting budget deficits, states are more aggressively going after poor people who have already served their criminal sentences. These modern-day debtors' prisons impose devastating human costs, waste taxpayer money and resources, undermine our criminal justice system, are racially skewed, and create a two-tiered system of justice.
So, between theLIBOR scandal and the HSBC scandal, the political class has its hands full keeping Pandora's box from fully opening to reveal its, uglier than anyone can possibly imagine, contents. They do this by transforming Pandora's box into an easily resolved "problem" that occurs in a sealed vacuum, of course, never revealing that this "problem" is deeply entrenched in the system.
In the case of laundering billions in drug cartel money by HSBC, the HSBC compliance boss quits during US Senate subcommittee. Part two, here. Problem resolved, or so the American public believes. In other words, the ruling class exposes only a very small tip of a giant systemic iceberg, making you believe that the problem is being resolved. Meanwhile, the money laundering of billions, perhaps, even trillions, continues without missing a beat.
In the book, World Banking World Fraud: Using Your Identity, author and former employee of HSBC, John Cruz exposes how major banks launder large sums of money through their bank and avoid detection. He learned of massive fraud and money laundering at the highest levels.
Read more...
The average income of Mexican households fell by 12.3% between 2008 and 2010, the government’s National Statistics and Geography Institute (INEGI) reported on July 15. The richest households generally lost the most in percentages, but poorer households suffered more because their income was already so low, according to the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure, which the INEGI conducts every two years. The decline in income reflects a 6.1% contraction of the Mexican economy in 2009 in the midst of a world economic crisis that started in the US; the Mexican economy recovered partially in 2010 with a 5.4% expansion. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/16/11)
The long-term economic situation is no better, according to José Luis Calva Téllez, a member of the Economic Investigations Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since the government began applying neoliberal economic policies in 1982, the Mexican economy has grown at an average rate of 2.1% a year, which is the worst economic performance in Latin America, Calva says. The minimum wage, the standard on which other wages are based, has lost 71.3% of its purchasing power over the same period; even the comparatively well-paid unionized workers have seen the purchasing power of their salaries fall by 50%. The main source of new job growth in Mexico, according to Calva, is narcotrafficking, when he says has created 600,000 jobs.
The DC9 (N900SA), alert readers will recall, had been tricked out to impersonate a plane from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.
An official-looking Seal beside the door, with an image of a U.S. Federal Eagle in the center, read: SKYWAY AIRCRAFT. PROTECTION OF AMERICA'S SKIES."
It was so close to being identical to the seal of Homeland Security that even eagle-eyed planespotters around the country were fooled. And there was nary a peep from the U.S. Coast Guard (a DHW Agency), whose major Caribbean Basin Interdiction Facility was located right next door.
"We never could figure out how they could get away with that," one SkyWay employee told us. "They had the same seal on the fleet of Hummers, and local cops in Tampa pulled them over and made them take it off. But not the Coast Guard. Never."
Yet the DC9 sat on the tarmac at Clearwater-St. Petersburg International Airport less than one hundred yards from the U.S. Coast Guard’s major Caribbean air station, with no questions asked or interference from the Coast Guard.
According to Daniel Hopsicker, author of Barry and 'the Boys' : The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History, and Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, in May 2006, a DC-9 landed in the Yucatan, from St. Petersburg, carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, and the company that owned the plane used an address that was the hangar, Huffman Aviation, which is the flight school that taught Mohammad Atta, and many of the other 9/11 hijackers to fly. Eighteen months later, Gulfstream II was busted with four tons. In and of itself, this may not mean much; however, if you consider the long and circuitous pathway that led up to this point, and that the number of connections would make a switchboard short-circuit, it very well may expose that there is much more to the 9/11 story than we're led to believe.
Three weeks after Mohammad Atta arrived to attend Huffman Aviation, the owner of the flight school was busted when the DEA found 43 pounds of heroin in his Lear jet on the runway of Orlando executive airport, and this begins a it gets even more suspicious.
After 9/11, a company called Britannia Aviation, which was housed inside the same hangar, was awarded a five-year major government contract to run an airport facility in Lynchburg, Virginia, over an established company at the Lynchburg airport that was worth $4 million and had 50 people working for it. The people who ran Britannia Aviation had a bank account with less than $500, and didn't even have an FAA license required to run the facility.
The men without an FAA license told the Lynchburg City Council that they did have the credentials. They had a major contract with Dietrich Reinhardt's CIA proprietary airline, Caribe Air, whose past included having all its aircraft seized at Mena, Arkansas after government prosecutors accused the company of using its planes to transport cocaine worth billions of dollars into the U.S. Moreover, Reinhardt had also operated the now-defunct St. Lucia Airways, referred to as a CIA proprietary company in a Senate intelligence committee report whose planes are linked to the delivery of Hawk and TOW missiles to Tehran, Iran in 1985 and 1986 as part of the covert arms-for-hostages deal between the United States and Iran.
Some of Atta’s German associates in Florida were the sons and daughters of prominent German industrialists, and the connections exposed suggest a strong German link to the hijacker milieu in Florida.
There are far too many intersecting names, places, dates and times to record here; however, if you want to know more, I suggest you listen to Daniel Hopsicker, himself. Very interesting interviews.
Read more...
35,000 people, including judges, police officers, government officials, and innocent men, women and children have been brutally murdered by warring drug-trafficking cartels in Mexico, a country that is literally a stone's throw away from the U.S. border. In fact, one former DEA officer said: 'I think they make al Qaeda look tame in terms of what they do.' Yet, despite close proximity, the horrific brutality, and the huge humanitarian issue presented, we hear next to nothing from the media, Homeland Security, nor, President Obama. Moreover, Hilary Clinton has not even designated these brutal cartels, Foreign Terrorist Organizations. If she did, U.S. banks would be required to block their assets. Furthermore, cartel members could not enter the U.S. nor, retain material support or resources from Americans. So, what's the holdup?
Well, of course, it's Americans’ insatiable appetite for illegal drugs that is fueling the Mexican "terrorists". It has nothing to do with the billions of dollars that our government the banksters earn from providing laundering services for Mexico's murderous drug gangs.
Nevertheless, Rep. Michael McCaul"introduced legislation [H.R.1270]on Wednesday that would direct Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to designate Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) – a designation that would put them on the same list as al Qaeda, the Taliban and Hezbollah."
Obviously, Rep. McCaul doesn't understand the "pursuit of profit at all costs" mentality of the inside-the-beltway crowd.
Hello? United States? Terror is here. Real terror, that is. The kind that kidnaps, tortures and kills we, the people. Hello?
Where is the "War on Terror" when you really need it? For that matter, where is the "War on Drugs"? Oh, that's right, we're too busy fighting wars over 10,000 miles away; arresting phony underwear/shoe bombers, terminal cancer victims, harmless tokers, elderly Glaucoma patients, and worrying ourselves sick of illegal immigrants (as if tougher immigration laws will stop drug cartels) to deal with the viscous terror that's right next door. Not to mention, eliminating those nasty drug cartels might eat into the politically favored class profits.
Yet, high schools and middle schools across South Texas are becoming fertile ground for drug cartels looking to recruit young smugglers.
The federal government denied him the medication he needed to live and thrive.
* In 1996 Peter was diagnosed with cancer and AIDS
* The medications he needed to treat these diseases caused extreme vomiting, and he could not keep them down long enough for them to work
* That same year, Proposition 215 legalized medical marijuana in California
* Under the recommendation of four physicians, Peter started using marijuana.
* The marijuana controlled his nausea, restored his appetite, and allowed his medications to work
Marijuana saved Peter's life, for the moment. This led him to fund research into medical marijuana and to start a business supplying it to buyer's cooperatives. The DEA took notice, raided and trashed his home, and even confiscated his computer, which contained the manuscript of his latest book.
Peter was charged with being a "drug kingpin!" And then, he was hamstrung, legally. The federal judge in the case took away his defense, barring any mention of . . .
* California's medical marijuana law
* his terminal illness
* how medical marijuana allowed him to keep down his medication and prolong his life
While the legal process dragged on, the government prevented Peter from using the marijuana that controlled his nausea. Peter was required to pass drug tests. He complied, even though his life was at risk, because . . .
* Peter's mother and brother had to put up their homes as collateral to post his bail
* If he failed the test, their homes would have been seized by the government
Peter's health deteriorated until he died at the age of 50. The vomiting had taken a tremendous toll on his alimentary canal, as well as his heart, and even his teeth. Despite the suffering, he never lost his sense of humor. And the reason I most admired him was that he felt sympathy for his tormentors, rather than rage.
Marijuana saved Peter's life, but the War on Drugs destroyed it.
Peter's most noted book was "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do." It promoted the idea that each person can do whatever they please with their own bodies and property, so long as they don't interfere with the right of others to do the same.
"Follow the money", "Deep Throat" tells Woodward in the film, "All the President's Men", or as former British newspaper journalist, Simon Jenkins, once said, "Follow the dirt and it leads to money. Follow the money and it leads to power. This maxim has rarely let me down."
Well, follow the money on the "War on Drugs" and it will expose a frightening truth: the drug cartels depend on a network of guardian angels and backers who come from where else: the ruling elites.
Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing (HUD) under the Bush Administration, and CEO of Solari, told Mel Fabregas from the Veritas show in a great interview in 2009 that one 14-year old kid in the projects can generate up to $10 million for the capital markets. How? Here's the example she used:
Let's say this 14-year old from the projects nets $100,000 in drug sales. That money must be laundered somewhere, right? Yes. In this case, it's laundered through a fast food franchise that’s traded on the stock market at $15/share. That transforms the $100,000 to $1.5 million in stock market value. Moreover, if that money is leveraged with debt and derivatives that amount can increase up to as much as $10 million. In other words, one 14-year old kid from the projects can generate up to $10 million in the capital markets for the privileged class.
In addition, that kid, if he avoids being shot and killed in the next couple of years has the potential to make even more money for the capital markets. How? More than likely, he will face incarceration, where he's not only out of the way, (after he gets too smart for his own good); he will generate even more money for the prison industrial complex. Why? There is a $25,000 gain for each person in prison.
So, recycling these kids in and out of prison serves three purposes: Number one, the profits speak for themselves; number two, it keeps this segment of the population “dumb” and desperate, and number three, it deprives small business of the upcoming work-force, or the human capital, necessary to thrive; therefore making it easier for corporate take-over.
Fitts also explained, and, even more importantly, proved we the people's complicity, which eventually became “Narco dollars for beginners” how organized crime influences business and government.
She addressed a group of members of the Spiritual Frontiers Foundation International, who were having a conference of how to help our society evolve spiritually, and she began by telling them that someone from the Department of Justice told a reporter she knows that the US banking and financial system launders $500 billion to a trillion dollars a year in illegal money, which includes narcotics trafficking, financial fraud and tax evasion
She then asked the audience, "What would happen if America stopped being the global leader and stopped laundering $500 billion to a trillion dollars a year in illegal money?
They responded that the stock market would go down because that money would go to other markets around the world, and that we would have trouble financing the government deficit, and our taxes would go up and/or our government checks would stop.
Fitts replied, "Okay, imagine a big red button up here on the lectern. If you push this button, you can stop all hard narcotics trafficking in your neighborhood, your city, town, county, state and your country tomorrow. Who'll push the button?"
Out of 100 people dedicated to evolving our society spiritually, only one would push the button.
She asked the other 99 why they wouldn’t push the button.
They responded: "We don't want our mutual funds to go down. We don't want our government checks to stop, nor do we want our taxes to go up."
Fitts has asked that question to audiences all over the US, and the only time 80% of the audience responded that they would push the red button occurred in TN, in 2008. Why is 80% majority so important? The historical rule of thumb states that in order to shift policy, an 80% consensus is required.
Innocent victims of bloody drug cartel turf wars is normal every day news in Mexico. Spanning 72 hours, starting last Thursday, 53 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez
In the first 40 days of 2011, Juarez is averaging eight homicides per day, Sandoval said. Also, in February, at least 24 women have been killed in 20 days.
In addition, last Friday, 13 people were killed in Acapulco, four of whom, authorities believe, were alive and tortured before they were dropped from a bridge. The worst torture was of a man who was decapitated; scalped with his face skinned. This spate of attacks on taxis in the Mexican resort city of Acapulco occurred hours before the Mexican Open tennis tournament was scheduled to start. Acapulco has been the scene of , and taxi drivers have often been targeted for extortion or recruited by the gangs to act as lookouts or transport drugs.
Two years ago, Marisela Escobedo's daugher was killed in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Her daughter's boyfriend confessed to the crime, but a court exonerated him earlier this year. When a second trial convicted the boyfriend, Sergio Barraza, of murder and sentenced him to 50 years in prison, he had already fled and gone into hiding.
Escobedo had actively protested the decision ever since, rather ominously stating that only death would stop her from protesting the impunity with which criminals operate in Mexico, and especially Chihuahua -- the home state of deadly Ciudad Juarez.
Now, Marisela Escobedo's protests have been silenced.
She was shot and killed by an assassin on Thursday, and the episode was caught on tape.
...12,456 people had been registered killed in drug-related violence so far this year, compared to 9,600 in 2009, bringing the total to 30,196 since President Calderon took office in December 2006.
(Left) People clean a blood stained patio at a home in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Saturday Oct. 23, 2010. At least 13 young people were shot dead and 15 wounded in an attack on this house late Friday during a 15-year-old boy's birthday party. (AP Photo/Raymundo Ruiz)
Gunmen stormed a 15-year old's birthday party, last Saturday, October 23, killing 13 people, the youngest, only 9-years old, wounding 20 more, in the second "drug cartel" massacre at a party this month, in Ciudad Juarez 2-days later, in Tijuana, 13 people were lined up and executed inside a drug rehabilitation clinic by gunmen who stormed the building. The next day, 15 people at a Mexican car wash.
Ciudad Juarez is crippled by escalating warring drug cartels, as they battle security forces and each other over smuggling routes into the United States.
The money trail has already lead to Citibank, Wachovia, Bank of America, etc. The banks play a critical role to the continuing success of the cartels as they allow the drug trade to flourish by providing essential financing.
Alternatively, the banks could serve as part of the solution - when hell freezes over, maybe, for only they have the power to deal a crippling blow to the cartels.
The egregious hypocrisy prevalent in the current relationships between the cartels, the global political and economic powers who profit immensely from this huge industry, facilitated by the "War on Drugs" is almost too much to comprehend, but comprehend we must if we want the slaughter to stop.
The drug trade is amongst the most, if not thee most, lucrative of all industries in the world, and has continued to escalate through decades of failing to account for this massive revenue.
The severity revolution in criminal justice, that began when former President Nixon launched the war on drugs, that escalated during the Reagan years, producing some of the "most prohibitive drug control laws ever" has very little to do with "law and order" and everything to do with profit. If you don't believe me, read the following:
We the people have spent well over $1 trillion (much more if you consider the government spending for all of the people directly and indirectly effected), yet the availability of drugs is similar to what it was when Nixon started this "war on drugs", and Reagan took it to a new level.
The conservatives, in their "tough on crime" law and order agenda, scapegoated Marijuana, making it their "symbol of the weakness and permissiveness of a liberal society." They cultivated a culture of fear over growing crime and the evils of marijuana amongst other drugs which gave rise to hundreds of new state, federal, and local laws, which, aside from creating a prison industrial complex, vastly expanded the government's power to seize and forfeit property. Because, during the 1980s, civil assets forfeiture was extended to drug trafficking and possession, and a host of other crimes, through the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, and the Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and many other such laws. In other words, the "war on drugs" enabled the Supreme Court to gradually erode our civil liberties. In fact, Newt Gingrich even introduced "legislation demanding either a life sentence or the death penalty for anyone caught bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into the United States."*
No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. 6,700 subpoenas later, Wachovia finally:
...admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.
However, despite the fact that Wachovia was caught red-handed in the largest anti-money laundering law in U.S. history, Wachovia (acquired by Wells Fargo in 2008) entered into a settlement with federal prosecutors. In other words, they got away with mass murder...literally. This should come as no surprise as no U.S. bank has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act — or any other federal law for that matter.
So, as our "justice" system boldly roars at, imprisons, and sometimes slaughters non-violent citizens, it conveniently turns a blind eye to those wealthy powerful elites who facilitate the heinous drug cartel killings and beheadings and burnings that, so far, claimed at least 28,000 lives, making Juárez valley, a Texas border town, one of the deadliest places on the planet. Yet marijuana/drugs remain illegal.
Marijuana, alone, is a $113 billion dollar business in the U.S. That's $113 billion unaccounted for...or is it? Why would so much revenue, that is protected by brutal crime, specifically the torturing, murdering and dismembering of countless numbers of innocent people, be allowed to remain in the hands of such violent criminals if conservatives are so concerned about law and order and fiscal responsibility and saving our economy from disaster?
Could it be that governments and their drug prohibition policies are not intended to eliminate illegal drug use/commerce? Could it be that government officials, politicians, banksters and the corporate elite profit off the drug wars just as much, if not more than the evil cartels?
The more enforcement there is, the higher the street prices, whereas the less enforcement, the lower the prices. The "war on drugs" has nothing to do with eliminating drug use and everything to do with profit, "because most of the profits do NOT come from the sale of drugs but from the laundering of the billions of dollars by banks and other financial institutions to turn the dirty money into legal capital".**
Generic drugs make up 70% of all prescriptions, and according to House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman, "in the last decade alone, generic drugs have saved consumers, businesses and state and federal governments $734 billion." Despite that savings, the cost of drugs continues to escalate. In large part this is due to what is regarded as the future of health care: biotechnology drugs, or "biologics".
Simply put, biologics are protein based drugs made from living organisms - hamster ovaries, mare's urine, pig intestines, blood - grown inside living cells, as opposed to chemicals, normally showing better efficacy and safety than conventional drugs. Used to treat everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis to psoriasis, biologics currently make up about 20% of the pharmaceutical market - predicted to make up half the market by 2015 - and are the fastest-growing class of medicines, with more than $40 billion in annual sales in the United States.
However, the FDA has no authority to approve lower-cost, generic versions, biosimilars or “follow-on biologics” (“FOBs”) so, these drugs very rarely face competition from generic copies. FOBs (generic form of biologics) could save patients, insurers and our government anywhere from $67 billion to $108 billion during the first decade, and between $236 billion to $378 billion over the next two decades according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
The contentious issue here is the length of time that brand names can hold a monopoly before the FDA can approve the entry of generic competitors. Competition from generic drugs has substantially reduced prescription drug prices and overall prescription drug expenditures, increased access to therapeutic drugs for more Americans, and hastened the pace of innovation.
The provision in proposed health care legislation would allow pharmaceutical companies to extend monopolies to 12-years exclusivity once the product is licensed by the FDA. Even after 12 years, this legislation would allow a pharmaceutical company to extend market protection for its biologic by making minor modifications to the drug to effect dosing, for example.
Generic brand medications only make up for 17 percent of all profits, and generic prescription companies are more focused on the hit that consumers will take financially if longer terms of exclusivity are given to brand-names and biologics. Brand names and biologics, however, are more focused on their profits.
So, why do biologics need a 12-year instead of a 5-year monopoly?
The answer is, of course, profit, and not just a little profit...a lot of profit. According to the pharmaceutical trade association, the average research and development costs are approximately the same for biologics as they are for conventional drugs. Not only that, generics face higher than normal barriers to entering the market. The FTC recently released a report entitled, “Follow-on Biologic Drug Competition” which addressed questions that have arisen about whether the price of biologics might be reduced by competition if there were a statutory process to encourage biosimilars or FOBs to enter and compete with pioneer (brand name) biologics once a pioneer drug’s patents have expired. The FTC did not recommend biologics any years of exclusivity protection.
Based on these findings, the Report concludes that patent protection and market-based pricing will promote competition by FOBs, as well as spur biologic innovation. It states that legislation to put a process in place for the abbreviated FDA approval of FOBs is likely to be an efficient way to bring FOBs to market, because of the time and cost savings it would provide.
In addition, the Report states that the 12- to 14-year regulatory exclusivity period is too long to promote innovation by these firms, particularly since they likely will retain substantial market share after FOB entry. The Report concludes that special procedures to resolve patent issues between pioneer and FOB manufacturers before FDA approval, which are not needed,
could undermine patent incentives and harm consumers. Finally, the Report states that FOB manufacturers are unlikely to need additional incentives – such as a 180-day marketing exclusivity period – to develop interchangeable FOB products.
See How Pay-for-Delay Settlements Make Consumers and the Federal Government Pay More for Much Needed Drugs: Hearing Before the H. Subcomm. on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, Comm. on Energy and Commerce.
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Does anyone still believe that marijuana prohibition is working — or that all of the people currently behind bars deserve to be there? Have the hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to educating, persuading, pleading and frightening us away from drugs done the job?
After more than 70 years of criminal prohibition, 41% of the American population report having used marijuana in their lifetime.
Keep in mind that the "federal government's annual drug use survey uses fuzzy math to get their results"
"Conducted by the Federal Government since 1971, the survey collects data by administering questionnaires to a representative sample of the population through face-to-face interviews at their places of residence."
How many chronic and heavy drug users have a consistent residence? That is, if they have any residence at all. It's highly unlikely that SAMHSA's pollsters will reach these people. Not to mention, that most of the people who do use drugs, that they do catch at home, will not truthfully admit to a federal employee that they engage in an activity that could land them in prison for years.
For too long, advocates of prohibition have framed their arguments on the false assumption that the continued enforcement of said laws “protects our children.” As the numbers above illustrate, this premise is nonsense. In fact, just the opposite is true.
The government’s war on cannabis and cannabis consumers endangers the health and safety of our children. It enables young people to have unregulated access to marijuana — easier access than they presently have to alcohol. It enables young people to interact and befriend pushers of other illegal, more dangerous drugs. It compels young people to dismiss the educational messages they receive pertaining to the potential health risks posed by the use of “hard drugs” and prescription pharmaceuticals, because kids say, “If they lied to me about pot, why wouldn’t they be lying to me about everything else, too?”
Most importantly, the criminal laws are far more likely to result in having our children arrested, placed behind bars, and stigmatized with a lifelong criminal record than they are likely to in any way discourage them to try pot.
Table of types of illicit drug use in a lifetime for 2007/2008
Harrison Narcotics Act - - 63rd US Congress 1914. Restricted the sale of heroin and was quickly used to restrict the sale of cocaine.
Marijuana Tax Act - - 75th US Congress April 14, 1937, signed August 2, 1937 Attempted to tax marijuana into oblivion Marijuana had not been shown to be dangerous, but the perception that it might be a "gateway drug" for heroin users--and its alleged popularity among Mexican-American immigrants--made it an easy target.
The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act - 91st US Congress October 27, 1970. The federal government took a more active role in drug enforcement and drug abuse prevention. Nixon, who called drug abuse "public enemy number one" in a 1971 speech.
Reagan-era drug policy legislation:
Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign becomes a centerpiece of the Reagan administration's anti-drug campaign. The movement focuses on white, middle class children and is funded by corporate and private donations.
By portraying drugs as a threat to white middle-class children, the administration was able to pursue more aggressive federal antidrug legislation.
Greater emphasis was put on military and criminal punishments rather than treatment solutions. Mandatory minimum sentencing were implemented and a competition between politicians to see who could be "toughest" on crime and drugs escalated to the point where the incarceration rate started to spiral out of control until today when the rate is far beyond any previous time in history
More prisoners today are serving life terms than ever before — 140,610 out of 2.3 million inmates being held in jails and prisons across the country — under tough mandatory minimum-sentencing laws and the declining use of parole for eligible convicts
The passage of the 1986 crime bill, notable for the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences also created the federal Sentencing Commission and the current system of federal sentencing guidelines, which did away with parole in the federal system, ensuring that prisoners would serve at least 85% of their sentences. And it included asset forfeiture.
Passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which established a federal death penalty for "drug kingpins." Reagan signed that bill in his wife's honor.
"Reagan just swept the country along with him. It was that the country was in a state of hysteria, Democrats and Republicans alike. He tapped into this hysteria and drove it to incredible heights. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon. We forget the extent to which everyone was into this. There was a phrase both parties used, 'no one to the right of me on the drug issue
...in the drug policy arena, he was just horrible. If you want a taste of the hysteria and the fear, read my book. You had kids turning in their mothers for smoking pot and people like Joyce Nalepka saying that was the right thing to do. You had Reagan pushing to get rid of Posse Comitatus so he could use the armed forces in the drug war. He was for freedom, but like so many people, not when it came to drugs. The Reagan era spawned all sorts of nasty innovations, and while not all of them came from the White House, they were all part of that same intrusive spirit. We are still suffering from that to this day," Arnold Trebach, author of "The Great American Drug War" and a pioneer in American drug reform and founder of the Drug Policy Foundation in 1988.
