Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
(Download report in Spanish or English as PDF at http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/Report -- the whole thing is just 24 pages!)
Executive Summary
The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.
Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of
drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.
Our principles and recommendations can be summarized as follows:
End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.
Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens. This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalization and legal regulation that can accomplish these objectives and provide models for others.
Offer health and treatment services to those in need. Ensure that a variety of treatment modalities are available, including not just methadone and buprenorphine treatment but also the heroin-assisted treatment programs that have proven successful in many European countries and Canada. Implement syringe access and other harm reduction measures that have proven effective in reducing transmission of HIV and other blood-borne infections as well as fatal overdoses. Respect the human rights of people who use drugs. Abolish abusive practices carried out in the name of treatment – such as forced detention, forced labor, and physical or psychological abuse – that contravene human rights standards and norms or that remove the right to self-determination.
Apply much the same principles and policies stated above to people involved in the lower ends of illegal drug markets, such as farmers, couriers and petty sellers. Many are themselves victims of violence and intimidation or are drug dependent. Arresting and incarcerating tens of millions of these people in recent decades has filled prisons and destroyed lives and families without reducing the availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organizations. There appears to be almost no limit to the number of people willing to engage in such activities to better their lives, provide for their families, or otherwise escape poverty. Drug control resources are better directed elsewhere.
Invest in activities that can both prevent young people from taking drugs in the first place and also prevent those who do use drugs from developing more serious problems. Eschew simplistic ‘just say no’ messages and ‘zero tolerance’ policies in favor of educational efforts grounded in credible information and prevention programs that focus on social skills and peer influences. The most successful prevention efforts may be those targeted at specific at-risk groups.
Focus repressive actions on violent criminal organizations, but do so in ways that undermine their power and reach while prioritizing the reduction of violence and intimidation. Law enforcement efforts should focus not on reducing drug markets per se but rather on reducing their harms to individuals, communities and national security.
Begin the transformation of the global drug prohibition regime. Replace drug policies and strategies driven by ideology and political convenience with fiscally responsible policies and strategies grounded in science, health, security and human rights – and adopt appropriate criteria for their evaluation. Review the scheduling of drugs that has resulted in obvious anomalies like the flawed categorization of cannabis, coca leaf and MDMA. Ensure that the international conventions are interpreted and/or revised to accommodate robust experimentation with harm reduction, decriminalization and legal regulatory policies.
Break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now.
INTRODUCTION
[I think the chart should be readable without formatting.]
UNITED NATIONS ESTIMATES OF ANNUAL DRUG CONSUMPTION, 1998 TO 2008
1998
2008
% Increase
Opiates
12.9 million
17.35 million
+34.5%
Cocaine
13.4 million
17 million
+27%
Cannabis
147.4 million
160 million
8.5%
The global war on drugs has failed. When the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs came into being 50 years ago, and when President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs 40 years ago, policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in controlled drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug free world’. In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period. While accurate estimates of global consumption across the entire 50-year period are not available, an analysis of the last 10 years alone1,2,3,4 shows a large and growing market.
(See chart above.)
In spite of the increasing evidence that current policies are not achieving their objectives, most policymaking bodies at the national and international level have tended to avoid open scrutiny or debate on alternatives.
This lack of leadership on drug policy has prompted the establishment of our Commission, and leads us to our view that the time is now right for a serious, comprehensive and wide-ranging review of strategies to respond to the drug phenomenon. The starting point for this review is the recognition of the global drug problem as a set of interlinked health and social challenges to be managed, rather than a war to be won.
Commission members have agreed on four core principles that should guide national and international drug policies and strategies, and have made eleven recommendations for action.
1. Drug policies must be based on solid empirical and scientific evidence. The primary measure of success should be the reduction of harm to the health, security and welfare of individuals and society.
SNIP
2. Drug policies must be based on human rights and public health principles. We should end the stigmatization and marginalization of people who use certain drugs and those involved in the lower levels of cultivation, production and distribution, and treat people dependent on drugs as patients, not criminals.
SNIP
3. The development and implementation of drug policies should be a global shared responsibility,
but also needs to take into consideration diverse political, social and cultural realities. Policies should respect the rights and needs of people affected by production, trafficking and consumption, as explicitly acknowledged in the 1988 Convention on Drug Trafficking.
SNIP
The idea that the international drug control system is immutable, and that any amendment – however reasonable or slight – is a threat to the integrity of the entire system, is short-sighted. As with all multilateral agreements, the drug conventions need to be subject to constant review and modernization in light of changing and variable circumstances. Specifically, national governments must be enabled to exercise the freedom to experiment with responses more suited to their circumstances. This analysis and exchange of experiences is a crucial element of the process of learning about the relative effectiveness of different approaches, but the belief that we all need to have exactly the same laws, restrictions and programs has been an unhelpful restriction.
4. Drug policies must be pursued in a comprehensive manner, involving families, schools, public health specialists, development practitioners and civil society leaders, in partnership with law enforcement agencies and other relevant governmental bodies.
SNIP
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The implementation of the war on drugs has generated widespread negative consequences for societies in
producer, transit and consumer countries. These negative consequences were well summarized by the former Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, as falling into five broad categories:
1. The growth of a ‘huge criminal black market’, financed by the risk-escalated profits of supplying international demand for illicit drugs.
2. Extensive policy displacement, the result of using scarce resources to fund a vast law enforcement effort intended to address this criminal market.
3. Geographical displacement, often known as ‘the balloon effect’, whereby drug production shifts location to avoid the attentions of law enforcement.
4. Substance displacement, or the movement of consumers to new substances when their previous drug of choice becomes difficult to obtain, for instance through law enforcement pressure.
5. The perception and treatment of drug users, who are stigmatized, marginalized and excluded.
[Lots of SNIP!]
DECRIMINALIZATION INITIATIVES DO NOT RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT INCREASES IN DRUG USE
Portugal
In July 2001, Portugal became the first European country to decriminalize the use and possession of all illicit drugs. Many observers were critical of the policy, believing that it would lead to increases in drug use and associated problems. Dr. Caitlin Hughes of the University of New South Wales and Professor Alex Stevens of the University of Kent have undertaken detailed research into the effects of decriminalization in Portugal. Their recently published findings26 have shown that this was not the case, replicating the conclusions of their earlier study27 and that of the CATO Institute28.
Hughes and Stevens’ 2010 report detects a slight increase in overall rates of drug use in Portugal in the 10 years since decriminalization, but at a level consistent with other similar countries where drug use remained criminalized. Within this general trend, there has also been a specific decline in the use of heroin, which was in 2001 the main concern of the Portuguese government. Their overall conclusion is that the removal of criminal penalties, combined with the use of alternative therapeutic responses to people struggling with drug dependence, has reduced the burden of drug law enforcement on the criminal justice system and the overall level of problematic drug use.
Comparing Dutch and US Cities
A study by Reinarman, et. al. compared the very different regulatory environments of Amsterdam, whose liberal “cannabis cafe” policies (a form of de facto decriminalization) go back to the 1970s, and San Francisco, in the US, which criminalizes cannabis users. The researchers wished to examine whether the more repressive policy environment of San Francisco deterred citizens from smoking cannabis or delayed the onset of use. They found that it did not, concluding that:
“Our findings do not support claims that criminalization reduces cannabis use and that decriminalization increases cannabis use... With the exception of higher drug use in San Francisco, we found strong similarities across both cities. We found no evidence to support claims that criminalization reduces use or that decriminalization increases use.”29
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Break the taboo. Pursue an open debate and promote policies that effectively reduce consumption, and that prevent and reduce harms related to drug use and drug control policies. Increase investment in research and analysis into the impact of different policies and programs.25
Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won. Governments do have the power to pursue a mix of policies that are appropriate to their own situation, and manage the problems caused by drug markets and drug use in a way that has a much more positive impact on the level of related crime, as well as social and health harms.
2. Replace the criminalization and punishment of people who use drugs with the offer of health and treatment services to those who need them.
A key idea behind the ‘war on drugs’ approach was that the threat of arrest and harsh punishment would deter people from using drugs. In practice, this hypothesis has been disproved – many countries that have enacted harsh laws and implemented widespread arrest and imprisonment of drug users and low-level dealers have higher levels of drug use and related problems than countries with more tolerant approaches. Similarly, countries that have introduced decriminalization, or other forms of reduction in arrest or punishment, have not seen the rises in drug use or dependence rates that had been feared.
SNIP
3. Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs (with cannabis, for example) that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.
SNIP
4. Establish better metrics, indicators and goals to measure progress.
SNIP
5. Challenge, rather than reinforce, common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.
Currently, too many policymakers reinforce the idea that all people who use drugs are ‘amoral addicts’, and all those involved in drug markets are ruthless criminal masterminds. The reality is much more complex. The United Nations makes a conservative estimate that there are currently 250 million illicit drug users in the world, and that there are millions more involved in cultivation, production and distribution. We simply cannot treat them all as criminals.
To some extent, policymakers’ reluctance to acknowledge this complexity is rooted in their understanding of public opinion on these issues. Many ordinary citizens do have genuine fears about the negative impacts of illegal drug markets, or the behavior of people dependent on, or under the influence of, illicit drugs. These fears are grounded in some general assumptions about people who use drugs and drug markets, that government and civil society experts need to address by increasing awareness of some established (but largely unrecognized) facts. For example:
• The majority of people who use drugs do not fit the stereotype of the ‘amoral and pitiful addict’. Of the estimated 250 million drug users worldwide, the United Nations estimates that less than 10 percent can be classified as dependent, or ‘problem drug users’.36
• Most people involved in the illicit cultivation of coca, opium poppy, or cannabis are small farmers struggling to make a living for their families. Alternative livelihood opportunities are better investments than destroying their only available means of survival.
• The factors that influence an individual’s decision to start using drugs have more to do with fashion, peer influence, and social and economic context, than with the drug’s legal status, risk of detection, or government prevention messages.37, 38
• The factors that contribute to the development of problematic or dependent patterns of use have more to do with childhood trauma or neglect, harsh living conditions, social marginalization, and emotional problems, rather than moral weakness or hedonism.39
• It is not possible to frighten or punish someone out of drug dependence, but with the right sort of evidence-based treatment, dependent users can change their behavior and be active and productive members of the community.40
• Most people involved in drug trafficking are petty dealers and not the stereotyped gangsters from the movies – the vast majority of people imprisoned for drug dealing or trafficking are ‘small fish’ in the operation (often coerced into carrying or selling drugs), who can easily be replaced without disruption to the supply.41,42
A more mature and balanced political and media discourse can help to increase public awareness and understanding. Specifically, providing a voice to representatives of farmers, users, families and other communities affected by drug use and dependence can help to counter myths and misunderstandings.
6. Countries that continue to invest mostly in a law enforcement approach (despite the evidence) should focus their repressive actions on violent organized crime and drug traffickers, in order to reduce the harms associated with the illicit drug market.
The resources of law enforcement agencies can be much more effectively targeted at battling the organized crime groups that have expanded their power and reach on the back of drug market profits. In many parts of the world, the violence, intimidation and corruption perpetrated by these groups is a significant threat to individual and national security and to democratic institutions, so efforts by governments and law enforcement agencies to curtail their activities remain essential.
7. Promote alternative sentences for small-scale and first-time drug dealers.
SNIP
8. Invest more resources in evidence-based prevention, with a special focus on youth.
SNIP
9. Offer a wide and easily accessible range of options for treatment and care for drug dependence, including substitution and heroin-assisted treatment, with special attention to those most at risk, including those in prisons and other custodial settings.
SNIP
10.The United Nations system must provide leadership in the reform of global drug policy. This means promoting an effective approach based on evidence, supporting countries to develop drug policies that suit their context and meet their needs, and ensuring coherence among various UN agencies, policies and conventions.
SNIP
11. Act urgently: the war on drugs has failed, and policies need to change now.
SNIP
COMMISSIONERS
Asma Jahangir, human rights activist, former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions, Pakistan
Carlos Fuentes, writer and public intellectual, Mexico
César Gaviria, former President of Colombia
Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil (chair)
George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece
George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, United States (honorary chair)
Javier Solana, former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Spain
John Whitehead, banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, United States
Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ghana
Louise Arbour, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, President of the International Crisis Group, Canada
Maria Cattaui, Petroplus Holdings Board member, former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce, Switzerland
Mario Vargas Llosa, writer and public intellectual, Peru
Marion Caspers-Merk, former State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health
Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, France
Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve and of the Economic Recovery Board
Richard Branson, entrepreneur, advocate for social causes, founder of the Virgin Group, co-founder of The Elders, United Kingdom
Ruth Dreifuss, former President of Switzerland and Minister of Home Affairs
Thorvald Stoltenberg, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Norway
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-war- ... led-2011-6
SNIP
White house drug czar Gil Kerlikowske broadly rejects the commissions recommendations.
http://www.kgoam810.com/rssItem.asp?fee ... d=29675471
White House Slams Report that Says War on Drugs 'Has Failed'
(WASHINGTON) -- The White House is slamming a report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy that says the long running war on drugs has been a failure.
In the report, the commission stated, "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed."
The commission also recommended that certain controlled substances should be legalized.
However, the White House says legalizing drugs like marijuana remains a non-starter for the Obama administration.
The Office of National Drug Policy says the war is succeeding because overall drug use in the U.S. is about half what in was in the late 70s. The president's approach, the office says, focuses on drug addiction as a disease, providing treatment and on efforts to prevent drug abuse.
I had no idea that the United Nations appointed a Global Commission on Drug Policy consisting of Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker, Papandreou (the current Greek PM), Louise Arbour, Branson, Carlos Fuentes, Zedillo (the former Mexican president), Gaviria (former Colombian president), Javier Solana, Cardoso (former Brazilian president and chair of the Commission), Mario Vargas Llosa, even George Fucking Schultz (vice-chair) and former Goldman Sachs head John Whitehead... for the most part a rogues' gallery of conservatives, bankers and neoliberals.
Okay, they left out the part where the banks launder hundreds of billions of dollars in illegal drug revenues every year, maintaining a global financial system that, not only in this way, is based primarily on crime.
Alfred Joe's Boy wrote:It was supposed to fail.
hanshan wrote:...
JackRiddler:I had no idea that the United Nations appointed a Global Commission on Drug Policy consisting of Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker, Papandreou (the current Greek PM), Louise Arbour, Branson, Carlos Fuentes, Zedillo (the former Mexican president), Gaviria (former Colombian president), Javier Solana, Cardoso (former Brazilian president and chair of the Commission), Mario Vargas Llosa, even George Fucking Schultz (vice-chair) and former Goldman Sachs head John Whitehead... for the most part a rogues' gallery of conservatives, bankers and neoliberals.
Yeah, well...(you're getting a little intellectually lazy, Jack, w/ your blanket inditement)...
...
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/05/t ... p-for.html
Too Big to Do Time?: Fed Wrist-slap for Wachovia Bank Makes a Farce of the Drug War
Friday, May 27, 2011 | Borderland Beat Reporter Gari
By:
Linn Washington Jr.
The U.S. government won convictions against 23,506 drug traffickers nationwide during 2010, sending 96 percent of the offenders to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.
Yet one of the biggest entities busted by the feds for involvement in drug trafficking last year received just a wrist-slap deal from federal prosecutors with nobody getting prison time.
During 2010, the U.S. government also won convictions against 806 persons involved in smaller-time drug-related money laundering, sending nearly 77 percent of those offenders to prison.
Yet when it came to a case involving billions of dollars in illegal drug profits, the federal government gave the same unusual wrist-slap to the same entity caught giving greed-blinded assistance to Mexican drug cartels by laundering billions of dollars in illegal profits for them.
So, what is this entity that federal prosecutors found worthy of big breaks for its laundering of billions of dollars, and for its blatant facilitating or tons of smuggled cocaine?
Meet Wachovia – once the nation’s sixth largest bank by assets and now a part of Wells Fargo Bank… a too-big-to-fail bank that for the feds is apparently too-big-to jail.
Wachovia recently completed what amounted to a year-long probation arising from a March 2010 settlement deal with federal prosecutors who were pursuing criminal proceedings against Wachovia for its facilitating of illegal money transfers from Mexico totaling $378-billion…a staggering sum greater than half of the Pentagon's annual budget, which included billions of dollars traced directly to violent Mexican drug cartels.
The record $160-million fine slapped on Wachovia under terms of that settlement deal included a $50-million assessment for failing to monitor cash used to ship into the US 22 tons of cocaine. (That fine amounted to less than two percent of Wachovia's profits during the prior year.)
Wells Fargo now owns Wachovia. Wells Fargo, federal prosecutors stress, was not involvement in the misdeeds that landed Wachovia in court, where it received a deferred prosecution deal.
Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia in early 2009 for $12.7-billion, shortly after Wells Fargo had received $25-billion in federal bail-out funds from the TARP program. That purchase helped make Wells Fargo America’s second-largest bank.
Many condemn the federal government settlement with Wachovia as a farce.
Criticism has come from persons in law enforcement frustrated by big-bank involvement in laundering drug money and from those who claim federal drug enforcement practices provide bigger breaks to drug kingpins than to low-level operators.
“All the law enforcement people wanted to see this come to trial. But no one goes to jail,” said Martin Woods, an English expert on anti-money laundering, whose work while with Wachovia’s London office helped unravel the drug connections. Woods says Wachovia officials bashed him for his investigative diligence and whistle-blowing as an employee.
“It’s simple: it you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point,” Woods said in an April 3, 2011 article published in The Observer, a British newspaper published on Sundays.
Wachovia’s involvement in big-time money laundering paralleled the period of a murderous escalation in violence in Mexico’s Drug War that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 Mexicans since 2006 alone, with the dead including politicians, prosecutors, police, soldiers, drug gang members and innocent bystanders.
During the same month last year when federal prosecutors gave Wachovia a break, finding no need to imprison any bank personnel for their involvement in massive drug-tainted money laundering, other federal prosecutors were pounding domestic drug dealers with long prison sentences.
For example, an Anchorage, Alaska man received a ten-year term for selling four ounces of crack cocaine, while an East St. Louis, Ill. businessman received a life sentence plus a $2.25-million fine for distributing three thousand pounds of cocaine between 2004 and his arrest in April 2008.
The amount of cocaine trafficking that sent the Illinois man to prison for life – one and a half tons - was much smaller than that single 22 ton cocaine shipment referenced in the Wachovia settlement document.
The settlement agreement Wachovia officials signed with federal prosecutors in Miami last year clearly stated that the bank knew that many of the transactions with Mexican financial institutions from 2004 to 2007 carried the stench of drugs.
That settlement agreement stated in part that as early as “2005 Wachovia was aware that other large US banks were exiting the [Mexican] business based on [anti-money laundering] concerns…Despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in business” according to news media reports.
One reason Wachovia stayed in the business as others pulled out is that the bank reaped hefty fees from that money-laundering "business," in which billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveler’s checks and bulk cash shipments went into Wachovia accounts from Mexican exchange facilities called casa de cambios (CDCs).
Jeffery Solman, the federal prosecutor who handled the Wachovia case, stated last year that “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.”
Last year Bloomberg News, in an article on the Wachovia money laundering scandal, reported how the federal government cited other mega-financial institutions in the U.S. like American Express Bank International and Bank of America for their complicity in laundering drug money.
Making a farce out of the nation's supposed War on Drugs, none of the mega-financial institutions identified by federal authorities as having been involved with laundering drug money and none of the well-paid individuals at those institutions which were facilitating that laundering has faced go-to-jail federal criminal prosecutions like those targeting small fry in the drug trade.
Days after Wachovia received its wrist-slap deal for laundering billions of dollars in drug money, federal prosecutors secured a five-year sentence for a 26-year-old Johnstown, Pa. man involved with a drug ring it claimed was responsible for $10,000 in drug sales per month.
Imprisoning that Johnstown street dealer for five years will cost taxpayers $113,115, based on the average cost of $22,623 annually to house a federal prisoner. He was one of six people netted during a drug crackdown in that small former steel town located in the mountains 66 miles east of Pittsburgh.
Alarming evidence of the Drug War farce – the prosecutorial pounding of small fry while major players get a pass – is evident in statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the federal agency that advises Congress on criminal sentencing matters.
During 2009, in the Southern Florida district where Miami is located, 96.1 percent of the 669 persons convicted in federal courts for drug trafficking received prison time. Twenty-percent of the persons convicted in Southern Florida federal courts for simply possessing drugs received prison time.
Of the 67 persons convicted of money laundering during 2009 in those same Southern Florida courts, 77.6% went to prison, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission statistics.
As noted in that April 2011 article in The Observer, the conclusion of the Wachovia case “was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the “legal” banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.”
That Observer article included observations made in 2008 by the then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime providing evidence suggesting that drug/crime money was “the only liquid investment capital” available to banks on the brink of collapse.
“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drug trade,” the Observer article quoted the U.N. official as stating. “There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”
The June 2010 Bloomberg News article provided an ominous observation about the wrist-slap protection large banks receive from criminal indictments due to a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory:
“Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets," says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering. The theory is like a get-out-of-jail free card for big banks, Blum says.
Another anti-money laundering expert disappointed with the federal government’s settlement with Wachovia is Robert Mazur, identified in the Observer article as one of the world’s “foremost figures” in providing anti-money laundering training and the point-man for US law enforcement during prosecutions against Columbian drug cartels two decades ago.
Mazur told The Observer, “The only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom.”
Copyright © Borderland Beat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... ern-states
Mexican drug battle leaves 28 dead
Police discover dead men on federal highway in Nayarit while scores of villagers flee their homes in Michoacán
Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 May 2011 11.59 BST
Mexican soldiers carry out an anti-drugs operation in Monclova, Mexico. Photograph: Semar/EPA
Fierce fighting among apparent rival drug gangs in western Mexico has left 28 people dead on a highway, while in a nearby state more than 700 people fled villages that have become battlegrounds.
The violence, which appeared to be unrelated, escalated on Wednesday in the western states of Nayarit and Michoacán, where drug cartels have been warring over territory.
Police in Nayarit were initially responding to a complaint of a kidnapping by a group of armed men who escaped on a federal highway near the town of Ruiz, when they heard a report of a shootout, according to the state prosecutor's office.
They found 28 men lying dead and four others wounded, as well as bullet casings from high-powered weapons and 10 abandoned vehicles.
The statement released late on Wednesday by the attorney general's office gave no further details.
Earlier in the day, an official in the nearby western state of Michoacán said drug cartel violence had prompted frightened villagers to flee hamlets and take refuge at shelters set up at a church hall, recreation centre and schools.
It is at least the second time a large number of rural residents have been displaced by drug violence in Mexico. In November, about 400 people in the northern border town of Ciudad Mier took refuge in the neighbouring city of Ciudad Aleman following gun battles.
The Michoacán state civil defence director, Carlos Mandujano, said about 700 people spent Tuesday night at a water park in the town of Buenavista Tomatlan, with most sleeping under open thatched-roof structures.
Mandujano said state authorities were providing sleeping mats, blankets and food.
Residents told local authorities that gun battles between rival drug cartels had made it too dangerous for them to stay in outlying hamlets. The latest reports said arsonists were burning avocado farms in the nearby town of Acahuato.
The fighting in Michoacán is believed to involve rival factions of the La Familia drug cartel, some of whose members now call themselves "the Knights Templar".
Drug violence has been on the rise in Nayarit, a Pacific coast state known for its surfing and beach towns. In October, gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash in the capital of Tepic, an attack that police said bore the characteristics of organised crime. The bodies of 12 murder victims, eight of them partially burned, were found on a dirt road in Nayarit last year. Officials have not identified the gangs fighting there.
The Norway-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates about 230,000 people in Mexico have been driven from their homes by the violence, often to stay with relatives or in the US.
http://counterpunch.org/whitney06012011.html
June 1, 2011
"Business is Booming"
Wall Street's Role in Narco-Trafficking
By MIKE WHITNEY
Imagine what your reaction would be if the Mexican government agreed to pay Barack Obama $1.4 billion to deploy US troops and armored vehicles to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to conduct military operations, set up check points, and engage in fire-fights that end up killing 35,000 US civilians on the streets of American cities.
If the Mexican government treated the United States like this, would you consider them a friend or an enemy?
This is exactly how the US is treating Mexico, and it's been going on since 2006.
America's Mexican policy--The Merida Initiative--is a nightmare. It's undermined Mexican sovereignty, corrupted the political system, and militarized the country. It's also resulted in the violent deaths of thousands of mostly poor civilians. But Washington doesn't give a hoot about "collateral damage" as long as it can sell more weaponry, strengthen its free-trade regime, and sluice more drug profits into its big banks. Then everything is just Jim-dandy.
There's no point in dignifying this butchery by calling it a "War on Drugs"?
That's nonsense. What we're seeing is a giant powergrab by big business, big finance and the US Intel services. Obama is merely doing their bidding, which is why--not surprisingly--things have gotten a lot worse under his administration. Obama has not only stepped up the funding for Plan Mexico (aka--Merida) but also deployed more US agents to work undercover while US drones carry out surveillance duty. Get the picture? This isn't some little drug bust; it's another chapter in America's War on Civilization.
Here's an excerpt from an article in CounterPunch by Laura Carlsen that gives a little background:"The drug war has become the major vehicle of militarization in Latin America. It's a vehicle funded and driven by the U.S. government and fueled by a combination of false morals, hypocrisy and a lot of cold, hard fear. The so called ‘war on drugs’ is really a war on people, especially youth, women, indigenous peoples and dissidents. The drug war has become the main way for the Pentagon to occupy and control countries at the expense of whole societies and many, many lives.
“Militarization in the name of the drug war is happening more quickly and more thoroughly than most of us probably anticipated under the Obama administration. The agreement to establish bases in Colombia, later suspended, sent out one of the first signals of the strategy. And we've seen the indefinite extension of the Merida Initiative in Mexico and Central America, and even, sadly, war boats sent to Costa Rica, a nation with a history of peace and no army...
“The Merida Initiative funds U.S. interests to train security forces, provide intelligence and war technology, give advice on reforming the justice and penal systems and promoting human rights–all in Mexico.” (The Drug War Can't Be Improved, It Can Only be Ended, Laura Carlsen, Counterpunch)
If it looks like Obama is doing his best to turn Mexico into a military dictatorship, it's because he is. Plan Mexico is a sham that conceals the administration's real motives, which is to make sure that the lavish profits from the drug trade end up in the right people's pockets. That's what this is all about, big money. And that's why the death toll has soared while the Mexican government's credibility has hit its lowest ebb in decades. US policy has turned large swaths of the country into killing fields and it's only getting worse.
Check out this interview with Charles Bowden who describes what life is like for the people who live at Ground Zero in the drug war; Juarez, Mexico:"This is in a city where people live in cardboard boxes sometimes. Ten thousand businesses have given up and closed in the last year. Thirty to sixty thousand people from Juárez, mainly the rich, have moved across the river to El Paso for safety, including the mayor of Juárez, who likes to bunk in El Paso. And the publisher of the newspaper there lives in El Paso. Somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000 people simply left the city. A lot of the problem is economic, not simply violence. At least 100,000 jobs in the border factories have vanished during this recession because of the competition from Asia. There’s 500 to 900 gangs there, estimates vary.
“So what you have is about 10,000 federal troops and federal police agents all marauding. You have a city where no one goes out at night; where small businesses all pay extortion; where 20,000 cars were officially stolen last year; where 2,600-plus people were officially murdered last year; where nobody keeps track of the people who have been kidnapped and never come back; where nobody counts the people buried in secret burying grounds, and they, in an unseemly way, claw out of the earth from time to time. You’ve got a disaster. And you have a million people, too poor to leave, imprisoned in it. That’s the city." (Charles Bowden, Democracy Now)
This isn't about drugs; it's about a crackpot foreign policy that supports proxy-armies to impose order through police-state repression and militarization. It's about expanding US power and beefing up profits on Wall Street.
Here's more background from author Lawrence M. Vance at the The Future of Freedom Foundation:"An undisclosed number of U.S. law-enforcement agents work in Mexico... The DEA has more than 60 agents in Mexico. There are in addition 40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, 20 Marshal Service deputies, and 18 Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents, plus agents from the FBI, Citizen and Immigration Service, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Coast Guard, and Transportation Safety Agency. The State Department also maintains a Narcotics Affairs Section. The United States has also provided helicopters, drug sniffing dogs, and polygraph units to screen law-enforcement applicants.
“U.S. drones spy on cartel hideouts, and U.S. tracking beacons pinpoint suspectS’ cars and phones. U.S. agents track beacons, trace cell-phone calls, read e-mails, study behavioral patterns of border incursions, follow smuggling routes, and process data about drug dealers, money launderers, and cartel bosses. According to a former Mexican anti-drug prosecutor, U.S. agents are not restricted from eavesdropping on anyone in Mexico by U.S. laws that require judicial authority as long as they are not on U.S. territory and not bugging American citizens. ("Why Is the U.S. Fighting Mexico's Drug War?" Laurence M. Vance, The Future of Freedom Foundation)
This isn't foreign policy; it's another US occupation. And, guess who's raking in the big cashola on this sordid little scam? Wall Street. That's right, the big banks are getting their cut just like they always do. Take a look at this excerpt from an article by James Petras titled "How Drug Profits saved Capitalism" at Global Research. It's a great summary of the objectives that are shaping the policy:"While the Pentagon arms the Mexican government and the US Drug Enforcement Agency enforces the ‘military solution’, the biggest US banks receive, launder and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to the drug lords’ accounts, who then buy modern arms, pay private armies of assassins and corrupt untold numbers of political and law enforcement officials on both sides of the border....
“Drug profits, in the most basic sense, are secured through the ability of the cartels to launder and transfer billions of dollars through the US banking system. The scale and scope of the US banking-drug cartel alliance surpasses any other economic activity of the US private banking system. According to US Justice Department records, one bank alone, Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo), laundered $378.3 billion dollars between May 1, 2004 and May 31, 2007 (The Guardian, May 11, 2011). Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels...
“If the major US banks are the financial engines which allow the billion dollar drug empires to operate, the White House, the US Congress and the law enforcement agencies are the basic protectors of these banks.....Laundering drug money is one of the most lucrative sources of profit for Wall Street; the banks charge hefty commissions on the transfer of drug profits, which they then lend to borrowing institutions at interest rates far above what – if any – they pay to drug trafficker depositors. Awash in sanitized drug profits, these US titans of the finance world can easily buy their own elected officials to perpetuate the system. ("How Drug Profits saved Capitalism" , James Petras, Global Research)
Repeat: "Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels..."
The War on Drugs is a fraud. This isn't about interdiction; it's about control. Washington provides the muscle so the banks can rake in the big doe. One hand washes the other, just like the Mafia.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/05/w ... -2012.html
What Mexico Will Look Like in 2012?
Friday, May 27, 2011 | Borderland Beat Reporter Gari
By Louis E.V. Nevaer
New America Media
In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have taken to the streets in peaceful marches in scores of cities calling for an end to President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs.
The protests reflect growing dissatisfaction among the public with Calderón’s drug war that has exacerbated rather than curtailed narco-violence.
This sentiment has been echoed by journalists as well. Jorge Ramos, the lead news anchor for Univision, has gone on record as saying, “Calderón’s strategy [against the drug cartels], which has cost more than 34,000 lives in the last four years, has been an utter failure.”
A failure to stem the violence has catapulted public safety to the top of the list of voters’ concerns ahead of next year’s elections in Mexico, trumping even the economy.Calderón will be termed out, but there is mounting pressure for would-be presidential hopefuls to declare that, if elected, they would call off the war on drugs.
But as 2012 nears, does Mexico have a choice?
It does not.
Is Calderón’s drug war working?
It’s one thing to criticize the war on drugs and another to offer a viable solution. To his credit, Calderón has recognized errors in his campaign against the drug cartels, and, of even more significance, he has, time and again, invited anyone anywhere to offer a viable alternative.
This modesty has been acknowledged by critics. Writing in Milenio newspaper, Hector Aguilar conceded that, “there is nobody proposing an alternative to Calderón's strategy."
By contrast, there are many who compare Mexico’s current campaign with that of Colombia’s more than a decade ago, and are optimistic. Mexican and U.S. officials, for instance, argue that Calderón’s policies are proving effective, as measured in drugs seized, money confiscated, drug lords arrested or slain and the constant disruption to the cartels’ organizations that has forced them to set up operations in the United States, Central America and as far away as Malaysia and West Africa.
This is how Katherine Corcoran of the Associated Press summed up the situation last month: “Mexican drug cartels now operate virtually uninhibited in their Central American backyard. U.S.-supported crackdowns in Mexico and Colombia have only pushed traffickers into a region where corruption is rampant, borders lack even minimal immigration control and local gangs provide a ready-made infrastructure for organized crime.” The price of this “success” has been, as Ramos points out with anguish -- violence.
But as Mexicans begin to think about next year’s elections, there is the sobering reality that no matter who is elected president, the war on drugs may be tweaked, but it won’t be abandoned.
Mexico pivotal to global drug trade
Why? Because in an increasingly interdependent world, Mexico has obligations to the international community to participate fully in stopping the global drug trade.
More importantly, Mexico has the United States as a neighbor – which is both the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs, and a militaristic nation that, with impunity, takes actions against nations it deems a national security threat.
Quite simply, regardless of the sentiments of poets and journalists – and everyday citizens who march peacefully through the streets of Mexican cities – the government has no choice in the matter.
There are two fundamental reasons why Mexico’s next president will stay the course.
Foremost is the matter of national sovereignty. It is unthinkable for Mexico to establish a quid pro quo, where the military’s campaign stops and the cartels cease their violence. The idea of having the Mexican state co-exist with nebulous geographic regions under the control of organized criminal syndicates is not in the cards. The last time Mexico relinquished jurisdiction over its geography, it emboldened foreign settlers to establish a breakaway republic – the Republic of Texas.
In more practical terms, should Mexico’s next president want to reach an agreement in which there were no more kidnappings, in return for the army returning to their barracks, with whom would he negotiate? Most of the “most wanted” drug lords are dead, have been arrested, sent to the United States for trial, or have fled Mexico and set up shop in other countries.
Secondly, what would happen if in 2012, Mexico decided to turn a blind eye and allow cartels to operate with impunity in the northern states, in exchange for an end to kidnappings, shootouts and violence?
U.S. won’t stand for rogue state
The United States wouldn’t stand for a rogue state to coexist alongside Mexico’s legitimate government. The United States launches cruise missiles into the Sudan, occupies Iraq, and initiates war in Afghanistan. In addition, since 2001 financial laws have changed around the world – in a desperate bid to stop the flow of narco-dollars into the global banking system. All one has to do is recall that last March, Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, settled the biggest action brought under the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and "deferred prosecution" by paying federal authorities $110 million in forfeitures. The DEA and IRS accused Wachovia of laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels. If federal officials are this relentless in prosecuting American corporations linked with drug traffickers, --
-- think of the retaliatory actions that the U.S. government would pursue should it conclude that Mexico represents a “national security threat.”
In other words, if Mexico’s next president abandons Calderón’s drug war, as Ramos suggests, then Mexico could easily be declared a “rogue state” that threatens the “national security interests” of the United States, always a precursor to economic and military actions.
In the best-case scenario, Mexico would then be subjected to financial havoc as American authorities move to seize bank accounts used by the drug cartels to launder their money, paralyzing Mexico’s financial system. In a worst-case scenario, Mexico may itself be occupied militarily by the United States.
No one in Mexico likes waking up to horrible news about violence, slayings and the relentless viciousness that’s going on every day. Then again, I suspect everyone in the United States is tired of waking up and hearing about Guantanamo detainees, car bombs in Iraq and the never-ending pursuit of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Indeed, critics like Ramos are naïvely offering an absurd alternative: That Mexico pursue a policy that will surrender its sovereignty to rogue criminal organizations, force the United States to declare it a rogue nation that threatens its national security interests, subject Mexico to economic sanctions and the possibility of being occupied (once more) by the United States. In the same way that Barack Obama has found it impossible to close down Guantanamo, so will Mexico’s next president find it impossible to end the war on drugs.
Anyway, why you hounding Hulk now? You know what my point is, and it's that EVEN THESE GUYS ARE SAYING IT! As you say, Zedillo: Even with legalization (in 30 years, sadly) no one's coming after his proceeds, he can be fairly sure. Ronald Reagan's George Schultz. Volker. A Goldman head. Even these guys are saying it.
How nice to be retired and really old, and able to say the occasional truth. Papandreou's the only sitting official, and my feeling that they're hypocrites is probably about to be confirmed by Greece's total failure to take any action on drug reform in the next few years. Still, hypocrites or no, even these guys are saying it! And they are not presenting a middle-of-the-road faux reform position. They're saying, drug war has failed, period. And: legalize marijuana and try legalizing everything else.
That's nonsense. What we're seeing is a giant powergrab by big business, big finance and the US Intel services. Obama is merely doing their bidding, which is why--not surprisingly--things have gotten a lot worse under his administration. Obama has not only stepped up the funding for Plan Mexico (aka--Merida) but also deployed more US agents to work undercover while US drones carry out surveillance duty. Get the picture? This isn't some little drug bust; it's another chapter in America's War on Civilization.
If it looks like Obama is doing his best to turn Mexico into a military dictatorship, it's because he is. Plan Mexico is a sham that conceals the administration's real motives, which is to make sure that the lavish profits from the drug trade end up in the right people's pockets. That's what this is all about, big money. And that's why the death toll has soared while the Mexican government's credibility has hit its lowest ebb in decades. US policy has turned large swaths of the country into killing fields and it's only getting worse.
This isn't about drugs; it's about a crackpot foreign policy that supports proxy-armies to impose order through police-state repression and militarization. It's about expanding US power and beefing up profits on Wall Street.
This isn't foreign policy; it's another US occupation. And, guess who's raking in the big cashola on this sordid little scam? Wall Street. That's right, the big banks are getting their cut just like they always do. Take a look at this excerpt from an article by James Petras titled "How Drug Profits saved Capitalism" at Global Research. It's a great summary of the objectives that are shaping the policy:
Repeat: "Every major bank in the US has served as an active financial partner of the murderous drug cartels..."
The War on Drugs is a fraud. This isn't about interdiction; it's about control. Washington provides the muscle so the banks can rake in the big doe. One hand washes the other, just like the Mafia.
JackRiddler wrote:.
I had no idea that the United Nations appointed a Global Commission on Drug Policy consisting of Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker, Papandreou (the current Greek PM), Louise Arbour, Branson, Carlos Fuentes, Zedillo (the former Mexican president), Gaviria (former Colombian president), Javier Solana, Cardoso (former Brazilian president and chair of the Commission), Mario Vargas Llosa, even George Fucking Schultz (vice-chair) and former Goldman Sachs head John Whitehead... for the most part a rogues' gallery of conservatives, bankers and neoliberals.
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