Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks | Video on TED.com.
Captivating look at how pervasive is global organized crime. Did you know it accounts for 15% of the world’s economy? And everywhere it goes it brings instability, violence, and corruption. Lou (paraphrasing)
A coalition of prominent B.C. police officers, health professionals, legal experts and academics is calling for the legalization and regulated sale of marijuana.
The group Stop the Violence, which includes former B.C. Supreme Court justice Ross Lander and B.C.’s former chief coroner Vince Cain, has launched a high-profile political campaign to “end the cannabis cash cow of organized crime.
“Panel member Dr, Evan Wood, of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, says marijuana prohibition is fuelling gang warfare, and school children now have easier access to pot than either alcohol or cigarettes, because of the reach of organized crime.
“Instead of having a regulated market, we’ve turned things over to this extremely violent unregulated market controlled by organized crime,” said Wood.”Cannabis is more available to young people than alcohol and tobacco, and what we’ve seen in a government-funded surveillance system is that the price of cannabis continues to go down and the potency of cannabis continues to go up.”Wood said the group is calling for the regulated sale of marijuana similar to cigarettes, so that it can be controlled, taxed and its use eventually reduced.
No deterrent. Former justice Lander said that 34 years on the bench taught him prohibition isn’t working.”The whole exercise is futile. [Marijuana's] being used prominently everywhere, not just in British Columbia but throughout North America, and it’s impossible to extinguish,” said Lander.”There’s no apparent deterrent to me. It wasn’t a deterrent to even those people who were tried and other people who might enter the same trade in dealing with these drugs.
“Stop the Violence said that in 2009 there were 43 gang-related deaths in B.C., and 276 drive-by shootings that put the public at risk.Victoria police officer David Bratzer says his experiences as a front-line officer showed him marijuana prohibition just isn’t working.”I’ve investigated situations where people have been stabbed in drug deals gone bad over something as small as a simple [$10] bag of marijuana, so its very much based on my personal experiences that I think a public health approach to this issue would be more effective than a criminal justice approach.
The group also released the results of an Angus Reid poll it commissioned that suggested only 13 per cent of British Columbians support keeping the current marijuana laws unchanged.The poll was conducted with a sample of 800 British Columbians and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 per cent.
via Legalize marijuana sales, say B.C. experts – British Columbia – CBC News.
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For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationships forged amongst international drug syndicates, neofascists and U.S. intelligence agencies, documenting the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.
While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, in the bizarro world of the “War on Drugs,” corporate interests and geopolitics always trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret state.
Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón turned the Army loose, allegedly to “dismantle” the drug cartels slowly transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily along Mexico’s northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives. Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply “disappeared.”
Writing in The Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that “cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state.”
“Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs,” Jenkins writes, “rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics–demand always evokes supply–so traduced as in Washington’s drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it.”
Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites organize crime.
via Partners in Crime: The U.S. Secret State and Mexico’s “War on Drugs”.
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President Calderon blames Americans for ‘not taking responsibility’ for drugs war – Telegraph.
When will the madness and the lies generated by it end ?
