US Coast Guard Operates Secret Floating Prisons In Pacific Ocean

Last week, Seth Wessler wrote a story for the New York Times, in which he described “terror on the high seas”: an expansion of the maritime war on drugs, the U.S. Coast Guard is operating a fleet of secret floating prisions in the Pacific Ocean. Coined “floating Guantanamos”, Coast Guard cutters have been deployed as far as 3,000 miles miles away from the nearest U.S. port, to international waters from Central America to South America in a bid to bust drug smugglers.

Wessler writes about a number of men who were detained by the U.S. Coast Guard and imprisoned on the cutters for weeks or months at a time. The practice of capturing smugglers and turning them back to their governments changed in 2012, when the Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.” Post 2012, Coast Guard cutters cruise around the Pacific picking up smugglers who will then be admitted to U.S. courts.

According to Wessler, the U.S. Coast Guard never intended to operate floating prisions, but thanks to U.S. marintime law, drug smuggling in international waters is considered a crime against the U.S (even if there is no proof), making the possibility of floating prisions legal. Once detained, conditions for the smugglers are quite rough, often kept on US vessels for weeks or months on end– chained to anything, usually on the ships’ decks exposed to the bare elements.

The Coast Guard has a humanitarian public image, celebrated in local newspapers for rescuing pleasure boaters off Montauk or hurricane survivors in Florida. But as the lone branch of the military that serves as a law-enforcement agency, the 227-year-old service has also long been in the business of interdicting contraband, from Chinese opium smugglers to Prohibition rumrunners. For centuries, Coast Guard operations waited to arrest smugglers once they crossed into U.S. territorial waters. Then, in the 1970s, as marijuana trafficking ballooned on the route from Colombia into the Caribbean before arriving in the United States, Justice Department officials argued to Congress that current U.S. law constrained law enforcement’s ability to punish drug smugglers caught on the high seas. While the Coast Guard, then a branch of the Department of Transportation, could chase smugglers into the Caribbean, Justice Department lawyers could rarely hold smugglers caught in the legal gray zone of international waters criminally liable in U.S. courts.

 

Congress responded by passing a set of laws, including the 1986 Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, that defined drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States, even when there was no proof that the drugs, often carried on foreign boats, were bound for the United States. The Coast Guard was conscripted as the agency empowered to seek out suspected smugglers and bring them to American courts.

 

In the 1990s and through the 2000s, maritime detentions averaged around 200 a year. Then in 2012, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.” The goal was to shut down smuggling routes in the waters between South and Central America, stopping large shipments of cocaine carried on speedboats thousands of miles from the United States, long before they could be broken down and carried over land into Mexico and then into the United States. In 2016, under the Southern Command’s strategy, the Coast Guard, with intermittent help from the U.S. Navy and international partners, detained 585 suspected drug smugglers, mostly in international waters. That year, 80 percent of these men were taken to the United States to face criminal charges, up from a third of detainees in 2012. In the 12 months that ended in September 2017, the Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships.

Wessler details the extent of his investigation below, which provides an eye-opening view of the extent of America’s secret extraterritorial war on drugs,

Over the last year, I’ve interviewed seven former Coast Guard detainees, some of whom are still in American federal prison, and received detailed letters, some with pencil renderings of the detention ships, from a dozen others. Most of these men remain confounded by their capture by the Americans, dubious that U.S. officials had the authority to arrest them and to lock them in prison. But it is the memory of their surreal imprisonment at sea that these men say most torments them. Together with thousands of pages of court records and interviews with current and former Coast Guard officers, these detainees paint a grim picture of the conditions of their extended capture on ships deployed in the extraterritorial war on drugs.”  

PBS NewsHour interviews Seth Wessler, where he speaks about the 700 suspected drug smugglers imprisoned on Coast Guard cutters between September 2016 through 2017.

It's Been Exactly 80 Years Since The US Declared War On Weed - And Weed Is Still Winning

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

The government fought cannabis - and cannabis won.

This Wednesday is the eightieth anniversary of the first major action the federal government took against cannabis in the United States, and eight decades later, that same federal government has still failed to reduce Americans’ consumption of the plant. In fact, it’s on the rise.

Long before the era of prohibition, druggists used cannabis as a medicine. According to Origins, a joint publication by the Ohio State University and Miami University history departments:

“Cannabis, like opiates and cocaine, was freely available at drug stores in liquid form and as a refined product, hashish. Cannabis was also a common ingredient in turn-of-the-century patent medicines, over-the-counter concoctions brewed to proprietary formulas.”

Then, like today, it helped people relax:

“The hashish candy advertised in an 1862 issue of Vanity Fair as a treatment for nervousness and melancholy, for example, was also ‘a pleasurable and harmless stimulant.’ ‘Under its influence all classes seem to gather new inspiration and energy,’ the advertisement explained.”

Though in 1906 the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act required patent medicine companies to list cannabis as an ingredient in products where it was present – and between 1914 and 1925 26 states passed laws prohibiting it — it wasn’t until 1937 federal authorities took substantial action.

On August 2, 1937, Congress passed the “Marihuana Tax Act,” which was largely the result of anti-narcotic crusader Henry Anslinger’s mission to ban the plant. As Time has explained, creating a “tax” on the substance effectively outlawed it:

“As with the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, Congress deemed an act taxing and regulating drugs, rather than prohibiting them, less susceptible to legal challenge. As a result, the 1937 legislation was ostensibly a revenue measure. Just as the Harrison Act used taxation and regulation to, in effect, prohibit morphine, heroin and other drugs, the Marijuana Tax Act essentially outlawed the possession or sale of marijuana.”

There are a variety of documented reasons for this ban. For one, Henry Anslinger was hysterically opposed to drugs. According to Origins, Anslinger,  a “former assistant commissioner of the Prohibition Bureau who headed the U.S. Treasury Department’s Narcotics Bureau from 1930 to 1962,” had previously advocated against a ban on cannabis because he believed it would be difficult to enforce (you don’t say!).

Origins explained:

“However, Anslinger began to capitalize on fears about marijuana while pressing a public relations campaign to encourage the passage of uniform anti-narcotics legislation in all 48 states. He later lobbied in favor of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.”

Many of these fears were the result of calculated campaigns in the 1920s by prohibition activists, who were inspired by their “success” in banning alcohol. Further, William Randolph Hearst, the infamous publishing magnate, launched a campaign to associate cannabis with violence and the degradation of society.

“The association of murder, torture, and mindless violence with marijuana was not borne out by evidence or actual events but blossomed thanks to the vivid imaginations of the journalists charged with sensationalizing the tired story of drug use and addiction,” Origins noted.

Similarly, Anslinger sounded the alarm on the alleged murders and rapes people committed while under the influence of the devil’s lettuce. In 1936, the film Reefer Madness, which now plays like a comedy, warned of the psychosis, violence, and dangers cannabis could bring about. The film warned of “marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.” Much of the testimony advocating the 1937 tax act focused on these unfounded fears, and Anslinger led the way.

“How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year can only be conjectured,” he wrote in a 1937 article titled “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth.” (Today, some research suggests cannabis is not linked to increases in violent crime).

The only witness who testified against the proposed ban was a representative from the American Medical Association, who congressmen dismissed (Anslinger also made an effort throughout his career to discredit research suggesting cannabis was not dangerous). The bill easily passed, undermining legal cannabis and also outlawed the production of hemp. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law.

Another related driver behind the ban stemmed from racism within American society. Though cannabis had been used in medicines and hemp was used in industry to produce materials like rope (in the 1600s, colonists were actually required to grow it), Mexican immigrants introduced the practice of smoking the plant, which, “in turn, generated a reaction in the U.S., tinged perhaps with anti-Mexican xenophobia.” This fear spurred the 1906 regulation in the Pure Food and Drug Act and persisted into the 1930s.

As Rolling Stone noted, there had been conversations in the United States not just about cannabis use, but other drugs, since the late 19th century.

“But in the next 50 years, concerns about inebriation only translated into law if the substance wasn’t already controlled by a powerful industry, and if there was a perception, accurate or not, that a given drug was being used by poor people, immigrants, and people of color.”

As fears surrounding substance use grew, Rolling Stone observed, they dovetailed with racist stereotypes about the poor and minorities that assumed these groups were more likely to commit crimes, be lazy, and lack self-control when it came to “sex, violence, and intoxication.”

By 1952, Congress had passed the Boggs Act, which imposed strict mandatory sentences for various drugs, including cannabis. In the 1970s, the Controlled Substances Act was passed, placing drugs into “schedules” as we know them today.

Though Nixon touted the war on drugs as an effort to save society, one of his advisers, John Ehrlichman, reportedly claimed in the 1990s that they pursued cannabis as an effort to criminalize black and anti-war activist. Other former advisers then claimed Ehrlichman was either joking or mistaken, but a cursory examination of arrests for cannabis shows the war on weed has disproportionately affected African-Americans though they use the substance at roughly the same rate as white Americans.

Overall, according to the ACLU, cannabis arrests accounted for over half of all drug arrests between 2000 and 2010, and 88% of those were for possession.

Though states across the country have begun to legalize cannabis both for medicinal and recreational use, the federal government continues to dig its heels in. The DEA recently insisted that even cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid, falls into the ominous Schedule I category, which also includes MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms but fails to cover highly dangerous and toxic legal drugs like alcohol and opioids.

Many industries also continue to oppose cannabis legalization. The alcohol industry, the private prison industry, and prison guard and police unions all lobby against legalization.  Most notably, pharmaceutical companies fight to keep cannabis illegal, all while at least one opioid producer concocts its own synthetic cannabis with the approval of the same FDA and DEA that opted to keep cannabis a Schedule I drug.

But against all these odds, cannabis continues to beat the government and establishment’s decades-long fight against it.

Many Americans have outgrown the fears instilled in them through films like Reefer Madness and are beginning to accept a live-and-let-live mentality. Though more research on the plant is undoubtedly needed (and limited due to federal restrictions), preliminary scientific studies and anecdotal evidence suggest the plant has the potential to treat a variety of ailments, from epilepsy to nausea to Parkinson’s disease. Veterans are increasingly using it to treat PTSD.

The United States’ relationship with cannabis is coming full circle, returning to times when it was a common ingredient in everyday medications. Many Americans are opting to substitute opioids with cannabis for pain, and opioid overdose deaths are lower in states with legal medical cannabis. Cannabis also poses a threat to profits from other pharmaceuticals.

Beer company profits have fallen in states where cannabis is legal, and some states are even moving to legalize hemp.

Meanwhile, cannabis industry is expected to generate $20 billion annually by 2020, and police are frequently trolled for attempting to enforce cannabis laws that Americans increasingly perceive as petty and unproductive.

All the while, federal bureaucracies continue to lag behind, clinging to outdated myths and prohibitions that — over the course of the better half of a century — have been debunked and proven ineffective, which is unsurprising considering humans have been consuming the plant for well over 2,000 years.

As Opioid Crisis Rages, Federal Drug Prosecutions Hit 25-Year Low

Members of the legal marijuana industry, who for months have been nervously anticipating a federal crackdown led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, can breathe a sigh of relief. According to data from the Justice Department, the number of federal drug-crime prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in 25 years, and the decline has continued to accelerate since President Donald Trump took office.

The latest data show that federal law-enforcement agencies prosecuted fewer drug offenders over the past 12 months than at any time during the last quarter century. During the first five months of the Trump administration, only 8,814 drug offenders were prosecuted by the federal government, a drop of 9 percent as compared with the 9,687 federal criminal cases prosecuted between February and June 2016.

Prosecutions fell sharply in June on a month-to-month basis following a spike in May. Over the long term, the six-month average has been declining slowly since 2003.

“During the month of June 2017, only 1,578 new prosecutions for drug crimes were brought - down 16.1 percent from the number in May. And prosecutions over the past year are even lower than they were five years ago. Overall, the data show that drug prosecutions in U.S. district courts are down 27.6 percent from levels reported in 2012.”

According to the report, most (75.8%) federal drug prosecutions involve trafficking charges, while another 21.8% are related to organized crime.

“So far during the first nine months of FY 2017, about 1 in 5 cases (21.8%) were the result of organized crime task force efforts. An additional three out of four (75.8%) fell under drug trafficking programs, while simple drug possession was the nature of the offense in the remaining 2.5 percent of cases.

The lead investigative agency for the largest number of prosecutions so far during FY 2017 was the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the lead investigative agency in nearly four out every ten (38.9%) federal criminal prosecutions filed.”

If the decline continues at the current rate, the US is on track to see a sharp drop in the number of per-capita prosecutions in 2017.

“During FY 2016 the Justice Department said the government obtained 68.9 narcotics/drugs prosecutions for every one million people in the United States. If pace during the first nine months of FY 2017 continues at the same rate, narcotics/drugs prosecutions for one million people in the United States this year will be 65.3.”

While the long-term trend appears to ignore the worsening opioid epidemic, some of the largest year-over-year increases occurred in regions where opioid abuse has surged since the beginning of the decade. The Northern District of West Virginia, a state with the largest number of opioid prescriptions written per capita, saw the largest year-over-year increase. Over the past five years, Wyoming saw the largest increase n prosecutions, up 242%. The district with the largest projected drop in the rate of prosecutions was New Mexico, with 30%.

The most-active district is unsurprisingly situated along the US-Mexico border. The Southern District of California, which encompasses San Diego, saw 453.6 prosecutions per million people last year, while the District of Arizona ranked second.  

Sessions has insisted that stepped up enforcement of drug laws is essential to combating the worsening opioid abuse crisis, but the decline  But the decline in prosecutions suggests that law enforcement agencies have been somehow less active in targeting high-level drug offenders, even as overdose deaths rise to all-time highs thanks to powerful synthetic opioids that have penetrated the markets for heroin, cocaine and even prescription pills. Given the high stakes, and the actions against drug manufacturers recetly ataken by a nmber of states" attorneys general, the decline in prosecutions at the federal level makes little sense.

Colombia Produces Record Cocaine Crop For 2nd Straight Year

We didn’t need any more data to definitively expose the many shortcomings of the US-led global prohibition on narcotics – but we got one today, courtesy of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

New figures show that cocaine production in Colombia reached an all-time high for the second straight year in 2016, as coca cultivation in the South American country surged 52 percent, spanning 146,000 hectares, compared with 96,000 in 2015. The 2016 crops produced an estimated 866 metric tons of cocaine, an increase of 35 percent compared to 2015. Meanwhile, cocaine use appears to be increasing in the two largest markets, North America and Europe.

While the UNODC said the survey results were “disappointing,” it noted that there were “some positives” in the report, including an increase of 49 per cent in seizures of cocaine - from 253 tons confiscated in 2015 to 378 tons in 2016. Of course, each seizure inevitably means some low-level trafficker – possibly working under the threat of violence – is being jailed, at an enormous cost to the public, while the seizure has little impact on the larger organization.

The rise in production comes as FARC, a communist insurgency that controlled patches of the Colombian countryside for more than 50 years, renounced drug trafficking under the terms of a peace agreement that was ratified by Colombia’s Congress in November. The group started disarming in March, but doubts remain: Can the group’s members will be able to work regular jobs. Meanwhile, FARC, which  once supported itself mainly through selling drugs and kidnapping wealthy individuals, is transforming into a political party.

In any event, one Colombian law enforcement official who spoke with the Guardian sounded optimistic about the country’s ability to work with FARC to reduce coca production.

“José Ángel Mendoza, the head of Colombia’s counter-narcotics police, said Colombia faced “a difficult historical moment”, but stressed that the figures reflected the state of the country on 31 December 2016.

Since then, the government has put in place an ambitious plan to eradicate 100,000 hectares of coca by the year’s end. Half of that amount is to be forcibly eradicated, and the other half removed through crop substitution agreements with coca farmers.

The substitution program is part of a peace deal with Farc rebels, who renounced drug trafficking as part of their demobilization deal. During much of the group’s 53 years as an armed insurgency, it financed its fight through the drug trade.

Former combatants have committed to work with the government to convince farmers to replace coca crops with another way to make a living.”

This forced eradication program is already yielding results, the Colombians say.

“Already 40% of the goal of forced eradication has been met, and 86,000 families – who account for as much as 76,000 hectares of coca – have signed on to crop substitution programs in exchange for subsidies of about $11,000 per farmer over the course of two years, according to the government.”

As VICE noted, at a joint press conference in May, President Trump pushed for Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos to increase eradication efforts. Santos won the Nobel peace prize late last year for his work on the FARC deal.

Trump said Colombia is one of the US’s closest allies “in the hemisphere,” before reaffirming US support for destroying cocaine crops and refineries by providing DEA personnel and resources to augment localized eradication efforts.

“We have a problem with drugs and you have a very big problem with drugs,” Trump reminded Santos.

“Recently, we have seen an alarmed — and I mean really a very highly alarmed and alarming trend,” Trump said. “Last year, Colombia coca cultivation and cocaine production reached a record high, which, hopefully, will be remedied very quickly by the President.  We must confront this dangerous threat to our societies together.”

Trump has said he believes his wall will help keep drugs out of the US ("walls work, just ask Israel"). Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans" plans for reducing the flow of illegal narcotics are no different from their predecessors. Once FARC has left the countryside, a new criminal group will take its place – an organization possibly more violent and unpredictable than the one that preceded it. Indeed, as long is there is demand, somebody will find a way to meet it. Maybe it"s time for governments to acknowledge that prohibition has failed, and that regulation could be a more productive strategy.

To be fair, if Santos does manage to engineer a sharp drop in Colombia’s cocaine exports with his voluntary crop-rotation plan, he might earn a Nobel Prize in economics, too.  
 

Mexico Just Beat the U.S. to Legalizing Medical Marijuana

These days, when Mexico and the United States are mentioned in the same sentence, it usually has something to do with President Trump building a wall. So it’s a little bit ironic that Mexico beat the U.S. to tearing down the wall between its citizens and access to legal medical marijuana. On June 21, 2017, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a decree legalizing medical cannabis in the country, with the strong support of the nation’s Lower House of Congress. [1]

There’s just this…one…little…pesky detail: only products with 1% THC or lower will be permitted. That’s just slightly less than some of the 20%+ THC products some of the legal medical cannabis dispensaries in America offer. Heh. Even so, the decree classified the psychoactive ingredient as “therapeutic.” [1] [2]

In the declaration, Nieto called on the Ministry of Health to draft and implement regulations and public policies regarding “the medicinal use of pharmacological derivatives of cannabis sativa, indica, and Americana or marijuana, including tetrahydrocannabinol its isomers, and stereo-chemical variants, as well as how to regulate the research and national production of them.” [2]

The decree is a start, but nothing close to what pro-marijuana lawmakers had hoped for. Sen. Miguel Barbosa said the legislation was “well below the expectations of society.” Sen. Armando Rios Peter referred to it as a “tiny” step away from a failed drug policy. [1]

But the bloody drug trade has made large swaths of Latin America terrifying warzones, so the move could ease such tensions, though the effect could be negligible, because – come on, 1% THC or less?

Though an estimated 100,000 people have died at the hands of drug cartels in the last decade, marijuana legalization of any kind is remarkably unpopular in Mexico. About 66% of the population opposes it.

The Catholic Church staunchly opposes legalization, even for medicinal purposes, once writing in an editorial:

“A drug is a drug even if it’s sold as a soft medicinal balm. Bad Mexican copycats emulate the neighbor to put on the table of ‘sane democracy’ a bleak, absurd and counterproductive debate. Recreational marijuana is a placebo to ease the pain of the social destruction in which we irremediably wallow.”

So, it might be a baby step, but it’s still a step in the right direction.

A statement from the Lower House of Parliament reads:

“The ruling eliminates the prohibition and criminalization of acts related to the medicinal use of marijuana and its scientific research, and those relating to the production and distribution of the plant for these purposes.” [2]

President Nieto was once a major opponent of marijuana legalization, but now believes that drug addiction should be thought of as a public health problem, and has advocated for Mexico and the U.S. to follow similar policies on drug use and marijuana legalization. [1]

Sources:

[1] The Washington Post

[2] The Fresh Toast

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

Ron Paul On The Drug War: Will The Trump Administration OD On Authoritarianism?

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Proseprity,

Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors in drug cases to seek the maximum penalty authorized by federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Sessions’ order represents a setback to the progress made toward restoring compassion and common sense to the sentencing process over the past few years. Sessions’ action also guarantees that many nonviolent drug law offenders will continue spending more time in prison than murderers.

Sessions’ support for mandatory minimums is no surprise, as he has a history of fanatical devotion to the drug war. Sessions’ pro-drug war stance is at odds with the reality of the drug war’s failure. Over forty years after President Nixon declared war on drugs, the government cannot even keep drugs out of prisons!

As was the case with alcohol prohibition, the drug war has empowered criminal gangs and even terrorists to take advantage of the opportunity presented by prohibition to profit by meeting the continued demand for drugs. Drug prohibition enables these criminal enterprises to make profits far above the potential profits if drugs where legalized. Ironically, the so-called “law-and-order” politicians who support the drug war are helping enrich the very criminals they claim to oppose!

The war on drugs also makes street drugs more lethal by incentivizing the creation of more potent and, thus, more dangerous drugs. Of course, even as Sessions himself admits, the war on drugs also leads to increased violence, as drug dealers cannot go to the courts to settle disputes among themselves or with their customers.

Before 9/11, the war on drugs was the go-to excuse used to justify new infringements on liberty. For example, laws limiting our ability to withdraw, or even carry, large sums of cash and laws authorizing civil asset forfeiture were justified by the need to crack down on drug dealers and users. The war on drugs is also the root cause of the criminal justice system’s disparate treatment of minorities and the militarization of local police.

The war on drugs is a war on the Constitution as well. The Constitution does not give the federal government authority to regulate, much less ban, drugs. People who doubt this should ask themselves why it was necessary to amend the Constitution to allow the federal government to criminalize drinking alcohol but not necessary to amend the Constitution to criminalize drug use.

Today, a majority of states have legalized medical marijuana, and a growing number are legalizing recreational marijuana use. Enforcement of federal laws outlawing marijuana in those states is the type of federal interference with state laws that conservatives usually oppose. Hopefully, in this area the Trump administration will exercise restraint and respect state marijuana laws.

Sessions’ announcement was not the only pro-drug war announcement made by the administration this week. President Trump himself, in a meeting with the president of Columbia, promised to continue US intervention in South and Central America to eliminate drug cartels. President Trump, like his attorney general, seems to not understand that the rise of foreign drug cartels, like the rise of domestic drug gangs, is a consequence of US drug policy.

The use of government force to stop adults from putting certain substances into their bodies - whether marijuana, saturated fats, or raw milk - violates the nonaggression principle that is the bedrock of a free society. Therefore, all those who care about protecting individual liberty and limiting government power should support ending the drug war. Those with moral objections to drug use should realize that education and persuasion, carried out through voluntary institutions like churches and schools, is a more moral and effective way to discourage drug use than relying on government force.

Canada Officially Moves To Legalize Recreational Marijuana Nationwide

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

Canada officially moved to legalize recreational marijuana on Thursday when the government introduced legislation allowing the possession of small amounts of cannabis. The new law also sets regulations for the sale, growth, and purchase of the plant.

USA Today reports:

“Canada’s federal government set the age at 18, but is allowing each of the provinces to determine if it should be higher. The provinces will also decide how the drug will be sold and distributed. The law also defines the amount of THC in a driver’s blood, as detected by a roadside saliva test, that would be illegal. Marijuana taxes will be announced at a later date.”

Vox notes that “Canadians will be allowed to grow up to four marijuana plants per household and possess up to 30 grams per person. For the most part, the bill follows the recommendations made by a recent federal task force on marijuana legalization.”

The outlet points out that the details of the bill could change as the bill works its way through Parliament, adding that if the legislation passes, it could be illegal under international law, which still favors prohibition. Canada joins Uruguay, the only other nation to have fully legalized recreational marijuana (Portugal has had great success with its decriminalization of all drugs).

Canada first allowed medical marijuana for terminal illnesses in 2001, and in some parts of the country, like Vancouver, weed shops are legal and law enforcement tolerates use of the plant. But the new legislation codifies the rights of all Canadians to use it, even if it still places restrictions on use (for example, attempting to regulate THC blood content in the context of driving  a car is a controversial practice in the United States, where studies show driving while high is far less dangerous than driving drunk)

If the law is passed, it will undoubtedly cut into crime rates in Canada, where tens of thousands of marijuana users are still arrested for possession every year.

As the Liberal Party, which introduced the legislation, argues:

“Arresting and prosecuting these offenses is expensive for our criminal justice system. It traps too many Canadians in the criminal justice system for minor, non-violent offenses. At the same time, the proceeds from the illegal drug trade support organized crime and greater threats to public safety, like human trafficking and hard drugs.”

If the bill passes, Canada will join multiple U.S. states, including California, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, which have all legalized recreational marijuana. It will join an even longer list of U.S. states and other countries relaxing laws, even if they are not outright repealing them.

Canada has taken a forward-thinking approach to drug addiction in general; last year the country began sponsoring injection centers where heroin addicts could consume their narcotics under the supervision of a doctor.

As mounting research shows the plant offers a wide range of medical benefits, and as the drug war continues to prove itself inefficient, ineffective, and destructive around the world, Canada’s recent move signals legalization is all but inevitable. As the Liberal Party of Canada’s website has argued:

“Canada’s current system of marijuana prohibition does not work. It does not prevent young people from using marijuana and too many Canadians end up with criminal records for possessing small amounts of the drug.”

This Won’t End Well, Trump Names Rabid Cannabis Prohibitionist as Drug Czar

Washington, DC – In a move likely indicative of a coming resurgence in the long-running “war on drugs,” the Trump administration has appointed extreme marijuana prohibitionist, Pennsylvania Rep. Tom Marino to serve as U.S. drug czar, according to a report by CBS News. As drug czar, Marino would be responsible for coordinating drug control strategy and federal government funding of the “drug war.”

Marino is known as a rabid hardliner on drug policy, going so far as to proclaim that nonviolent drug offenders should be placed in a “hospital-slash-prison.” Congressman Marino is set to resign his position in the House to direct the Office of National Drug Policy Control, which advises President Trump on drug policy.

Since 2011, Marino has voted against amendments on three different occasions that would have prohibited the U.S Department of Justice from interfering with state medical cannabis laws and allowed Department of Veterans Affairs doctors to give military veterans medical cannabis recommendations, according to MassRoots.

Additionally, Marino voted against a law to protect state-controlled CBD programs from federal crackdowns and has at least twice opposed industrial hemp legislation. Perhaps the biggest irony here is the fact that Marino, in an October interview with the Sun-Gazette, had the nerve to absurdly claim he’s a “states’ rights guy.”

In the same interview, he noted that the only way he would ever agree to legalizing cannabis would be after “a really in-depth medical scientific study.” Revealing his extreme level of ignorance about the veracity of medicinal cannabis, Marino said:

“If it does help people one way or another, then produce it in pill form … You can’t smoke it for this, but you take a pill. But don’t make an excuse because you want to smoke marijuana. Look what’s happening to states and cities who are legalizing it. They are running into a lot of problems.”

Revealing his extremist views on drug policy in testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, Marino noted:

“One treatment option I have advocated for years would be placing nondealer, nonviolent drug abusers in a secured hospital-type setting under the constant care of health professionals. Once the person agrees to plead guilty to possession, he or she will be placed in an intensive treatment program until experts determine that they should be released under intense supervision. If this is accomplished, then the charges are dropped against that person. The charges are only filed to have an incentive for that person to enter the hospital-slash-prison, if you want to call it.”

The appointment of a rapid prohibitionist as drug czar, in addition to having Attorney General Jeff “good people don’t smoke marijuana” Sessions helming the DOJ, seemingly indicates that we will see states’ rights rolled back in favor of allowing federal interference in state policy.

READ MORE:  Cops Use Faulty Test Kits to Incite Fear about THC in Water Supply -- Scientists Say It"s Impossible

There is a clear and present danger of the combination of Sessions at the helm of the DOJ, and Marino as drug czar. They can attempt to usher in major policy changes that will likely result in a crackdown in states that have legalized the recreational, and even the medicinal use, of cannabis.

If Jeff Sessions appointment to Attorney General wasn’t enough of a wake-up call regarding the extreme danger legal cannabis currently faces, the appointment of Marino should elucidate that a major crackdown on marijuana is on the horizon.

Make no mistake that all available evidence suggests the federal government is preparing to turn the clock back on cannabis policy. Please share this extremely important information, as the fate of legal cannabis in the United States likely hangs in the balance.

Why Is The State In Our Bedrooms & Living Rooms As Well As Our Bank Accounts?

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

There"s a word to describe a state with unlimited power over the private lives, spaces, choices, behaviors, communications and accounts of its citizens: totalitarian.

A limited government is concerned with proscribing the exploitation of citizens by elites and criminals. A Totalitarian State seeks control of everything--including what goes on in the bedrooms, living rooms and minds of its citizens.

A recent conversation with my longtime friend G.F.B. clarified a key distinction between the public and private spheres.

G.F.B."s example of the state exerting control over its citizens" private choices and behaviors in their own homes was the Prohibition of alcohol which was the federal law of the land in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933.

Though alcohol consumption in the home was not banned outright at the federal level, the net result of banning the manufacture and distribution of alcohol was the criminalization of everyday citizens" attempts to purchase alcohol for their home consumption.

A limited government"s purview is actions taken in public that could harm other citizens. Drunken drivers, for example, end up killing innocent citizens. Limiting the "freedom" to drive drunk is a state action that is limited to the public sphere: if a citizen chooses to get drunk in the privacy of his own home, that"s different from driving on public streets while drunk.

In the good old days of the early Republic, the government was focused on matters of sovereignty and defense, not what citizens were doing in their own homes or communicating in private letters. Enforcement of federal laws was largely limited to collecting tariffs and other revenues and adjudicating property disputes.

Central states have long had an interest in control and adjudicating property disputes.ling every aspect of their citizens" private lives, beliefs and choices. What separated these total-control autocracies and totalitarian states from governments "of the people, by the people, for the people" was the sacrosanct civil liberties that protected the privacy and private choices of the citizens from state control.

The unholy alliance of "progressive" do-gooders and let-me-tell-you-how-to-live religious zealots delivered Prohibition, and a host of other "we want control of your bedroom and living room" regulations. This moral superiority was of course the height of hubris and hypocrisy, as the zealots and "progressives" were just as sinful, petty and venal as any "unenlightened" non-believer.

The separation of church and state was dissolved by the moral crusades in which the "morally superior" wielded the brute power of the state to punish anyone who didn"t live according to the demands of the "morally superior."

Look, if a private citizen wants to shoot up smack in the privacy of his own home, and perhaps end his life in an overdose, that should be his right. Who authorized the state to intercede in private choices and behaviors?

The state may limit the "freedom" to inject others with smack, or promote the injection of smack publicly, but it has no right to impose its view of "rightness" on the choices made in the bedrooms and living rooms of private citizens.

The Prohibition of drugs has been an unmitigated catastrophe for those ensnared in the War on Drugs gulag and for the nation. The state has the option of educating the citizenry about the potential dangers of drugs, including alcohol and cigarettes, and limiting the sale of these drugs to minors, but its prohibitions should be limited to the public sphere.

Yesterday, I described how the state can steal money from your bank account before informing you that the state suspects you may owe taxes, but with no actual evidence to support this suspicion. First they steal your money, and the bank deducts an additional $100 for the hard work of digitally transferring your money to the state, then they notify you of their suspicions.

If this isn"t Kafkaesque, then what is?

A limited government would be required to go through public, judicial processes to gain the authority to take money from your account. But the state doesn"t need any judicial process or review; a nameless bureaucrat (and his/her computer program) simply enters your name and bank account in a "suspicious" list and the machinery of the state steals your money and then informs you after the fact of your presumed guilt.

There"s a word to describe a state with unlimited power over the private lives, spaces, choices, behaviors, communications and accounts of its citizens: totalitarian.

Smith"s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

Legal Weed is Doing What Trump’s Wall and a Trillion Dollar Drug War NEVER Will

Vowing to be “ruthless,” building a mammoth wall, and revisiting crackdowns on federal cannabis prohibition won’t stop barbarous drug cartels or the flow of substances the State deems illegal into the United States — reinvigorating the war on drugs will, in fact, have quite the opposite effect ostensively intended.

But if he sticks to his word (unlike with that dubious swamp promise) President Donald Trump will empower the exact criminals he eviscerates publicly by keeping illicit substances the prized goods of the black market.

Perhaps the president simply has not examined the overwhelming evidence across-the-board that decriminalization or legalization focuses funds on providing help to addicts, robs cartels of viability, lowers the rate of drug abuse, and empties prisons of otherwise nonviolent offenders.

Or perhaps he has.

Because the war on drugs wasn’t meant to be won — or, at least, not by anyone but the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial machine, the for-profit prison-industrial complex, politicians, and, perhaps incidentally, violent drug cartels.

“We’ve defended the borders of other nations, while leaving our own borders wide open, for anyone to cross — and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate,” Trump proclaimed in his first full speech to Congress, moments later adding that, with getting tough, “Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately, stop.”

Abandoning logic for a fear-based appeal to the perpetually paranoid masses, Trump continues heralding the notorious border Mexico border wall as a feasible method to keep the bad guys and bad drugs out of the U.S. — presumably under the premise Americans will be safer. He continued,

“For that reason, we will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border. It will be started ahead of schedule and, when finished, it will be a very effective weapon against drugs and crime.

“As we speak, we are removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our citizens. Bad ones are going out as I speak tonight and as I have promised.”

Not many would argue the presence of violent gang members isn’t desirable — particularly if they involved in violent and destructive behavior — but expecting the deportation of criminals and cartel members to somehow stifle the drug pipeline or thwart criminal activity is ludicrously negligent.

Worse, reviving the dead horse that is the cannabis prohibition robs Americans of a vital medicine not only treating everything from cancer, Crohn’s disease, childhood epilepsy, PTSD, and countless other conditions, it prevents people addicted to tobacco and dangerous opioid painkillers from having access to a potential cure.

Claiming you have the country’s best interests at heart while ratcheting up the effort to prosecute those who use a plant, for any reason, belies Trump’s actual goals of placating the somnambulant masses while ensuring excessive laws generate income for prisons, police, and Big Pharma.

“But this president can’t, as he as forcefully remarked, expect much fairness from the national media, and if he keeps promising draconian reductions in crime and especially drug abuse, and doesn’t act accordingly, it will haunt him,” writes the National Review’s Conrad Black. “The War on Drugs has largely been a fraud and a complete failure. After the imprisonment of nearly 7 million people and the spending of at least $1.5 trillion, narcotics are as readily available — and as or more widely used — and absorb more of the GDP than ever. And the United States is not blameless in the inflammation of virtual civil wars in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere, though there were many other contributing causes in those countries.”

If the new administration sought seriously for a major victory in the war on drugs, Trump and his cohorts would look to Portugal and other countries where — although kinks are still being worked out — decriminalization of all drugs has had impressive results in reducing crime, addiction, and imprisonment.

But broad decriminalization wouldn’t keep Americans addicted to prescription opioid pharmaceuticals — thus yanking the unspoken basis for U.S. troop presence out from under that operation. Broad decriminalization, by nature, means less people would wind up mired in the boggling complexity that is the court and prison system.

Something darker than pure profit motivates political drug warriors, however — this isn’t just about the money.

Cannabis prohibition and the classification of substances as arbitrarily harmful — despite voluminous evidence even so-called harder drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and cocaine have viable medicinal qualities — represent an insidious method of control. American society tends to conflate morality with legality, thus instilling a stigma around substances, against those who ingest, and particularly against anyone struggling with dependence.

Drugs and users have been horrendously stigmatized throughout the duration of this failed political battle, precisely as former President Richard Nixon desired when he ratcheted up the war on pot in the name of criminalizing the antiwar left and being black. The worse opinion the public maintains of drug culture, the simpler it will be for the State to hoodwink the ignorant into believing the easily-refuted — such as that cannabis holds no medical value and those who partake must be stoners and amoral lawbreakers.

This pits citizen against citizen and neighbor against neighbor, as the State encourages everyone to poke their noses in the affairs of everyone else, and dutifully report anything even minimally suspicious.

Militarized police investigating drug ‘crimes’ have permission to knock down doors, ransack residences, seize assets — houses, cars, cash, savings, and any valuables — in many cases, when the activity is only suspected of taking place.

As a bellicose nation with the most bloated military budget on the planet, our choice of belligerent language aptly describes the war on drugs and its consequences — masking the need to question its validity with the somber overtones of a military endeavor.

“Instead of conducting a serious war,” Black continues, “which would entail a massive sweep of campuses and a severe interdiction of delivery, as well as a tight control of border points and the air approaches to the country, it has been easier, these 40 years, just to troll through African-American and Latino areas, round up users, give first offenders a soft ride for denunciations of their suppliers, and send 7 million of such easily replaceable people to prison on absurdly extreme sentences, and masquerade as warriors against drugs. If the anti-drug war were conducted against white middle- and upper-income-area users, and the university students of America, with the same zeal it is waged against the non-white poor, the demand for and supply of drugs would decline sharply, the obscenely inflated number of incarcerated people would skyrocket, the ranks of students in institutions of higher learning would be thinned out sharply; and practically every elected official in the country would be impeached, recalled, or hammered at the polls.”

In telling ways, the United States has surreptitiously held loyal to its Puritanical roots, sanctimoniously denouncing illicit substances on the world stage while secretly taking a toke or snorting a line behind closed doors.

This — that Americans, like anyone else, wish to be left to live life without a nanny state dictating what should be verboten — is the elephant in the drug war room.

Trump doesn’t want to end the war on drugs anymore than any other president in a succession of administrations who see value in depriving the populace of liberties while profiting off the misery criminalization brings.

No matter how tall or impenetrable the president and his supporters build this wall — no matter how tough on crime and drugs, users and dealers U.S. police forces get — nothing will ever stop these substances from circulating.

Demand necessitates supply, but rather than legalization and resuscitating the economy through businesses centered on cannabis and hemp, the carbon-copy White House has chosen the predictable, stale, and forever-hollow call to arms against drugs.

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But in actuality Trump’s heightened war on drugs just another tired manifestation of the government’s war on you.