Posts Tagged ‘Ronald Reagan’

This Week in Drugs (Nov. 12, 2010)

Nov 12th, 10 / 2 Comments

by David Robles

Results from the Nov. 2 general election in Arizona are still coming in, with medical marijuana Proposition 203 now within 725 votes of winning as of Friday afternoon. Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell told The Associated Press that provisional ballots were leaning in favor of the measure. The gap has narrowed significantly since election day, when the measure was failing by about 7,000 votes. There were approximately 59,000 outstanding ballots left to count as of Friday afternoon. UPDATE: Prop. 203 passed!

Will California’s failed Proposition 19 launch a global conversation about marijuana prohibition? Reuters had an interesting post-election analysis on the measure here.

Gulf cartel leader Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” Cardenas, or “Tony the Storm,” was killed in a shootout with Mexican marines in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, on Friday according to the Associated Press. The next day, gunmen from the rival Zetas gang hung messages mocking his death. The Zetas, a gang of hit men formed more than a decade ago by former Mexican soldiers, split from the Gulf cartel earlier this year. President Obama called his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderon on Saturday “to reaffirm United States support for Mexico’s efforts to end the impunity of organized criminal groups,”  according to a statement from the White House. More than 31,000 people have been killed in Mexico since Calderon took office and launched his cartel crackdown in December 2006.

This week saw a continuation of the flagrant drug war violence in Mexico with at least 20 murdered over the weekend in Ciudad Juarez, the AP reported Monday. Seven men believed to be attending a family party were gunned down Saturday night and 11 others were killed the same day, including two whose bodies were found dismembered. Two Juarez police officers were gunned down in their patrol car on Sunday.

As the Mexican army’s role as Mexico’s chief policing force increases, reports of human rights violations have followed suit, according to Al Jazeera English. The National Human Rights Commission reported more than 1,800 violations allegedly committed by the army in 2009, a more than 800 percent increase since President Calderon took office in 2006.

A 12-year-old boy known only as El Ponchis, or “the cloak,” is allegedly working as a hired assassin for the South Pacific Drug Cartel leader Jesus Radilla, according to The Sun. Macabre videos of the boy depict him clubbing a man with a weapon marked “CPS” (Cartel Pacifico del Sur), posing with a rifle by a dead body, and slitting the throats of gang enemies nearly to the point of decapitation.

The ATF’s anti-gun trafficking initiative, Project Gunrunner, has “significant weaknesses,” according to a Department of Justice report Tuesday. The report criticized the ATF for focusing on less important gun dealers and “straw purchasers”rather than higher-level traffickers, smugglers, and the “ultimate recipients of the trafficked guns” in Mexico, Reuters reported, along with unsystematic sharing of intelligence with partners in the U.S. and Mexico. (Read our past coverage of gun trafficking to Mexico here.)

On Tuesday U.S. federal appeals court judge Juan Torruella told an audience at the University of Puerto Rico that legalizing marijuana and perhaps other drugs is a better way to combat drug abuse and crime. Nominated to be a federal judge by President Ford and elevated to the appeals court by Reagan in 1984, Judge Torruella believes legalization is the only “realistic” alternative following the loss of the drug war at great societal cost, according to AP.

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Drug Policy, Drug War History, Guns, Mexican drug cartels, This Week In Drugs

On this day in history: Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs

Jun 24th, 10 / 6 Comments

Like most people of my generation, my introduction to the drug war was the “Just Say No” anti-drug propaganda of the mid-1980s. I remember the commercials well: racially-ambiguous girls and gang-banger boys lured clean-cut kids in dark stairwells with the frightening promise that some drug –any drug – would make them “feel good.” Later, the TV taught me that my brain would fry like an egg if I ever strayed and said “yes” – even once.

Although it was President Richard Nixon who first named a national drug czar, it was Ronald Reagan who launched the anti-drug offensive as we know it. The time was ripe: the conservative revolution had begun — a backlash to the loose morals and rampant drug use of the 1960s and 1970s.  The war in Vietnam was over and the hippie generation had traded flower power for Wall Street chic. Reagan wanted to shrink government, and the drug war gave him moral high ground against cushy social entitlement programs and liberalism.

On June 24, 1982, Reagan signed Executive Order 12368, which gave the White House new control over national anti-drug efforts. Addiction treatment programs were cut. Aggressive interdiction was prioritized. Stiff prison sentences were urged. The propaganda battle, in which there was no room for nuance, no distinction between pot and heroin, geared up.

From the Rose Garden, Reagan called on international governments to join the fight against drug trafficking and made it clear that any solution other than tough law enforcement was simply another form of surrender:

“Drugs already reach deeply into our social structure, so we must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country, to let kids know the truth, to erase the false glamour that surrounds drugs, and to brand drugs such as marijuana exactly for what they are—dangerous, and particularly to school-age youth.

We can put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement, through cooperation with other nations to stop the trafficking, and by calling on the tremendous volunteer resources of parents, teachers, civic and religious leaders, and State and local officials.

We’re rejecting the helpless attitude that drug use is so rampant that we’re defenseless to do anything about it. We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win.” (Full remarks here.)

Now 28 years later, thousands have died in a U.S.-funded battle with drug cartels in Mexico, our prison systems are overflowing with non-violent drug offenders and our nation has spent $1 trillion with no measurable results. Last month, the War in Afghanistan officially became the United States’ longest military battle. But the War on Drugs has lasted even longer, with more casualties and domestic ramifications. It is time to consider whether this is a war that we as a nation can win, and at what cost. There will be more to come from CrawfordOnDrugs.com. Consider subscribing via RSS and follow me on Twitter (links to the left). And please join the conversation.

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Drug War History