This NewsFeed from Drug Sense is brought to you from The Canadian Harm Reduction Network
The Los Angeles Daily News ran several stories last week about newborn babies being taken from mothers due to false positives on drug tests. The stories are so important that we excerpt three of the stories here, and strongly recommend the full stories to anyone with time to read them. In addition to the overview and a shocking look at the high numbers of false positives, there is a heartbreaking story of one family who paid the ultimate price for this cruel policy.
Also last week, trouble in the U.S. peyote market; and one Ohio town is having a conversation in the wake of drug sweeps at a local school.
At least some former law and order conservatives are seeing the folly of the drug war, according to a story in the New York Times. But in Ohio, at least one law and order judge still doesn't get it at all. A different judge in Indiana is trying to sort out the mess made by police who appear to have used money confiscated from alleged drug deals as a general slush fund. And, finally, mark my words, when semi-subs are outlawed, only outlaws will have semi-subs.
As noted in the last issue of this newsletter, a recent drug war surge in California has caused at least one columnist to question federal priorities.
Yet another cannabis consumer has fallen victim to a grossly disproportional paramilitary police raid.
The depiction of "cannabis culture" in the popular media is a double- edged sword, normalizing cannabis and humanizing growers, sellers and consumers on the one hand, while fostering and perpetuating stereotypes on the other.
Yet another study has concluded that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, which is rather like saying that the Earth is smaller than the Sun ... by several orders of magnitude. Do we really need more studies on this subject?
To demonstrate their drug-fighting zeal, communist officials in China had six "drug dealers" executed last week. While China regularly executes ostensible drug "dealers," the executions have little effect. "The number of drug-related cases have been growing," admitted Supreme People's Court spokesman Ni Shouming. With China's growing economic prowess comes a growing smorgasbord of drugs: "The quantity and new types of drugs are increasing."
The Mexican government last week gladly accepted $400 million of money courtesy the U.S. taxpayer, "to fight drugs." To make the arrangement more acceptable to Mexican politicians and law enforcement, "House and Senate leaders toned down the human rights" concerns. Ironically, shortly after the $400 million gift to Mexican drug war camp followers was announced, embarrassing police training videos surfaced in Leon, Mexico in which police are shown being taught how to torture suspects. "Perhaps it looks inhuman to us," explained one Mexican official, but everyone else is doing it, too: this is a "method that is used all over the world." Police are shown training how to force a victim "to crawl through vomit and injecting carbonated water into the nose of another."
And in Canada this week, another B.C. grow op bust. Fifteen police, trained in the latest U.S. SWAT-team tactics, raided a grow operation in Prince Rupert. As is customary, guns were drawn, and "perps" were roughed up and thrown to the ground. After all, grow ops are associated with possible danger to children. Electrical hazards, chemical hazards: all these things and more inside of a grow op could harm kids, we are told: so police want to take grow shows down - to save the kids. Confused police suspected something was amiss when the marijuana plants they expected to find turned out to be, well, tomatoes. A search of the employee's cars failed to turn up so much as a single cannabis cigarette. Police left, but so far haven't mentioned the flub, nor have they apologized to the indoor tomato farmers they roughed up. And all that talk about how grow shows might "endanger children" with the indoor lights, chemicals and dangerous wiring? Switch the plant from cannabis to tomatoes, and such indoor grow op concerns vanish.