The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.

But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.

Read the rest here.

Still trying to make satire redundant

San Francisco (who else?) has banned smoking by private citizens in their own homes (apartments). However, they did write in an exception... for weed. Yep. You can be fined $1000 for lighting up in your own home, unless it's a joint. 

From here.

Mexico — What Went Wrong?

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . .

Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.

Mexico, the Aggressor

Facts are stubborn and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts. Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., larger than that of any other single American trade partner (including Japan and Germany) except China. The architects of NAFTA long ago assured Americans that such a trade war would not break out, or that we should not worry over trade imbalances, given the desirability of outsourcing to take advantage of Mexico’s cheaper labor costs.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law.

What is also unsaid is that many of the millions of Mexican expatriates in the United States who send remittances home to Mexico are themselves beneficiaries of some sort of U.S. federal, state, or local support that allows them to free up cash to send back to Mexico.

When Obrador urges his fellow citizens to abandon their country and head illegally into the United States, his primary concern is not their general welfare and futures. He seems quite unconcerned that those who send home remittances live in poverty in the United States and seek offsetting subsidies from the U.S. government to find enough disposable income to save the Mexican government from its mostly corrupt self.

Why the U.S. government does not tax remittances and why it does not prohibit foreign nationals on public assistance from sending cash out of the country are some of the stranger phenomena of the entire strange illegal-immigration matrix.

Read the rest here.

On a related note; I talked about this back in 2011. You can read that blog post here.

Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Read the rest here.
HT: MG

Why so many cops like the war on drugs

It's a huge cash cow. Follow the money.

Some Clarity on the War on Drugs

MLB Suspends A-Roid + 12 Others

In the biggest surprise since this morning's sunrise Major League Baseball handed out suspensions to 13 players including Alex Rodriguez for chemical cheating. Most copped to the charges and accepted the MLB version of a plea bargain that let them off with 50 game suspensions. But A-Roid was in the cross-hairs for his attempts to entice others into cheating, attempts to obtain and destroy evidence and directly lying to MLB when questioned on the matter. No plea bargain there. He was suspended for 214 (211) games which will commence after his appeals are exhausted.

It is overwhelmingly likely he will be out for the entirety of the 2014 and whatever part of the 2015 season is left over from when he starts to serve the suspension. Some experts opine that this may effectively end his career. The Yankees however are still on the hook for whatever part of his contract is not voided by the suspension. So he stands to walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

My take is that this is a good first step and probably as much as could be hoped for given the constraints of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Union. One really encouraging sign is that unlike in the 90's and early 2000's when most players resisted any testing and did everything in their power to obstruct inquiries into the rampant doping, the pendulum seems to have swung. Most players now see chemical cheating as dangerous to the integrity of the game itself and are loudly demanding stronger sanctions and more aggressive testing. There is almost no sympathy being expressed for those caught doping.

Players are actually pushing their union delegates to impose even more severe penalties than what MLB has asked for in the past. Among the more popular suggestions being floated by angry ballplayers is going to a two strikes and your out rule, with a first offense being a 100 game suspension. Second offenses resulting in a lifetime ban from professional baseball. And one innovative idea that might carry the most deterrent power of any I've heard of so far. The suggestion being that any player caught doping on a first offense, and proven beyond any doubt, would be liable to having his contract terminated by his club without further appeal. Given the kinds of long term contracts, frequently worth tens of millions of dollars, with a lot of pay back loaded, this could be the key to bringing an end to the era of chemical cheating.

Anyways MLB gets two and a half cheers for mostly handling this particular case right. A few too many leaks for my taste but all in all they didn't make a hash out of it. There was talk of invoking the MLB equivalent to the death penalty and slapping A-Roid with a lifetime ban. But as much as I don't care for the man that would have been overkill for what was technically a first offense. Likewise they didn't try to deny him his right to appeal. That would have looked bad and actually made the bum a sympathetic character. Besides there's really no need. By every account MLB has absolutely damning evidence against A-Roid. So let him file his appeal. It's just delaying the inevitable.

Morally of course, judgment has been rendered. He really would do well to just let the Yankees quietly pay him off and retire from baseball. There's just no point in trying to comeback in 2015. Nothing he can do will salvage his reputation and the doors to the Hall of Fame are forever closed to him.

Correction: I initially posted that A-Rod was suspended for 214 games. It was actually 211.

Yankees Superstar A-Rod May Face Severe Sanctions For Doping

(CBS News) Milwaukee Brewers' outfielder Ryan Braun was one of at least 15 Major League Baseball players under investigation for taking performance-enhancing drugs. He was suspended Monday for the rest of the season, and an even bigger name could be next.

The game's highest-paid player, New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez is also under investigation. A Major League Baseball team executive told CBS News Braun's 65-game suspension could be nothing compared to what Rodriguez faces.

The executive said it's not a matter of "if" Rodriguez will be suspended for using performance enhancing drugs, but "when."

"They have an overwhelming amount of evidence on this guy showing multiple years of usage," the executive said. "He's met with Major League Baseball. He's seen the evidence. He is staring down a penalty much, much harsher than Braun's. It could be years... or even a lifetime suspension."

Read the rest here.

Group calls criminalizing drug use "Human Rights violation"

On the eve of a major conference on drug problems in the Western Hemisphere, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that jailing people for personal drug use constitutes a human rights violation and called for abolishing criminal penalties.

“To deter harmful drug use, governments should rely instead on non-penal regulatory and public health policies,” the organization said in a statement released at a news conference in Guatemala, where the annual general assembly of the Organization of American States this week will focus on the drug policies of member governments. “Subjecting people to criminal sanctions for the personal use of drugs, or for possession of drugs for personal use, infringes on their autonomy and right to privacy.”

Read the rest here.

Prohibition...

Unbelievably stupid? Yes.
Human Rights violation? Not even close. These people are trivializing a very weighty legal concept.

Obama: I’ve got ‘bigger fish to fry’ than pot smokers

In an interview with ABC News, President Obama told Barbara Walters that recreational pot smoking in states that have legalized the drug is not a major concern for his administration.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of marijuana smokers in Colorado and Washington, the two states where recreational use is now legal.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said.

Read the rest here.

Feds wrestle with legalized pot

Senior administration officials acknowledged Friday that they are wrestling with how to respond to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, which directly violates federal drug law and is sparking a broad debate about the direction of U.S. drug policy.

The most likely outcome will be that the Justice Department will prevent the laws from going into effect by announcing that federal law preempts the state initiatives, which would make marijuana legal for recreational use, law enforcement sources said. But the White House and the Justice Department have not made a decision yet, senior officials said.

Read the rest here.

Mexico to rethink drug war after two states legalize pot

MEXICO CITY — The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has left Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto and his team scrambling to reformulate their anti-drug strategies in light of what one senior aide said was a referendum that “changes the rules of the game.”

It is too early to know what Mexico’s response to the successful ballot measures will be, but a top aide said Peña Nieto and members of his incoming administration will discuss the issue with President Obama and congressional leaders in Washington this month. The legalization votes, however, are expected to spark a broad debate in Mexico about the direction and costs of the U.S.-backed drug war here.

Read the rest here.

Mexico has been brutalized by America's hopeless attempt at prohibition.

State Ballot Initiatives Advance Libertarian Causes

In an historic first that has been largely ignored in the media both Colorado and Washington State decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use. Oregon narrowly defeated a similar measure. Federal law still criminalizes marijuana. But this is a huge move signalling America's waning support for prohibition. It will also make it exceedingly difficult to enforce Federal law without the aid of local law enforcement.

On another front, and one where I am conflicted, Maine Washington and Maryland approved ballot measure legalizing same sex marriage. As I have said many times the government needs to get out of the marriage business and remove the word from the legal code. Anyone who wants their particular domestic arrangements recognized for purposes of benefits etc should simply draw up a contract and have it notarized by the Justice of the Peace or local equivalent. A civil union system such as exists in many European countries would also work. But marriage should be left to religious institutions without state interference of any kind. Regrettably as long as we are going to insist on state involvement in marriage then the above measures are right.

An Indictment of the War on Drugs

Do you want to live in an authoritarian society? Do you desire an intrusive government? Do you wish for a government that is a nanny state? Do you yearn for government bureaucrats to tell you what you can and cannot do? Do you like puritanical busybodies telling you how to live your life? Do you believe that the government should define and enforce morality? Do you reason that vices should be crimes? Then you should support the war on drugs.

Do you love liberty? Do you treasure freedom? Do you want to live in a free society? Do you prefer government at all levels to be as limited as possible? Do you think people should be responsible for the consequences of their own actions? Do you wish the federal government would at least follow its own Constitution? Do you reason that vices should not be crimes? Then you must oppose the war on drugs.

Read the rest here.

Feds are silent as three states ponder legalizing marijuana

Voters are set to cast their ballots in three Western states next month on whether to legalize the sale of marijuana for recreational use, initiatives that would directly violate federal law but that have drawn only silence from the Justice Department.

Despite the urging of drug enforcement experts, officials in Washington have not said how the federal government would deal with possible state laws in Colorado, Washington and Oregon that would conflict with the federal Controlled Substances Act. Federal law prohibits the production, possession and sale of marijuana and classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, putting it in the same category as LSD and heroin.

Read the rest here.

Lance Armstrong suffers legal setback in doping charges

AUSTIN, Texas -- A federal judge handed Lance Armstrong a quick setback Monday as he went to court to save his seven Tour de France titles and his reputation as one of the greatest cyclists ever.

Armstrong filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency from moving ahead with charges that he used performance-enhancing drugs throughout much of his long career.

But within hours, U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks dismissed the 80-page complaint. He said it seemed more intended to whip up public opinion in Armstrong's favor that focus on the legal argument.

Read the rest here.

New York governor wants to decriminalize possession of small amounts of pot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new legislation to decriminalize public possession of small amounts of marijuana, lowering the penalty from a misdemeanor to a non-criminal offense.

The measure - which strikes indirectly at the New York Police Department's controversial stop and frisk program - seeks to eliminate a nuance in state law that differentiates between public and private possession of the drug.

At present, first time offenders who are found to be carrying less than 25 grams of marijuana on their person are supposed to be issued a non-criminal violation ticket, similar to a traffic ticket, while those observed to be openly displaying a small amount of the drug - in an upturned palm, for instance - are often arrested on a misdemeanor criminal charge.

But critics of the NYPD's stop and frisk program say minority residents in high-crime areas are routinely arrested and charged criminally, following stops and searches by police that turn up small amounts of the drug in their pockets.

Those arrest records can turn up in background searches by landlords, employees and colleges, drug policy analysts said.

Read the rest here.

This would basically turn pot possession into the legal equivalent of a parking ticket.

Marijuana grows openly in California towns

California's San Joaquin Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. It is also where, among the fresh fruits and vegetables, an estimated half-a-million plants of marijuana are growing openly, some allegedly being sold for non-medicinal purposes.

"In the last two years, we've seen large-scale commercial farming operations of marijuana and explosions of backyard marijuana grows," said Lieutenant Rick Ko of the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. Ko says the spike in cannabis cultivation is a result of California's booming medical marijuana trade.

Read the rest here.

DEA "forgets" prisoner who nearly dies in custody

Daniel Chong, the UC San Diego student who was left in a Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell for nearly five days, said the time spent there was a life-altering experience. On Wednesday, the DEA apologized for the incident.

The 23-year-old spoke with NBCSanDiego and said he was increasingly worried throughout the days he spent in a 5-foot by 10-foot cell. “They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m not sure how they could forget me...”

...Chong said he was at a friend’s house in University City celebrating 4/20, a day many marijuana users set aside to smoke, when agents came inside and raided the residence. Chong was then taken to the DEA office in Kearny Mesa.

He said agents questioned him, and then told him he could go home. One agent even offered him a ride, Chong said. No criminal charges were filed against him.

But Chong did not go home that night. Instead, he was placed in a cell for five days without any human contact and was not given food or drink. In his desperation, he said he was forced to drink his own urine.

“I had to do what I had to do to survive …. I hallucinated by the third day,” Chong said. “I was completely insane.”

Chong said he lost roughly 15 pounds during the time he was alone. His lawyer confirmed that Chong ingested a powdery substance found inside the cell. Later testing revealed the substance was methamphetamine.

After days of being ignored, Chong said he tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his spectacles with his teeth and then attempting to carve “Sorry mom,” on his arm. He said nurses also found pieces of glass in his throat, which led him to believe he ingested the pieces purposefully.

Chong said he could hear DEA employees and people in neighboring cells. He screamed to let them know he was there, but no one replied. He kicked the door, but no one came to get him.

By the time DEA officers found Chong in his cell Wednesday morning Chong was completely incoherent, said Iredale.

“I didn’t think I would come out,” Chong said.

Read the rest here.

Somebody's head needs to be put on a spike and mounted on top of the DEA field office.

Dutch court upholds ban on foreign tourists buying pot

AMSTERDAM — A Dutch court on Friday upheld a new law that will prevent foreign visitors from buying marijuana in coffee shops across the Netherlands, potentially ending the decades of “pot tourism” for which this city and others became universally known.

A group of coffee shops had challenged the government plan, launched after southern cities in the Netherlands complained of increased levels of drug-related crime. The decision means that coffee shops in the south must stop selling cannabis to foreign tourists by May 1, while Dutch and foreign residents will be eligible for a “weed pass” that allows them to purchase it legally. The plan is to be rolled out to other Dutch cities, including the popular tourist center of Amsterdam, by next year.

Read the rest here.

That's OK. California will happily take the tourism.