Mexico: bleeding to death in the war on drugs
Another 72 corpses found in a new mass grave. Feuding cartels blamed for displays of mutilated bodies. Death toll in four-year crackdown passes 28,000 […] a total of 72 contorted bodies had been laid out in rows beneath the summer sunshine. The 54 men and 18 women had all been recently murdered. […]
They had been taken hostage by the Zetas, a gang of drug-runners […]
Mass graves are becoming an increasingly common by-product of the wave of drug-related violence sweeping the country. In May, 55 bodies were pulled from abandoned mine near Taxco, just south of Mexico City. Last month, 51 more were unearthed from a field next to a rubbish tip near the northern city of Monterrey.
Total Body Count for the Week: 301
Total Body Count for the Year: 7,331
“8% of nighttime weekend drivers tested positive for marijuana”
Brutal Pete.
What’s happening in Mexico is in a large part to blame on the gang of six.
Monsters.
If you are a cop who wants to catch the bad guys, join us and help end prohibition. Once the money supply is cut to the cartels, their strength will evaporate and we can bring them to justice.
When prohibition ends, the wall dividing the community from the police will fall. “Oh, no, it’s the police,” will change to “Thank God, it’s the police!” overnight. Think about how good that will feel, and stop fighting legalization. Together, we can bring the murderous cartels to justice and end the violence.
And for those who absurdly claim the drug violence blood is on the hands of the users, think again. The blood is on YOUR hands, for supporting the laws and policies that have created this situation. The solution is obvious, and every day you stand in the way the corpses pile up.
I can’t bring myself to say that I’m happy the national media is finally paying attention to what is happening in Mexico, because it is too horrific to be happy about.
But hopefully, though I am not optimistic, that these stories finally start to make people realize that we all have blood on our hands for allowing the drug war to continue for as long as it has.
It is brutal what is happening in Mexico. If this doesn’t get prohibitionist to rethink their stance then nothing will.
The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
Published on 08-25-2010
Source: Time Magazine
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.
The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.
Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. “There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.” The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of “cultural elitism.”
The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state – with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.
Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit’s – including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.
In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous – decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”
68 days. And we can start trying to help Mexico by reducing their money flow and maybe even some of their production.
Although I don’t think CA is a major purchaser of cartel
weed,it appears they do have a lot of growers working there.
With legalization comes the possibility of mass legal grows with the ability to flood the market and remove the profits necessary to sustain the cash flow required by the cartels to continue buying guns and corruption.
Both necessary for them to continue to outgun and outrun the federal troops.
The shame is all the lives lost when we could have dealt a crippling blow to the cartels by legalizing marijuana nation wide and beat the cartels with a shovel,hoe and a watercan,instead of millions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Apart from the one Pete posted http://tiny.cc/unavy there are actually another two very good pieces in todays UK Independent:
Johann Hari: Violence breeds violence. The only thing drug gangs fear is legalisation
http://tinyurl.com/23kddkv
Leading article: Mexico’s stark reminder of the cost of prohibition
http://tinyurl.com/36vldbh
Only 8%? So what this would suggest is that 8% of nighttime weekend drivers have smoked pot sometime in the last roughly 6 weeks. This is probably less than the percentage of the general public who have smoked pot sometime in the last roughly 6 weeks. So the problem is?
8%? …and? Hell 89% of teen drivers are distracted, lets ban that. What percentage is tired drivers, hungry,angry,overly happy, just got dust in thier eye,playing with the radio, putting makeup on,looking at the pretty girl in the red dress on the sidewalk…Hello who cares?
Wow, the comments over at the ‘6 Czars’ are quite brilliant!
People are even calling for the death penalty.
http://discussions.latimes.com/20/lanews/la-oe-0825-kerlikowske-marijuana-20100825/10?page=4
What happened to the Nazis after Germany was defeated in 1945?
They all ran and hid like cockroaches (if they could) to escape prosecution, imprisonment and possibly even death.
Now, what will happen to Drug Warriors when the rest of the world realizes who the real terrorists are? What will they do when the entire world turns on them en masse?
Hopefully the exact same thing.
Thinking of you, Drug Warriors. Sleep tight.
It’s time they said goodbye ..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSJcXPCxlzI
But of course… more murders only means the Prohibitionists are really “Winning”. Per this article at
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/26/mexico.dead.bodies/?hpt=T2
“”This is a result of the activity of the state against them, which has significantly weakened the operational capacity of criminal groups,” Calderon’s office said.”
Prohibitionists love these murders, because it’s a sign that they’re right and they’re “Winning”. It’s not total outrage and a horror. It means they’re winning.
Which is the scariest? The vicious cartels or the idiotic, irrational, and terrifyingly, purposely blind and insane Prohibitionists?
Am I the only one who sees “0 comments” on the LA Times article? When I click to add a comment I see tons of anti-prohibitionist criticism, but from the actual article’s page all I see is that a bunch of people on facebook liked it. I suppose it might be a little paranoid to suppose that isn’t just a little glitch…but it certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented.
I like the article immensely! When all they can do is spin the same old debunked and refuted rhetoric it makes the passage of Prop 19 that much more probable.
Thanks to Pete and all the cannabis sites refuting and debunking their propaganda for the last few years,many non-tokers have joined the legalization side of the issue because they can see,without much effort,that the prohibition only helps the people supporting it and not our society.
And let’s not forget that these 74 dead are NOT other cartel members whom they’re fighting with. They were just people, like you and me, who were looking for a better life.
So, tell us again how it’s just the cartels killing the cartels.
Well. Mexico appears to be near a breaking point. The choices Mexican leaders face are simple. Legalize the drug trade, and take away the power of the cartel overnight, or decend into a failed state. All the elements are there for us to wind up with a Somalia on our southern border. And, just so’s there’s no mistake here, this is exclusively the fault of US policy, and more specifically, the Bush afministration for forcing the current Mexican policy, when the legalization discussion was open there under President Fox. And the Obama administration for continueing the encourage and fund those policies.
I’m sorry, darkcycle,
I’ve lived down here now for 10 years and I don’t see it happening like it’s presented to you up there, if you’re “up there.” That’s why it’s such a laugh for me to catch US News when I’m up there. While things aren’t great, they’re no where near the oblivion that’s preached hourly by US media. I have yet to reach “concerned.”
Change of subject:
Marijuana Heals Cancer …Cannabinoid Receptors In The Human Body
Link
[Ed. — Claygooding: please use html links or short links. Or have more text before your long link. Every time you post a link in your comments that isn’t done properly, it messes up the front page of Drug WarRant.]
BBC special on Cannabinoid Receptors…below an article by Steve Kubby, Sierra Times …A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells. It is hard to believe that the knowledge that cannabis can be used to fight cancer has been suppressed for almost thirty years , yet it seems likely that it will continue to be suppressed. Why? According to Cowan, the answer is because it is a threat to cannabis prohibition . “If this article and its predecessors from 2000 and 1974 were the only evidence of the suppression of medical cannabis, then one might perhaps be able to rationalize it in some herniated way. However, there really is massive proof that the suppression of medical cannabis represents the greatest failure of the institutions of a free society, medicine, journalism, science, and our fundamental values,” Cowan notes. Millions of people have died horrible deaths and in many cases, families exhausted their savings on dangerous, toxic and expensive drugs. Now we are just beginning to realize that while marijuana has never killed anyone, marijuana prohibition has killed millions.
Ezrydn, do the bodies have to be dug up on your front yard? Is the war leaving your neighborhood alone? Good, support the policies that have killed 7331 people this year alone. Don’t think that just because you aren’t seeing the bodies on your street they aren’t there. I spent two bloody years in Nicaragua, circa 78-79. I can tell you, the rich people and the people in the citys didn’t see much of that war either. Yet an entire country went through a revolution. Right on up to the ‘Siege of Managua’ people in the rich suburbs of the capitol were able to pretend it wasn’t happening.
Don’t mean to tread on your sence of personal safety, but the cartels are able to out spend and out gun the government not only there in Mexico, but in Columbia as well. If I lived there I’d be mighty thankful that they were at war with each other as well as with the Mexican Federal government. Because otherwise, there’s a good chance that you’d be living under a narco-dictatorship by now. Don’t thank me, though, I didn’t put these monsterous policies in place. If it’s all good for you, then mazeltov.
One more thing….in Nicaragua, the people weren’t just hiding their heads in the sand, although some were. The Samoza government was telling everybody that they were winning, and the situation was well in hand right up to the end. So don’t look for truth in the Mexican media, I don’t look for it in ours, particularly where the drug war is involved. Hint.
These bastards are going to get to walk away from a mess they created without ever being held accountable. It makes me sick to the stomach.
Now we are just beginning to realize that while marijuana has never killed anyone, marijuana prohibition has killed millions.
Durring the 1970s, my only sibling and sister started suffering badly from depression. I tried to talk her out of going on Valium while offering to freely supply her with a little hash that I thought might help. To no avail though. She was born in 1945 and was already too intimidated through media indoctrination to take the advice of her much younger brother who had been happily tripping since he was 14. One medication led to another. She was only 34 yrs at the time of her sudden and lethal stroke, and on 5 different prescribed meds.
It really makes steam come out of my ears when I read another know nothing trying to place the blame on anyone who buys any kind of mind altering drug. Poppycock!