The leaked cables, which various journalism organizations such as WikiLeaks and the New York Times have been publishing, have been interesting historically, but have produced very little in terms of startling or radically new information that had previously been hidden.
The New York Times covers Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency
WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.
In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.
Yes, some details may be new, but anyone who has been paying close attention to drug policy and the way our government deals with drug policy is already aware of the shady international position of the DEA and the blatant fact that drug policy agencies are being used for many other political purposes, including spying.
In fact, the real danger of the leaked cables is the likely assumption by some that these cables are somehow showing the worst of what is happening out there.
These are State Department communiques — far from the kind of place where anyone would discuss the real underbelly of DEA operations. For that you’d need to see some files buried deep inside 600 Army Navy Drive in Arlington, Virginia.
What we’re seeing now reported by the New York Times is the visible part of the iceberg.
Still, it’s good to see this, at least, aired publicly.
I am convinced Kerli is over in Portugal,writing checks to buy the Portuguese legislature back on the prohibition train. The economy sucks over there too and they are politicians,,,,,,
DEA Demands Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Records
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/dea-demands-michigan-s-medical-marijuana-records
Evidence #1;
DEA Demands Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Records
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/dea-demands-michigan-s-medical-marijuana-records
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DEA Demands Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Records
Opinion by Reason Foundation
(6 Hours Ago) in Society / Drug Law
By Jacob Sullum
The Associated Press reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration is demanding medical marijuana records from Michigan’s Department of Community Health “as part of an investigation in the Lansing area.” The department is resisting, citing a state law that makes it a misdemeanor to release information about patients who use medical marijuana or the caregivers who are authorized to supply them. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Bruha has asked a judge to order the department’s compliance, saying that notwithstanding Michigan’s medical marijuana law, which was approved by voters in 2008, “the cultivation, possession and distribution of marijuana remains illegal under federal law,” so the “state-created confidentiality provision…must yield to the enforcement power of the federal agency.””
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The FACT the DEA (and much of the federal government) attempts to ignore is that, Constitutionally, the laws of each individual state trump any federal laws (with the sole exception of the federal Constitution, which rules all the states’ governments as well as the federal government). Any state government which yields to the federal government on an issue where state law and federal rules clash is a traitor to its constituency and should be removed, forthwith.
Actually, I was not aware of the sheer size of the foreign DEA operations. Offices in 82 countries around the world?!? That made my head swim.
Most Federal agencies are trouble and cause more harm than help, but the only agency that is truly 100% harm is the DEA. I hope to live to see the day when we finally pull the plug on this terrible, destructive, and downright evil agency.
Paul, I think that’s one of the most important things about these cables. I forget that I haven’t talked much recently about the insidious global presence of the DEA. In many ways the DEA involvement in medical marijuana is mostly a distraction to keep us from thinking about what they’re really doing. Medical marijuana harassment is almost a hobby for them.
And yes, they need to be eliminated entirely as an agency.
!
The DEA should be abolished and all those alcoholic souts that leach taxpayers dollars should be “put to pasture!” They’ve turned into nothing more that the “American Gestapo!”
Another excerpt from the above link;
“”When asked about the Holder memo, the agents acted as if they were above the law. “Obama is not our president,” [medical marijuana activist Ryan] Basore [who rented the Okemos grow space to the caregivers] reported the agents saying. “The people wanted change,” Basore overheard another agent say as they effectively laughed in the face of their own superiors.””
Given that the DEA is exceeding its authority internationally, there’s every reason to believe they’re exceeding their authority domestically as well.
The DEA is like Nixon’s White House Plumbers, only on a grander scale. Whoever pulls the DEA’s strings for personal gain is likely to ignore or reject any and all complaints against the DEA while providing an unreasonable defense of the agency and its network of accomplices.
So far, no one in government is calling for an investigation of the DEA along the lines of the 1975 Church Committee investigation of the CIA and FBI. That by itself is suspicious. A similar senate investigation of the DEA is long overdue.
SAMHSA’s report on “treatment” statistics for drug and alcohol “abuse” is out.
Admission rates for marijuana use rose by 30 percent nationwide, and were the highest in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Normally I would point out that there are no medical cannabis States on the list, but I did read a gov’t release from 2007 which demonstrates that it’s not the law or it’s implementation that causes the increase in cannabis use, it’s that people talk about it as if it’s not a pure skin of evil. So Iowa, New York,New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Missouri all had active dialogues that did not automatically shun the idea of medical marijuana, so we can confidently state that’s why so many of these states residents are strung out on reefer.
Good grief, did I just type “strung out on reefer”?
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Seriously, were we not so hung up on the reefer people might have been able to mention the significant reduction in cocaine and meth use. That might be nothing but the normal ebb and flow between opioids and speed/cocaine. There is no such thing as a 20 year user on a level of seriously degenerate addiction with coke/speed. Back in my coke days we used to joke around about stumbling on to a “lifetime” supply of coke. I liked to point out that a lifetime supply for the degenerates I hung around with wouldn’t likely be more than 2 or 3 kilos. They’d say Ace, that makes no sense. A kilo would barely last 2 or 3 months, and I’d say, yeah, and with 3 kilo’s of pure you wouldn’t last 6 months.
The DEA is named in a lawsuit over the synthetic cannabis brouhaha.
http://www.avvo.com/news/minnesota-store-owners-file-suit-against-feds-over-fake-pot-1211.html
Ooops, Michigan made synthetic cannabis against the law but screwed the pooch on the penalty language:
http://www.freep.com/article/20101229/NEWS06/12290346/Granholm-to-new-lawmakers-Restore-penalties-for-synthetic-marijuana
This is your brain on arbitrary knee jerk laws….
“Obama’s not our president.” Sounds typical. In any event, the piece linked by Clay above makes me VERY glad that my State has no central records of MMJ users.
That statement from Holder meant exactly: NOTHING.
Granholm is a piece of work. What this country does NOT need is a new class of criminal, and new penalties attached to formerly legal behavior. The piece linked by Duncan goes on to claim forty-some calls to poison control centers related to K2 and it’s chemical cousins. And how many linked to bleach? How about the fact that there would be no reason to have ever ingested any of these substances had marijuana been legal? The whole K2 saga is of the abject failure of prohibition as a policy.
The DEA was intended to be Nixon’s STASI, with far-reaching powers of arrest. It was going to be Tricky Dick’s goon squad to hammer the hated hippies with. But its’ ‘father’ was instead allowed to slink off the stage in partial (and much deserved!) ignominy, and the agency instead became the CIA’s ‘bitch’…and remains so to this day.
DEA is so riddled with CI spooks they might as well move their headquarters to Langley. Every time the DEA gets close to a real juicy collar, time and again the case starts to falter and die. That’s because the CIA wants to keep their dope-dealing foreign tin-pot ‘assets’ in place a little longer…until the ‘assets’ either get greedy or the boys at Langley don’t need them anymore. Same old, same old…
The Canadian RCMP is in league with the DEA, committing treasonous activities in the name of the ‘drug war.’ There is a growing movement to disband this rogue regiment of the Canadian Forces.
They are not a police force, no matter what the paint on the cars says. They are a military regiment out of control. Our Airborne regiment was disbanded for much less.
Absolutly right, Nemo. The DEA is allowed to bust Medical MJ patients and suppliers, but never allowed to get close to the real sources of the hard drugs coming into this country. The CIA’s black ops budget depends on inflated black market prices just as much as any cartel head’s income does. Remember Eugene Hasenfus? Remember Iran/Contra?
And if you don’t think that the CIA’s current black ops budgets depend on Afghan Heroin traffic into Europe, I’ve got some bridges you might be interested in buying…
No dark,the bankers/financiers get that profit. There is so much money in it that only the ultra rich can play at that game.
I knew we were screwed when the DEA didn’t just purchase the opium from the farmers and napalm it,thus stopping 90%
of the opium production in the world with out spending millions more than it would have cost trying to “capture” it later.
DarkCycle, I do indeed recall those names, and there’s a name you should know as well, Terry Reed, a compatriot of Hasenfus’s, who wrote the be-all-and-end-all book about the Iran/Contra years, COMPROMISED.
The book traced out paths no investigator had the balls to follow through on, save Gary Webb…and we all know what happened to him (two rounds to the brain as ‘suicide’?).
Given how many Bush 1 Iran/Contra retreads showed up in Junior’s Cabinet, reading that book again provides plenty of reasons why. And also why the DEA is pretty much a standing joke amongst intel agencies.
The Bankers and the Financiers are at the top of that pyramid no matter who’s trafficking. And the CIA, not having an operable large scale smuggling network in Afghanistan, (like they did in both S.E. Asia and in Central America) is in the doubly damning position of relying on both the corrupt Karzai Government AND the Taliban to keep the opium and hence the money flowing. Russia has been screaming, loudly, at the amounts of heroin entering their country, with the facilitation of our CIA and the tacit approval of DEA. They’ve even been making noise about ANOTHER Russian incursion into Afghanistan just to shut down the flood. Though that has been roundly ignored by the American Corporate Media Machine.
Clay, who always profits on blood money? Whether it’s war or military expansion, illegal drugs or human trafficking, who is equipped to handle those large sums?
Nemo, I know all about that. I read that book, and I was there. I knew Felix “chi-chi” Rodriguez. Personally. I heard of Hasenfus way before the media. I was in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama. 1977-1979. I came home with Malaria and three kinds of tropical skin fungus, one I still have to treat daily or it comes back and causes my skin to turn black and peel off.
I knew all the Alphabet soup guys because I was seconded to them. Spent the whole time in intelligence, and what I can’t say is far more comprehensive, though I was dealing with demographics and other unrelated, mostly boring things and the dirty stuff didn’t really enter my purview.
And Gary Webb’s finger twitched.
.
.
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Here’s a knee slapper The powers that be have written up regulation of dispensaries that are entitled to open because Prop 203 won. As expected they have codified a buffer zone around chuches community centers and bars. Yes folks you read that right, Phoenix thinks that the bars need to be protected from the very embodiment of evil itself, the medical cannabis vendors. Oh yeah, they also a using a 1000 foot buffer for medical cannabis vendors.
Yes Duncan, Thou shalt not profane this society’s drug of choice by allowing shrines to lesser gods (or lesser drugs) to exist near their temples.
“Phoenix will limit the size of dispensaries to no more than 2,000 square feet and also require facilities to be a certain distance away from schools, bars…” (Emphasis mine – k.)
Bars.
Bars?
And how far away do schools have to be from bars? How about the distance between schools and tobacconists? Bars and tobacconists?
You really have to wonder just who is putting the bug in the ear of the legislators to come up with this bilge. You just know it isn’t the average citizens; they’re too busy just trying to survive.
Nope, the booze-and-tobacco reeking hands of special interests, not to mention politicking ‘public servants’ (no doubt doing so on our dime and time) have reached out and grabbed the earlobes of said legislators. Time we pulled their other ear and reminded them of how cold it is outside, employment-wise, and if they don’t want to feel that chill, then they better listen to their paymasters.
Yeah its a story has old has time itself give certain groups plenty of funds and power and unfortunately they become Drunk that is exceedingly intoxicated on Power,Money and their God is Arrogance and Stupidity.
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