Governments can employ drug wars for superficial purposes. Sometimes it’s to provide plausible denials for committing human rights crimes against minorities, or even political opponents. Several events in Florida and Russia illustrate the continuing problem of drug war human rights abuses:
In October 2017, Derek Benefield was driving in the Florida Panhandle’s Jackson County when he was pulled over for allegedly swerving into the opposite lane. Once at the car, sheriff’s deputy Zachary Wester claimed to smell marijuana and conducted a search of the vehicle, which, he reported, turned up methamphetamine and marijuana. Despite insisting the drugs weren’t his, Benefield, who was already on probation, was arrested, charged $1,100 in fines and court fees, and sentenced to one year in county jail.
Benefield was seven months into his sentence when, in September 2018, the state attorney’s office dropped his case and those of 118 others. Largely thanks to the diligence of one assistant state attorney, Wester was suspected of routinely planting drugs during traffic stops over his two years in the department. […]
In Russia, human rights leader Oyub Titiyev of Chechnya was recently released from a Russian jail after serving 18 months for 207 grams of marijuana. His supporters say the charges were fabricated after his car was stopped for a documents check. In another case, Russian investigative reporter Ivan Golunov was arrested and charged with drug trafficking, leading to rebukes by Russian journalists and human rights activists that the authorities planted the drugs. Russia’s Interior Ministry was forced to drop the charges against Golunov due in part to Golunov’s status as a public figure, and because the Ministry couldn’t prove he owned the drugs. The incident inspired an ongoing public debate causing many Russians to reconsider their support for Russia’s drug war.
Whether it involves the planting of drugs on 1950s black motorists in Pasadena, California, to discourage them from moving into white neighborhoods, or the more recent performance of President Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippine drug war, a conflict the UN Human Rights Council sees as a homicidal attack on the poor—drugs notwithstanding; drug wars demonstrate how categorical thinkers in governments use law enforcement to harass or even eliminate an immense range of people deemed undesirable. It’s no surprise public perceptions of drug wars emerge that make the friendly local police officer on the beat look rare, even extinct, replaced by sanctioned predators, destroyers of lives and careers.
People finally learning what we’ve been saying for a long while now. If you want control over something, regulate it. If you ban it you abdicate any control you may have had. https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/in-californias-cannabis-war-civil-is-the-new-criminal?fbclid=IwAR29KkFiDWtpiSviWCApxkDmbEJVkIhEEjEoZPJOUOC3r5n5b9O9fwYmKNs
French judge rules Jewish woman’s killer not responsible because he smoked weed
https://t.co/DJfESXkVyL
JTA — A Muslim man who killed his Jewish neighbor in Paris while shouting about Allah is probably not criminally responsible for his actions because he had smoked marijuana beforehand, a French judge ruled.
‘After Two Puffs, I Was Turned Into a Bat’
http://cannabisnews.com/news/16/thread16685.shtml
Admitting to marijuana use became a popular way of avoiding conscription, and murderers cited the brainwashing powers of “an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death” to plead diminished responsibility for their crimes.
Their claims were frequently supported by an expert witness, the pharmacologist Dr James Munch, who claimed that “after two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat”. Sentences were commuted from death to imprisonment on Munch’s evidence, and Anslinger had to ask him to stop testifying.
Ladies and gentlemen, Keith Humphrey’s Junior: https://twitter.com/germanrlopez/status/1152216529393606656?s=20
Please get on Twitter Kaptinemo (I know you’ve refused in the past). I implore you.
Hungriness note a tangibles offers against you. drugwarrant.com
http://bit.ly/2NL6Hs5
I wonder if the guy who promoted the theory that heroin cannot cause an overdose death is still reading DWR? If so he might like to check out the career of Dr Barton, (Harold Shipman 2.0.)
https://www.homecare.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1596982/Dr-Barton-linked-to-656-deaths-as-lethal-painkillers-shorten-pensioners-lives
Long before the war, the Nazis had a program of euthanizing mental patients and others who were deemed by those in power, in the parlance of the ideology, “To have lives not worth living.”
Seems Doctor Barton had taken a page from their book and applied it to the elderly.
Stanton Peele makes that case, and from a quick read of the article, it looks like it was a a lethal drug combo, and Heroin was used in concert with other medications. “The Gosport Independent Panel’s report stated: ‘There was an institutionalised regime of prescribing and administering ‘dangerous doses’ of a hazardous combination of medication not clinically indicated or justified, with patients and relatives powerless in their relationship with professional staff.’ ”
Dr. Peele’s assertion remains unrefuted.
According to a tweet from his sister and his Wikipedia entry, Mark A. R. Kleiman died today, July 21, 2019.
Mark Albert Robert Kleiman
Born: May 18, 1951
Died: Jul 21, 2019
complications from a kidney transplant
Organ Transplants Denied for Using Cannabis
https://twitter.com/DendeCannabist/status/1113212548558364672
☛ Hospitals Deny Patients Organ Transplants for Smoking Weed
☛ The Heartlessness of Dying for Prohibition
☛ Denied a Liver Transplant for Using Medical Marijuana,
and Dying for It
☛ Park City man denied lung transplant in Utah
because of traces of marijuana dies
☛ A ‘Catch-22’ of medical marijuana and organ transplants
☛ California Woman Denied Essential Heart Transplant
Because She Uses MMJ
Jacob Sullum on Mark A.R. Kleiman: https://reason.com/2019/07/22/rip-mark-kleiman-who-brought-rigor-dispassion-and-candor-to-a-frequently-overheated-drug-policy-debate/?fbclid=IwAR0sWkKSr27T_BnvdP1l_cBnnm3NsV68F6BXBz2Wv_AFfWqvypwdvyo7U5E
Paul Krassner Requiescat In Pace
April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019
1960s prankster Paul Krassner, who named Yippies, dies at 87
https://t.co/OmZydpNP4D
Kleiman’s death is a no doubt win for human freedom
Shame on you. Kleiman was pro legalization of marijuana long before it was fashionable. We didn’t agree on much, but there were points where we did. His predilection for what-iffary and his slow-walking legalization were the main sticking points.
This calls to mind Craig Reinarman’s review of Kleiman’s book ‘Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results’
Pay particular attention to the paragraphs that begin “If Kleiman were Drug Czar…”
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Against+Excess%3A+Drug+Policy+for+Results-a015436130
Remember, this is the guy who used to defend DARE:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dope/dare/kleiman.html
To be fair, that book was written over twenty years ago, And yes, Kleiman was a nanny statist to the end. And he never, ever admitted he was wrong,and he was wrong a lot.
Now he’s dead, we should be able to stop flogging him.
“And he never, ever admitted he was wrong,and he was wrong a lot.”
Yup, I always assumed the A.R. in Mark A. R. Kleiman stood for “Always Right” until I read his obiturary.
Frustrating and irritating he could be, but he was saner than most drug policy wonks that have the ear of those in power (yeah, I know – low bar). It was particularly fun to watch him over-react to honest criticism. I’ll miss him.
Mark Kleiman Was the Nation’s Greatest Thinker on Drug Policy: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/mark-kleiman-was-the-nations-greatest-thinker-on-drug-policy/
How much to be revealed about marijuana especially
in this time and nation for the general public!
For the actual experience of the smoked herb has
been completely clouded by a fog of dirty language
by the diminishing crowd of fakers who have not had
the experience and yet insist on being centers of
propaganda about the experience.
The Great Marijuana Hoax by Allen Ginsberg
7:38 P.M. Nov. 13, 1965
San Francisco, California, USA, Kosmos
http://marijuana-uses.com/the-great-marijuana-hoax-by-allen-ginsberg/
Kindly google: Kleiman proposes, or rather endorses, the neo-prohibition of alcohol and tobacco …
Mark’s inability to grasp the significance of the science behind the endocannabinoid system was extremely problematic.
It was the wrong that pretty much negated any other thing he did IMOP.
I actually liked him and was saddened to hear about his death.
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A Pennsylvania woman who is a State authorized medicinal cannabis patient has been arrested for smoking cannabis. Not the cannabis part…the smoking part. It’s illegal for Pennsylvania patients to smoke their medicine. But we don’t need to worry about the woman illegally smoking medicinal cannabis in the future. Her registration in the Pennsylvania medicinal cannabis registry was revoked.
Educate yourself: “Is Kleiman angling for a job lobbying for the Mexican drug cartels?”
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The Professor doesn’t need a new career.
I am thankful to this blog giving unique and helpful knowledge about this topic.