As I've written before, the escalating and increasingly violent drug wars in Mexico represent a serious national security threat to the United States. And recognizing the proven link between drug trafficking and illegal immigration, we should urge our elected representatives to reject amnesty programs disguised as "comprehensive immigration reform." Last October I wrote a column quoting local terrorism expert Larry Martines, a former homeland security adviser to Gov. Jim Gibbons, on the connection between illegal immigration and drug trafficking in Northern Nevada and elsewhere throughout the nation. According to Martines, four ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels are battling for control of lucrative drug routes into the United States. He also reported that more than 5,000 Mexicans - including women and children caught in the crossfire -- have been killed since 2006. [continues 550 words]
We're continually told that the raging war between Mexican drug cartels isn't expected to cross to the U.S. We've only half -- sort of - -- believed that when told so by local law-enforcement leaders the past year. Now it's time to believe, and we'd better be prepared in case the little bit we've seen turns into a surge. Be prepared. That's the message given by one of the nation's smartest minds on drug warfare, former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey. [continues 289 words]
EL PASO -- Former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey contends that millions of people may rush to cross the U.S. border if security conditions worsen and lead to a governmental collapse in Mexico. "A failure by the Mexican political system to curtail lawlessness and violence could result (in) a surge of millions of refugees crossing the U.S. border to escape the domestic misery of violence, failed economic policy, po verty, hunger, joblessness, and the mindless cruelty and injustice of a criminal state," McCaffrey said in an after-action report based on the Dec. 5-7 International Forum of Intelligence & Security Specialists in Mexico, an advisory group to Mexican law enforcement leaders. [continues 419 words]
Representative Jim Ramstad, a Republican from Minnesota, is said to be a candidate for drug czar in the Obama administration. This would take bipartisanship one step too far, at the expense of public health. Ramstad, who is retiring after 18 years in office, gets high marks for working with a Democratic colleague, Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, to require insurers to cover mental health and addiction treatment (the two men are alcohol recovery partners). But Ramstad has also voted repeatedly against federal funding for needle exchange programs for drug users to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. Washington's paralysis on this issue goes back to when President Clinton let his drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, sabotage funding efforts by Donna Shalala, then secretary of Health and Human Services. McCaffrey hyperbolically called clean-needle programs "magnets for all social ills." In 2002, Clinton admitted that "I was wrong" not to lift the funding ban. [continues 149 words]
Upton Sinclair once remarked that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. This observation is borne out by the reactions of Barry McCaffrey to the extraordinarily damning revelations contained in a very long front-page New York Times story, regarding McCaffrey's role as a military analyst for NBC. The story, which is remarkably detailed and well sourced, really has to be read in its entirety. The gist of it is that McCaffrey, a retired general, has spent the last few years getting paid a whole lot of money by defense contractors to go on TV and shill for their products, while giving his audience the impression that he's providing them with a disinterested analysis of what the U.S. military ought to be doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. [continues 523 words]
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity. The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles. Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007. [continues 5191 words]
On paper, Jim Ramstad -- who is rumored to be Obama's choice for drug czar -- looks like the ideal man for the job . He's a recovering alcoholic himself and a Congressman who championed legislation recently passed to provide equal insurance coverage for addictions and other mental illnesses. To top it off, he's a Republican, giving Obama what looks like a relatively harmless way to make his cabinet more bipartisan. Choosing Ramstad would appear to make a powerful statement about addiction as a medical, not a moral issue. [continues 734 words]
In case you haven't noticed, there's a low-level civil war under way south of the border, and the bad guys seem to be winning. In the 24 months since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico's drug cartels, over 6,500 soldiers, narcos, cops, judges and innocent bystanders have been gunned down, beheaded or blown up. Absolutely no one is safe. In May the country's top law enforcement officer was riddled with bullets after his bodyguards dropped him off at home. The assassins were waiting on the other side of the door - literally an inside job. [continues 750 words]
The craft poke out only a foot above water and can carry 12 tons of drugs. WASHINGTON - Drug cartels have turned to a new and effective vehicle to smuggle their goods, using small, homemade "semi-submersibles" that are hard to detect and yet effective at carrying millions of dollars worth of cocaine and other illicit drugs that end up in the United States. Military officials who oversee Latin and South America have grown alarmed by the increased use of these boats, which poke out above the water only a foot or so but carry more than 12 tons of cargo. The military's ability to interdict the craft is hampered in part because its attention has been focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on border security. [continues 718 words]
The Arbitrary Distinctions at the Root of Prohibition High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It, by Joseph A. Califano Jr., New York: Public Affairs, 270 pages, $26.95 The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture, by Richard DeGrandpre, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 294 pages, $24.95 On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain "how substance abuse ravages America," Joseph Califano declares that "chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation's largest religion." Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano's meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed, here he seems to be saying that opiates are the religion of the masses. Americans, he implies, are seeking from psychoactive substances the solace they used to obtain from faith in God, and better living through chemistry is nearly as popular as better living through Christ. [continues 3891 words]
I read with interest the comments of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a paid adviser to CRC Health Group, which operates a methadone clinic in Huntington, and of CRC CEO Barry Karlin published in The Herald-Dispatch on Feb. 15 urging West Virginia lawmakers to embrace methadone clinics. The information supplied is not balanced or complete. Methadone maintenance was described as being a safe and efficacious method for treatment of opioid addiction. McCaffrey stated that methadone programs "... can get many people addicted to maintain sobriety." [continues 413 words]
When it comes to feeling today's financial crunch, Arizona is no different than any other state in our Union. So it's no surprise to see that Governor Napolitano is proposing to save the state over $60 million by transferring responsibility for prisoners in the state penal institutions to the counties. In the early 1970s, Arizona had a state prison population of around 2,000. By the end of 2000 that population had grown to almost 28,000. Today Arizona houses some 37,000 prisoners in the state system and the prison population is expected to grow by over 50 percent in the next decade, a trend that is double that for the general population. Arizona's prison system now costs some $900 million a year, or about 10 percent of total state expenditures from General Fund dollars. [continues 679 words]
Medical marijuana is 100 percent completely legal - however, only in a synthetic form of which there are many versions. Look at the Controlled Substance Act. How insane it is that our government imprisons, takes away parents from their children, and destroys the lives of hard-working every-day Americans by the hundreds of thousands every year because they utilize organic marijuana instead of that prescribed by physicians. According to Barry McCaffrey, the former federal drug czar, organic marijuana is much healthier for you because of its many natural beneficial compounds that can help people - especially suffering from muscular-selector type ailments and arthritic problems. [continues 143 words]
Gen. Barry McCaffrey offers an excellent primer on Colombia's recent economic and political reforms and why the United States must pass the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement stalled in Washington (Congress should OK trade deal, Issues & Ideas, Nov. 25). By promptly passing the trade agreement, Congress will help cement these reforms and send the unmistakable signal to other Latin American nations that Washington takes seriously economic and democratic liberalization. The economic reasons for passage are as compelling as the national-security arguments that McCaffrey outlined. Colombia is developing into a regional economic power, and it is the second-largest Latin American market for U.S. agriculture exports. [continues 160 words]
After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure. 1. After Pablo On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellin, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, -ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house. [continues 15494 words]
Rolling Stone on the War on Drugs. If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs." Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations. [continues 1013 words]
The proposed free-trade agreement with Colombia has stalled in Congress. The success and stability of Colombia and the Pan-American region depend on our ability to recognize the importance of this agreement to the United States, to Colombia's economy, to human rights progress and to enhanced U.S. national security. This fall I spent several days in Colombia, meeting with President Alvaro Uribe and other high-ranking officials in the government and military. I visited refugee camps, economic development zones and counter-drug operations. The Colombia I recently visited is drastically different from the place I visited seven years ago when I served as the U.S. national drug czar. [continues 676 words]
Dear Editor, Many thanks to The New Paltz Oracle for the two editorials, "Should Students with Drug Convictions Get Financial Aid?" (Thur, Nov. 1). While the nuances of this specific aspect of drug policy are often times subtle, there are also aspects that are blunt and obnoxious. Such is the question of financial aid for those with a drug conviction. The first thought that comes to my mind is this is a form of double jeopardy wherein a student with a conviction for a drug offense is being punished a second time. The second thought is why are there no such penalties for convictions of other crimes? [continues 216 words]
(1) VETS MAKE UP QUARTER OF NATION'S HOMELESS Pubdate: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 Source: Los Angeles Times (CA) Copyright: 2007 Los Angeles Times Author: Associated Press Lonnie Bowen Jr. was once a social worker, but for 17 years the Vietnam war veteran has slept on the streets off and on as he's battled substance abuse and mental health problems. "It's been a hard struggle," said Bowen, 62, as he rolled a cigarette outside a homeless processing center in downtown Philadelphia, where he planned to seek help for his drug and alcohol problem, as he has before. [continues 6565 words]
McCaffrey Speaks At SIUE's Arts & Issues Series Drugs are funding the war in the Middle East, four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, U.S. Army (Ret.), told the crowd gathered to hear his discussion about the war on terror at an SIUE Arts & Issues presentation Saturday night. "(Our government) has been willfully in denial of that reality." He said the majority of the 44 recognized terrorist organizations are not funded by any communist state, but rather by the international crime of drug smuggling. [continues 1002 words]
