[photo] Duterte tells civilians 'don't get yourselves kidnapped' as he orders troops to BOMB hostage-takers and threatens to declare martial law as part of Philippines' drug war * President Rodrigo Duterte say kidnap victims may become 'collateral damage' * Abu Sayyaf, which is linked to al-Qaeda, earns millions kidnapping for ransom * Duterte also threatened to bring in martial law in his campaign against drugs * His government also acted at the weekend to ban Filipinos watching Pornhub President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the military to 'blast' Islamist militants who have been on a kidnap-for-ransom spree in the Philippines, even if hostages would also be killed. [continues 759 words]
ZARANJ, Afghanistan - Shortly after sunrise, an Afghan special operations helicopter descended on two vehicles racing through the empty deserts of southern Afghanistan, traversing what has become a superhighway for smugglers and insurgents. Intelligence showed that the men were transporting a huge cache of drugs and weapons from Helmand Province to Nimruz Province, a hub for all things illegal and a way station on the global opium trail. Hovering above, the troops fired tracer rounds into the sandy earth beside the vehicles, which skidded to a stop. [continues 1375 words]
Our government doesn't care enough about protecting Americans from terrorism. If government officials cared, they would end the drug war and focus instead on ISIS. Imagine our country without a drug war. I see a country with $40 billion extra per year to fight terror. I see a country that focuses all its current drug war might, which is used to arrest hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, with literally no reduction in drugs, on breaking up ISIS. I don't mean that we keep bombing them only. When we bomb, we may kill terrorists, but we also kill civilians, and those civilians have family and friends who join the terrorists in vengeance against us. I do not want us to back down at all. I want us to dedicate a massive amount of resources toward creating more professionals like Ali Soufan. He was an FBI agent who spoke fluent Arabic and he was able to flip many Al Qaeda terrorists to work for our side to break up terror networks. [continues 126 words]
As The Washington Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al-Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers." On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas. Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon. A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and now widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war-torn country's black-market economy each year, likely giving militias access to new arms, fighters and the ability to keep the conflict boiling, according to the Guardian newspaper. [continues 593 words]
CHILAPA, Mexico - For nearly a week, gun-toting masked men loyal to a local drug gang overran this small city along a key smuggling route. Police officers and soldiers stood by as the gunmen patrolled the streets, searching for rivals and hauling off at least 14 men who have not been seen since. "They're fighting over the route through Chilapa," said Virgilio Nava, whose 21-year-old son, a truck driver for the family construction supply business, was one of the men seized in May, though he had no apparent links to either gang. "But we're the ones who are affected." [continues 1477 words]
The number of people murdered in the drug war in the United States is larger than the death toll of our military in Iraq and three times greater than the death rate of our soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Mexican drug cartels kill more people than ISIS and they proliferate mainly in the United States - killing teens and adults indiscriminately. The U.S. is on the verge of legalizing pot in many states. Why not all? In fact, why not legalize the sale of all drugs and tax them? [continues 177 words]
I am a peaceful, proud, patriotic pothead. As such, I relish the rights afforded to all Americans by the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and political expression. As a patriot I feel it's my duty to express my opinion on things my government does, whether it's popular or not. This is what I've always believed as I openly spoke out against our nation's war on drugs. Because of Mike Huckabee's presidential announcement, this column is dedicated to exercising my free speech rights again by voicing my opposition to America's daily bombing of the Middle East's Muslim populations. Which we've done for decades now, in the name of the goodness Huckabee-like Americans think we dole out. This is the real reason some of them want to attack us or bomb us back as Osama bin Laden did - not because they're jealous of our freedoms, as that self-righteous idiot from Texas claimed. [continues 967 words]
Make no mistake about it: the recent heroin epidemic is exactly what the Taliban and al-Qaeda were hoping to achieve. Sure, it took the tightening of prescription drug supplies to give it the boost it needed, but with introductory level pricing, it was just a matter of time before they'd sew the market up. So, when will this nation allocate real and serious dollars to fight this terror attack? Perhaps it would help to begin referring to it not just as an epidemic, but as the chemical weapon attack it is. Because that's what it's going to take -- a huge intervention. That and the acceptance that we cannot do this with our existing under-funded chemical dependency facilities and the half-baked policies of health insurance companies when it comes to drug addiction. ROCHESTER [end]
LONDON: (AFP) When Britain bans the herbal stimulant khat, Mohamod Ahmed Mohamed will lose his livelihood. But he fears most for his small Somali community without the leaf that fuels its social life. "I can switch to another business but what about the youth, where are they going to go-the street, the mosque, to hard drugs?" he says at his khat warehouse near London's Heathrow airport. "You are taking away their freedom. Why target us? You will never find somebody falling over on the street or fighting from khat like they do when they are drunk." [continues 625 words]
We can grow some drugs locally and fair-trade drugs can supply the rest. Following the principles of the 100-mile diet, medical marijuana is best grown close to home to reduce transportation costs and support local growers. Kamloops' city council is sensibly looking at zoning of industrial land for marijuana crops and the federal government wants to reduce small grow ops in favour of larger facilities. However, it's not practical to grow drugs such as coca and poppies close to home. And practicality aside, many of these growers could benefit from fair trade and legalization. [continues 423 words]
MAUA, KENYA-James Mithika is a farmer in chocolate brown wingtips. His plot of land lies not far from Mount Kenya, off a red dirt road and a short walk past the goat that bleats like an old man clearing his throat. Mithika moves cautiously to avoid tromping on the beans his mother insisted on planting and then shows us his prized two-acre field of moss-covered and gnarly trees, some more than 100 years old. "The best miraa in the world," Mithika proclaims. [continues 4292 words]
WASHINGTON - In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe. The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon. [continues 1149 words]
The leafy stimulant khat has been smuggled into Canada in bongo drums, golf bags, boxes labelled "technical manuals" and "telecommunications equipment," airline luggage, courier packages and mail. But while khat smuggling has become a nuisance crime for Canadian authorities, who seize around 20,000 kilograms of it every year, a series of arrests in Britain on Tuesday suggests it is now being used to fundraise for terrorism. Counterterrorism police raided four homes in London, Cardiff and Coventry as part of what Scotland Yard described as "a pre-planned, intelligence-led operation into suspected fundraising for terrorism overseas." [continues 385 words]
BUENOS AIRES - In January, U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Marine Corps Lieutenant General John F. Kelly to head the United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM). Based in Miami, Fla., USSOUTHCOM runs military operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and is the key U.S. "drug warrior" in the region. Across the region, the key question, among civilian and military leaders alike, is whether the change in commanders will bring with it a change in focus. The top priority for USSOUTHCOM is to fight narcotics trafficking from the Andes to the Rio Grande. With the Cold War's end, fighting communism was no longer the U.S. armed forces main objective; USSOUTHCOM increasingly concentrated on pursuing coercive anti-drug initiatives, and funds to fight the drug war were plentiful. But the change in commanders is an opportunity for the U.S. to revise, at long last, its regional doctrine in order to address other pressing security needs. [continues 537 words]
With Millions in Federal Funding, One Goes on the Trail of Synthetic Marijuana. Reporting from Little Rock, Ark.- When Jeffery H. Moran goes to work each day, he swipes his security badge, passes into an airtight chamber, opens a bombproof door and enters a lab full of deadly toxins. As chief of the counter-terrorism laboratory at the Arkansas Department of Health - one of 62 such federally funded labs in the country - he heads two dozen chemists who are on constant alert for the release of pestilence or poisons in the United States. [continues 924 words]
How a Republican Aristocrat and Loyal Bush Soldier Turned into a Marijuana Activist and Public Pot-Stirrer. One day in March, John McKay ran into Jodie Emery. It was an encounter that should have been awkward--to say the least. McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, had put Emery's husband Marc in prison. The so-called "Prince of Pot" is now serving a five-year-sentence in connection with the seed empire he ran from Vancouver, B.C., a business hailed as heroic by the legalization movement and demonic by federal law-enforcement authorities like McKay. [continues 5656 words]
Local Cannabis Cultivators at the Remedy Find a Home and Safe Haven in California It is easy for cannabis-using Californians to forget how good they have it. As of January 1 this year, possessing an ounce or less of marijuana is an infraction punishable by a $100 fine and no criminal record. If you have a medical-cannabis referral, it is basically legal for you to possess, ingest and grow marijuana in California. Not true in America's south, where medieval marijuana laws can ruin a pothead's life. In Florida, 25 marijuana plants is a felony that could get you 15 years in prison. If you get caught growing one plant in the state of Virginia, you can end up in prison for five to 30 years. Any amount of weed can get you a prison term of a year in Tennessee and Alabama. [continues 311 words]
On Feb. 15, Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila pleaded for their lives in Spanish, identifying themselves as American federal agents moments after members of a Mexican drug cartel forced their vehicle bearing U.S. diplomat plates off the highway in Central Mexico. The cartel responded by firing more than 80 rounds from automatic weapons. That event instantly changed the landscape of our nation's involvement in Mexico's bloody war. For the first time in 25 years, cartels are targeting American law enforcement. Avila recently described the ambush by the Zeta cartel, comprised of former Mexican military special forces as "pure evil." Even at the Mexican hospital, he feared that they would come back and finish the job. [continues 543 words]
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. [continues 1926 words]
WASHINGTON -- When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons. But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan's biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States. [continues 1773 words]
