The Candy Machine.
Not so long ago, just before Christmas, I read an article in one of the bigger newspapers around here. NRC Next if I'm correct. Anyway, this article started with addressing the reader about his party mentality. Having worked hard all year long people all around deserve a party, especially during Christmas and New Year's day. And a lot of these people fuel this party with cocaine. Ain't no party like a cocaine party and well you deserve it the article started.
Next it went on to question this right. It started with explaining the journey that line of cocaine has to take before it reaches your nose. All these poor farmers, all these poor traffickers, all the people in these poor countries that suffer from our desire to party like hell. First only South America, but these days Africa is used as a big hub into Europe. Poor little Africa. Poor people of Africa!
Of course it didn't took long before the connection to terrorism was made. After all, we people must be terrorized and what proves 'a thing must be banned' more than a connection with terrorism these days? Yes, while snorting your line of cocaine you actively support terrorism in the world. Nasty Europe. Nasty cocaine snorting Europe!
I can't deny any information inside the article. These stories are sad and the situation is so bad. And worse, it's getting more bad every year. We can't keep going on like this. This must be stopped. I agree totally, I mean I too feel like that. But still, if you ask me the conclusion was simply dead wrong. Making people feel bad because they simply want to relieve their brains for a while is not the answer. Making people feel bad, so you can get them to support the so called "war on drugs" is not the answer if you ask me. The "war on drugs" is not the answer I feel, it's the cause if not the accelerator of more trouble to come.
So many people are simple mindedly thinking illegal drugs are bad and we need to ban them all. So many people believe without question exactly all the stories people tell them. And face it, from day one we learn illegal drugs are bad. I mean, I did. So many misconceptions exist in the mind of people on the subject. Even within my own head, still! But if you ask me, I feel that illegal drugs is not the problem. The illegality maybe, but not the drugs itself. In the same way that I feel the gun is not the problem. It's the consciousness behind the gun that decides the gun is good or bad. And if you ask me with illegal drugs it's exactly the same.
So at the moment I'm reading a book by Tom Freiling. A great book if you ask me. It's called The Candy Machine - How cocaine took over the world. Here's the back of the book:
Gabrielle unwinds at weekends with a line of coke - and also works for a major police force. Juan Pablo is a drugs mule in Bogotá who gets his stash from a sweathouse. New Yorker Ted's spent the last twenty years dealing. Belica started picking coca when she was eleven. Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, thinks legalization's the only way..
Cocaine is big business. Governments spend millions on an unwinnable war against it, yet it's now the drug of choice in the West. How did the cocaine economy get so huge? Who keeps it running behind the scenes?
In The Candy Machine Tom Freiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and New York. He meets Medellín hitmen, US kingpins, British crack users, Jamaican boatmen and Brazilian traffickers, and talks to the soldiers and narcotics officers who fight the gangs and cartels. He traces cocaine's progress from legal 'pick-me-up' to luxury product to mass global commodity, and ultimately shows how America's anti-drugs crusade is actually increasing demand.
Cutting through the myths about the white market, this is the story of cocaine as it's never been told before.
While reading the book I've already read so many sad things that make you wonder. So many sad stories, but this time with another conclusion. If the author presents a conclusion at all. It's more the conclusion I form from these stories. If you ask me, he just tells the other story. A mostly untold story. Which story is truth, I don't know. But I like to share some of these remarkable stories while I'm reading the book. I like to share them here on Facebook.
Like I've said before. I can't deny any information in the aforementioned newspaper article, but I feel the conclusion is so stupid and morally wrong. And that's what I like to address. I do believe the stories of these people are so sad and yes something must be done to get this straight. Now I'm no activist of any kind and have no intention (or even power) to self handedly change anything in this world. But maybe by sharing some of the information in the book, you might too start to look at the "war on drugs" in a different way. And maybe, just maybe something will change this way. So at forehand I say sorry for all these Walls you are going to read the next couple of days/weeks, the peculiarities of being a Facebook friend of me I guess. :)
--edit: this I wrote on Facebook; but I’ll put all the quotes here too probably. Unfortunately no big discussions here, for that I’ll refer to Facebook.
*) White politicians found that drug scares offered them an opportunity to bond with their white electors, especially in times of recession or redundancy. The political gains to be made by scaremongering invariably outweighed whatever concerns over public health they might have had. [Page 20]
*) America's first drug Tsar, Dr. Hamilton Wright, alleged that drugs made black men uncontrollable, and that they encouraged them to rebel against the authority of white people. [Page 21]
*) During the prohibition era in the US, alcohol consumption did not really lowered much. But homicides and death rates by alcohol poisoning went through the roof. Many feared that the nation would drown in a torrent of cheap legal alcohol after the prohibition era ended. That did not happen. Alcohol consumption stayed the same, but homicides and death rates fell sharply. [Page 26]
*) So it was that a policy principally aimed at combating the use of heroin by a very small minority of Americans inadvertently criminalized several million Andean coca-chewers, who had been chewing coca unhindered for thousands of years. [Page 30]
*) The term "war on drugs" was coined by Richard Nixon, but it had nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with the fact that he was running for the Presidency for the second time and he thought that it would be nice if this time he won. He knew that if he was a strong anti-crime guy that would get him a lot of votes. But boy, if he could be in charge of a war, how those votes would pour in! [Page 34]
*) After a briefing with Nixon in 1969, H. R. Haldeman, by now the President's top aide, noted in his diary that 'Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that, while not appearing to do so. [Page 34]
*) The [1972] Shafer report went on to assert that there was no link between marijuana and crime; that alcohol was far more dangerous than marijuana; and that personal use of marijuana should be decriminalized. This was not what the good Christian Richard Nixon wanted to hear. 'Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish," he raged. [Page 35]
*) A good example of how the press created stories to fit the demand for a drug scare is "Jimmy's World", the title of an article published in the Washington Post in September 1980, which described the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict who lived with his drug-addicted parents. Janet Cooke wrote the article, even won a Pulitzer Prize for it, but had fabricated the story. [Page 63]
*) Blame is at the heart of the war on drugs. In retrospect, one can't help but conclude from the politicians's reactions to economic restructuring and the closure of many of America's biggest factories in the 70's and 80's, that the crack scare obviated the need to develop effective policies to tackle mass unemployment. As long as the focus stayed on drugs and drug-abuse, inner-city residents could be blamed for the poverty they had been driven into. The inner cities were going to be abandoned either way; what the politicians had to do was convince the American public that the inner cities deserved to be abandoned. [Page 67]
*) Tony Papa's story is telling. His car had broken down and he had no money to repair it. A guy asked if he wanted to make a quick buck by doing a drug delivery. He turned it down, because he didn't want nothing to do with it. Some time later he again had no money and was desperate. Again the same question and this time he accepted. The deal appeared to be a sting operation. The guy was facing life imprisonment, but would have to do less time if he'd turned informant. Changing Tony's life for ever. [Page 73]
*) David, the former police officer with South Bureau Narcotics in Los Angeles, told me that planting drugs on suspects was common. Sometimes when we stopped a guy, we'd search him thoroughly but couldn't find any drugs. So we figured that he must have dropped them when he saw us, and we'd go back and check the pathway. When we couldn't find anything, one of my partners would say, "Hey, here it is!". [Page 76]
*) In 2002, Detroit's Chief of Police Jerry Oliver admitted that 75 per cent of his department's budget was spent on fighting the drugs trade. This has had important ramifications for other branches of law enforcement. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime such as murder, rape, and aggravated assault have declined. [Page 77]
*) In Baltimore, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, but arrest rates for murder have gone from 90 per cent to half that. Younger police officers are no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learnt only to make meaningless drug arrests at the nearest corner. [Page 77]
*) Congress also made twenty-six crimes, all related to drug sales and distribution, punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence. This proved to be the single most dramatic change ushered in by the anti-drugs legislation of 1986, one that inadvertently sent a generation of black American men to prison. After 1986, anyone found in possession of more than five grams of crack cocaine - even first-time offenders - was sent to prison for at least five years. [Page 78]
*) Tony Papa said most of the guys were doing fifteen years to life, and they were either murderers or drug dealers. I thought, "This is crazy. This murdered got the same sentence as me." I met hundreds and hundreds of people that had been involved in drug activity, but I never met a kingpin of a high-end drug dealer. I just met a lot of pawns, who had been juggling to put food on the table for their families. [Page 79]
*) By the millennium, a third of all African-American men in the US were in prison, on probation or parole or under some other form of criminal justice system supervision. In 2008, more black men in their twenties were under the control of the nation's criminal justice system than the total number in higher education. [Page 83]
*) First came the prison, than the town around it. They were built mainly in Republican territories, and you have generations of prison guards in those towns. So they fed their communities by filling the prisons with people from the inner cities. It became their cash cow and politicians used to fight each other to build the next prison. That's why the laws are very hard to change. [Page 83]
*) The prison system just seems to be a boot on the neck of these poor communities. Drugs continue. You can get drugs anywhere, any time. The law doesn't stop that. It just puts away a lot of people who shouldn't be in prison. There's no rehabilitation, no training, no real education for the most part, so these guys just get trained to become even better at the drug trade. Our tax dollars are just going to the training of more sophisticated criminals! You can get over an addiction, but you'll never get over a conviction. Every time you go for a job, it's hanging over your head like a big ugly cloud. The only place that wants you is right back in the drug culture, the very group that we say we're trying to save you from! [Page 84]
*) Now, we had forty-foot walls, gun towers, every technology known to mankind, but drugs were still the number one problem we had in the joint. If you can't keep them out of a totally controlled environment, how realistic is it to tell the American people that we can keep them out of the country? That's straight-up bullshit. [Page 85]
*) Once out of prison, felons find themselves politically as well as economically marginalized because the United States is the only industrial democracy that denies ex-prisoners the right to vote. In Southern states, as many as 30 per cent of black men are barred from voting. This has ensured that arch-conservative candidates have won successive elections in the south. It's modern day slavery. [Page 85]
*) Steven Levitt found an interesting and frequently overlooked factor that went a long way to explain falling crime rates; the legalization of abortion in 1973. Children born because their mothers were denied an abortion are substantially more likely to be involved in crime, even when taking account of the income, age, education and health of the mother. After 1973, saw fewer unwanted children were born, as more women chose to have abortions. Between 1985 (when an unwanted child born in 1973 would have turned twelve) and 1997 (when an unwanted child born in 1973 would have turned twenty-four), homicide rates fell by a quarter in states with higher rates of abortion but increased by 4 per cent in states with low rates of abortion. [Page 89]
*) Too many people like things the way they are. Big time drug dealers are making billions of dollars a year, tax-free. Law enforcement, who are in effect paid huge tax money to fight the first group. It's unbelievable, but the good guys and the bad guys have a mutual interest in the perpetuation of the status quo. The third group that is winning is the politicians, who talk tough about the war on drugs -- which gets them elected and re-elected. The fourth group is those in the private sector who make money from increased crime -- the people that build and staff prisons, the people that sell burglar alarms and security services. There's big money in all of that. And the fifth group is the terrorists, because almost all of the primary funding for terrorism around the world comes from the sale of illegal drugs. [Page 102]
*) A slight decline in drug use is taken as evidence that government policies are finally working. A slight increase is taken to mean that not enough is being done. Both scenarios demand for more funding. The war on drugs has become a war without end. [Page 103]
*) When the US government started cracking down, we started using alternative routes, like Haiti. The Cali cartel took it to the next level, made it more like a corporation, sending it in by the ton on boats. All the Colombian ships where being searched up and down in the port of Miami, so they'd ship it to another country and bring it in on a Panamanian ship or a Guatemalan ship. We were hiding the stuff in concrete statues, or dissolving two or three kilos in water, soaking it into businessmen's suits, then drying them out and bringing it in that way. [Page 134/135]
*) Americans consume roughly 290 metric tons of cocaine a year. Imported in bulk, this load could be carried across the US-Mexican border in just thirteen trucks. Instead, it seeps in in thousands of ingenious disguises: dissolved in polystyrene and turned into pet bedding, sewn into children's nappies, or smuggled inside pineapples. Very often such complicated chicanery isn't even necessary: most of America's cocaine crosses the border hidden in private vehicles. [Page 136]
*) What the most famous singer of narcocorridos Rosalino 'Chalino' Sanchez celebrated in his songs is not the drugs trade, but the power the drugs trade has given to the powerless. For Mexicans who have had little choice but to leave their own country to work as a second-class citizens in the United States, cocaine is the hero of the piece. It has given Mexicans somethings that Americans are happy to pay good money for, something that miraculously gains rather than loses value when it crosses the border. [Page 140]
*) In many cities of the United States, the authorities have asked radio stations not to play narcocorridos. The DEA has reportedly trailed the composers of the songs, as they have the composers of crack music. In some cases they have even taken singer-songwriters to court, charging them with complicity in the drug-smuggling offences they describe in their corridos. [Page 140]
*) Mexican judges are also particularly susceptible to bribery by drug traffickers. Take this case from 2004, in which a group of eighteen hit men from the Sinaloa cartel was detained by soldiers in Neuvo Laredo. They were found to be carrying 28 long guns, 2 short guns, 223 cartridges, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, 12 grenade launchers, and 18 hand grenades, yet Judge Gomez Martinez set them free, ruling that they were innocent of charges of involvement with organized crime. [Page 145/146]
*) Another memorable judge is Humberto Ortage Zurita from the southern state of Oaxaca. In 1996, he presided over the case of two men detained in a car with six kilos of cocaine. The judge absolved them, declaring that no one could be sure that the cocaine was theirs. Hearing a case of a woman who had been stopped on a bus with three kilos of cocaine taped to her stomach, Ortega Zurita ordered that she be set free, because she did not carry the drugs consciously'. Shortly afterwards, Judge Ortaga Zurita 'committed suicide', by stabbing himself several times in the heart. [Page 146]
*) Mexican drug-related violence skyrocketed during the course of 2006, when the government was targeting the capos. Doing so left a power vacuum; suddenly drug-trafficking corridors and territories worth billions of dollars were up for grabs, which the capos' lieutenants rushed to secure. The ensuing struggle for control unleashed terrible violence, which rival cartels vied to exploit and government have proven unable to put an end to. The problem is that aggressive drug enforcement only increases the violence it purports to put an end to. Yet such is the authorities' faith in the law and its enforcement that they see the disputes that their policies give rise to as a positive development, however counter-productive they prove to be. [Page 148]
*) Since interception of cocaine in transit failed, the United States decided to stop coca being turned into cocaine in the first place. Destructing Colombia. I mean you can travel over the department of Putumayo in a helicopter for half an hour and all you see is barren land, where fifteen years ago it was one of the most pristine jungles in the world. Most of the damage done to the Colombian rainforest today is the result not of coca cultivation, but of the fumigation of the coca crops with herbicides sprayed from American crop-duster planes. [Page 152/153]
*) If the coca plants have been fumigated, the farmer will get a group of fifteen or so people together, and the next day they'll go out and cut off all the branches, right back to the trunk. They'll grow back lovely. The chemicals only affect the leaves and the branches, not the root. For every hectare lost, the cocalero will replant two hectares: the first to recover his losses and repay the Mafioso who financed him, and the second to generate an income for himself. [Page 159]
*) Meanwhile, the 2.5 million litres of glyphosate that were sprayed over Colombia between 1992 and 1998, and the millions more that have been sprayed since then have had deleterious effects on the countryside. The wind picks up the chemicals and they go everywhere, so a lot of the maize, yucca and plantain turn sickly too. The poison gets into the water, so a lot of people get ill. The United States government initially pooh-poohed these complaints, even accusing its critics of being in the pay of the cocaine traffickers. [Page 161]
*) Considering that Colombia is a leading producer of cocaine, marijuana, and, until recently, heroin, and that the laws governing drug consumption are as selectively enforced as the rest of Colombia's laws, not really, it comes as a surprise to find how few Colombians actually use drugs. Just 1.5 per cent of them have tried cocaine, largely because it's still too expensive for most of them, but also because it's widely regarded as a rich man's drugs, strictly for export to the fantasy lands of Europe and the United States. [Page 176]
*) Just 1 per cent of the retail price of cocaine in the US goes to the coca farmer i Colombia. Four per cent goes to its cocaine producers and 20 per cent goes to its smugglers. The real winners are the distributors in the countries where cocaine is retailed, generally the United States and Europe. Seventy-five per cent of the retail price of cocaine never leaves the country in which it was realized. [Page 177]
*) If support for fumigation collapse, and if we stopped spraying, cultivation would go up to 600,000 hectares, and we'd see a real worldwide problem. The governments of Colombia and the United States insist that without this aggressive law enforcement, demand for cocaine would explode. But this way of thinking side-steps the fact that world demand for cocaine is satisfied by about 200,000 hectares of coca, and has been, with little variation, since the late 1970s, in spite of the huge sums spent spraying the coca fields. Coca cultivation has been unaffected by the fumigation programme, but Colombia rainforest have not. [Page 179]
Saturday, January 29, 2011