Jeremy Kuzmarov: For more than a decade the CIA has provided wads of dollars to the office of Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president largely as a means of buying political influence.
War On Drugs
Massive Mexico-U.S. Drug Trade: White Elephant in the Room
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Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Whether we want to admit it or not, any discussion revolving around the U.S. and Mexico must start and end with drugs. However, these next two days President Obama and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto will do everything in their power to dance around the issue and ignore the elephant in the room.
Will America See Marijuana Legalization in Our Lifetime?
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David Love: As is the case with same-sex marriage, the tide seems to be turning on public attitudes on marijuana. For the black community, with so many young people incarcerated for possessing small quantities of the drug, the stakes are high.
The Atrophied Conscience of Apartheid America
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Mark Naison: What is daily life for young people of color who are poor is quite literally out of sight and out of mind, and thereby unimaginable, not only for middle class and wealthy residents of cities, but for the mayors of thoses cities.
The Ugly Truth of Mandatory Drug Sentencing
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Seth Ferranti: Clarence Aaron is serving three life terms for a small-time college cocaine deal, another victim of heinous mandatory drug sentencing laws. If he’s waiting for Obama—or anyone else—for help, he’ll be waiting a long time.
Reduced Drug Possession Penalties Can Save Money and Lives
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Diana Zuñiga: Voters overwhelmingly believe that California’s prisons and jails are overcrowded and want more alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders.
Mass Incarceration: Points of Agreement on the Right and the Left
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Diane Lefer: When a community sees daily injustice and doesn’t see the rule of law equally applied, it becomes morally and ethically easier to choose to live in a lawless way.
Racial Justice in the Criminal Justice System
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Sharon Kyle: While most Americans are cognizant of the disproportionate representation of Black and Brown men in our prisons, fewer are aware of criminal justice system’s selective enforcement of laws and selective use of penalties which often results in racially biased outcomes.
Coca: One More Thing US Drugs Policy Gets Wrong
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Diane Lefer: In Bolivia, as in much of the Andes, people understand that coca leaves are not the same as cocaine. The leaves, which are rich in vitamins and minerals, are used for tea, in candies, in flour for baking cakes, as an anaesthetic, and in beverages.
The Coming Revolt: When Will the Sleeping Giant Awake?
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Mark Naison: You cannot beat down and repress such a large number of people without generating a response. Where it comes, and when it comes may be a mystery, but come it will. And when it does, it will shake this nation to its foundations.
Dr. Paul’s Patented Super Miracle Cure-All Remedy
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Mark Halfmoon: Ron Paul stands for the most important things that the corporate beneficiaries of GOP rule desire: no regulation, no taxes, every-man-for-himself-only-the-strong-survive “free” market rule.
We’re All Black Now
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David Love: Corporate greed on the part of arms manufacturers has turned an obscure and anachronistic amendment dealing with militias into a license to kill, literally, on a massive scale. The result is a gun for every American, with no system of licensing, registration and background checks.
Real Immigration Reform Needed, Not Just Words
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Alvaro Huerta: Instead of sympathetic words for immigrants in a re-election, campaign-style format, we need for Obama to make immigration reform a top priority in lieu of pandering to a growing Latino electorate.
The New Jim Crow: Our Role in Incarceration Nation
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Diane Lefer: Judge Gray referred to Senator Jim Webb of Virginia who, in looking at the entire criminal justice system in which we hold the world record for the number of people incarcerated, concluded either we are the most evil people in the world or we are doing something seriously wrong.
America’s “Shoot ‘Em Up, Lock ‘Em Up” Mentality Is Its Undoing
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David Love: The land of the free is home to only 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And we spend more than all nations combined on “defense”. We are addicted to shooting em up or locking em up. But we can’t provide healthcare to all.
American Drug Users Fund Deadly Cartels
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Andrea Nill: Over the past couple of weeks, thousands of Mexicans have taken to the streets to protest the bloody drug war that has ravaged Latin America and left 35,000 people dead since 2006 in Mexico alone.
More Black Men Are in Prison Today Than Enslaved in 1850
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Dick Price: “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday
Amnesty Shmamnesty
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Adam Eran: Would the oligarchy that is the military-industrial-prison-media complex stoop so low as to incite a war, even promoting Iran as a backwater deserving of U.S. “shellacking”? And is the Pope really Catholic?
Scapegoating War Crimes in Af-Pak on Drugs
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Jeremy Kuzmarov: It might not be Reefer Madness redux, but the blame being put on drugs for civilian deaths in Afghanistan today has that same air of hysteria about it.
California NAACP Right to Support Legalized Marijuana Prop 19
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David Love: The California NAACP is under fire when it should be applauded for its courage. Alice Huffman is carrying out the mission of her organization, ensuring that it protects civil rights and remains relevant in changing times. Should we expect her to do less?
First Solve Prison Crisis, Then Fix California’s Budget
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Dick Price: To get a handle on the damage California’s current approach to incarceration is having on its citizens, consider this: In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its vaunted university system, UC Merced.
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
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Michelle Alexander: The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs.
African-Americans Have Seven Times Greater Chance of Imprisonment
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Sherwood Ross: It is far more likely that in the late twentieth century, in contrast to earlier time, patterns of discrimination reflect unconscious biases rather than blatant attempts to oppress African Americans.
Obama’s Base Pact with Colombia Accelerates Dangerous Trend
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Sherwood Ross: Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’sFebruary 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”
800,000 Americans Busted Annually for Pot
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The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.
Friday Feedback: Repeal the Controlled Substances Act of 1970
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Only a clause about interstate commerce provides the CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) with any pretext of constitutionality. The effect of the CSA on interstate commerce is to fatten outlaws and endanger homeland security while the treasury bleeds.
The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure: From the Vietnam to the Afghan Quagmire
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In a recent interview, Richard Holbrooke, White House Special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan and a key architect of President Obama’s “surge” strategy, declared the War on Drugs in Afghanistan to be a failure.
The American InJustice System
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Per capita, the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any industrialized nation in the world. Over 2.3 million Americans are living behind bars or under conditions where the state oversees their conduct. Crime rates have continued to fall over the past 25 years, however, incarceration rates have grown. Funding to build prisons exceeds [...]
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