Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drugs. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Afghan Opium Output Up 61%

Data recently released by the United Nations shows a 61% increase in opium production in Afghanistan this year. This continues an upward trend ever since the US invasion in 2001, which also happened to be the year that the Taliban outlawed opium. The government crackdown that year resulted in a 185 ton yield. The harvest has since grown to 5,800 tons a year.
The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion of Afghanistan.
-PressTV

I can't help but notice that wherever the CIA goes, rising drug production seems to be a consistent theme.
Ironically, the Taliban had overseen a significant fall in heroin production in the months before the invasion. Their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – collaborating with the UN – had decreed that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns.
As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91 per cent from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares.
The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this production, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.
However, with the overthrow of the Taliban opium fields returned, despite the destruction of crops by coalition forces and initiatives to persuade farmers to switch to other produce.
-Daily Mail

Mission Accomplished?

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Crooked CoCo County Cop

Norman Wielsch, commander of the state's Central Contra Costa Narcotics Enforcement Team (CNET), and Chris Butler, who runs the investigative firm Butler and Associates, were arrested together in Benicia by federal agents on as many as 25 suspected felony offenses, including possessing, transporting and selling marijuana, methamphetamine and steroids, and embezzlement, second-degree burglary and conspiracy.
Public defenders have moved quickly to re-examine CNET cases they lost.

"Was he motivated by a desire to confiscate as much drugs as he could so he could turn around and sell them? Was he writing false police reports? Was he exaggerating in police reports? You have to question everything in a CNET investigation."
-Contra Costa County Public Defender Robin Lipetzky


Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Founders of Mexico's most violent drug cartel were trained by US


The Zetas have a fearsome reputation, but the real surprise comes not in their ruthless use of violence, but in the origins of where they learned the tricks of their bloody trade.
Some of the cartel's initial members were elite Mexican troops, trained in the early 1990s by America’s 7th Special Forces Group or "snake eaters" at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
-Al Jazeera

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

OPD pre-holiday drug sweeps

Coke don’t grow in the ghetto
Guns ain’t made in the hood










For Christmas this year, OPD wants to prosecute 100 Oaklanders for drug trafficking
"A lot of it is a fishing expedition," he said. "It starts with crummy little infractions: riding your bike on the sidewalk, or you have a dog without a leash, a taillight out, something like that. It lets us stop you and talk to you, and from there maybe we can find some probable cause, a way to legally find the drugs. A lot of people who don't know what police are doing see that and call it harassment."

Oh, we know they’re profiling. And it IS harassment.
Help from the several communities in which open-air drug markets operate is limited, Seder said. Many people say they won't help police for fear of becoming known as a snitch and facing violent retribution, he said.
"But if you're not going to stand up for the place you live in, what will you stand up for?" Seder said. “The neighborhood ends up being tacitly involved, in a sense, with the permissive attitude."

Cops want citizens to snitch, but cops don’t tolerate snitching amongst their own ranks. It’s probably the most sacrilegious thing a cop could do. Cops even refuse to admit their own mistakes, or admit the mistakes of their fellow cops. No one circles the wagons like cops do. No one. Their constant whining and complaining about citizens not snitching on each other is probably THE most hypocritical thing about cops.

Merry Christmas.