drug war

By Scott Simpson, Vancouver Sun

 

One of British Columbia's biggest underground industries could find itself short-circuited by a BC Hydro technology upgrade.

 

Hydro is moving ahead with a plan to replace mechanical electricity meters with smart meters across the province that are expected to make it a lot tougher for indoor marijuana growers to conceal their operations.

 

Smart meters represent the first major upgrade on conventional analog electricity meters in a half century. Hydro last month issued a request for proposals for companies to bid on installation of new, digital meters as well as the accompanying hardware and software, to serve all of its customers by 2012.

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By: Chris Selley, National Post

 

Law and order

Ours not to reason why. Ours but to shut up, and vote Conservative.

 

The New and Improved Stockwell Day seems to have continued his relapse toward the Old and Unimproved Stockwell Day while we were away, which is a pity. On his Maclean’s blog, John Geddes goes beyond the prima facie absurdity of using a rise in unreported crime to justify building more prisons — presumably “to lock up the unreported criminals,” as Geddes quips — and explains that when Mr. Day said that home invaders have been getting off with conditional sentences, he had absolutely nothing, repeat nothing, to back it up. Which is, y’know, not bloody good enough.

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By: Ian Bailey, Globe and Mail

 

It’s not enough to buy crack. You need a pipe to smoke it. And since drugstores don’t sell crack pipes, self-confessed addict Tony Smith has gone into a lot of dirty places in this Vancouver Island city to find pieces to craft pipes.

 

The 40-year-old Thunder Bay native, who has lived in Nanaimo for more than half his life, says he has made pipes from pieces of washing machines, steel wool, reused glass tubing from old neon signs, and glass broken from eyedroppers. There was a time, he says, when he would have had 10 to 15 pipes to show a visitor to his room in the Balmoral Hotel, a residence for people with addictions and mental illness. But Mr. Smith says he is using crack less these days, so has only one crack pipe to display – a homemade creation of yellowing plastic.

 

Within weeks, however, Mr. Smith will likely be able to pick up a clean pipe, provided with the city’s blessing as part of a plan by the Vancouver Island Health Authority to distribute so-called crack kits to addicts in this coastal town of about 80,000.

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By: Charles W. Moore, Telegraph Journal

 

Scanning coverage of Conrad Black's release from prison on bail, I was amused (sort of) by a reporter's describing Mr. Black as a "one-time conservative." This assessment was based on Mr. Black's taking up the cause of prison and drug-law reform during his incarceration, and says more about the writer's superficial, stereotyped perceptions of "conservatism" than about Mr. Black's politics.

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By Josephine Staddon, The Daily News

 

Having always been a social activist, a placard-carrying protester, I make every attempt to research the pros and cons of controversial events.

 

Right now it is the struggle to do the 'right thing' for illegal drug users. Why are we attempting to legitimize illegal drug use?

 

First of all, marijuana is not a harmful drug. I have yet to hear of anyone dying from its effects. If so, then why not places to go to and have a doobie? Why can't people grow a couple of plants for their own use?

 

This would, of course, result in a loss of jobs for hundreds of people involved in the pursuit of pot criminals.

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CBC News

 

Conrad Black has slammed the U.S. justice system as he reflected publicly on the 28 months he spent in a federal prison.

 

"Of course, I was glad, jubilant, to leave … but also grateful for many of the relationships I had formed; enlightened by my observation of American justice on the other side of the wall; and happy to have got on well in an environment very foreign to any I had known before," Black wrote in a column for the National Post.

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By Bruce Livesey, Special to The Gazette

 

JUAREZ, Mexico – Like most cops in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Jesus Manuel Fierro-Mendez was dirty.

 

In fact, soon after being promoted to the position of captain, he was smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine into the United States. And when Fierro-Mendez quit his job in the spring of 2007, after someone tried to kill him, he went to work for the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug-trafficking organization, run by Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, the richest drug lord in North America and the second most wanted man in the world after Osama bin Laden.

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By: Adrian Humphreys, National Post

 

Guillermo Marquez Alvarez, a businessman in the city of Morelia in central Mexico, cherished his 13-year friendship with the brother of Mexico's President, Felipe Calderon, until a man slid beside him in a taxi and demanded he act as a messenger between the President and Los Zetas, a notoriously savage drug cartel.

 

If he helped the gangsters he would be well paid, he was told that morning. If he refused, he and his family would be killed.

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The Chronicle Herald

THE level of extreme violence in northern Mexico was off the charts long before Ottawa issued a travel advisory, after daylight executions of two U.S. consular officials on the streets of Ciudad Juarez a week ago, warning Canadians to avoid trips to that troubled region.

Ever since Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s controversial war on the powerful Mexican drug cartels that ship their illicit goods across the U.S. border began in 2006, as many as 18,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting bloodbath. Many were cartel foot soldiers involved in turf battles, but others were police officers, journalists and innocent civilians caught in crossfires or killed as a result of mistaken identity.

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