war on drugs

By BILL KAUFMANN, Calgary Sun

 

It doesn’t happen by design, it’s just how things shake out in the war on drugs, says the senior cop.

 

Drug bust statistics compiled by a new Alberta police force created largely to battle organized crime — the drug trade, in other words — reveal a strikingly lopsided picture.

 

In 2009-10, the entity comprising city and RCMP officers known as ALERT states it seized illicit drugs of various kinds worth $104 million.

 

Of that total, nearly $101 million was marijuana — the drug that, unlike legal pharmaceuticals and alcohol, has never led to a fatal overdose and which most Canadians believe should be decriminalized. Read more »

By Kent Spencer, The Province

 

An Abbotsford mom says gun-toting police terrified “innocent” children on the weekend during a raid that failed to produce the underground grow-op bunker police were after.

 

“Maybe somebody’s going to get shot the next time,” mom Jennifer Hewison, 35, told The Province after an emergency response team surrounded the family’s home on Saturday, looking for what they called a “large-scale grow operation” in an underground bunker.

 

Abbotsford police admit they failed to find a bunker, but said no apology will be made.

  Read more »

By: Jonathan Power, Toronto Star

 

During the difficult years that preceded the British handover of Hong Kong to China, the Chinese government's intense antipathy to opium and the still fresh memories of the evil that 18th century buccaneering Britain had inflicted on China and Hong Kong added an extra emotional charge to what, anyway, was a most complicated transition. Without opium there would have been no Hong Kong. The British only acquired it because of the Opium Wars, and the city's early economic success was built on the opium trade.

 

It was the British who fed the Chinese propensity for opium. Historians point out that the Chinese would have found it elsewhere, even grown some of it themselves. But the truth is the Indian-grown opium was the brand the Chinese smokers savoured and the British East India Company marketed it with commercial élan.

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By Tracy Wilkinson and Ken Ellingwood, Vancouver Sun

 

Nearly four years after President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown against drug traffickers, the cartels are smuggling more narcotics into the United States, amassing bigger fortunes and extending their dominion at home with such savagery that swaths of Mexico are now in effect without authority.

 

The groups also are expanding their ambitions far beyond the drug trade, transforming themselves into broad criminal empires deeply involved in migrant smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and trafficking in contraband such as pirated DVDs.

 

Undeterred by the 80,000 troops and federal police officers arrayed against them, gunmen frequently take on Mexican forces in the open. Operatives of one group, the Zetas, did so in northern Mexico this spring when they blockaded army garrisons. In June a group believed to be linked to another organization, La Familia, ambushed federal police in the western state of Michoacan, killing 12 officers in early morning light.

  Read more »

By: Paul Carlucci, Enfield Weekly (Nova Scotia)

 

It is the traditional duty of the steely Conservative to position him or herself (mostly himself, however, as a simple function of participation numbers) against all things criminal. Criminality is everywhere. First, it must be feared. Then, laws must be passed and police forces further empowered. Finally, prisons must be built. Perhaps in some glorious future those prisons will be private. In the interim, that billions are spent on them will have to suffice.

 

To recap:

 

Conservative Party: Tough on crime.

 

Liberal Party: Likes to see innocent people savaged by the criminally insane.

  Read more »

By Lachlan Labere - Salmon Arm Observer

 

Drug issues continue to be the biggest threat to the health and safety of the community.

 

Salmon Arm RCMP Staff Sgt. Kevin Keane emphasized this point when delivering an update to city council Monday.

 

“When you look at it from other priorities, such as youth, traffic, the increase in property crime, it seems to be at the core of everything,” said Keane.

 

Keane said the detachment has made several high-profile arrests and that is going to be the norm.

 

“Down at the shop, we’re starting to get a little mean-on these days, we’re starting to get angry about it. We just don’t tolerate anybody anymore who kind of flaunts it.” Read more »

Editorial, Orangeville Citizen

 

PERHAPS IT’S IN RESPONSE to the law-and-order agenda of the Harper Conservatives, and maybe it’s a sign of things to come. Whatever the case, a Supreme Court of Canada judgment released last Friday must be sending alarm bells ringing among Canadians concerned at protecting our civil liberties.

 

For years now, we’ve become accustomed to politics dominating the United States Supreme Court, a classic example being when that court voted 5- 4 to effectively put George W. Bush in office by barring recounts in Florida that would likely have given the swing state to Al Gore.

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By: Colby Cosh, Macleans

 

Bill C-95, the “criminal organization” amendment to the Criminal Code passed in 1997, has borne its inevitable fruit. Devised to calm the spirits of a fearful nation, the law bent civil liberties into new and fascinating shapes. It created a new offence:

 

 

Which sounds fair enough, but be sure to check out the convenience-of-the-Crown caveats in subsection (2):

 

 

To put it another way, you can conceivably be tried for “participating in or contributing to” a criminal organization even if it didn’t get around to committing any crimes, you didn’t do anything to help it actually commit crimes, you didn’t know what particular crimes it might be thinking of committing, and you couldn’t possibly pick anybody else in the group out of a lineup.

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By: Terence Corcoran, National Post

 

The Harper government, fresh from botching its alleged pander to the libertarian wing of the Conservative party with its voluntary census plan, appears to be having no problem steamrolling over the libertarian wing’s sensitivities on crime. In back-to-back performances this week, two Cabinet ministers invoked harsh tough-on-crime motives that show the Tories’ concern about individual rights to be a fleeting interest compared with their enthusiasm for escalating the bonkers American war on drugs, gambling and sex.

 

Under the guise of fighting “organized crime,” a global economic sector created largely by government laws and regulations, the Conservatives — with hardly a peep from the opposition or critics — this week expanded the Canadian division of the monstrous U.S.-led war on drugs. For a government allegedly concerned about the “intrusiveness” of a pollster extracting personal information under threat of fines and prison, the Conservatives are disturbingly unconcerned about a massive increase in police power to meddle in the lives of its citizens in the name of fighting crime.

  Read more »

By ROB TRIPP, Toronto Sun

 

KINGSTON, Ont. - The federal prison service plans to build new cells at 35 penitentiaries across the country to make room for an exploding inmate population.

 

A total of 60% of the country’s 58 federal prisons will see expansion, according to internal Corrections Canada information obtained by QMI Agency.

 

A list compiled by senior officials shows that new units will be built at six federal prisons in Ontario, including four in the immediate Kingston, Ont., area — Collins Bay, Frontenac, Pittsburgh and Bath institutions.

 

All six federal prisons for women will see expansion, according to the information.

  Read more »