Notice they don’t tell you how much he got busted with…5K is a lot to cough up for a minor schedule drug bust in a not really urban area.

A former Crawford County Sheriff’s deputy who served as a school DARE officer faces felony marijuana charges.

William John Bonkowski III, 45, was arrested Thursday as part of a series of 11 drug-related arrests around the county. The Grayling Township resident worked for the sheriff’s department for more than a decade and for a time taught the school-based Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, officials said.

And pot is endemic up there, you’d have to be a pretty busy person to get attention leading to an arrest. Anyway, people always think I’m being rhetorical when I say “the government is the drug dealer.” But I’m not. And you have to love the DARE angle- who wants to bet in addition to recruiting new street talent, there was also some Maf54 action going on? It’s par for the course for these types.  Read more 

I got this in an email from another Black blogger; I haven’t confirmed the victim’s race, but even so, it’s a horrible intersection of several issues we’ve been speaking of lately. And likely, one example of something that happens daily in this country. Here’s the short story:

A man died early this morning after being Tasered by Fayetteville Police Department officers.

The dead man has been indentified as Otis C. Anderson, 36, of the 2700 block of Providence Street in Fayetteville.

One police officer has been place on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation. The State Bureau of Investigation has been called in to investigate. Fayetteville police also are conducting an internal investigation.  Read more 

Really long, but worth it. Bottom line: America has lost the War on Drugs, in every effective measure of those words. You knew that, of course, but what fascinated me about this piece was that despite the moderate, non-foily tone, it’s impossible not to come away with the conclusion that our drug policy is directed by complete idiots or corrupt players or both. More radically minded people like me will point out that a big chunk of the failure must be the result of endemic corruption, but even without that, the shift is complete. The time when we can hopefully and unabashedly speak about drug policy reform is here, even if the media has yet to realize that fact. It’s because there are three groups of people in this country, and one of them is finally in the majority.

The first, and largest, are those who believe it is time for sensible drug policy reform, from top to bottom. That group includes not only dope-smoking hippies and Rave-tripping teens, but experienced law enforcement officials and conservative politicians. One of many choice quotes from the article:

“What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,” says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. “The other guys were learning just as we were learning,” Coleman says. “We had this hubris.”  Read more 

Like in other places and times in Asia, the Fear of the Black Man takes on different forms, and is expressed in different degrees and brutalities. You think we need to be careful of our police state here? Get a load of this very scary scene from a macbre, high speed techno action flick complete with Tarantinoesque levels of violence. I don’t think they got to eat chicken and breakdance back at the station either. Time to jump on the Boycott the 2008 Olympics Bandwagon, Folks:

Beijing Vice: a brutal bust reveals the strong arm of the Chinese law
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:55 AM
By Melinda Liu

Where have all the foreign drug dealers gone? Ask the men in black. Beijing expats are buzzing about a weekend crackdown in Sanlitun that struck many of us as more brutal than the norm. (Yes, here brutal can be the norm.) With Beijing pouring controversial investments into Africa — and preparing to host the 2008 Summer Olympics — you’d think officialdom would want to avoid incidents perceived to have racist and repressive overtones. Like rounding up dozens of black men — reportedly including the son of a Caribbean ambassador — and beating many of them in public during a drug raid. Pan Yali (an expat who’s using his Chinese name due to fear of retaliation) filed this eyewitness account about the bust:

One sees shocking things in China. Sometimes they are also not surprising. That they are not surprising may be one of the most disturbing things of all.

Saturday night, I hesitantly pedaled into a small street in Sanlitun, the bar area most popular with expats in Beijing. It is a shoddy, miniature replica of some of the most unappealing carnival-esque streets in the world, the Fourth Circle of Western expat-in-Asia bar hell, a circus that Bosch would appreciate. Two weekends ago, an Australian architect — a former contestant on the TV show Big Brother — ordered a drink at a bar here at 3 AM, then slumped over his table, and never woke up. (Drugs or foul play were suspected, but police dropped the case for lack of evidence.) Tonight the entire cast of characters was out in force: drunken foreigners, the locals who “love” them, the shady bar owners, the homeless children and their decrepit pimps, the flower-sellers and the African drug dealers.

And then, the young men in unmarked black jumpsuits wielding batons.  Read more 

Ian does all the hard work, so just go read his excellent recap about drugs and why there is only one answer in the drug “war.” Legalization, in some form or another, is going to happen. It’s simply a matter of time. No matter how entrenched the Drug War MIC establishment, eventually it’s going to be so ugly, corrupt and not effectual that taxpayers around the world will say, “enough.” I think I’ll begin to see it in this country in my lifetime; kids today really don’t care about that Great Evil in the same way as folks my age and older have been brainwashed to be.

I just had a conversation with a friend, and I reminded him: it’s always a good time to advocate sensible drug policy/legalization. Always. That is, as far as that political battle goes, our side is always going to lose. Pushing for drug legalization is a guaranteed no-go, as far as causes are concerned. Until that day that it is not.  Read more 

The prison population will increase by 200,000 in the next five years and by 2025 the prison population in some areas will increase by 90%. That is at least $50,000 a head. These prisoners will be farmed out as cheap or free labor and will provide a permanent slave class. End slavery in America.

What the war did do was help drive the nation’s prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hit — a dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs.  Read more 

The IndyKidz tend towards high polemicism and strong rhetoric, not strong enough language or rhetoric (see: Update with excerpt below) but I still love ’em. They were Shrill before it was fashionable, and they pay attention to stories that even the progressive blogosphere often overlooks. There is another, even longer running war going on, right here in America. And its captive victims are making the parts to feed to the military machine that is gorging itself on blood overseas:

In 2005, FPI sold more than $750,000,000 worth of goods to the federal government. Sales to the Army alone put UNICOR on the Army’s list of top 50 suppliers, ahead of well-known corporations like Dell Computer, according to Wayne Woolley, Newhouse News Service.

Over the past three years, thousands of federal prisoners have been working overtime filling Pentagon contracts for everything from radio components to body armor.

Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the Army’s Communication and Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., has shipped more than 200,000 radios to combat zones, most with at least some components manufactured by federal inmates working in 11 prison electronics factories around the country. Under current law, UNICOR enjoys a contracting preference known as “mandatory source,” which obligates government agencies to try to buy certain goods from the prisons before allowing private companies to bid on the work. This same contracting restriction applies to state agencies.  Read more 

Here is a good short discussion about our continuing failure in the “war on drugs.” The money quote:

The reporter places no emphasis on the most astonishing (if true) fact in the story: grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That’s about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the “French Connection” days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.  Read more 

I can still remember the change. Right after the election of 2000, there was a new barrage of ass, oops I mean ads, proclaiming pot to be “more dangerous than we thought” and other sundry bullshit. News flash: pot makes you lazy, relaxed, calm and generally not interested in any crime greater than calling the local pizza place twice in one 24hr period. Bush directed his drug enforcers to crack down on pot, over other more serious drugs, early on in his administration. Here are the results:

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released today, marijuana arrests reached an all-time high in 2005 — 42.5% of all drug arrests were for pot. Pot arrests have doubled since the 1990’s.  Read more