Slouching Towards Oblivion

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

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

Don't Fuck With Katie

In one of her milder moods - which come up when Republicans manage not to be lying sacks of shit about every-goddamned-thing - Katie Porter shivs the GOP for gaslighting us about how it's awful at the border in all places, at all times.


House Oversight Committee hearing 03-07-2023


After all the squawking they've done about "Biden's failure to secure the southern border", I'd like to know what took the Trumpsters so long to get the dogs trained up.

And also too, I think maybe the blindly devoted Supply-Siders aren't the ones we need looking for solutions that have to include the Demand Side.

Just a thought.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Today's Both Sides Crisis

It's not Both Sides, dammit.

I kinda get it - the Press Poodles invite that inference, and use that phrase sometimes, as they try to appeal to a sensibility that should transcend political parties.

And I can see a kind of noble gesture in that. But "Both Sides" is a big time trigger, so it seems like they could come up with something that doesn't smack of the lazy-ass "journalism" that let's everybody off the hook so we can all wring our hands and offer up thoughts and prayers while doing absolutely not one fucking thing about it.

Meanwhile, here I am bitching about Press Poodles while almost as many Americans are dying every day because of fentanyl as they are of COVID-19. It's another wave of preventable happenstance, and that shit makes me crazy.




Cause of death: Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

During the past seven years, as soaring quantities of fentanyl flooded into the United States, strategic blunders and cascading mistakes by successive U.S. administrations allowed the most lethal drug crisis in American history to become significantly worse, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Presidents from both parties failed to take effective action in the face of one of the most urgent threats to the nation’s security, one that claims more lives each year than car accidents, suicides or gun violence. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49, according to a Post analysis.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, the country’s premier anti-narcotics agency, stumbled through a series of missteps as it confronted the biggest challenge in its 50-year history. The agency was slow to respond as Mexican cartels supplanted Chinese producers, creating a massive illicit pharmaceutical industry that is now producing more fentanyl than ever.

The Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies are responsible for detecting illegal drugs at the nation’s borders, failed to ramp up scanning and inspection technology at official crossings, instead channeling $11 billion toward the construction of a border wall that does little to stop fentanyl traffickers.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the executive branch office headed by the “drug czar” and tasked with coordinating the government’s response, spent years fending off elimination and struggled to create an effective strategy to combat the scourge. The office lost its seat in the White House Cabinet and remains sidelined.

“Law enforcement did the best it could,” said David King, executive director of a federal drug task force in San Diego. “We can only do so much. But in Washington, they have been very slow to respond to this and now we are at the confluence of paralysis.”

The DEA said it is now taking direct aim at the Mexican cartels and the fentanyl epidemic. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged that the government remained too focused on heroin at the onset of the crisis, as Mexican traffickers ramped up production of synthetic opioids.

“It is a new, deeper, more deadly threat than we have ever seen, and I don’t think that the full extent of that harm was immediately seen in 2015,” she said.

Narcotics agents say street-level demand for fentanyl is rising fast because so many new users are getting hooked. More than 9 million Americans “misused opioids” in 2020, according to the latest estimates by the Department of Health and Human Services. But the agency has not tracked the rise of fentanyl and does not know how many Americans are using it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is unable to track overdose deaths in real-time. Its published data is one year behind, obscuring the picture of what is happening on the ground in 2022. The agency continues to count the death toll for 2021 — in a provisional tally seven months ago, it calculated the overall number of drug overdoses at 107,622. Two-thirds were due to fentanyl.

When President Richard M. Nixon launched America’s first war on drugs 51 years ago, annual overdose deaths stood at 6,771.

There is one federal system that collects both fatal and nonfatal overdose data in real-time in several regions of the country. But the system, called ODMAP, is kept from public view. A database launched by the drug czar’s office last week maps some nonfatal overdoses, which can highlight regions where deaths are likely to follow.

Without comprehensive data, the federal government is driving blind.

“This is like tracking the epidemic by visiting cemeteries,” said John P. Walters, who served as drug czar during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. “We’re not measuring what’s coming into the country in real-time. We’re not measuring what’s happening with the health consequences and where to put resources to buffer those health consequences. Our drug-control strategy is an embarrassment, and it doesn’t begin to propose a way of reversing this problem.”

The American fentanyl crisis deepened during the coronavirus pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, fatal overdoses surged 94 percent, and
an estimated 196 Americans are now dying each day from the drug — the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 757-200 crashing and killing everyone on board.

Ed Byrne knows better than anyone the cost of fentanyl on U.S. streets. Byrne, 54, a Homeland Security Investigations agent in San Diego, has kept his own count of the nearly 500 fatal overdoses he has witnessed. It was a way to impose some order on the snowballing disaster.

“It is so much useless death,” said Byrne, who began investigating fentanyl cases in 2018.

San Diego is ground zero for fentanyl trafficking into the United States. More than half of all the fentanyl seized along the southern border is confiscated there, much of it produced in clandestine drug labs and pressed into tablets by cartel networks in northern Mexico. Drug loads that cross the border undetected go to stash houses in Los Angeles and Phoenix before spreading eastward across the country. In Southern California, the cartels are renting Airbnbs to store drugs before shipping them across the country.

Byrne tracked fentanyl shipments as a key member of Team 10, a multiagency task force specializing in the drug. At death scenes, Byrne tested pills and powder and fingernails, a job that took him to $10 million mansions, rental apartments and homeless camps. Sometimes he went to suburban homes to find teenagers dead in their childhood bedrooms.

For all of Team 10’s success in catching dealers, the drugs and the overdoses kept coming. San Diego County tallied 92 fentanyl-related deaths in 2018, the year the task force was formed. Last year, there were 814.

Byrne and his colleagues printed hats and T-shirts with their own logo for Team 10: a lone wolf, howling into a void.

Fentanyl overtakes San Diego’s streets

The roots of the epidemic reach back to the Bush administration, which did little as countless Americans became addicted to oxycodone and other prescription opioids while U.S. drug manufacturers, distributors and chain pharmacies made billions in profits.

During the Obama administration, amid a wider questioning of the U.S. criminal justice system, the government defunded and dismantled key drug-monitoring programs in the years before fentanyl hit. President Barack Obama demoted the White House drug czar position, removing the role from the Cabinet. And when heroin use rose after the government crackdown on prescription opioids, authorities treated fentanyl as an additive, rather than a distinct threat requiring its own specific strategy.

President Donald Trump took office just as the fentanyl epidemic was about to explode. He promised to build a wall along the U.S. southern border that he said would stop drugs. But Mexican traffickers were sneaking fentanyl right through the front door, hidden in passenger vehicles and commercial trucks passing through official ports of entry in California and Arizona. Today, the partisan border debate in Washington remains fixated on a physical structure that is virtually useless for stopping the deadliest drug U.S. agents have ever faced.

Since President Biden took office, his administration has amplified a public messaging campaign to warn about fentanyl’s mortal threat — “One Pill Can Kill.” He has stepped up efforts to improve scanning technology at border crossings and repair a broken counternarcotics partnership with Mexico. But with Republicans blaming Biden’s border policies for record numbers of immigration arrests, the president and many of his top officials have said little about the skyrocketing amount of fentanyl entering the country.

When the U.S. government cracked down on the U.S. opioid industry starting in 2005, it choked off street supplies of prescription narcotics but left behind a ravenous market. Mexican cartels filled it, first with crude heroin, then fentanyl. The cartels imported drugs and chemicals from China, hired chemists and purchased pill presses. But at the moment when the federal agencies responsible for preventing the drug from gaining a foothold in America were needed most, they fell short.

The amount of fentanyl seized along the U.S. southern border — the most reliable gauge of supply — has jumped ninefold during the past five years. Since July, border seizures of fentanyl have averaged 2,200 pounds a month, meaning U.S. authorities are confiscating more fentanyl in a single month than they did during all of 2018. Federal officials estimate they are capturing 5 to 10 percent of the fentanyl crossing from Mexico, but they acknowledge it could be less.

The drug is cheaper than ever because supplies are so abundant. On the streets of U.S. cities in the early 2000s, the most popular prescription pain pill was made by Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, one of the nation’s oldest drug manufacturers. The company’s 30-milligram oxycodone tablets, known as “blues” or “M-30s,” sold for roughly $30 apiece on the black market. Today, fake M-30s made by Mexican cartels using fentanyl look identical but sell for $4 or $5 apiece on the streets of San Diego, and can be especially lethal to first-time users.

Byrne had been to 486 death scenes by the time his bosses decided he’d seen enough. They sent him this summer on a new assignment in the South Pacific. As he prepared to leave San Diego, the narcotics agents and prosecutors who worked with him threw a farewell party at the Tin Roof, a honky-tonk bar downtown in the city’s renovated Gaslamp Quarter.

“I can’t say we made progress,” said Sherri Walker Hobson, a tough, laser-focused former federal prosecutor who worked closely with Byrne, raising a toast to her best friend as the bar went quiet. “But we put up a good fight. We did the best we could to manage this.”

San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter is lined with pricey new restaurants and old-style saloons that evoke the city’s history. They share the streets with thousands of people sleeping in tents and alleys, many gripped by addiction.

A few stood outside the Tin Roof, just beyond the sidewalk tables, on the night of Byrne’s farewell. At one point, a grubby, disheveled man with bulging eyes walked into the party and sat down among the cops. He didn’t speak, but he appeared to be under the influence of something powerful.

When one of the bartenders noticed and came onto the floor to confront him, the man ran to the back of the restaurant. Two of the plainclothes narcotics officers from Byrne’s party followed. They shooed the man out of the bar and back onto the street.

‘China, China, China’

By 2017, fentanyl had become the leading cause of overdose deaths in America. For three years, Hobson, then an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, had been tracking the steady rise in fentanyl seizures at the busiest land port in the nation — San Ysidro, 20 miles south of downtown San Diego. Fentanyl deaths had quadrupled in San Diego County between 2014 and 2017.

In the spring of 2017, Hobson formed the Fentanyl Working Group, a collection of federal and state drug agents, prosecutors and chemists, along with the medical examiner and other public health officials. It amounted to an emergency summit. Byrne joined the cause. They were hoping for a turnout of 15 people. Forty showed up.

The group began to collect drug overdose and seizure data and quickly realized that the doses of fentanyl that had been causing so many deaths in San Diego and across the country were coming from cartels in Mexico, not from traffickers in China.

“China was in the rearview mirror,” Hobson said.

Hobson and her colleagues tried to spread the word. They launched a local public awareness campaign. They created fact sheets and PowerPoint presentations to alert law enforcement agencies in the region. Hobson traveled the country, speaking at national drug policy conferences, where she sounded the alarm about the flood of fentanyl coming from Mexico.

From 2016 to 2017, fentanyl seizures at California’s ports of entry rose by 266 percent, from 573 pounds to 2,099. Most involved counterfeit M-30 pills. At the time, 2.2 pounds of fentanyl cost about $40,000. That amount could be turned into 1 million pills, netting the cartels millions in profit.

Hobson knew how the cartels operated because she had been prosecuting methamphetamine cases since the 1990s. The San Diego region had been a hub for small-batch, U.S.-made “biker meth.” Then Mexican traffickers figured out how to cook it cheaper, and make it purer. They put competitors north of the border out of business.

“I think a lot of people underestimated the Mexican cartels,” Hobson, who retired in 2020 after 30 years with the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego, said in a recent interview. “I knew they were very innovative. They weren’t hesitant to adapt and try new things.”

Outside San Diego, Hobson’s warnings went largely unheeded.

The importation of fentanyl from Mexico was not the focus of the Trump administration. In October 2017, a Justice Department official said in an op-ed column that “most illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues come from China.”

The department announced an indictment against Chinese nationals, furthering the narrative that China was paramount. Reading through the indictment, Hobson realized that the allegations were old, dating back to 2014 and 2015. By 2017, it was clear to Hobson and members of the Fentanyl Working Group that the supply lines had shifted.

“There was so much focus on China, they didn’t look at where the ball was,” Hobson said. “They weren’t looking at the cartels in a serious way. It was all about China, China, China.”

‘A game changer’

Byrne caught a case in 2017 that confirmed the lightning-fast rise of the Mexican cartels. On Aug. 11, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer stationed at Los Angeles International Airport intercepted a package from China containing a chemical called 4-ANPP, a precursor used to make fentanyl. Byrne and Hobson, along with agents from the DEA and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, devised a plan.

The team replaced the precursor with a bag of sand, put a tracking device on the package and followed it to San Diego. It was delivered to a post office box near the border linked to a man named Cesar Daleo. Byrne recognized the name from his days working as a U.S. Border Patrol agent before he joined Homeland Security Investigations. Daleo was once a Border Patrol agent, too.

The team members decided to allow Daleo to pick up the parcel. It would be the 14th time that he had signed for such a package since 2016. They hoped Daleo would take the interstate off-ramp from San Ysidro into Mexico. If he took the bait and drove onto the ramp, he would be making a commitment to entering Mexico. The team could then prove in court that the precursor chemicals were bound for the cartels.

On Aug. 29, 2017, Daleo picked up the parcel and opened the box, severing a hairline surveillance wire and sounding an alarm to the team. He tossed the box containing the bag of sand into his trunk and headed south, taking the off-ramp to Mexico. A Homeland Security tactical team cut him off. One of the agents tossed a stun grenade at Daleo’s car. He crashed into a guardrail. The agents smashed Daleo’s driver’s side window, dragged him through it onto the ramp and carted him off in handcuffs.

Daleo later pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. For the first time, Byrne and Hobson had unassailable proof that the cartels were making their own fentanyl and cutting out the middlemen.

“It was a game changer,” Byrne said.

But in Washington, fentanyl was barely registering on the radar screen.

That year, the DEA published a 94-page resource document that devoted four pages to synthetic opioids. It made no mention that Mexican traffickers were producing fentanyl. Under “Drugs of Concern,” fentanyl was not listed. In the DEA’s 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment, the agency devoted 10 of 169 pages to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. U.S. law enforcement agencies surveyed by the DEA identified heroin as the greatest threat facing the nation, followed by meth and prescription drugs. Fentanyl came in fourth, slightly ahead of marijuana.

DEA’S Faces of Fentanyl documents extent of drug crisis

A memorial to people who have died from fentanyl lines the walls at the headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

There were other missteps. In the years before fentanyl hit the streets, crucial programs to monitor drug use were dismantled.

One, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program, gathered urine samples from recent offenders. The program, run by the White House drug czar, was scuttled in 2013 by budget cuts.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network, which collected drug use and overdose data from hospitals and emergency responders, was eliminated in 2011. The government brought back a version of the program in 2018, but by then, the fentanyl crisis was well underway.

“These programs, as imperfect as they were, at least gave us something. And they were defunded,” said Keith Humphreys, who served as a drug policy adviser to the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

Drug agents confiscated nearly 1 million fentanyl pills at an Inglewood, Calif., home in July. Drug loads that cross the border often go to stash houses in the Los Angeles area. (Drug Enforcement Administration)

Soon after Trump became president, his administration proposed eliminating the drug czar’s office entirely. It became a backwater for political appointees, many of them with scant or no drug policy expertise. A 23-year-old Trump campaign worker was named deputy chief of staff, but no one had been nominated to head the office. Nearly nine months into his presidency, Trump selected Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) — a former federal prosecutor and one of Trump’s first and most strident supporters in Congress — to be drug czar. But Marino soon withdrew his nomination after it was revealed in a joint Washington Post-“60 Minutes” investigation that he had co-sponsored legislation that made it more difficult for the DEA to hold drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies accountable when they violated federal law.

As the Trump administration was preparing to leave the White House in 2021, the drug czar’s office issued its annual National Drug Control Strategy to Congress. The document is supposed to detail the government’s plan to reduce drug demand and disrupt supply chains. But the 2021 strategy document was nearly identical to the one issued in 2020. Many of its sections had simply been copied from the previous year.

San Diego first responders try to revive a woman who overdosed on Nov. 11. (Salwan Georges)

‘Hold people accountable’

One name on the medical examiner’s list of 2017 overdose deaths in San Diego is Leo Holz. The cause of death was “fentanyl toxicity.” His age: “zero.”

Leo was 10 months old. He was crawling around on the bed between his sleeping parents. Leo picked up a bright blue pill and put it in his mouth. When his parents woke up, their baby was cold and unresponsive.

Leo was the youngest person in San Diego to die because of fentanyl. Since then, the drug has killed two other children there before their first birthdays.

Byrne and Hobson investigated the Holz case, tracing the pills to a drug ring that included a U.S. citizen in Tijuana named April Spring Kelly. She told prosecutors she used heavyset women as “body carriers,” because they were less likely to be patted down, and sent them through Arizona and California crossings.

Couriers were smuggling packages taped to their thighs and abdomens, or in body cavities. “Stuffers,” as the agents called them, could sneak a pound of pills or powder through a port of entry. Kelly admitted in a plea agreement to smuggling nearly half a million fentanyl pills across the border. She was sentenced to 14 years.

The Trump administration was less focused on drugs than immigration. Trump officials were preparing to award contracts worth billions of dollars for the president’s border wall, and they invited construction firms to set up side-by-side prototype designs on a dusty lot near the Otay Mesa crossing, 27 miles south of downtown San Diego. The region was a natural choice. The fencing CBP had installed along the border there over the previous two decades was more formidable than anywhere else.

What Trump officials didn’t acknowledge was that the barriers made little difference to the cartels: The place with the mightiest fence was also the traffickers’ primary gateway for hard drugs.

“The cartels saw the void left by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry,” said John Callery, a 30-year veteran of the DEA who retired after running the San Diego field office. “Nature abhors a vacuum and they said, ‘Holy crap. We only have to get five pounds of fentanyl across the border instead of 7,000 pounds of meth. Perfect. And we can make 10 times as much money.’”

In the summer of 2018, a hard-charging local prosecutor in San Diego named Terri Perez proposed setting up Team 10 to investigate every fentanyl death and trace the drugs to the dealers. The team was headquartered at the DEA’s San Diego field office, and staffed by federal and local law enforcement officers from across the region.

“I had never seen anything like this. It’s impacting people from their early teens to their 40s and 50s, families being destroyed, parents losing their kids, schools losing their students,” Perez said. “We needed to hold people accountable.”

Perez turned to Byrne. He started to investigate dozens of overdose deaths, comforting family members while trying to gain access to the cellphones of the dead for leads.

Byrne and Hobson knew they were seeing only a small fraction of the drugs pouring across the border. And what they were hearing from DEA agents was not encouraging. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was critical of his country’s drug war partnership with the United States and argued that it burdened Mexico unfairly and fueled violence.

Once López Obrador took office in December 2018, security and counternarcotics relationships with the United States had gone cold. He was distrustful of the DEA and the access U.S. agents had cultivated across the Mexican government.

In Washington, Trump had declared the opioid epidemic “a national health emergency” and pressured China to crack down on fentanyl shipments to the United States. But his administration’s focus at the border was to stop immigration. Trump, who falsely said Mexico would pay for the border wall, wanted the Democrats to provide $5 billion for the project. He shut down the government toward the end of 2018 when they wouldn’t give it to him.

The impasse ended after 35 days and led to a compromise on border security. Democrats agreed to furnish $1.4 billion for the wall. Republicans agreed to provide $564 million to add more-advanced “non-intrusive inspection” technology, known as NII, at the ports of entry.

“We asked: What would it take to stop the flow of drugs? Could we do a Manhattan Project for NII?” said a congressional staffer who worked closely on the funding plan but wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

More than 228,000 cars and trucks were entering the United States each day from Mexico, but CBP officers were scanning only about 6 percent of commercial trucks and 1 percent of passenger vehicles.

Mexican traffickers were playing those odds, and winning. They could send the stuffers through the crossings, or just load the drugs into cars and trucks, and shrug off whatever losses they incurred as the price of doing business.

The border security plan that emerged in 2019 after the shutdown promised to change that calculus. Congressional appropriators set a goal for CBP to scan 72 percent of commercial trucks and 40 percent of passenger vehicles entering from Mexico.

To reach that objective, CBP needed software systems capable of processing the millions of images from the state-of-the-art scanning equipment. That required artificial intelligence to help agents quickly detect hidden compartments, altered engine parts and other anomalies.

The three-dimensional scans couldn’t find fentanyl buried deep in an engine block, but they could detect suspicious changes in densities. The drug loads show up as glowing bright spots because the X-rays pass through them so easily. CBP officers could route those vehicles to additional inspection.

“We gave them a huge pot of money,” the congressional staffer said. “We thought we had a good plan.”

San Diego emergency responders revive a woman who overdosed outside her San Diego apartment on Nov. 11. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The rising toll

After Byrne had responded to 100 fatal overdoses in San Diego, the pace suddenly picked up. Less than a year later, he was at his 200th death scene. Fentanyl was killing people in the most private and intimate of places — in their bedrooms, their bathrooms, in the hallways of their homes.

One of Byrne’s problems was that no one else wanted to test for fentanyl at crime scenes. In the early stages of the crisis, much of the DEA messaging had been geared toward alerting first responders to the dangers of fentanyl. They became so terrified that they would call in hazmat crews if they thought fentanyl was present.

But Byrne saw the downside to the scary messaging. Fentanyl is only a significant threat if the powder is dispersed into the air and inhaled. Touching the pills or handling bags of powder is not a mortal risk because the drug isn’t easily absorbed through the skin. Pharmaceutical fentanyl “patches” prescribed to manage intense pain use a chemical agent to allow the drug to be absorbed.

Fentanyl’s reputation made it hard for Byrne to get fellow officers and agents to do their own testing. So, they would call him, and he’d arrive in his Ford Explorer. In the back, he kept two MX908 mass spectrometers. He once found the crumbs of a pill under a dead teenager’s keyboard. The boy’s father hit the space bar, and when the monitor lit up, the boy’s message exchanges with the dealer popped up on the screen.

Sending samples to a lab that took weeks to process the results meant the loss of crucial time for investigative leads. And when a “hot,” or super-potent, supply was ravaging users in rapid succession, it was important to know right away that an especially lethal batch of fentanyl had hit the streets.

By 2019, fentanyl deaths in San Diego had risen 787 percent in five years.

“Just when we think it can’t get any worse, the latest numbers prove us wrong,” U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer said at a news conference that July.

That summer, Byrne responded to a call at an extended-stay motel in San Diego’s Clairemont Mesa district. A 30-year-old parolee named Major Williams, whom police had identified as a gang member, was found dead in his room. The cause of death: “fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol.”

Less than two years later, Byrne was back at the same motel to investigate another fentanyl death.

“It was the exact same room,” he said.

Glory days

During the 1980s and 1990s, DEA agents were seen as the rock stars of the law enforcement world, making major busts in the United States and helping to capture Latin American drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Pablo Escobar.

The DEA has struggled during the past decade, losing nearly 1,300 staffers, 700 of them agents. Many agents retired early to take lucrative private-sector jobs. Today, the agency has more than 800 vacancies.

For six years, the DEA went without a Senate-confirmed administrator. Michele Leonhart, a 35-year veteran, announced her retirement in 2015 following revelations that DEA agents were attending sex parties with prostitutes hired by Colombian drug cartels.

Leonhart’s departure marked the beginning of a tumultuous time at the DEA. The agency went through five acting administrators, three of them during Trump’s tenure.

In 2018, DEA agent Fernando Gomez was charged with participating in a decade-long conspiracy to smuggle thousands of pounds of cocaine from Puerto Rico to New York. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

In 2020, DEA agent Jose Irizarry was accused of conspiring to launder money for a Colombian drug cartel while living a lavish lifestyle replete with wild yacht parties, bikini-clad prostitutes and homes in Cartagena, Colombia; Puerto Rico; and South Florida. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

More recently, a former agent, Manuel Recio, was accused of making payments to current agent John Costanzo Jr. in return for inside information about pending DEA cases. That information was then allegedly peddled to criminal defense attorneys hoping to recruit new clients. Recio and Costanzo could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted. They have denied the allegations.

A recent audit by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found that the DEA failed to effectively monitor its foreign offices and agents overseas. The DEA has ordered an outside review of the agency’s 92 foreign offices in 69 countries “to ensure integrity and accountability.”

Mark Coast, a retired DEA agent in San Diego who also spent 30 years as a Marine Corps reservist, said he saw the agency lose its operational muscle and strategic focus. “Everything is whack-a-mole,” he said in an interview. “A dealer pops up, they take that dealer out, and another one pops up.”

“There is no strategic plan,” he said.

Eighteen months ago, Milgram, a former New Jersey attorney general, became the first Senate-confirmed DEA administrator since 2015. She inherited the fentanyl crisis and has been scrambling to marshal a more robust response.

“This is not a war on drugs, this is a war to save lives,” she said in a recent interview at DEA headquarters in Northern Virginia, where the lobby walls are covered with more than 4,000 portraits of fentanyl overdose victims sent in by their families. They are almost entirely young faces, many of them in their teens and 20s.

“When you look at the faces, you have a sense of the enormity of what we’re losing,” Milgram said.

Since taking office, she has promoted the One Pill Can Kill campaign and begun targeting the two top Mexican cartels behind the flood of fentanyl — Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation — going after their financial networks and global supply chains.

A DEA map, shared with The Washington Post, traces fentanyl cases back to Mexico’s two most powerful cartels, based in the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco.

Between May and September, the DEA and other law enforcement agencies seized nearly 980 pounds of fentanyl powder and 10.2 million pills, and they investigated 380 fentanyl-related cases, connecting 35 directly to the two cartels. The DEA also investigated 129 cases of fentanyl ordered via social media platforms, including Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and TikTok.

Milgram described the cartels’ push to expand markets by addicting more people as “deliberate, calculated treachery.”

Rahul Gupta, Biden’s drug czar and the first trained physician to hold that job, said in a recent interview that he is focused on flattening fentanyl’s death curve. He said he does not need the president to return his role to the Cabinet.

“The goal is really to address the crisis of today, not yesterday,” he said.

Gupta said the Biden administration is implementing a “harm reduction” approach that seeks to reduce deaths by supporting safe-use policies and expanding access to counseling and treatment. “Only 1 in 20 people who need the help are able to get it today in the United States of America,” he said.

Along the border, the administration is struggling to deploy the sophisticated scanning systems. Nearly four years after Congress gave the CBP money to expand inspections, new systems have been installed in Brownsville and Laredo, Tex., and at other border crossings. But they require officers to conduct labor-intensive reviews because the CBP lacks the ability to automate the process with artificial intelligence software and centralized command centers.

A House Appropriations Committee report published in June chastised the agency for its failures, saying it had a “paradigm-shifting opportunity” to “revolutionize” the inspection process. Instead, the strategy “continues to depend on CBP Officers to review thousands of images manually,” the report stated, calling it a shortsighted “failure to innovate” that is “inexcusable and must be immediately addressed by current DHS leadership.”

Byrne watches as members of the San Diego Medical Examiner's Office remove the body of a fentanyl overdose victim from a downtown apartment building on June 5. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

‘Just heartbreaking’

During a visit this fall to the medical examiner’s office in San Diego, 261 corpses in body bags were laid out on metal trays and stacked up on carts in the refrigerated morgue. Thirty-seven of the people had died of fentanyl overdoses. Fentanyl is now responsible for 1 in every 5 deaths handled by the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office. So many people are dying, it takes nearly four months to complete toxicology reports.

“It’s just heartbreaking,” said Medical Examiner Steven D. Campman, who reviewed 1,672 fentanyl-related deaths from 2014 through 2021.

“A fair number of families ask: ‘Shouldn’t I have done something? Couldn’t I have seen something?’ I tell them it shouldn’t be on them, and I can’t offer them much more.”

In October, after three months in the South Pacific, Byrne returned to San Diego. The city’s Deputy District Attorneys Association had named Byrne “Law Enforcement Officer of the Year” and invited him to pick up the award. Byrne looked 10 years younger, his face thinner and more tanned than when he had left San Diego.

After the awards ceremony, he went back to work. An old case among his 486 came to court for a sentencing hearing.

On Nov. 3, 2020, Sarah Elizabeth Fuzzell, 24, had been found dead in her apartment in Vista, Calif., 40 miles north of downtown San Diego. Byrne gained access to her phone. The drug dealer was unaware that one of his customers had just died. A Team 10 member texted the dealer, posing as Fuzzell on her phone. The man who had sold Fuzzell the fentanyl, Cole Salazar, fell for the ruse. Salazar was charged with selling the lethal dose.

The case took two years to wend its way through the courts. On Oct. 15, Byrne drove to the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego for Salazar’s sentencing. Fuzzell’s older sister, Megan, along with her mother, Mindy, had made the trip from their home in Oklahoma City. Megan, 30, was a medical researcher who had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Oklahoma and been a high school valedictorian and National Merit scholar. She volunteered at medical clinics to raise awareness about the dangers of drug overdoses.

Megan testified about the loss of her little sister.

“Since her death, I’m left with a hole in my heart that is irreparable and constantly present,” she told the judge. “I’m lost without her. My family feels incomplete and broken.”

That Wednesday evening, Byrne met Megan and Mindy for dinner in San Diego’s Little Italy. Even though the judge had sentenced Salazar to 10 years in prison, the mood was muted. The next night, the Fuzzells returned home to Oklahoma.

The following day, Byrne received a text message from Megan’s father.

“Mindy and I found Megan dead in her bed about 630 last night,” David Fuzzell wrote.

David and Mindy had lost their only remaining child. The autopsy results were still pending, but Byrne already knew. Megan was 487.

Six days later, he wrote to a Post reporter:

“I have been lucky to not have lost someone close to me in this battle, but I can sadly say I know all too well the heartbreaking sorrow of those who have. I accept Megan as 487. It impacted all of us from Sarah’s case like a knife in the gut. I still cannot speak with her mother. I know it’s not true but I somehow feel like I’ve failed the Fuzzells. How did we sit with her at dinner less than 48 hours before and not see or sense anything?

“In 2021, 107,000 souls were snuffed out from fentanyl in America. That number will be eclipsed this year. All the futures that have been lost, those still to be lost.

“Where’s the outrage?”

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Ending Another War

I'll go ahead and be critical of Joe Biden, and the Clintons, and Republicans, and myself - and anyone else who was more than a bit dumb about all that get-tough-on-crime bullshit from back in the 80s and 90s.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but...


And I'm not trying to be all woke and shit. I don't think I'm simply following a trend again, which is pretty much what we were all doing 35 years ago - I just got fooled.

I had plenty of company of course, but that's not an excuse, or even a good way to explain it.

I was just wrong. My outlook, my attitude, my philosophy - all of it - flat fuckin' wrong.

If there's nothing particularly racist about our criminal justice system - which, BTW, doesn't exist in isolation from the society it's supposed to serve - then that justice system wouldn't be choked with brown people all the fuckin' time.

And if that society isn't racist, but somehow POC are still way over-represented in the statistics and the prison population etc, then there must be something actually wrong with POC, and if that ain't racist thinking, then the whole fucking universe is upside down and backwards.

There is something very very very wrong with the way we've been doing things.


The War on Drugs, not the war in Afghanistan, is America’s longest war. It has used trillions of American taxpayer dollars, militarized American law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local), claimed an untold number of lives, railroaded people’s futures (especially among Black, Latino, and Native populations), and concentrated the effort in the country’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. The War on Drugs has been a staggering policy failure, advancing few of the claims that presidents, members of Congress, law enforcement officials, and state and local leaders have sought to achieve. The illicit drug trade thrived under prohibition; adults of all ages and youth had access to illicit substances. Substance use disorders thrived, and policymakers’ efforts to protect public health were fully undermined by policy that disproportionately focused, if unsuccessfully, on public safety. It is time for an American president to think seriously about broad-based policy change to disrupt the manner in which the United States deals with drugs.

Despite its dramatic policy failures, the War on Drugs has been wildly successful in one specific area: institutionalizing racism. The drug war was built on a foundation of racism and xenophobia. As I have written in Marijuana: A Short History, the historical foundation of drug policy in the United States was to vilify African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants from Asia and Mexico, and other outgroups, and to turn White America against each. Michelle Alexander and numerous others have effectively highlighted how America’s criminal justice system from arrest to trial to incarceration to post-release conditions disproportionately punish people of color, creating a cycle of harm in their communities.

We know the design and enforcement of America’s drug laws were racist in intent and in practice. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted penalties for possession of crack cocaine (a substance predominantly used by poor and minorities users) that were 100 times higher than for the possession of powder cocaine (a substance used more often by wealthier, white users). And while Congress in 2010 reduced that disparity in penalties from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and in 2018 President Trump signed a law making that change retroactive, thousands of low level offenders were left out from resentencing because of a loophole. And in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the retroactive resentencing effort for those low-level offenders.

In addition, research shows that Black and white Americans use cannabis at roughly the same rates. However, Black Americans are more than 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis offense than are white Americans. And even in states that have reformed their cannabis laws, the institutionalization of racism in police departments’ enforcement of the drug war sustains, as Blacks are more than two times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis offenses in those legal jurisdictions. And while cannabis offenses have plummeted in those states, the impact of those remaining arrests and convictions are felt in an outsized way across Black and Brown America and in Native American communities.

The 2018 law mentioned above was titled the First Step Act. This label was fitting in that it described the long road toward broader criminal justice reform and for justice in the communities that the War on Drugs targeted for decades. And in his 2019 State of the Union Address, President Trump praised that bill becoming law, by noting that it addresses the explicit racism in the American criminal justice system. He noted,

“This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community. The First Step Act gives nonviolent offenders the chance to reenter society as productive, law-abiding citizens. Now States across the country are following our lead. America is a nation that believes in redemption.”

President Trump was right that America believes in redemption, but only in theory. It rarely advances redemption in practice. Every president in the 20th and 21st centuries helped perpetuate, in some way, a drug war with one “crowning achievement”: systematically harming minority communities in America with intent and malice. Supporters of prohibition, be they presidents or other elected officials, advocates, law enforcement leaders, or everyday citizens wrap themselves in a mystical cloak of “protecting the children” and “keeping communities safe.” In reality, that hypocrisy has sought simply to protect white children (a failed effort) and to keep white communities safe (another missed target).

If prohibition supporters cared deeply about children and the safety of communities, they would look at what the War on Drugs have done to Black and Brown children and communities and be sickened. They would see families divided, young people (especially young Black men) have dreams dashed and future opportunities restricted, communities rocked by gang and police violence, systematic underinvestment with simultaneous over-policing in cities, and dozens more disastrous consequences because of their failed drug policies. Prohibition supporters from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue should consider how the drug war has harmed specific American communities and recoil, but instead, they ignore reality and refuse to advance legitimate alternatives.

It is time for President Biden to face the reality of his role and the role of his colleagues and predecessors in advancing the drug war. He must consider vast reforms—some which require the cooperation of Congress and others than can be implemented via executive action—that deal with drug policy in a thoughtful and reasoned, rather than anachronistic and heartless way. Mr. Biden must realize that choices about drug reform—pardons, sentencing reform policy, the expansion of mental health and addiction services, cannabis legalization, police reform, prison reform, community reinvestment—should not focus on whether those reforms come without costs. Mr. Biden must compare whether those reforms are a policy improvement over the status quo: prohibition.

Too often elected officials, policy analysts, advocates, and citizens hide behind the cowardice of highlighting the challenges that drug reform can potentially cause, while refusing to speak and think bravely about the comprehensive failures and harms perpetuated by current policy. Mr. Biden can no longer do what he and his predecessors have done: sit idly by, awaiting a perfect policy to replace the unmitigated failures of the War on Drugs. A significant part of the electoral coalition that swept Mr. Biden to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually to the White House were Black, Latino, and Native Americans who have been harmed the most by the War on Drugs.

Part of that solution must be an embrace of full-scale criminal justice reform that works to inject fairness into a system that has, for centuries, disproportionately punished people of color, the poor, the undereducated, those without personal or political connections, and any others in our society who fall on hard times. Drug reform—and particularly—cannabis reform must sit at the forefront of the president’s efforts to chase the type of justice that has eluded so many for so long. Legalizing cannabis, focusing broader drug reform efforts around public health policy rather than inhumane criminalization, prioritizing law enforcement funds toward violent crime rather than petty crime, coordinating an intergovernmental effort to harmonize criminal justice reform through legislative and executive efforts, and reinvesting in the communities that our government has targeted and persecuted are a requirement for President Biden to be the humane and justice-oriented president he marketed himself to be in the 2020 campaign.

Eight months into this administration, Mr. Biden faces an embarrassing reality with regard to drug policy. Donald Trump, who received only 8% of the Black vote in 2016, did more as president to change drug policy and ameliorate the effects of the drug war for communities of color than has Joe Biden, who won 87% of Black support in 2020.

In the same way this president took the bold step of ending America’s second longest war in Afghanistan, he should take the equally bold step of ending America’s longest war: the War on Drugs.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Pimping The Obvious


WaPo:
The nation’s opioid epidemic is changing the way law enforcement does its job, with police officers acting as drug counselors and medical workers and shifting from law-and-order tactics to approaches more akin to social work.
Departments accustomed to arresting drug abusers are spearheading programs to get them into treatment, convinced that their old strategies weren’t working. They’re administering medication that reverses overdoses, allowing users to turn in drugs in exchange for treatment, and partnering with hospitals to intervene before abuse turns fatal.
“A lot of the officers are resistant to what we call social work. They want to go out and fight crime, put people in jail,” said Capt. Ron Meyers of the police department in Chillicothe, Ohio, a 21-year veteran who is convinced that punitive tactics no longer work against drugs. “We need to make sure the officers understand this is what is going to stop the epidemic.”
Officers are finding children who were barricaded in rooms while their parents got high, and they are responding to the same homes for the same problems. Feelings of exasperation course through some departments in which officers are interacting with the same drug users over and over again, sometimes saving their lives repeatedly with naloxone, a drug that reverses an opiate overdose.
How much more are we going to expect the cops to do? I like it better that they're helping people instead of shooting them, but we can't just keep piling more tasks on them because we're not willing to be inconvenienced by it all.

Anyway, isn't it amazing how "the drug problem" can move so suddenly from, "government handouts and mollycoddling won't make up for the moral deficiency of those people", to something more like, "maybe we should start looking at this as a public health issue".

And gee - it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the enormously powerful circle jerk of Coin-Operated Politicians, and their buddies in the Rent-a-Prison bidness, and the DEA as an organization of Confiscation For Fun and Profit with guns and permission to fuck you out of everything you own.

The truly obvious though, is simply that the drug thing really hasn't mattered as long as it was "an urban problem", and we were just fucking over the brown people. Now that it's come to the great American Cracker Barrel, we should try something that might be a better approach? Something we could've been doing this whole time? Because it works better? And we've always known that?

Two things:
  1. I wonder how many well-connected leeches will suddenly discover their life-long passion for providing Re-Hab services - as a proper Market-Based solution, you understand -  and of course financed by taxpayers.
  2. This is another one of those things the hippies have been trying to get the cement heads to understand for a very long time.
And you can color me un-fucking-surprised.

Today's Tweet

And in case you're at all confused by that - 
It'd be nice if I could be more comfortable thinking this is a signal that we're starting to understand there are way more facets to the "drug problem" than we've been conditioned to believe.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Legalized Dope

I'm hoping I never go back to smoking anything, and I'm not convinced (yet) that fully legalizing marijuana is such a great idea - but all that said, so far so good.  At least it seems Colorado is making it work.

From Nation of Change:
Not counting medicinal weed sales, Colorado sold nearly $19 million in their recreational weed market in the month of March, and $1.9 million of that goes straight into government coffers and towards building schools. At this pace, according to PolicyMic, Colorado will make $30 million this year in pot taxes alone.
--and--
Crime rates in Colorado have dropped by 10.6% while Dunkin Donuts has begun expanding its brand in the state (really). It looks like a really good future for people living in Colorado, or any state that legalizes both medical and recreational marijuana – though it is admittedly too early to tell.The cherry on top of this tax-generating cake? Crime rates are also down in Colorado, so while kids are hopefully going to get a better education, the government (idealistically) will spend more money improving infrastructure and other business opportunities for Colorado citizens, and unemployment rates are plummeting. The Colorado police can take a little rest from their duties.
We'll see what happens down the road, of course - the likelihood of Murphy's Law kicking in with a powerful vengeance increases by at least an order of magnitude when you put politicians in charge of just about anything.

What seems pretty cool tho' is that first, you're generating some decent revenues (both private and public) which pumps up the dollar circulation in many hundreds of localities, which gooses lotsa local economies, which makes for more jobs, which makes for more taxpayers, which makes for better revenue streams etc etc - all of which means it gets a little easier to make that big ol' wheel go 'round.

But the thing that really stands out for me is that Colorado is reporting a fair drop in crime.  There's nothing totally concrete about linking pot sales to a drop in crime - altho' in my experience, it's a lot harder to do all that macho shit when you're stoned - but it's not outa the question and anyway, I think the obvious benefit is that the Law Dogs can stop wasting time and energy and money trying to enforce a buncha really stoopid Pot Rules. Plus, we should see a drop in the truly shitty activities of the Cop Entrepreneur - the kinda crap where cops make a bust solely because they can confiscate the property of a "Drug Kingpin" in order to pay for a coupla cruisers or body armor or because they can pick up a surplus MRAP left over from Iraq and Afghanistan, but they'll need a few extra hundred K so they can qualify for the matching funds from their buddies at DHS or DEA or BATF or whoever else is sending their kids to Preppy Mills by funneling public dollars into private coffers.

So anything that kinda mellows us out, and potentially puts a hole in the crony-go-round bullshit that is The War On Drugs?  Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Pot Smokers Beware!

Via Reuters:
Young, casual marijuana smokers experience potentially harmful changes to their brains, with the drug altering regions of the mind related to motivation and emotion, researchers found.
The study to be published on Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience differs from many other pot-related research projects that are focused on chronic, heavy users of cannabis.
The collaborative effort between Northwestern University's medical school, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School showed a direct correlation between the number of times users smoked and abnormalities in the brain.
"What we're seeing is changes in people who are 18 to 25 in core brain regions that you never, ever want to fool around with," said co-senior study author Dr. Hans Beiter, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University.
In particular, the study identified changes to the nucleus accumbens and the nucleus amygdala, regions of the brain that are key to regulating emotion and motivation, in marijuana users who smoke between one and seven joints a week.
The researchers found changes to the volume, shape and density of those brain regions. But more studies are needed to determine how those changes may have long-term consequences and whether they can be fixed with abstinence, Beiter said.
"Our hypothesis from this early work is that these changes may be an early sign of what later becomes amotivation, where people aren't focused on their goals," he said.
The study, which was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, comes as access to pot is expanding following 2012 votes in Washington state and Colorado to legalize its recreational use. The drug remains illegal under federal law.
Medical pot is allowed in 20 U.S. states.
Pot legalization advocates make the argument that marijuana is safer than alcohol a central part of their campaigns.
Other research has found drinking alcohol alters the brain, Beiter said. But while researchers do not know exactly how the mental rewiring seen in pot users affects their lives, the study shows it physically changes the brain in ways that differ from drinking, he said.
This latest study fits with other research showing marijuana use has significant effects on young people because their brains are still developing, and Beiter said he has become convinced that marijuana should only be used by people under 30 if they need it to manage pain from a terminal illness.
So first, this tiny little study - funded by the 2 most influential anti-drug policy shops in the US Gov't, and which seems not to be particularly well-designed - has somehow managed to reach certain conclusions that confirm and/or reinforce what the current policy happens to be?  Imagine my surprise.

But secondly, the researchers have found that smoking pot has a pronounced effect on your "emotions" and your "motivation".  They spent how much of my money?  To find out that potheads get kinda giggly sometimes - or maybe a little gushy?  And that they're a bit lax about things like deadlines and/or that when some people get stoned, they tend not to do much of anything more strenuous than hittin' speed dial to order a fuckin' pizza?

Sweet screamin' Jesus, you guys - does anybody up there ever fucking wonder why everybody shits on your heads about wasting time and money?  Whose brother-in-law do I have to blow to get a few of those bucks flowin' this direction?

This reads like The Onion.  Tell ya what - why not just ask The Prez what was up with him when he was smokin' that shit?  That way, you find out exactly the same thing, but you save a shitload of tax dollars; and then you could send about 20% of that money to me as a Consultant's Fee, while you crow about how diligent and frugal you are.  Fuck.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Just What We Need

Considering all the shit the world wants to throw in our general direction, I think the US Military should really make an effort to take all those young Americans - you know, the kids we've trained to kill on command and armed with enough lethal machinery to level every city and every farm building on the planet and still have enough left over to go back and "make the rubble bounce" - yeah, what we really need to do is give those kids lots and lots of drugs.
After two long-running wars with escalating levels of combat stress, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops last year were taking prescribed antidepressants, narcotics, sedatives, antipsychotics and anti-anxiety drugs, according to figures recently disclosed by the U.S. Army surgeon general. Nearly 8 percent of the active-duty Army is now on sedatives and more than 6 percent is on antidepressants – an eightfold increase since 2005.
“We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now. … And I don’t believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence,” said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference at Camp Pendleton on combat stress.-- The Spokesman-Review
War is a racket.  Every war - on, for, or against anything - is a racket.  If you don't know that by now, then you don't know anything.

And isn't it so perfectly coincidental how The "War On Terrorism" is now nested perfectly into the "War On Drugs"?

Thursday, April 05, 2012

Know Your Shit

I hate this.  I hate thinking I need to teach my kids that the cops are not their friends, and are not looking out for them.



(hat tip = Balloon Juice)

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Pot Cracks

I didn't know you could be fired for "personal views that were contrary..."

From newser.com: Cops Fired For Opposing War On Drugs

The whole concept of Loyal Opposition seems lost in this country.  It's more than just possible for a guy to be against The Policy you've told him to implement, AND be able to execute the plan as if was his own.  It happens every day in every organization you can name.  In this case, it's the people wearing the badges - the ones who're at the broken end of the bottle every day - who know the most about how The Policy translates out in the real world.  We need to be listening to them very closely - not firing them for telling us the truth.

And one other minor point: Something you really DON'T want in an organization that's armed to the teeth and authorized to use deadly force, is a bunch of gung-ho gonzo goons runnin' around lookin' for an excuse to go off on somebody.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Privateering

Classic - this comes as no shock to people, and so there's no general outrage, and so underfunded law enforcement agencies end up looking and acting a lot like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Moyers and The Wire

Bill Moyers' Journal has a very interesting interview with the creator of HBO's The Wire.

(Be sure to look for the full version - in 2 parts)

The guy has a lot to say about telling a story that journalists should be telling us and aren't - we're only getting some of these stories thru "reality-based fiction".  That's a pretty weird concept.  I should prob'ly think on that one for a while.