Prohibition Continuing

There are lots of stories like this one about the Sinaloa cartel using Chicago as a major distribution hub for heroin and other drugs--and it could have been written anytime in the last few years, or in the early 1980s for that matter, though it would have been about Columbia rather than Mexico, and Miami rather than Chicago.  Change a few names, but the drug wars story remains the same.

A couple of course members brought up Portugal's own post-war-on-drugs policies. If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you can read a good piece from October 2011. A free introduction that summarizes current policy is here. Also last year, Forbes had a very short summary of the positive results.  A paper from the UC Berkeley economics department finds a positive correlation between decriminalization in Portugal and both homicide and drug mortality rates relative to other European Union countries." One small sign of a growing left-right consensus against the war on drugs is a  study of the effects of Portugal's decriminalization policy for the Cato Institute--a right-wing think tank--by left-wing civil liberties blogger Glenn Greenwald.  One of the stronger criticisms of the studies of decriminalization, including of Greenwald's, can be found on Barack Obama's White House website.

Gangs on Drew Street III

The Drew Street neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles was back in the news with a huge multi-agency sweep that netted 28 suspected gangbangers and nacro-traffickers. By huge I mean it took 500 agents to roust those 28 people. Maria Leon and her bad luck 13 children made their trademark appearance in the piece. The rousted were sometimes ungrateful, as in the scene shown here. Check out Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah for why poor people in gangster-run neighborhoods don't like the cops. No, it's not because they are gangsters themselves or love their oppressors, but because the cops come and make a big show, break down the door and terrify the kids, and then they leave. Nothing changes. The journalists say it's because Drew Street is a clan transported almost intact from a "lawless region" of Sinaloa - yes where the big killings of top police happened last week - and that they have a quasi-innate hatred of cops. Naw. It's because the cops don't actually make things better.

Couple of other problems with the journalist view:

• If the Avenues gang has been in the neighborhood for 60 years, it's interwoven into the society. The neighbors are right that cops and sweeps won't make a difference.
• If convicted, the 54 Avenues now in custody will go to prison - from which la eMe runs the Avenues. The biggest "gang haven" in California is California's prisons.

What to do instead? Spend some redevelopment dough. Try much better schools and straight jobs. Do lots of good street work - without cops. The real revolution: decriminalize the big-money narcotics.

A final word on the end of gang week in the LA Times - their story on "Big Mike," a former Grape Street Crip turned gang interventionist. Big Mike fits the neighborhood in topping out at $17,000 a year. And he has left the neighborhood to raise his daughter in "the high desert."

Mexico Drug Wars Coverage

The LA Times offers a little background on the military operations the Mexican government and the Sinaloa drug cartel are conducting against each other. The recent action follows the assassination of Mexico's No. 3 law enforcement official, Edgar Millan Gomez in Mexico City by a petty thief who was waiting for him in one of his supposed safe houses. The Mexican government is portraying the violence as the act of a cartel desperate over its weakening by an effective government crackdown.

The newspaper columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez has a better explanation, one involving money. He compares the current Sinaloa problem to the decline of Medellin godfather Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s: "The weaker Escobar became, the more enemies he made . . . and the less money he had, the more he resorted to violence to take revenge on his enemies and strike fear in them."

It's not clear why the Sinaloa cartel would be running out of money, given their apparent ongoing control of the Pacific coast cocaine transhipment routes. But at least this story about the international drug trade provides a better context for the shoot-outs in Glassell Park than the dumb recent LA Times story about the mother from Guerrero with thirteen gang children.

One of the best pieces on the overall context suggests that the cartels are turning Mexico into a "failed state." This may seem far-fetched. But when Mexico's defense secretary said "Organized crime is not, and can never be, stronger than Mexico," he raised exactly that possibility.

Drug Sting Nabs 75 Students at San Diego State U.

The LA Times coverage of this bust suggested an EME connection, and it's interesting to think of possible connections between specific college frats and the hardcore drug syndicates in Mexico, who some observers believe control the country's federal government, not to mention large swathes of territory, e.g. much of Tijuana. See also Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which explains how the Napoli-area "System" and its leading clans have allowed semi-autonomous dealers to access nice middle-class clients like college students without visible mob strings attached.


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Story by SARA LIPKA, Chronicle of Higher Education
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A yearlong undercover drug investigation has resulted in the arrests of 75 students at San Diego State University and 21 other people accused of being involved in illegal drug sales there, university and law-enforcement officials announced on Tuesday.

Eighteen students were arrested on Tuesday, and 15 others were arrested in recent weeks, the student newspaper, The Daily Aztec, reported. The other arrests were made over the past 12 months.

During the investigation, officers have seized $100,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms, methamphetamine, and illicit prescription drugs, according to the district attorney's office for San Diego County. The officers also seized four guns, brass knuckles, and $60,000 in cash.

The university's police department started the investigation after a student died of a cocaine overdose in May 2007, the district attorney's office said in a written statement. Federal drug agents joined the investigation about five months ago. During the investigation, another student, from San Diego Mesa College, died of a drug overdose in a San Diego State fraternity house near the campus.

The officers in the investigation infiltrated seven San Diego State fraternities and made more than 130 undercover drug buys, both on and off the campus, officials quoted in news accounts and in the district attorney's statement said.

The officials said that students had coordinated the deals mainly by text messages. In one case, a member of the Theta Chi fraternity sent a mass text message to his "faithful customers," informing them of a "sale" on cocaine after a brief waiting period while he and his "associates" traveled to Las Vegas.

The university's president, Stephen L. Weber, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that faculty and staff members were not informed that the undercover investigation was being conducted on and near the campus.

"This was not a difficult decision," he said. "We needed to do something about it. We're talking about drug trafficking. That's the thing we were not prepared to turn our backs on. We had to deal with this."

San Diego State has suspended all the students who were arrested, pending due-process reviews, Mr. Weber said in a written statement on the university's Web site.

The university is also looking into whether any fraternities were involved organizationally, beyond the actions of individual members. If it finds that they were, Mr. Weber told reporters, those fraternities will be kicked out as campus organizations.

In a statement issued later in the day, the university announced that six fraternities had been placed on "interim suspension," pending hearings.

Among the students arrested were an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice and a master's candidate who was a month away from a degree in homeland security and who worked as a community-service officer under the supervision of the campus police.

In his own statement regarding the arrests, Mr. Weber called the investigation "a big step forward towards a safer environment for our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors."

"Illegal substances are inconsistent with our values and with the pursuit of our mission," he said. "Certainly today's arrests underscore the scope of the challenges universities face as we fight this major societal problem."

Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2757n.htm