Drug War Follies #31
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by: petergorman
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DRUG WAR FOLLIES
Looking Back While We Face Forward. Where Some of the Items We’ve mentioned in the first 30 issues of SKUNK Currently Stand
By Peter Gorman
Well, Skunk mag has lasted a lot longer than some people thought it might and so did this column. Good for us. And in this retro issue we’re going to look back at a few of the items we’ve covered in the past 4-plus years and bring you up to date on them.
Which doesn’t mean you’ll get bored, you lazy motherfuckers so don’t even think about turning the page till you’ve read every stinking word and have memorized most of them!
The very first Drug War Follies led off with Goerge Bush, having narrowly been reelected, visiting his pal Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia. "Our two nations share in the struggle against drugs…," he deadpanned. "The drug traffickers who practice violence and intimidation in this country send their addictive and deadly products to the United States."
Well, in the four years since that meeting, the US had sent a couple of billion more dollars to Uribe via Plan Colombia—the plan is going into it’s ninth year—and the price of coke remains stable, at very inexpensive compared to 1980 prices. Additionally, violence in Colombia has claimed several thousand more lives in it’s civil war that appears more and more to be about coke money than anything else, miles and miles of primary Colombian rainforest has been lost to misdirected coca crop fumigation and much of Mexico, as a byproduct of Plan Colombia, has become a killing field.
And Uribe, close friend to both drug cartel players and the paramilitary AUC, responsible for most of the killing in Colombia, managed to twist enough arms and make enough promises to have the one-term presidency rule in Colombia changed so that he could run again. And did, and won. Which insured the coke lines would remain open.
So time, at least in this case, didn’t heal a damned thing.
In the second issue of DWF, we covered poor schmuck Weldon Angelos, who was sentenced in late 2004 to 55-years in a US federal lockup over the sale of two ounces worth of pot to a snitch from his car. Angelos, founder of Extravagant Records, which had Snoop Dogg signed, received the unfreakingbelieveable sentence because he had an unlicensed gun in his car during the 2001 and 2002 sales, and when police finally searched his home in 2003 they found him in possession of a total of three unlicensed guns there.
The update is that a court of appeals upheld his sentence in early 2006 and Angelos is finishing his fourth year in the pen. That sucks.
The update on Schapelle Corby, also covered in the second issue of Skunk, sucks as well. The then-27 year old boogie boarder was found with 4.2 kilos of pot in her boogie-board bag while entering Bali. At the time we reported on her Corby was facing a possible death sentence under Indonesia’s insane drug laws. She wound up being spared the death penalty but was sentenced to 20-years, which she is currently serving.
In issue #5 we discussed Rene Boje, busted at Todd McCormick’s Bel Air manse while tending medical marijuana in 1998. We wrote about her because her extradition and a trial in the US was just then coming up. Her story had a happy ending when a US judge sentenced to one year’s probation which she was allowed to serve in Canada with her family.
Issue #6 dealt with another extradiition, this one of Marc Emery, who was arrected on July 29, 2005 at the behest of the US DEA for seed selling. Announcing his arrest, then-DEA head Karen Tandy (who has since retired and moved on to being a policy spokesperson for Motorola) made a point of explaining that the legalization movement would be hurt in both Canada and the US because of the amount of money Emery regularly donated to the cause. She also painted Emery as a general monster and one of the largest drug dealers in the Western hemisphere. Well, the update is that Marc is still dealing with the extradition process. But you all probably knew that, didn’t you? Oh, you think you’re so darned clever, don’t you my pretties….?
A personal issue was dealt with in Issue #7 when friends of mine were wrongly put in prison in prison in Iquitos, Peru. They had shipped out a legal bottle of ayahuasca, a plant medicine, but someone jealous told airport authorities in Lima it was really liquid opium. My friends were picked up and put in jail, with no one actually testing the material. When this reporter called in favors and had the material tested—more than a year after my friends were incarcerated—it proved to be the medicine and not opium but the judge, citing the need to have drug offenders in jail to keep the US drug warriors happy, declined to release them. It took nearly another year to have them ordered free.
IN issue #10, Drug War Follies saluted Dr. Tod Mikuriya, one of the drafters of California’s prop 215, that state’s medical marijuana law. In the decade following its passage Dr. Tod wrote more than 9,000 recommendations for it, landing him in hot water with the California Medical Board, which severely restricted his license inn 2004. Unfortunately, two years after Skunk wrote about him, he succumbed to cancer and died on May 20, 2007. RIP, Dr. Tod. We need more like you.
Chris Sellers was the subject of this column in issue #15. Sellers was an 18-year-old kid in Johnson County, Texas when he ran afoul of the law. Three very stoned teens interrogated by the police while tripping identified him as the person who had given them acid at a party. Though they later recanted and said Chris was there but that another fellow had provided the acid, Chris was given 10-years’ probation. In Johnson County that’s as good a jail, and he wound up doing nearly 8-years behind bars for offences such as being late with probation fees.
The good news is Sellers finally was released nearly six months ago and is nearly off the hook. If he can make it till February, 2009 he plans to turnn pro as an extreme fighter—a skill he learned fending for himself in jail.
Issue #16 had one of those fantastic stories where nearly the entire Collinsville, Virginia Sheriff’s department was arrested on charges ranging from stealing dope from the property room to drug distribution, money laundering, racketeering, gun selling and obstruction of justice. Even the Sheriff got caught. Unfortunately, the update is that most of the 13 cops pleaded guilty to minor offences and got minimal incarceration or suspended sentences. The sheriff served 8-months in a federal lockup for lying to a federal agent and was released on July 3, 2008. A writer for the Martinsville [VA] Bulletin, which broke the story, said that without question if the people involved were not members of the sheriff’s department the sentences would have been considerably harsher.
Longtime activist Craig X Rubin was highlighted in issue #22 after his Temple 420, which had opened its doors in April, 2006 "as a refuge for the spiritual growth of the 420 Nation," was busted for utilizing cannabis during services in November of that year. At the time of the Drug War Follies column, Rubin had been found guilty of distributing cannabis to his flock, but had yet been sentenced. He’s since been sentenced to 4-years-8-months but appealed and was set free without bond or even peeing-in-a-bottle restrictions awaiting the government’s response. In May of this year he was given permission to re-open the temple but he’s holding off for now. His brightest news: The police officer who arrested him has joined the Temple 420 and will be attending services once it does finally reopen.
It would all be funny if people werent dying and the prisons weren't full.
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