Friday, November 28, 2008
oldest stash of marijuana found in China
November 27, 2008
By Dean Beeby, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.
The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.
The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.
"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.
Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.
The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.
The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.
Researchers also could not determine whether the cannabis was smoked or ingested, as there were no pipes or other clues in the tomb of the shaman, who was about 45 years old.
The large cache was contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl, and was likely meant to be used by the shaman in the afterlife.
"This materially is unequivocally cannabis, and no material has previously had this degree of analysis possible," Russo said in an interview from Missoula, Mont.
"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied."
The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the man's high social standing.
Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
The company operates a cannabis-testing laboratory at a secret location in southern England to monitor crop quality for producing Sativex, and allowed Russo use of the facility for tests on 11 grams of the tomb cannabis.
Researchers needed about 10 months to cut red tape barring the transfer of the cannabis to England from China, Russo said.
The inter-disciplinary study was published this week by the British-based botany journal, which uses independent reviewers to ensure the accuracy and objectivity of all submitted papers.
The substance has been found in two of the 500 Gushi tombs excavated so far in northwestern China, indicating that cannabis was either restricted for use by a few individuals or was administered as a medicine to others through shamans, Russo said.
"It certainly does indicate that cannabis has been used by man for a variety of purposes for thousands of years."
Russo, who had a neurology practice for 20 years, has previously published studies examining the history of cannabis.
"I hope we can avoid some of the political liabilities of the issue," he said, referring to his latest paper.
The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide.
Mexico's Unsuccessful Drug War, Painfully Preserved and Hidden
November 27, 2008
Mexico City Journal
Mexico's Unsuccessful Drug War, Painfully Preserved and Hidden
By MARC LACEY
MEXICO CITY — At their best, museums are glorious cultural repositories, reflecting the highest flowering of human creativity, ingenuity and art. But not everything in every culture is glorious, and there are museums for those aspects, too, which is why, hidden from the public, there is an institution here devoted to Mexico's dark side, the Museum of Drugs.
It is a place that leaves those who manage to get inside shaking their heads and lamenting the long, spirited but largely unsuccessful war this country has waged to control illegal narcotics.
Run by the Mexican military and open only to graduating cadets and select guests, the Museo de los Enervantes presents the drug war in all its ugliness and complexity. There is a room devoted to the ancient roots of drug use in Mesoamerica, like the use of hallucinogenic peyote and mushrooms by the Maya and Aztecs, and displays that show all the military does to try to stem the tide, uprooting marijuana plants and uncovering hidden caches of cocaine and heroin.
"You eradicate in one place and you continue on, and when you go back they're growing it again," said Maj. Mario Ayala López, who insisted that his face not be shown in any photographs, an atypical request for a museum curator but a reality in present-day Mexico, where the drug violence knows no bounds.
To give young cadets a sense of what they will be hunting for once deployed into the field, drugs themselves are on display, real-life samples under glass of everything from methamphetamines, which are manufactured in huge quantities in Mexican laboratories, to heroin, to marijuana, which is grown in fields hidden away in the countryside. The museum itself could not be more secure, located on the top floor of the Defense Ministry.
Along the halls, there is a farmworker mannequin propped up under a tree with a rifle in his hands, guarding a field of poppies and marijuana. Around his neck is a pendant of Jesús Malverde, considered the patron saint of outlaws. Nearby is a board with nails sticking into it, a makeshift trap set to injure anyone, but especially soldiers, who might creep near.
In a display case are actual notes that soldiers have recovered in raids on fields growing the precursors for the drugs that will be smoked, snorted or injected. The handwritten messages are pleas from the farmers to the soldiers to leave their fields alone in exchange for a little cash.
Getting the drugs to the biggest market on Earth, the United States, requires ingenuity, and there is an entire room devoted to that. Drug-filled shoes, beer crates and even a drug-filled surfboard are on display. There is a doughnut sprinkled with poppy seeds that were to be used to make heroin, and a doll that was stuffed with drugs and then handed to a child to carry.
A model of a woman who was apprehended in Tijuana shows her with a protruding stomach, which was caused not by pregnancy but by a package containing several pounds of tightly wrapped cocaine. A photograph features another female trafficker, this one with cocaine surgically implanted in her buttocks. She died after one of the packages burst upon her arrival at Mexico City's airport.
Toward the end of the tour the museum, which opened in 1985, introduces the people who have turned Mexico into the prime trafficking country in the hemisphere. There is a model of a stereotypical trafficker wearing fancy cowboy boots, a big belt buckle imprinted with a marijuana plant and plenty of jewelry.
On the wall is a photograph of a trafficker's child, a baby dressed in camouflage surrounded by dozens of shotguns. "There are generations that grow up in this culture," Major Ayala said. "For them it's normal."
Farther on are some of the vestments recovered during drug raids, like a bulletproof trench coat and a protective polo shirt, both designed by Miguel Caballero, a Colombian clothing designer who runs a pricey boutique not far away.
Traffickers have plenty of money to spend, and this museum gives a taste of some of their buying habits. There is a gold-encrusted cellphone recovered from Daniel Pérez Rojas, a founder of the Zetas, a paramilitary group, and plenty of weaponry decorated with precious metals and stones. A Colt pistol recovered from Alfredo Beltra Leyva, a leader of the feared Sinaloa cartel who was arrested in January, bears the oft-repeated revolutionary quotation, "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees."
There is another Colt pistol encrusted with emeralds that once belonged to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and probably the most wanted trafficker of all. It was marked with the initials ACF, for Armado Carrillo Fuentes, who once led the Juárez Cartel but died while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997. The gun was probably a gift from Mr. Carrillo to Mr. Guzmán, the curator speculated, and thus a sign of an alliance between their rival cartels.
Nowhere is the word "guerra," or war, featured in the museum, because the Mexican military considers its counternarcotics mission to be something different from that. "We don't use that term," said Major Ayala, who was wearing his dress uniform as he strode formally through the museum.
At the museum entrance, though, is a shrine that features the names of 570 Mexican soldiers who have died fighting illegal drugs as far back as 1976. In the last two years, since President Felipe Calderón has sent soldiers on more antidrug missions than any of his predecessors, 67 names have been added to the list.
And, sadly, there is plenty of room on the wall for more.
Mexico City Journal
Mexico's Unsuccessful Drug War, Painfully Preserved and Hidden
By MARC LACEY
MEXICO CITY — At their best, museums are glorious cultural repositories, reflecting the highest flowering of human creativity, ingenuity and art. But not everything in every culture is glorious, and there are museums for those aspects, too, which is why, hidden from the public, there is an institution here devoted to Mexico's dark side, the Museum of Drugs.
It is a place that leaves those who manage to get inside shaking their heads and lamenting the long, spirited but largely unsuccessful war this country has waged to control illegal narcotics.
Run by the Mexican military and open only to graduating cadets and select guests, the Museo de los Enervantes presents the drug war in all its ugliness and complexity. There is a room devoted to the ancient roots of drug use in Mesoamerica, like the use of hallucinogenic peyote and mushrooms by the Maya and Aztecs, and displays that show all the military does to try to stem the tide, uprooting marijuana plants and uncovering hidden caches of cocaine and heroin.
"You eradicate in one place and you continue on, and when you go back they're growing it again," said Maj. Mario Ayala López, who insisted that his face not be shown in any photographs, an atypical request for a museum curator but a reality in present-day Mexico, where the drug violence knows no bounds.
To give young cadets a sense of what they will be hunting for once deployed into the field, drugs themselves are on display, real-life samples under glass of everything from methamphetamines, which are manufactured in huge quantities in Mexican laboratories, to heroin, to marijuana, which is grown in fields hidden away in the countryside. The museum itself could not be more secure, located on the top floor of the Defense Ministry.
Along the halls, there is a farmworker mannequin propped up under a tree with a rifle in his hands, guarding a field of poppies and marijuana. Around his neck is a pendant of Jesús Malverde, considered the patron saint of outlaws. Nearby is a board with nails sticking into it, a makeshift trap set to injure anyone, but especially soldiers, who might creep near.
In a display case are actual notes that soldiers have recovered in raids on fields growing the precursors for the drugs that will be smoked, snorted or injected. The handwritten messages are pleas from the farmers to the soldiers to leave their fields alone in exchange for a little cash.
Getting the drugs to the biggest market on Earth, the United States, requires ingenuity, and there is an entire room devoted to that. Drug-filled shoes, beer crates and even a drug-filled surfboard are on display. There is a doughnut sprinkled with poppy seeds that were to be used to make heroin, and a doll that was stuffed with drugs and then handed to a child to carry.
A model of a woman who was apprehended in Tijuana shows her with a protruding stomach, which was caused not by pregnancy but by a package containing several pounds of tightly wrapped cocaine. A photograph features another female trafficker, this one with cocaine surgically implanted in her buttocks. She died after one of the packages burst upon her arrival at Mexico City's airport.
Toward the end of the tour the museum, which opened in 1985, introduces the people who have turned Mexico into the prime trafficking country in the hemisphere. There is a model of a stereotypical trafficker wearing fancy cowboy boots, a big belt buckle imprinted with a marijuana plant and plenty of jewelry.
On the wall is a photograph of a trafficker's child, a baby dressed in camouflage surrounded by dozens of shotguns. "There are generations that grow up in this culture," Major Ayala said. "For them it's normal."
Farther on are some of the vestments recovered during drug raids, like a bulletproof trench coat and a protective polo shirt, both designed by Miguel Caballero, a Colombian clothing designer who runs a pricey boutique not far away.
Traffickers have plenty of money to spend, and this museum gives a taste of some of their buying habits. There is a gold-encrusted cellphone recovered from Daniel Pérez Rojas, a founder of the Zetas, a paramilitary group, and plenty of weaponry decorated with precious metals and stones. A Colt pistol recovered from Alfredo Beltra Leyva, a leader of the feared Sinaloa cartel who was arrested in January, bears the oft-repeated revolutionary quotation, "I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees."
There is another Colt pistol encrusted with emeralds that once belonged to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and probably the most wanted trafficker of all. It was marked with the initials ACF, for Armado Carrillo Fuentes, who once led the Juárez Cartel but died while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997. The gun was probably a gift from Mr. Carrillo to Mr. Guzmán, the curator speculated, and thus a sign of an alliance between their rival cartels.
Nowhere is the word "guerra," or war, featured in the museum, because the Mexican military considers its counternarcotics mission to be something different from that. "We don't use that term," said Major Ayala, who was wearing his dress uniform as he strode formally through the museum.
At the museum entrance, though, is a shrine that features the names of 570 Mexican soldiers who have died fighting illegal drugs as far back as 1976. In the last two years, since President Felipe Calderón has sent soldiers on more antidrug missions than any of his predecessors, 67 names have been added to the list.
And, sadly, there is plenty of room on the wall for more.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
County explores pot card ID program
Tuesday, Nov 25 2008, 9:22 pm
By Rob Parsons/Staff Writer
It's high time for a medical marijuana card program in Colusa, officials said.
The Colusa County Board of Supervisors last week formed a committee to explore and eventually implement the pot card program for medicinal users.
The local committee comprises Beth Robey, director of Health and Human Services, District Attorney John Poyner and supervisors Mark Marshall and Gary Evans.
Passed in 1996, the Compassionate Use Act, also known as Proposition 215, allows doctors to recommend the use of marijuana for medical purposes. In 2003, California passed SB 420, which allows the Department of Health Services to create an ID card program.
The cards are intended to provide law enforcement with the means to identify legal medical users.
Statewide marijuana advocacy groups have been pushing the remaining counties to implement the law. Colusa County is one of the last counties in the state to implement the program, in part because there has been no local demand for it, Robey said.
Officials admit there has been sense of urgency to establish the program locally.
Poyner said the county's informal system has worked well enough without the establishment of a card program.
"I think (the informal system) works just fine," Poyner said.
Colusa Sheriff Scott Marshall said medical marijuana laws are confusing and have created a new kind of criminal.
"There is a problem developing with criminals ripping off people with medical marijuana grows," Marshall said.
"That's a new problem that medical marijuana caused."
Marshall said the biggest misconception about the law is that marijuana is legal in certain cases.
"Marijuana is still illegal," Marshall said.
"Prop. 215 cards just prevent prosecutors from prosecuting the crime."
Marshall said it is a poorly written law with too many loopholes that clashes with federal anti-drug legislation.
Robey said the program could be a positive alternative for individuals with serious medical issues. She said she is curious to see what, if any, locals will have in the program.
"In my opinion, the lack of demand for it means our informal system is working," Robey said.
There is no timetable for implementation of the program, officials said.
Contact Rob Parsons at 458-2121 or rparsons@tcnpress.com.
Medical Pot Caregivers Should Provide More Than Just Marijuana, Says Calif. Supreme Court
Instead, the court held, it requires consistently providing the "daily life necessities" of patients well before marijuana is considered an option.
"The words the statute uses -- housing, health, safety," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote, "imply a caretaking relationship directed at the core survival needs of a seriously ill patient, not just one single pharmaceutical need."
The 22-page ruling is bad news for the average medical marijuana grower who wants to sell to ailing friends, but good news for law enforcement officers who would like to rein in a growing number of outlaw caregivers around the state.
Berkeley solo Lawrence Gibbs, who represented a Santa Cruz County man claiming caregiver status, said the ruling "drastically narrowed the class of people who can qualify as primary caregivers" and forces those seeking medicinal pot to turn to government-approved collectives and cooperatives.
San Francisco-based Deputy Attorney General Michele Swanson, who presented the state's position, said the decision "draws the line more clearly" on who can be a marijuana caregiver.
"There have been a lot of illegal operations popping up," she said, "and this decision has made clear they are operating outside the law."
Roger Mentch was arrested in 2003 after narcotics investigators found 190 plants in various stages of development in his house. He claimed he grew so many plants because he was the primary caregiver for five other people, whom he counseled on usage, taught how to grow, and even sporadically drove to the doctor.
Mentch was charged with cultivating marijuana and possessing it for sale after officers decided he was running a for-profit business that enabled him to deposit as much as $5,500 a month in his bank account.
At trial, Mentch argued he should be allowed to present the affirmative defense that he was entitled to grow marijuana and sell it to others because he qualified as a primary caregiver under the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, codified as Health & Safety Code §11362.5. But Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Samuel Stevens refused.
Mentch received three years' probation. But San Jose's Sixth District Court of Appeal reversed his conviction last year, saying there was enough evidence that Mentch qualified as a caregiver to permit the affirmative defense at trial. The Supreme Court seemed torn on the issue at oral argument in October.
On Monday, the justices disagreed with the appellate court, holding in People v. Mentch, 08 C.D.O.S. 14435, that medical marijuana caregivers must have consistently provided care to patients before they found they might benefit from marijuana use.
"What is not permitted," Werdegar wrote, "is for an individual to establish an after-the-fact caregiving relationship in an effort to thereby immunize from prosecution previous cultivation or possession for sale."
Werdegar said the court's interpretation should "pose no obstacle" for bona fide caregivers.
"The spouse or domestic partner caring for his or her ailing companion, the child caring for his or her ailing parent, the hospice nurse caring for his or her ailing patient," she wrote, "each can point to the many ways in which they, medical marijuana aside, attend to and assume responsibility for the core survival needs of their dependents."
The Compassionate Use Act, she added, "allows them, insofar as state criminal law is concerned, to add the provision of marijuana, where medically recommended or approved, as one more arrow in their caregiving quiver."
The Supreme Court also tossed Mentch's argument that he deserved the affirmative defense under the medical marijuana statute that allows individuals to advise patients how to cultivate their own medical marijuana.
"As it is undisputed Mentch did much more than administer, advise and counsel," Werdegar wrote, "the program provides him no defense."
Mike McKee
11-26-2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
pot-friendly coffee house
More than 100 people are expected to attend the morning rally, many acting as "human billboards" with signs promoting the regulation of cannabis and demanding pot-friendly stores such as the Kindred Cafe be left alone.
"It's all supporters and friends just coming out to show moral support," said organizer Matt Mernagh.
"It's a very busy intersection at 8 a.m., right. Being human billboards with our flags, our signs, our megaphones. It just shows people that we're not going to let this go away."
The gathering comes after police raided the cafe Thursday, charging two employees with trafficking marijuana for allegedly selling undercover officers marijuana-laced treats.
Following the raid, police said they removed furniture, machinery, smoking paraphernalia and an amount of marijuana.
Owner Dominic Cramer faces trafficking-related charges and was expected to turn himself into police later Monday.
Cramer also owns several other cannabis culture shops in the city.
Chad Cooke, a spokesman for the cafe, said the store provides a place for people with medical permits to smoke marijuana, as well as social users, to gather, but never sold drugs.
He said the rally is not associated with Cramer or the cafe and he has asked the event organizers to keep it peaceful.
"The time has passed for the in-your-face 'We smoke pot and get high, get used to it' mentality. That doesn't win over public support and that's not what we are about. We are about approaching it from a point of view that it is something normal and common sense prevails, and public opinion prevails, that this is really a non-issue and we can move forward from this," he said.
Cooke said Cramer would be turning himself in to police later in the day and be detained overnight for a bail hearing Tuesday. At the time of publication, he had not been formally charged.
In 2004, a Vancouver SWAT team raided Da Kine Cafe and arrested owner Carol Gwilt for openly selling pot to customers. Seven cafe staff members were charged with drug-trafficking and possession of marijuana for the purpose of trafficking.
In 2006, Gwilt pleaded guilty to trafficking charges and possession of the proceeds of crime. Investigators had seized nine kilograms of marijuana, some hashish, 300 cannabis-laced cookies and about $60,000 in U.S. and Canadian currency.
Budding wealth in the weed
Budding wealth in the weed
With the courts striking down the federal government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana, private growers are bullish on pot's commercial potential
Eric Nash can barely contain his excitement waiting to hear from Health Canada whether he can start growing marijuana for 250 patients now that the Federal Court of Appeal has struck down the government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana.
That would be just the start. He says there are tens of thousands more who are ailing across the country, clamouring for his organic B.C. bud.
"There is a great opportunity here for the government to collect significant tax revenue currently being lost to the street market," enthused Nash, whose company, Island Harvest, has cleared the industrial security regulatory hurdles and meets the standards set by Ottawa to grow cannabis legally.
"Our vision is to have a sustainable commercial agriculture operation," he said. "There's no reason we can't achieve that. Look at the number of compassion clubs, look at the number of people using marijuana to relieve a headache or premenstrual cramps!"
On Oct. 27, the federal government lost its appeal of a 2007 Federal Court ruling that the government's policy allowing licensed producers to only grow marijuana for one sick person was unconstitutional. That decision was stayed pending the appeal.
The appeal court agreed with the trial judge -- the medical marijuana scheme was constitutionally deficient -- and refused to suspend the impact of their ruling to give the government time to amend the regulations.
Health Canada spokesman Phillipe Laroche said the department was still studying the ruling and had not decided on its response.
More and more research is supporting previous anecdotal evidence that cannabis may have a wide range of therapeutic uses, from the treatment of Alzheimer's, depression, glaucoma, epilepsy and cancer to HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and ADD/ADHD. Its most ardent promoters say cannabis may be an addition to the modern pharmacopoeia that rivals Aspirin in the breadth of its applications.
Until now, the government's program has artificially depressed the medical market by making it difficult for patients to qualify, supplying what many consider poor-quality marijuana and restricting qualified licensed growers to supplying only one patient.
Doctors have been reluctant to prescribe marijuana, claiming they have no guide on dosage or the usual pharmaceutical medical studies to rely on.
Nash said three serious analyses of the medical marijuana market in the last eight years give an idea of its scope and potential.
While Health Canada has issued roughly 2,500 exemption permits over eight years, the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2000 estimated the number of self-medicating marijuana patients to be 1.9 per cent of the population. A Price Waterhouse report prepared for Health Canada two years later concluded it was more like four per cent of the population, and a report in 2004 by a member of the federal government's advisory committee on marijuana suggested the reality was closer to seven per cent.
The four-per-cent model would put sales at more than $400 million annually, Nash said.
More optimistic projections say the medical market, including ancillary products such as vaporizers and paraphernalia, could be as high as $20 billion.
Currently, Ottawa sells maybe $1 million a year worth of the pot produced in a Manitoba mine, and compassion clubs across the country sell about $10 million worth of cannabis products.
By far the vast majority of patients who need marijuana as a medicine continue to buy their drugs from the black market -- that's one of the fundamental reasons behind the Oct. 27 court ruling.
The government adopted the Medical Marijuana Access Regulations (MMAR) and accompanying bureaucracy in 2001. It has modified it since then in the face of judicial warnings that it was constitutionally inadequate.
The federal court decision promises an economic boon immediately for the hundreds of legal cannabis producers and increased opportunity for many others.
Nash said it was good news for both the consumer and producer.
Restricting growers of medical marijuana results in a huge gift of revenue to organized crime.
Stephen Easton, an economist at Simon Fraser University and with the Fraser Institute, has done the most respected work on the size of the domestic pot industry.
In the 1990s and even throughout the early part of this decade, he said, tons and tons of Canadian marijuana flooded into the U.S. market. People were backpacking across the border with as much weed as they could carry, or kayaking across with a stash of bud worth as much as emeralds.
Between 1990 and 2000, the Canadian pot market doubled in size, fuelled primarily by increased hydroponic production.
Nationally, Canadians apparently spent $1.8 billion toking up -- just shy of the $2.3 billion we burned on tobacco.
By 2006, when he did his calculations, Easton said the numbers indicated a provincial wholesale market of $2.2 billion. You could increase that to $7.7 billion retail if consumers paid top dollar for their bud.
That dwarfed any other B.C. agricultural product.
The result on the street was easy to see: a proliferation of gangs duly documented by the RCMP, as every crook plucked what Easton called "the low-hanging fruit."
With the tightening of the border post-9/11, smuggling now is more the purview of the very organized and the very desperate.
U.S. authorities have charted the rise of their own domestic production as American states relaxed enforcement and sentencing -- pot production in California rivals Canada's total output.
And with the north-south route to market becoming problematic, more B.C. bud has moved east either to be sold or to find a less monitored area of the border before turning south.
By far the biggest factor in the marijuana market in recent years, however, has been the revolution in production -- the ease, predictability and, most importantly, the portability that has come with advances in indoor cultivation.
B.C. bud ruled in the 1990s when the underground marijuana trade was responsible for keeping afloat many small communities buffeted by resource-market gales, but these days be you in Barrie, Ont., or Joe Batt's Arm, N.L., you can easily obtain good seeds and fail-safe equipment and within a few months be producing marijuana to rival B.C.'s best.
Some estimates in the 1990s suggested as much as 50 cents of every dollar generated in some Kootenay towns could be traced directly to pot.
Former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Celerino Castillo III spent 12 years in the USDA infiltrating Manhattan drug rings, destroying jungle cocaine labs and training anti-narcotics agents. The climax of his career was pulling the curtain back on drug-smuggling by the Nicaraguan Contras with links to Lt.-Col. Oliver North and the CIA.
Mexico is again considering legalization because of the violence and social upheaval caused by illicit drug trafficking, and Canada should be headed down the same path, he says. So should South America and the U.S.
"The corruption is everywhere -- every month we arrest a law enforcement official, every month," he insisted, "whether it's a border patrol agent or a customs agent or a DEA agent or an FBI agent. We arrest a law enforcement officer once a month. It's huge. The amount of money is just so big. 'I have a mortgage to pay, I have to send my kids to college.' That's always the excuse."
He shakes his head.
He explained that in his state, drug couriers once arrived with suitcases of cash to deposit in local banks: "Now they buy the banks. Especially now with this upheaval. Who else has the ready cash?"
He laughed.
"But that's actually how they're money-laundering today -- they buy a bank," Castillo added. "There's no way we can keep up."
In retirement, Castillo has become a featured speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former police, corrections and judicial officers who want to change drug policy.
"There's more production, more product and more of everything than there ever was. The war on drugs doesn't work," he said.
Dana Larsen, the former NDP candidate, who stepped down during the federal election when his recreational drug use was publicized, is promoting a new Vancouver compassion club.
Larsen, who used to be the leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party, thinks the time has come to move into the medical field.
"I think there's enough of a market in town to support another dispensary," Larsen said.
His menu of cannabis products included six strains of dried marijuana, four kinds of hash, two pot products in capsules and double-strength bonbons -- cannabis-infused organic chocolates.
In Oakland, Calif., the private dispensaries that support the state's medical marijuana program are said to be generating revenues in excess of $70 million a year.
Michelle Rainey is one of roughly 2,500 Canadians with a licence to possess and use marijuana. Rainey has Crohn's disease and finds her homegrown pot an effective replacement for the expensive pharmaceutical drugs she'd been prescribed.
She believes the country's health-care system could save a fortune if there was a working medical marijuana program. The roughly 110,000 Canadians suffering from Crohn's disease and the 90,000 living with ulcerative colitis, for example, are estimated to spend $162 million a year for prescription drugs.
Many of those people are already benefiting from marijuana, Rainey said, but many, many more could be.
Consider, too, that many battling cancer and HIV/AIDS find edible cannabis products work to stimulate the appetite, but they've got to buy them on the street.
"We have a huge problem with physicians being apprehensive about signing for patients even though the proof is there," Rainey said.
"Our seniors, for instance, are spending their pensions on big pharma only to end up with more aches and pains, when all they may need is a puff or a brownie!"
In its decision, the Federal Court of Appeal did more than simply hand Ottawa a legal loss. It said the government had been knowingly dragging its heels since at least 2003.
As a result, lawyer Kirk Tousaw told B.C. Supreme Court that this decision renders the criminal law invalid based on that history of jurisprudence, which ties enforceability of the criminal law to the existence of a constitutionally adequate medical access scheme.
He said the judgments in Ontario courts and now the federal court mean the state of the law is unclear and therefore criminal sanctions cannot be imposed.
In this latest case -- called Sfetkopoulos et al v. Attorney General of Canada -- some 27 patients with exemptions to possess marijuana for medicinal use applied to Health Canada for authorization to designate Carasel Harvest Supply Corporation as their marijuana producer.
Health Canada refused, saying that violated the regulations that restricted growers to supplying only one patient at a time.
But the Federal Court Trial Division agreed with the patients and declared part of the MMAR unconstitutional because it threatened their liberty and security of the person by preventing them from choosing their marijuana producer.
The judge accepted that sick people should have access to marijuana for the treatment of serious medical conditions and they should not be forced to risk imprisonment to buy their medication on the black market.
He interpreted the constitutional guarantee of security of person rights to include access to medication without undue state interference.
Ottawa appealed and the Oct. 27 ruling was the result.
The question is how Ottawa will respond to the appeal court's decision.
Since the impugned marijuana access scheme is a product of regulation rather than statute, the government can quickly promulgate new rules.
"They could make cosmetic regulatory changes," Nash acknowledged, "which would force another court challenge.
"But I think the judges are pretty fed up with them doing that."
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Arcata to consider medical marijuana guidelines
Arcata to consider medical marijuana guidelines, new police position
Donna Tam/The Times-Standard
Posted: 11/19/2008 01:18:12 AM PST
After months of discussion, the council may finally decide on amending the medical marijuana guidelines to the city's recently adopted land use code.
The council will also consider hiring a fifth over-hire position for the Arcata Police Department. The over-hire, a position used to cover for officers during extended leaves or training, would be used to address the anticipated retirement of a senior officer in April, and enable the department to hire a police officer trainee in time for the Basic Law Enforcement Academy beginning in January. Missing the academy would delay filing the position by about six months.
Another issue the council will tackle is creating a Transactions and Use Tax Oversight Committee. The committee would ensure that the funds generated from the recently approved sales tax will go strictly toward street maintenance and public safety.
In other matters, the council will continue to hold a public hearing on the Trillium Creek development. The proposed project includes a request to develop a 3-acre clustered development within a 7.4-acre subdivision that would be a part of an overall 24.4-acre site. The remaining 17 acres would be a protected watershed and forest preserve through a conservation easement.
The council will also hold hearings to consider adopting a resolution that would authorize a $225,000 loan to local manufacturer Wing Inflatables to create jobs; and an amendment to the city's housing rehabilitation guidelines to include a pilot program offering housing rehabilitation loans to senior citizens who own manufactured homes in mobile home parks.
If You Go:
What: Arcata City Council meeting
Where: City Hall, Council Chambers, 736 F St.
When: 6 p.m. today
Donna Tam can be reached at 441-0532 or dtam@times-standard.com.
Donna Tam/The Times-Standard
Posted: 11/19/2008 01:18:12 AM PST
After months of discussion, the council may finally decide on amending the medical marijuana guidelines to the city's recently adopted land use code.
The council will also consider hiring a fifth over-hire position for the Arcata Police Department. The over-hire, a position used to cover for officers during extended leaves or training, would be used to address the anticipated retirement of a senior officer in April, and enable the department to hire a police officer trainee in time for the Basic Law Enforcement Academy beginning in January. Missing the academy would delay filing the position by about six months.
Another issue the council will tackle is creating a Transactions and Use Tax Oversight Committee. The committee would ensure that the funds generated from the recently approved sales tax will go strictly toward street maintenance and public safety.
In other matters, the council will continue to hold a public hearing on the Trillium Creek development. The proposed project includes a request to develop a 3-acre clustered development within a 7.4-acre subdivision that would be a part of an overall 24.4-acre site. The remaining 17 acres would be a protected watershed and forest preserve through a conservation easement.
The council will also hold hearings to consider adopting a resolution that would authorize a $225,000 loan to local manufacturer Wing Inflatables to create jobs; and an amendment to the city's housing rehabilitation guidelines to include a pilot program offering housing rehabilitation loans to senior citizens who own manufactured homes in mobile home parks.
If You Go:
What: Arcata City Council meeting
Where: City Hall, Council Chambers, 736 F St.
When: 6 p.m. today
Donna Tam can be reached at 441-0532 or dtam@times-standard.com.
Medical marijuana advocates plead with supervisors to drop federal appeal
Kelly Simione, Correspondent
Posted: 11/18/2008 09:17:32 PM PST
Several members of the Marijuana Anti-Prohibition Project on Tuesday asked the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to reconsider its opposition to issuing medical marijuana identification cards to patients.
Forty of California's 58 counties are distributing marijuana cards.
"It's about the responsibility of government to protect its citizens." said Barbara MacKenzie, a representative of Shelter From the Storm.
Lanny Swerdlow, a medical marijuana advocate, hopes the supervisors will consider dropping a planned appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court with San Diego County.
"We want them to stop arresting medical marijuana patients and stop wasting taxpayer's money on frivolous lawsuits," Swerdlow said.
None of the supervisors would comment about the request.
Legal marijuana poses pot puzzle
Growing plants for medical purposes will be legal - but having seeds won't
Matthew Miller
mrmiller@lsj.com
Though medical marijuana soon will be legal in Michigan, patients and their caregivers still will have to break the law to get it, at least the first time.
Proposal 1 will allow approved patients and their caretakers to possess and grow the drug, but there won't be a legal way to get marijuana seeds or seedlings.
"How do you get from point A to point B? There is no law that protects you there," said James McCurtis, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Community Health, "and we are not giving any advice on how you get your marijuana."
It's a gray area that's common to most of the 13 states that have passed medical marijuana initiatives. California is alone in allowing "dispensaries" to sell marijuana on a nonprofit basis.
And "like many things in the world that happen in a legal gray area, it seems to happen without a great deal of difficulty," said Bruce Mirken, communications director at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C.
"It's unfortunate that there are limits right now to what a state can do," he added.
With the possession, distribution and sale of marijuana still illegal under federal law," Mirken said, "If you set up a full scale distribution system for seeds or seedlings, you run the risk of running afoul of the feds."
Lynn Allen is getting ready to cultivate his own marijuana plants.
The 52-year-old Williamston man, who has the bleeding disorder hemophilia and HIV, contracted from a tainted blood transfusion, bought a book. He is researching which strains of marijuana might work best for his condition.
But the lack of protection for those buying seeds "does disturb me a bit," he said. "I don't know offhand how we'll deal with that unless they turn a blind eye to it."
That's something that Lansing Police Chief Mark Alley said he won't do.
"We don't plan on turning our backs on illegal behavior," he said.
Still, there are apparently plenty of people in the state interested in participating in the program.
"We've been getting calls ever since Nov. 5," McCurtis said, "because a lot of people think the day after the election that the law goes into effect right away.
It doesn't. The Department of Community Health has until April 4 to put rules in place for administering the program. After that, it will take another 20 days or so to process the first requests, McCurtis said.
New opportunity
Danny Trevino has seen some of the eagerness. The owner of Hydroworld Hydroponics, a Lansing shop that sells hydroponic equipment, fertilizer, and high output gardening lights, he said, when Proposal 1 passed, "I got busy."
It's a business opportunity Trevino, 36, isn't going to miss. He's had T-shirts made that say "Medical Marijuana Specialist." He plans to start teaching classes on how to grow, using plastic plants.
But asked whether he hoped to serve as a caregiver - the law allows designated caregivers to grow marijuana for up to five patients - Trevino replied, "I'll probably be a patient instead."
But it won't be that easy. Proposal 1 specifies which diseases and symptoms make a patient eligible for the program. To obtain a registry card, patients will need written certification from a physician that they qualify. Because marijuana is not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration, doctors can't prescribe it. Caregivers will need to apply as well.
And McCurtis said, "we need to dig deeper. It may require us to go through medical records, but I don't know that until we actually get the rules set in stone."
The fees for the program still need to be worked out, McCurtis said, but the plan is that it will be self-sustaining, requiring no additional money from taxpayers.
Federal law 'supreme'
John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, emphasized that Proposal 1 hadn't changed anything as far as the federal government is concerned.
"(Marijuana) is illegal by federal law, and federal law is supreme," he said, though he acknowledged that federal law tries "to focus on major trafficking and distribution."
But Dianne Byrum, spokeswoman for the Coalition for Compassionate Care, the group that supported the proposal, said there's hope that President-elect Barack Obama will ease current restrictions.
Indeed, Obama has promised to stop Drug Enforcement Administration raids on patients in states that allow medical marijuana.
The logic behind Proposal 1 was that "people were getting marijuana anyway and using it," she said. "This only gives protection to those seriously ill people who are using marijuana for medical reasons under the structure of this new law."
Additional Facts
Proposal 1 key points
Proposal 1 will:
• Permit physician approved use of marijuana by registered patients with debilitating medical conditions including cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C, MS and other conditions as may be approved by the state Department of Community Health.
• Permit registered individuals to grow limited amounts of marijuana for qualifying patients, up to 12 plants per patient, in an enclosed, locked facility.
• Require Department of Community Health to establish an identification card system for patients qualified to use marijuana and individuals qualified to grow marijuana. That system will be in place by April 4. The first registration cards will be issued later that month.
• Permit registered and unregistered patients and primary caregivers to assert medical reasons for using marijuana as a defense to any prosecution involving marijuana.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Marijuana hotspots vs. Starbucks -- who wins?
Marijuana hotspots vs. Starbucks -- who wins?
Good news for all you caffeine-adverse medical marijuana users out there, courtesy of the federal drug czar (We know. How often does that happen?)
There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco than Starbucks Coffee shops. Or at least, so says the Office of National Drug Control Policy in a posting on its official blog, pushingback.com.
Seem a little far-fetched? It sure looks that way.
You don't have to go through this kind of effort to find pot in San Francisco. But it's still easier to find a Starbucks.
AP
You don't have to go through this kind of effort to find pot in San Francisco. But it's still easier to find a Starbucks.
The feds contend there are 98 marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco, compared to 71 Starbucks Coffee shops. They even provide a Google map mashup showing the supposed locations of both.
But their numbers don't add up, and medical marijuana types are peeved.
First, the map is not click-able, so you can't zoom in to determine exact addresses. Even so, there appear to be dispensaries listed in highly improbable places, like two on Leavenworth between California and Clay streets -- a section at the top of Nob Hill sporting Victorians, a couple of corner stores and a laundromat, but no apparent pot for sale.
San Francisco's Department of Public Health, which issues permits for medical marijuana dispensaries, is also befuddled by the federal data.
"It was extremely incorrect," said Larry Kessler, a senior health inspector at the department. "I don't know how they got that."
DPH lists 24 dispensaries in the city that either have permits or are trying to obtain one.
The federal drug office says their information includes those dispensaries, plus dozens more that are unregulated yet easily findable through a Google search.
"This is information that is readily available to any teenager," said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He called the state's medical marijuana law "essentially a fraud that's been perpetrated on the people of California" because of the potential for abuse.
But when asked for the data used to create the map, Lemaitre provided a list with 74 entries for marijuana dispensaries, not the 98 claimed.
He said some alternative medicine-type spots were removed from the list because the feds are actually unsure if they sell pot.
Of the 74, six of them don't list addresses in San Francisco. Five of those say they offer marijuana delivery service to the city, while a sixth is in Los Angeles.
Of those with city addresses, some are clearly marijuana dispensaries, like The Vapor Room on Haight Street. But other listings include 12 Galaxies, the Mission District nightclub that closed in August, and businesses with defunct Web sites and phone numbers that just ring and ring.
The data also has at least one double listing. It includes both ACT UP, the AIDS organization that used to run a dispensary at 1884 Market St., and Market Street Cooperative, which currently operates the dispensary at that location.
Lemaitre said it's difficult to get precise data on "the illegal drug business."
"Drug dealers and proprietors of medical marijuana dispensaries aren't kind enough to provide us with their sales data and operating locations," he said.
Bottom line though: the data the feds turned over listed less than 71 actual marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco, meaning Starbucks wins.
Venti cappuccinos for everyone.
Good news for all you caffeine-adverse medical marijuana users out there, courtesy of the federal drug czar (We know. How often does that happen?)
There are more medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco than Starbucks Coffee shops. Or at least, so says the Office of National Drug Control Policy in a posting on its official blog, pushingback.com.
Seem a little far-fetched? It sure looks that way.
You don't have to go through this kind of effort to find pot in San Francisco. But it's still easier to find a Starbucks.
AP
You don't have to go through this kind of effort to find pot in San Francisco. But it's still easier to find a Starbucks.
The feds contend there are 98 marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco, compared to 71 Starbucks Coffee shops. They even provide a Google map mashup showing the supposed locations of both.
But their numbers don't add up, and medical marijuana types are peeved.
First, the map is not click-able, so you can't zoom in to determine exact addresses. Even so, there appear to be dispensaries listed in highly improbable places, like two on Leavenworth between California and Clay streets -- a section at the top of Nob Hill sporting Victorians, a couple of corner stores and a laundromat, but no apparent pot for sale.
San Francisco's Department of Public Health, which issues permits for medical marijuana dispensaries, is also befuddled by the federal data.
"It was extremely incorrect," said Larry Kessler, a senior health inspector at the department. "I don't know how they got that."
DPH lists 24 dispensaries in the city that either have permits or are trying to obtain one.
The federal drug office says their information includes those dispensaries, plus dozens more that are unregulated yet easily findable through a Google search.
"This is information that is readily available to any teenager," said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He called the state's medical marijuana law "essentially a fraud that's been perpetrated on the people of California" because of the potential for abuse.
But when asked for the data used to create the map, Lemaitre provided a list with 74 entries for marijuana dispensaries, not the 98 claimed.
He said some alternative medicine-type spots were removed from the list because the feds are actually unsure if they sell pot.
Of the 74, six of them don't list addresses in San Francisco. Five of those say they offer marijuana delivery service to the city, while a sixth is in Los Angeles.
Of those with city addresses, some are clearly marijuana dispensaries, like The Vapor Room on Haight Street. But other listings include 12 Galaxies, the Mission District nightclub that closed in August, and businesses with defunct Web sites and phone numbers that just ring and ring.
The data also has at least one double listing. It includes both ACT UP, the AIDS organization that used to run a dispensary at 1884 Market St., and Market Street Cooperative, which currently operates the dispensary at that location.
Lemaitre said it's difficult to get precise data on "the illegal drug business."
"Drug dealers and proprietors of medical marijuana dispensaries aren't kind enough to provide us with their sales data and operating locations," he said.
Bottom line though: the data the feds turned over listed less than 71 actual marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco, meaning Starbucks wins.
Venti cappuccinos for everyone.
Modesto men scheduled for sentencing today in medical marijuana case
last updated: November 16, 2008 09:51:37 PM
Two Modesto men are to be sentenced today on federal drug charges in U.S. District Court in Fresno.
Luke Scarmazzo and Ricardo Ruiz Montes, both 28, were convicted in May. They operated a medical marijuana dispensary that raked in $6 million to $9 million in less than two years of operation.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Medical Marijuana eases economic pains
Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun columnist
Published: Friday, November 14, 2008
DUNCAN - Eric Nash can barely contain his excitement waiting to hear from Health Canada whether he can start growing marijuana for 250 patients.
That would be just the start. There are tens of thousands more who are ailing across the country clamouring for his organic B.C. bud.
"There is a great opportunity here for the government to collect significant tax revenue currently being lost to the street market," Nash, one of the best-known legal cannabis producers, enthused.
With the current global financial crisis, this court ruling is certainly a bright light in dark economic times. We're just waiting for clarification. I figure our production would increase significantly from several pounds to 150 pounds or more immediately."
Now that the Federal Court of Appeal has struck down the government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana, Nash believes commercial agricultural production of pot is around the corner and the sky's the limit.
His local company, Island Harvest, has cleared the industrial security regulatory hurdles so the company meets the standards set by Ottawa to grow the much-demonized plant.
"Our vision is to have a sustainable commercial agriculture operation," he said. "There's no reason we can't achieve that. Look at the number of compassion clubs, look at the number of people using marijuana to relieve a headache or pre-menstrual cramps!"
More and more research is supporting previous anecdotal evidence that cannabis may have a wide range of therapeutic uses from the treatment of Alzheimer's, depression, glaucoma, epilepsy and cancer to HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and ADD/ADHD. Its most ardent promoters say cannabis may be an addition to the modern pharmacopeia that rivals Aspirin in the breadth of its applications.
It doesn't take a genius to realize the potential profits are staggering.
Until now, the government's poorly administered medical program has artificially depressed that market by making it difficult for patients to qualify, supplied what many consider poor-quality marijuana and imposed an arbitrary restriction on qualified licensed growers to supplying only two patients.
Doctors, too, have exacerbated the situation with their reluctance to prescribe marijuana, claiming they have no guide on dosage or the usual pharmaceutical medical studies to rely on. That is changing, slowly.
Nash explained there have been three relatively recent, serious analyses of the medical marijuana market, which give an idea of its scope and potential.
The Canadian Medical Association Journal did a survey in 2000 and estimated the number of self-medicating marijuana patients to be 1.9 per cent of the population; a Price Waterhouse report prepared for Health Canada two years later concluded it was more like four per cent of the population, and a report in 2004 by a member of the federal government's advisory committee on pot suggested the reality was closer to seven per cent.
(Health Canada, after eight years, has issued roughly 2,500 exemption permits to needy patients.)
Regardless, Nash said, based on the four-per-cent model, that puts sales at more than $400 million annually.
More optimistic projections say the medical market, including ancillary products such as vaporizers and paraphernalia, could be as high as $20 billion.
Add it up: The government sells maybe $1 million a year worth of the pot produced in a Manitoba mine, and compassion clubs across the country sell about $10 million worth of cannabis products.
By far the vast majority of patients who need marijuana as a medicine continue to buy their drugs from the black market. It's a crazy situation: imagine if diabetics had to go to a corner dealer to score insulin.
That's one of the fundamental reasons behind the court ruling Oct. 27: the medical marijuana program set up by Ottawa at the turn of the millennium isn't working.
The government adopted the Medical Marijuana Access Regulations (MMAR) and accompanying bureaucracy in 2001. It has modified it since then in the face of judicial warnings that it was constitutionally inadequate, but it still can't pass muster.
The courts find that offensive.
This new judgment heralds a tectonic shift in the country's medical-marijuana regulatory regime and perhaps even the drug laws. It may even invalidate the cannabis prohibition.
Two B.C. Supreme Court justices sitting on separate cases (one about simple possession, the other production and trafficking) are currently seized with that question.
If they agree that because a section of medical program is unconstitutional the criminal law cannot be enforced, it would also mark the triumph of a Trojan horse strategy by cannabis activists to achieve legalization by expanding medical access.
Just as liquor was once obtained via prescription, cannabis could be regulated in a similar fashion, obviating the need for a criminal prohibition.
No matter how you look at it, the federal court decision promises an economic boon immediately for the hundreds of legal cannabis producers and increased opportunity for many others.
Nash said it was good news for both the consumer and producer.
The former government communications worker and his partner, Wendy Little, have been growing since 2002 and proselytizing longer than that. Their book Sell Marijuana Legally is a huge hit; they created an online users' group for patients and growers, and they teach courses.
But medical growers across the country have been restricted, a policy that results in a huge gift of revenue to organized crime.
B.C. bud's staggering numbers
Stephen Easton, an economist at Simon Fraser University and with the Fraser Institute, has done the most respected work on the size of the domestic pot industry.
He sat down earlier this year in Denny's with one of B.C.'s biggest dealers and went over his numbers.
"He figured it out differently than I did, using lights and ballasts," Easton said. "But he worked out the numbers with me and it all worked out. He told me it was very close. He was quite surprised. I was very happy about that. We had a really good talk. He was really helpful for me."
Since Easton's original estimates, the domestic marijuana market has undergone some changes, but nothing cataclysmic.
"The fluctuations in the dollar are the main economic factor," he said. "It has gone up and down and that pushes these guys."
For most of the last few years, the most significant factor has been the various improvements in border security triggered by the 9/11 terrorist strikes.
In the 1990s and even throughout the early part of this decade, tons and tons of Canadian marijuana flooded into the U.S. market carried by anyone with moxy and a decent plan.
People were backpacking across with as much weed as they could carry in the Interior, or kayaking across with a stash of bud worth as much as emeralds.
Between 1990 and 2000, the Canadian pot market doubled in size fuelled primarily by the increased hydroponic production of B.C. bud.
Nationally, we apparently spent $1.8 billion toking up - just shy of the $2.3 billion we burned on tobacco.
By 2006, when he did his calculations, Easton said the numbers indicated a provincial wholesale market of $2.2 billion. You could increase that to $7.7 billion retail if consumers paid top dollar for their bud.
That dwarfed any other B.C. agricultural product.
The result on the street was easy to see: a proliferation of gangs duly documented by the RCMP, as every crook plucked what Easton called "the low-hanging fruit."
The tightening of the border has had several effects.
Not just everyone can take it across now, with underground sensors, heightened air traffic scrutiny and the deployment of the military. Smuggling now is more the purview of the very organized and the very desperate.
At the same time, U.S. authorities have charted the rise of their own domestic production as American states relaxed enforcement and sentencing - the opposite of the 1980s and 1990s when their stiff attitude drove marijuana growers north.
In California alone, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica and San Francisco all have officially told police to make marijuana offences their lowest priority.
Evolving production
Pot production in California rivals Canada's total output.
Similar initiatives have been adopted in other states and cities such as Seattle, Denver and even Missoula, Mont.
With the north-south route to market more problematic, more B.C. bud has moved east to feed eastern appetites or find a less monitored area of the border before turning south. The Mounties have responded by increasing surveillance along the Trans-Canada on the Prairies, resulting in large seizures.
By far the biggest factor in the marijuana market in recent years, however, has been the revolution in production - the ease, predictability and most importantly the portability that has come with advances in indoor cultivation that mean great weed can be grown anywhere.
The RCMP have been reporting huge busts in Eastern Canada as production has sprouted in the Maritimes and Ontario, reducing their appetite for West Coast pot.
In Ontario, whose provincial production is said to have surpassed B.C.'s, authorities have uncovered two separate operations each capable of producing $100 million worth of cannabis a year.
B.C. bud ruled in the 1990s when the underground marijuana trade was responsible for keeping afloat many small communities buffeted by resource-market gales.
Our pot even had cachet even up until four or five years ago but these days, be you in Charlottetown or Joe Batt's Arm, Nfld., you can easily obtain good seeds and fail-safe equipment and within a few months be producing marijuana to rival B.C.'s best.
Nevertheless, Easton explained, when you are looking at a commodity and domestic production, it's all about the money.
The rise of the dollar in recent years worked against growers and exporters, but its recent fall provides an upward fillip.
"I imagine with all the market turmoil the domestic marijuana industry will pick up a bit," Easton said. "it's just had a 15-to-20-per-cent bump in two months."
Some estimates in the 1990s suggested as much as 50 cents of every dollar generated in some Kootenay towns could be traced directly to pot.
With the international financial tempest wreaking havoc again with commodity prices, B.C. bud may yet help ride out the storm but probably not to the same extent.
"We'll just have to watch housing prices in Nelson," Easton laughed.
Mexico considering legalization
Sitting in Kitsilano eating breakfast before meeting the city's police board, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Celerino Castillo III nodded his head furiously.
"Yes, yes, it's all about the money," he said. "The money, it's all so corrupt."
Castillo spent 12 years in the USDA infiltrating Manhattan drug rings, destroying jungle cocaine labs and training anti-narcotics agents. The climax of his career was pulling the curtain back on drug-smuggling by the Nicaraguan Contras with links to Lt.-Col. Oliver North and the CIA.
From the Amazon to the slums of Mexico City to the ghettos of America, Castillo has had a front-row seat on the western hemisphere's drug world and come to the conclusion it's time to abandon our current approach.
Mexico is again considering legalization because of the violence and social upheaval caused by illicit drug trafficking, and Canada should be headed down the same path, he says. So should South America and, of course, the U.S.
The money is too corrosive.
"The corruption is everywhere - every month we arrest a law enforcement official, every month," he insisted, "whether it's a border patrol agent or a customs agent or a DEA agent or an FBI agent. We arrest a law enforcement officer once a month, It's huge. The amount of money is just so big. 'I have a mortgage to pay, I have to send my kids to college.' That's always the excuse."
He shakes his head.
He explained that in his state, drug couriers once arrived with suitcases of cash to deposit in local banks: "Now they buy the banks. Especially now with this upheaval. Who else has the ready cash?"
He laughed.
"But that's actually how they're money-laundering today - they buy a bank," Castillo added. "There's no way we can keep up."
In retirement, Castillo has become a featured speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former police, corrections and judicial officers who want to change drug policy.
"There's more production, more product and more of everything than there ever was. The war on drugs doesn't work," he said.
"All I'm hoping for is people to start to listen and educate themselves about what's going on in the world," he said. "I know first-hand. I've seen it from an agent's point of view.
"It's affecting and destroying a lot of families. For 40 years we've been trying this John Wayne approach and it's not working. The bottom line: There are a lot more drugs today than we had 40 years ago."
'These are the dealing tables'
Dana Larsen ushers me into his new marijuana dispensary in the 800 block of East Hastings Street.
The former NDP candidate, who stepped down during the federal election when his recreational drug use was publicized, has renovated the run-down storefront and is promoting a new compassion club.
Like Nash, he thinks the medical pot market is about to expand exponentially and legally.
"There's no smoking in here," he said as he showed me around the spartan office. "But there's a vapour lounge two doors down in the Seed Bank where you can light up after you leave."
There is a modest reception area and a large back room. It's clean but unfinished.
"These are the dealing tables," he said, pointing to a handful of folding tables separated by office screens to provide a measure of privacy.
He laughed.
"I guess I should call them dispensing tables."
Larsen, who used to be the leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party and Prince of Pot Marc Emery's lieutenant, thinks the time has come to move into the medical field.
"I think there's enough of a market in town to support another dispensary," Larsen said.
"There are more than enough patients who need reliable, quality cannabis products than the current two clubs in the city provide."
His menu of cannabis products included six strains of dried marijuana, four kinds of hash, two pot products in capsules and double-strength bon-bons - cannabis-infused organic chocolates.
The pot ranged in price from $7.50 a gram for Pine Cross up to $8 a gram for Sweet Tooth; pressed Kif (soft hash made with a sieve) went for $8 a gram; and very potent Bubblehash, which was extracted using water and ice rather than a sieve, went for $25 a gram.
In Oakland, Calif., the private dispensaries that support the state's medical marijuana program are said to be generating revenues in excess of $70 million a year.
Medical marijuana could help the sick
Michelle Rainey is one of roughly 2,500 Canadians with a licence to possess and use marijuana. She's also a celebrity in the medical marijuana world and on YouTube.
Rainey has Crohn's disease and finds her home-grown pot an effective replacement for her previous expensive regimen of pharmaceutical drugs.
She believes the country's health-care system could save a fortune if there was a working medical marijuana program, and those who could benefit from cannabis could easily shift away from other medications.
The roughly 110,000 Canadians suffering from Crohn's disease and the 90,000 living with ulcerative colitis, for example, are estimated to spend $162 million a year for prescription drugs.
Many of those people are already benefiting from marijuana, Rainey said, but many, many more could be.
Consider too that many battling cancer and HIV/AIDS find edible cannabis products work to stimulate the appetite, but they've got to buy them on the street.
"We have a huge problem with physicians being apprehensive about signing for patients even though the proof is there," Rainey said.
"Our seniors, for instance, are spending their pensions on big pharma only to end up with more aches and pains when all they may need is a puff or a brownie!"
Rainey has facilitated more than 70 exemptions for local patients, 30 suffering from Crohn's: "I receive dozens of e-mails from people suffering every day from all over the world who have discovered cannabis alleviates pain and nausea. The government should not be preventing people from getting access to an effective medicine."
The courts agree.
In its decision, the Federal Court of Appeal did more than simply hand Ottawa a legal loss. It said the government had been knowingly dragging its heels since at least 2003.
As a result, lawyer Kirk Tousaw told B.C. Supreme Court that this decision renders the criminal law invalid based on that history of jurisprudence, which ties enforceability of the criminal law to the existence of a constitutionally adequate medical access scheme.
He said the judgments in Ontario courts and now the federal court mean the state of the law is unclear and therefore criminal sanctions cannot be imposed.
In this latest case - called Sfetkopoulos et al v. Attorney General of Canada - some 27 patients with exemptions to possess marijuana for medicinal use applied to Health Canada for authorization to designate Carasel Harvest Supply Corporation as their marijuana producer.
Health Canada refused, saying that violated the regulations that restricted growers to supplying only two patients at a time.
But the Federal Court Trial Division agreed with the patients and declared section 41 (b.1) of the MMAR was contrary to s. 7 of the Charter because it threatened their liberty and security of the person by preventing them from choosing their marijuana producer.
The judge accepted that sick people should have access to marijuana for the treatment of serious medical conditions and they should not be forced to risk imprisonment to buy their medication on the black market.
He interpreted the constitutional guarantee of security of person rights to include access to medication without undue state interference.
Ottawa appealed and lost.
Court rebukes government
The appeal court agreed with the trial judge - the medical marijuana scheme was constitutionally deficient - and rebuked the government.
The three judges said the Crown had brought forward a case dismissed by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2003, that nothing had changed and the marijuana access regulations remained flawed.
In the unanimous 2003 decision, the justices similarly complained about Ottawa's failure to deal properly with this issue.
In their terse three-page decision a fortnight ago, the justices refused to suspend the impact of their ruling to give the government time to amend the regulations.
Health Canada spokesman Phillipe Laroche said the department was still studying the ruling and had not decided on its response.
Now, Tousaw has argued that those charged or convicted while the medical marijuana access scheme was deemed unconstitutional should have their convictions overturned or their charges stayed. That's thousands of Canadians.
In particular, Tousaw says Ryan Poelzer should have his conviction overturned.
Poelzer was charged May 18, 2007 and there is no disagreement about the facts. He was smoking a joint on a B.C. Ferry as it pulled into Langdale and that offended an off-duty cop who called the RCMP. As he stepped off the ferry, Poelzer was arrested and in his backpack police found 78.3 grams of marijuana, 8.6 grams of hash, and assorted paraphernalia and pro-drug literature.
In spite of Tousaw's argument that the cannabis prohibition was invalid, or alternatively that the status of the prohibition is so confused that prosecution constituted an abuse of process, the provincial court judge in the case decided B.C. jurisprudence had declared the medical marijuana scheme valid and therefore the criminal law was fine and Poelzer in clear violation of it.
But Tousaw says the B.C. precedents are wrong and fly in the face of this latest ruling.
The Crown disagrees.
Federal lawyer Peter Eccles said the MMAR requirements are reasonable given the legitimate societal interest in controlling the distribution of a "potentially harmful drug."
"They ensure only those with a bona fide medical need for marijuana, verified by appropriate medical declaration, obtain legal access," Eccles said. "Mr. Poelzer is not such an individual."
Perhaps.
Two B.C. justices will render their opinions soon on whether there actually is a criminal marijuana law in force at the moment or whether de facto legalization has occurred because the medical access scheme is unconstitutional.
Market issues 'need to be addressed'
The question is how will Ottawa respond to the federal court decision.
Since the impugned marijuana access scheme is a product of regulation rather than statute, the government can quickly promulgate new rules.
"They could make cosmetic regulatory changes," Nash acknowledged, "which would force another court challenge. But I think the judges are pretty fed up with them doing that."
And for good reason - sick people should not have to deal with the black market.
Nash said it's time to get medical marijuana out of the courts, properly regulated and controlled.
"It comes down to consumer choice," Nash said. "We have people across Canada who want our organic product. Patients want different price ranges, they want different strains, they want different hybrids. There are market issues here that need to be addressed. When you go to a pharmacy do you want to be told you can only have Bayer?
"This is about patients' rights and a legitimate need."
imulgrew@vancouversun.com
LA Times
The involvement of the top four Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in distribution and money-laundering on U.S. soil has brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities.
Residents of the quiet Beaver Hills subdivision in Lilburn, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, awoke to the trans-border crime wave in July, when a brigade of well-armored federal and state police officers surrounded a two-story colonial home at 755 East Fork Shady Drive, ordered neighbors to lock their doors and flushed out three men described as members of a Mexican drug cartel. One was captured after he tried to slip down a storm drain. Another was caught in the ivy in Pete Bogerd's backyard. He lives two doors up and is president of the neighborhood association.
"It blew us away," Bogerd said. "I didn't know we had that many cops."
A short while later, police hauled out a 31-year-old from the Dominican Republic who for nearly a week had been chained and tortured inside the basement, allegedly for not paying a $300,000 drug debt.
In the months after, several dozen suspects have been charged with moving drugs and money for Mexican traffickers through Atlanta, which has emerged as an important hub for thriving narcotics markets in the Eastern United States.
Few regions of the nation have been immune -- even Anchorage reported activity by the Tijuana drug cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, according to federal law enforcement agencies.
In suburban San Diego, six men believed to be part of a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix organization have been accused in connection with as many as a dozen murders and 20 kidnappings over a three-year span.
Last month, three armed men disguised as police officers broke into a Las Vegas home, tied up a woman and her boyfriend and abducted the woman's 6-year-old boy. Authorities said the men were tied to a Mexican drug smuggling operation and were trying to recoup proceeds allegedly stolen by the child's grandfather. The boy, Cole Puffinburger, was found unharmed three days later. Federal authorities have charged his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, with racketeering, after he allegedly mailed $60,000, believed to be drug proceeds, from Mississippi to Nevada. Police continue to search for the kidnappers.
In September, authorities announced that 175 alleged members of Mexico's Gulf cartel had been rounded up across the country and abroad. Of those, 43 had been active in the Atlanta area, they said.
The arrests were part of Project Reckoning, an 18-month investigation that tracked criminal activity in the U.S. by the Mexican cartels. All told, Project Reckoning authorities have arrested 507 people and seized more than $60 million in cash, 16,000 kilograms of cocaine, half a ton of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin and 51 pounds of marijuana.
Last month federal authorities in Atlanta announced indictments against 41 people they said were trafficking drugs and laundering money for Mexican cartels. Among those netted in Operation Pay Cut were a former deputy sheriff from Texas who was stopped on a Georgia highway with nearly $1 million in cash in his pickup.
The footprints of Mexican smuggling operations are on all but two states, Vermont and West Virginia, according to federal reports. Mexican organizations affiliated with the so-called Federation were identified in 82 cities, mostly in the Southwest, according to an April report by the National Drug Intelligence Center, an arm of the Department of Justice.
Elements of the Juarez cartel were identified in at least 44 cities, from West Texas to Minneapolis. Gulf cartel affiliates were operating in at least 43 cities from South Texas to Buffalo, N.Y. And the Tijuana cartel, active in at least 20 U.S. cities, is extending its network from San Diego to Seattle and Anchorage.
Many cities showed evidence of multiple cartels, according to the report, which was based on federal, state and local law enforcement reporting.
The extent and depth of cartel activity was not specified, but the Drug Enforcement Administration told Congress two years ago that it believed Mexican-based trafficking organizations "now have command and control over the drug trade and are starting to show the hallmarks of organized crime, such as organizing into distinct cells with subordinate cells that operate throughout the United States."
The Congressional Research Service last year reported that in the U.S. the cartels "maintain some level of coordination and cooperation among their various operating areas, moving labor and materials to the various sites, even across the country as needed."
Chuck Miller, an NDIC spokesman, said it remained difficult to determine why and how the cartels chose specific urban regions.
"It could be one of them may know someone in one part of the country, and have established routes for up there," Miller said. "It could be geographic locations that are operating in Mexico or adjacent to other areas. Or there could be affiliations with individuals residing in specific locations."
A rogue operation
In one case in San Diego, a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix operation moved into Southern California in 2002, and began kidnapping and shaking down people believed to be working as smugglers and launderers for Mexican traffickers.
Court documents show it operated for several years without attracting concerted action from law enforcement, amassing a fortune that helped pay for equipment that included fake badges and police lights and uniforms.
Officers familiar with the case believe the group, known as Los Palillos, or the Toothpicks, killed a dozen people, committed as many as 20 kidnappings and trafficked methamphetamine to Kansas City, Mo., to finance its war with the cartel in Tijuana -- all from a base in San Diego County.
The group was shut down by authorities last year, when one victim's family reported the abduction. Two of six alleged members went on trial last month.
They face charges related to the kidnapping of Eduardo Gonzalez Tostado, the son of an Ensenada banker. Gonzalez, 32, lived in Chula Vista and fit the profile of the Palillos' prey: a relatively well-to-do Mexican entrepreneur who had taken refuge over the border.
Gonzalez, a well-known champion Baja California desert off-road racer, testified that he owned a car dealership and a trucking firm in Chula Vista and a seafood restaurant in Tijuana.
Defense attorneys, citing transcripts and FBI interviews, alleged that he had been under federal investigation and that he had smuggled drugs for the cartel, according to court documents. A Times check found no evidence of businesses operating at the addresses listed on licenses.
Gonzalez testified in a San Diego court that he is not associated with the Arellano Felix cartel and had never kidnapped, smuggled drugs or laundered money. He could not be contacted for comment.
Gonzalez testified that over eight days, he was handcuffed, blindfolded and shocked with a Taser stun gun while his kidnappers negotiated for a million-dollar ransom. (Agents confiscated a Taser at the house that matched scars on Gonzalez's back, according to court records.)
FBI agents planted an electronic beacon in the ransom money, which led them to the Chula Vista cul-de-sac, where they freed Gonzalez.
The spare tire case
In tiny Pearsall, Texas, just outside San Antonio, a tow-truck driver was abducted and taken across the border last year by thugs allegedly connected to Mexican drug traffickers.
The men reportedly were angered at the disappearance of drug profits they had hidden in a spare tire of a car the driver had towed from an accident on Interstate 35, the main thoroughfare from San Antonio to the border city of Laredo. A federal grand jury in San Antonio indicted five men in April in connection with the international kidnapping.
The indictment said the defendants were offered as much as $15,000 to bring the driver to Mexico, court records show. They lured him to Frio County Regional Park in Pearsall by phoning in a fake request for a tow, then bundled him off to Piedras Negras, where he was "tortured and interrogated about the missing spare tire" and held for a week, the indictment alleged.
The assailants phoned his boss and threatened to "cut the head off of the driver" unless the supervisor brought the missing money to Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras.
U.S. authorities were alerted, and after intense negotiations, the driver was released at the port of entry in Del Rio, Texas, upriver from Eagle Pass. The five men were arrested and are to stand trial in San Antonio on Monday.
A toast to St. Death
Cartel members also have pleaded guilty in federal court this year as part of a murder-for-hire and kidnapping ring that stretched from the Rio Grande to North Texas.
Several men and two teenage boys on this side of the border were killed as part of a war that pitted the Gulf cartel against the Sinaloa cartel over the lucrative drug trafficking to North Texas and beyond. Hit men were paid in drugs and cash to help carry out the slayings, according to court documents.
Police in the U.S. learned about the abductions when the parents of the two boys, the youngest 14 years old, reported them missing. The investigation ended when one of the accused killers, Gabriel Cardona-Ramirez, also known as "Pelon" and "Gaby," bragged about how the boys were crying when he slashed them to death with a broken bottle, then poured their blood into a cup for a toast.
"Poom! The little cup [drink]! Poom!" Cardona-Ramirez boasted on a federal wiretap planted at a cartel hide-out on Orange Blossom Loop in Laredo. His words were translated into English for U.S. court officials. "I filled it with blood and poom! I dedicated it to La Santisima Muerte" -- St. Death.
Here in Georgia, the case of the man held in the basement on East Fork Shady Drive is indicative of how "these traffickers unleash ruthless forms of violence in order to protect and defend their drugs and cash," said Rodney G. Benson, DEA special agent-in-charge in Atlanta.
Jay S. Mortenson, also a DEA special agent, said officers surrounded the house after the hostage's wife phoned them from Rhode Island. She said cartel members came up with a ruse to have him bring the title of a newly purchased vehicle to Georgia, and when he arrived in July they abducted him over a $300,000 drug debt.
When officers burst inside they found the husband, Oscar Reynoso, in the basement, chained at his ankles. His mouth was gagged with black tape.
Unbound, Reynoso began talking. Mortenson said he told officers he delivered the title to the cartel members at a Waffle House restaurant in Duluth, Ga., and then was driven to East Fork Shady Drive. Taken into the kitchen, he was surrounded; one of the assailants pointed him out as "the thief who stole the money."
Three men who tried to flee the house during the raid face criminal charges in connection with the abduction and extortion scheme.
In addition, Reynoso was charged with distributing cocaine, after he admitted he had dealt drugs and owed the money to the cartel, Mortenson said.
The home at 755 East Fork Shady Drive was vacant because the owners had moved and could not find a buyer. Today it stands as a reminder to Beaver Hills residents of how far the drug wars in Mexico have come.
"I hope we don't have anything more like this," said Barbara Park, who lives across the street in a cul-de-sac. "It was pretty scary, and we have a nice neighborhood."
Serrano and Quinones are Times staff writers.
richard.serrano@latimes.com
sam.quinones@latimes.com
LA Times
The involvement of the top four Mexican drug-trafficking organizations in distribution and money-laundering on U.S. soil has brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities.
Residents of the quiet Beaver Hills subdivision in Lilburn, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, awoke to the trans-border crime wave in July, when a brigade of well-armored federal and state police officers surrounded a two-story colonial home at 755 East Fork Shady Drive, ordered neighbors to lock their doors and flushed out three men described as members of a Mexican drug cartel. One was captured after he tried to slip down a storm drain. Another was caught in the ivy in Pete Bogerd's backyard. He lives two doors up and is president of the neighborhood association.
"It blew us away," Bogerd said. "I didn't know we had that many cops."
A short while later, police hauled out a 31-year-old from the Dominican Republic who for nearly a week had been chained and tortured inside the basement, allegedly for not paying a $300,000 drug debt.
In the months after, several dozen suspects have been charged with moving drugs and money for Mexican traffickers through Atlanta, which has emerged as an important hub for thriving narcotics markets in the Eastern United States.
Few regions of the nation have been immune -- even Anchorage reported activity by the Tijuana drug cartel led by the Arellano Felix family, according to federal law enforcement agencies.
In suburban San Diego, six men believed to be part of a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix organization have been accused in connection with as many as a dozen murders and 20 kidnappings over a three-year span.
Last month, three armed men disguised as police officers broke into a Las Vegas home, tied up a woman and her boyfriend and abducted the woman's 6-year-old boy. Authorities said the men were tied to a Mexican drug smuggling operation and were trying to recoup proceeds allegedly stolen by the child's grandfather. The boy, Cole Puffinburger, was found unharmed three days later. Federal authorities have charged his grandfather, Clemons Fred Tinnemeyer, with racketeering, after he allegedly mailed $60,000, believed to be drug proceeds, from Mississippi to Nevada. Police continue to search for the kidnappers.
In September, authorities announced that 175 alleged members of Mexico's Gulf cartel had been rounded up across the country and abroad. Of those, 43 had been active in the Atlanta area, they said.
The arrests were part of Project Reckoning, an 18-month investigation that tracked criminal activity in the U.S. by the Mexican cartels. All told, Project Reckoning authorities have arrested 507 people and seized more than $60 million in cash, 16,000 kilograms of cocaine, half a ton of methamphetamine, 19 pounds of heroin and 51 pounds of marijuana.
Last month federal authorities in Atlanta announced indictments against 41 people they said were trafficking drugs and laundering money for Mexican cartels. Among those netted in Operation Pay Cut were a former deputy sheriff from Texas who was stopped on a Georgia highway with nearly $1 million in cash in his pickup.
The footprints of Mexican smuggling operations are on all but two states, Vermont and West Virginia, according to federal reports. Mexican organizations affiliated with the so-called Federation were identified in 82 cities, mostly in the Southwest, according to an April report by the National Drug Intelligence Center, an arm of the Department of Justice.
Elements of the Juarez cartel were identified in at least 44 cities, from West Texas to Minneapolis. Gulf cartel affiliates were operating in at least 43 cities from South Texas to Buffalo, N.Y. And the Tijuana cartel, active in at least 20 U.S. cities, is extending its network from San Diego to Seattle and Anchorage.
Many cities showed evidence of multiple cartels, according to the report, which was based on federal, state and local law enforcement reporting.
The extent and depth of cartel activity was not specified, but the Drug Enforcement Administration told Congress two years ago that it believed Mexican-based trafficking organizations "now have command and control over the drug trade and are starting to show the hallmarks of organized crime, such as organizing into distinct cells with subordinate cells that operate throughout the United States."
The Congressional Research Service last year reported that in the U.S. the cartels "maintain some level of coordination and cooperation among their various operating areas, moving labor and materials to the various sites, even across the country as needed."
Chuck Miller, an NDIC spokesman, said it remained difficult to determine why and how the cartels chose specific urban regions.
"It could be one of them may know someone in one part of the country, and have established routes for up there," Miller said. "It could be geographic locations that are operating in Mexico or adjacent to other areas. Or there could be affiliations with individuals residing in specific locations."
A rogue operation
In one case in San Diego, a rogue faction of the Arellano Felix operation moved into Southern California in 2002, and began kidnapping and shaking down people believed to be working as smugglers and launderers for Mexican traffickers.
Court documents show it operated for several years without attracting concerted action from law enforcement, amassing a fortune that helped pay for equipment that included fake badges and police lights and uniforms.
Officers familiar with the case believe the group, known as Los Palillos, or the Toothpicks, killed a dozen people, committed as many as 20 kidnappings and trafficked methamphetamine to Kansas City, Mo., to finance its war with the cartel in Tijuana -- all from a base in San Diego County.
The group was shut down by authorities last year, when one victim's family reported the abduction. Two of six alleged members went on trial last month.
They face charges related to the kidnapping of Eduardo Gonzalez Tostado, the son of an Ensenada banker. Gonzalez, 32, lived in Chula Vista and fit the profile of the Palillos' prey: a relatively well-to-do Mexican entrepreneur who had taken refuge over the border.
Gonzalez, a well-known champion Baja California desert off-road racer, testified that he owned a car dealership and a trucking firm in Chula Vista and a seafood restaurant in Tijuana.
Defense attorneys, citing transcripts and FBI interviews, alleged that he had been under federal investigation and that he had smuggled drugs for the cartel, according to court documents. A Times check found no evidence of businesses operating at the addresses listed on licenses.
Gonzalez testified in a San Diego court that he is not associated with the Arellano Felix cartel and had never kidnapped, smuggled drugs or laundered money. He could not be contacted for comment.
Gonzalez testified that over eight days, he was handcuffed, blindfolded and shocked with a Taser stun gun while his kidnappers negotiated for a million-dollar ransom. (Agents confiscated a Taser at the house that matched scars on Gonzalez's back, according to court records.)
FBI agents planted an electronic beacon in the ransom money, which led them to the Chula Vista cul-de-sac, where they freed Gonzalez.
The spare tire case
In tiny Pearsall, Texas, just outside San Antonio, a tow-truck driver was abducted and taken across the border last year by thugs allegedly connected to Mexican drug traffickers.
The men reportedly were angered at the disappearance of drug profits they had hidden in a spare tire of a car the driver had towed from an accident on Interstate 35, the main thoroughfare from San Antonio to the border city of Laredo. A federal grand jury in San Antonio indicted five men in April in connection with the international kidnapping.
The indictment said the defendants were offered as much as $15,000 to bring the driver to Mexico, court records show. They lured him to Frio County Regional Park in Pearsall by phoning in a fake request for a tow, then bundled him off to Piedras Negras, where he was "tortured and interrogated about the missing spare tire" and held for a week, the indictment alleged.
The assailants phoned his boss and threatened to "cut the head off of the driver" unless the supervisor brought the missing money to Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras.
U.S. authorities were alerted, and after intense negotiations, the driver was released at the port of entry in Del Rio, Texas, upriver from Eagle Pass. The five men were arrested and are to stand trial in San Antonio on Monday.
A toast to St. Death
Cartel members also have pleaded guilty in federal court this year as part of a murder-for-hire and kidnapping ring that stretched from the Rio Grande to North Texas.
Several men and two teenage boys on this side of the border were killed as part of a war that pitted the Gulf cartel against the Sinaloa cartel over the lucrative drug trafficking to North Texas and beyond. Hit men were paid in drugs and cash to help carry out the slayings, according to court documents.
Police in the U.S. learned about the abductions when the parents of the two boys, the youngest 14 years old, reported them missing. The investigation ended when one of the accused killers, Gabriel Cardona-Ramirez, also known as "Pelon" and "Gaby," bragged about how the boys were crying when he slashed them to death with a broken bottle, then poured their blood into a cup for a toast.
"Poom! The little cup [drink]! Poom!" Cardona-Ramirez boasted on a federal wiretap planted at a cartel hide-out on Orange Blossom Loop in Laredo. His words were translated into English for U.S. court officials. "I filled it with blood and poom! I dedicated it to La Santisima Muerte" -- St. Death.
Here in Georgia, the case of the man held in the basement on East Fork Shady Drive is indicative of how "these traffickers unleash ruthless forms of violence in order to protect and defend their drugs and cash," said Rodney G. Benson, DEA special agent-in-charge in Atlanta.
Jay S. Mortenson, also a DEA special agent, said officers surrounded the house after the hostage's wife phoned them from Rhode Island. She said cartel members came up with a ruse to have him bring the title of a newly purchased vehicle to Georgia, and when he arrived in July they abducted him over a $300,000 drug debt.
When officers burst inside they found the husband, Oscar Reynoso, in the basement, chained at his ankles. His mouth was gagged with black tape.
Unbound, Reynoso began talking. Mortenson said he told officers he delivered the title to the cartel members at a Waffle House restaurant in Duluth, Ga., and then was driven to East Fork Shady Drive. Taken into the kitchen, he was surrounded; one of the assailants pointed him out as "the thief who stole the money."
Three men who tried to flee the house during the raid face criminal charges in connection with the abduction and extortion scheme.
In addition, Reynoso was charged with distributing cocaine, after he admitted he had dealt drugs and owed the money to the cartel, Mortenson said.
The home at 755 East Fork Shady Drive was vacant because the owners had moved and could not find a buyer. Today it stands as a reminder to Beaver Hills residents of how far the drug wars in Mexico have come.
"I hope we don't have anything more like this," said Barbara Park, who lives across the street in a cul-de-sac. "It was pretty scary, and we have a nice neighborhood."
Serrano and Quinones are Times staff writers.
richard.serrano@latimes.com
sam.quinones@latimes.com
Pot grower is now a patient, as soon as he can get on the registry
Pot grower is now a patient, as soon as he can get on the registry
Posted by Crystal McMorris | The Bay City Times November 16, 2008 07:06AM
Larry Myers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980, when he woke up to numbness in his limbs one morning while on his honeymoon in California.
Since then, the 55-year-old Pinconning man has found relief in marijuana. The only thing that helps calm the spasms the disease causes is puffing on a pipeload of pot.
He said his doctor is aware of his use and advised him to continue using it if it provides relieve from his symptoms.
Myers is glad the law legalizing marijuana for medical use has passed, but wishes it included provisions to get prescriptions written and filled.
"As someone who's got some experience growing marijuana, I'll tell you it's not such an easy thing," Myers said, "especially for a person who's dying of cancer or something."
Myers has pleaded guilty twice to marijuana-related crimes in Bay County. In 1987, police took the media along for a raid of the home he lived in at the time on Kaiser Tower Road. They found marijuana plants growing in a semi-trailer in his back yard.
Myers eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and served probation but no jail time.
"I had three kinds of pot," Myers said. "Good, better and best. The state police said it was the best marijuana they had ever seized. It was dubbed in High Times (marijuana magazine) as Pinconning Paralyzer."
Myers again pleaded guilty in 2007 to delivery of marijuana after he says a friend of a friend set him up.
"I'm a convicted felon now," Myers said, sitting in a wheelchair in his modest home, overlooking the Saginaw Bay.
Myers says he plans to get himself on the marijuana patient registry as soon as he figures out how so that he can legally continue using his medicine of choice.
"I think it's great that the voters of Michigan passed Proposal 1," Myers said. "I don't want to have to worry about getting arrested again."
Posted by Crystal McMorris | The Bay City Times November 16, 2008 07:06AM
Larry Myers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980, when he woke up to numbness in his limbs one morning while on his honeymoon in California.
Since then, the 55-year-old Pinconning man has found relief in marijuana. The only thing that helps calm the spasms the disease causes is puffing on a pipeload of pot.
He said his doctor is aware of his use and advised him to continue using it if it provides relieve from his symptoms.
Myers is glad the law legalizing marijuana for medical use has passed, but wishes it included provisions to get prescriptions written and filled.
"As someone who's got some experience growing marijuana, I'll tell you it's not such an easy thing," Myers said, "especially for a person who's dying of cancer or something."
Myers has pleaded guilty twice to marijuana-related crimes in Bay County. In 1987, police took the media along for a raid of the home he lived in at the time on Kaiser Tower Road. They found marijuana plants growing in a semi-trailer in his back yard.
Myers eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and served probation but no jail time.
"I had three kinds of pot," Myers said. "Good, better and best. The state police said it was the best marijuana they had ever seized. It was dubbed in High Times (marijuana magazine) as Pinconning Paralyzer."
Myers again pleaded guilty in 2007 to delivery of marijuana after he says a friend of a friend set him up.
"I'm a convicted felon now," Myers said, sitting in a wheelchair in his modest home, overlooking the Saginaw Bay.
Myers says he plans to get himself on the marijuana patient registry as soon as he figures out how so that he can legally continue using his medicine of choice.
"I think it's great that the voters of Michigan passed Proposal 1," Myers said. "I don't want to have to worry about getting arrested again."
Pot grower is now a patient, as soon as he can get on the registry
Posted by Crystal McMorris | The Bay City Times November 16, 2008 07:06AM
Larry Myers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980, when he woke up to numbness in his limbs one morning while on his honeymoon in California.
Since then, the 55-year-old Pinconning man has found relief in marijuana. The only thing that helps calm the spasms the disease causes is puffing on a pipeload of pot.
He said his doctor is aware of his use and advised him to continue using it if it provides relieve from his symptoms.
Myers is glad the law legalizing marijuana for medical use has passed, but wishes it included provisions to get prescriptions written and filled.
"As someone who's got some experience growing marijuana, I'll tell you it's not such an easy thing," Myers said, "especially for a person who's dying of cancer or something."
Myers has pleaded guilty twice to marijuana-related crimes in Bay County. In 1987, police took the media along for a raid of the home he lived in at the time on Kaiser Tower Road. They found marijuana plants growing in a semi-trailer in his back yard.
Myers eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and served probation but no jail time.
"I had three kinds of pot," Myers said. "Good, better and best. The state police said it was the best marijuana they had ever seized. It was dubbed in High Times (marijuana magazine) as Pinconning Paralyzer."
Myers again pleaded guilty in 2007 to delivery of marijuana after he says a friend of a friend set him up.
"I'm a convicted felon now," Myers said, sitting in a wheelchair in his modest home, overlooking the Saginaw Bay.
Myers says he plans to get himself on the marijuana patient registry as soon as he figures out how so that he can legally continue using his medicine of choice.
"I think it's great that the voters of Michigan passed Proposal 1," Myers said. "I don't want to have to worry about getting arrested again."
Larry Myers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1980, when he woke up to numbness in his limbs one morning while on his honeymoon in California.
Since then, the 55-year-old Pinconning man has found relief in marijuana. The only thing that helps calm the spasms the disease causes is puffing on a pipeload of pot.
He said his doctor is aware of his use and advised him to continue using it if it provides relieve from his symptoms.
Myers is glad the law legalizing marijuana for medical use has passed, but wishes it included provisions to get prescriptions written and filled.
"As someone who's got some experience growing marijuana, I'll tell you it's not such an easy thing," Myers said, "especially for a person who's dying of cancer or something."
Myers has pleaded guilty twice to marijuana-related crimes in Bay County. In 1987, police took the media along for a raid of the home he lived in at the time on Kaiser Tower Road. They found marijuana plants growing in a semi-trailer in his back yard.
Myers eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and served probation but no jail time.
"I had three kinds of pot," Myers said. "Good, better and best. The state police said it was the best marijuana they had ever seized. It was dubbed in High Times (marijuana magazine) as Pinconning Paralyzer."
Myers again pleaded guilty in 2007 to delivery of marijuana after he says a friend of a friend set him up.
"I'm a convicted felon now," Myers said, sitting in a wheelchair in his modest home, overlooking the Saginaw Bay.
Myers says he plans to get himself on the marijuana patient registry as soon as he figures out how so that he can legally continue using his medicine of choice.
"I think it's great that the voters of Michigan passed Proposal 1," Myers said. "I don't want to have to worry about getting arrested again."
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