Sunday, June 3, 2018

MONICA SHOWALTER - CUBA EXPOSED AS THE GUILTY PARTY MAKING VENEZUELA ANOTERH NARCOSTATE!

Cuba exposed as the culprit in making Venezuela a narcostate




How does a hellhole with no money like Venezuela stay afloat? Obviously, because of the cocaine trade.
And that's been going around for years, given that dozens of top Venezuelan rulers have been sanctioned or put on Treasury Department watchlists. The very rulers at the heart of Venezuela's socialist hellhole, so admired by Bernie Sanders and Sean Penn, are nothing but Pablo-Escobar-style drug dealers. Imagine how repulsive it is: All of the legal businesses have been put out of business by socialist diktats, while all of the illegal businesses, such as drug dealing, have flourished - and the money floats only upward to the party elite, keeping their lives lives of vulgar luxury, while the rest of the country starves.
Who created this situation? Venezuela's communist master, Cuba. That's the verdict of a long investigative report, from the Daily Beast, titled "How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela A Mafia State," by respected reporter Christopher Dickey.
Here's his lead-in tease:
The Castros claimed Cuba was never into drug smuggling, then they said it quit. But their own operations were nothing compared to the ones they helped facilitate in Venezuela.
Dickey makes a persuasive case for the Castros's history of drug dealing, starting with Cuba's pilot project, the making of Colombia into a narcostate, which it nearly became until the advent of President Alvaro Uribe, who was elected in 2002. Colombia had a history of outlaws, as Mark Bowden wrote in his superb history of the Colombia narcowars, but never was a cocaine capital until Castrocame along and enabled Escobar, who was a sort of pioneer in drug dealing, creating, with Castro's help, the first cartel, and nearly taking over the country. Back in the 1980s, Pablo Escobar got his start and became a drug-lord pioneer based on his cooperation with Cuban authorities and Miami Cuban bad guys, enabling him to nearly take over the Colombian state, all with a little help from his Castroite friends.
He writes:
In the years that followed the Ochoa trial, Cuba offered to cooperate with the United States fighting against drug traffickers. The Clinton administration shelved proposed indictments of the regime, and as relations gradually warmed, the U.S. would begin to liaise with Cuban authorities in the war on drugs. But at the same time the Cuban intelligence services were reaching out in other directions, to networks that would become the world’s biggest suppliers of cocaine: the narco-guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and  Venezuela’s security forces. Cuban counterintelligence is said to have tutored the Venezuelan spies, domestic and foreign, and helped to organize them to root out opposition to the regime of Hugo Chávez. Indeed, the Cubans taught them to do whatever might be necessary to survive.
Over time, many of Chavez’s officers would become known as theCartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns: “cartel” because of their involvement with the drug trade on a scale that nobody in 1989 could have imagined; “the suns” for the insignias on the epaulets of Venezuela’s generals.
Castro himself had always considered Colombia a prize, founding the ELN narcoguerrilla group in 1964 for one, which later dealt drugs, and aligning with the Communist Party of Colombia, whose arch-terrorist wing, FARC, was always his faithful ally and had office space for years in Havana. Castro even had a role in starting the riots of 1948, which led to immese bloodshed in the country and culminated in the FARC wars, also launched in 1964. Colombia's history with Castro has always been a history of getting the country trapped into drugs, the better to strike out at the yanqui imperialistas up north.
Uribe crushed the cartels, along with their Marxist narcoterrorist overlords, and every two-bit drug dealer his men could find. Uribe hated drugs so much he didn't even want casual marijuana use legal. He and his vice president Francisco Santos (who was kidnapped and tied to a bed for months in 1990 by Escobar's monsters in a superb account described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez), had an absolute "thing" against drugs. I've heard Santos speak about it in person at UCLA, and can only say his sentiment about it is beyond intense.
Uribe's crushing of these communist brutes led Cuba to make Venezuela the new narcostate it needed to serve its national interests of Getting Gringo. Cuba taught Venezuela's Marxist galoots the ropes of drug dealing, got them hooked up with the master drug dealers of FARC, and got money streams flowing into the coffers of the Chavista elite, making them comfortable as they starved their country into communist submission.
Meanwhile, things turned up roses for the Castros as Ben Rhodes, leading President Obama by the nose, led the rapprochement efforts with Cuba in 2015, rewarding the country with diplomatic relations, even after a repulsive, anti-American, utterly death-strewn history like this, creating two narcostates. Leftists still romanticize communist Cuba, and support the Ben Rhodes effort to coddle these filthy dictators. Dickey's account exposes how hollow that strategy was, and how morally bankrupt or ignorant these U.S. players have been.
Read Dickey's excellent account of the whole revolting history of how Cuba made Venezuela its second narcostate here.


OPIOID MURDERS BY BIG PHARMA




“While drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past 10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5 trillion.”
“Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”

Bush-Era DOJ Report Recommended Felony Charges for OxyContin Execs



Oxicontin
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A confidential 2006 Department of Justice (DOJ) report recommended three Purdue Pharma executives face felony charges over their concealment and denial of the abuse potential of their now infamous opioid drug, OxyContin, according to a Tuesday New York Times report.

OxyContin, a formulation of the powerful semi-synthetic opioid painkiller oxycodone, is perhaps the prescription pill most closely associated with America’s opioid epidemic. Fueled by decades of widespread pain prescription and intensified by cheap heroin and ever-more-dangerous illegal imported synthetic opioids like fentanyl, the drug crisis is killing Americans on a demographically significant scale — more than traffic deaths and firearm murders combined. Prescription opioids alone led to more than 17,000 overdose deaths in 2016.
Predating the public acknowledgement of the epidemic, there was an intense marketing push for drugs like OxyContin in the 1990s. In 2007, Purdue reached a settlement with the Justice Department over this marketing and the attendant denial of OxyContin’s abuse potential. The company had to pay more than $600 million, and three executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges, performed community service, and paid millions in personal fines.
The New York Times, however, obtained a confidential DOJ report prepared by the federal prosecutors who first worked the case, showing much more serious wrongdoing on the part of Purdue and the three executives — President Michael Friedman, General Counsel Howard Udell, and Medical Director Dr. Paul Goldenheim — than had ever been disclosed before.
In the 120 page report, those federal prosecutors — from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the heavily-affected Western District of Virginia — recommended the executives be brought up on serious felonies, including conspiracy charges. They based this determination on their findings that internal company documents and emails indicated they knew addicts were stealing OxyContin from pharmacies, crushing and snorting pills, and paying crooked doctors for prescriptions almost immediately after the drug hit the market in 1996. At the same time, the company was aggressively marketing the drug as an alternative that was less attractive to drug abusers.
The executives, meanwhile, testified before Congress in 2001 that they were unaware of OxyContin’s (and its cousin MS Contin’s) abuse potential until 2000.
Eventually, DOJ officials in Washington, under the authority of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, opted not to pursue more serious charges against the men after meeting with them. The New York Times cites a former Drug Enforcement Administration official, Joseph Rannazzisi, claiming the U.S. Attorney in Western Virginia, John Brownlee, was “outgunned” in the decision to settle for misdemeanors, although Brownlee testified that he was “satisfied.”
Purdue, now under different leadership, is by no means out of the legal woods over its opioid marketing. Texas and five other states are pursuing lawsuits against Purdue and other opioid manufacturers over their policies and their relation to the opioid epidemic.
Some commentators, like Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz and Breitbart News’s John Hayward, have questioned the wisdom of this aggressive stance, calling the drug companies a “scapegoat” for the nation’s overdose woes and pointing to the availability of cheap street drugs as more pressing.

As fatal overdoses 

rise, many Americans

see drug addiction as 

a major problem in 

their community



Americans overwhelmingly see drug addiction as a problem in their local community, regardless of whether they live in an urban, suburban or rural area, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The public’s concerns come amid steep increases in the number and rate of fatal drug overdoses across all three community types in recent years.
Nine-in-ten Americans who live in a rural area say drug addiction is either a major or minor problem in their community, as do 87% in urban and 86% in suburban areas, according to the survey of 6,251 adults, conducted Feb. 26-March 11. Substantial shares in each community type say addiction is a majorproblem, though people in urban and rural areas are more likely to say this than those in a suburban setting (50% and 46%, respectively, compared with 35%).
The problem of drug addiction has drawn widespread attention as the United States confronts an opioid epidemic. President Donald Trump last year declared the epidemic a national public health emergency, and statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention underscore the deadly toll that opioids and other drugs have taken.
Nationally, more than 63,600 people died of a drug overdose in 2016, the most recent year for which full data are available. (Preliminary data suggest the 2017 number will be even higher.) That’s an increase of 21% from the prior year and nearly double the 34,425 drug overdose deaths that occurred a decade earlier. Opioids – ranging from illegal street drugs like heroin to prescription painkillers – have played an especially lethal role: About two-thirds (66%) of the fatal overdoses in 2016 involved an opioid.
Urban, suburban and rural counties all have experienced significant growth in deadly drug overdoses, according to the CDC. There were 19,172 fatal overdoses in urban counties in 2016, up 25% from the year before. Suburban counties experienced 36,424 such deaths, up 22%, while rural counties saw 8,036 deaths, up 9%. (This analysis uses the National Center for Health Statistics county classification scheme to assign each county to a community type. Pew Research Center used the same approach in its analysis of demographic and economic trends in the new study about American community types. Also, it’s important to point out that not all fatal overdoses are the result of drug addiction. The CDC notes that overdose deaths can have other causes, such as inadvertently taking the wrong drug.)
Suburban counties not only had the most overall drug overdose deaths in 2016, they also had the highest age-adjusted rate of deadly overdoses – a metric that controls for differences in population size and average age across the three community types. The age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths in suburban counties was 21.1 per 100,000 people in 2016, compared with 18.7 per 100,000 in rural counties and 18.5 per 100,000 in urban counties.
Overdose deaths rise sharply among black urban men
Whites, blacks and Hispanics all have experienced substantial increases in fatal drug overdose deaths in recent years, but there has been an especially large rise among blacks. The overdose death rate for black Americans rose 40% between 2015 and 2016, from 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people to 17.1 per 100,000. Among black men in urban counties, specifically, the fatality rate rose 50% – from 22.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2015 to 34.0 per 100,000 a year later.
Despite the sharp year-over-year increase among blacks, whites continue to have a substantially higher overall drug overdose death rate (25.3 per 100,000) than both blacks (17.1 per 100,000) and Hispanics (9.5 per 100,000).
In the Center’s new survey, about half of blacks (49%) say drug addiction is a major problem where they live, as do 45% of Hispanics and 40% of whites. Majorities of eight-in-ten or more across the three groups say this is at least a minor problem in their community.



NC Police Find $90 Million in Meth Hidden in Truck Driven by Alleged Illegal Alien




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Officials in Linden, North Carolina, discovered 120 gallons of liquid methamphetamine hidden inside the fuel tank of a semi truck being driven by an alleged illegal alien, reports say.

Harnett County Sheriff’s officers pulled the truck over on May 19 and discovered the large amount of the liquefied drug. According to WRAL, the liquid was destined to be turned into 454 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine and would have had a street value of $90.8 million.
The seizure was part of a wider investigation into the trafficking of meth in the area.
The truck was crewed by Raul Topete Arreola, 49, and Aquileo Perez Pineda, 48. Pineda was quickly put on an immigration hold while immigration officials looked into Arreola’s immigration status.
The pair were charged with three counts each of trafficking methamphetamine and placed under a three million dollar bond.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.




nterior Dept. Opioid Task Force Drug Seizure Nets 913.5 Pounds of Illegal Narcotics




Drug Bust
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Department of Interior (DOI) Secretary Ryan Zinke announced on Thursday the agency’s Opioid Task Force conducted a major operation around tribal reservations in Arizona, netting a massive seizure of illegal narcotics.

The 11-day investigation conducted between May 15 and May 26 ended with a roundup of more than 9,050 Fentanyl pills, 48.5 pounds of methamphetamine, 1.2 pounds of heroin, 863 pounds of marijuana, and one-half pound of cocaine.
DOI said $30,000 in cash was found over the course of the bust, with the street value of the drugs seized totaling $4,791,417
Eighty-six people were arrested during the operation, according to DOI.
“Our task force on opioids continues to distinguish itself as one of the finest operations in law enforcement today; I could not be more proud of these professionals,” Zinke said in a press release distributed following his appearance Thursday on Fox and Friends, where he announced the operation.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the scale of the problem, and rather than further stigmatizing victims, we are cracking down on the dealers who are selling out our children, selling out our communities, and selling out our nation,” Zinke said.
Zinke thanked the “brave men and women” who took part in the operation and warned drug dealers and traffickers law enforcement officers are “keeping drug dealers up at night.”
“And with good reason; if you are trafficking these drugs, we will find you, arrest you, and bring you to justice,” Zinke said.




View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

News Release: Trump Admin. Taskforce Completes Successful Opioid Bust in AZ -https://www.indianaffairs.gov/node/7254/press_release/attachment/newest 

"I commend the efforts of @BIAOJS, along w/ federal, tribal & state partners for successfully conducting this operation… together can we protect our loved ones...”-PDAS Tahsuda

“A drug-free Indian Country is a healthy Indian Country,” John Tahsuda, principal deputy assistant secretary for DOI’s Indian Affairs,” said in the press release.
“Only together can we protect our loved ones from the harmful effects of these devastating substances,” Tahsuda said.
“Secretary Zinke has worked with tribes to carry out President Trump’s directive to stop the opioid crisis, conducting dozens of tribal visits to see the affected communities, while listening and learning about how to fight the crisis,” the DOI press release said.
“In starting new initiatives to fight the epidemic, such as the creation of the Joint Task Force, [DOI] is committed to giving all resources required to fight drug abuse,” the release said.


Special Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Division of Drug Enforcement (DDE) and BIA K-9 uniformed officers, along with the Tohono O’odham Police Department, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI-Sells, Arizona), U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), Pascua Yaqui Tribal Police Department, San Carlos Apache Tribal Police Department, Gila River Tribal Police Department, Native American Targeted Investigations of Violent Enterprises (NATIVE) Task Force, and the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) took part in the operation, according to DOI.
The  Arizona operation is the second led by Interior’s Opioid Task Force, DOI said.
Follow Penny Starr on Twitter

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