Government injecting veterans with cocaine for drug addiction research

Washington Examiner | Apr 29, 2009

By Bill Myers

Drug-addicted veterans are being injected with cocaine by researchers at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in taxpayer-funded studies, The Examiner has learned.

The study subjects are being given the injections as part of a search for medicines that researchers hope will block cocaine absorption in the body, said Timothy O’Leary, the VA’s acting director of research and development.

All the subjects were recruited because they were addicted to cocaine, O’Leary said. About 40 volunteers — most of them veterans — are being given injections at VA labs in Kansas City and San Antonio, he added.

Hundreds of veterans have apparently been used as human subjects in the past decade, according to records and interviews with officials.

The VA has handed over several other abstracts from studies over the past decade, and O’Leary said his agency has been conducting such research for at least 25 years.

O’Leary said that the subjects’ safety was paramount. But documents of a decade-old study that tested morphine on veterans found nearly 800 “adverse events” from anorexia to heart tremors.

Last month, The Examiner reported that the federal government had spent millions of taxpayer dollars to give addicts drugs such as crack and intravenous cocaine as well as morphine and other opiates in publicly funded clinical studies. The VA documents and interviews suggest that the programs have been even more widespread than previously suspected.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, more than 6,000 licenses have been given to scientists to use otherwise illegal drugs in their experiments. DEA officials declined to hand over their records.

O’Leary said the studies were desperately needed to find ways to treat addiction. An estimated 140,000 vets suffer from drug addiction, according to VA officials.

“As you know, there are a lot of people out there who suffer from addictions. It’s a huge societal problem,” O’Leary said in a phone interview.

Critics say that experimenting on addicts runs contrary to ethical guidelines on “informed consent.” The doctrine requires that human laboratory subjects understand the risks of the experiment and can say no. For at least 20 years, scientists have recognized that addiction is a disease, which means that addicts can’t simply say no.

Pressure is mounting on the government to come clean about its drug experiments.

“How many ways can the government get it wrong?” Cato Institute scholar Tim Lynch asked The Examiner.

Compared with the CIA’s former habit of testing dangerous drugs on unwilling volunteers, these programs are “an improvement if the research deals with volunteers and full disclosure of the risks involved,” Lynch said. “But it is not clear to me why the government has to subsidize such research.”

U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said through a spokesman that he was “closely reviewing” the matter.

O’Leary said that the cocaine injections in San Antonio and Kansas City were being given in “extremely controlled conditions,” but when asked to detail what he meant by that phrase, he said he wasn’t familiar with those labs.

VA officials have not acted on a Freedom of Information Act request for access to their files.

Cocaine Highways: Post-NAFTA, Most Drugs Cross U.S. Borders in Trucks

Trucks waiting to cross the US border at Nogales. Photo: David Sanders Arizona Daily Star

Mexican Cartels Using Huge Fleet of 18-Wheelers, Only 5% Inspected at Border Crossing

ABC | Apr 16, 2009

By RICHARD ESPOSITO, ASA ESLOCKER, and BRIAN ROSS

Most of the drug shipments smuggled into the United States by the Mexican cartels are hidden in trucks that drive across U.S. border checkpoints in plain sight, with little fear of inspection, U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

Only about 5 percent of trucks coming into the country from Mexico are inspected, according to U.S. officials.

“It is just too costly and too slow given the volume of trucks to actually try to stop and inspect each and every truck,” said Juan Zarate who dealt with the issue in the Geroge W. Bush White House as Deputy National Security Director.

The number of trucks coming into the U.S. has steadily increased since the passage of NAFTA in 1993. Almost 3,000,000 loaded container trailers crossed at border checkpoints last year.

“It does open up the potential for drug networks to take advantage, but I think it is something we have to find alternative ways of addressing,” said Zarate.

Any attempt to inspect all trucks crossing the border, “would have a hugely negative impact in terms of commercial traffic and trade between the United States and Mexico,” said Zarate, who also held the position of Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism.

“You would see lines like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.

The Mexican cartels’ fleet of 18-wheelers has long since replaced the Caribbean air drops and speed boats used by the Colombian cartels in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the era of “Miami Vice”.

And major cities at interstate highway junctions, like Atlanta, have become important hubs for the Mexican cartels.

“Atlanta is a central trans-shipment point for pushing narcotics to some of the largest distribution cells in the United States,” said Rodney Benson, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA office in Atlanta.

Drug Agents Stakeout Truck Stops and Trail 18 Wheelers

Instead of tracking fancy sports cars at glitzy night clubs in Miami, federal drug agents now spend a lot of their time trailing behind huge 18-wheel trucks and conducting surveillance at interstate truck stops.

Flying over Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction,” the intersection of interstates I-85 and I-285, Benson pointed out the truck stops and warehouses where his agents have made major arrests and drugs seizures.

“It’s also a major money collection point,” said Benson. “They do operate with a business-like efficiency,” he said.

Federal agents and local police say the Mexican cartels often rent homes in quiet, upscale suburban neighborhoods for their operatives.

“You couldn’t build a better environment to camouflage this activity,” said Gwinnett County district attorney Danny Porter.

In a major raid last week, aimed at the Atlanta operations of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, police and federal agents raided 16 locations and arrested 21 people.

Nearby residents were shocked to learn their neighbors might be connected to the Mexican cartels.

“Their daughter goes to school with my daughter,” said Amber Youngblood of Duluth, Georgia. “It makes you think twice about who your neighbors are,” she said.

As Mexico battles cartels, military becomes the law

Retired soldiers tapped to run police forces

MSNBC | Apr 1, 2009

By Steve Fainaru and William Booth

ETATLAN, Mexico – President Felipe Calderón is rapidly escalating the Mexican army’s role in the war against drug traffickers, deploying nearly 50 percent of its combat-ready troops along the U.S-Mexico border and throughout the country, while retired army officers take command of local police and the military supplies civilian authorities with automatic weapons and grenades.

U.S. and Mexican officials describe the drug cartels as a widening narco-insurgency. The four major drug states average a total of 12 murders a day, characterized by ambushes, gun battles, executions and decapitated bodies left by the side of the road. In the villages and cities where the traffickers hold sway, daily life now takes place against a martial backdrop of round-the-clock patrols, pre-dawn raids and roadblocks manned by masked young soldiers.

Calderón’s deployment of about 45,000 troops to fight the cartels represents a historic change. Previous administrations relied on Mexico’s traditionally weak police agencies to combat the traffickers who funnel 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States. The cartels corrupted local authorities and reached tacit agreements with the national government, limiting the violence while the drugs continued to flow.

After Calderón became president in December 2006, he told Mexicans that the use of the military against the cartels would be limited and brief. But it is now the centerpiece of his anti-narcotics strategy, according to interviews with senior U.S. and Mexican officials and dozens of people on the front lines of the war.

“It can be traumatic to have the army in control of public security, but I am convinced that we don’t have a better alternative, even with all the risks that it implies,” said Monte Alejandro Rubido, a senior public security official who is overseeing the overhaul of Mexico’s police forces.

The military’s withdrawal is dependent on the success of the police reforms, according to the government. U.S. and Mexican officials predict that troops will be patrolling the streets for years. In many regions, the army has become the law. But rather than quelling the violence, it increasingly appears to have been drawn into a deepening morass of cartel rivalries, local political disputes and blood feuds.

In the southern state of Guerrero, the army ratcheted up security last year, killing several alleged drug traffickers and making dozens of arrests. That was followed by a two-month stretch in which nine soldiers were abducted and decapitated in the state capital, four policemen were incinerated in a daylight grenade attack near a beach resort and a former mayor was shot 24 times before 1,000 people packed into a plaza for the coronation of a town beauty queen.

Mexicans have greeted the unprecedented deployment of federal troops in their communities with a mix of gratitude and dismay.

“There are a lot of opinions. I personally feel more secure to see the army out in the streets,” said Denis González Sánchez, a 29-year-old city administrator in Petatlan, a Guerrero beach town of 30,000 where the army began patrols last year after three dozen gunmen massacred the family of a former mayor accused of links to traffickers. “A lot of people feel exactly the opposite: They say that the army is making us less secure. But I always think it’s better knowing that they are out there protecting us, that they are watching over us, when there is nobody else to do it.”

Mexican officials say the cartels operate on a $10 billion annual budget earned from drug sales in the United States; according to U.S. government estimates, they employ 150,000 people. This year, the Mexican government will spend $9.3 billion on national security, a 99 percent increase since Calderón took office.

Since December 2006, more than 10,100 people have been killed in the strife, including 917 police officers, soldiers, prosecutors and political leaders, according to Milenio, a Mexican media organization. At the same time, human rights complaints against the army have surged 576 percent, according to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, including allegations of unlawful detentions, forced disappearances, rape and torture.

A ‘courageous step’

Calderón and his advisers have described the military’s deployment as an emergency measure while he seeks to reform Mexico’s local, state and federal police. He has promised that when the new police forces are ready, the troops will return to their barracks. That process may take until the end of his six-year term in 2012, he said recently.

The government is attempting to vet and retrain 450,000 officers, most at the state and municipal levels, employing lie detectors, drug tests, psychological profiling and financial reviews to weed out corruption and incompetence. Nearly half of the 56,000 officers vetted so far have failed.

Obama Refuses Perry’s Request for 1,000 Troops on Border

MSNBC | Mar 14, 2009

By Holly LaFon

A displeased Gov. Rick Perry spoke out Thursday against Barack Obama’s rejection of his request last month for 1,000 more “boots on the ground” (meaning 1,000 troops, since 1,000 boots only equals 500 people) to be sent to the Texas-Mexico border.

He requested the aid to help keep the growing drug cartel violence in Mexico from spilling into the United States.

Obama told a group of reporters that he did not feel troops were necessary, but would consider in what cases National Guard deployments would be effective.

Perry, on the same day that he rejected stimulus unemployment funds from the federal government, saying that “[Texas] can take care of itself,” told Fox News that, “Washington has been an abject failure at defending our border.”

At a House panel meeting on Thursday to decide what measures Homeland Security Department should take to secure the border, Homeland Security official Roger Rufe agreed with President Obama’s assertion that deploying troops should only come as a last resort, in the off chance that other resources such as DoD and the National Guard were expended.

Many officials in border cities have applauded Obama’s decision not to use extreme measures such as sending troops. Patricio Ahumeda, mayor of Brownsville, Texas, openly criticized Perry’s plan, calling him out of touch with what is really going on.

“I appreciate and support Obama’s decision not to militarize the border because troops aren’t trained for this sort of thing. There was an incident where a national guard killed a shepherd in the El Paso area. It doesn’t work. The training is not the same. We’re not at war, and the violence and incidents that are occurring over there are not daily and are not spilling over here yet.”

He also pointed out that the crime rates in Brownsville and El Paso are significantly less than many other large cities. While El Paso had 418 violent crimes in 2007, Austin, Texas, had 540, and Washington D. C. had 1,347.

Meanwhile, just across the border, bodies are piling up in Mexico as the violent situation in places such as Ciudad Juarez has grown dire. The drug-related death toll reached 6,290 people last year, and has already hit 1,000 in the first two months of 2009.

The morgue and crime lab in Juarez has seven doctors, and two were hired in the last two weeks, to help with the onslaught of cases. Other morgues have been attacked at gunpoint, drug traffickers knowing investigators use the cadavers to help track the perpetrators.

Mayor Ahumeda believes the best thing Texas can do is work with Mexico and President Calderon to stop the violence.

“Texas needs to work with Mexico to prevent guns and ammunition from crossing the border and reduce the demand for drugs,” he said. “They’re not doing enough in that respect. I don’t mean pick them up and throw away the key. I mean going after those people in the United States, the criminals who are preying on young people who are hooked, and get them treatment, and teach our kids to stay off of drugs.”

Maybe he secretly wants the troops so Texas can secede from the union.

Mexican soldiers arrested for alleged drug ties

Reuter | Mar 6, 2009

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A dozen Mexican soldiers were arrested on suspicion of working with the violent Gulf Cartel, the Mexican army said on Thursday, a blow to President Felipe Calderon’s military-backed campaign against drug gangs.

The troops are accused of collaborating with four municipal policemen in the central state of Aguascalientes who provided protection for Gulf cartel capos, the army said in a statement.

The arrests come as Calderon sent thousands more troops to the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez in an attempt to curb spiraling drug violence that killed more than 6,000 people last year.

Calderon deployed the army to fight organized crime since taking office in 2006 partly because soldiers have traditionally been seen as less corrupt than police.

But several recent high-profile arrests — including a presidential guardsmen who allegedly received $100,000 a month to track Calderon for drug traffickers — reveal infiltration in the highest levels of Mexico’s security forces.

The Gulf cartel is fighting a turf war for control of smuggling routes with its main rival the Sinaloa federation, led by Mexico’s most wanted man Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

The Gulf cartel’s feared hitmen known as the Zetas, infamous for torturing and beheading their enemies, were founded by a group of military deserters.

(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Bill Trott)

Mexico vows more troops for drug war on U.S. border

Reuters | Feb 25, 2009

By Julian Cardona

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico promised on Wednesday to pour more troops into a northern border city at the heart of the country’s drug war, where a meeting of federal officials was rattled by bomb scares earlier in the day.

Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, has become Mexico’s most violent city as security forces take on drug cartels warring for control of smuggling routes into the United States.

“We aren’t going to give up an inch of the city and we will expel them from Juarez,” Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont told reporters after a security cabinet meeting in Ciudad Juarez, which was heavily guarded by federal police.

“There will be a substantial increase in military and federal police presence in the coming weeks.”

Threats against public officials have been rising in the region. Last week suspected drug hitmen killed two city councilmen near Ciudad Juarez.

Gangs also have threatened to kill the mayor and last week forced out the police chief after killing his deputy and promising murders of police officers every 48 hours.

“They want to sow terror and the municipal and state police are totally overwhelmed,” Chihuahua state lawmaker Victor Quintana told Reuters.

A former soldier attacked a convoy carrying Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes late on Sunday in what Mexican media speculated was linked to the drug war.

During Gomez Mont’s visit to Ciudad Juarez, authorities received bomb threats and found traces of explosives in a vehicle parked at the airport, which was evacuated by soldiers and federal police but reopened by late afternoon.

“Anonymous calls to the police and army alerted us to the threats but they turned out to be false,” army spokesman Enrique Torres said.

Frightened travelers waited outside the airport and flights were diverted to the state capital, Chihuahua.

President Felipe Calderon has sent out about 45,000 troops across the country but clashes between rival gangs and security forces killed some 6,000 people last year.

Even with about 2,500 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez and surrounding areas, more than 250 people have died in drug violence this month in the city.

Drug trade experts say Mexico’s most-wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, who leads a cartel from the Pacific state of Sinaloa, is vying to take Ciudad Juarez’s lucrative smuggling route from local cartel leader Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

Law and order in the city has collapsed as Guzman’s hitmen seek to destroy the Juarez’s cartel’s entire operation, said Tony Payan of the University of Texas in El Paso.

Full Story

Youth mental illness costs U.S. billions

Reuters | Feb 13, 2009

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mental illness, substance abuse and behavioral problems among children and young adults, costs the United States $247 billion a year in treatment and lost productivity alone, an expert panel said on Friday.

The panel set up by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine which advise U.S. policymakers urged the White House to set prevention goals and coordinate government action to attack the problem.

The panel looked at the financial toll from mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, as well as drug and alcohol abuse and behavioral problems by people up to age 24.

It concluded that treatment and lost productivity costs alone reached an estimated $247 billion annually. That figure excluded criminal justice and education, workplace disruption and social welfare spending which would certainly add many billions more to the price tag.

“It’s a lot of money,” said Kenneth Warner, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, who headed the panel.

The estimate came as the Obama administration and many lawmakers look for ways to improve U.S. healthcare, which is the world’s most expensive but lags many other countries in some quality measures.

Some school-based and other programs have effectively reduced mental health, substance abuse and behavioral problems but federal leadership has been lacking, the panel said.

“We really can prevent a lot of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders,” Warner said.

Obama’s surge and the Afghan heroin trade

Bharath is Truth | Feb 9, 2009

By Johann Samuhanand

Bangalore, India, February 09 — As America surges in Afghanistan, it has created its own stirring in the heroin trade, which has come back to life after NATO forces took over the country from the Taliban. The Taliban, who enforced not only Sharia law but other stringent Islamic conditions on the people as well, ensured that poppy was not cultivated at all. Though this infuriated ordinary Afghans, the Taliban enforced it ruthlessly. This also ensured the vanquishing of the drug mafia run by drug lords like General Dostum, Ishmeil Khan, etc.

When the International Security Assistance Force took over, it opened the floodgates of freedom of the media and personal liberty, and also the freedom to grow poppy. Initially, it ensured that ordinary Afghans were happy with the money that came from this trade. This time, the Taliban did not abolish this trade, but cleverly used it to subvert the central rule of Karzai as desired by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The United States winked at this as long it was supporting the Pakistani army and ISI and didn’t affect its global interest in the painkiller market in Europe. ISI thinks that subverting the Indian economy through heroin and other poppy-derived drugs is as effective as a terrorist attack against India. As the global prices for heroin crash in the European market, the CIA is waking up to face the challenge of protecting its market in Europe and the United States.

Related

• US to increase troops in Afghanistan by 30,000

The connection between ISI and the CIA through drug money is not much known, since ISI is intricately linked to jihadi terrorism, which gets more media space. ISI cannot survive as an institution with this “oxygen” from the drug trade.

Again, the hawala system in Afghanistan is controlled by poppy-generated illegal money. One finds that the hawala centers and drug routes are the same. Ninety-three percent of the world’s illegal opium is grown in Afghanistan. The world’s intelligence agencies and drug lords have their meeting point in the small but prosperous town of Baramcha in Helmand, which grows 70% of Afghanistan’s poppy. The GDP of Afghanistan is US$7.8 billion, while the illegal opium trade is worth more than US$5 billion!!! Now one can understand how important drug trade is to Afghanistan, to the jihadis, to ISI and to the United States, where the illegal street trade is worth US$200 billion! The Taliban are able to completely ignore or reduce taxes on non-opium trade in the areas they control, as long as one pays 10% tax on the opium produced, thereby winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Afghan farmers.

Then what is the game plan of the Obama administration in inviting the following people for his inauguration: Gul Agha Sherzai, Dr. Ashraff Ghani Ahmedzai, Ali Ahmed Jalali, and Abudullah Abdullah? Why is he trying to replace Karzai with one of these warlords? These guys are not angels. The reason is drug money, which made even Zilmay Khalizad salivate for the job.

Full Story

Henchman of Mexican drug lord ‘dissolved 300 bodies in acid’

Three hundred bodies were allegedly dissolved in acid by a man accused of working for a Mexican drug kingpin.

Telegraph | Jan 24, 2009

By Nick Meo

Santiago Meza Lopez confessed to disposing of the victims of Mexico’s grisly drugs wars over a decade by dumping them in graves and pouring acid on them to let them dissolve underground, said police. He has been arrested in the border city of Tijuana.

The victims are believed to be rivals of Teodoro Garcia Simental, an alleged former lieutenant of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel, authorities said.

Soldiers and police paraded Meza, 45, before reporters at a cement-block shack on the outskirts of the city where he allegedly disposed of the bodies. Two grave-sized holes had been dug near the walls.

The security officers made Meza tell reporters how he allegedly disposed of the bodies, prodding him to speak up whenever he mumbled.

Meza, who has not yet been charged, was arrested along with three others on Thursday at a Tijuana hotel. He told reporters on Friday that he was paid $600 (£440) a week for his work.

Earlier this month, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration identified Garcia as one of ten men it believed to have been battling for drug trafficking routes through the border city. The DEA said Garcia was the chief rival of alleged Arellano Felix cartel leader Fernando Sanchez Arrellano.

Mexican officials have blamed the power struggle for a surge in violence in Tijuana, the birthplace of the Arellano Felix cartel. The two men split in April after a shootout between their followers left at least 14 people dead, Mexican and US officials say.

Drugs violence claimed more than 5.300 lives in Mexico last year.

Mexico seizes almost 3 tons of meth ingredient from Korean ship

Mexican traffickers are the main methamphetamine suppliers to the United States.

SMH| Jan 23, 2009

Mexican authorities say they have seized nearly three tonnes of pseudoephedrine from a ship that arrived from South Korea.

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• Meth ‘superlabs’ outsourced to Mexico

Soldiers and federal agents have found eight million pseudoephedrine tablets weighing 2.8 tonnes in 60 boxes aboard a ship in the Pacific port of Manzanillo.

Pseudoephedrine is the main ingredient used to make methamphetamine.

The bust occurred on Monday and was announced on Thursday in a joint statement from the attorney-general’s Office, the navy and departments of defence and public safety.

Mexico has banned all imports of pseudoephedrine to try to thwart methamphetamine production. The US Justice Department says Mexican traffickers are the main methamphetamine suppliers to the United States.