Global Ganja Report

This week, more than 12,000 people—85% of them Black—now serving time for crack cocaine offenses will have their sentences reviewed by a federal judge under terms of the Fair Sentencing Act, passed in August of last year. The reform bill reduced the 100-to-1 disparity between minimum sentences for crack and powder cocaine to 18-to-1. On Nov. 1, those already serving time became eligible for a hearing to consider reducing their sentences under the new changes.

Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos said that legalization of soft drugs such as cannabis would allow shifting focus to harder drugs and help to stop international violence and trafficking. In an interview with Metro News, Santos said: "The world needs to discuss new approaches... we are basically still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the last 40 years." 

Nine Congress members on Oct. 31 issued an open letter to President Obama urging him to put a halt to new aggressive Justice Department tactics aimed at dismantling California's medical marijuana industry. "It's unconscionable...to endanger the lives of patients," the reps state in the strongly worded letter, which calls for rescheduling cannabis. It especially urges support for HR 1983, the States' Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act, which was introduced by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) earlier this year.

State, local and federal law enforcement in Arizona announced Oct. 31 that they have dismantled a smuggling ring allegedly operated by the Sinaloa Cartel, which is believed to have trafficked some $2 billion of drugs from Mexico through the state over the past five years. "We in Arizona continue to stand and fight the Mexican drug cartels, who think they own the place," Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said in a statement about the investigation, dubbed Operation Pipeline Express. A total of 76 individuals are being held in connection to the ring, from organizational bosses to stash-house guards to those who transported the drugs in backpacks and in vehicles. Weapons and large bundles of compacted cannabis were seized in the raids.

Richard Lee, central figure in downtown Oakland's cannabis-friendly Oaksterdam enclave, does not appear intimidated by the federal government’s crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries. Lee closed his dispensary, Coffeeshop Blue Sky, this week after US Attorney for California's Northern District Melinda Haag sent a letter to his landlord threatening criminal prosecution. But he promptly reopened it three doors down, with giant posters of cannabis buds in the windows. An employee at the door hands out fliers reading: "Thank you for your support. Together we will survive the attack. Long Live Oaksterdam." Lee told the New York Times he is not afraid of being a target. "If they do decide to prosecute me criminally," he said, "my defense is that juries cannot be punished for their verdicts."

Nine Thai soldiers turned themselves in Oct. 29, three weeks after a deadly attack on two Chinese freighters on the Mekong River near the Burmese border. Thirteen Chinese crew members were killed in the attack, their bodies found floating in the river. News accounts in Thailand indicate the freighters were carrying nearly a million amphetamine pills. The army commander in in Thailand's northern Chiang Rai province, Major Gen. Prakarn Chonlayuth, speculated that Burma-based Shan warlord Nor Kham had arranged the execution of the 13 Chinese seamen in a dispute over trafficking routes. (Asia Sentinel, Oct. 31; BBC News, Oct. 29)

Mexico's former President Vicente Fox again spoke out for drug legalization this month, telling a Washington DC meeting of the right-libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity that prohibition bears responsibility for the horrific toll in his country's cartel wars: "Fifty thousand kids from 15 to 25 years old have been killed in the last five years. Violence does not defeat violence." He asked rhetorically: "Do we really expect that the government will eradicate the drugs from the face of the earth?"

The clandestine online activist network Anonymous has released an Internet video demanding that Los Zetas, Mexico's bloodiest drug cartel, release one of its members who was kidnapped from a street protest in Veracruz. The Anonymous spokesman—in tie, jacket and Guy Fawkes mask—says if the Zetas don't release their comrade, it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates. Speaking in Spanish with fluent use of Mexican slang, the masked spokesman says: "You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him." Otherwise it threatens to reveal the Zetas' "cars, homes, bars, brothels and everything else in their possession. It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located."