Drugs

On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, I was in Medellín, Colombia, the city that gave its name to one of the world’s most notorious drugs cartels. Our taxi driver offered us some cocaine to fuel the party we were heading to: $10 for a gram; $15 for the “luxury” product. Our group decided to splash out and get a gram of the really good stuff. I’d tried coke a couple of times in London. It was like snorting drain cleaner. Whoosh… I found that half a line of Medellín’s best was enough to keep you going until sunrise. But the next day it was difficult to be within six feet of another human being, the coke having burned up all the dopamine in my brain. Coke is evil. I imagine a lot of other people were feeling the same in Medellín that New Year.

President Trump has authorized what he called a "kinetic strike" from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called "narco terrorists" aboard. The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime. The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro "the world’s No.

Two terror attacks which hit Colombia on Thursday revealed a scary new level of sophistication among the country’s ever present narco-terrorists – and threatened to return the country to the violence and chaos that many had hoped it had finally escaped.The double terror strikes killed 18 people and involved a car bomb in Colombia’s third most populous city of Cali in which at least six people died, and an earlier drone downing of a police helicopter near the city of Medlllin – long notorious as Colombia’s drugs capital – in which 12 people died.

“The one thing that binds each and every one of us is not necessarily love... it’s pain,” Hunter Biden said in his interview yesterday with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan. Well, that’s good, because we’re not all sons of a former president, so at least we have something in common. Someone has really been working the 12 steps! Cockburn will admit that he didn’t really see it until now, but after yesterday, he’s ready to admit that Robert Hunter Biden may be the only person who can lead the Democratic party out of the wilderness. It’s a development worthy of the best "scion’s fiction.

On a trip to the nation's capital last week, 77-year-old Governor Janet Mills of Maine was confronted with an old skeleton in her closet: accusations of cocaine use. A man approached Mills and, while filming, asked if she believed "sniffing cocaine at work" is a "human right," Fox News reported. Mills gracefully responded, "What the fuck?" That, Cockburn notes, is not a no. The man followed up with a more straightforward question: "How much more does an eight-ball cost with inflation?" Unfortunately, Mills did not give the reporter current street prices and instead chose to walk away. (The answer is around $180 in DC, per Cockburn's law enforcement sources.

Washington, DC Reason magazine staffers Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion walked away from the Reason Versus debate in Howard Theater, Tuesday night, with victory candy cigarettes in hand. Their feat? Convincing a little over half their audience that the federal government should legalize all drugs. Their opponents from City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual, started off in the lead with 43 percent of the debate's attendees opposed to legalization. By the end, they lost 4 percent, while Reason gained 13. So what pushed these young, suit-wearing voters to change their conservative-leaning minds toward libertarianism? Sullum, 59, and Binion, 33, argued that prohibition makes the black market more dangerous for drug users.

Consider it the first tangible example of Donald Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy made real. The president’s day-one Executive Order calling for the “total elimination” of multiple cartels is now getting its teeth in the form of a list drawn up by the Department of State designating eight different groups based across Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations, according to the New York Times.

So far this year, Philadelphia has seen more than two shootings a day. Among the statistics was a local rapper known as Phat Geez. Here’s the message in his song “No Gunzone”: “Killings all up in my city / Can’t get enough of it / Facing all of these problems / I cannot run from it.” Derrick Gant was his real name. Dead at twenty-eight. So now comes Cherelle Parker, only a few months into her first term as Philly’s Democratic mayor, trying to plug the dike against a flood of lawlessness. Looking across her native city, she says that too much of what she sees is never OK, no matter concerns, including hers, about “root causes.