LEGALIZED POT: WHAT STATES HOPING FOR EXTRA REVENUE GET WRONG

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DEEP HISTORY AND THE GLOBAL DRUG CONNECTION, PART 1

Shadows Photo credit: Georgie Pauwels / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
To many, the anecdote described below will sound far-fetched, and logical minds may suspect that the Vietnam vet in the story created the "incident" himself.
But as those who lived through that period may remember, representatives of the covert side of government did far worse and often. Infiltration, intimidation, framing, and more were all part of the arsenal against the "disloyal." No method was deemed too severe.
Today, we may find ourselves in a comparable period. Incidents covered by WhoWhatWhy such as the fiery death of journalist Michael Hastings and the open statements that Edward Snowden should be assassinated remind us to take nothing for granted. (To see our stories on these threats, please go here here, here, here, here, and here.)
The essay below is by the father of "Deep Politics" analysis, Peter Dale Scott. It reminds us that, too often, it is not the wild-sounding that is the fiction but the constant assurances that everything is a-ok, that our society operates on fundamental decency, and that we need to stay focused on the small things and leave the big problems to others.
Below, Scott describes that phenomenon as "a great conspiracy/of organized denial."
Seeking to reverse this organized denial, Scott, in the book introduction that follows, posits based on his decades of research powerful connections between militarism, vast illegal drug operations, and America's intelligence agencies. Sound far-fetched? So does much of history itself.
Excerpt from American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), Introduction. Deep History and the Global Drug Connection:

Two Researchers Encounter a Deep Event

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If by terrorism we mean "the use of violence to intimidate," then in September 1971 the historian Alfred McCoy and I witnessed a minor California terrorist incident. A Vietnam veteran of Special Forces living in East Palo Alto who had seen opium loaded onto the CIA's Air America airplanes in Asia agreed on my telephone to be interviewed by the two of us. But when we arrived at his house the next morning, he had changed his mind. Motioning to us not to speak, he led us back down his front-door steps to his sports car, an MG. Overnight someone had warned him not to talk to us by burning a large hole in its steel door, with what he said could only have been a sophisticated implosion device, of the sort used by his old unit.(1)
One might think that such a vivid and incongruous event could hardly be forgotten, especially since it had clearly been generated by knowledge of what had been spoken on my telephone. But in fact for more than a decade, I totally suppressed my memory of it, even through the first two years of a determined poetic search to recover just such suppressed memories.(2)
And so, as I rightly suspected, had Alfred McCoy. In the preface to the 2003 edition of his monumental classic, The Politics of Heroin, he writes in prose about his own bizarre suppression of the same facts:
I landed in San Francisco for a stay with poet and Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott. He put me in touch with an ex-Green Beret, just back from covert operations in Laos, who told me, over the phone, of seeing CIA aircraft loading opium.
He agreed to be interviewed on the record. The next morning, we knocked at his door in an East Palo Alto apartment complex. We never got inside. He was visibly upset, saying he "had gotten the message." What happened? "Follow me," he said, leading us across the parking lot to his MG sports car. He pointed at something on the passenger door and named a chemical explosive that could melt a hole in sheet metal. It was, he said, a signal to shut up. I looked but cannot recall seeing. [Ed. Apparently this refers to the "something on the passenger door."] The next day, I flew to Los Angeles, visited my mother, and then flew on to Saigon, forgetting the incident.(3)
As I began to recall this episode in a different millennium, the incident itself seemed less surprising. The nation was then in turmoil, and even nonviolent antiwar protesters like myself were subject to ongoing surveillance.
Much worse things were happening. In San Diego, "Vigilantes led by an FBI informant wrecked [an antiwar] paper's printing equipment, firebombed the car of one staffer, and nearly shot to death another."(4)
In Chicago in the same period, "The army's 113th Military Intelligence Group… provided money, tear-gas bombs, MACE, and electronic surveillance equipment to the Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups."(5)
The crimes I have just recalled, in Palo Alto, San Diego, and Chicago, are examples of what I first conceptualized as deep state violence and would now call deep force violence (violence from an unexplained or unauthorized source). There are many varieties of this deep nonstate-sanctioned violence as so conceived.
In most cases illegal violence is an assignment handed off by an established agency to organized groups outside the law. There are also cases of proxy violence when the delegation of violence is not to nonstate actors but to agencies of other governments.
Finally, there are cases in which the violence reinforces the de facto power structure of the country without directly involving the CIA or other established official agencies at all. Such violence may be affirmatively sanctioned by members of the established power structure.
Or it may be passively sanctioned by failure to punish those responsible. Unprosecuted lynchings were the de facto enforcement of illegally segregated Jim Crow society in the American South.
Land grabs in the American West were achieved with press-encouraged violence against Native Americans, many of them nonviolent, who originally lived there.(6)
This cultural tolerance of violence and murder spilled over into other aspects of American life, notably union busting. In the 1914 "Ludlow massacre," during a mineworkers strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, only one member of the strikebreakers was convicted, and he was given only a light reprimand.(7)
Peter Dale Scott Photo credit: Press For Truth / YouTube (Creative Commons Attribution license reuse allowed)

Most of us (including myself) don't like to dwell on such disturbing practices inside America, which is why McCoy and I both repressed what happened in East Palo Alto. But they persist, in America and throughout the world. And one reason they persist is precisely because of our reluctance to think about them.
Elsewhere I have written of civilization as "a great conspiracy/of organized denial."(8) I mean by this the creation of a partly illusory mental space in which unpleasant facts, such as that all Western empires have been established through major atrocities, are conveniently suppressed.(9)
I say this as one who believes passionately in civilization and fears that by excessive denial our own civilization is indeed becoming threatened.
There are social and political consequences of failing to acknowledge and deal with forces of violence at work in America and the ways in which they frequently collaborate with police and intelligence agencies that are mandated to protect the American public. The fact that we suppress such discordant details of violence probably contributes to our individual mental health. But this suppression leads to a collective politics that is increasingly unreal and ineffective, as major abuses cease altogether to be addressed.
In discussing sanctioned criminality and violence, I hope to restore one such area of suppressed memory. But the writing of this book has led me to understand my experience in Palo Altoand indeed all such sanctioned violenceas examples of what I now call deep events: events that are systematically ignored, suppressed, or falsified in public (and even internal) government, military, and intelligence documents as well as in the mainstream media and public consciousness.
Underlying them is frequently the involvement of deep forces linked either to the drug traffic or to agencies of surveillance (or to both together) whose activities are extremely difficult to discern or document.
A clearly defined deep event will combine both internal featuresevidence, such as a discernible cover-up, that aspects are being suppressedand external featuresan ongoing and perhaps irresoluble controversy as to what happened. Some deep eventsthe 1968 assassinations, the Tonkin Gulf incidents, and 9/11clearly have both features. Others do not. For example, the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor continues to spark debate and investigations, even though the case that it was a false-flag operation is usually presented without any persuasive evidence.(10)
In my experience, deep events are better understood collectively than in isolation. When looked at together, they constitute a larger pattern, that of deep history. For some years, beginning before 9/11, I have noted that from time to time America's recorded or archival history has been disrupted by deep events such as the John F. Kennedy assassination. These events are attributed publicly to marginal and unthreatening agentslike Lee Harvey Oswald. But cumulatively, the historical succession of deep eventssuch as Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11has impacted more and more profoundly on America's political situation.
More specifically, as I shall argue, America's major foreign wars are typically preceded by deep events like the Tonkin Gulf incidents, 9/11, or the 2001 anthrax attacks. This suggests that what I call the war machine in Washington (including but not restricted to elements in the Pentagon and the CIA) may have been behind them.
After completing the later chapters of this book, I have come to state this conclusion more forcefully. Since 1959, most of America's foreign wars have been wars 1) induced preemptively by the U.S. war machine and/or 2) disguised as responses to unprovoked enemy aggression, with disguises repeatedly engineered by deception deep events, involving in some way elements of the global drug connection.
Also, since completing this book, I have an even clearer picture of America's overall responsibility for the huge increases in global drug trafficking since World War II. This is exemplified by the more than doubling of Afghan opium drug production since the United States invaded that country in 2001. But the U.S. responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic has merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.
This book goes back in time to the late 1940s and 1950s and the murky circumstances under which the CIA began to facilitate drug trafficking in South and Southeast Asia, culminating in Afghanistan. Writing it has enabled me to have further thoughts about the Palo Alto incident and particularly the importance of its dateSeptember 1971. As we shall see, this was a time of a major change in the U.S. relationship to the Southeast Asian drug traffic. In June 1971, Nixon had declared a War of Drugs, and Laos in that same September, under instructions from the U.S. embassy, had just made opium trafficking illegal.
After two decades of CIA assistance to drug-trafficking warlords in Burma and Laos, elements in the CIA were now beginning to leak significant if partial stories about this situation to papers like The New York Times. (11) Al McCoy, my fellow witness in Palo Alto, had himself just been briefed in Washington about
the politics of heroin by CIA veterans like Edward Lansdale and Lucien Conein.(12)
A little earlier, a researcher on the University of California campus, with whom I as I then thought had initiated contact, advised me to look into the record of hitherto unknown details such as the career of Paul Helliwell and the CIA proprietary Sea Supply, Inc. It developed that he too was a CIA veteran.
I now suspect as I did not at the time that I was being fed leads by my source as part of a larger scenario. Was the CIA project of disclosure being opposed in Palo Alto by another deep force determined to stop it? Or were the two apparent deep forces really one, working in Palo Alto to set limits to a predefined limited hangout? I still do not know, but writing this book has helped me to better understand the relevant historical developments in 1971 (see chapter 6).
In earlier versions of this book, I attributed the sanctioned violence of the Palo Alto incident, like the Letelier assassination I discuss next, to the CIA's global drug connection. But that statement does not solve a mystery: it opens one up. As a matter of description, it sounds more precise than terms I have
used in earlier books: "the dark quadrant" from which parapolitical events emerge or "the unrecognized Force X operating in the world," which I suggested might help explain 9/11.(13) But the precision is misleading: in this book I am indeed attempting to denote and describe a deep force, or forces, that I
do not fully understand.
This mystery underlies, for example, the careers of men like Willis Bird and Paul Helliwell or of institutions like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International that were of use to both the CIA and the international drug trade. And I shall argue that if we do not focus more on this neglected aspect of the U.S. war machine, we shall never come to grips with the forces behind the ill-starred U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

References

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1. He attached great importance to the fact that, while much of the steel door was burned away, the wooden floor of the car was barely charred.
2. I narrated this recovered memory first in my poem Coming to Jakarta (New York: New Directions, 1989), 14748, and then a second time a decade later in Minding the Darkness (New York: New Directions, 2000), 138.
3. Alfred W. McCoy,The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Traffic(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), xii, quoting Scott,Coming to Jakarta, 14748. I believe that when I first checked with McCoy about this in 1990, his memory ended with our descending the stairs from the veteran's home "to see something."
4. David E. Kaplan, "Spying on the San Diego Street Journal (and other Americans),"U.S. News & World Report, January 9, 2006, "Among the Street Journal's reporters was a young Lowell Bergman, whose later exploits as a 60 Minutes TV producer would be portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie The Insider. We were targets along with a lot of other people,' recalls Bergman. By 1971 we'd all left town.'"
5. George O'Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 269. America in the 1960s and 1970s was engulfed in mass violence.The government's resort to it in proxy operations was not wholly gratuitous; like many of the groups it targeted, it sincerely believed that revolution here was imminent or had already begun. But the two incidents I have just described, against nonviolent antiwar groups, must be described as surplus violence, inviting and perhaps even designed to provoke a violent response. At some point, elements of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society did eventuallyas the so-called Weathermenresort to bombs themselves. A full history of the antiwar movement will have to assess the extent to which gratuitous government violence was a factor in leading to the Weathermen's formation.
6. "Those investigating American Indian history and U.S. history more generally have failed to reckon with the violence upon which the continent was built" (Ned Blackhawk,Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 3)
7. Graham Adams, Age of Industrial Violence 19101915: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).
8. Scott, Minding the Darkness, 137.
9. I suspect in fact that most readers will be tempted to reject and forget my anecdote of the bombed car door as something that simply "doesn't compute" with their own observations of America.
10. Although this is a topic too broad for this book, I would suggest that three sorts of deep events, most of them still hotly debated, date further back in U.S. history than those associated with the postwar global drug connection: 1) provocations and/or deceptions leading to war, such as the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, which was instrumental in bringing America into World War I; 2) intrigues inducing policy change, as when a Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) was converted (by a court reporter who happened to be a former railroad president) into a "ruling" that corporations are persons protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (see Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights [New York: Rodale Books,
2002]); and 3) plots for leadership change, such as the alleged murder by arsenic of President Zachary Taylor in 1850 (see Michael Parenti, History as Mystery [San Francisco: City Light Books,1999], 304), the Lincoln assassination, or General Smedley Butler and the so-called Business Plot of 1935.
11. E.g., The New York Times, June 6, 1971; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 28687.
12. Among the CIA veterans interviewed by McCoy at this time were Edward Lansdale (June 17, 1971, Alexandria, Virginia), Lucien Conein (June 18, 1971, McLean,Virginia), Bernard Yoh (June 15, 1971, Washington, D.C.), and William Young (September 8 and 14, 1971, Chiangmai).
13. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1977), 4649; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 179.
14. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 42, 71.
15. Naomi Klein, in her otherwise shrewd analysis, oversimplifies when she calls the murder "Pinochet's most outrageous and defiant crime since the coup itself" (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2007], 99).

The Vice President's illegal operations

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Bolivia kicks out US Drug Enforcement Agency; drug crime rates immediately plummet

Friday, September 11, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Bolivia, cocaine, DEA

(NaturalNews) Most Americans have been conditioned to believe that the function of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is toreduce the manufacture, sale and trafficking of illegal drugs. However, one South American nation has thrown a huge wrench into that supposition.

The government of Bolivia recently booted U.S. DEA agents out of the country, and according to a report cited by AntiMedia.com, the Bolivian government has actually managed to reduce drug manufacturing and the criminal activity associated with it since the DEA left.

As reported by the Manquehue web site, dealing in drugs now represents less than 1 percent of the Andean country's gross domestic product (GDP) in a "sustained reduction" after the ejection of the DEA.

The site further reported:

According to data from the United Nations, Bolivia achieved a reduction in the amount of coca fields the plant which is used as a raw material for the elaboration of cocaine approximately in an 11% since the year 2014, and in over a 30% since 2010, which amounts to four consecutive years of decline, from over 30 thousand to some 20 thousand hectares.

[B]No "strong-arm police" tactics[/B]

The DEA was ejected from Bolivia in 2008 following charges of conspiracy and espionage; within three years, AntiMedia.com noted, progress in the Bolivian government's efforts to curb drug trafficking and production was already being made.

"The strategy employed by the Bolivian government may be a surprise to many prohibitionists because it did not involve any strong-arm police state tactics," said the AntiMedia.com report. "Instead, they worked to find alternative crops for farmers to grow that would actually make them more money."

According to a report in VICE News, the UN notes that Bolivian coca cultivation is now at its lowest point since the world body began monitoring it in 2003. In addition, the site noted that Bolivian officials are looking at even further decreases to comply with a national law that sets aside no more than 12,000 hectares for coca planting.

While the government is currently negotiating for a final allowance of 20,000 hectares, whatever the final target is will mean that Bolivia is nonetheless unique in its ability to reduce coca cultivation while avoiding the kind of violence and alienation of poor farmers that is typical of other, more orthodox, eradication methods and efforts in the region.

"Bolivia has adopted a policy based on dialogue, where coca cultivation is allowed in traditional areas alongside alternative development [in others]," Antonino de Leo, UNODC's representative in Bolivia, told VICE News.

He added that Bolivia had mostly succeeded in its "innovative approach" that combines the unionization of coca growers and respect for human rights with forced eradication efforts in non-permitted regions.

"It's not only about making money off a crop," said de Leo. "In the old fashioned alternative development approach, we substitute one illicit crop for a licit crop. It's about a more comprehensive approach that includes access to essential services like schools, hospitals, and roads in areas that traditionally have been hard to reach."

[B][B]DEA as drug dealer[/B]

Although the country's approach to coca cultivation is novel, it should not be surprising. The country's drug czar, as well as its president, Evo Morales, are both former coca growers.

Following his election in 2005, Morales undertook efforts to negotiate with coca grower unions, promising them he would give them higher prices for growing less coca. Recently, the UN has estimated Bolivia's legitimate coca crop at more than $8 per kilogram of dried leaves, which several times higher than it is in Colombia and double the market rate in Peru.

The ejection of the DEA from Bolivia - and the country's subsequent drop in the production and sale of coca - is most definitely unique in that the DEA has been implicated in drug-running operations, as Natural News reported recently.

In addition, Morales' decision to eject the agency from his country was vindicated after documents surfaced showing that the DEA had been conducting covert reconnaissance in some neighboring countries, VICE News reported.

[B]Sources include:

TheAntiMedia.org

InstitutoManquehue.org

http://InstitutoManquehue.org

NaturalNews.com[/B][/B]

Quote:Life-destroying 'spice' drug engulfs Russia

Moscow blames Ukraine for proliferation of new highly addictive and deadly narcotic among its youth.

Mansur Mirovalev | 20 Feb 2015 13:32 GMT | Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Prescription drugs, Drug cartels

Members of a pro-Kremlin youth group attack 'spice' pushers with hammers and bats [AP] Moscow, Russia - Two weeks after quitting heroin, Roman was consumed by an urge to score another drug - something harmless and inexpensive, something that would not have a throttlehold on his life.
He did not have to look very hard. The word "mix" and a mobile phone number were scrawled in big, shaky letters on a cracked concrete wall metres away from a railway station that links Moscow to its southeastern suburbs.
Roman dialled the number, overcoming his suspicion that this could be a police setup. A man picked up the phone, his voice coarse and indifferent, and said a bag with enough for "five or six joints" was available for less than $10.
"I'll text you the number of a QIWI purse," he said, referring to a popular payment system that allows instant anonymous payments. "When I get the money, I'll give you directions."
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[TD="class: caption"]A hand-written telephone number of a 'spice' drug pusher in Moscow written on a wall in an underground pass [Mansur Mirovalev/Al Jazeera][/TD]
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After transferring the money from a nearby shopping mall, Roman was told the stash, wrapped in plastic, was hidden in the snow under an empty beer bottle near the fourth section of the wall surrounding the station.
Inside the bag was the most shape-shifting illicit drug Russia has ever seen.
Highly addictive and known as "spice" or "mix" or "bath salts", it can be smoked, snorted or injected causing an intense high - as well as panic attacks, hallucinations, epilepsy-like spasms, temporary paralysis, cardiovascular problems and lung disease, according to health officials.
"It causes psychological disorders that are difficult to treat medically," Sergey Polozov, psychologist and head of the Stopnarkotic movement that has some 4,000 volunteers working throughout Russia to counter the "spice" trade, told Al Jazeera. "Thirty percent of first-time users get addicted."
"Spice" also has carcinogenic effects and leads to an "increasing number of reports on suicides associated with preceding use of these products", said a 2013 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
An especially strong strain of "spice" has killed more than 40 Russians since September and landed some 2,000 in hospitals. Russian officials purported that a Ukrainian regional governor is allegedly implicated in the distribution of the "killer spice" in Russia.
Chameleonic drug
"Spice" has nothing to do with pepper or saffron and is named after a drug that triggered an interstellar war in The Dune, Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel series. First synthesised in 2004, it is an umbrella brand for the ever-growing family of substances whose chemical formula has been constantly changed to avoid blacklisting.
Banned in the United States and the European Union, it is widely available in Russia and several ex-Soviet republics in myriad variations.
But millions of Russians, mostly youngsters, who have tried "spice" in the past decade, believed that it was a harmless, cheap and legal substitute to marijuana. "Spice" pushers maintained the myth with online ads or business cards that can be found on trains or in nightclubs that show laughing cartoon characters, ganja-smoking musician Bob Marley, or slogans such as "100 percent harmless".
It had been openly sold in tobacco shops or tiny kiosks in underground passes, next to transportation hubs or shopping malls until 2009, when authorities started to ban one spice formula after the other. Vigilante youth groups punished "spice"pushers by beating them up, dousing them with paint, and burning their product.
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[TD] I did not like the high. It's unpredictable, like a roulette - one time you are happy, next time you want to jump out of the window or hide under the bed.
Roman, drug addict[/TD]
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But it's a hydra-headed business with a "designer" drug whose makers are no longer limited by nature and can alter the formula any way they like - turning the users into involuntary guinea pigs that try and test the alterations. "Spice" highs can now mimic the effects of amphetamine, cocaine, or psychedelic drugs.
These days, precursors or the chemical base for "spice" are mass-produced in China or Southeast Asia. They are shipped to Russia as contraband or simply mailed - several grams of the substance hidden in an envelope is enough for several ounces of the market-ready product.
"It's a tsunami of synthetic drugs," Viktor Ivanov, head of FSKN, Russia's top anti-drugs agency, said in televised remarks in early February.
After reaching a Russian middleman, the chemical is diluted in water or poisonous chemicals such as acetone or brake fluid, and sprayed on herbs such as chamomile. It is sold in small bags for between $5 and $100 depending on the drug's potency and the pushers' marketing skills.
And the effects of "spice" are sometimes worse than heroin addiction - according to a former heroin addict.
"I did not like the high," Roman, a lanky 27-year-old Muscovite recovering from almost three years of heroin addiction, told Al Jazeera describing his experience of buying and trying spice in early December.
"It's unpredictable, like a roulette - one time you are happy, next time you want to jump out of the window or hide under the bed," he said after a meeting of Addicts Anonymous held in the backyard of a church in uptown Moscow.
Fidgeting in an uncomfortable wooden chair and constantly running his hand through his messy blond hair, he added: "That's the scariest drug I've ever tried."
Yet another epidemic
Russia is home to more than eight million drug addicts, FSKN's Ivanov said - although his agency's rigorous statistics include occasional and one-time drug users as addicts.
In the late 1990s, Afghan heroin flooded Russia via ex-Soviet Central Asia. With a population of 143 million, in 2008, Russia devoured 70 tonnes of heroin - more than one-fifth of the drug consumed globally - becoming "the single largest national heroin consumer in the world", the UN said.
As authorities fought to cut down the heroin flow, Russians switched to new drugs.
One was "crocodile" - a cheap intravenous opiate made of codeine pills which was named after the scale-like, gangrenous skin lesions it causes. First concocted in Russian prisons, it ravaged Russia in the early 2010s, decimating former heroin addicts. The average life expectancy of a "crocodile" addict was about two years.
But in 2013, the health ministry made codeine pills a prescription-only drug, and "crocodile" died out - along with thousands of addicts. By that time, spice had already mutated into Russia's most dangerous drug.
Recently, Russia's war on drugs got mixed up with Kremlin's new geopolitical battle.
Blaming the Ukrainians
A triumphant FSKN statement accused Ukrainians, Moscow's new archenemies, of organising a drug cartel and channelling the proceeds to finance Kiev's war against pro-Russian rebels.
FSKN said its forces arrested some 50 mobsters, part of a "transnational criminal community" that kept its money in a bank owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, the billionaire governor of the Dniepropetrovsk region.
The cartel was allegedly active in 30 of Russia's 85 provinces selling the "killer spice", the February 6 statement claimed. An agency official told a national television network the spice trade involved organisers of last year's pro-Western revolt in Ukraine and financed Kiev's war against pro-Moscow separatists.
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[TD="class: caption"]Members of a pro-Kremlin youth group douse two tied-up spice pushers with red paint [AP][/TD]
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Kolomoisky's press service was not available to comment on the allegations.
The authors of an "analytical" television show on NTV, a Kremlin-controlled national broadcaster, claimed in October that Ukrainian authorities were allegedly behind the import of the most dangerous spice strains to Russia.
"Somebody is deliberately trying to poison the young generation in Russia," Sergei Vaganov, head of a rehabilitation centre in the western Siberian city of Surgut, told NTV.
Ineffective ban
On February 3, President Vladimir Putin signed a long-awaited bill banning all possible variations of "spice" and punishing its production and distribution with hefty fines or jail sentences of up to eight years in cases where the drug causes a user's death.
Anti-drug campaigners criticised the law saying spice pushers should be treated like heroin dealers and face stricter punishment such as life in jail.
"This law is an indulgence," Kirill Petrov, an analyst with the City Without Drugs, Russia's most outspoken non-governmental rehabilitation centre in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, told Al Jazeera.
But the law seems to have changed little about the spice trade. Hundreds of Russian websites and online forums still advertise and sell spice.
"A new 'super mix' has a good relaxing effect for 45-60 minutes," advertises one of the websites about a spice strain available for $6 per gram - or for $2.2 if you buy two kilograms. Another website offers a variety of "spices" that work as "legal soft hashish" and "give unreal effects" for between $70 and $140 per gram.
Most of the online dealers offer 24/7 delivery, discounts for wholesale buyers and bonuses for long-term customers.
Offline pushers also seem unaffected by the ban. A pusher's phone is still seen near the train station where Roman bought his first bag of "spice".
When this reporter called the number, a man answered and said: "I will text you the number of a QIWI purse."
Source:Al Jazeera

Quote:

Three owner Li Ka-shing in exclusive talks to buy O2 for £10bn

O2 deal will create Britain's biggest mobile phone company with 32m customers

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European authorities are likely to approve the O2 sale Photo: AFP






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By Christopher Williams, and Denise Roland

7:27AM GMT 23 Jan 2015
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Telefonica has confirmed that it is in exclusive talks with Hutchison Whampoa, owner of the mobile operator Three, for the sale of its UK subsidiary O2 for £10.25bn in cash.

The Spanish telecoms giant said the pair were negotiating an upfront payment of £9.25bn with an additional £1bn to be paid "once the cumulative cash flow of the combined company in the UK has reached an agreed threshold".

It said the exclusivity period will last several weeks, allowing the pair to finalise the deal and for Hutchinson Whampoa to complete due diligence on O2.

The move will mean more upheaval for a sector still digesting BT's planned takeover of EE.

The combination of Three and O2 will create Britain's biggest mobile operator, with 32m customers, leapfrogging EE's 28m and relegating Vodafone to last place with 20m.

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It will cut the number of networks from four to three, triggering a competition investigation.
The industry regulator, Ofcom, has for years resisted calls for more consolidation in the industry following the 2010 merger of Orange and T-Mobile, to form EE.
However, European competition authorities have recently approved deals that created markets of only three networks in Austria, Ireland and Germany, with conditions.
Rumours that Hutchison, controlled by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, could seek a consolidation deal in the UK emerged in November after BT confirmed it was in talks with both Telefonica and the owners of EE.
When BT chose to enter exclusive talks to buy EE for £12.5bn in December Telefonica was widely seen as likely to seek a quick alternative exit from O2. The Spanish group has been working to reduce heavy debts and expand in Latin America.
It feared being saddled with a UK business under attack from a new powerful rival in BT, without broadband or television offers with which to fight back.
O2 was already seen as suffering from under-investment and was left with the weakest share of 4G airwaves in an auction two years. As speculation of a merger with Three intensified this week, analysts at Macquarie said the combination would be "very rational".
It would create an operator with enough customers to justify its investment in airwaves, and enough airwaves to serve their growing demand for mobile internet access.
Hutchison entered the UK market from scratch in 2003 having bought a chunk of 3G airwaves at in a blockbuster auction at the height of the dotcom boom. The Hong Kong conglomerate has sunk cash into the venture as it has struggled to build scale and played the role of challenge brand, undercutting the incumbents.
Macquarie suggested consolidation would "materially improve the UK market structure and benefit EE and Vodafone".
To protect consumers in other consolidating European mobile markets, regulators have imposed conditions including guarantees for virtual' mobile operators who buy wholesale access to networks then use their own brand to sell to customers. In Britain they include Tesco Mobile and TalkTalk.
Sky, without a mobile offering to match BT's plans for EE, has also held recent talks with both Vodafone and O2 about a wholesale deal, so could also benefit.
As well as competition hurdles, Hutchison will have to find a way to disentangle the two network sharing deals that O2 and Three are signed up to with Vodafone and EE respectively. The complications prompted O2 chief executive Ronan Dunne to comment in November that he saw a merger with Three as the least likely of all possible scenarios for consolidation.