“The number of young adults admitted to California hospital emergency rooms with heroin poisoning increased sixfold over the past decade, the state said, the latest evidence of growing abuse of the highly addictive drug,” according to Reuters. “According to the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, emergency rooms across the state saw 1,300 heroin poisoning cases involving young adults between the ages of 20 and 29 in 2014, compared to 200 in 2005,” Circa reported.

The news has driven home challenges policymakers face in reckoning with legal pot’s effect on broader drug markets and the broader battle against illicit substances.

Shifting markets

Experts have not established the relationship between more accessible marijuana and increased heroin use. One recent study published by JAMA Internal Medicine reported, with regard to states that had legalized marijuana for medical use, there was “about a 25 percent decrease in the projected amount of people expected to overdose in those states in 2010. This means that about 1,700 less people died than were expected to in states with medical marijuana.”

But some analysts have warned that the uptick in heroin use can be at least indirectly attributed to the creeping legalization of marijuana. “Made-in-the-USA marijuana is quickly displacing the cheap, seedy, hard-packed version harvested by the bushel in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains,” the Washington Post reported from San Ysidro, CA. “That has prompted Mexican drug farmers to plant more opium poppies, and the sticky brown and black ‘tar’ heroin they produce is channeled by traffickers into the U.S. communities hit hardest by prescription painkiller abuse, offering addicts a $10 alternative to $80-a-pill oxycodone.”

California hasn’t been ranked atop the list of states where oxycodone abuse runs highest. But OxyContin peddling had become so pervasive and lucrative in the San Francisco Bay Area that it earned an SF Weekly cover story three years ago. Since then, the Golden State’s place on the front lines of Mexican drug smuggling has remained unchanged. Raul Benitez-Manaut, who researches the drug war at the National Autonomous University in Mexico, told the Post that pot decriminalization “has given U.S. consumers access to high-quality marijuana, with genetically improved strains, grown in greenhouses. That’s why the Mexican cartels are switching to heroin and meth.”

A string of busts

In Santa Cruz County, heroin busts have tracked with the increase in use seen statewide, according to Mario Sulay, commander of the county’s anti-crime force. “The seizure of the half-pound of heroin in Navarro’s three residences increased the amount of the drug seized so far by the team in the county this year to nearly 4 kilos, more than it has confiscated over the past five years combined,” reported Patch from Gilroy. Sulay “attributed the large amount to an uptick in the heroin being trafficked through the U.S. border from Mexico, which has grown by 300 percent over previous years[.]”

Californians have also recently been caught up in the heroin trade across state lines. In New Mexico, Darmarvis Marquel Lee of San Bernardino pled guilty this month to trafficking almost 3 kilograms of heroin. The charges ensured he could face up to two decades in federal prison.

In a stunning sign of the scope of California’s heroin problem, the Fresno police force was sent reeling in March by a multi-agency federal bust of a drug ring allegedly led by Deputy Police Chief Keith Foster. Along with five others, Foster was charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin and oxycodone, in addition to marijuana:

“The arrests, which were announced at a news conference Thursday afternoon at the FBI office in northwest Fresno, stemmed from an ‘intensive’ ongoing, year-long joint investigation by the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that involved ‘considerable’ surveillance and wiretaps, said U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner, the region’s top federal law-enforcement official.”

A review of medical records, police reports and a federal lawsuit show deputies with the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office, police officers with the City of Deming and medical professionals at the Gila Regional Medical Center made some questionable decisions.

The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming.  According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement.      

Eckert’s attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks.  Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity.  While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.  

The lawsuit claims that Deming Police tried taking Eckert to an emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”

But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert was admitted.

What Happened

While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures.  A review of Eckert’s medical records, which he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.  

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool.  No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.  

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines.  No narcotics were found.  

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these medical procedures. 

And, get this: They sent him the bill for thousands of dollars for the gestapo-like medical assault!

Read the rest here.

(h/t to Reason mag.)

Jan. 3, 2013

By Chris Reed

A high-profile Los Angeles-based African-American sportswriter took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to compare Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution to the house slave character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Django Unchanged.” Sowell, 82, is a leading African-American libertarian-conservative intellectual who won the National Humanities Medal for his wide-ranging work, which blends economics, history, sociology and other scholarly fields in sophisticated fashion.

Jason Whitlock, the Fox Sports writer who made national headlines last month when NBC’s Bob Costas quoted his anti-gun views on Sunday Night Football, mocked the idea that Sowell was brilliant, saying he was admired because he told people what they wanted to hear, like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Whitlock has nearly 155,000 followers on Twitter.

The comparison struck those familiar with Sowell’s long academic career as odd. His views about welfare causing dependency and about the value of free markets were forged 50 years ago while getting a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. They weren’t conjured up in recent years in a bid to become a media star. Sowell is low-profile beyond his syndicated column.

The comparison is also odd given Whitlock’s own views. He was one of many who rebuked ESPN’s Rob Parker for questioning whether Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was authentically black. The link to Whitlock’s post on the Fox Sports site was headlined “ESPN and Parker not elevating conversation about race.”

Beyond that, Whitlock shares Sowell’s passionate disdain for the drug war. Whitlock wrote in the Huffington Post that “America’s war on drugs is a scam to lock up poor people, a prop to advance political careers and an easy way for corrupt police and politicians to funnel millions of untraceable dollars into their own pockets.” Sowell has been ripping the war on drugs since Whitlock, 45, was a child.

Whitlock did not respond to my Twitter remarks to him.

By John Seiler

People naturally move from depressed countries to thriving countries. That’s especially true when travel between the two countries is easy, as it is between the United States and Mexico.

Because so many Mexicans have come to the United States, pressures have risen to give even illegal immigrants access to tax-funded student loans. A writer I’ve read a lot over the years, Gustavo Arellano of the OC Weekly, writes the paper’s ¡Ask a Mexican! column. I like how he flavors his articles with a few Spanish words, much as H.L. Mencken did with German words a century ago.

In his current column, Arellano writes about the advance of the California Dream Act scholarships last year, whose actual official title is: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act. And about the federal Dream Act. He quotes the California law’s author, Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, who “ceaselessly supports DREAMers.”

Cedillo explained: “[S]tudents will have the opportunity to receive Cal Grants, Board of Governors Fee Waivers (for community-college students) and other state-funded scholarships.”

But the legislation comes too late. The California and American dreams have turned into economic nightmares, even as Mexico’s economy has turned into the real dream, leading immigrants to return home.

The Pew Hispanic Center’s recent report found:

“After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed, according to a new analysis of government data from both countries….”

Here’s Pew’s graph:

You’ll notice the previous time the numbers dropped: the 1930s. That was during the Great Depression, when many immigrants returned home because U.S. unemployment soared above 25 percent. It was a global depression, so people might not have gotten jobs back in Italy, France, Sweden or Mexico. More people were farmers back then, and a family farm could make us of extra hands.

Curiously, that’s a reason mentioned in this short RT video about current immigrants returning home:

This shows that what America is going through now may not really be the time after the Great Recession, but the middle part of the Greater Depression. Although the official California unemployment rate is 10.9 percent, the real level — including those working part time who want to work more and those who have given up looking for work — is 25 percent, just as during the 1930s, as I have reported.

A difference this time from the 1930s is that Mexico’s economy is not also in a slump, but is a hot tamale:

“First-quarter growth was 4.6 per cent compared with a year earlier, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2010, prompting several analysts to upgrade 2012 growth forecasts.”

U.S. decline

The Pew study noted,

“It is possible that the Mexican immigration wave will resume as the U.S. economy recovers.”

However, this seems unlikely because U.S. economic growth will remain sluggish for many more years. In particular, residential and business construction, which employed hundreds of thousands of immigrants until the real-estate bust of 2006-07, remains overbuilt. Compared to a year before, home prices in April 2012 declined 3.1 percent in Los Angeles County and 2.3 percent in Orange County; although prices did rise 2.4 percent in San Diego county, and rose in the long-depressed counties of Riverside, 5.3 percent, and San Bernardino, 5.9 percent.

The reason the United States is so underperforming compared to Mexico is because of the nations’ debt loads. Everybody is seeing how high government debt is imploding the economies of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (the PIIGS). But consider these numbers of public indebtedness by country. This is a U.S.-Mexico comparision I don’t think anyone else has made.

Debt by percent of GDP (CIA and Eurostat data), least to most:

8.7 Russia
10.1 Hong Kong
30.3 Australia
37.5 Mexico
38.7 Switzerland
54.4 Brazil
43.5 China
69.3 Spain
82.0 Germany
83.5 Canada
86.5 France
103 United States
108.4 Ireland
108.5 Portugal
120.9 Italy
165.3 Greece
208.2 Japan
230.8 Zimbabwe.

Mexican and U.S. debt

Some comments: Japan is an anomaly because it has borrowed heavily to rebuild after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami. Although its high debt before that had helped retard economic growth during the past two “lost decades” there.

Zimbabwe, of course, is an economic basket case from dictator Mugabe’s socialist confiscation policies. Spain’s relatively low debt, 69.3 percent, means it might fare rather well in the ongoing European crisis.

The big thing to notice is that Mexico’s debt is just 37.5 percent of GDP, a bit lower than Switzerland’s 38.7 percent. ¡Excelente!

By contrast, the U.S. debt is 103 percent. Terrible. That’s more than two-and-a-half times as large as Mexico’s ratio.

A big reason for the U.S. debt is the huge military commitment overseas. By contrast, Mexico has no imperial ambitions. Its war on drug dealers — foisted on it by by Tio Samuel — at least wastes the money at home.

Mexico also has a young population, whereas America’s is shifting into its Baby Boomer retirement phase, in which well-educated Boomers drop out of the work force — and, as they head for the links, start soaking up Social Security and Medicare, not to mention Metamucil.

Government debt is like family credit cards. Suppose your family income is $60,000, which it is for many Californians. A 38.7 percent debt means you own $23,220 on the plastic. Not great, but manageable if you’re frugal.

But a 103 percent debt is $61,800, which is difficult even to sustain, let alone pay off.

It’s true that the U.S. government currently pays really low interest rates. That’s because the Federal Reserve Board is keeping rates low. As my colleague Wayne Lusvardi has shown, artificially low interest rates are devastating the private economy because families, in their private savings, actually are losing money from inflation. So the low interest rates that help the government debt are undermining the private economy that is the foundation of the whole government structure. That’s why I expect the Fed, after the election, will jack up interest rates, just as Fed Chairman Paul Volcker did in the late 1970s to kill the 1970s inflation.

But that will meain higher interest paid on the federal government’s current national debt of $15.7 trillion — and rising.

It’s a Catch 22 that cannot have a good ending.

Recent economic history

Mexico also has had more pro-market presidents in recent decades. President Reagan obviously was pro-market. But his successor, President George H.W. Bush, increased taxes in 1991, crashing the economy. In 1993-94, President Bill Clinton raised taxes and tried to push Hillarycare into law.

But after his actions led to the Republicans taking over Congress in 1995, Clinton switched. He dropped Hillarycare; cut taxes — twice; and enacted welfare reform. The dot-com boom ensued. A mild recession began in 2000. But Clinton left office enjoying the first budget surpluses in 30 years.

In 2001, President George W. Bush panicked after 9/11, and went on a wild spending spree, turning the Clinton surpluses into record deficits. At the same time Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, also panicked over unbased economic worries after 9/11 and debased the dollar, causing the inflation we’ve suffered since then; and kept interest rates artificially low, sparking the boom-bust in housing. (There were other reasons for the housing boom-bust, including shady bank loans and government easy loans to homeowners.)

Bush’s tax cuts would have helped — but they expired in 2010. Since about 2008, this has caused great uncertainty, because no one knows if the extensions since then will continue, so no one can plan for future tax policy.

After the September 2008 financial crisis, Bush also panicked and signed the infamous TARP bailout of Wall Street, paid for by Main Street. He also imposed the Sarbanes-Oxley absurd regulations on business.

President Obama has continued the Bush policies of wild spending, record deficits and hyper-regulation, especially Obamacare and the absurd Dodd-Frank financial reform disaster. Current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has continued the Greenspan policies of easy money and too-low interest rates.

Although America needs financial and business reform, Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank were bureaucratic monstronsities that have destroyed businesses and jobs.

Republicans are saying that Mitt Romney, if he becomes president, will improve things. That’s unlikely. His Romneycare in Massachusetts when he was governor there was the model for Obamacare. Romney only would tinker with Obamacare, not get rid of it entirely. And he’s not serious about spending cuts. Any reduction in the trillion-dollar deficits must include major cuts to defense spending. But Romney, on his Web site, even attacks Obama’s proposed “cuts,” which really are just a slowing of massive increases that Obama would continue. Romney admits, “This will not be a cost-free process.”

There is little indication that America will veer away from barreling toward a Greek-style crisis.

Mexican history

Now consider Mexico’s recent presidents. The 1994 devaulation crisis crashed the Mexican economy. But the New York Times later reported of new Presidente Ernesto Zedillo, elected that year, “[T]he tight-money policies and fiscal discipline that he imposed after [the crisis] brought the broad economic indicators back to healthy growth in two years.”

Further free-market reforms have been enacted by Presidente Vicente Fox, elected in 2000, and current Presidente Felipe Calderon, elected in 2006.

Let’s compare them: Since 1994, Mexico has had 17 years of economic policies, 1995-2012, promoting free markets. The United States has had only six years promoting markets, 1995-2000, all under Clinton. The Bush-Obama years, 2001-2012, have been 11 years of assaults on the private economy.

Of course, Mexico has its own problems, especially the horrible drug-gang violence. But that was caused because the drug “war” was pushed on Calderon by Bush. In 2007, Bush gave Calderon $500 million in U.S. taxpayers’ money to heighten the war. Calderon should have told the Yanqui caudillo to keep his money. But it’s hard to say no to a bully with 10,000 nuclear weapons. The Bush-Calderon “war” on drugs meant drug-gang retaliation across Mexico. Of course, almost all the dope ends up in the United States. And the drug “war” is pointless, because the dope still is readily available at low prices. Mexico pays the price in blood for Yanquis getting high.

Perhaps Mexico’s next presidente, elected this year, will reverse this process, and even legalize drugs, as has been urged by ex-Presidente Fox.

After Portugal legalized drugs a decade ago, drug use actually declined. Drug addiction has been treated as a medical, not a criminal, problem. With no profit motive, the pushers don’t push drugs on kids, or fight turf wars.

A combination of continued economic growth and ending the drug violence through legalization would turbocharge the attractiveness of Mexico’s economy. Likely millions more immigrants to the United States would return home.

Goin’ South

Not only that. Millions of gringos would head South, seeking jobs and freedom. Among the many ways Mexico is freer than El Norte, South of the border you can smoke and drink most anywhere. And you can buy Cuban cigars legally.

The United States government still imposes an embargo on most Cuban goods, especially cigars, because of fears that the Soviet Union will use Cuba as a base for a Red Army invasion, as in the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.” Except that the Soviet Union dissolved 21 years ago. Now we know who’s been using all the drugs the U.S. government confiscated from Mexican drug gangs.

As millions of gringos move South to pursue the bright Mexican Dream, we’ll soon hear complaints about the Yanquis “taking Mexican jobs.” Yanqui defenders will say they’re only “doing jobs Mexicans won’t do.”

And for their children attending university, gringo parents will insist on the Mexican government passing a “Mexican Dream Act.”