Drugs

Subterms

    Latest story

    188 Shares96 Views

    FBI to reinvestigate 2023 White House cocaine find and leak of supreme court Dobbs draft

    by

    The FBI will launch new investigations into the 2023 discovery of a bag of cocaine at the White House during Joe Biden’s term, as well as into pipe bombs discovered at Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot by supporters of Donald Trump, and the leak of the supreme court’s draft opinion before the historic overturning of national abortion rights with the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.Dan Bongino, a rightwing podcaster turned deputy director of the FBI, made the announcement on X, where he said he had requested weekly briefings on any progress in looking into the old cases. The incidents have been popular talking points on America’s political right wing and among conspiracy theorists.Bongino said that he and the FBI director, Kash Patel, had been evaluating “a number of cases of potential public corruption that, understandably, have garnered public interest” and had made a decision “to either re-open, or push additional resources and investigative attention, to these cases”.The FBI deputy director made an appeal for “investigative tips on these matters”.The discovery of a small, zippered bag of cocaine in a cubby near the entrance to the West Wing two years ago drew excited commentary from Republicans, including then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has said it was implausible the drugs could belong to anyone beyond Joe Biden or son Hunter Biden – even though the Biden family was away from Washington at the time.Bongino has previously alleged, without presenting any evidence, that he was in touch with whistleblowers who told him they were “suspicious” that evidence from the White House cocaine bag “could match a member of the inner Biden circle”.A formal laboratory test confirmed that the powder found was indeed cocaine and the Secret Service said the substance was found in a “highly trafficked” area of the White House and it was reviewing visitor logs to determine how it had gotten there.Then White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that public tours of the West Wing had taken place over the weekend when the discovery was made, prompting an evacuation of the executive mansion.“We have confidence that they will get to the bottom of this,” Jean-Pierre later said, referring to the Secret Service. A White House spokesperson said that the allegations that Hunter Biden was involved was “incredibly irresponsible”.But in his first interview as a president in February this year, Trump returned to the subject, arguing that forensic analysis should have revealed fingerprints but the evidence appeared to have been deliberately wiped clean. He described the cocaine discovery as a “terrible thing”.The pre-emptive publication of the supreme court’s opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion in Politico on 2 May 2022 provoked condemnation from Trump, who called the source of the leak “slime” and demanded that the journalists involved be imprisoned until they revealed who it was.Eight months later, the supreme court released a 23-page report into the leak saying the investigative team “has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of the evidence”.Investigations into both cases ended without identifying who was responsible for the cocaine or the leak.Bongino also announced more resources for the FBI’s investigation into the placement of pipe bombs at the Democratic national committee and the Republican national committee in Washington.The bombs, which were later defused, had been planted the night before Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.Reuters contributed reporting More

    More stories

    • 175 Shares195 Views

      in US Politics

      New bill aims to allow research to catch up with US’s increasing cannabis consumption

      by

      A recently introduced bill, if it passes, would allow research on cannabis despite its schedule I status, which some experts say could help policymakers “craft effective” legislation in the future and potentially allow more clinical research on medical cannabis.Representatives Dina Titus and Ilhan Omar introduced the Evidence-Based Drug Policy Act of 2025 (EBDPA) last week, which would radically ease research restrictions on cannabis and other schedule I substances.Omar said in a statement that the law would allow research to catch up with the US’s increasing cannabis consumption: “We need drug policy to follow the science and reflect the reality on the ground in states across the country.”Schedule I substances, including cannabis, heroin and MDMA, are legally defined as having “no accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse”. Medical cannabis proponents point out that cannabis’s federal schedule I status is contradictory, given that patients throughout the US already use cannabis for medical purposes.The Biden administration pushed for cannabis to be reclassified as a schedule III substance, which would alter its legal status and make cannabis-based medicines eligible for FDA approval.But the rescheduling process has continued to stall since Donald Trump reentered the oval office.Unlike rescheduling, the EBDPA would be simple to enact. In its current form, it repeals sections of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act of 1998 that forbid federal funds from going towards research of schedule I substances, and that require the ONDCP to oppose any attempts to legalize schedule I substances.Still, there are questions as to whether this bill has the ability to pass.Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University, says that the bill is a “modest proposal” and “it might be possible for it to gain the bipartisan support it needs to pass”.Cat Packer, director of Drug Markets and Legal Regulation at Drug Policy Alliance, notes that the bill “has the potential to attract bipartisan support as a modest but meaningful step forward” due to it prioritizing “evidence over ideology”.Though more comprehensive federal cannabis reform might be in the distant future, “the EBDPA should be seen as a neutral step that would enable policymakers to study what works – and be better prepared to craft effective, informed legislation in the future,” Packer added.On the other hand, Aaron Smith, CEO of the National Cannabis Industry Association, doesn’t feel as hopeful and that because of “the hyper-partisan times we live in, getting this bill, or any legislation, frankly, passed isn’t likely in the near term”.Packer hopes that policymakers will see that the bill is vital for shaping smart cannabis policy.“The federal government cannot meaningfully learn from the experiences of the 24-plus states that have legalized cannabis,” Packer says of the current state of affairs.There aren’t ways at the moment for the federal government to scientifically measure cannabis’ impact on youth consumption and health outcomes, arrest and incarceration rates, and who benefits economically from legal cannabis policies, versus who is left out.Existing policy is not only outdated, but there’s “an institutional blindfold that prevents the federal government from adapting to real-world conditions and designing effective, responsive policies”, Packer said.Ideally, Harris says the law would lead to “an increase in rigorous research to inform medical use practice”, noting that there are many questions when it comes to how cannabis functions as a medicine, about ideal doses, long term-impacts of different consumption methods, and whether certain strains work better for some conditions than others.While Omar and Titius have emphasized cannabis when promoting the bill, it would allow federal funding to go toward research on other schedule I substances as well.Smith said that “drug policy should be rooted in scientific fact” and that any step in that direction should be applauded. Harris echoed that sentiment, noting that research on other schedule I substances is “much needed,” given that “several substances in schedule I – psilocybin and MDMA in particular, seem to have therapeutic effects for some people with difficult-to-treat conditions”. Federally funded medical research on the efficacy of these drugs could advance medicine in the US.“If there is evidence to support FDA approval for a schedule I drug for therapeutic applications, this bill would mean that the Office of National Drug Control Policy would not have to reflexively oppose it,” Harris said.Should the bill pass, Harris is skeptical of how much federal funding will actually go to schedule I research as “the Trump administration, so far, has seemed opposed to federal research funding more broadly”.Still, she says: “This bill is an important and reasonable effort to improve the sensibility of federal drug policies, but the current climate could dampen its short-term effects.” More

    • 225 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump is dismantling a key worker safety group. It’s another betrayal of the working class | Devan Hawkins

      by

      As Donald Trump announced his tariffs in the White House Rose Garden last month, he proclaimed: “We’re standing up for the American worker.” While it remains to be seen what impact these tariffs will have on American workers, his words were belied by the fact that just a day before this announcement, hundreds of workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh) – an organization that has stood up for US workers since 1970 – discovered that they had been laid off.Niosh was founded as part of the Occupational Health and Safety Act with the purpose of “developing and establishing recommended occupational safety and health standards”. The organization has been on the frontline of protecting worker health and safety ever since. Its work has focused on understanding the risks faced by millions of workers throughout the country who put their safety on the line every day to perform their jobs. For example, Niosh’s Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program investigates fatalities to understand their circumstances and make recommendations, ensuring that more of these workers, who risk their lives for others daily, can be safer in the line of duty.Far from being a caricature of a federal body firmly entrenched in the Beltway, Niosh’s work is spread across the country. One of Niosh’s most notable sites is its Morgantown, West Virginia, facility. Located in the heart of coal country for decades, it has focused on studying the health impacts of coalmining – particularly black lung disease – which has seen notable increases in recent years. Nearly 200 workers were fired from the Morgantown location, which will severely hamper this work. (Some were temporarily rehired.)Niosh also supports surveillance programs run out of 23 states. These state-based programs focus on the unique needs of the workforce in those areas. For several years, I was fortunate to have been an epidemiologist with such a program in Massachusetts, where my colleagues and I focused on understanding and preventing health challenges ranging from bloodborne pathogen exposure among healthcare workers, to asthma risk among cleaners, to fatalities in the construction industry.Since its founding, Niosh has been a nimble organization, adapting to and studying new and emerging threats. The World Trade Center Health Program, which is administered by Niosh, was created to study the health impacts of responding to those terrorist attacks – ranging from traumatic injuries and respiratory disease to cancer and mental health – while providing support for those responders.In a similar way to its response to the September 11 attacks, in the grip of the epidemic of opioids and suicides that have cost tens of thousands of lives over the past two decades, Niosh has sought to understand the workplace component of these challenges. These efforts have helped to shed light on the pathway linking occupational injuries to a high risk of drug overdoses among workers in certain occupations, particularly in the construction industry, and contribute to efforts to prevent these deaths.During the Covid-19 pandemic, Niosh studied the risks faced by frontline workers. The pandemic also highlighted one of Niosh’s most essential functions: air filtration ratings. Niosh tests, approves and certifies respirators to ensure that workers are protected from airborne risks ranging from silica dust to lead.Niosh also supports the future of occupational safety and health workers. Niosh traineeship programs across the country provide support to students studying occupational health and safety. I was fortunate to be supported by such a program when I was in graduate school. Throughout the country, hospital employee safety departments, union workplace safety committees, and community occupational health and safety advocacy organizations are staffed by others like myself who received this support.Now is the worst possible time for Niosh to be dismantled. Traditional workplace hazards still remain. In 2023, the last year with available data, there were 5,283 fatal occupational injuries – one every 99 minutes. Violent injuries at work are a growing concern, particularly among healthcare workers. Increasing temperatures caused by climate change place many vulnerable workers at high risk for illness, injury and death, while extreme weather events, such as the wildfires that devastated southern California earlier this year, threaten the health and safety of emergency workers. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work, presenting new dynamics and hazards.We need Niosh to study these emerging threats and safeguard workers.It remains to be seen what will happen to the remainder of the organization and the programs supported by Niosh throughout the country. Regardless of what occurs, we should support the current and former workers of the organization and carry forward its mission, just as Niosh workers have advocated for the health and safety of workers across this country since the organization’s inception.

      Devan Hawkins is a writer and researcher from Massachusetts. He is the author of the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      US blocks Canadian access to cross-border library, sparking outcry

      by

      The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US.The library’s entrance is on the Vermont side. Previously, Canadian visitors were able to enter using the sidewalk and entrance on the American side but were encouraged to bring documentation, according to the library’s website.Inside, a line of electrical tape demarcates the international boundary. About 60% of the building, including the books, is located in Canada. Upstairs, in the opera house, the audience sits in the US while the performers are in Canada.Under the new rules, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.“This closure not only compromises Canadian visitors’ access to a historic symbol of cooperation and harmony between the two countries but also weakens the spirit of cross-border collaboration that defines this iconic location,” the town of Stanstead said in a press release on Thursday.US Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to queries posed on Friday.In a statement to Reuters, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the US was responding to drug trafficking.“Drug traffickers and smugglers were exploiting the fact that Canadians could use the US entrance without going through customs. We are ending such exploitation by criminals and protecting Americans,” the statement said.The department provided no evidence of drug trafficking or smuggling and did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.In 2018 a Quebec man named Alexis Vlachos pleaded guilty in a Vermont court to charges relating to a plot to use the library to smuggle backpacks full of handguns into Canada on at least two occasions. He was later sentenced to 51 months in a US prison.Relations between the United States and Canada, longtime allies, have deteriorated since Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada as the 51st state and imposed tariffs.The library is a relic of a time when Americans and Canadians could cross the border with simply a nod and a wave at border agents, residents say. It was the gift of a local family in the early 1900s to serve the nearby Canadian and American communities.A small group of American and Canadian protesters gathered outside on Friday.Peter Welch, a Democratic senator from Vermont, called reports of the closure troubling.“Vermont loves Canada. This shared cultural institution celebrates a partnership between our two nations,” Welch said on X. More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘It’s back to drug rationing’: the end of HIV was in sight. Then came the cuts

      by

      This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.View image in fullscreenThere is a risk, says Lewin, director of Melbourne University’s Institute for Infection and Immunity and past president of the International Aids Society, of “dramatic increases in infections, dramatic increases in death and a real loss of decades of advances”.There is no official public list of which contracts have been cancelled, and which remain. It appears that virtually no HIV-prevention programmes funded by the US are still in operation, save a handful principally providing drugs to stop pregnant women passing on the infection to their babies. Countries report disruption to the most basic measures, such as condom distribution.Some treatment programmes have been spared, but not those whose focus conflicted with the Trump administration’s war on “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), such as those working with transgender communities. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have been laid off, while worried patients are hoarding drugs or stretching supplies, according to UNAids surveillance. UNAids itself has lost more than half of its funding.Even programmes that have survived the cull have faced turmoil since February, with instructions to stop work rescinded but with no certainty that funding will continue.View image in fullscreenIn only one example, the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric Aids Foundation says it has had to halt HIV treatment for 85,000 people in Eswatini, including more than 2,000 children, and tests for thousands of pregnant women and babies to prevent transmission and begin life-saving medication.Access to drugs represents an “immediate crisis”, Lewin says. “If people with HIV stop the medications, then not only do they get sick themselves, which is tragic, but they also then become infectious to others.”As clinics on the frontline of treating the disease scrabble to secure access to basic drugs, scientists at this month’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco were hearing that HIV might soon be preventable with a once-a-year injection.The drug lenacapavir was already generating huge excitement in the field, after trial results showed that a six-monthly jab could prevent HIV. New results from the manufacturer Gilead suggest that a tweak to the formula and how it is given could see its protective effects last even longer.Nevertheless, Lewin says, the mood at the meeting, packed with many of the world’s leading HIV specialists, was “dire”.As well as programme cancellations, there are “huge concerns around science and what’s going to happen to the [US] National Institutes of Health, [whose] funding of science has been so significant on every level”, she says.Some scientists in receipt of US funding have been told to remove their names from DEI-linked research, she says, even though DEI is fundamental to the HIV response.View image in fullscreen“I don’t mean that in a sort of touchy-feely way, I mean that’s what we need to do: you need to actually get those treatments to these diverse communities.”In 2022, 55% of all new HIV infections were within “key populations”, such as gay men, other men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, prisoners and people who inject drugs.Prof Linda-Gail Bekker, of South Africa’s Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, has seen US funding for three trials of potential HIV vaccines involving eight countries cancelled and only reinstated after an appeal to the US supreme court.“We’re running around like chickens without heads to at least get one going, because the vaccines are sitting in the fridge and will expire,” she says.She led the lenacapavir trial that showed it offered 100% protection to young women in sub-Saharan Africa, but now worries about HIV/Aids prevention “falling off the radar completely”.The global community had been making headway towards the United Nations’ goal of ending Aids by 2030, she says, with a five-year plan to use “amazing new innovative tools and scale them up”, which would have led to “less dependence on foreign aid and more self-reliance” as new infections fell and attention shifted to maintaining treatment for people with HIV.“All of that is hugely at risk now because, without these funds, our governments will have to step up but they will concentrate on treatment,” she says. “We know they will do that, because that is what we did for the first 30 years.”Efforts to control Aids were entering “the last mile”, which was always likely to be more expensive, she says. “The people who were happy to come into health facilities, they would have come into health facilities.”It would be difficult to rely on government funding to reach the remaining groups, she says, not only because of fewer resources but also because in some countries it means targeting groups whose existence is illegal and unrecognised, such as sex workers or sexual minorities, and young girls may be reluctant to use government clinics if they are not supposed to be sexually active.“I feel like the odds are very stacked against us,” says Bekker, adding: “We’re obviously going to have to re-programme ourselves [and] formulate a different plan.”Pepfar had pledged funding to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to deploy 10m doses of lenacapavir in low-income countries. While the Global Fund has promised to maintain its commitment, it might receive fewer than the planned number of doses, Bekker fears.“Six months ago, I was saying the best thing we can do with lenacapavir is offer it to everybody in a choice environment. [Now] I think we’re gonna have to say who needs [injectable] prep,” she says, “and the rest have to do the best they can.“How do we make that decision? And what does that look like? It is back to sort of rationing.“When we started ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] way back in 2000,” Bekker recalls, “you would go, ‘you get treatment; you don’t, you don’t, you don’t’.“It feels terrible … but you have to get over that. You have to say it will be infection-saving for some people. And we’ve got to make it count.”View image in fullscreenFor Beatriz Grinsztejn, president of the International Aids Society, the disruption is critical and threatens many vulnerable people. But, she adds, it could present “an important opportunity for ownership – otherwise we are always left in the hands of others”.She worries about the impact of cuts to funding on younger scientists, with their potential loss from the research field “a major threat for the next generation”. But, she adds, the HIV community is “powerful and very resilient”.There have already been calls for new ways of doing things. It is “time for African leadership”, members of the African-led HIV Control Working Group write in the Lancet Global Health. There are now plans for Nigeria to produce HIV drugs and tests domestically.Christine Stegling, deputy director of UNAids, says it began “a concerted effort” last year to develop plans with countries about how their HIV programmes could become more sustainable domestically “but with a longer timeframe … now we are trying to do some kind of fast-tracking”.Governments are determined, she says, but it will require fiscal changes either in taxation or by restructuring debt.The goal of ending Aids by 2030 is still achievable, Stegling believes. “I think we have a very short window of opportunity now, in the next two, three months, to continue telling people that we can do it.“I keep on reminding people, ‘look, we need to get back to that same energy that we had when people were telling us treatment can’t be available in the global south, right?’ And we didn’t accept it. We made it happen.“We have national governments now who are also very adamant, because they can see what can happen, and they want to make it happen for their own populations.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump policies could fuel illicit drug trade despite vow to curb fentanyl

      by

      Donald Trump’s policies could leave the US more vulnerable to dangerous synthetic drug trafficking from abroad, even as the administration has vowed to stop fentanyl from entering the country, former government officials say.This week, Trump imposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, ostensibly as a tactic to stem the flow of illicit drugs into the US.Jim Crotty, the former Drug Enforcement Administration deputy chief of staff, called the approach “coercive” and said it has the potential to backfire. Federal funding cuts could also leave US borders more insecure, according to Enrique Roig, a former Department of State official who oversaw Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) portfolios and who has also worked with USAid.US overdose deaths began to decrease significantly for the first time in 2023, after rising for decades. But Crotty notes this progress is fragile.“We’re seeing this decrease in overdose deaths and everyone’s still trying to suss out exactly why. I don’t think now is the time that we want to stop any of those existing efforts because we know that at least some, or a combination of them, have been working,” Crotty said.Roig agreed: “All this has to be working together in concert.”Federal funding cuts could put the US behind when it comes to drug detection technology. The global drug supply has increasingly shifted towards highly potent synthetic substances such as fentanyl and newly emerging nitazenes. Often, these drugs arrive in the US in the form of powders or precursor chemicals that take up minimal space, and are difficult to detect by odor.Roig says advanced drug detection technology is therefore vital, but Trump’s federal funding and staff cuts mean less money for the latest technology and equipment, and fewer people to install it.Ram Ben Tzion, the CEO of Publican, which provides drug detection technology to government agencies outside the US, says cutting-edge methods detect suspicious shipments even before they get to the border. Publican uses large language models to flag shipments that “don’t make sense” and are likely to contain illicit substances. For example, his company once found fentanyl precursors in a shipment to a residential address in California. The shipment claimed to contain fashion items, but came from a Chinese construction company.Similarly, the UN Container Control Programme, which has historically received state department funding, helps authorities flag suspicious shipments before they reach their destination. This program has helped authorities around the world seize hundreds of tonnes of illicit drugs each year. Roig says federal funding cuts have stalled CCP’s implementation in Mexico, even though it’s a primary security target for Trump.Some of Trump’s measures are more showy than they are constructive, Crotty and Roig said. The designation of certain cartels as terrorist organizations “doesn’t do much of anything”.It’s symbolic, says Crotty, given that they were already designated transnational criminal organizations. Other measures are a harmful waste of money, according to Roig. Just this week, for instance, the administration suspended the use of military planes to deport immigrants, including those accused of drug related crimes, due to the extravagant cost.Roig says this measure was completely unnecessary, as “Ice already has its own fleet of airplanes” that are much cheaper.Crotty is concerned the aggression could backfire.“The Mexican people are protective of their culture and their sovereignty. If you push them too hard, could it do more harm than good?” he said.Mexico sent 10,000 troops to its US border to cooperate with Trump’s demands, but Crotty says “while in a vacuum that sounds like a whole lot”, Mexico’s border is vast, and drugs are often transported in “minute quantities”. So, the US needs Mexico’s cooperation when it comes to intelligence – otherwise “you’re not going to find the proverbial needle in the haystack”, Crotty said.Roig said that “it’s important that we do this in cooperation with Mexico and not alienate them,” adding that Trump’s aggressive stance toward China could harm the Biden administration’s progress negotiating with the Chinese government to cooperate on counternarcotics initiatives.Massive USAid cuts also threaten programs intended to curb the “root causes” of the drug trade, says Roig. Some USAid-funded programs simultaneously tackled drug smuggling and another one of Trump’s key issues, migration – as cartels that traffic drugs also traffic people.When Roig worked with USAid, he says he spent a lot of time on “community violence prevention efforts”, including programs to keep young people from joining international crime organizations and cartels. (Notably, the Trump administration has purged many websites describing USAid programs.)If the drug supply does increase, it could mean US overdoses begin to rise again as well. But Crotty is worried we won’t even know if that happens. Layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could leave fewer people to track overdose deaths, and Trump’s attack on government data sharing could keep everyone in the dark.“​​ CDC maintains the overdose death dashboard. A lot of that stuff is data driven. Are they still going to have access to the data?” he said.The Guardian contacted INL and UNODC for comment. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Mexican drug lord pleads not guilty to killing of DEA agent after US extradition

      by

      After years as one of US authorities’ most wanted men, the Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom on Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a US federal agent.Caro Quintero pleaded not guilty to running a continuing criminal enterprise. Separately, so did Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of another cartel. Carrillo is accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent on Thursday to eight US cities, a move that came as Mexico sought to stave off the Donald Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports next week.For Camarena’s family, the arraignments marked a long-awaited moment.“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope – hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” the family said in a statement thanking Trump and everyone who has worked on the case over the years.The White House, in a statement Friday ahead of the arraignments, called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world”.In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.But members of Mexico’s security cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican attorney general Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”Mexican security secretary Omar García Harfuch said the people sent into US custody were “generators of violence” in Mexico and represented a security threat to both countries.Caro Quintero had long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition.He was one of the founders of a Guadalajara-based cartel and one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the US in the late 1970s and 1980s.Caro Quintero had Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 because he blamed the agent for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation the year prior, authorities said. Camarena’s killing marked a low point in US-Mexico relations and was dramatized in the popular Netflix series Narcos: Mexico.Caro Quintero had been 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his verdict in 2013.After his release, he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCaro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs”.“Whoever’s saying it is a liar!” he said, according to the newspaper. “I’m not working any more, let’s be clear about that! I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again.”The US, which had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20m reward, sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest. It happened days after the Mexican and US presidents at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden respectively, met at the White House.But the request remained in limbo as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the US to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.Then, in January, a non-profit group representing the Camarena family sent a letter to the new Trump administration urging it to renew the extradition request.Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies”, who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as “The Viceroy”, continued his brother’s business of smuggling drugs over the border until his arrest in 2014.He was sentenced in 2021 to 28 years in prison for organized crime, money laundering and weapons violations.Among the others extradited are leading members of Mexican organized crime groups recently designated by the Republican administration as “foreign terrorist organizations”.They include cartel leaders, security chiefs from both factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a man wanted in connection with the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022. More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      If Trump’s tariffs start a trade war, it would be an economic disaster | Mark Weisbrot

      by

      “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word,” said Donald Trump last month. Pundits, politicians and financial markets are trying to figure out why, since he announced a week ago that he would impose tariffs on the United States’s three biggest trading partners: 25% for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China.One theory is that tariffs can be a beautiful distraction. Trump, more than any previous US president, has fed on distractions for years, both to campaign and to govern. He can move seamlessly from one distraction to the next, like a magician preparing for the opportune moment to pull a coin from where it appears to have been hidden behind your ear.Although he still has seven weeks before he takes office, he could use a distraction that can start sooner. He has run into problems with cabinet and other appointments that require Senate confirmation. Of course he could easily find people who would do his bidding and be acceptable to a Senate with a Republican majority. But that would defeat the main purpose of nominating people who seem indefensible: to force Republican senators to display the abject subservience that Trump needs to be public, in order to ensure his unwavering dominance within his party.This is no small part of his governing strategy; it involves a big takeaway from the failures of his first term, from his point of view. The lesson is: loyalty to Trump first. Violators will be banished. And with small margins in the Senate and the House, things could begin to unravel if this core imperative goes unenforced.But the days before Trump actually takes office could also be the best time for him to use the threat of tariffs to begin bullying foreign governments for things that might benefit his allies, donors or himself. Other governments besides the three that he named are trying to figure out what they can offer Trump to avoid the economic disruption of tariffs. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, who does not see Trump as a friend, has urged the EU to negotiate with him, rather than adopt a retaliatory, eg tariff, response.Trump’s two offered pretexts for the tariff threat – migration and drugs, in this case fentanyl – are not credible. About 18% of the undocumented people encountered by border patrol over the past year have been from Venezuela and Cuba, two countries that have been devastated economically by sanctions imposed by the US government. If reducing immigration were really Trump’s concern, he would not have deployed sanctions that have driven millions of people from their homes to the US border; and he could end these sanctions in January by himself.Broad economic sanctions are a form of economic violence which targets civilians in order to achieve political ends, including regime change. US congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, made this clear in a letter that he wrote to Joe Biden asking for the sanctions on Venezuela to be dropped. The Trump sanctions in Venezuela in 2017 killed tens of thousands of civilians during the first year, and many more in the years that followed, including under Biden.As for fentanyl, about 75,000 people died from overdoses of this drug in 2023. But it’s difficult to see how Trump’s tariffs could help solve this problem. It’s a glaring example of how more than four decades of a failed “war on drugs”, based on criminalization of use and supply-side intervention, have made things worse. In this case the drug war has led to an innovation – fentanyl – that is vastly more powerful than heroin, much cheaper to produce, more addictive and easier to transport, distribute and produce.There is general agreement in the economic research on the effects of Trump’s trade and tariff wars in his first term as president, in which he placed tariffs on about $380bn of US imports. The overall impact on living standards for US workers and most Americans is found to be negative, with the cost of the tariffs being absorbed by US consumers. Employment overall did not increase, and may have fallen due to the negative impact of retaliatory tariffs.The economic research looking at the expected impacts of tariffs that Trump has talked about going forward also finds the impact on the US economy to be negative. And there is potential for much more damage if other countries respond with more retaliatory tariffs than they did in 2018-2020.Meanwhile, the productivity of Trump’s tariff offensive in generating distractions remains high. On Sunday he took a shot at the so-called Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and other economic powers: “We require a commitment from these countries,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”None of these things will happen while Trump is in office. Nor will threats like this deter the majority of the world, when it is ready, from replacing a system of global governance that is overwhelmingly run by one country with help from the richest people in other rich countries. Our current system is one in which the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar-based financial system bestows upon the US government gives the president the power to destroy whole economies with the stroke of a pen.But this is a longer story; for Trump it’s just another threat and another distraction in the post-truth world that he, as much as anyone, helped create. But he will need more than distractions to take this country further down the road toward de-democratization, which is what brought to him and his party the power that they now have.

      Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy More