Quick Hits (page 5)
DEA in trouble - again
By: Norml news
WASHINGTON - In an unusually harsh critique of an agency with a strong global reputation, the White House has questioned the ability of the Drug Enforcement Administration to stem the flow of narcotics and is threatening to give the agency its smallest budget increase in 15 years.
The agency "is unable to demonstrate progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the United States," the Office of Management and Budget wrote in an assessment released this week as part of the budget plan. The agency lacks clear long-term strategies and goals, its managers are not held accountable for problems, and its financial controls do not comply with federal standards, the review found.
The findings raise uncertainties for the agency at a time when Washington expects it to enlarge its antidrug role. That is because the F.B.I. is moving 400 agents off drug cases to terrorism, and the drug agency is being asked to pick up the slack.
Officials at the agency and its parent, the Justice Department, said the agency was working to address many of the concerns in the report. They said the report was more a reflection of the agency's failure to communicate its successes than its ability to fight drug trafficking.
"It's not that we're doing things wrong or we've been ineffective," a spokesman, Will Glaspy, said. "It's more that we just need to do a better job of defining our accomplishments."
Officials at the agency pointed to a growing number of seizures for some types of drugs along with the reduced purity of street drugs as evidence of their success in squeezing suppliers out of business.
Critics say that drug purity has increased and that drugs have become easier to buy than ever before. President Bush acknowledged in his report on drug strategy for 2002 that use among young people was at "unacceptably high levels" and that "in recent years we have lost ground" in reducing illegal use.
The report on the agency was one of 234 that the Office of Management and Budget completed for 20 percent of the programs and agencies as it tries for the first time to assign standards and criteria to budget review.
Officials stressed that the criticisms were not uncommon. Like the agency, half the programs reviewed received overall ratings of "results not demonstrated."
Still, the severity of the report on the drug agency caught law enforcement officials off guard because of the agency's prominence, size and generally solid reputation in fighting trafficking. Unlike sister agencies like the F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the drug agency has largely avoided major scandals and calls for reform from members of Congress. It has enjoyed generally strong support on Capitol Hill, and its former director, Asa Hutchinson, who left last week to join the Homeland Security Department, was popular among conservatives in Congress.
With that support, the agency has seen its budget more than double since 1995, according to the Justice Department. But in the White House budget released on Monday, the financing is to remain essentially flat at $1.56 billion.
Its growth of less than 1 percent is dwarfed by increases in financing at other law enforcement agencies of 10 percent or more. Mr. Glaspy said it represented the smallest increase for the agency since 1988.
The performance assessments for the drug agency and other bureaus "were one factor, but clearly not the only factor in funding decisions," said Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House on the budget.
The overarching concern in financing law enforcement, officials said, is the need to make counterterrorism the top priority. The Bush administration has sought to link drug use to the threat of terrorism, and other Justice Department drug enforcement programs received proposed increases of up to 10 percent in the budget. But the drug agency will be asked to scale back spending in areas like community enforcement even as it seeks to add agents on the street, officials said.
"When you're fighting a war against terrorism, there is not an infinite amount of money to go around," an official at the Justice Department said. "We are putting significant funds into the war against drugs. But we have to be realistic as to what we can afford."
Critics said the critique of the agency was long overdue and could start a debate about how the war on drugs is working.
"The emperor has no clothes," said Eric F. Sterling, the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Silver Spring, Md., and a specialist on drug enforcement. The White House report "should really shake up our national revelry with drug enforcement and generate a major re-evaluation of our antidrug efforts."
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group in New York that promotes alternative policies, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by the findings.
"Typically," Mr. Nadelmann said, "the D.E.A. has gotten a pretty free ride. Nobody was really held to account for the issue of reducing overall drug use. But this suggests some measure of seriousness about actually putting in a set of real criteria."
Growin' Our Own (page 5)
Strawberry fields - was it real?
By: Denny
Fresno 1966, friends were being shipped off to Viet Nam. I was a junior in high school. When you scored pot back in those days, it was like a Federico Fellini movie. You paid first then set up a time and a location for the drop. Of course, back then weed came in small match box containers. The price for one match box was five bucks. All you needed next was a pack of yellow wheat straw papers and you were set to have yourself a great experience.
I remember the first time scoring. We lived near an open field and the guy that said he could get some Mary Jane, that's what they called it back then, said he'd come by at about four o'clock in the afternoon and that the stuff would be in a match box. Well, I thought that he would come up to the door like a friend would, come in and make the transfer in a discreet manner.
He was older than I was and he had a funny name, Blade. Anyway, four o'clock comes around so I go out in the front yard and here comes Blade, in a beat up old pale blue 1963 Corvair. I see him driving down the street toward me at about forty five miles an hour, then passes right by me and flings something out of the window into the field next door to us and never took his foot off the pedal nor did he looked back.
Paranoia was not a commonly used term back in those days. So I'm thinking maybe there is something wrong here, maybe he's a cop or an informer or something and I am being watched. Well, I wait awhile and look around, then decide that maybe that's just the way it's done. So I head over to the field and start looking for the small red match box container. I finally spot it and kind of take a quick look around to see if anyone is watching, then pretend to drop something and pick it up. Not very clever, but whatever. I walk back to my house and head directly to my room to examine the contraband. I slid open the match box and there it was, a finely manicured compact golden little bar of Acapulco Gold. We didn't know the difference back then. It was the first time I had ever scored or smoked pot.
Later that year a good friend of ours, Bill, had better connections, so my friend Tom and I got a bag of some lime green weed from him. Crystals shining like the Heavens above. He said it was from Oaxaca, Mexico. And it sure was light green in color. As fragrant as any smoke on the market today.
It was a Friday night and my girlfriend, Susan, and I called up Tom and asked if he wanted to go out to the walnut orchards near Fresno State College and listen to music and talk and party and basically have a good time. We brought the whole lid with us which, back then cost ten dollars. I had just purchased a portable turntable, battery operated, and brought along the new Beatles album with Strawberry Fields Forever on it. We drove Tom's Volkswagen beetle down a dirt road, way out in the middle of nowhere, thinking that we were safe from getting busted for smoking the 'evil weed.' I set up the record player in the back part of the beetle and start playing the Beatles. We rolled a couple of joints, smoked one and had a few laughs. Then at some point Tom and I got paranoid and decided to bury the bag of weed in the orchard, not really taking careful consideration on the exact location of where we hid the booty. We were really stoned. So we're talking and listening to the Beatles and the song Strawberry Fields comes on and we're digging it and right at the part where the music starts to change and really starts sounding different, we look out across the field and see five or six guys in white t-shirts running toward us as fast as they can. There wasn't a moon so it was really hard to see more than a few hundred yards away. The music is blaring and it seems unreal. We think we are hallucinating this but the figures are getting closer and closer. We freak out and look at each other, then turn and run to the car and jump in and within seconds Tom has the car started and slams it into first gear and punches it. The record screeches and all we could hear is the four cylinders gunned to the max.
Tom looks in his rear view mirror and sees a guy running right there at the back of the car trying to grab the bumper or something. And I looked to one side and see another dude off to the right of us running and trying to get into our car. Our hearts were pounding and the blood was rushing to our brains. I don't think we've ever been so scared in our lives. Of course we thought the worse, we thought we were going to get murdered or some God awful thing.
The funny thing about this story is that to this very day, I'm really not quite sure that there were really some guys out there chasing us or if it was a real hallucination that all three of us saw together. One thing I do know is this- I'm glad we hightailed it out of there that night. Better safe than sorry.
The next day Tom and I went back to the same place to get the lid that we had stashed. It took a while but we did find it. And the whole time heading out there we were wondering if we just freaked out the night before or if it was real, because if it was real then, maybe, we wouldn't be here right now to tell this story.
Pipeline (page 5)
Words of wit
By: Daryllisauris
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backwards: NAIVE
Isn't making a smoking section in a restaurant like making a peeing section in a swimming pool?
OK... so if the Jacksonville Jaguars are known as the "Jags" and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are known as the "Bucs", what does that make the Tennessee Titans?
If 4 out of 5 people Suffer from diarrhea ... does that mean that one enjoys it?
There are three religious truths:
1) Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.
2) Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith.
3) Baptists do not recognize each other in the liquor store or at Hooters.
If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes?
Why do we say something is out of whack? What's a whack?
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
When someone asks you, "A penny for your thoughts" and you put your two cents in . . . what happens to the other penny?
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? Aren't they just stale bread to begin with?
When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a race car not called a racist?
Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety one?
"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?
If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?
Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks?
What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me . . . they're cramming for their final exam.
I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks, so I wondered what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?
Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the mailmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?
If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
No one ever says, "It's only a game" when their team is winning.
Ever wonder what the speed of lightning would be if it didn't zigzag?
Last night I played a blank tape at full blast. The mime next door went nuts.
If a cow laughed, would milk come out of her nose?
MEDICAL MARIJUANA convictions appeals assistance in California. Recorded medical conditions only, with or without Dr. recommendation. For details contact our lawyer.
Dakota Joseph Arts
American Indian Art
P.O. Box 981
Auberry, California 93602
KeNa Productions. For all your website needs. Emphasizing fast load times, usability, browser compatibility, standards compliance and high quality graphics.
The Whipping Post. Not for the politically correct. Riveting commentary to engage, enrage, enlighten and inflame.