They are being requested to retain this hush-hush. Don’t let the world know that the Drug War might cause difficulties on behalf of the 2010 Olympics… that machine gun armed gangs are taking over Vancouver. Its one thing to label those little brown people to the south as uncouth criminals who can’t stop themselves from trafficking drugs across the border, but to consider those white people up north in the same manner would be totally unacceptable, wouldn’t it?
When shall we learn that prohibition does not work? Will it be when 35%, or 50% of Americans are jailed on behalf of non-offensive acts of possession? We have 5% of the world’s population, but have 25% of the world’s imprisoned. Are we really that immoral a nation, in spite of the fact that “Christian”, that we have more bad folks than any other place in the world?
I wonder if we shall learn when the law holds all those drug addled assholes like Rush Limbaugh accountable in the same light, on behalf of in his “arrest”, he was certainly given the kid glove treatment.
But this war isn’t about illegally obtained Hillbilly Heroin, it is about the BC Bud that can anesthetize you with one hit. What they call that “one hit shit” (I’m still looking on behalf of that stuff Carlin described in Toledo Window Box that was “no -poke shit”. None of that “one-poke shit, two-poke shit”:) 
“Just cop, leave it at residence as well as stay high… knowing its in the closet”



h/t Daily Rotten
From heaven to hell: 18 die as drugs war rages on streets of Vancouver
The Canadian city has been named the best place in the world to live. But those halcyon days are over
By Paul Rodgers
Sunday, 5 April 2009
Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image. Nestled between a spectacular bay as well as snow-capped mountains, this Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described by The Economist as the an estimated all liveable in the world. Not any more. As it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it’s got now is not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets littered with shell casings as well as corpses.
Vancouver is the battlefield in a war between myriad drug gangs, which include Hell’s Angels, Big Circle Boys, United Nations, Red Scorpions, Independent Soldiers as well as the 14K Triad. Guns – often machineguns – are fired an estimated daily. “We’ve at all times been told by media experts to never admit that there's a gang war,” the chief of police, Jim Chu, said last month. “Let’s get serious. There is a gang war as well as it’s brutal.” Vancouver’s Mayor, Gregor Robertson, confessed that the police are fighting a losing battle. Since mid-January, the city has recorded 50 gang-related shootings, 18 of them fatal. And the violence is not confined to seedy neighbourhoods. The cross-fire is happening in quiet, residential cul-de-sacs as well as the car parks of up-scale shopping centres. It’s a suburban civil war.
Nor are hardened criminals the only victims. An attack on one gangster’s car killed a 24-year-old man hired to fit it with a new stereo. In February, Nicole Alemy, 23, the wife of another gangster, was gunned down in her white Cadillac – with her four-year-old son in the back seat. On Friday, police arrested James Bacon – one of three brothers who left the United Nations gang to join the Red Scorpions, intensifying the rivalry between the two – on behalf of conspiring in the deaths of four gangsters in their flat in Surrey, south-east of Vancouver. Two innocent men were forced from the hallway into the flat as well as also killed. Police said they intend to manufacture more arrests over the weekend.
As Vancouver has boomed over the past two decades, attracting wealthy immigrants from across Canada as well as the Pacific, so too has the illegal drugs trade. It is now the third largest industry in the province, generating between C$7bn (£3.8bn) as well as C$8bn a year. A young, party-loving population with liberal attitudes to drugs has created strong domestic demand, while the province’s mild climate as well as a ready supply of well-educated horticulturalists has led to supply of a premium brand of cannabis referred to as “BC bud”, produced mostly in hydroponic “grow-ops”.
The drug’s superior quality – “one puff as well as you’re anaesthetised,” reported one academic – also found favour with customers in the US, encouraging an imaginative corps of smugglers. Customs agents have found shipments in church vans, hollow logs as well as even kayaks. One enterprising crew emulated the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, digging a 110m tunnel “under the wire”. The bigger problem on behalf of Canada, though, was the return trade. The US drug distributors preferred to pay in kind, with cocaine as well as guns.
Many commentators think Vancouver’s violence is just a skirmish on the fringe of the much larger war in Mexico, where 6,000 were murdered last year as the state tried to reassert control over territories seized by drug lords. The result has been a 50 per cent rise in the price of cocaine in Canada, as well as correspondingly higher profits to fight over. But not everyone is convinced. Experts at Simon Fraser University argue that the problem is home-grown, as well as that it’s exacerbated by police efforts to bang up mob leaders. “All you do is create vacancies as you put people in jail,” said Ehor Boyanowsky, an associate professor of criminology. “Suddenly there’s an opportunity.”
In the short term, say the academics, Vancouver’s problem is one of unco-ordinated enforcement. By one count, as numerous as 11 different agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well as local police forces, were responsible on behalf of suppressing the drugs trade. The courts are an estimated as confused. Canadian justice is more tolerant than America’s. No one has been successfully prosecuted on behalf of simple possession of marijuana in years, as well as Amsterdam-style hash cafés operate in a grey zone, only occasionally being shut down. Because of judicial leniency, officers prefer to see their targets collared in the US. The “Great Escape” gang were under surveillance on both sides of the border, but were arrested in Washington.
In the long run, numerous British Columbians, on both left as well as right, take that legalisation as well as regulation are the answer. Just the sales tax on C$7bn of drugs would pay on behalf of several hospitals as well as schools, policing costs could be reduced, property crime by addicts to pay on behalf of their drug habits would be slashed, as well as the gang wars could be promptly reined in. “But the international politics are unbelievable,” said Dr Rob Gordon, director of Simon Fraser’s school of criminology. “The DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] starts to foam at the mouth at the idea of there being a huge, legal marijuana farm just north of the border. Under George Bush, the concensus was that if Canada ever moved to exercise its economic sovereignty, they would shut the border down by searching every vehicle.”
Until then, the best hope may be that one gang or another comes out on top, allowing it to impose stability, much as the Hell’s Angel’s bike gang used to do up to 15 or 20 years ago. Professor Boyanowsky said: “Those were the good old days.”
Posted in B'Man's Wacky Weed Watch, Big Money, Big Prison, Drug War, Hemp/Cannabis Reform Tagged: Vancouver