Search Results: fbi (94)

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Sammy Flores Jr. was born in 1971 and given the name of his father, Samuel Flores Sr., who happened to be one of the largest marijuana trafficking kingpins in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Junior was quick to follow in his father’s shady footsteps.
After his father was riddled with bullets by Mexican police at a dusty roadside checkpoint in Guadalajara in the fall of 1985, Flores fell into a life of crime of his own. Just three months after his old man was gunned down, Flores was arrested at the Pittsburgh airport carrying $17,000 in cash and a silenced .22 caliber pistol after having just completed a 205 pound weed sale in the city.

USDOJ


Update – 10:00 a.m. 5/21/2014: FBI Director James Comey has pulled a 180 today, announcing that he is in no way loosening the agency policy on marijuana use. Comey has indicated that his comments were a joke (an unfunny joke that basically stereotypes all young people and computer hackers as pot users). Comey retracted his comments today at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting after being grilled by Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions.
“I am absolutely dead-set against using marijuana,” Comey said today. “I did not say that I am going to change that ban.” Original story below.

Weed Quotes

The District of Columbia’s long-awaited medical marijuana program took a big step forward this week when officials issued occupancy permits for DC’s first marijuana cultivation center and dispensary. Both locations are less than three miles from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The step was widely viewed as one of the last hurdles to a working medical marijuana program that almost 70 percent of DC voters approved in a referendum 14 years ago, reports In The Capital. Congress spent years blocking funding for the program before finally getting out of the way after President Obama was elected. Then a tortuous three-year regulatory process began, which has only recently been completed.

The November Coalition

Report Shows Continued Arrests Near Record Levels While Use Rises
 
Marijuana arrests continued at near-record levels in 2011, the vast majority of which were for simple possession. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, 757,969 arrests were made nationwide for marijuana, more than 87 percent of which were for possession. This is a slight decrease from 2010.
Marijuana arrests accounted for slightly less than half of all drug arrests last year. In 2011, one American was arrested for marijuana possession every 42 seconds.
Despite intensive law enforcement resources being used to arrest and punish marijuana users, rates of marijuana use continue to rise. The “National Survey on Drug Use and Health” — commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and released in late September — showed that marijuana use had slightly increased nationally between 2010 and 2011. According to the report, more than 29.7 million people aged 12 and older used marijuana at least once in the past year.

Weed Quotes

Half Of All American Drug Arrests Are For Cannabis; New Stats Reveal Failure Of “War On Drugs”
Just over one week before voters in three states will decide on ballot measures to legalize and regulate marijuana, the FBI on Monday released a new report showing that police in the United States arrest someone for marijuana every 42 seconds, and that 87 percent of those arrests are for possession alone.
Monday’s FBI report shows that 81.8 percent of drug arrests were for possession only, and just under half (49.5 percent) of all drug arrests were for marijuana.
A group of police, judges and other law enforcement officials advocating for the legalization and regulation of marijuana and other drugs pointed to the figures showing more than 750,000 marijuana arrests in 2011 — more than 40 years after the start of the “War On Drugs” — as evidence that this is a war that can never be won. With more than 1.5 million total drug arrests drug arrests being reported in the U.S. in 2011, that’s one drug arrest every 21 seconds.

East County Magazine

​A new FBI report released on Monday shows that there is a drug arrest every 19 seconds in the United States. That’s right, three people a minute, 180 people an hour, 4,320 people a day.

A group of police and judges who have been campaigning to legalize and regulate drugs pointed to the figures showing more than 1.6 million drug arrests in 2010 as evidence that the War On Drugs — really a war on U.S. citizens — is a failure that can never be won.
“Since the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’ 40 years ago we’ve arrested tens of millions of people in an effort to reduce drug use,” said Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore narcotics cop who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). “The fact that cops had to spend time arresting another 1.6 million of our fellow citizens last year shows that it simply hasn’t worked.

Photo: Mail Online

​A Miami police officer was arrested by the FBI on Thursday and charged with possession of cocaine and marijuana he had stolen from a drug dealer last year.

Roberto Asanza, 31, of Miami, a six-year veteran of the force, was charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, reports Jay Weaver at the Miami Herald. Asanza, a Marine veteran and 1998 graduate of Coral Park High, was released on a personal surety bond after his first appearance in federal court on Thursday.
Asanza faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. His lawyer — an assistant federal public defender named Kashyap Patel — declined to comment.

Over the past several months, New Times dug into the backgrounds of the seven companies’ current and former owners, executives, and partners. These marijuana moguls include some of the state’s best-connected and savviest businesspeople. Many also have backgrounds that haven’t been explored in-depth. Among them are a real-estate developer once tied to political corruption, a hedge fund manager who recruited two gambling tycoons as investors, an attorney embroiled in a burgeoning Tallahassee FBI probe, a Gainesville entrepreneur who bought a franchise from one of the largest cannabis companies in Colorado, an ex-IBM executive, a Miami mortgage broker, and some of the largest nursery operators in Florida.

It currently sells a powerful opiate.

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek

The Intercept reports that Insys Therapeutics, the company that donated $500,000 to oppose REC in Arizona, is about to release a synthetic THC spray to relieve side effects associated with chemotherapy that would compete directly with MED. It’s been more widely noted that Insys’ only current product is an opioid spray. Insys noted in a 2007 SEC filing that legalization is a threat to its business.

Forbes surveys a list of cannabis-involved pharmaceutical companies that are takeover targets. Insys is among them.

Legalization troubles some cops.

Excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.

LA Weekly asked cops why they oppose the Adult Use Marijuana Act (AUMA) California’s REC ballot initiative. “This is not a law-enforcement jihad or Reefer Madness,” Ken Corney, Ventura’s police chief and president of the California Police Chiefs Association said. “Proposition 64 isn’t about green, leafy marijuana that people smoke at home or pass across the aisle at a concert. It’s a for-profit play to bring the commercialization of marijuana to California.”

The piece continues: “[Corney] subscribes to the theory, so far unproven, that the proposition’s biggest financial backer, Holmby Hills tech billionaire Sean Parker, is in it to open the door to Big Marijuana profits for rich folks like himself.”

The group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition endorsed AUMA.

Three Santa Ana, Calif. cops who were caught on video last year snacking and mocking an amputee (“I was about to kick her in her fucking nub”) during a dispensary raid are no longer with the department. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office has filed petty theft charges against the three officers.

The three had argued that they believed police had already disabled all of the cameras and therefore “had a reasonable expectation that their conversations and actions were no longer being recorded.”

Art Way, Colorado state director for Drug Policy Alliance writes:

Those with vested interest in the devaluation of black life and the criminalization of black                            communities need the drug war for political cover. Those who want to end state sanctioned                        murders should consider joining forces to end the drug war. 

This is a war waged to keep the black, brown and poor disenfranchised all while using their bodies as commodities for a prison industrial complex similar to the human commodification witnessed during slavery. ( H/T Word on the Tree )

A small but growing number of Canadian RCMP officers (the equivalent of FBI agents) are getting their MED reimbursed by the government.

In the Philippines, imprisoned drug lords have raised a $21 million reward for whoever kills the country’s new president Rodrigo Duterte. For his part, Duterte offers bounties of $1 million for drug lords killed and $600,000 for drug lords captured. According to his administration, 75 percent of the drugs in the country were manufactured inside its largest prison.

Industry hub Pueblo, Colo. has seen quite a few drug busts.

A Pennsylvania man has been charged with abuse of a corpse after blending weed with brain embalming fluid.

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