The Red Line: The Geopolitics of Tajikistan

 No country could possibly feel more like "the edge of the known world" than the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. A nation where the president has been in power since '92 and has ruled the country with an iron fist, amassing a huge amount of wealth for himself using everything from Aluminum to Heroine; but things are beginning to change and Dushanbe could very soon be answering to new masters. Tajikistan is the latest battleground between Beijing and Moscow, the winner of which is yet to be decided. This weeks panel Peter Leonard (Eurasianet) John Heathershaw (Exeter University) Edward Lemon (Oxus Society) Mathieu Boulegue (Chatham House) Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Or follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus More info at - www.theredlinepodcast.com Support the show at - https://www.patreon.com/theredlinepodcast

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The Red Line: Colombia (FARC, Paramilitarios and Cocaine)

 Colombia has always been closely associated with the international Cocaine trade, but the situation there is far more complicated with wider ramifications for the entire region. The government of Bogota has been at war with the rebels in a 6-way struggle for almost 60 years, with a peace deal now sitting on the table. Is this deal a workable peace though, or just the start of the next phase? We ask our expert panel. Alison Fedirka (Geopolitical Futures) Ted Piccone (Brookings Institution) Chris Sabatini (Chatham House) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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Vox: Weed was the real winner of the 2020 election

 On November 3, four American states voted to legalize marijuana: Arizona, New Jersey, Montana and South Dakota. Combined with the other states that have done so in recent years, one in three Americans now live in a state where access to marijuana has been legalized. It shows that Americans are souring on the harsh drug policies that have put millions of people in prison.

But America’s national drug policy is a different story. Under federal law, marijuana is still classified as a “schedule 1” drug, meaning it’s considered to have little medical value and a high risk of abuse, along with drugs like LSD, heroin, ecstasy and psilocybin mushrooms. In states where marijuana has been legalized, that conflict with federal law creates numerous problems for legal marijuana sellers and users. And few national politicians talk about legalizing marijuana throughout the country. But advocates are hoping that by introducing new state laws one by one, Americans who are ready to move on from the country’s decades-long war on drugs will eventually force the federal government’s hand.

OCCRP: What Lockdown? World’s Cocaine Traffickers Sniff at Movement Restrictions

But OCCRP reporters have found that the world’s cocaine industry — which produces close to 2,000 metric tons a year and makes tens of billions of dollars — has adapted better than many other legitimate businesses. The industry has benefited from huge stores of drugs warehoused before the pandemic and its wide variety of smuggling methods. Street prices around Europe have risen by up to 30 percent, but it is not clear how much of this is due to distribution problems, and how much to drug gangs taking advantage of homebound customers. [...]

As many countries begin partially reopening their economies, traffickers may now be in a position to become more powerful than ever. With economies in distress and many businesses facing ruin, cash-rich narcos may be able to cheaply buy their way into an even bigger share of the legitimate economy. [...]

Exports to the world’s other biggest cocaine market, Europe, have suffered even less disruption. Unlike exports to the United States, cocaine bound for Europe is typically moved in legal air and sea cargoes, especially fast-moving fresh goods such as flowers and fruit. The latter, as food, has continued to move unimpeded during the pandemic, helping feed Europe’s 9.1 billion euro-a-year cocaine habit. [...]

Perhaps as a response to increased seizures, the street price of cocaine has risen by 20 to 30 percent during the lockdown period from mid-February until the end of April compared to the same period last year, according to Sciuto of the DCSA. Six months, criminal groups in Europe paid 25,000 to 27,000 euros for a kilogram of cocaine; they now fork out 35,000 to 37,000 euros, he said, adding that Spanish police have noticed the same trend.

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The Guardian: How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war

A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night. [...]

The murders that occurred here happened in the middle of a truce that the government negotiated between the rival gangs, which was credited with halving the homicide rate. But the reality, the informant says, is that it taught them to hide their victims in clandestine graves such as these. Ticas was not formally trained in forensics, and many of the techniques he uses he discovered himself. But he is not the only one learning in the process. [...]

Rather than a problem to be deported away, however, the reality of the gang is considerably more complex. Born out of the ecology of Los Angeles’s fierce gang warfare, MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a brutal civil war still raging at home. In time, the gang expanded to include other nationalities, and it spread to other American cities. Today, in the US, it numbers no more than 10,000 members and functions mostly – its penchant for sensational violence aside – like an average American street gang, fighting to control neighborhood turf and local drug sales.

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WorldAffairs: MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence

How did El Salvador become one of the most violent countries on earth? And what role did the United States play in creating the notorious MS-13 gang? On this week’s episode, we explore the origins of El Salvador’s bloody gang war with journalist William Wheeler. Wheeler spoke with gang members, frustrated reformers, crime investigators and government officials to better understand the violence in the country and what is driving El Salvadorans northward and for his new book: “State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence.” He is in conversation with World Affairs executive producer Joanne Elgart Jennings.

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UnHerd: 2017: when the US woke up to its drugs shame

This was the year the US finally woke up to what was happening in its midst. There were 70,200 overdose deaths, a sharp rise on the previous year and more than the toll from guns, car crashes or AIDS at the peak of its epidemic. At least 10 million people were misusing opioids, wasting an estimated $80 billion from the economy.

The awful scale of abuse and addiction raises issues over prohibition, exposing the futility of trying to curb the flow of illicit drugs in a globalised world where chemists in Asia can cook up new drugs for immediate sale across the 50 states of America. The Dayton coroner told me his team would monitor the dark web to determine the products that would soon be found inside bodies in their morgue.

But it sparks other issues too: over the US health system, which leaves so many poorer people without healthcare to tackle problems. Over the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism, since the epidemic was fostered by a pharmaceutical firm pushing highly-addictive new painkillers and callous doctors signing dozens of daily prescriptions in ‘pill factories’. It has even provoked debate over rich philanthropists who profit from misery then launder their images with donations to major museums.[...]

The British Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton and his equally-brilliant wife Anne Case, economists at Princeton University who have tracked this plague of pointless fatalities among middle-aged white people, called them ‘deaths of despair’. They published a paper in 2017 called ‘Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century’. It revealed death rates of white people with no more than a high school diploma had grown to be 30% higher than those of black people — having been 30% lower at the turn of the century.

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Europe Elects: Portugal | Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 06 of October 2019 parliament election in Portugal.

Politico: Pass the Duchy: Luxembourg’s grand plan to legalize cannabis

Luxembourg, however, wants to go further and become the first country in the European Union to make cannabis completely legal. Its health ministry is slated to unveil a proposal to start the legislative process this fall, and the goal is for it to become law within two years. [...]

One of the main advocates is Health Minister Etienne Schneider, who cites health reasons as the most important driver. He said young people are already getting weed on the black market, coming into contact with drug dealers who provide cannabis of unknown quality, and getting access to more potentially dangerous drugs. [...]

A possible playbook for Luxembourg is the U.S. state of Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational cannabis. Legalization advocates say that they chose to frame the issue so that voters view pot the same the way they view alcohol — a substance that is widely available and socially acceptable. [...]

"In Germany, there is a consensus that there is a reason why medical cannabis is allowed and that there are patients who benefit from it," Goetz said. "So there's no reason for prohibiting that. But there is definitely not a consensus yet on legalizing it for recreational use."

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WorldAffairs: What Comes Next? How the World's Most Violent Places Recover

The most violent places today are not at war. Eighty-three percent of all violent deaths occur outside of conflict zones, and in 2015, more people died violently in Brazil than in Syria’s civil war. Yet multiple places which were once engulfed in violence and instability have recovered and have since formed stable democracies. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security", joins Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, in conversation about how violent and weak states transform into stable ones.

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UnHerd: Scotland’s drug shame

Data recently published has revealed that in Scotland, drug-related deaths rose by a shameful 27% last year to 1,187. That means the death-toll in Scotland was equivalent to five Lockerbie bombings or fifty 7/7s. It is nearly three times that of the UK as a whole, and, per capita, the drug death rate in Scotland is higher than that of the U.S. Yet no national emergency has been declared. [...]

And the cause has baffled many. Myself included. It may be attributable to a number of factors, including the sharp managed-decline of the industries around which many working-class communities formerly cohered. The mechanisms by which they once lifted themselves out of poverty were sacrificed on the altar of the free-market and replaced with Frankie and Benny’s, American-style shopping malls, casinos and, in Dundee (the drug-death capital) a world-leading design museum — partly funded by the billionaires implicated in the U.S. opioid crisis. [...]

My theory is that the drug problem is worse in Scotland for the same reason the drink, cigarette and life-expectancy problems are worse: the severity of deindustrialisation was that much more acute north of the border because we lacked the political autonomy to mitigate its impact in context-specific ways. Then again, I’m not an academic. Maybe it’s just the weather that’s killing everyone. [...]

Where the U.S. led, Scotland followed. Research published by Scottish Universities in 2018 found that 18% of the Scottish population was prescribed at least one opioid painkiller in 2012 and that “there were four times more prescriptions for strong opioids dispensed to people in the most deprived areas, than to those in the most affluent areas”. Every bit of data available points to a large increase in the prescription of addictive painkillers like co-codamol and tramadol over the last 10-years in the very communities where people are dying.

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VICE: Indonesian Prison Officials Believe Inmates Are 'Turning Gay' After Sleeping Next To The Same Sex

The latest bout of LGBTQ discrimination is ongoing in West Java’s prisons. District office head of Indonesia’s Ministry of Law and Human Rights, Liberti Sitinjak, claims “deviant sexual acts” are becoming more rampant among prisoners in his area. This allegation is based on the discovery of same-sex relationships in detention centers. [...]

Sitinjak said the solution to overcapacity is to stop incarcerating people for minor offenses, like drug use. Send them to rehab instead, he suggested. Sounds pretty progressive, right? Not so fast. His aims are conservative at their core, because with less prisoners and more space in cells, inmates won’t have to sleep so close to each other, which according to Sitinjak, means less homosexuality. [...]

Sitinjak did get one thing right: there are too many offenders in West Javanese jails and prisons. In fact, 60 percent of inmates in West Java are incarcerated for drug use. Indonesia’s criminal law needs an update, considering minor drug offenses can earn you a three-year sentence.

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Vox: North Dakota quietly decriminalized marijuana

As the news outlet Marijuana Moment and the advocacy group NORML reported, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a bill decriminalizing marijuana last week — but the issue got little to no attention from his office or news media. The law makes it so first-time possession of up to half an ounce of marijuana is no longer a criminal misdemeanor that carries the potential for jail time, but instead is an infraction that only carries a fine. [...]

The concern for legalization advocates is that decriminalization keeps the ban on selling marijuana, which means users wouldn’t have a legal source for the drug, and criminal organizations would therefore still have a source of revenue that they can use for violent operations around the world. The fines, while less punitive than arrests or prison time, can also cause problems, since they’re often applied in a racially disparate manner. [...]

Supporters of legalization argue that it eliminates the harms of marijuana prohibition: the hundreds of thousands of arrests around the US, the racial disparities behind those arrests, and the billions of dollars that flow from the black market for illicit marijuana to drug cartels that then use the money for violent operations around the world. All of this, legalization advocates say, will outweigh any of the potential downsides — such as increased cannabis use — that might come with legalization.

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Vox: Denver may become the first US city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

The initiative would not legalize magic mushrooms; they’d remain illegal under state and federal law. And it wouldn’t decriminalize or deprioritize the distribution and sales of psilocybin mushrooms — all of that could still be pursued by police. [...]

Advocates for the measure argue that decriminalization would shift law enforcement resources away from pursuing nonviolent offenses. They claim that psilocybin is safe, nonaddictive or close to nonaddictive, and that a growing body of evidence suggests the drug has therapeutic benefits for illnesses ranging from depression to end-of-life anxiety to addiction. [...]

Still, decriminalization alone may have its benefits. A 2009 report from the libertarian Cato Institute, written by Glenn Greenwald, concluded that decriminalization freed people from the “fear of arrest” when they sought help for their addiction and “freed up resources that could be channeled into treatment and other harm reduction programs.”

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The Atlantic: Trump the Toddler

Twenty days into a partial government shutdown, the impact on government workers, their families, and basic services is coming into view. Food is not being inspected. Transportation Security Administration workers are calling in sick rather than working without pay. Millions could be evicted from their home, hundreds of thousands of workers are about to miss their paycheck, and tens of millions could lose food assistance. All because the president isn’t getting his way. [...]

What makes this shutdown distinctly Trumpian is not only that the president has taken credit for it, but that it was provoked by his most reliable trigger, being humiliated by a woman. Democrats and Republicans had already negotiated a deal to fund the government and border security without the wall. But after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Trump that he lacked the votes to pass a bill with money for a wall and Ann Coulter mocked him, Trump erupted and demanded that the lame-duck Republican House pass funding for a wall, scuttling the deal. When Trump met with Democrats on Wednesday and they repeated that they will not fund his wall, the president said “Bye-bye” and walked out. Making maximalist demands, offering nothing in return, and then withdrawing in anger the second those demands are not met is a child’s strategy for getting what he wants.

Others have already pointed out that the empirical case for the wall is thin. Despite what the administration has argued, most drugs come to the United States through ports of entry; terrorists fly to the U.S. rather than engaging in dangerous, grueling overland treks over thousands of miles to enter from the southern border; and the wall won’t halt the smuggling or illegal entries it is designed to stop. It would, however, be a massive, official symbol of American hostility toward immigrants of Latin American descent, which is why it matters so much to both Trump and his fiercest supporters.

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Nautilus Magazine: Against Willpower

More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths—like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether.  [...]

The specific conception of “willpower,” however, didn’t emerge until the Victorian Era, as described by contemporary psychology researcher Roy Baumeister in his book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. During the 19th century, the continued waning of religion, huge population increases, and widespread poverty led to social anxieties about whether the growing underclass would uphold proper moral standards. Self-control became a Victorian obsession, promoted by publications like the immensely popular 1859 book Self-Help, which preached the values of  “self-denial” and untiring perseverance. The Victorians took an idea directly from the Industrial Revolution and described willpower as a tangible force driving the engine of our self-control. The willpower-deficient were to be held in contempt. The earliest use of the word, in 1874 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in reference to moralistic worries about substance use: “The drunkard ... whose will-power and whose moral force have been conquered by degraded appetite.” [...]

A paradigmatic example of reframing is the phenomenon of “temporal discounting,” in which people tend to discount future rewards in favor of smaller immediate payoffs. When offered $5 today versus $10 in a month, many people illogically choose immediate gratification. However, when the question is reframed to make the tradeoffs explicit—“Would you prefer $5 today and $0 in a month or $0 today and $10 in a month?”—more people choose the larger, delayed reward. Research suggests that reframing the question in this way nudges people toward delayed gratification because the different versions of the question employ entirely different cognitive processes. In a neuroimaging study, when the question is edited to explicitly mention $0, not only are the brain’s reward responses reduced, brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a correlate of effortful self-control) decreases as well.5 A conscientious reframing of a problem in this manner would certainly be an example of willpower, but it would not fall into the conventional understanding of the term. Rather than relying on an effortful fight against impulses, this kind of willpower has the individual completely reimagine the problem and avoid the need to fight in the first place. [...]

Doing so would rid us of some considerable moral baggage. Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of personal discipline. An extreme example is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use problems as primarily the result of individual choices. Unhealthy moralizing creeps into the most quotidian corners of society, too. When the United States started to get concerned about litter in the 1950s, the American Can Company and other corporations financed a “Keep America Beautiful” campaign to divert attention from the fact that they were manufacturing enormous quantities of cheap, disposable, and profitable packaging, putting the blame instead on individuals for being litterbugs. Willpower-based moral accusations are among the easiest to sling.

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Haaretz: Executions in Saudi Arabia Have Doubled Under Crown Prince, Watchdog Says

Reprieve said there have been nearly 700 executions in Saudi Arabia since 2014. There were an average of 13 executions a month this year, although that number peaked in July when 27 people were executed – including seven on a single day. [...]

Reprieve Director Maya Foa said: “Despite promises of reform from the crown prince, the kingdom is executing drug offenders at an alarmingly high rate, and at least 30 people – including some arrested as teenagers – face imminent execution for exercising their democratic rights. [...]

Nearly 40 percent (58 people) of those executed in 2018 were convicted of drugs offenses, with 77 percent of them foreign nationals. Overall, 49 percent of the people executed this year were foreign nationals

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CityLab: Luxembourg’s New Deal: Free Transit and Legal Weed

Luxembourg rarely gets much international attention. But last week, the government of the Rhode-Island-sized nation-state made some dramatic policy announcements. Last Thursday, a new ruling coalition announced that the landlocked Grand Duchy would be the first country in the world (just ahead of Estonia) to make its public transit entirely free at point of use.

If that groundbreaking announcement weren’t enough, the coalition also confirmed that it would boost Luxembourg’s monthly minimum wage by €100 ($114), give everyone two more days off a year, and legalize recreational cannabis by 2023. [...]

Right now, for example, public transit is practically free: A two-hour ticket on the railways costs €2 (or €3 in first class), while an all-day pass costs €4. Young people and students, meanwhile, already travel free. These nominal charges only generate €30 million of revenue annually for a system that costs a little under €1 billion to run, so it’s no great leap to dispense with charging at point of use altogether. Dispensing with the need for tickets also cuts the costs incurred selling and checking them, and the revenue shortfall will be partly recouped by cancelling a commuter subsidy. The hope is that the law will ultimately pay off in other ways, by reducing direct costs for citizens and getting cars off the road when they travel. [...]

The minimum-wage raise and extra holidays, meanwhile, might sound like populist pie in the sky to Americans. But in Luxembourg, it’s just an extra cherry on top of an already generous layer cake of progressive working conditions. Working weeks are already short (an average of 1,512 working hours per year in 2015, compared to 1,783 in the U.S. and 1,676 in the U.K.) and conditions especially flexible. Creating a new national holiday and adding a day to the country’s statutory minimum will bring the total number of days off employees must receive (excluding national holidays) up to 26. With the total national holidays now at 11 days, that means all Luxembourg workers can expect 37 paid days off a year. And the minimum wage in Luxembourg is already quite high. With different minimum categories depending on age and qualification, its current lowest rate for workers over 18 is €2,084.54 ($2,364) a month.

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Axios: Marijuana legalization, daylight savings and other notable measures passed in the midterm elections

Marijuana legalization: Michigan became the 10th state to legalize marijuana — including the District of Columbia — and first midwestern state to do so for recreational use. North Dakota rejected a similar measure, but voters in Missouri approved the legalization of medical marijuana.

Abortion: The matter was on the ballot in three states. In Oregon, voters defeated a measure that would have banned the use of public funds to pay for abortion coverage. Alabama and West Virginia approved sweeping anti-abortion language to the states’ constitution, proclaiming that women have no right to perform the procedure.[...]

Daylight saving: Californians decided they no longer want to reset clocks twice a year. A measure they approved would implement a permanent year-round daylight saving time. But, it requires a two-thirds vote from the state legislature and a change in federal law to go into effect.

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UnHerd: Why I regret my war on drugs

In 1961, when I was ten years old, Britain signed the United Nations Single Convention on Drugs committing all member states to a global prohibition on production, supply and use of certain drugs for non-medical use. Xenophobia was the foundation of the convention, identifying those who were associated with the use of cannabis, opium and cocaine – namely Hispanics, Chinese and Afro-Americans.

Ten years later, the Labour Party supported the passing of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. It has continued to support drug prohibition ever since – in government and in opposition – although this pernicious policy has brought distress to millions and death to tens of thousands.

Prohibition, though, was a failure. You just have to look at the number of overdose deaths in Britain compared with countries that have moved from punishment to treatment, such as Portugal, to see this approach has been catastrophic. It created a fiercely hostile environment, acted as a barrier to troubled individuals seeking help and, in the process, hugely damaged the criminal justice system. [...]

Relying on prohibition as the main policy tool gifted the drugs trade to criminals, creating a free and uncontrolled black market in which the biggest profits went to the most violent players. Meanwhile, we criminalised generations caught up in drugs, betraying people who should have been able to look to the Labour Party for a way out of their abandoned hell. [...]

For every pound we spend fighting the drug war, we have to spend many more just to clear up the mess. It is a terrible irony that the Home Office is pursuing a policy that creates half of all property crime and channels a vast income stream towards organised criminals. And the war on drugs is also filling our prisons. We currently have the highest prison population in Western Europe. And these prisons are awash with drugs, creating new addicts.

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