The Jim Bakker Show

Philippine police chief fights back tears, pledges loyalty to Duterte

Philippine National Police chief Ronald Dela Rosa wipes his tears after answering questions, during a joint hearing session of the committee on public order and dangerous drugs and the committee on justice and human rights, at Senate headquarters in Pasay city, metro Manila, Philippines

By Manuel Mogato

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines’ police chief broke down before a Senate inquiry on Wednesday and vowed to stand by President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly war on drugs, after a narcotics kingpin testified to entrenched police involvement in the illicit trade.

Amid high drama in the televised hearing, an emotional Ronald dela Rosa grimaced and held back tears in animated remarks in which he promised to rid police ranks of crooked elements.

Dela Rosa, a stocky, celebrity-like general nicknamed “Bato” (Rock), was responding to hours of testimony from Kerwin Espinosa, a confessed drugs dealer and son of a mayor who was shot dead last month by police while in prison on remand for narcotics links.

“I will not surrender, I will clean up the national police,” Dela Rosa told senators.

“I will be with you,” Dela Rosa said of Duterte. “I will not abandon this fight even if the public is losing trust in the police.”

Parallel probes by both chambers of the Philippine legislature have been largely drab, though sometimes highly dramatic.

The panels have heard gripping witness accounts of all things from death squads and sordid affairs to corruption, murder and sex tapes. Participants have included convicted kidnappers, prison gangsters, an assassin and world boxing icon Manny Pacquiao.

In September, a self-proclaimed hit man testified to having heard Duterte order assassinations and to having watched him kill a man with a machine gun while a mayor in 1993. Duterte has rejected that as lies.

Close to 2,500 people were killed in the first four months of Duterte’s presidency, mostly in police operations and others by suspected vigilantes.

Duterte has resolutely defended the police and is outraged by Western and activist concerns that extrajudicial killings could be taking place.

Espinosa, who arrived at the hearing wearing a flak jacket, confessed to dealing in drugs and to paying police protection money. He accused two generals and numerous officers on his turf of complicity.

NO SUPERHERO

Dela Rosa vowed to do everything to stop it.

“I’m not superman, I’m an ordinary policeman,” he said. “But I’ll do my best to clean the police force even if it will cost my life. We will survive this.”

Central to the probes has been Senator Leila de Lima, who initiated and led the investigation into Duterte’s crackdown, but found herself ousted by his Senate allies. Days later, she was subject to a congressional investigation into Duterte’s accusations that she herself was involved in drugs deals while justice minister.

It did not stop there. Duterte has humiliated de Lima during speeches, accusing her of adultery, making a sex tape of her affair with her driver and bagman, and even recommending she hangs herself.

De Lima has petitioned the Supreme Court to muzzle Duterte.

Though she has admitted to the affair, she has rejected testimony by a string of criminals linking her to drugs deals.

Espinosa also implicated de Lima on Wednesday, saying he paid protection money to her driver on four occasions when she was in the cabinet.

De Lima denied knowing him and said his testimony was at gunpoint, under duress.

“May God forgive you for all your sins, and may God forgive you for all your lies about me,” she said.

In an interview last week, de Lima told Reuters she feared for her life, having stood up to a president who had a following of “diehard fanatics”.

“The president has a personal vendetta against me, and then it got worse because of my initiative … the Senate enquiry, into the extra-judicial killings,” she said.

“He has staged all of these personal attacks, revealing even my personal private life and portraying me as an immoral woman so that people would no longer believe me.”

(Additional reporting by John Chalmers; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Exclusive: Philippines police plan new phase in drugs war – sources

Police holding a tag for a man who was killed by a gunman

By Tom Allard and Clare Baldwin

MANILA (Reuters) – Signaling a shift in strategy in its blood-soaked war against drugs, Philippines police aim to reduce the killing of suspects and put more resources into arresting prominent people tied to the trade, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Project Double Barrel Alpha will put a stronger focus on arresting politicians, military, police, government officials and celebrities allegedly involved in narcotics, the sources said.

The new approach will be outlined on Tuesday at a meeting of police chiefs from each of the Philippines’ 18 regions at Camp Crame, the police headquarters north of the capital Manila, Philippines National Police spokesman Dionardo Carlos confirmed to Reuters.

The operation will be launched within days, Carlos said, adding he did not have further details of the new operation.

The meeting comes after what one of the sources familiar with details of the plan described as “intense” discussions among law enforcement officials about the wave of killings of drug suspects.

“We will give emphasis [to] arrests rather than neutralization,” said one of the sources.

Asked why the new approach is being taken now, he said: “It is related to the EJK issue. We are doing our best to address that … It was a collective decision after an intense discussion of the implications of the EJK issue.” He did not elaborate on who was involved in the decision-making.

“Neutralization” is a euphemism for the killings that have characterized the anti-drugs drive. EJK refers to extrajudicial killings.

A recent poll showed public unease over the deadly anti-drug campaign, with 94 percent of the respondents saying it was important for the police to take suspects alive.

Another component of Project Double Barrel Alpha will see police working with community leaders to clear neighborhoods of drugs and set up local rehabilitation programs.

‘NARCO STATE’

Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte had given police six months to suppress drugs and crime, warning the country was on the verge of becoming a “narco state”. He then extended the campaign, called “Project Double Barrel” another six months to make it a year.

In less than four months since taking office, almost 2,300 people have been slain in the crackdown, according to official figures, revised down from earlier estimates of 3,600.

The majority of the deaths – more than 1,600 – were during police operations, drawing sharp criticism from Western governments, the United Nations, human rights groups and some Catholic priests.

“If you know any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” Duterte told supporters the day after he took office on June 30 this year.

Duterte’s comments were condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard. “It is effectively a license to kill,” she said.

At other times, however, Duterte has said he doesn’t endorse extrajudicial killings or vigilante murders of drug suspects.

“Who killed them? I don’t know but why are they pointing at me, blaming me for those deaths,” Duterte said earlier this month.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella told Reuters:

“Everything that the president said was always in the context of sticking within the law.”

WAR ON POOR

For months, Duterte has also talked about cracking down on major drug dealers, government officials and prominent Filipinos who use drugs, take bribes from drug syndicates or are directly involved.

He has read out the names of 158 government officials with alleged links to illicit drugs. He has also boasted of a broader list of about 1,000 drug suspects.

Police have said they are compiling a list of celebrities accused of being drug users and peddlers.

Now Project Double Barrel Alpha will start going after the big names in the illegal drug trade, or “high value targets”, the sources familiar with the plan said.

Thus far, the counter-narcotics campaign has focused overwhelming on impoverished drug users and small-time dealers, prompting criticism that it’s a war on the poor.

In recent years, government officials who have been arrested for drugs are more likely to be set free than serve any prison time.

Data from the Philippines Department of Justice reviewed by Reuters shows that 715 officials were arrested between 2011 and 2016 on drug matters, including “law enforcers”, elected officials and government employees. Of those, 74 per cent had their cases dismissed, or were acquitted. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

CLEARING BARANGAYS

Another element of Project Double Barrel Alpha, was what one source described as a “Barangay Clearing Operation”, where police will work more closely with local authorities and residents to “systematically” rid neighborhoods of drugs and place more emphasis on rehabilitation.

About 27 percent of barangays – the more than 42,000 districts or villages that comprise the lowest tier of government in the Philippines – were deemed drug-affected as of September 2016, according to police and anti-narcotics enforcement data.

Once community leaders declare an area drug-free, the chief of police will certify it as such.

The military will be involved in the clearing operation, providing what one source described as “perimeter security” and intelligence.

Philippines military spokesman Brigadier General Restituto Padilla would not comment directly on any greater involvement of the military in the anti-drugs campaign. He told Reuters the armed forces would step in where police numbers were “lean” and when they were asked to become involved.

If armed forces personnel did arrest people, it was only where “law enforcement officers are not in the locality,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Karen Lema and Manuel Mogato in Manila.; Editing by Bill Tarrant.)

Bullets trump rehab as Asia quickens failing war on drugs

Men inject heroin into their arms along a street in Man Sam, northern Shan state, Myanmar

By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Antoni Slodkowski

BANGKOK/YANGON (Reuters) – The Philippines has launched a bloody “war on drugs” that has killed at least 2,400 people in just two months, while neighboring Indonesia has declared a “narcotics emergency” and resumed executing drug convicts after a long hiatus.

In Thailand and Myanmar, petty drug users are being sentenced to long jail terms in prisons already bursting at the seams.

The soaring popularity of methamphetamine – a cheap and highly addictive drug also known as meth – is driving countries across Asia to adopt hardline anti-narcotics policies. Experts say they are likely to only make things worse.

Geoff Monaghan has seen it all before. He investigated narco-trafficking gangs during his 30-year career as a detective with London’s Metropolitan Police, then witnessed the impact of draconian anti-drug policies as an HIV/AIDS expert in Russia.

“We have plenty of data but often we forget the history,” said Monaghan. “That’s the problem.”

He believes President Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign in the Philippines will fuel more violence and entrench rather than uproot trafficking networks. “I’m very fearful about the situation,” he said.

Reflecting the regional explosion in use, the amount of meth seized in East and Southeast Asia almost quadrupled from about 11 tons in 2009 to 42 tons in 2013, said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The only region seizing more meth was North America, where the booming trade inspired the popular television series “Breaking Bad”.

Meth was the “primary drug of concern” in nine Asian countries, the UNODC said, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan and South Korea.

PLAYING CATCH-UP

A rising chorus of experts blame this surge in production and use of meth in Asia on ineffective and even counterproductive government responses.

They say national drug-control policies are skewed toward harsh measures that criminalize users but have failed to staunch the deluge of drugs or catch the kingpins behind it.

They also want a greater emphasis on reducing demand through more and better quality drug rehabilitation.

“There is so much scaremongering and hysteria surrounding the issue of drugs,” says Gloria Lai of the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a global network of 154 non-governmental groups. “That’s a disincentive for challenging old ways of thinking.”

Meth is a transnational business, worth around $15 billion in mainland Southeast Asia alone in 2013, the UNODC says.

Much of the production takes place in laboratories in lawless western Myanmar. Ingredients such as pseudoephedrine and caffeine are smuggled across porous borders from India, China and Vietnam.

Laos and Thailand are major trafficking routes, with the finished product traveling by road or along the Mekong River for distribution throughout Southeast Asia and China.

Meth is sold in cheap pills called “ya ba”, a Thai name meaning “crazy medicine”, or in a more potent, crystalline form known as “crystal meth”, “ice” or “shabu”.

Contraband is effectively hidden amid rising volumes of regional trade, leaving law enforcement to play catch-up, said Jeremy Douglas, the UNODC’s Asia Pacific chief.

“We need to start thinking about big-time regional engagement, up to the highest level. It’s impossible to deal with the problem on a country-by-country basis,” he said.

“I can’t recall the last time a major trafficking kingpin was caught.”

SOCIAL COST

The meth explosion carries huge social consequences: overburdened health services, overcrowded prisons, families and communities torn apart.

Small-time users and dealers bear the brunt of unsparing law enforcement that is popular in crime-weary communities. In mid-July, as drug war killings escalated in the Philippines, one survey put President Duterte’s approval rating at 91 percent.

Thailand launched an equally popular “war on drugs” in 2003 that rights activists said killed about 2,800 people in three months, a death toll later halved by a government-appointed inquiry. Figures show it had no lasting impact on meth supply or demand in Thailand.

“The world has lost the war on drugs, not only Thailand,” the country’s justice minister Paiboon Koomchaya told Reuters in July.

Paiboon hinted at a radical shift in policy, saying he wanted to reclassify meth to reduce sentences for possessing and dealing the drug.

For now though, Thailand continues to jail thousands of petty drug users, with about 70 percent of its 300,000 or so prisoners jailed on drugs offences, according to government data.

TOUGH TO TREAT

Meth addiction is tough to treat, ideally requiring costly and time-consuming counseling. Long-term use can cause changes in brain structure and function.

In March, U.S. President Barack Obama said drug dependency should be seen as “a public health problem and not a criminal problem”, part of a bid to roll back a “war on drugs” begun in the 1970s and now widely seen as a failure.

Policy in Asia is largely moving in the opposite direction, with drug rehabilitation underfunded and inadequate.

Less than 1 percent of dependent drug users in Indonesia got treatment in 2014, said the UNODC. Lacking alternatives, desperate Indonesians resort to herbal baths, Islamic prayer and other remedies of unproven efficacy.

“Rehab” in many countries often means detention at a state facility. In Thailand, thousands of users are held at army camps for four months. Relapse rates at drug detention centers range from 60-90 percent, says the World Health Organisation.

“Often, the government response causes more harm to an individual than the drug itself,” said the IDPC’s Lai.

Evidence shows that the most effective treatment is voluntary and community-based. A 2015 study in Malaysia found that half the people at compulsory centers relapsed within 32 days of release, compared with 429 days for those who had volunteered for treatment.

Tackling demand is complicated by meth’s broad appeal across different ages, professions and social classes.

In Myanmar, manual laborers claim that smoking ya ba boosts their stamina, while students say it boosts their grades.

A Yangon student who asked to be identified by the nickname “Nick” told Reuters at a grim state-run rehab clinic that he smoked ya ba to help him concentrate on his studies.

When asked how many of his fellow students also used it, Nick replied: “Almost all of them.”

(Additional reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre and Patpicha Tanakasempipat in Bangkok, Kanupriya Kapoor in Jakarta and Wa Lone in Yangon; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Obama cuts short prison sentences for 214 convicts

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at a Young African Leaders Initiative town hall in Washington, U.S

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama cut short the prison terms of 214 convicts on Wednesday, the largest number of commutations a U.S. leader has granted in single day since at least 1900, the White House said.

Obama has now granted a total of 562 commutations during his presidency, more than the number by the past nine presidents combined, it said. In Wednesday’s batch, 67 convicts were serving life sentences.

The convicts were serving time for crimes including possession of crack cocaine and methamphetamine, with intent to distribute. Some were imprisoned on charges of gun possession.

One of the convicts, James Wright of Baltimore, Maryland, was serving a 20 year sentence that began in 2006 for possession of crack with intent to distribute. He will be released in December.

Obama has worked to reform the U.S. criminal justice system and reduce the number of people serving long sentences for nonviolent drug offences. It is a rare issue on which Obama gets support from Republican lawmakers.

For years crack offenders faced stiffer penalties than powder cocaine offenders, even though the substances are similar at the molecular level. Critics have said the disparity has unfairly harmed minority and poor communities.

In 2014, Obama announced the most ambitious clemency program in 40 years, inviting thousands of drug offenders and other convicts to seek early release. But the program has struggled under a flood of unprocessed cases.

“Our work is far from finished,” White House counsel Neil Eggleston said about the commutations. Eggleston urged Congress to take action. “While we continue to work to act on as many clemency applications as possible, only legislation can bring about lasting change to the federal system,” he said.

The program automatically expires when Obama leaves office next January and it is uncertain whether the next president would continue with a similar plan. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in the Nov. 8 election, has championed “law and order” in his campaign. Democrat Hillary Clinton has called for criminal justice reform.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner and Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Andrew Hay and Steve Orlofsky)

The dark side of Philippines popular drug war

Jennelyn Olaires, 26, cradles the body of her partner, who was killed on a street by a vigilante group, according to police, in a spate of drug related killings in Pasay city, Metro Manila, Philippines

By Czar Dancel

MANILA (Reuters) – When the image of Jennelyn Olaires weeping as she cradled the body of her slain husband went viral in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte called it melodramatic.

There’s not much Duterte hasn’t said when it comes to his war on drugs, his only real election platform and his big promise to the 16 million Filipinos who swept him to power in May by a massive margin.

And “the punisher”, as he is known, has been true to his word.

Hundreds of suspected drug dealers have been killed since Duterte took office just one month ago. Six were assassinated in a single night in Manila, among them Michael Siaron, Olaires’s 29-year-old husband who was shot dead by unknown assailants on motorcycles.

“A friend called out that Michael was shot. I ran out to see him,” Olaires, 26, said in a rundown part of the capital’s Pasay area, with its ubiquitous slums, squatters and thieves.

“Thoughts were running in my mind. It can’t be you. You don’t deserve this. There are others who deserve this more than you,” she said, recalling the moment she discovered his body.

“If I only have wings, I will quickly fly to his side.”

(For a Wider Image photo series of Jennelyn Olaires, see http://reut.rs/2anBCTt)

Photographers surrounded her behind a police cordon as she held his body. A piece of cardboard was left next to his corpse with the word “pusher” written on it.

Dozens of similar killings have taken place almost daily in the Philippines, but with drugs and crime so deep-rooted, there is barely any public outrage.

Some 316 suspected drug dealers were killed from July 1-27, 195 of which were vigilante killings, according to police. Human rights groups estimate the body count to be at least double the official number.

‘KILL DRUGS, NOT PEOPLE’

Duterte has not condemned vigilante killings. He has previously promoted them.

The tough-talking former mayor of Davao City mentioned the image of Olaires holding her husband in his state of the union address on Monday and said media had tried to portray it as being like the Michelangelo’s Pieta, the sculpture of Mary holding the body of Jesus.

Olaires will bury her husband on Sunday. She concedes he was a drug user but says it is impossible he was a dealer because they were too poor and could barely pay for their next meal.

Siaron made money by riding a pedicab – a bicycle with a sidecar – and did odd jobs.

He even voted for Duterte in the May 9 election.

“They must kill the ones who don’t deserve to live anymore, the ones who are a menace to society. Because they cause harm to others. But not the innocent people,” she said.

“I don’t need the public’s sympathy. I don’t need the president to notice us.

“I know that he doesn’t like this kind of people. But for me, I just hope that they get the true offenders.”

Asked if she had a message to tell Duterte, she said: “kill drugs, not people.”

(Additional reporting by Erik De Castro; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Kim Coghill)

As Duterte takes over in Philippines, police killings stir fear

A member of the Philippine National Police stands guard as he detains people as part of the "Rid the Streets Of Drinkers and Youth" operation on a main road i

By Manuel Mogato and John Chalmers

MANILA (Reuters) – Two things catch the eye in the office of Joselito Esquivel, a police colonel enforcing a national crackdown on drugs in the Philippines’ most crime-ridden district: a pair of boxing gloves in a display cabinet and an M4 assault rifle lying beside him.

“It’s all-out war,” the Quezon City officer says of a spike in killings of suspected drug dealers by police across the country since last month’s election of Rodrigo Duterte, a tough-talking city mayor, as the country’s president. “Duterte has already given the impetus for this massive operation.”

Duterte has vowed to wipe out drug crime within six months but, according to Chito Gascon, head of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), the aggressive rhetoric behind his promises has already instilled a sense of impunity among the police.

“Basically, you have Mr. Duterte saying: ‘It’s okay, I’ve got your back’,” said Gascon.

On average, at least one person has been shot dead by police or anonymous vigilantes every day since the May 9 election that swept Duterte to power, an escalation from the first four months of the year when the rate was about two a week.

Handwritten warning signs have been left on some corpses.

Duterte, who will be inaugurated on Thursday for a six-year term, has cheered the police on: after a druglord was killed in a northern province recently, he traveled there to congratulate them and hand over a reward worth about $6,000.

Critics, including leaders of the influential Roman Catholic church and human rights advocates, fear a spiral of violence could lie ahead for the Philippines if vigilantism and summary executions become an accepted norm after Duterte takes office.

“My concern is that instead of law and order, what we will see is lawlessness and fear,” said Gascon. “What will result is an increase in the body-bag count.”

On Monday, Duterte branded as “stupid” human rights groups and lawmakers who have complained about his draconian plans to crush crime and re-introduce the death penalty.

“When you kill someone, rape, you should die,” he told his last public meeting as mayor of Davao City, where death squads have killed hundreds of drug-pushers, petty criminals and even street children since 1998, according to rights groups.

Duterte denies any involvement in the vigilante killings.

A political outsider whose coarse defiance of the traditional ruling class has drawn comparisons with Donald Trump, Duterte has even figured in commentaries on Britain’s vote to leave the European Union as an example of a global trend towards populism triumphing over the establishment.

POLICE COVERING THEIR TRACKS?

Duterte’s pick to be the country’s police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, concedes that some recent killings may have been carried out by officers involved in the drugs business who were covering their tracks so that the new president does not go after them.

“That could be true,” he told Reuters. “Some police officers are shifting from drug protectors to drug punishers.”

But dela Rosa added that so much work towards wiping out drug crime has been accomplished recently that his job will be easy when he takes over at the end of this week.

Railing against critics, he said most of the victims in the recent wave of killings were shot by police in self-defense.

“I have no problem how many people die in legitimate police operations, the police have a right to defend themselves,” he said. “We are police officers, we are not hard killers.”

Only two of the roughly 60 recent killings took place in Quezon City, a crowded and gritty part of sprawling Metro Manila that has the country’s highest crime rate. Most were in areas outside the capital that are less intensively policed.

Esquivel, the officer in Quezon City, said his force has also adopted a softer tack by inviting drug peddlers and addicts to surrender and go into rehabilitation. Just last week, over 1,000 gave themselves up there, he said.

Despite that gentler approach, police in the Philippines are open about their readiness to use guns.

Outside Esquivel’s headquarters there is a police firing range and a banner cheerily announces a monthly “shoot fest”, a contest for officers where sometimes winners receive a gun.

According to data from the University of Sydney, the number of guns in the Philippines is a small fraction of the total in the United States, but Filipinos seem much more inclined to use them.

Gun deaths per 100,000 people in the United States was at 10.54 in 2014, but the Philippines’ rate of 7.2 in 2008, the last year for which figures were available, was not far behind.

NARCO-STATE

Duterte has predicted that if the tide of drug addiction in the Philippines is not pushed back, it will become a narco-state.

In 2012, the United Nations said the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine use in East Asia, and according to a U.S. State Department report, 2.1 percent of Flipinos aged 16 to 64 use the drug, which is known locally as “shabu”.

There appears to be support in the Philippines for Duterte’s uncompromising line on criminals.

When a suspected rapist was killed in custody recently, the CHR raised concerns, but they were lost amid an outpouring of sympathy for the police on social and mainstream media.

Still, many people across the country are feeling anxious.

“There is a sense of fear because what was done to the hardened drug couriers, users and manufacturers could be done to you,” said Winston Boston, a 49-year-old financial adviser in Manila. “Anyone could just be accosted.”

(Additional reporting by; Neil Jerome Morales; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Heroin use at 20-year high in U.S. drug ‘epidemic’, U.N. says

By Shadia Nasralla

VIENNA (Reuters) – A heroin “epidemic” is gripping the United States, where cheap supply has helped push the number of users to a 20-year high, increasing drug-related deaths, the United Nations said on Thursday.

According to the U.N.’s World Drug Report 2016, the number of heroin users in the United States reached around one million in 2014, almost three times as many as in 2003. Heroin-related deaths there have increased five-fold since 2000.

“There is really a huge epidemic (of) heroin in the U.S.,” said Angela Me, the chief researcher for the report which was released on Thursday.

“It is the highest definitely in the last 20 years,” Me said, adding that the trend was continuing.

The rise could be linked to U.S. legislation introduced in recent years which makes it harder to abuse prescription opioids such as oxicodone, a powerful painkiller that can have similar effects to heroin, Me said.

The law meant the texture of the pills was changed to make it more difficult to crush them and inject them into the blood stream, Me said.

“This has caused a partial shift from the misuse of these prescription opioids to heroin.”

Another reason for the increase in the use of heroin, which in the United States mainly comes from Mexico and Colombia, is greater supply that has depressed prices in recent years, Me said.

The United States has also seen a spike in deaths related to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more so than morphine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fentanyl has been named as the drug that killed pop singer Prince this year.

At least 207,000 deaths globally were drug-related in 2014, with heroin use and overdose-related deaths increasing sharply also over the last two years, according to the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“Heroin continues to be the drug that kills the most people and this resurgence must be addressed urgently,” Yury Fedotov, the executive director of the UNODC, said.

U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year asked Congress for $1.1 billion in new funding over two years to expand treatment for users of heroin and prescription painkillers.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Sex Trafficking on American Indian Reservations – old problem, new name

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, who lives on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation, speaks at an anti-trafficking conference at the Fort Peck Community College in Montana, April 28, 2016.

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A victims’ advocate on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation figures she first saw sex trafficking more than a decade ago, a local nurse says it happened in her own family and a women’s counselor is sure she has seen it countless times.

But while it was sex trafficking, it had no name, they say.

Law enforcement, advocates and residents of Fort Peck, a vast, remote reservation of windswept plains in the U.S. state of Montana, say they have been seeing cases of sex trafficking for years without labeling them as such.

Tribal law at Fort Peck only added sex trafficking as a distinct crime earlier this year, distinguishing it from rape, sexual abuse or kidnapping, experts say.

Public awareness of the crime is critical, say activists who held a conference last month on recognizing trafficking on the reservation.

“We have to acknowledge and say that sex trafficking is happening in our communities,” said Toni Plummer-Alvernaz, a conference organizer.

“Native women are trafficking their relatives. People are often trading their bodies for drugs,” she said.

Colleen Clark estimates she has counseled some 8,000 victims of violence during her three decades working at the Red Bird Women’s Center in Wolf Point, the reservation’s largest town with a population of fewer than 3,000 residents.

“When I look back through those years, I can see where some of those women were victims of human trafficking,” Clark said.

“But we didn’t have a name for that then. There was not a whole lot of public awareness.”

Even now, numbers don’t tell the story, and there is little in the way of statistics to quantify what experts, advocates and authorities say is happening.

“Based on our investigation of trafficking on Fort Peck, the scope of the problem is far larger than any information we have so far in terms of statistics would reflect,” said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

She helped write the tribal law against trafficking.

Updating the law with trafficking will help in efforts to collect data and “demonstrate to the community and to other governments, to the public at large that there’s a problem here and it’s reaching crisis levels,” she said.

One obstacle is overcoming myths and stereotypes, experts said.

“The popular idea of what sex trafficking involves often is people chained to a basement, Russian women brought over to this country in container ships and sold into slavery,” Healey said. “But sex trafficking doesn’t look like that most of the time.”

It can simply involve a person being exploited for sex, someone buying the sex and someone else orchestrating the deal, she said.

“There’s no movement across borders or physical confinement necessary,” she said.

UNDER-REPORTED

Evidence of trafficking on the Fort Peck reservation won’t be found in federal statistics, said Cyndee Peterson, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Montana who heads up a task force teaching law enforcement and attorneys to recognize trafficking.

Records, she said, do not show federal prosecutors handling any trafficking cases on Fort Peck going back five years.

“How do we know these cases are here? Because the advocates that actually are on the ground talking to the victims are telling me,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Don’t look at our numbers and think that it’s not happening,” she said. “People did not know what they were seeing.”

Now, she said, after every training session held by her task force, a law enforcement officer will approach her and say: “You know what? I actually have had trafficking cases in the past and I didn’t recognize it as trafficking.”

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, a member of the Fort Peck tribes’ executive board, blames some of the lack of evidence to Indian problems falling on deaf ears in the white community.

“I think it’s just an attitude of well, we’re all savages and it’s just another dead Indian,” he said.

Twenty-five years after her half-brother was sent to prison, Tami Adams-Martens, 59, a nurse at Poplar Hospital, said she now realizes the case involved trafficking.

Her stepsister had been hooked on crack cocaine and in debt to a dealer but had no money, she said.

“(The dealer) said, ‘Look, somebody is going to get hurt if you don’t pay up. Do you have anything else I want?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve got a 13-year-old daughter,'” she said.

A fight broke out, and the dealer was killed by Adams-Martens’s half-brother who stepped in to block the deal, she said. He spend 17 years in prison.

“I didn’t realize it was trafficking,” she said, adding: “I think everyone here has a story like that or is very close to a story like that.”

NO NAME FOR IT

Joni Johnson, who helps crime victims on the reservation, works with two young women who have suffered domestic violence, are drug users and who she is certain are trading sex for drugs.

“They don’t realize when they’re doing, but it is human trafficking,” she said.

A more haunting case was some 15 years ago when a sexual assault victim revealed that she was selling her nieces for drugs, she said.

“There just wasn’t a name for it,” she said.

Name or not, the problem stretches far back in time, Clark said.

“We could go back to the day that the settlers came, the day that fur trappers came, those days when colonization hit and demeaned the significance and honor and sacredness of women and children,” she said.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Sex trafficking reaches crisis on Native American Reservations

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report.

On Fort Peck, a reservation of some 10,000 people, six newborn babies tested positive for meth in just two weeks in April and were taken to a hospital 300 miles away, said Howard Bemer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent for Fort Peck.

Meth use and other crime exploded with the tapping of reserves in the Bakken oil fields to the east and south of the reservation in the last decade. The boom brought tens of thousands of workers, flush with cash, to the region.

With the drop in world oil prices, many of those workers are gone but the crime has not, said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

“The boom brought problems that don’t disappear when the boom disappears,” she said.

The drug trade helps incite sex trafficking, as people exchange themselves, family members or friends to get high, she said.

“If someone is addicted to meth, they’re not in their right mind. It is much easier to get them to do things that they never would have done if they weren’t addicted,” she said at a recent anti-trafficking conference in Poplar, the reservation’s tribal headquarters.

Drug debt is a forceful driver of trafficking, and dealers threaten users to pay up by any means, said Sgt. Grant Snyder, a trafficking investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Maybe it’s your 12-year-old daughter, maybe it’s your 5-year-old daughter,” he said.

FAMILY

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

On the bleak, windswept reservation along the Missouri River just 20 miles from the Canadian border, more than half the children live in poverty and jobs are scarce.

Most people work in ranching, mining and farming, but one in three is unemployed. The largest communities are Wolf Point and Poplar, rundown hamlets that are little more than crossroads with a smattering of stores, gas stations, bars and fewer than 4,000 residents between them.

Outside of town, dirt roads link the weathered houses and tumble-down trailers that dot the seemingly boundless grasslands.

Demand for foster care for children removed from homes due to substance abuse is showing a sharp increase, said Courage Crawford, a program director at the Spotted Bull Recovery Resource Center in Poplar which offers rehabilitation programs.

“There aren’t a lot of places in the country that have a perfect storm of both being this rural and this under served of basic services … and also such high rates of poverty and also such rates of abuse,” Healey said.

Last month, the reservation was mourning the death by beating of a 13-month-old girl. A woman responsible for caring for her, while the child’s mother was in jail, has pleaded not guilty to murder.

A memorial service program showed a photograph of the smiling chubby-cheeked girl with shining eyes and a flowered headband.

“With the loss of this child I think we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel,” said Azure, the tribal chief.

Also this year, a Wolf Point man was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl grabbed at a local playground.

Meth is blamed for 40 percent of crime on native land, and most tribal police say domestic violence and assault has increased as a result of addiction, according to the NCAI.

Just thirteen tribal police patrol Fort Peck’s 3,200 square miles, according to the local Journal newspaper.

Across the country, fewer than 3,000 tribal and federal officers patrol more than 56 million acres of Indian country.

Shortages of Drugs Globally

A pharmacy employee dumps pills into a pill counting machine

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) – Philip Aubrey buys medicines for British government-funded hospitals across London, capital of the world’s fifth-largest economy, but last year he struggled to secure supplies of a basic AIDS drug.

He is not alone. Shortages of essential drugs, mostly generic medicines whose patents have long expired, are becoming increasingly frequent globally, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to suggest minimum prices may be needed to keep some products on the market.

Drug shortages are due to a variety of factors from manufacturing, quality and raw material problems to unexpected spikes in demand, but such upsets are aggravated when there are few suppliers.

“It can be really problematic,” said Aubrey.

The rise in shortages has gone hand in hand with a wave of consolidation among the companies making generic drugs – which range from global pharmaceutical giants to smaller firms in countries such as India – reducing the number of manufacturers making individual product lines.

Downward pressure on generic drug prices is good news for healthcare systems in the short term, but it may fuel disruption if a supplier hits production problems. While the lack of a patent means other suppliers could also make the same drug, they would still need regulatory approval and that can take years.

The result, according to experts, is a worryingly fragile supply chain, particularly for injectable medicines such as chemotherapy treatments and certain antibiotics.

Benzathine penicillin, for example, a vital drug for preventing transmission of syphilis from mother to child, has been in short supply for years because of manufacturing problems, inconsistent demand and a relatively low price.

“Medicines can be too cheap,” said Hans Hogerzeil, professor of global health at Groningen University in the Netherlands and a former director for essential medicines at the WHO. “For a viable market model you need at least three and preferably five different manufacturers.”

The idea of minimum prices for certain essential medicines contrasts sharply to traditional pricing debates about how to reduce the sky-high cost of new patented drugs for diseases such as cancer and hepatitis C.

Drug shortages will be discussed as a specific topic for the first time at this year’s WHO World Health Assembly in May, and U.S. and European regulators told Reuters more needed to be done to address the problem.

Shortages in the United States hit a peak in 2011 due to manufacturing outages, yet the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists still lists 155 products as being in short supply.

The European Association of Hospital Pharmacists says more than four out of five of its members face regular shortages, while doctors in Canada have been grappling this year with tight supply of a widely-used epilepsy drug.

COUNTERFEIT RISK

Shortages in developing countries can go unreported for months or even years, increasing the risk of counterfeits entering the supply chain, according to Lisa Hedman, a procurement and supply chains expert at the WHO.

Hedman was an author on a WHO report released earlier this year setting out possible ways to tackle the problem.

These include a global notification system for supply problems, increased collaboration between regulators and potential advanced purchase commitments for priority drugs, as well as action on pricing.

Low-cost generic manufacturing has produced huge benefits in increasing drug affordability but the report warned: “Too low prices, however, may drive manufacturers out of the market.”

Valerie Jensen, associate director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortage program, believes global action could complement national measures, such as a new FDA policy to speed reviews of generics competing with only one other product.

“We know that internationally this is a problem and we need to think of ways to address it,” she said.

Drug regulators themselves have limited scope for action, since while they can keep a drug off the market, they cannot require a company to make a product.

“We need to sweet talk manufacturers to get them to think about best practices,” said Brendan Cuddy, head of manufacturing and quality compliance at the European Medicines Agency.

Brendan Shaw, assistant director general at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations in Geneva, argues that recognising the need to keep generic drugmakers financially viable is essential.

“Companies don’t like stock-outs either, so it is in everyone’s interest to find a way forward,” he said.

In London, medicines buyer Aubrey has now resolved the supply difficulties he faced over the HIV/AIDS treatment nevirapine, after one generic supplier eventually fixed its production problems, but he is still struggling to get supplies of other important drugs.

These include the bladder cancer therapy BCG and even diamorphine, or heroin, the powerful painkiller sometimes given to end-stage cancer patients.

As the man holding the purse strings, Aubrey needs to get a good deal on price but he worries that a couple of hundred medicines in Britain now have only one supplier.

“We need a balance,” he said. “It’s not good news if there is a shortage and patient care is compromised.”

(editing by David Stamp)

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