TERRORIST PRACTICE BY DEA TARGETING BLACK LICENSED PROFESSIONALS
Al Sharpton Show – Keepin’ It Real with Rev. Al Sharpton – Mon-Fri: 1PM-4PM –
Jack Folson From Michigan (me) called into the show on Friday, November 15,2019 and spoke about the so called “Opioid Epidemic.” The topic was on the terrorism practiced by the Drug Enforcement Agency against Healthcare professionals including Doctors, Nurse Practitioners, Dentists, and Pharmacists.
The following information includes excerpts by way of background as well as references to the DEA’s malfeasance. Follow the links for more information.
https://waok.radio.com/shows/keepin-it-real-rev-al-sharpton follow this link to read more:
Rev. Al Sharpton is the founder and President of the National Action Network (NAN), a not-for-profit civil rights organization based in Harlem, New York, with over 47 Chapters nationwide. As one of the nation’s most-renowned civil rights leaders, Rev. Sharpton has been praised by President Barack Obama as “the voice of the voiceless and a champion for the downtrodden,” and by former President George W. Bush who said that “Al cares just as much as I care about making sure every child learns to read, write, add and subtract.”
Recently featured on the cover of Newsweek Magazine, the opening sentence in the story echoed what many have said about him even since he was a child prodigy: “If the Rev. Al Sharpton didn’t exist, he would have to be invented.” The Wall Street Journal in a cover story said Rev. Al Sharpton has grown from the premier politician of protest to the ultimate political pragmatist (Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2010), and this year, Rev Al Sharpton was selected to be profiled in a cover story in Ebony Magazine along with 7 others, including President Barack Obama, for the Ebony magazine …
Issues included:
- The disproportionate attack on people of color which has been proven before.
| On Thursday a federal district court judge found substantial evidence that San Francisco police officers and federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents specifically singled out Black people in the Tenderloin neighborhood for federal drug law enforcement. In late 2013 and 2014, San Francisco police officers collaborated with the DEA to conduct buy bust operations in which undercover officers allegedly engaged in hand-to-hand drug sales with people they identified as low-level drug dealers. All 37 people targeted and prosecuted in these drug sweeps are Black. The San Francisco police and federal government claim they targeted people who sold drugs near schools. But federal defenders presented the court withsubstantial evidence that San Francisco police officers singled out Black people for federal drug law enforcement while overlooking individuals of other races who were engaged in the same type of criminal activity. For example, a video showed an undercover informant refusing to buy drugs from an Asian woman and waiting to buy drugs from a Black woman instead. Attorneys also identified approximately 60 other specific incidents in which non-Black people were arrested for drug trafficking in the Tenderloin but were not federally charged… |
- b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCLgayygr78 (Former DEA agent told to target Black People.
- c) https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nixon-aide-war-drugs-tool-target-black-people-article-1.2573832
| “You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon’s harsh anti-drug policies. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying,” Ehrlichman continued. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” |
d) The fact that it has been proven that these racist policies do more harm than good for example:
Although other countries have issues what is notable is the fact that a 15 year study in Portugal has shown great improvement in moving people from the cycle of addiction and incarceration onto the roles of productive members of society. https://www.mic.com/articles/110344/14- years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening
| If someone is found in the possession of less than a 10-day supply of anything from marijuana to heroin, he or she is sent to a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, typically made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission recommends treatment or a minor fine; otherwise, the person is sent off without any penalty. A vast majority of the time, there is no penalty. |
| Anatasia Hotel, London England |
So not only is this racist policy ineffective it wastes an inordinate amount of our nation’s resources.
| The FY 2019 budget request for DEA S&E and HIDTA totals $2,441 million, which is a 17.0% increase over the FY 2018 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) http://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033151/download |
EXPOSING THE INJUSTICE
In a Health and Human Services report called White opioids: Pharmaceutical race and the war on drugs that wasn’t, released in 2017, written by Julie Netherland et.al,[PMCID: PMC5501419 NIHMSID: NIHMS752948 PMID: 28690668] states;
Whiteness is a sociocultural achievement: it is actively maintained through the shoring up of social boundaries distinguishing White and from not White”
Further,
“The public response to White opioids looked markedly different from the response to illicit drug use in inner city Black and Brown neighborhoods, with policy differentials analogous to the gap between legal penalties for crack as opposed to powder cocaine. This less examined ‘White drug war’ has carved out a less punitive, clinical realm”
Even the Office of the Inspector General reports the inadequacies of the DEA in combating diversion.
The major issues are the illicit drugs and not the prescribed medications. So once again the DEA is off target by targeting Healthcare Providers while largely ignoring the low level diversion actors in the street. Curiously, Healthcare Providers are assumed to be lacking due diligence if they don’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have addressed any red flags but in court hardly ever produce evidence of real diversion but rely on suspicion and glitzy presentation.
Jack Folson, Jr. R.Ph / Clinical Pharmacist
Living in the Spirit of Sankofa
for now, you’re within the norms
