Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s cure for a hangover—poppers and beer—is good, but nothing beats smoking weed from the minute your feet hit the floor until you go to bed again that night… and a Bloody Mary or five.
(via BuzzFeed)
At the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny, a former NYPD narcotics detective also snared in the scandal testified that it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people.
In the astonishing testimony from Stephen Anderson, a former NYPD narcotics officer who’s testifying under an agreement with prosecutors, Anderson told of how he participated in false arrests and planted cocaine in order to meet arrest quotas and prevent a colleague from being put back on street patrol. The scandal hanging over the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads has led to the arrests of eight police officers. Via the New York Daily News:
“Tavarez was ... was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.
“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.
“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.
Anderson, who worked in both the Queens and Brooklyn South narcotics squads, was asked by Justice Gustin Reichbach if such practices were widespread and if he’d observed them with frequency.
He replied:“Yes, multiple times.”
The judge pressed Anderson on whether he ever gave a thought to the damage he was inflicting on the innocent.
“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators,” he said.
“It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.”
The city paid $300,000 to settle a false arrest suit by Jose Colon and his brother Maximo, who were falsely arrested by Anderson and Tavarez. A surveillance tape inside the bar showed they had been framed.
Anyone currently in prison for drugs-related felonies in New Your State might want to start an immediate appeals process to get their sentences overturned… whether they are guilty or not!
This is all kinds of wrong. If the exposure of this cancer on the NYPD isn’t a good excuse to end the drug war, what ever would be?
Thank you Glen E. Friedman!
Snoop Dogg portrait made from marijuana, hash and joints by artist Jason Mecier. That’s $1,500 worth of THC on the canvas.
This will be on display and featured in the new book La Luz de Jesus 25, as part of the 25th Anniversary of La Luz de Jesus Gallery.
November 4–27
Opening receptions: November 4 & 5, 8–11 PM
La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd Los Angeles, CA. 90027
I don’t speak Portuguese so it’s a little hard for me to tell you exactly what’s going on here, but from what I gather, Brazilian police spell out their departments’ names in acronyms with seized drugs or weapons and then take a photo of it for bragging rights.
Go to Fabio Lopez’s Flickr page to see larger image.
(via The Good Blood)
Kiddies, I wouldn’t try making this LEGO bowl at home. Smoking out of plastic and aluminum doesn’t seem too smart. Fun idea. Dangerous execution.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Ice Bong
Burnest Hemingway: For Whom the Bowl Tokes
Smoke on the Water: The Porsche Hookah
(via reddit )
Dangerous Minds, reporting from Fantastic Fest in Austin…and loving it.
Released last year in Mexico during the country’s bicentennial celebration, El Narco (aka El Infierno) is the cinematic equivalent of a turd in the punchbowl. Director Luis Estrada’s intimate and epic gangster film is a brutal, darkly funny and deeply cynical exploration of the illegal drug industry that is reducing a great country into a decimated war zone. Estrada clearly feels that in 2010 there was little to celebrate in Mexico. And it’s getting worse. This was not exactly the film Mexican authorities wanted as part of its glorious national celebration.
In a resounding “fuck you” to the those who tried to thwart the film’s release, El Narco became a critical and commercial success in Mexico and it is easy to see why. Like the Godfather or De Palma’s Scarface, El Narco tells a story that is filled with melodrama, violence and tragedy and it does so with operatic grandeur and a brash attitude. What separates Estrada’s film from Coppola’s and De Palma’s is in its sense of place, a landscape that can be as unforgiving as it is beautiful, a place where men are dwarfed by forces they cannot control, where stretches of highway seem to go on forever and a dead pickup truck is the only sign of civilization.
With its characters struggling against harsh realities meted out by a ruthless God, man and fate, El Narco occasionally looks and feels like a Sam Peckinpah film. As I watched the movie, I could imagine seeing Warren Oates from Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia walking into the frame holding his blood-encrusted, fly-specked bag. Estrada shares Peckinpah’s knack for peeling back the facade of a kind of ludicrous machismo that conceals the fear within the gangster mentality. Underneath the bling bling, big guns and bigger talk lurks men who tremble at an unexpected knock at the door, who deceive and are betrayed, who kill to keep from being killed… and the killers can be anyone at anytime. If the drug wars end it may not be because of any political or legal agenda, it may be the result of a bigass, collective, self-inflicted gunshot wound. Wait long enough and these fuckers may end up wiping themselves out. Except, as Estrada sees it, there is a younger generation just waiting to fill those dead men’s boots.
Throughout El Narco a Greek chorus of narcocorrido songs, drug ballads, comment upon and serve as ironic counterpoints to the action. Narcocorridos depict the drug lords as folk heroes, bigger-than-life figures that instill a kind of perverted national pride in Mexico’s youth. The songs serve the same cathartic function as old school gangster rap did for Black kids in the States two decades ago. For many young Mexican men, the choices are slim to none -deal drugs or make a run for the border. Either way, you end up enslaved. The ballads tell the tale but tend to glorify the gangster life in an all too familiar way, the difference lays in tradition, accordions instead of beat boxes.
The drug dealers in El Narco exude the seductive aura of money and power, implacable as Aztec gods, but in actuality they’re just expendable foot soldiers, as easily blown away as a line of cocaine in a sudden gust of wind. Estrada is very good at showing us the sweat beneath the swagger, laying bare just how pathetic and vulnerable these men are.
Although superior to most gangster movies, El Narco breaks no new ground. Its dramatic arc is tried and true, its narrative conventional. There is romance, intrigue, betrayal and cruel justice. It has fine performances, is beautifully photographed and emotionally engaging. It adheres to the rules of the genre. It had to. In order to get his message across, that Mexico is becoming a country run by drug dealing terrorists, Estrada had to smuggle it within a classic form of storytelling much like the folk songs spun by the singers of narcocorridos. El Narco is a song sung with the voice of a man who has seen the darkness on the horizon growing ever closer and who must keep singing.
El Narco has an American distributor and, after some foot dragging, is scheduled to hit theaters soon. Its an important film and a viable commercial prospect. Let’s get it out there.
Luis Estrada discussing El Narco after its screening at Fantastic Fest 2011.
Trailer for El Narco after the jump…
Green Cure on WeedMaps, a local non-profit medical cannabis dispensary.
The RAND Corp. reviewed police crime statistics for ten days before and after city officials in Los Angeles closed several cannabis dispensaries last summer when a new local ordinance went into effect. RAND researchers examined the neighborhoods of 170 businesses that remained open and another 430 which were ordered to close. That’s a pretty big sample.
Well, well, well, what do you know? Crime increased as much as 60% in areas within three blocks of a shuttered dispensary compared to three blocks around operating dispensaries. I’m sure this isn’t what the RAND Corp; expected to find. Los Angeles City councilman Ed Reyes called the report an “eye opener.” Via the Washington Post:
“If medical marijuana dispensaries are causing crime, then there should be a drop in crime when they close,” said Mireille Jacobson, a RAND senior economist and the study’s lead author. “Individual dispensaries may attract crime or create a neighborhood nuisance, but we found no evidence that medical marijuana dispensaries in general cause crime to rise.”
Crime was among the concerns that prompted the City Council to pass the ordinance that put strict guidelines on the pot clinics and forced many of them to close. Law enforcement authorities have long argued collectives attract crime because they often handle large amounts of cash and thieves can resell marijuana. Two workers at different dispensaries were killed during robberies in June 2010.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca went one step further last September when he said nearly all dispensaries operate as criminal enterprises, a claim that infuriated medical marijuana supporters who have said law enforcement officials have resorted to scare tactics to advance their agenda.
“They have perpetuated this myth that there is more crime associated with collectives,” said James Shaw of the Union of Medical Marijuana Patients, an advocacy group for medicinal marijuana users. “This council should be emboldened to revise the ordinance so it’s not so draconian to the patients and their associations.”
Damn right they should revise it! For readers outside of Los Angeles, to give you a feel for things here: at one point the city claimed there were up to 900 medical marijuana dispensaries. Whether that’s accurate or not, I can’t say, but there were and there still are a LOT of them. More than there are McDonald’s or Starbucks by a long-shot. As in several times more and then combine that total. From my apartment, I can walk (not drive) to a dozen or more of them. Each and every one of them is a law-abiding business as far as I can tell. Not one has even the whiff of being a “criminal enterprise.” Some of them operate just like, say, a nice wine store would. Since they provide more foot traffic in the areas they operate in—and usually have security guards—maybe this is the sole reason the seem to have a dampening effect on crime?
But who cares what the reason for lower crime is? I thought lower crime was supposed to be a good thing? What is the City Council doing closing down lawfully run businesses that provide MORE jobs than McDonald’s and Starbucks combined? These dispensaries pay taxes, too. The Los Angeles City Council needs to mind its own business and leave these businesses alone.
Redditor “Picklemick” spotted this perfect little “nugbunny” in his bud. He says: “Guys, I just saw this and made it in paint.” I’m still waiting for the herbal image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Maybe if I smoke enough?
(via reddit)
Rolland “Rolly” Crump is a Disney legend. Originally working as an assistant animator under Uncle Walt himself in the early 1950s, Crump performed “in betweener” work on Disney classics like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations, and Sleeping Beauty.
In 1959 Crump joined Walt Disney Imagineering, becoming one of Walt Disney’s key designers for Disneyland. He worked on the Haunted Mansion, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Adventureland Bazaar. Crump served as key designer on the Disney pavilions featured at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, including “It’s A Small World.” When that attraction was given a permanent home at Disneyland, Crump added the iconic puppet children clock at the entrance. He was also one of the lead designers on a Disneyland attraction that was shelved after Disney’s death, The Museum of The Weird.
During his long and illustrious career, Crump contributed to the designs for Walt Disney World, Busch Gardens and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus World, before returning to Disney to project design “The Land” and “Wonders of Life” pavilions at EPCOT Center. Now in his 80s and still going strong, in 2004 Crump was given a Disney Legends Award.
But back in 1960, Rolly Crump made a series of whimsical and delightful posters depicting Beatniks and their predilection for drugs. Made for poster pioneer Howard Morseburg’s Esoteric Poster Company, Crump worked for Morseburg until 1964, also turning out posters satirizing Communism, Cuba and the Soviet Union. Some of these posters were discovered again and are for sale via Crump’s Zazzle store.
Thank you Taylor Jessen!
