War On Drugs – Page 3 – The Pen Hustle With Brandy Cavalli

A county coroner in Pennsylvania has started ruling heroin overdose deaths as homicides, saying drug dealers are murderers.

Lycoming County Charles Kiessling Jr. had been marking overdose deaths as accidental, which he called standard practice, but said he’s trying to raise awareness of a heroin epidemic that contributed to a 13 percent increase in overdose deaths in Pennsylvania in one year.

Kiessling told The Daily Item of Sunbury:

“If you chose to sell heroin, you’re killing people and you’re murdering people. You’re just as dead from a shot of heroin as if someone puts a bullet in you.”

He has ruled one overdose death in 2016 as a homicide, with four others pending the results of toxicology testing.

Homicide is defined as a death caused by another person. Not all homicides are determined to be crimes, and the decision on whether charges should be filed is made by prosecutors.

Read the entire article | Coroner Starts Ruling Heroin Overdose Deaths As Homicides

Richard Nixon’s Former Aide Reveals The Truth Behind The “War On Drugs”

Harper’s Magazine writer Dan Baum has shared with the world the purpose behind the infamous “War On Drugs” that became popular in the 1970’s under President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.

Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.