Current Issue :: April 18, 2008 :: Contents
The Drug Issue
Cover Story
Oregon’s prison rates buck national trend
Drug courts, of which Multnomah County’s is one of the oldest, represent one attempt to steer away from increasingly punitive drug laws that many critics say are ineffective at best and discriminatory at worst. By intervening early with a comprehensive treatment program, drug courts aim to break the cycle of punishment and reoffense that feeds a costly, ever-growing prison system.
Editorial
Portland rises above the battlefield
Column
Time has come to treat addicts with beds, not behind bars
Is the war on drugs working? Or is it a complete legal and social failure? As an officer in the Denver, Colo., police department for 36 years, it was that work that cemented my opposition to our drug war.
Street Culture
Lindsey
You remember her eyes clearly—pale blue and bright crystal. A frozen frame of one moment of adolescent bliss. A moment quickly lived, but stuck, blinking over and over like a rotating projection slide of a single image. Like the photo wheel of your mind can only grasp a solitary fragment of your history, looking down at her dead body lying in abject peace in a heavily cushioned coffin. You told her not to do that shit, that she'd only end up here, told her time and again.
News
‘One of the biggest casualties is human rights’
In 2000, Alberto Giordano founded Narco News, an Internet newspaper that draws together a network of journalists as co-publishers. In 2001, Giordano received First Amendment protections in a landmark New York Supreme Court case — Banamex vs. Mario Menendez, Al Giordano and Narco News — setting a precedent for all online journalists and Web sites. The paper's School of Authentic Journalism, founded in 2002 in Mexico and Bolivia, has trained more than 100 journalists to be investigative reporters on civil rights and the impact of U.S. drug policy on Latin America.
The Long Shadow of Gary Webb’s ‘Dark Alliance’
In the first pages of “Dark Alliance,” prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb describes an idea that haunted him as a newspaperman: one day he would pick up the phone and some stranger on the other end would give him the Big One, the tip that would turn the rest of his career into an anticlimax. For Webb, that call came in July 1995, from an Oakland woman who said her boyfriend was in federal court on drug-trafficking charges. “‘There’s something about Rafael’s case that I don’t think you would have ever done before,’ she said. ‘One of the government’s witnesses is a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it.’
