Former Potter Valley resident killed in Afghanistan helicopter ...

Know that their sacrifices will not go in vain. Prayers for all of their families.

Bring the "Brother" home! God bless him and his family!

I am sorry to hear of another loss of a brave American in Afghanistan. Condolences.

Goodbye, brother, American, friend.
What a horrible death, a million miles from home.
And we shouldn't even be over there, you shouldn't have been over there -- this purposeless war, moving ever onward without an end in sight. More bodies will come home, and we will write more letters, and say our prayers.
How long until we pick up our phone and call our congressmen and demand an immediate withdrawal, an end to American occupation of hostile lands.
Bring him home. Bring them all home.

Forrest was a wonderful person who I had the pleasure of knowing as far back as my memory goes into childhood. Regardless of what you believe as to why we are in the mideast for war or drug purposes, please respect the fact that he was doing what he believed was for the good of the country. Nobody is asking you to share his belief, but at least show him some respect for at least standing up for what he believed was right. Thats called integrity. Not enough people have it anymore. Forrest, I have fond memories of us playing as kids. Richard, Sue, & Heather, and to Forrest's wife; I pray your hearts can heal quickly but forever remember how he touched so many people's lives in his time on earth.

Another NARC bites the dust!

Sign-up and you know you can die. If this person was military he would have my blessings. But he was a federal NARC a Godless person with no soul fighting for some lost cause in a country he was not welcome. I don't use drugs or condone them.
But have had encounters with gun toting DEA. They love to fly around in armed choppers pointing guns at people. All people and citizens are no more than low class scum to them. America better stay out of Afghanistan. Russia got it's booty kicked as did any other invader all through history.

Funny, you can throw around accusations and lump all of them into one pot. Showing a lot of ignorance. Forrest was far from a Godless person. Since your ignorant, judgmental, and disrespectful, your whole family must be too. See how that logic works. Nice.

rootsfarmer wrote:

DEA narc playing cowboy shooting at civilianss.*sob*

Are you blaming him or his leadership?

The CIA and Crack Cocaine
See more @ http://kristalball.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch...
In tribute to the late investigative reporter Gary Webb. Irrefutable evidence that the the US government was responsible for the catastrophic crack cocaine epidemic. Also features Freeway Rick and US Senator John Kerry.

If I was this mans family I would investigate thoroughly.....the DEA has a history of importing cocaine and heroine into the USA and spreading it around the world....why do you think the USA is in Afghanistan??? DUH its the smack!

Seems there is always some attention getter that has no respect for fellow human beings.

What a bunch of low life, redwood tree eating bugbear eaters! The only thing that matters here is that a local man died. I have never heard such a bunch of crap about the DEA. I personally know many Agents. The do not go around sticking guns in your faces. They do not bring in Cocaine and other drugs and sell them. DEA provides a service that no other military or police force can provide for America. Stop being so disrespectful to the Family here. Oh and how come none of you brought in the Marijuana factor here?

Ricky Ross wrote:

The CIA and Crack Cocaine
See more @ http://kristalball.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch...
In tribute to the late investigative reporter Gary Webb. Irrefutable evidence that the the US government was responsible for the catastrophic crack cocaine epidemic. Also features Freeway Rick and US Senator John Kerry.
If I was this mans family I would investigate thoroughly.....the DEA has a history of importing cocaine and heroine into the USA and spreading it around the world....why do you think the USA is in Afghanistan??? DUH its the smack!

They're doing the exact same thing today with Afghanistan. 90% or more of the heroin in Europe and Russia is from Afghanistan. Even Putin blames the U.S. for poisoning a whole generation of Russians with heroin by our meddling in Afghanistan. That's why there is a movement to send more troops there, to *protect* the poppy fields! Wake up people! The 80's was crack in our ghettos, the 2000s are poisoning Europe with heroin for massive profit for covert ops all over the world!

Observation wrote:

Seems there is always some attention getter that has no respect for fellow human beings.

...who feels the need to play cowboy of the skies and expect the taxpayers to foot the bill. you reap what you sow.

Who cares what his job was? Forrest had family and friends that loved him for who he was not what he was. I think the disrespect of fellow community memebers is a disgrace to our community. Put the shoe on your foot for a change. How would you feel if it was your family member who was killed, no matter how, and the community was this disrespectful to your loss....Get a life Ukiah.

ashamed wrote:

Who cares what his job was? Forrest had family and friends that loved him for who he was not what he was. I think the disrespect of fellow community memebers is a disgrace to our community. Put the shoe on your foot for a change. How would you feel if it was your family member who was killed, no matter how, and the community was this disrespectful to your loss....Get a life Ukiah.

We are ASHAMED as well by what the DEA is doing in Afghanistan!

Flood of Afghan heroin fuels drug plague in Russia
Sign up for email newsletters now!
Sign up for email newsletters now!
Never miss a McClatchy story
current user avatar
current user avatar
current user avatar
Register
Log in logout
member center
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Facebook
More on this Story

* Story | Russia treats drug addicts with lasers or quarantine
* Story | U.S.-built bridge is windfall — for illegal Afghan drug trade
* Story | Afghan drug trade thrives with help, and neglect, of officials
* Story | West looked the other way as Afghan drug trade exploded
* Story | Karzai's brother threatened McClatchy writer reporting Afghan drug story
* Graphic | Heroin's toll on Russia
* Graphic | Afghan heroin hits Russia
* Gallery | Russia has many drug addicts and ways to handle them

Heroin's toll on Russia

MCT

View larger image
Comments (19)
Recommend (6)
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

CHELYABINSK, Russia — Young men with sores on their arms shuffled up the stairs of a dark, underground shopping arcade and into the daylight to plop dingy wads of rubles into the drug dealers' hands. The dealers casually reached into their pockets or plastic shopping bags and handed over tablets of synthetic morphine, a type also used as a horse tranquilizer, and paper packets that appeared to contain heroin.

Across the street in this gray, post-Soviet industrial town, two Russian policemen sat in a faded wooden booth, and a couple more sat in a police truck outside. They didn't seem the least bit interested.

A police officer walked by but didn't interrupt the transaction. Asked whether he was worried, one of the dealers, a young man with a white driving cap tipped down over his eyes, leaned back against a railing and giggled.
In Miass, a small town west of Chelyabinsk near the foothills of the Ural Mountains, Elena Shapkovskaya wasn't laughing. She works at the No. 40 pharmacy and often has to call the police when heroin addicts crowd the shop and begin shooting up in plain view.
"Sometimes instead of calling the police, we call an ambulance, because they're lying on the floor," Shapkovskaya said, looking down at the tile floor beneath her feet.
Drugs have become yet another scourge of post-communist Russia, with millions addicted to heroin and an annual death toll reportedly in the tens of thousands from overdoses and other drug-related causes.
* Russian authorities seized 2.4 metric tons of heroin in 2006, about three times the seizures in 2002, according to United Nations figures. That's a small fraction of the estimated 60 metric tons that are thought to arrive in Russia from Afghanistan each year.
* In 2008, Russian officials said that the country had more than 5 million frequent drug users, up from 3 million in 2002. U.N. estimates are lower — drug usage is notoriously hard to calculate — but they indicate that the percentage of Russians who use opiates is the highest in the world for countries with populations larger than 100 million. Opiate usage in the United States, which receives very little Afghan opium or heroin, is about one-third of Russia's.
* Russia had some 940,000 HIV-positive adults and children in 2007, up from 390,000 in 2001, according to the U.N., and an estimated 80 percent of Russians currently living with HIV were infected by dirty needles. AIDS killed about 40,000 Russians in 2007, but the U.N. says the toll could be as high as 71,000. It was 1,900 in 2001.
"It is difficult to be anything other than pessimistic when it comes to forecasting what the future holds for Russia vis-a-vis heroin abuse and trafficking," said a report last year by the U.N. office on drugs and crime.
Russian officials publicly blame America for the plague because almost all the heroin comes from U.S.-dominated Afghanistan, but they won't discuss in detail how drugs move through their country. They've yet to devise a comprehensive plan to address the issue. Trials of high-level traffickers are conducted in secret. Even midlevel police officials usually don't talk, and when they do, it's privately and away from their workplaces.
'THE AMERICANS HAVE DONE NOTHING'
Chelyabinsk, a city of more than 1 million in southwest Russia, once was known as Tankograd — "tank city" — for its World War II production of T-34 tanks. It later gained notoriety as the center of a region swamped by radioactive waste from a nearby nuclear-weapons facility.
A different poison is spreading today: Chelyabinsk has become a major transshipment center for Afghan opium and heroin, which enters Russia from Central Asia.
The drugs usually reach Russia from Tajikistan and Kazakhstan in trucks or, in smaller amounts, tucked away in train compartments or nervous travelers' stomachs.
The trade is nothing new in Russia, but after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it exploded. Afghan opium production climbed from 3,400 metric tons in 2002 to a record 8,200 metric tons in 2007, partly because U.S. and NATO-led troops put a low priority on curbing it. Heroin flooded into Central Asia, and on to Russia.

"When I heard the Americans were going to enter Afghanistan I thought they were going to solve the problem, to stop the drugs," said Yevgeny Roizman, who had connections with Russian organized crime before he became a member of parliament. He now runs an anti-drug organization in the city of Yekaterinburg, another big heroin-distribution hub north of Chelyabinsk.
"But in the period after they came, there was a big increase in the region ...," Roizman added. "It makes me think the Americans have done nothing to stop the drug trafficking."
Although it's an unintended consequence of the U.S. action in Afghanistan, some Russian officials trace the growing problem to an American plot.
Viktor Ivanov, the head of Russia's Federal Drug Control Service, the national drug enforcement agency, told parliament in May that it was reasonable to "call the flow of Afghan opiates the second edition of opium wars." He was referring to the 19th-century war between Britain and China sparked by exports of opium from British India to China.
Ivanov isn't alone.
"I can name you a lot of politicians in Russia who said that the Americans specially arranged the situation in Afghanistan so that we would receive a lot of drugs, and this is the real aim of their occupation," said Andrei Klimov, the deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia's lower house of parliament. "I'm not sure this is true, but who knows."

The U.S. government takes no direct responsibility for fueling Russia's drug problem.

"I would say the entire international community is responsible. The U.N. Security Council looked favorably on the U.S. and NATO doing what they're doing in Afghanistan," a State Department official said, referring to the U.N. mandate backing the foreign presence in the country. "So when critics like Russia say the U.S. and NATO aren't doing enough, well, it's really the entire international community that needs to take action on this."

A second State Department official pointed to the lack of Russian effort to provide assistance in Afghanistan.

"The Russians have had opportunities to come to the table on this and to provide alternative options," the official said. "If this really was a priority for them, we could work something out."

Both officials were authorized to speak to a reporter only if they weren't identified.

In Russia, it's much easier to blame a U.S. conspiracy than to bring up the subject of corrupt officials, the Russian mafia and their involvement in the drug trade.

Russia's Federal Drug Control Service wouldn't respond to McClatchy's questions over the course of a month, nor would the Interior Ministry or the national intelligence service. The Russian government routinely suppresses basic information about drug-related trials, even the names of defendants.

Igor Khokhlov, a senior researcher at the Academy of Sciences, a government-funded research institute, has researched the drug trade and concluded that high-level authorities aren't involved.

"They have safer and better ways to benefit from their high offices," he said in an e-mail interview.

However, it's almost impossible to do business in Russia, legal and otherwise, without a "krysha" — a Russian word that means "roof" — a patron to protect a businessman from corrupt government officials, criminals and other realities of modern Russia. It seems unlikely that kryshas could operate in Russia's estimated annual $15 billion drug-trafficking industry without high-level government contacts.

A 2008 U.N. report concluded that Russian organized-crime groups "provide protection to drug trafficking networks in exchange for a share of the proceeds."

The former deputy director of the Federal Drug Control Service, Alexander Mikhailov, said that Tajiks usually ran the wholesale heroin business at the border and delivered the drugs to gypsy communities, who handled retail distribution. He acknowledged that both groups have patrons whose "job is to corrupt those who affect his business: police, customs, narco-police, the people who should be fighting drugs."

Who protects the drug dealers, and how do narcotics get from the border to places such as Moscow? Mikhailov, who served for 25 years in the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, ignored the questions. "I don't like to give names in the drug business," he said. "Most people don't."

Sporadic news reports suggest that narco-corruption occurs at senior levels of law enforcement. In 2003, five federal anti-narcotics agents were arrested, accused of taking bribes from a drug dealer. During 2004, an Interior Ministry lieutenant colonel was charged with leading a group of former police officers who were caught selling heroin in the Moscow region. Russian news wires reported in 2006 that more than 160 staff members of the federal anti-narcotics service had been caught for drug-related crimes.

'I PAID BRIBES TO GET LET GO'

As his friends died drooling and shaking with Afghan heroin burning through their veins, Alexei knew that things were getting out of control. In 2002 or 2003, it seemed as if a dam had burst: The number of heroin dealers in his north Moscow suburb grew from three to a few dozen, and the supply was purer than anything he'd had before.

Alexei, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of legal concerns, started shooting up heroin every day and earning cash as a drug courier.

After 2002, more than a dozen of Alexei's friends didn't survive overdoses after vomiting in nightclub bathrooms or on their apartment floors. Roman, 23, died in a hospital ward after shooting up in a stairwell. Christina, 21, overdosed at home. Pyotr, 37, went to a party, used some heroin and had a fatal heart attack at his girlfriend's apartment.

Nevertheless, Alexei, a 28-year-old with a buzz cut who favors black jeans and bright white sneakers, said he didn't worry much about getting caught ferrying packages of heroin between Moscow and outlying towns

"I was arrested in clubs and apartments, but ... I paid bribes to get let go," he said.

A federal anti-narcotics officer who works in a region near the Kazakh border sat down recently with a McClatchy reporter for a meal of grilled pork and vodka, but agreed to an interview only if his name wasn't used; his agency had said that its agents weren't allowed to talk to journalists.

"I've heard about a lot of cases of local police taking bribes to protect drug dealers," said the agent, who had a pink face, thick shoulders and a gold tooth that shone when he smiled. Those cases, he said, are investigated by police departments' internal affairs bureaus, which aren't above suspicion themselves.

The agent said he earned $540 a month for working to control a trade worth millions of dollars in his area. Local police, he said, make even less.

A second federal officer, who met a reporter in his car in a parking lot, sighed when he talked about the subject. "I can't tell you that there's not much police corruption," said the officer, a thin man wearing a cheap brown jacket who drove up in a small white Lada, a matchbox-like Russian car.

"I can't say the situation is getting any better," he said, speaking anonymously for the same reason as the first federal officer. "The amount of heroin coming in increased a lot during the past two years."

Vladimir Bogomolov, who's run a drug treatment center in the city of Chelyabinsk for 10 years, started to describe the network to a visiting American reporter.

"The Russian (criminal) groups are above the Tajiks and gypsies; they allow them to sell drugs and take a percentage of what they make," he said between sips of coffee. The police, he said, "are extremely corrupt."

An associate who sat in on the interview interrupted Bogomolov: "We shouldn't talk about what's happening right now."

So Bogomolov, who's committed much of his life to fighting the drug problem in his city, stopped talking about it.

He had the look of a defeated man.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/708...
Flood of Afghan heroin fuels drug plague in Russia