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Santa Cruz students arrested over international drug ring

March 9, 2016

Santa Cruz students

Authorities have arrested six UC Santa Cruz students for running an international Ecstasy ring. All of the suspects are fraternity and sorority members. [LA Times]

On Friday, investigators seized more than $100,000 in MDMA shipments from three homes in Santa Cruz. While searching the homes, investigators found about 5,000 tablets, or 4.1 pounds, of MDMA, also known as Ecstasy.

Detectives determined the students were receiving shipments of Ecstasy from overseas. Santa Cruz police worked with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Department of Homeland Security to track the packages.

Homeland Security agents also intercepted another large Ecstasy shipment to the same group of students on Friday.

The suspects who were taken into custody are Cecilia Le, Haoi Nguyen, Nathan Tieu, Cesar Casil, Benny Liu and Mariah Dremel. They are all 21 years old and members of the Lamda Phi Epsilon fraternity or the Alpha Kappa Delta Phi sorority.

Officers charged the students with possession of a controlled substance for sale. University officials placed them on interim suspension pending the outcome of campus judicial proceedings.

Leaders of both the fraternity and sorority to which the students belong said their Santa Cruz chapters are suspending activities and functions.


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Reality check… College is expensive. College towns are full of customers looking to purchase drugs. Drugs are expensive. Sell drugs to pay for education. It’s that easy. This is nothing new; it’s happening in every college town.


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the drug war!

a failure 100 years ago; a failure today; and a failure FOREVER.


prohibition doesn’t work.


time to legalize drugs and end cartel control.


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What really sucks is that they have allowed the Greeks to invade UCSC. Back in the day, the bananaslug culture frowned on the Greeks. What has become of the true counter culture.


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Talk about a profitable senior project. They are just a little ahead of their time.


Given societies current trajectory, ecstasy will be legal in a year or two. It helps ease pain, right?


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Foreign students provide big bucks to our UC system and we pay for this? One might say that these students were here to get smart and poison the local dummies..


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Or maybe these are the children and grandchildren of immigrants — probably legal ones if they are from Asia as they appear to be.


I would expect that there are likely people of all ethnicities involved in the drug trade. Ecstacy is more common among the college crowd so it would make sense that the dealers would likely be students. For white, anglos without college education, the proportion of meth & pot dealers would be likely higher.


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explain to me how clean MDMA is poison?


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Be that as it may, I don’t see any blond hair blue eyed kids in those mug shots.


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Thanks captain obvious. The blonde hair blue eyed kids are the ones buying the pills.


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haha; bert understand the free market.

time to teach everyone else here bert!


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Don’t let them wok your dog!


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Jorge,


Wow, and here I thought my biblical double entendres were good. Okay, society says I am not supposed to laugh at your racist statement, so I didn’t. *cough*


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One can no longer tell by appearances who is what-or what is who–for it is all illusion. The firefighter that buys an underage girl and breaks her bones, the students that bullied a classmate to the point of suicide, the college rapes-and pedophiles crawling out of every nook and cranny. The national news is a macabre nightmare: a woman wandering around a train station with a severed child’s head, women throwing their newborns out of high rises in New York at alarming rates, 10 year olds (hell, even 6 year olds) that murder, children found in home freezers (six of them) without any teachers or neighbors raising an eyebrow as to where they have been.


Some will immediately go from point A to B: and tie everything to either immigration and race, political candidates, taxes, or other current topics. Instead, let’s think outside the box.


What if these are the symptoms of something much more widespread? Something global. Is it really just a sign of the times? Or a sign we are living on a dying planet? A civilization in its final throes of madness? Every day now, we see pictures of Mars by NASA–and people identify objects on Mar’s barren wasteland of a planet–a shoe, a mermaid, a handgun. Isn’t it true we have the capacity to turn our planet into the same thing–a virtual wasteland? That we don’t feed, house and heal people—but instead research and build trillion dollar technology to destroy them? The human collective unconscious-Jung used to call it. Deep in our subconscious minds…..we know the bottom line. A destiny we self-created with our constant wars, our hate and our disdain for those “inferior” to us awaits us. Our fate is sealed….unless we push-and push hard–to turn all of this around….quickly. Like our lives depend upon it.


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indigo1955,


“Or a sign we are living on a dying planet?”


Pertaining to drugs, we true Christians couldn’t care less about the downfall of civilization pertaining to the drug culture. Additionally, and thats why we do nothing about global warming, because when the earth is destroyed, that means the return of Jesus the Christ, praise!


“Just before Jesus’ return He continued by say, ‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. And there shall be signs in the sun and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.’” (Luke 21 v.10-11, 25-26)


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We may not see eye to eye on the Jesus thing, but I completely agree about the passage you described in Luke. Every day, the world manages to shock me more and more. There is another verse I was taught as a child that during these times “people would beg for the mountains to fall into the sea….for all of it to end” something like that…but that “it would not end”. Meaning to me–we have seen nothing yet.


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jesus smoked cannabis


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The planet is fine, it’s people who are f’d up.


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Take a breath! It is no illusion that these kids are Asians and got the product from Asia. This happens in the Central Valley all the time, now it is on the coast…


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they understand american capitalism perfectly; what is the problem?


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Here’s another approach to the situation. Stuff like this has been going on since the beginnings of human civilization. What has changed is the instantaneous and constant publicity of such events. For some reason most people are addicted to sensationalism and, in my opinion, lack the patience to look at the big picture and the attention span to get a real perspective.


Perhaps, we are also too caught up in thinking of ourselves as “superior” to people of previous eras due to technological advancement. Such advancement does not necessarily translate into ethical and moral superiority which is where we need improvement most. Technology is a tool not a value. As such, it empowers those who use it best. When the information age began, it tended to empower the individuals who adopted computers first. Now both public and private large institutions have caught up and are using the tools for their own goals which often conflict with those of individuals.


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Thanks RonHolt for one of the more intelligent comments on this site regarding

our propensity as a culture to search out the sensationalist stories of the day and then to reduce our interpretation of the action or storyline to it’s lowest common denominator, missing the fine points regarding man’s inhumanity to man.

Or sometimes just the opposite, mankind’s ability to see past the headlines and attempt to “walk in the shoe’s” of those who are different from us.

That’s what separates us from the less complex species, isn’t it?


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vmmill42,


“……… the day and then to reduce our interpretation of the action or storyline…”


At this juncture of our understanding relative to humanity and the future, there is no room for any “interpretation” whatsoever, but only empirical facts.


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Sounds like the plot of the walking dead.


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Are they U.S. Citizens are another charity package?


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