Latin American Leaders: UN should promote debate on alternatives to fighting drug trafficking
Calderon, Santos, and Molina all hit on this theme, without explicitly mentioning legalization (“market alternatives” was used again), but making it clear that the current policy wasn’t acceptable.
If you’re interested in watching Calderon’s fairly strong speech, see it here (skip to around the 32 minute mark. [Thanks, Sanho]
We have a ton of problems here in the United States with out-of-control prosecutors who seem to be completely unaccountable (and immune to lawsuits when they abuse their position).
We’re not the only ones with that problem. Check out this story from Russia.
Zelenina heads a laboratory at the Penza Agricultural Institute, some 600 kilometres southeast of Moscow, one of the best-equipped chemical-analysis labs in Russia. She is a specialist in the biology of hemp and poppy, and is a sought-after expert in legal cases involving narcotics produced from these plants.
In September 2011, the defence attorneys of Sergey Shilov, a Russian businessman under investigation by the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FDCS), asked her to provide an expert opinion on the amount of opiates that could possibly be extracted from 42 metric tonnes of food poppy seeds that Shilov had imported from Spain in 2010. . .
. . .On the basis of gas-chromatography and mass-spectrometry measurements of samples analysed in her lab, Zelenina calculated the overall morphine and codeine content in the poppy-seed consignment in question to be 0.00069% and 0.00049%, respectively. In such low concentrations, opiates can only be identified or extracted in well-equipped analytical chemistry labs, she wrote.
“This opinion apparently failed to satisfy the prosecutors,” says Irina Levontina, a linguist at the Russian Language Institute in Moscow, who is frequently heard as an expert in libel and drug lawsuits. “It has become quite common for Russian prosecutors to accuse independent experts if they don’t like their opinions. It can be downright dangerous for experts to appear in court.”
Talk about a chilling effect on both science and criminal defense.
She’s been released pending trial, but faces serious charges. More here
Just as a reminder, Russia has an extremely backward zero-tolerance drug policy that outlaws heroin replacement programs and needle exchange — a policy that has resulted in a 10-fold increase in HIV cases in the past decade.
Oh, and the head of the UNODC is Russian representative Yuri Fedotov.
Seems promising…
Dear Hillary,
I am writing to apply for the post of drug war publicist for your Mexico Drug War. I have over ten years of experience publicizing various aspects of the drug war and believe that I could step in immediately and help reinvigorate your drug war visibility.
I’m thrilled to see you’re looking to move in this direction. Clearly, past efforts by the State Department to publicize the drug war have been less than fully effective, as drug war awareness barely reaches the level of political discussion. It certainly hasn’t helped that the ONDCP director has undermined these efforts by bizarrely claiming that the war doesn’t even exist!
I have some great ideas and feel like I’m ready to start on the ground running. I figure one of the first things we can do is more widely distribute some of the most gruesome images of Mexican victims, in media throughout the United States. Then, in the Mexican press, we distribute images of U.S. soldiers (or DEA agents) shooting at Mexican nationals on Mexican soil. This should give us a good start.
I have many more excellent ideas like this and would love to bring them to the State Department’s War on Drugs. I am confident that I can increase the public’s awareness of this war in no time.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Pete Guither
Experienced Drug War Publicist
Seven Sensational Drug Documentaries
Romney Fat Cat’s Reefer Madness – Maia Szalavitz shines a light on the Semblers.
Tweets.
Kevin Sabet: In the South Bronx, 76 of cigarette packs collected avoided the combined NYC and State tax. Legalization doesn’t work. http://t.co/rxH0LP7M
Pete Guither: @KevinSabet EVEN in the poor S. Bronx, portion of packs collected tax and rest were less-violent gray, not black market. Legalization works.
Why legalizing marijuana is a bad idea – the Baker Institute Blog continues its legalization series with a very weak argument by Joan Neuhaus Schaan.
A war that should end A Mennonite calls for Christians to support ending the war on drugs.
A rather curious article by Baker Institute fellow Gary Hale, former chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the DEA: Legalization of marijuana: When, not if
He calls himself a pragmatist who is neither for nor against legalization, but considers it inevitable and argues that we should plan for it, by considering a myriad of legal issues.
It’s interesting speculation, but seems to me, at points, to be a bit of putting the cart before the horse.
Sure, all these things could come up, but not right away, and we don’t even know how legalization is going to occur. There could be (and should be) opportunities for different states to try different regulatory approaches — that’ll cause some chaos, sure, but it’ll help us discover the ones that work the best.
Couple of other points I found telling:
More questions: Will governments be faced with having to pay “reparations” to the families of police officers and federal agents who died while working to destroy marijuana plantations in the United States and abroad? [...] What do we say to these men who answered the call of the U.S. government to suppress the supply-side of the marijuana?
Not surprising, but telling, that it didn’t even occur to him to include “reparations” to the civilians who died in the war on marijuana.
I also find it a bit odd that he focuses so much on marijuana as hallucinogen, when in reality its classifcation as such is more a technicality than an actual factor.
…
Other articles in the series, which continues this week, include:
Marijuana: A case for legalization by William Martin
The greatest harms associated with cannabis are not the effects of the drug but of our drug policies…
In a contest with alcohol and tobacco, marijuana wins by Silvia Longmire
There are too many additional arguments on both sides of the issue to list them all here, and it would behoove the reader to do additional research if intent on forming a solid opinion one way or another. But based on the potential (or lack thereof) of harm to the human body, for people to become dependent, and for people to become violent against each other, marijuana wins in a competition against already-legal alcohol and tobacco.
…
It’s worth pointing out that, as usual, this series asks the wrong question, as I’ve made clear in the past: Legalization Isn’t the Question