Science advisers given right to dissent
By Mark Henderson
Times (UK)
December 16, 2009

Cocaine and rebels haunt Peru's remote jungle
By Terry Wade
Reuters
December 15, 2009

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions
By Rajeev Syal
Guardian (UK)
December 13, 2009


Editorials / Éditoriaux

Editorial only worsens drug problem
By Evan Wood MD, PhD
Prince George Citizen
December 14, 2009

The slippery slope of marijuana regulation
Social attitudes toward the drug have moved beyond legal and political thinking. No wonder the L.A. City Council is having such a tough time.
Tim Rutten
LA Times
December 16, 2009

Legal highs are not a police matter
The penalties meted out to children using legal substances such as mephedrone are outrageous, as is the police involvement
By Geoffrey Alderman
Guardian (UK)
December 14, 2009

Swift action sought on medical marijuana
D.C. Council chairman ready to begin crafting policy with lifting of ban
By Tim Craig
Washington Post
December 15, 2009

Subject: US: Group: Pot measure has enough sigs for 2010 ballot

The Associated Press
Monday, December 14, 2009

Group: Pot measure has enough sigs for 2010 ballot

By MARCUS WOHLSEN

SAN FRANCISCO -- A group campaigning to put a marijuana legalization measure before California voters said Monday it has enough signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot.

The measure has far more than the nearly 434,000 signatures needed to make the statewide November 2010 ballot, said Richard Lee, an Oakland medical marijuana entrepreneur and the initiative's main backer.

"We'll keep our organizers on the street to keep the momentum going strong, but today we're declaring an overwhelming victory," Lee said.

The proposal would legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana for adults 21 and older. Residents could cultivate marijuana gardens up to 25 square feet. City and county governments would determine whether to permit and tax marijuana sales within their boundaries.

County election officials across the state must still validate and count the signatures before the California Secretary of State places the measure on the ballot. Campaign organizers say they will submit more than 650,000 signatures of registered voters next month.

A Field Poll conducted in April found that 56 percent of California residents supported legalizing and taxing marijuana to help bridge the state budget deficit. Still, pro-legalization advocates are divided over whether the ballot measure is being pushed too soon.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law. But some legal scholars have argued the U.S. government could do little to make California enforce the federal ban if the drug became legal under state law.

Opponents of the measure contend legalization of marijuana will lead to more drug abuse among minors.

"If you increase the availability of a drug, you increase its use in youth. If you decrease the perception of harm, you increase its use in youth," said John Redman, executive director of Californians for Drug Free Youth. "Legalizing marijuana does both."

Supporters point to provisions in the legalization measure that call for jail time for anyone who sells or gives marijuana to children. It forbids smoking pot in a public place or in front of minors.

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Jamaica lawmaker calls for legalizing small amounts of marijuana for private use
Winnipeg Free Press
December 12, 2009

Washington Post
September 30, 2009

Hallucinogenic Herb Under Legislative Eye

By J. Freedom DuLac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

On 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan, just past the yellow "Drug Free Zone"
sign, the B&K News Stand sells hookahs, rolling papers and "Purple Sticky Salvia."

The psychedelic Purple Sticky label warns that the contents of the cylindrical package -- dried leaves of the hallucinogenic herb Salvia divinorum and a chemical extract of the drug -- are to be used as incense only. But at $29.95 for a pillbox the size of a small jar of lip balm, that's some awfully expensive fragrant foliage.

It's perfectly legal to sell, possess and ingest salvia in the District.
But the same stuff, long used for medicinal and mystical purposes by Mazatec Indians in Mexico, will get you arrested in Virginia, where a ban on salvia passed unanimously in both the House and Senate last year.

Last month, after police reported multiple instances in which officers had to restrain people under the influence of salvia, the Ocean City Council passed emergency legislation to ban salvia products, which were being sold at almost 20 shops on the resort town's boardwalk. An identical ban followed suit in Worcester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and state Del. Jim Mathias, the former mayor of Ocean City, plans to push for a statewide ban when the General Assembly meets in Annapolis this winter.

Salvia has been gaining popularity over the past decade as a smokable drug whose psychotropic extract provides a short-lived but potent hallucinogenic trip. The 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 1.8 million people in the United States had tried salvia, "and it's probably even more now," said Matthew W. Johnson, a psychopharmacologist at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, where he studies salvia and its active ingredient, salvinorin A. "It's really hit a critical mass in the last couple of years."

There's ample evidence online: Salvia, which is widely available for purchase on the Internet, has become a popular theme on YouTube, where countless bong-smokers in their teens and 20s have posted videos of themselves stumbling, laughing uncontrollably, talking nonsensically and just plain freaking out. (Video titles include "Jess' Journey To Space,"
"Worst Salvia Trip bad bad bad" and "!!!Hilarious Salvia Trip!!!!!!")

"It's an unpredictable drug that clearly alters rational behavior and alters your psyche," said Mathias, who sponsored an earlier anti-salvia bill that stalled in the Senate. Watching YouTube videos of kids flying high on salvia, "you see how panicky and paranoid and fearful they become. But if somebody for whatever reason decides this drug is something they want to partake in, they can buy it like they're buying a comic book or chewing gum. You don't even have to be 18. . . . I just don't think you should be able to buy salvia like you'd buy a Mounds bar."

Researchers worry that a rush to regulate the drug could interfere with efforts to learn whether salvinorin A can be used to treat cocaine addiction and Alzheimer's disease, among other conditions. But total or partial salvia bans have been imposed in 16 states; North Carolina will make it illegal in December. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has labeled salvia "a drug of concern" and is considering adding it to the list of drugs banned under the Controlled Substances Act. (It's illegal in at least a dozen countries.)

But fret not, green thumbs: Salvia divinorum is not the same as the ornamental species of salvia you've been planting all these years.
They're family, but Salvia divinorum is the hippy-trippy uncle of the genus. "Salvia, the flowering plants, are backbones of the garden," said Ginny Rosenkranz, a commercial horticulture educator at the Maryland Cooperative Extension. "Salvia divinorum is a different species entirely. It's not know for its flowers; it's not considered ornamental."

The genus salvia is part of the mint family and is commonly called sage, hence the trippy nicknames for "Sally D": Magic Mint, Diviner's Sage, Sage of the Seers.

Although its hallucinogenic qualities were known by ethnobotanists and in psychedelic drug circles for many years, salvia had a low profile in this country until the late 1990s, when word spread that concentrating the active compound, salvinorin A, and smoking it was like a legal ticket to a magic carpet ride.

"That's when things started changing, around 1998, 1999, and you started seeing mail-order companies offering it," said Daniel Siebert, creator of the Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center, a salvia Web site. Siebert has experimented with the drug himself, "though I haven't done it in a couple of years," he said.

He describes his experience as a journey to another place. "If you take a high dose, you get immersed in this dreamlike trance state," he said.
"You're seeing this narrative scene unfold, like you do when you're asleep, and you're not aware of your body or the room you're in. You think you're someplace else."

Siebert said traditional Indian use of salvia was reserved for occasions "when they have a real reason to consult with their inner selves or with divine beings . . . usually a problem they're trying to gain insight into. It's a solemn, sacred thing."

Today, however, "more and more people are smoking excessively high doses and being careless," Siebert said. They "are experimenting with it in a party atmosphere while drinking with a lot of friends around, and they're finding it confusing and disorienting."

But is it dangerous? Johnson, the psychopharmacologist, said emergency rooms aren't reporting an increase in salvia overdoses or other issues related to the drug -- in part because "it's very short-acting, lasting five to 10 minutes."

Salvia doesn't appear to be addictive, nor is it particularly toxic, Johnson said. "The science is pretty clear. . . . Salvia is not the next methamphetamine or the next cocaine or heroin."

But, he warned, "this is a powerful drug. If someone were to drive on it, that would be a very bad thing."

In Delaware, Brett Chidester, 17, committed suicide in 2006 after becoming a salvia smoker. There was no evidence that Chidester was under the influence of salvia when he killed himself, but within four months, state legislators passed "Brett's Law," making salvia a controlled substance.

A dozen states have put salvia on Schedule I, the most restrictive class of drugs, including heroin, LSD and marijuana.

That has made research into the drug's possible therapeutic uses more difficult, said Thomas E. Prisinzano, a University of Kansas researcher who has been studying modifying salvinorin A to treat drug addiction.

"I'm concerned about the rush to regulate," Johnson said. Putting a substance on Schedule I "disincentivizes pharmaceutical companies that might pour millions of dollars into the development of a potential medication for cocaine dependence or Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia."

Worcester County Commissioner Linda Busick shrugged off such concerns.
She recalled walking down the Ocean City boardwalk and wondering when and how the summer resort became an open-air drug market, with Purple Sticky Salvia and other brands offered at multiple levels of potency and in various flavors at the ubiquitous T-shirt shops.

"There's some feeling out there that we made a rush to judgment," Busick said. "But this is bad stuff. I had a youngster tell me that . . . you might think you can fly when you're on it and you'll need somebody to hold you back. Kids were having really bad experiences with it, and it was legal. We needed to stop it."

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The Union: The Business Behind Getting High

http://www.amazon.ca/Union-Business-Behind-Getting-High/dp/B0025XUTKQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1260807744&sr=8-1

A recommended DVD which explores that Marijuana industry in British Columbia.

 

 

DPA
December 14, 2009

Opium cultivation on the rise in Golden Triangle

Bangkok : Opium cultivation in South-East Asia rose 11 percent this year as soaring prices in Laos and political instability in Myanmar drew more farmers to the illicit poppy crop, a UN report revealed Monday.

Cultivation increased to 33,811 hectares from 30,388 hectares last year in the Golden Triangle - comprising parts of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand
- which two decades ago accounted for more than 70 percent of the world's supply of heroin, a refined derivative of opium.

After years of crop-substitution and development projects that reduced the acreage under cultivation in the region, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) now acknowledges a "worrisome" trend towards increased cultivated in the illicit crop since 2006.

"We are worried about the trends, especially in Myanmar where we see potential for an unravelling of much of what containment has produced over the past two decades," said Gary Lewis, UNODC regional representative for the Asia Pacific.

According to the report Opium Cultivation in South-East Asia, between
1988 to 2006, poppy growing in Laos, Myanmar and Thailand dropped from 157,900 hectares to 24,157 hectares in 2006.

But cultivation has since been on the rise, increasing 47 percent in Myanmar and 19 percent in Laos. Thailand, historically a minor opium grower although a major conduit for heroin from the Golden Triangle, saw its cultivated acreage drop 27 percent this year to only 211 hectares.

Myanmar accounts for the lion's share of opium cultivation in the region, with more than 50 percent coming from the Shan State, a base for several ethnic minority groups such as the Wa and the Shan.

"The eastern Shan State has seen a really dramatic increase in opium cultivation over the past four years, from 3,000 hectares to 11,000 hectares," Lewis said.

Myanmar's military regime has little control over the east Shan State, although it has demanded that all minority groups place their armed militias under state control this year. Few have complied.

In Laos, where opium sells for $1,327 per kg, up 8 percent from 2008, the increase in cultivation is market driven.

"It's all about supply and demand," said Leik Boonwaat, UNODC country representative for Laos. "In Laos, the price is high because of the scarcity of supply, while demand remains high."

By comparison, this year's the price for a kg of opium was $317 in Myanmar and $48 in Afghanistan, now the world's leading provider of the drug.

Leik estimated that there were at least 12,000 opium addicts in the land-locked country.

-----

Opium poppy cultivation in South-East Asia - Dec 2009 (pdf) http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/SEA_Opium_survey_2009.pdf
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The Boston Globe
December 13, 2009

You can't handle the truth

A respected scientist set out to determine which drugs are actually the most dangerous -- and discovered that the answers are, well, awkward

By Mark Pothier

In the long and tortured debate over drug policy, one of the strangest episodes has been playing out this fall in the United Kingdom, where the country's top drug adviser was recently fired for publicly criticizing his own government's drug laws.

The adviser, Dr. David Nutt, said in a lecture that alcohol is more hazardous than many outlawed substances, and that the United Kingdom might be making a mistake in throwing marijuana smokers in jail. His comments were published in a press release in October, and the next day he was dismissed. The buzz over his sacking has yet to subside: Nutt has become the talk of pubs and Parliament, as well as the subject of tabloid headlines like: "Drug advisor on wacky baccy?"

But behind Nutt's words lay something perhaps more surprising, and harder to grapple with. His comments weren't the idle musings of a reality-insulated professor in a policy job. They were based on a list - a scientifically compiled ranking of drugs, assembled by specialists in chemistry, health, and enforcement, published in a prestigious medical journal two years earlier.

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title "Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances," ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug specialists now consider it one of the most objective sources available on the actual harmfulness of different substances.

That ranking showed, with numbers, what Nutt was fired for saying out
loud: Overall, alcohol is far worse than many illegal drugs. So is tobacco. Smoking pot is less harmful than drinking, and LSD is less damaging yet.

Nutt says he didn't see himself as promoting drug use or trying to subvert the government. He was pressing the point that a government policy, especially a health-related one like a drug law, should be grounded in factual information. In doing so, he found himself caught in a crossfire that cost him the advisory post he had held for a decade.

The same issue is becoming a hot one in America - this fall the Obama administration took a baby step toward easing federal scrutiny of medical marijuana use, and a policy report due early next year is expected to emphasize addiction prevention and treatment over criminal enforcement. Opponents are already attacking the administration for its laxity, but Thomas McLellan, a newly installed White House drug official, has begun loudly pushing for policy that incorporates more science.

"We must increase the use of evidence-based tools at our disposal,"
McLellan said in an interview last week.

But as Nutt's case illustrates, that is tough to do. The more data we accumulate about drug harmfulness, the more it seems like the classification systems used by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other governments need to be dismantled - and the more it becomes clear that societies can't, or won't, take that step. Drug laws are rooted in history and politics as much as science. Our own culture embraces one intoxicant - alcohol - that Nutt's ranking deemed far more dangerous than 15 other harmful substances. And even if it were possible to divorce drug politics from drug-use facts, some policy specialists say, letting science call the shots would be a bad idea.

Intoxication has been part of human culture since before recorded history. So have its consequences. A drug can cause all sorts of harms, some devastating, some minor: It can ravage the body of an addict, or simply make a user late for a meeting with the boss. Drugs can impoverish families, trigger deadly violence, cause cancer. In modern society, drugs drive crime and increase health costs for everyone.

To Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at London's Imperial College who chaired the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, it made sense that laws and policies should take into account the harmfulness of the drugs themselves. But when he considered ways to improve the system, he discovered a problem.

"It became clear that [the government] didn't have any systematic, transparent way of assessing drugs at all," he said. "If you say drug laws are based on reducing harm, you have to actually know what kind of harm they cause."

So about a decade ago, he and some colleagues set about to gauge the dangers of 20 substances as objectively as possible. This would not be a measurement with calipers and a scale - drug risks are inevitably subjective, depending on factors like an individual user's tolerance, the amount used, and the duration of use. But Nutt also knew he could create better data than anything the government was currently employing.

He and his colleagues assembled a range of independent experts and asked them to score each drug in three categories - its physical effects on the user, the likelihood of addiction, and its impact on society. The group included addiction specialists registered with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as people with expertise in chemistry, forensic science, and police work.

They gave the specialists a detailed list of parameters to consider. In assessing the addictiveness of, say, cocaine, they would separately rate its pleasure, psychological dependence, and physical dependence, and the ratings would be combined to create an overall risk factor. After a series of meetings and discussions, the rankings were determined by averaging scores across all the categories. The result was a paper published in the public-health journal The Lancet in March 2007.

Number one on the experts' list was an easy call: heroin. It's extremely addictive and, by any measure, destructive to the user and the society around him. Cocaine came in second, followed by barbiturates and street methadone.

Then the list got interesting. Alcohol, which has always been legal in England and was only briefly outlawed in the United States, took the fifth position, above tobacco (9), marijuana (11), LSD (14), and ecstasy (18). The least harmful drug in all respects was khat, a stimulant derived from the leaves of an African shrub.

Included in the Lancet paper was the authors' recommendation that the government should reclassify drugs to reflect the harms they cause. "We saw no clear distinction between socially acceptable and illicit substances," they wrote, suggesting "a more rational debate" on drug policy, based on "scientific evidence."

The ranking - nicknamed the "drug league table," after the British term for sports standings - lay quietly, more or less ignored by the public and politicians, until King's College issued a press release in October based on a lecture Nutt had given in July. Nutt thought he was making much the same point he made in the medical journal two years earlier: If we looked at harm objectively, we would engineer a drastically different set of drug policies than the ones we now use.

He was swiftly booted from his government position. Home Secretary Alan Johnson said Nutt had crossed a line. He "cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy," Johnson told The Guardian newspaper.

"It was a funny, kind of petulant reaction," Nutt told the Globe, "all about machismo and politics. We're harder on drugs than you, we're tougher."

Suddenly, Nutt was everywhere - the papers, the BBC, YouTube, a Facebook page started by his backers. Critics accused him of sending England's youth a mixed message about drug use. Supporters charged the government with stripping the professor of his right to speak freely.

Amid the charges and countercharges, others wondered whether, beneath all the controversy, the government shouldn't just start paying more attention to that list.

If Nutt's list is accurate - if we really do know which drugs are really bad and which are relatively benign - the next step is figuring out how to make use of that information.

It might seem obvious that the most harmful drugs should receive the most attention from the government, with beefed-up prevention and treatment programs, and tougher punishments for producers and distributors. And to conserve their limited resources, it might make sense for drug officials to stop worrying about the least harmful substances, even decriminalizing or legalizing them.

But real-world drug policy is not like that. To a certain extent, say analysts, legal drugs are acceptable and illegal ones are dangerous because, well, because they're already illegal.

"There's a crazy kind of logic that argues, about some currently illegal drug, 'Look how dangerous it is! You couldn't possibly legalize a drug as dangerous as that!' " said Mark A.R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA. The fact that a drug is against the law makes people overestimate its risks, he said, while legal status causes them to underestimate dangers.

Politicians tend to follow that same line of thinking, leaving socially acceptable legal drugs alone, while making easy prey of would-be liberalizers. In the United States, for instance, it would be politically insane to call for the legalization of the least harmful drugs on Nutt's list - khat, GHB, and steroids - while campaigning to outlaw tobacco.

One indisputable fact that emerged from Nutt's study is this: We have assigned a high social value to booze. Alcohol causes many of the harms associated with "harder" drugs - lots of people die or become deeply dysfunctional because of drinking - yet it has been entrenched in society for so long that scientific evidence of its hazards relative to other intoxicants doesn't get much of a public hearing.

Kleiman and other experts - including Nutt - are not suggesting that either Britain or the United States should ban alcohol. America tried that once, and even during Prohibition, people didn't stop drinking - they simply built a system of illegal manufacturing and distribution big enough to satisfy their thirst. Instead, Kleiman believes a good strategy on alcohol should include increased taxes to discourage drinking - young people and heavy drinkers are price-sensitive - and an outright ban on sales to people who have been convicted of drunken driving or other alcohol-fueled crimes.

Of course, that would require new laws, and more political wrangling.
How many convictions? How long of a ban? If the science is complicated, the politics would be more so. The fight would last more than a few rounds.

Nutt, for one, seems ready to go the distance. "The majority of people in [Britain] are more damaged by alcohol than any other drug," he said.
"Let's get the scaling of harm right."

For drugs that are currently illegal, he said, that means having prevention efforts and laws that are proportionate to their dangers. For instance, British law allows up to five years imprisonment for marijuana possession, a penalty Nutt called "infantile and embarrassing."
McLellan, the White House drug adviser, echoed him, saying jailing pot smokers "is idiocy, a really bad use of resources."

But drug law will never be as simple as making a list, and even experts say it shouldn't be. At a certain point, scientists should excuse themselves from the discourse, Kleiman said. Intoxicants are part of our culture in ways that a list can't sort out for us.

"Science gives you facts about the world," he said, "and you have to assign values to those facts. It doesn't tell you what's worth having and what's not worth having."

Mark Pothier is the Globe's senior assistant business editor. He can be reached at mpothier@globe.com.

(c) Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

----------------------------------------------------
The online version includes the graph "Ranking drugs":
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/13/you_cant_handle_the_truth/#

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Pubdate: Fri, 11 Dec 2009

Source: Wall Street Journal (US)

Page: A7

Copyright: 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487

Author: Sean Carney

MARIJUANA IS NOW A PERSONAL MATTER FOR CZECHS

The interim Czech government, led by chief statistician-turned-Prime Minister Jan Fischer, early this week took a step towards making casual marijuana smoking a less worrisome affair.

Mr. Fischer's cabinet defined on Monday what constitutes "small amounts" of cannabis for personal use, clarifying the country's new penal code that from next year decriminalizes cultivation and possession of the plant by individuals, according to Czech news agency CTK.

As of Jan. 1 ordinary Czechs can grow up to five marijuana plants or have several marijuana cigarettes in their pockets without fear of criminal prosecution. Previously what constituted a small amount wasn't specified.

The government's approval of a table specifying what amounts of drugs are permissible is a vital part of the country's new penal code that was last year approved by both houses of parliament and in January of this year was signed into law by President Vaclav Klaus. Without the just-approved table of amounts that will be used by Czech police, the January decriminalization of the drug would be difficult to judge by courts and investigators.

The plant still remains illegal, however, though from the new year possession of five or less plants is merely a misdemeanour, and fines for possession will be on par with penalties for parking violations.

There is also an interesting lifestyle footnote: Czechs are Europe's biggest drinkers of hops-infused beer and are also the continent's leaders in smoking pot. Czechs consume 320 pints of the golden brew per person annually. Also 22% of Czechs between the age of 16 and 34 smoke cannabis at least once a year, according to a recent report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Czech decriminalization of small amounts of cannabis possession does not, however provide greater clarity to the country's policy on medical marijuana. "Konopi Je Lek," a Czech non-profit organization promoting medical marijuana recently co-founded the country's first marijuana dispensary in Prague despite there being no medical marijuana laws on the country's books. The grand opening of the dispensary on Sept. 28 was attended by Prague's Mayor Dr. Pavel Bem, who is also a physician and proponent of sensible use of the herb. Since then, however, Prague police have raided it, hauling away the cannabis meant for patients, and the dispensary is now looking for growers to help restock its supply.

 

 

US may take new look at `war on drugs' MiamiHerald.com ... take a new look at US anti-drug programs such as Plan Colombia and the M�rida Initiative for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. ... See all stories on this topic

---

THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT

U.S. may take new look at `war on drugs'

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER

aoppenheimer@MiamiHerald.com

If you had asked me 10 years ago whether the United States will ever change its interdiction-focused counternarcotics policies -- and perhaps even decriminalize marijuana consumption at home -- I would have told you, ``never.'' Today, I say, ``perhaps.''

Earlier this week, in a tacit admission that current U.S. anti-drug policies are not working, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill to create an independent commission to review whether the U.S. anti-drug policies of the past three decades in Latin America are producing positive results.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where supporters say it has a good chance to pass, given its bipartisan support in the House. The 10-member panel, modeled after the 9/11 Commission that made recommendations to Congress and the White House after the 2001 terrorist attacks, would have to issue its report in 12 months.

REASON FOR CHANGE

What's interesting about the planned independent drug policy commission is that the idea didn't come from a pro-legalization advocate, nor any leftist or libertarian crusader. The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), opposes decriminalization of drugs for non-medical use, and is as mainstream as members of Congress come.

But Engel's frustration over the results of the U.S. war on drugs is symptomatic of Washington's growing skepticism about U.S. anti-drug policies these days.

Since 1980, the United States has spent nearly $14 billion trying to stop drug-smuggling from Latin America, the bill says. While U.S. drug consumption has declined significantly as a percentage of the population, there are still 25.7 million users of marijuana, 5.3 million users of cocaine and 453,000 users of heroin. Meanwhile, U.S. law enforcement and prison systems are overwhelmed by prosecutions on drug-consumption charges.

Interdiction-focused policies have not changed Latin America's status as the world's largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana, and drug-related violence in the region has -- if anything -- increased. In Mexico alone, 5,661 people died in drug-related violence last year, more than double the previous year's total.

``Billions upon billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent. In spite of our efforts, the positive results are few and far between,'' says Engel, who chairs the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee. ``Clearly, the time has come to take a fresh look at our counternarcotics efforts.''

The proposed commission will, among other things, take a new look at U.S. anti-drug programs such as Plan Colombia and the M�rida Initiative for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Engel said that it will ``assess all aspects of our drug policy,'' although he clarified in an e-mail to me that decriminalization of marijuana is not part of his intentions for the commission.

Earlier this year, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia signed a joint declaration suggesting that the time has come to consider decriminalization of marijuana -- studies show that it's not more harmful than alcohol and tobacco, they said -- and to focus on education and prevention to reduce drug consumption.

If I had any doubt that the public mood toward anti-drug policies in the United States is changing, a conversation with former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, convinced me of that. Rocha, who was known as a hard-line enforcer of U.S. anti-drug policies when he headed the 950-strong embassy staff in Bolivia until 2002, told me that he supports the Cardoso-Zedillo-Gaviria statement.

``Things have changed,'' Rocha told me. ``We have to be intellectually honest, and reach the conclusion that the time has come to change the focus of our failed policies.''

OPEN CONVERSATION

My opinion: Washington is on the verge of beginning a taboo-free discussion on its drug policies that was unthinkable a few years ago.

There are three main reasons for this: First, the U.S. focus on ``the war on drugs'' of the 1990s has been replaced by the war on terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Second, the 2008 economic crisis is moving U.S. lawmakers to review how government funds are spent. Third, the drug-related violence in Mexico is creating growing anxiety in U.S. national security circles.

Most likely, the proposed independent commission will not recommend decriminalization of marijuana, but will install the issue as a legitimate debate. Meantime, the Obama Administration will soon announce a new National Drug Control Strategy that will focus more on demand reduction than its predecessors.

At any rate, it's clear there is a growing sentiment that the war on drugs is not working, and that we need to further focus on drug consumers rather than drug producers.

--
XVIII International AIDS Conference
July 18-23 2010 | Vienna, Austria

Dr Marcus Day DSc
Director
Caribbean Drug & Alcohol Research Institute
Box 1419
Castries
SAINT LUCIA

1-758-458-2795 Office
1-758-458-2796 Fax
1-758-721-7278 Cell -


�Harm reduction� is often made an unnecessarily controversial issue as if there was a contradiction between prevention and treatment on one hand and reducing the adverse health and social consequences of drug use on the other. This is a false dichotomy. They are complementary.

Taken From UNODC (2008) Reducing the adverse health and social effects of drug use: A comprehensive approach.

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