• Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    The Obama Administration’s Public Health Approach to Drug Policy

    By R. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy

    President Obama’s comments during last week’s live YouTube interview about the need to approach our national drug problem from a public health perspective were timely, thoughtful, and well-grounded in what science tells us about drug use and its consequences. Like the president, I am opposed to the legalization of illegal drugs. At the same time, I understand, from firsthand experience as a police officer and police chief, that we cannot arrest or incarcerate our way out of a problem this complex, and that a “War on Drugs” mentality is too simplistic an approach to be effective.

    Before my confirmation as President Obama’s drug policy advisor, I’d spent thirty-seven years −- my entire professional career -− in law enforcement or working on law enforcement issues. Just one year before my career began, in 1971, President Nixon held a press conference declaring illicit drugs “public enemy number one.” It was a powerful metaphor — characterizing the Nation’s drug problem as fundamentally a criminal justice issue, and marking the beginning of a so-called “War on Drugs” that would last for most of the next four decades.

    While drug use was spreading across the country, especially after support for legalization reached a high point in the late 1970’s and the introduction of crack cocaine in the 1980’s, this era came to be defined with a heavily punitive emphasis, from mandatory minimum sentences to enhanced penalties for crack cocaine possession. Our Nation’s courageous law enforcement officers, prosecutors, courts and prisons system were asked to shoulder an ever-growing load, and to use the effective — but limited — tools at their disposal to arrest and prosecute dangerous drug traffickers that deserved severe sentences in addition to non-violent drug addicts.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net - International

    Amsterdam is done. Where will potheads turn now?

    By Agence France-Presse

    Sunday, January 30th, 2011

    MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — Learning to grow their own weed or finding a dealer: French and Belgian potheads are seeking alternatives to the famous Dutch coffee shop as The Hague plans to cut off drug tourists.

    Incensed by the “nuisance” caused by millions of people crossing its borders each year to visit one of 670 licensed coffee shops, the Netherlands plans to turn these cannabis-vending cafes into private clubs for card-carrying members — Dutch residents only.

    “We are busy learning about growing cannabis at home,” a 27-year-old Belgian visitor told AFP at “Mississippi”, a well-known coffee shop in Maastricht on the border with Germany and Belgium.

    “Smoking a joint, that is our recreation. We really enjoy smoking a joint with a cup of coffee,” said the woman, a regular of the smoky establishment in the hold of a barge moored on the Maas River.

    Though technically illegal, the Netherlands decriminalized the possession of less than five grams (0.18 ounce) of cannabis in 1976 under a so-called “tolerance” policy.

    Cannabis cultivation and wholesale remain illegal and are in the hands of criminal organizations in a black-market business worth an estimated two billion euros ($2.7 billion) per year.

    About 1.4 million foreigners visit Maastricht’s 14 coffee shops every year, more than half of them Belgian, followed in joint second place by French and Germans.

    The foreigners’ presence raises the hackles of local residents who blame them for traffic jams, nocturnal disturbances, and attracting the seedy underbelly of the illegal drug trade.

    “In the 200 yards between the parking garage and the entrance to Mississippi, I can be approached twice or three times by people trying to sell me cocaine,” said a 19-year-old French student on the street of Maastricht.

    The city proposed in 2005 to ban foreigners from its coffee shops, whose owners opposed the move and are contesting it before the Dutch Council of State — the country’s highest administrative court which also advises the government on legal issues.

    The court, set to make a ruling in the coming months, sought the input of the European Court of Justice, which ruled in December that banning foreigners was justified “by the objective of combating drug tourism and the accompanying public nuisance”.

    The new, rightist Dutch government inaugurated last October wants to extend the proposed ban to coffee shops countrywide and has mooted the introduction of a national “wietpas” (literally weed pass).

    Coffee shops are currently permitted to stock no more than 500 grams (a little over one pound) of the soft drug at any given time, but this limit is often flouted.

    “Nuisance and criminality related to … the trade in narcotics must be reduced,” states the governing coalition agreement signed in September.

    “Coffee shops must be private clubs for adult residents of the Netherlands on presentation of a pass,” it stipulates.

    “If they keep us out, we will find it (cannabis) at home, in France, but it is not the same,” said regular Maastricht visitor Kevin Armand, 22. “The quality of what we can buy on the street (in France) is not the same.”

    Armand was on a three-day visit to the Netherlands … “to smoke quality grass in peace,” as he explains.

    Adrian, a 25-year-old salesman from Luxembourg, insisted he would continue visiting the capital of the southern Limburg province and “try to find weed from dealers on the streets”.

    Maastricht’s coffee shop owners also dread the impact of the government’s hardened stance on soft drugs.

    “It will be an economic catastrophe for us, but also for tourism,” predicted Marc Josemans, owner of the “Easy Going” coffee shop and president of the Association of Coffee Shops of Maastricht.

    At least one Belgian has read the writing on the wall.

    “I have been coming to Maastricht for years to get my weed,” said the 57-year-old, who like most of the cannabis users approached by AFP, did not want to give his name.

    “This may be a good time to stop smoking joints.”

  • Letter of the Week

    Letter Of The Week

    ANOTHER CASUALTY OF THE DRUG WAR

    RE “Homicide fight centers on drug trade” (Page A1, Jan. 12): During
    a raid of a suspect’s Dorchester home, one detective, spotting a
    child, says, “Let him sleep. Because he’ll never forget it.” You can
    bet that 4-year-old will never forget seeing his father dragged off
    and his house ransacked. One of every three African-American males
    born today will have similar contact with the legal system, mostly
    because of the so-called war on drugs, a trillion-dollar,
    multi-decade crusade that has made no dent in either the supply of or
    the demand for drugs.

    The pathos in Maria Cramer’s article is heartbreaking, as unemployed
    carpenters and other nonviolent folk do exactly what their
    hard-pressed predecessors did nearly a century ago during the
    violence-creating era of Prohibition. The predictable,
    community-destroying violence stems not from the drugs, but from the
    policy of prohibition.

    Are murderous gangsters dealing alcohol or cigarettes?

    Bill Fried

    Somerville

    Pubdate: Tue, 18 Jan 2011

    Source: Boston Globe (MA)

    Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v11/n000/a004.html

  • What You Can Do

    Cut Drug War Spending

    President Obama said it is time for the federal government to tighten its belt and stop wasting money on needless expenses. The failed war on drugs is one expense we could do without.

    Write President Obama and ask him to stop wasting your tax dollars on failed drug policies.

  • Hot Off The 'Net - International

    Soldiers Seize Drug Slingshot on US-Mexico Border

    In what seems like a scene straight out of a Monty Python movie, Mexican soldiers seized a giant catapult believed to have been used to fling drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Acting on a tip from the U.S. Border Patrol, the Mexican military confiscated 45 pounds of marijuana, an SUV and a metal-framed catapult just south of the border with Arizona last Friday. The U.S. tip was based on surveillance video of the border region, recorded by National Guard troops deployed to help U.S. border guards.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    Obama’s Questions From Youtube Deal Mostly With Legalizing Pot

    By David Jackson, USA TODAY

    The YouTube generation is speaking, and many of them want to legalize marijuana.

    Changing the nation’s drug laws is dominating the questions submitted by YouTube users in advance of President Obama’s 2:30 p.m. question-and-answer on the video website.

    UPI is reporting that “the top 10 questions all involved ending or changing the government’s war on drugs, legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana and embracing industrial hemp as a “green” initiative to help farmers.”

    A coalition of groups that support legalization of marijuana report that the top 100 questions deal with their issue, and says, “the American people want to know why our country is continuing the failed, catastrophic policy of drug prohibition.”

  • Hot Off The 'Net - Law Enforcement & Prisons

    Border Patrol Agent Fired For Views On Drug Legalization Files Lawsuit

    By Lucia Graves

    In September of 2009, border patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez was fired for expressing his views on drug legalization to a fellow agent. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico has joined Gonzalez in filing a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

    Gonzalez, 26, alleges that he was dismissed from his job in El Paso, Texas after saying in casual conversation that legalizing and regulating drugs would help stop cartel violence along the southern border with Mexico. His letter of termination stated his comments were “contrary to the core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication, and esprit de corps.”

    Gonzalez told his colleague Shawn Montoya in April of 2009 that “legalization of drugs would end the drug war and related violence in Mexico,” adding that “the drug problems in America were due to American demand for drugs supplied by Mexico,” according to the complaint he and the ACLU-NM filed in federal court.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net - International

    Global Commission on Drug Policies

    Ex world leaders, Branson launch drugs campaign
    Sir Richard Branson
    GENEVA — Former world leaders and other personalities including Virgin chief Richard Branson on Monday launched a global drive to tackle drug abuse, amid signs that a crackdown on drugs crime is failing.

    “There is a growing perception that the ‘war on drugs’ approach has failed,” the Global Commission on Drug Policies said in a statement, as it began an inaugural two day meeting in Geneva.

    The commission, a private venture chaired by ex-Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, also includes the former presidents of Mexico and Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo and Cesar Gaviria, ex-EU foreign affairs chief Javier Solana and former Norwegian minister and international negotiator Thorvald Stoltenberg.