Pubdate: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 Source: Associated Press Latin American Cities Criticize Drug War By FRANK BAJAK Associated Press Writer MEDELLIN, Colombia (AP) Drug policy officials from 10 Latin American cities signed a declaration Wednesday criticizing global antinarcotics efforts for not doing enough to treat chronic drug abusers. "International cooperation prioritizes halting the cultivation and trafficking of illegal psychoactive substances, while minimizing prevention and treatment," the Medellin Declaration states. The document was the fruit of a twoday conference whose participants included the organizers of German and Swiss programs that allow addicts to consume illegal drugs in medically controlled settings. No representatives of U.S. cities were invited to the conference, held in a city whose name is synonymous with the nowdefunct cocaine cartel whose principal market was the United States. Conference organizers, who feel Colombia is unfairly stigmatized by the Washingtonled drug war, had wanted a document that would advocate an end to the prosecution of drug addicts and endorsement of "harm reduction" methods practiced in much of Europe. Their model was a 1990 resolution signed by more than 30 European cities that labels attempts to stop the flow of illegal drugs a failure and advocates the decriminalization of marijuana as well as small quantities of hard drugs for personal use. The Medellin document does not go so far, but does say that offering help to "drug addicts should not depend on making total abstinence the lone objective. Intermediate objectives that achieve a dignified life for the individual can also be reached." Signatories included representatives of this city and Bogota, Colombia; Santiago, Chile; Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion; Bolivia's La Paz; the Cuban capital of Havana and Jalisco, Mexico. Organizers of the conference, ambitiously entitled "First International Summit: Large Urban Cities and Drug Plans," said representatives of Cali, Colombia, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, who left the conference early, had promised to sign. Although tamer than what he wanted, conference organizer Guillermo Castano said the declaration "will serve to open up conversations all over Latin America." "The consumption of illicit drugs is neither endemic nor epidemic in Latin America," said Castano, Medellin's drug policy coordinator, noting that barely 6.5 percent of Colombians have even experimented with illegal drugs. But drug abuse is on the rise in this and many other Latin cities, where narcotics are cheap and rehabilitation programs are scarce and poorly funded, conference participants said. I n metropolitan Buenos Aires, where cocaine costs about five dollars a gram, there are 300,000 chronic drug users, no cityrun residential drug treatment facilities and the courts are jammed with drug cases because narcotics possession is punished by jail or mandatory drug treatment, city health officials said. Conference participants were briefed by Hannes Herrmann, drug policy director of Basel, Switzerland, on his country's experiment distributing heroin to hardened addicts. The policy, which produced a drop in drugrelated crime and increased the number of junkies with steady housing and jobs, was endorsed last month by 71 percent of Swiss voters. Werner Schneider, drug policy director in Frankfurt, Germany, described how the death rate from consumption of illegal drugs in his city dropped from 147 in 1991 to 47 in 1995. Drugrelated court cases were down 15 percent to 20 percent. Schneider attributed the declined to policies that include toleration of hard drug use by addicts and creation of "shooting galleries" where chronic heroin users can inject themselves with clean needles. "For the first time in 20 years, there is no open drug scene in Frankfurt," Schneider said.