After Three Decades Of Getting Tough On Crime, The U.S. Is The World's Top Jailer, With A Quarter Of All The Prisoners On The Planet Now Behind American Bars. But Are The Overcrowded Prisons And Skyrocketing Costs Worth It? AVENAL, California - In the early afternoon at Avenal State Prison, inmates wait to be let out into the exercise yard under the blistering central California sun. Scattered among the army-style bunks that line the barracks' walls, 100 prisoners play cards, talk or read. In the corner, a few sit on benches watching TV, the volume loud enough to be heard over the din of voices and loudspeakers. Oprah Winfrey is discussing personal growth. [continues 3081 words]
In a classroom thick with wigs, sinks and barber chairs, a man sprays water through a woman's sudsy hair and works his fingers carefully to rinse the shampoo. Standing in front of a large mirror, another man brushes and sprays a woman's hair. Two others discuss styling techniques. It could be a scene from any community college, but for the bars on the windows. This is Hameenlinna Central Prison, near Helsinki. The stylist working at the mirror is a convicted murderer. The man washing hair is a drug trafficker. Two of the three women are also prisoners; the other is a professional hairstylist hired to teach the class. There are no guards. [continues 2369 words]
It's a shame Canadians can't see American Super Bowl ads. If we had, we would have seen an omen of things to come. We would also have seen evidence that, despite what commentators were saying after Sept. 11, irony is alive and snickering. On Sunday night, the White House ran the most expensive public service ads ever, two 30-second spots that cost $3.4 million U.S. The message: "Terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder. If you quit drugs, you join in the fight against terror in America. [continues 681 words]
Trafficking Prime Source Of Funds For Many Groups In response to this week's terrorist attacks in the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told a news conference Wednesday that "we have to make sure that we go after terrorism and get it by its branch and root." Mr. Powell meant his comment to be a warning to states that support terrorists. But the evil of terrorism has another root: money. Terrorist groups may be forged by people holding fanatical beliefs, but their operations still need material support. Weapons have to be bought, training financed, travel paid for, bribes offered and terrorists sheltered. Even zealots need cash. [continues 811 words]
Be Very Skeptical When Politicians Talk About Illegal Drugs It's a rare event when a senior federal minister says anything about illegal drugs, so I suppose I should be grateful for justice minister Anne McLellan's letter (March 9) taking issue with a column I wrote on the subject. But I'm afraid I can't leave it at that, because Ms. McLellan's cynical letter, and other such statements by federal officials, are misleading the public about Canada's drug policies. [continues 1226 words]
Canada's Justice Minister, Anne Mclellan, Lets Washington Dictate Canadian Drug Policy Any Canadian who has ever wondered just who is in charge of this country's policy on illegal drugs got a clear answer from Justice Minister Anne McLellan last week: The government of the United States is in charge, that's who. Naturally, Ms. McLellan didn't say this in so many words: that much honesty would be awkward. But for those familiar with the international War on Drugs, events last week allow no other interpretation. [continues 1448 words]
Patrick Dorismond probably never knew that the men who killed him were police officers. Standing on a New York City street corner one night last March, Dorismond and his friend Kevin Kaiser were approached by three men who, Kaiser later recalled, looked like "derelicts." They asked Dorismond if he had any marijuana. The men were undercover police officers. They didn't know Dorismond or his friend. They had not seen him do anything suspicious. They were simply approaching people based on a vague profile of pot dealers. Dorismond, who was black, fit the profile. [continues 2110 words]
SAN YSIDRO, Calif.--The broad sidewalk is filled with pedestrians streaming north. Alongside, across 16 lanes, hundreds of cars are lined up to drive in the same direction. Uniformed agents pick their way through the idling vehicles, their dogs sniffing for the drugs that are certainly here, somewhere, in this river of machines and people. It's midmorning on a sunny Tuesday. This is as slow as it ever gets at the San Ysidro port of entry on the Mexican-American border--the busiest border crossing in the world. [continues 1832 words]
In the 16th century, the Marques de Caete, the Spanish viceroy of Peru, was bothered by the extent to which Indians were chewing coca leaves, a practice that delivers a small amount of the same drug users take when they snort cocaine today. The Marques ordered a limit to the amount of coca that could be planted. He even set up financial incentives to get farmers to substitute food crops for coca. It didn't work. Coca was too much in demand, too lucrative. [continues 2054 words]
BOGOTA--They are dark memories now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, Colombia's drug lords loomed large in North American nightmares. Pablo Escobar, the ruthless chief of the Medellin cartel, was the most infamous of all, the personification of the cocaine plague. In 1989, pressed by Colombian authorities, Escobar declared "total and absolute war," then launched an unprecedented campaign of terror. The Colombian government responded with its own brutal force. For the first time, the War on Drugs became a literal war. [continues 1925 words]
On June 6, 1998, a surprising letter was delivered to Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations. "We believe," the letter declared, "that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself." The letter was signed by statesmen, politicians, academics and other public figures. Former UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar signed. So did George Shultz, the former U.S. secretary of state, and Joycelyn Elders, the former U.S. surgeon general. Nobel laureates such as Milton Friedman and Argentina's Adolfo Perez Esquivel added their names. Four former presidents and seven former Cabinet ministers from Latin American countries signed. [continues 3942 words]
Worried about the growing wealth and power of organized crime? Jim Flaherty, Ontario's attorney general, says he's got a solution. It's called civil asset forfeiture -- a police power invented in the United States and promoted internationally by the American government and American police. It works in the U.S., Mr. Flaherty claims. So the provincial Tories are bringing it here. But here's something strange: It seems that Americans themselves don't think this American idea is so terrific after all. In fact, events just last week confirm that Americans increasingly see this police power as a serious threat to property rights and civil liberties. [continues 661 words]
Renee Boje, Now A Roberts Creek Resident, Hopes That Canada's Justice Minister Will Reject Extradition Request. OTTAWA - With her peasant skirts, willowy looks and gentle voice, Renee Boje appears to be just the sort of flower child one would expect to meet at Roberts Creek on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast. But not everyone agrees. U.S. drug enforcement officials insist Boje, 30, is a serious criminal on the run from justice, a woman guilty of such a terrible crime that she must be punished as harshly as rapists and murderers. [continues 1569 words]
Humans have used psychoactive drugs in just about every society in every time in history. There has never been, and can never be, a "drug-free world." If drug use will always be with us, it follows that the harms drugs can cause will also remain. There is no "solution" to the drug problem. That might sound resigned, but it's not. We still can, and must, make important choices: Which drug-related harms will society cope with? Some are worse than others. Given the range of possible drug policies we could adopt, which policies will produce the fewest and least destructive harms? We can't choose solutions, but we can, and do, choose our problems. [continues 2117 words]
The case of a U.S. woman who fled to B.C. after being charged for watering plants at the home of a medicinal marijuana advocate highlights the gap between Canadian values and America's war on drugs. With her peasant skirts, willowy looks and gentle voice, Renee Boje appears to be just the sort of British Columbia flower child one would expect to meet in Robert's Creek, a short ferry ride up the coast from Vancouver. But not everyone agrees. American drug enforcement officials insist Ms. Boje, 30, is a serious criminal on the run from justice, a woman guilty of such a horrible crime that she must be punished as harshly as rapists and murderers. [continues 2262 words]
After working for five months in four countries preparing a series on illegal drugs, I think I'm entitled to a little self-indulgence. So bear with this journalist while he writes about journalism -- specifically, the media's role in the insanity of drug prohibition. It's a long and sorry record. Prohibition laws owe their very genesis to "drug scares" fomented by the media. Maclean's, for one, ran the racist screeds of Emily Murphy that led directly to legislation in the 1920s. [continues 693 words]
Legalization isn't perfect, but it's better than a drug ban. Humans have used psychoactive drugs in just about every society in every time in history. There has never been, and can never be, a "drug-free world." If drug use will always be with us, it follows that the harms drugs can cause will also remain. There is no "solution" to the drug problem. That might sound resigned, but it's not. We still can, and must, make important choices: Which drug-related harms will society cope with? Some are worse than others. Given the range of possible drug policies we could adopt, which policies will produce the fewest and least destructive harms? We can't choose solutions, but we can, and do, choose our problems. [continues 2154 words]
Evidence shows no link between the law and rate of drug use. Most Canadians, I am sure, strongly support the criminal prohibition of drugs such as cocaine and heroin. I am equally sure those Canadians share one assumption about drugs that, more than anything else, is the reason they want drugs banned. It is the idea that criminal prohibition keeps the rate of drug use and addiction down. Prohibition may not stop all drug use, people think, but if it were lifted, drugs would be much cheaper. Users wouldn't fear arrest. Inevitably, drug use and addiction would soar and society would suffer. [continues 2287 words]
Trying To Enforce Drug Laws Can Sometimes Bring Out The Worst In Even The Best Officers One of the worst police corruption scandals in American history began with 3 1/2 kilograms of cocaine. That's what Los Angeles police officer Rafael Perez stole from a police evidence room. When he was caught, in August 1999, he agreed to talk, not just about the theft, but also about the shootings, robberies, ferocious beatings and other corrupt practices that were standard operating procedure for many of the officers of his police station. [continues 2566 words]
Banning Drugs Inflates Their Value. As A Result, Organized Crime Grows More And More Powerful On Feb. 14, 1929, three men in police uniforms and two others in civilian clothes approached a Chicago garage known to be a shipping centre in the illegal alcohol trade. They found seven men inside. Pointing their machine-guns, the police ordered the men up against a wall. As the seven stood with their hands in the air, the officers opened fire, killing them all. [continues 4301 words]
Wiretapping, 'Reverse-Stings' All Diminish Citizens' Rights Patrick Dorismond probably never knew that the men who killed him were police officers. Standing on a New York City street corner one night in March, Mr. Dorismond and his friend, Kevin Kaiser, were approached by three men who, Mr. Kaiser later recalled, looked like "derelicts." They asked Mr. Dorismond if he had any marijuana. The men were undercover police officers. They didn't know Mr. Dorismond or his friend. They had not seen him do anything suspicious. They were simply approaching people based on a vague "profile" of where pot dealers might be found and what they might look like. Mr. Dorismond, a black man, fit the profile. [continues 4353 words]
DO OUR DRUG LAWS HARM US MORE THAN THEY HELP? A growing number of doctors and public health officials say criminal law is, at best, useless in stopping the damage to health caused by drug use. Early one morning in 1993, Alan and Eleanor Randell were startled by the sound of the doorbell in their Victoria home. At the front door were two police officers. "As soon as I saw them," Eleanor Randell says, her voice shaking even now, seven years later, "I knew that there was something wrong." [continues 4951 words]
WAR ON DRUG SMUGGLING 'DESTRUCTIVE' AND 'SENSELESS' A Former U.S. Drug Warrior Says The Billions Spent Battling Traffickers Should Go Toward Treatment For Addicts And Community Development. NEW YORK - When retired Lt.-Cmdr. Sylvester Salcedo decided to protest the American War on Drugs, he wasn't quite sure how to go about it. No American veteran of the fight against drugs had ever before done what Mr. Salcedo wanted to do. So, taking his lead from veterans of the Vietnam War who protested by returning their medals, Mr. Salcedo last November dropped his navy Achievement Medal into a FedEx envelope and mailed it to U.S. President Bill Clinton. [continues 3568 words]
U.S. Customs agents at the world's busiest crossing have an impressive record in busting smugglers. But, the U.S. admits, 'drugs still flood in.' SAN YSIDRO, California - The broad sidewalk is filled with pedestrians streaming north. Alongside, across 16 lanes, hundreds of cars are lined up to drive in the same direction. Uniformed agents pick their way through the idling vehicles, their dogs sniffing for the drugs that are almost certainly here, somewhere, in this river of machines and people. [continues 2554 words]
Mexicans call the violence and corruption spawned by illegal drug trafficking 'Colombianization.' And they fear it could undermine their country's progress towards becoming a developed nation. Dan Gardner The Ottawa Citizen TIJUANA, Mexico - Driving to work one morning in 1997, Jesus Blancornelas entered a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film. A car had wheeled around and blocked the street ahead of him. As Mr. Blancornelas, a renowned Mexican newspaper editor, watched from the passenger seat, the windows of the blockading car were rolled down. [continues 3273 words]
Politicians try to solve the drug problem by destroying the source plants. Here's why they always fail. Cocaine, heroin, opium, marijuana: as strange and threatening as these illegal drugs appear to most people, they are made from quite ordinary plants. Why not destroy those plants in the field and therefore stop dangerous drugs from ever being made? That's a beguiling idea, and a very old one. In the 16th century, the Marques de Canete, the Spanish viceroy of Peru, was bothered by the extent to which Indians were chewing coca leaves, a practice that delivers a small amount of the same drug users take when they snort cocaine today. The Marques ordered a limit to the amount of coca that could be planted. He even set up financial incentives to get farmers to substitute food crops for coca. [continues 3190 words]
The U.S. boasted that defeating Colombia's cartels would end the illegal drug trade. Instead, things got worse. BOGOTA, Colombia - They are only dark memories now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, Colombia's drug lords loomed large in North American nightmares. Pablo Escobar, the ruthless chief of the Medellin cartel, was the most infamous of all, the personification of the cocaine plague. In 1989, pressed hard by Colombian authorities, Escobar declared "total and absolute war." A horrified world watched as the drug lord launched an unprecedented campaign of terror. The Colombian government responded with its own brutal force. For the first time, the "War on Drugs" became a literal war. [continues 4593 words]
Billions Spent, But Drugs Still Sold, Used Every society in history that could grow plants had drugs. These drugs weren't just for stanching wounds and healing the sick. They were also psychoactive drugs for altering sensation and consciousness. Few things can be said to be practically universal among human societies. Psychoactive drug use is one of them. The Incans chewed the leaves of Erythroxylin coca, the coca bush, to release the cocaine within. Ancient Egyptians, Romans, and many others grew the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, which oozes the sap that becomes opium, morphine and heroin. Buddhist Indians celebrated what we call marijuana. Some North American aboriginals had peyote; others had tobacco. Europeans had alcohol. [continues 822 words]
continued from Part 1a: The precedent for international drug prohibition had been set in conferences in 1909 and 1911. At the time, a few nations, notably Canada and Britain, were interested in international regulation of opium, but it was the United States that instigated these conferences and prodded the talks away from mere regulation toward total criminal prohibition. The First World War delayed this process before prohibition could be made internationally mandatory, however. American plans were further hampered in the inter-war period by the refusal of the U.S. to join the League of Nations. [continues 3777 words]
Uncle Sam's global campaign to end drug abuse has empowered criminals, corrupted governments and eroded liberty, but still there are more addicts than ever before. On June 6, 1998, a surprising letter was delivered to Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. "We believe," the letter declared, "that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself." The letter was signed by statesmen, politicians, academics and other public figures. Former UN secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar signed. So did George Shultz, the former American secretary of state, and Joycelyn Elders, the former American surgeon general. Nobel laureates such as Milton Friedman and Argentina's Adolfo Perez Esquivel added their names. Four former presidents and seven former cabinet ministers from Latin American countries signed. And several eminent Canadians were among the signatories. [continues 1188 words]
Question: When is a war not a war? Answer: When the focus groups prefer the term "balanced approach." That's all you really need to know about how drug policy has changed since the bad old days of Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs." The John Wayne rhetoric has lost its political appeal and been replaced with the soothing vocabulary of Mr. Rogers. Beyond that, drug policy is just as vicious, stupid and destructive as ever. This was demonstrated twice last week, once by an American, then by one of our own. First up was Bill Clinton, the Zen master of mendacity. In his seven years in power, Clinton's speeches about drugs have been models of moderation, and even his drug czar, a retired general, says he hates the term "drug war" because it doesn't reflect the "balanced approach" he prefers. Of course, the number of Americans arrested for drug crimes is now at an all-time high, as is the number of Americans in prison and the size of the federal anti-drug budget, but Clinton has never been one to let mere facts spoil a good lie. [continues 625 words]
For just a few moments, I was blissed out like a Beatle playing the sitar. Allan Rock, the health minister, put me in that Nirvana last week when he announced that 14 sick or dying people wouldn't be busted, 'cuffed, and locked up if they used marijuana to ease their suffering. Such compassion. Rock spoke of humanity and felt everyone's pain. He was enlightened. He was a maharishi in a silk tie. He was Gandhi in pinstripes. But then I made a phone call and dropped to earth like a tequila drinker who eats the worm. I spoke with John Klaver, a 51-year-old veteran of the Edmonton fire department, who, in three decades of service built an impressive resume: decorated, held rank of captain, worked as fire investigator. But he may soon have to add another line: convicted drug criminal. [continues 685 words]
A Tory Senator will launch a campaign today to have the Senate do what the House of Common won't: review all of Canada's drug laws and policies. Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, angry that the House of Commons "hasn't taken the issue seriously," wants the Senate to strike a special committee to study drug issues and tour the country to discuss its findings. The questions to be asked are sweeping: Should marijuana be legalized? What about other drugs? Does prohibiting the use of drugs do more harm than good? What new public health methods might be used to ease the damage done by drug use? How are other countries dealing with drugs? [continues 979 words]
Watching Health Minister Allan Rock announce that the government may, after a suitable period of testing, waiting and delay, allow marijuana to be used as a medicinal drug, I was left perplexed. One might even say flummoxed. There are so many unanswered questions. Please don't misunderstand. I think it's wonderful that emaciated AIDS patients using a minor drug to stave off death may, just may, no longer be handcuffed, charged and convicted like criminal scum. That the government is at long last considering making this change at some time in the distant future shows how generous of spirit it really is. But after airing this pale ray of enlightenment, Mr. Rock quickly added that the government would not even think of generally legalizing marijuana. He was adamant. Smoke a joint and you are criminal scum. And that's the way it will stay. [continues 645 words]
