The French Prime Minister and presidential election front-runner, Lionel Jospin, incurred the fury of right-wing opponents yesterday by declaring that smoking a joint at home was less dangerous than drinking and driving.

Mr Jospin repeated his refusal to bow to pressure from some Socialist and Green allies for the decriminalisation of cannabis. He said relaxing the laws on soft drugs would "give the wrong signal to young people".

But the Socialist Prime Minister told the French news agency Agence France Presse, in an interview by fax, that virulent critics of cannabis should remember that both drinking alcohol and smoking tobacco could be more life-threatening.

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PARIS - The acrid scent of cannabis wafted into France's presidential race on Tuesday as Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stirred controversy by suggesting occasional smokers should be treated with leniency.

Supporters of conservative President Jacques Chirac, his neck-and-neck rival in the April 21 vote, slammed the remarks as irresponsible while the country's pro-legalisation lobby called for a proper debate on reform of France's tough drug laws.

Jospin, who has previously owned up to having smoked cannabis himself twice, started it all by telling an interviewer on Monday: "Smoking a joint at home is certainly less dangerous than drinking and driving."

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The various armed factions waging civil war in Colombia are financially dependent on the U.S. drug war.

Forcibly limiting supply while demand for drugs remains constant only increases the profitability of drug trafficking. For the same reasons prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States, the drug war has been doomed from the start.

Even if every last plant in Colombia were destroyed, Americans would continue to get high. Cut off the flow of cocaine and domestic methamphetamine production will boom. Thanks to past successes in eradicating marijuana in Latin America, the corresponding increase in domestic cultivation has made marijuana America's number one cash crop.

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US Demands A Secure, Compliant Hemisphere

Revolt in Argentina, clashes in Bolivia, violent disputes over land in Brazil, trade unionists murdered in Colombia, and a general strike in Venezuela: Latin America has been exasperated by 20 years of ultra- liberalism. Now the US is using its fight against global terrorism as a pretext for a military response to unrest in the Americas.

"The key question about the defence of the American hemisphere is: what is the threat? In the past, the Americas faced a relatively well- defined threat that the average American could understand (1). Today that threat has become infinitely more complex and more difficult to define." That was Professor Lewis Arthur Tambs, diplomat, historian, professor at Arizona State University and the author of a report on the future of the Americas, summarised in nine points the nine Ds the guiding principles for the hemisphere's security before 11 September. (They are defence, drugs, demography, debt, deindustrialisation, populist post-cold war democracy, destabilisation, deforestation and the decline of the United States (2).

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PARIS, Oct. 23 -- The price of Afghan heroin has dropped, but police departments across Europe say that is unlikely to affect street prices much and has not done so to date.

British police intelligence sources said the price at the Afghanistan- Pakistan border had dropped since Sept. 11 to $200 a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, from $400. Europe gets the bulk of its heroin from Afghanistan while American dealers buy from Colombia, Mexico and Southeast Asia as well.

A spokesman for the British National Criminal Intelligence Service noted that the border price for heroin was $100 a kilo until July 2000 when the Taliban banned the cultivation of opium poppies. The price then shot up to $400.

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FRANCE'S Socialist Health Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has backed calls for the decriminalisation of all drugs.

His comments have revived a debate among a political class divided between Roman Catholic conservatives and urban liberals and are likely to embarrass Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister, who is far more cautious on the subject.

M Kouchner was speaking a week after the French National Aids Council -- including scientists, jurists and doctors -- said that French legislation banning drug-taking gave rise to a "policy that hesitates between treatment and repression and constitutes a handicap to developing the strategy of reducing Aids risks". M Kouchner has long shared this view, but had not hitherto expressed it so clearly while in his ministerial post.

[end]

Regarding the editorial "Misplaced Priorities" (Aug. 25):

The editorial was right on target. In order to justify ever-expanding budgets, U.S. drug warriors claim they target major drug kingpins who traffic in heroin and cocaine. U.S. government statistics reveal otherwise.

The drug war in America is in large part a war against marijuana, by far the most popular illicit drug. In 1999 there were 704,812 arrests for marijuana, 620,541 for possession alone.

For a drug that has never been shown to cause an overdose death, the allocation of resources used to enforce marijuana laws is outrageous.

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Attorney General John Ashcroft responded to the Justice Department's latest figures on drug prosecutions by claiming that they prove that "federal law enforcement is targeted effectively at convicting major drug traffickers and punishing them with longer lockups in prison."

The data the department released show almost the opposite: that the nation's tough drug sentencing regime is, to a great extent, being used to lock up comparatively low-level offenders who could easily be prosecuted in state courts.

The data, far from affirming that the federal drug effort is a success, raise real questions about the federal government's prosecutorial priorities in the war on drugs. The growth in federal drug prosecutions over the past two decades has been prodigious.

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Political Battle Brews Over Freedom To Party At Will

PAULE, France -- To the young, they are free-for-alls of drug-induced revelry and thumping techno beats in the bucolic French countryside. To President Jacques Chirac, they are a growing problem.

Rave parties, Dionysian fests involving abundant marijuana, heroin, cocaine and especially the designer drug Ecstasy, have been around for about a decade in Europe. But now, with five rave-related deaths reported in a year and increasing property damage, they are drawing the attention of France's political establishment.

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PAULE, France - To the young, they are free-for-alls of drug-induced revelry and thumping techno beats in the bucolic French countryside. To President Jacques Chirac, they are a growing problem.

Rave parties, Dionysian fests involving abundant marijuana, heroin, cocaine and especially the designer drug ecstasy, have been around for about a decade in Europe. But now, with five rave-related deaths reported in a year and increasing property damage, they are drawing the attention of France's political establishment.

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PAULE, France -- To the young, they are free-for-alls of drug-induced revelry and thumping techno beats in the bucolic French countryside. To President Jacques Chirac, they are a growing problem.

Rave parties, Dionysian fests involving abundant marijuana, heroin, cocaine and especially the designer drug Ecstasy, have been around for about a decade in Europe. But now, with five rave-related deaths reported in a year and increasing property damage, they are drawing the attention of France's political establishment.

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Parties Draw Thousands To Countryside

PAULE, France -- To the young, they are free-for-alls of drug-induced revelry and thumping techno beats in the bucolic French countryside. To President Jacques Chirac, they are a growing problem.

Rave parties, Dionysian fests involving abundant marijuana, heroin, cocaine and especially ecstasy, have been around for about a decade in Europe. But now, with five rave-related deaths reported in a year and increasing property damage, they are drawing the attention of France's political establishment.

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A State Department investigation into a joint U.S.-Peruvian program to interdict drug traffickers' airplanes has reached a clear-cut, if dismaying, conclusion. According to the report released Thursday, the probe, which followed the accidental shooting down in April of a private plane carrying American missionaries, found that sloppy discipline and procedures explained how CIA-contracted trackers and Peruvian Air Force personnel could have combined to target and kill innocent people.

The program dates back to 1994, so the Bush administration can hardly be blamed for its failures.

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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner was quoted Wednesday as admitting that he had practiced euthanasia on dying patients and urging the decriminalization of marijuana in France.

Kouchner, a founder of the Nobel Peace prize-winning aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, told the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland that he had ended the lives of patients during wars in Lebanon and Vietnam.

The minister said he took it on himself to end the lives of suffering patients, and said the practice was secretly done often in France. But he did not say he himself had practiced euthanasia in France, where it is illegal.

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PARIS -- When it comes to mandating treatment for drug addicts, French leaders have a tip for Americans: They've been there, done that and found out it's not the answer.

Not by itself, anyway. "We tried that in France already," said Nicole Maestracci, head of the nation's drug-control office. "Compulsory treatment doesn't work. If you take care of the drug problem but don't give a person a chance to change his life, he will go back to the drugs."

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A GROWTH promoting protein in the brain may be partly responsible for Parkinson's disease, drug addiction and schizophrenia, scientists said yesterday.

The protein, Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) was thought to be needed simply for the proliferation, maturation and survival of nerve cells.

But a team of French researchers has found it also boosts levels of a receptor molecule called D3 which allows neurones to respond to dopamine.

Dopamine is a key chemical which enables neurones to communicate with one another. Faults in the dopamine message system are believed to be involved in brain disorders, including Parkinson's and schizophrenia, as well as drug addiction. The scientists, led by Olivier Guillin from the Unite de Neurobiologie et Pharmacologie Moleculaire in Paris, conducted experiments with rats genetically engineered to provide a "model" of Parkinson's disease.

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A substance produced by the brain to help cells grow also helps a key chemical messenger do its job, a finding that could shed new light on Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and drug addiction, researchers say.

The substance, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, has long been known to help brain cells mature and survive. The researchers found that BDNF also helps the messenger dopamine by providing a pathway used to deliver the message.

The findings are reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by Pierre Sokoloff of INSERM, the French equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, and colleagues in Paris and Marseille, France.

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Regarding the report "In Capital of Ecstasy, the Dutch Practice Tolerance"

A logical, measured drug policy eludes the United States because all illicit substances are treated as equal. A growing majority of the world's citizens realizes not only that each drug is different, but that treating them the same way restricts our ability to control the most harmful drugs.

Legalization does not mean a full-blown, unrestricted, unregulated scheme, similar to the black market system that reigns in most countries today.

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In announcing that his first foreign trip as president will be to Mexico, George W. Bush is living up to his campaign pledge to forge a "special relationship" with it. Although that phrase is usually reserved for America's traditional friendship with Britain, Mr. Bush is right to set ambitious goals for strengthening relations with Mexico. Thanks to President Vicente Fox's electoral defeat of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party last year, a more democratic Mexico can be an important American ally in the Western Hemisphere.

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In the next few weeks, Colombia's complex conflict with guerrillas and drug traffickers is likely to come to a head, on more than one front.

In the jungle-draped southern state of Putamayo, two new U.S.-trained Colombian army battalions are supposed to go into action for the first time in support of a major offensive against the plantations and labs of the cocaine industry, marking the military debut of Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar program to combat the narcotics trade.

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