(AP) LOS ANGELES - Three men who pleaded guilty to distributing marijuana to seriously ill patients received probation instead of a prison term after a judge expressed admiration for their work and called the prosecution "badly misguided." Scott Imler, Jeff Yablan and Jeffrey Farrington each received one year of probation and up to 250 hours of community service on Monday. They had faced up to 30 months in prison. Judge Howard Matz of U.S. District Court said he was navigating "somewhat uncharted shoals," but pointed out that the three men did not distribute the marijuana for money or political leverage. prison. [end]
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's acknowledgment that opium production is on the rise in Afghanistan is most welcome if it spreads to others in the Bush administration. For more than two decades, Washington's war on drugs has tilted heavily toward supply-side strategies: arresting drug smugglers and dealers, attempting to squeeze off the production and availability of narcotics. But this approach has failed in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces and the U.S.-backed government have been less effective than the Taliban in controlling the production of opium and heroin. [continues 251 words]
Ed Rosenthal, an advocate of medical marijuana, is to be sentenced this week on marijuana cultivation charges. His conviction, by a California jury that was made to believe he was a common drug trafficker, was a miscarriage of justice. Growing marijuana for medical use is legal under the California Compassionate Use Act, passed by the voters in 1996, and Rosenthal was authorized by the City of Oakland to grow it. But U.S. law does not distinguish between growing medical marijuana and run-of-the-mill drug cultivation. At Rosenthal's trial, Judge Charles Breyer prohibited the jury from hearing a medical-marijuana defense. [continues 133 words]
The views of United States drug czar John Walters and Attorney General John Ashcroft are not shared by most Americans -- nor by the leaders of other more enlightened countries. These officials are living in a fantasy world of their own creation, as evidenced by their belief that the U.S. government is currently winning the war on drugs. Jeff Moore, Staunton, Virginia [end]
Regarding the report "Canada splits with U.S. on drugs" (May 20): In all fairness, while Canada has been criticized by the United States for legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, America has been criticized for its discredited, zero tolerance, draconian drug policies and its associated use of the prison system. I don't condone injecting drugs, but Canada's safe injection sites must be a more humane way of dealing with drug use than anything America is doing. Locking up drug addicts to forget about them is reminiscent of America's prohibition era. It doesn't work. [continues 52 words]
PARIS, Jan. 11 - There's no rush to choose a new team, Jan Ullrich keeps saying, even though training camps are being held everywhere and the first races of the new bicycle season are just weeks away. The Tour Down Under begins Jan. 21 in Australia, followed by the start of the Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia and the Tour of Qatar, both on Jan. 31. Secondary races all, they offer riders a chance to put some kilometers in their legs in racing conditions, under a hot sun, not the sleet and cold that mark the early European races. [continues 872 words]
France is planning to tighten restrictions on the smoking of cannabis in an attempt to curb its steadily rising popularity. Campaigners claim that millions of people are regularly defying existing laws as more plantations of cannabis are discovered, particularly in the south of the country. At normal levels of consumption, up to three million French people will have smoked the drug on Christmas day. France's hardline interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, has been consulting cabinet members and government officials on raising the maximum penalties for cannabis use, from the present level of a year in prison or a UKP5,000 fine. [continues 418 words]
A federal appeals court in California last week struck an important blow for medical marijuana, and for the First Amendment. It held that the government cannot revoke the licenses of doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients. The federal government should now abandon its misguided policy of targeting doctors and sick people to fight marijuana use. The ruling gives new life to the medical marijuana initiative, also known as Proposition 215, which California voters passed in 1996. The law permits seriously ill people to use marijuana on the advice of their physicians, and it says that doctors may not be punished for recommending marijuana to their patients. Shortly after it became law, the federal government announced that it would use its authority under the Controlled Substances Act to revoke the prescription licenses of doctors who recommended marijuana to a patient. [continues 108 words]
On a recent summer tour through south London, I saw the future of drug legalization. A young couple injected heroin inside the filthy ruins of an abandoned building. In this working-class neighborhood, residents weave in and out of crowded sidewalks, trying to avoid making eye contact with dealers who openly push heroin, marijuana and crack. Scotland Yard aggressively targets international drug traffickers, and I applaud its strong overall anti-drug policy. But last year, a local police commander initiated a pilot program in which people caught possessing marijuana were warned rather than arrested. Often, they were just ignored. In news reports and my interviews, residents criticized the program for bringing more drug dealers, more petty criminals and more drug use. [continues 558 words]
The French National Assembly has voted through a law making it an offence to drive while under the influence of drugs. Offenders will be liable to two years in jail and a fine of 4,500 euros. The law - which now goes before the upper house or Senate at the end of the month - also authorises police to conduct random testing. The new law was aimed mainly at smokers of cannabis, which is by far the most popular drug among young people. [continues 258 words]
October 8, 2002 -- You know how to walk like an Egyptian - now scientists say they can make you smell like one, too. Researchers in France have recreated the perfume of the pharaohs, a scent believed to have been used by the ancient Egyptians to boost their love lives. But there's a hitch: The ingredients of Kyphi perfume, an aphrodisiac that helps wearers relax, include marijuana, so it can't be made commercially. The legendary aphrodisiac was concocted by experts from L'Oreal and the Center for Research and Restoration of French Museums.Researcher Sandrine Videault based the formula on the writings of Greek historian Plutarch. The numerous ingredients include pistachios, mint, cinnamon, incense, juniper and myrrh. [end]
Cultivation And Consumption Of The Plant In France Have Soared In Recent Years In France the secret growing of Cannabis sativa , which existed on only a small scale a few years ago, is booming. More than 50 shops around the country now sell the equipment required for this new form of "gardening", whose practitioners, according to Ananda, a specialised wholesaler, number tens of thousands. The craze for home-grown cannabis is also evident from the proliferation of books, magazines and websites devoted to the subject, as well as from the increase in the number of events that aim to promote the plant's legal and industrial form, hemp, which contains almost no psychoactive substances. This has already given its name to a trade show, the Salon Europeen du Chanvre, which has been held in Paris for the past two years, to a line of mass-market cosmetics, and to a folkloric festival in Montjean-sur-Loire, western France. [continues 821 words]
PARIS - The French Navy's dramatic high seas raid in June of a ship suspected of smuggling drugs has been attacked by Greek and Spanish officials for a lack of professionalism, France's Le Monde newspaper said on Saturday. The "Winner," a Cambodian-flagged freighter bound for Spain from the Caribbean, was seized in the Atlantic in an operation ordered by the French interim right-wing government three days before the decisive second round of the legislative elections. French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin had at the time hailed the operation "a great success against international drug trafficking." [continues 240 words]
The tribes of the French rave movement were massing yesterday for what may turn out to be their last stand. The frontier of France and Italy, high in the Alps, was the battleground chosen by the ravers for a confrontation with the French government, which they claim is engaged in a "genocidal war" against youth culture, techno music and large rave parties. The French authorities have pledged to enforce rigorously a new law, giving them the power to seize the sound equipment at any rave that takes place without written permission. The ravers said the government has blocked all reasonable efforts to seek such permission in recent weeks. They insisted that Europe's biggest rave of the year, the Teknival " due to last until Sunday, and attract up to 20,000 people and dozens of bands or "sound systems" from several countries " would go ahead regardless. [continues 1024 words]
Regarding "An atrocity of arrests in a Panhandle town" (Meanwhile, July 31) by Bob Herbert: The problem of racial profiling in America is by no means limited to Texas. U.S. government statistics reveal that the drug war is waged in a racist manner through the nation. Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. Although only 15 percent of the nation's drug users are black, blacks account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug violations, over 42 percent of those in federal prisons for drug violations, and almost 60 percent of those in state prisons for drug felonies. Support for the war on some drugs would end overnight if whites were incarcerated for drugs at the same rate as minorities. [continues 88 words]
The British organizer of a giant rave in France threatened yesterday to halt the country's holiday traffic in protest against a government policy against free music festivals. Allan Blinkhorn, an organiser of the Teknival, due to start "somewhere in the south of France" on Thursday, said he planned a slow-moving convoy of trucks carrying loudspeakers on the main motorway south from tomorrow night. "Two trucks packed with sound systems travelling at 50kph (30mph), means 400 kilometres (250 miles) of jams," Mr Blinkhorn said. [continues 274 words]
France's new government looks set to take the opposite line from Britain on drugs, handing down stiff penalties even for casual users of cannabis, writes Jon Henley A couple of days before the British home secretary, David Blunkett, announced he was reclassifying cannabis as a less dangerous drug, the doorbell rang at Jerome Expuesto's home in Le Tour-de-Salvagny near Lyon. The gendarmes on his doorstep were there to escort the 29-year-old off to Saint-Paul prison, where he is now serving a three-year term for drug dealing in what many see as the latest distressing injustice in France's increasingly aggressive war on drugs. [continues 556 words]
NEW YORK When I was a high school social studies teacher in Vermont, one of my duties was to instruct a state-mandated unit on alcohol and illegal drugs. Our curriculum encouraged us to lead "discussions" about these substances, but there was one fact we could never discuss: They make you feel good. That's right: They make you feel good. You read it here first. And soon, New Yorkers will be reading it on the subway - right under a photograph of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Earlier this week, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws unveiled a $500,000 advertising campaign featuring a quotation from Bloomberg. Asked last year whether he had ever smoked marijuana, Bloomberg told New York magazine, "You bet I did. And I enjoyed it." [continues 502 words]
LONDON - Colombia should have everything in its favor. An Atlantic and Pacific coastline, the wealth of oil, coal, diamonds and coffee, a rich potential for tourism and a long history of respect for democratic institutions should make the country a model Latin American nation. Instead, Colombia has a long history of violence: 40,000 have been killed in nearly four decades of guerrilla and paramilitary violence. Illegal armed groups routinely kidnap, take hostages, commit murder and extortion, and show unrestricted contempt for international humanitarian law, both against the civilian population and against their political opponents. [continues 710 words]
French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stirred controversy by suggesting that occasional smokers of cannabis 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 pro-legalization lobby called for a debate on reform of France's tough drug laws. Jospin said legalization would send the wrong signal to the young but insisted that France's 32-year-old drug laws should be applied "in an intelligent manner" toward users. [end]
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. [continues 306 words]
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." [continues 312 words]
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. [continues 61 words]
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). [continues 1222 words]
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. [continues 614 words]
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. [continues 145 words]
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. [continues 166 words]
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. [continues 366 words]
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. [continues 672 words]
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. [continues 173 words]
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. [continues 652 words]
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. [continues 354 words]
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. [continues 134 words]
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." [continues 307 words]
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. [continues 54 words]
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. [continues 243 words]
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. [continues 285 words]
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. [continues 488 words]
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. [continues 494 words]
As a nation we now have nearly half a million people behind bars on drug charges, more than the total prison population in all of Western Europe. And the burden of this explosion in incarceration falls disproportionately on black and Latino communities. Deaths attributable to marijuana are very rare. In fact, deaths from all illegal drugs combined, including cocaine and heroin, are fewer than 20,000 annually. By contrast, more than 450,000 Americans die each year from tobacco or alcohol use (not counting drunk driving fatalities). Should we outlaw liquor and cigarettes? Ask anyone who remembers our nation's disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibition. [continues 87 words]
Inside France
