In "The Lost War," his Outlook article on the international drug trade, Misha Glenny writes that "the 'War on Drugs' is defeating the 'war on terror.'" What he fails to note, however, is that while we still have a lot to accomplish, the national effort against drugs is working on its own terms. With a comprehensive anti-drug strategy in place, involving foreign policy, enforcement, education, treatment and prevention, overall drug use in the United States has declined by roughly half in the past 25 years -- from about 13 percent of the population in 1980 to just over 6 percent of the population in 2005. Cocaine use, including crack, is down 70 percent. Do we want to go back? [continues 350 words]
GALKAYO, Somalia, On a dusty street that runs through this town of 80,000 in central Somalia, a cluster of men sit on low stools, lost in their daily ritual -- chewing the green leaves of a mild narcotic called khat. Lethargic and stupefied, they seem oblivious to everything. Only when their cellphones jangle -- a surreal sound in this otherwise primitive place -- do they snap to life. Soon they've arranged the money transfers they've been waiting for and lapse back into their somnolent masticating. [continues 1400 words]
A recent article in The Washington Times by Sara A. Carter show the frightening importance of the alliance between Arabic terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. It documents how well known this dangerous situation has been for several years, for which no effective action had been taken by the Department of Homeland Security or local officials. As an old drug-policy hand, I thought I had heard everything about it. But parts of the story were news to me and terribly disturbing. One example was the report that "approximately 20 Arab persons a week were utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames." I do not claim that this horrendous problem is easy to deal with; it is not. [continues 550 words]
A hundred people gathered at Washington's Scripture Cathedral in May, many of them teenagers from the surrounding O Street NW neighborhood, where a murderous street feud had terrorized the community. Our anti-violence group, Peaceoholics, had convened a forum to ask "What's Snitching and What's Not?" Snitching -- and its sibling, witness intimidation -- is much in the news these days, the result of a series of high-profile killings and shootings both here in the Washington area and elsewhere. But there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about it, not just among people in the community, but also among law enforcement officials and the media. [continues 1292 words]
Although it is encouraging that the FBI is reducing its discrimination against job applicants who have used marijuana ["FBI Bows to Modern Realities, Eases Rules on Past Drug Use," news story, Aug. 7], the change highlights the hypocrisy in the war on drugs. While the federal government is allowing college-educated people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts to apply to the nation's top law enforcement agency, it is denying school loans, food stamps and public housing to hundreds of thousands of lower-income people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts. And there's the racial divide. Law enforcement routinely targets black communities for drug arrests, even though blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. While white drug users go on to work at the FBI, blacks go to jail. Bill Piper Director of National Affairs Drug Policy Alliance Washington [end]
We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province in April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our Forward Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his deployment to the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is the economic mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of the local government." [continues 1966 words]
Since 2000, the Drug Enforcement Administration has embarked on a muscular campaign against prescription painkiller abuse. It has utilized undercover investigations, SWAT raids, asset forfeiture, and high profile trials against "kingpin" doctors. These tactics should be familiar to anyone who has studied the drug war, but the results are a shocker. Prescription opioids have actually grown scarce. To put it bluntly, the DEA has finally found a drug war it can win. "Opiophobia" is a term that describes doctors' increasing unwillingness to prescribe opioid painkillers - a class of drugs that includes Vicodin and OxyContin - and especially high-dose opioids, to those in pain. This fear is rooted in the DEA's practice of jailing those doctors it deems are prescribing outside "legitimate medical standards." [continues 578 words]
How America and Mexico Can Defeat the Cartels U.S. and Mexican authorities are nearing agreement on an aid package to support Mexico's courageous new offensive against the deadly drug syndicates that threaten both our nations. The stakes are high for the United States: We depend on Mexico as a cooperative neighbor and trade partner, and most of the marijuana and as much as 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in this country pours over our southern border. If Mexico cannot make significant headway against the bloodthirsty cartels, our security and our people will suffer the consequences. [continues 628 words]
If a narco-state can be defined as a nation where the production and export of illegal drugs comprises the equivalent of about 50 percent of that country's legitimate gross domestic product, then Afghanistan is a narco-state. The numbers are staggering. According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2007, which was issued in July, Afghanistan is home to 82 percent of the area throughout the world that is devoted to the cultivation of opium. Because Afghan poppies generate better yields than can be found elsewhere, the country was responsible for 92 percent of the opium produced in the world last year. The U.N. estimates that "around 92 percent of the world's heroin comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan." The 2007 World Drug Report revealed that "[t]here are indications that a small but increasing proportion of opiates from Afghanistan are being trafficked to North America." That means that Taliban-controlled areas in southern Afghanistan, where much of the recent increases in opium output have occurred, are effectively selling heroin to American addicts to finance their military operations against U.S. and allied forces. [continues 506 words]
Paul Kengor rails against legalizing drugs ("A conservative take on drugs," Forum, Sunday) as if all drugs were alike and all drugs were illegal. Of course, neither is true. Let us consider marijuana, an illegal drug, in comparison to alcohol, which is legal and regulated. Alcohol is more addictive (15 percent of users become dependent versus 9 percent for marijuana) much more toxic and more likely to induce violent and aggressive behavior. So why exactly is alcohol a huge and legal industry, while we arrest nearly 800,000 Americans each year on marijuana charges, 89 percent of them for simple possession? Why have we taken a popular product -- used by at least 100 million Americans, according to federal surveys that even the government admits probably are gross underestimates -- and given a monopoly on sales and distribution to criminal gangs rather than legitimate, regulated businesses? The late Milton Friedman understood, as do other real conservatives, that the only marijuana policy that makes sense is treating it like alcohol, with common-sense regulations, taxes and controls. Bruce Mirken Director of communications Marijuana Policy Project Washington [end]
Paul Kengor makes the common mistake of assuming that punitive drug laws deter use. The drug war is in large part a war on marijuana, by far the most popular illicit drug. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study reports that lifetime use of marijuana is higher in the United States than in any European country, yet America is one of the few Western countries that still punishes citizens who prefer marijuana to martinis. Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of tobacco. The short-term health effects of marijuana are inconsequential compared to the long-term effects of criminal records. [continues 110 words]
Paul Kengor's commentary "A conservative take on drugs" (Forum, Sunday) is atypically bad. His take on those of us who oppose the war on drugs, also known as Prohibition II, is wrong in many ways. Primarily, his notion that legalization advocacy is solely a libertarian view is absurd. I would point to former Secretary of State George Shultz, the late economist Milton Friedman and a man Mr. Kengor quotes, William F. Buckley, as non-libertarians against the drug war. The good professor should know that Mr. Buckley was friends with Peter McWilliams, a man whose death still lays at the feet of Prohibitionists. Mr. McWilliams' death is one of the saddest examples of our present-day Prohibition's errant ways, and Mr. Buckley is no friend of the drug war. Even former Rep. Bob Barr, who almost a decade ago held Washington voters' ballots hostage for nearly a year because of the medical cannabis (Measure 59) issue, is supporting the Marijuana Policy Project. Drug Policy Forum of Oregon Eugene, Ore. [end]
Surgeon General's Warning: Attention Pregnant Mothers, Smoking Crack Can Be Hazardous to Your Baby's Health. I once saw the mock warning label above in a political cartoon attacking the idea of legalizing drugs. It was a wonderfully cutting illustration of what drug legalization would actually look like -- flesh on a noxious concept cooked up amid gatherings of libertarians. Practically speaking, the argument for legalizing drugs is flawed on so many levels that a full accounting here is impossible. My experience is that drug legalization is generally favored either by people who do an excessive amount of drugs or those who have never touched the stuff. The latter are clueless as to why a syringe of heroin is totally different from a glass of Merlot. [continues 756 words]
So, listen, Barry Bonds: We've got, like, a completely new way of thinking about this whole debate on controlled substances in athletics that will totally blow your mind. The new team in first place in the Congressional Softball League? None other than Washington's marijuana lobbyists. Dude! The One Hitters -- a team sponsored by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and related advocacy groups -- had by last week amassed a 13-3 record and vaulted to the top of the league, which includes teams from the RNC, DNC, Justice, Customs and Border Protection Service and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. [continues 223 words]
So this is how he is: The chief lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project has short, clean-cut blond hair, and wears crisp, dark suits and conservative red-and-blue patterned ties. There is not a hint of dope pusher about him. He's 28, married with three children, and possesses a boyish face, easy laugh and driven demeanor. He doesn't even have a tattoo. And his office? Downtown Geekville. His desk is neat and tidy. Volumes of Riddick's Senate Procedure and Deschler-Brown Precedents of the U.S. House of Representatives are displayed prominently on it. Like other buttoned-up lobbyists, he dines at locales such as Bistro Bis, The Monocle and Sonoma. [continues 828 words]
Originally Sentenced to 25 Years, Specialist Did More Good Than Harm, Judge Says A prominent pain doctor who received a 25-year prison term three years ago for drug trafficking was re-sentenced yesterday to less than five years by a judge who concluded during his retrial that he helped far more patients than he hurt. The decision by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema was a setback for federal prosecutors, who were seeking a life sentence for William E. Hurwitz. [continues 605 words]
Regarding the June 29 Metro article "House Repeals Needle Ban": The repeal of the ban on funding for the District's needle exchange program brings up a bigger issue: access to clean needles for the rest of the world. A federal ban prohibits the United States from supplying clean needles, even to countries with huge HIV-AIDS epidemics caused by needle-sharing among drug users. There is no time to waste. In an epidemic fueled by intravenous drug use, transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus is so rapid that weeks and months make a difference. [continues 99 words]
First lady Laura Bush rightly pointed out in the June 25 news story "Beyond Iraq: The First Lady, Back in Africa" that the stigma attached to having AIDS is an enormous barrier to fighting Africa's pandemic. Stigma and discrimination reduce the effectiveness of billions of dollars spent on HIV/AIDS programs because infected people are often reluctant to avail themselves of these services. Until recently, the global health community and development workers lacked a concrete set of tools to effectively identify and tackle stigma. To address this, the International Center for Research on Women, the Academy for Educational Development and our partners developed a tool kit, based on stigma research in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia, that offers strategies and practical skills -- from the perspective of the "stigmatizer" and the "stigmatized" -- for HIV-affected communities, health-care providers and local media to reverse the devastating effect that the stigma has on people infected with and affected by HIV and AIDS. T If U.S. and other world leaders want HIV/AIDS programs to be effective, more resources and interventions must be put in place to combat the stigma. These efforts will go a long way in battling AIDS. Geeta Rao Gupta President International Center for Research on Women Washington ns [end]
In Paola Barahona's tiny office at PreventionWorks!, a needle exchange program, a Wonder Woman Pez dispenser sits on the shelf above her desk. She sports a Wonder Woman bracelet and carries a Wonder Woman notebook. On the city's back streets, where she encourages intravenous drug users to use clean needles and get tested for HIV, Barahona is a down-to-earth version of a superhero, trying to save lives. "I just wish I had a magic lasso in this town to make people tell the truth," she said recently, recalling her experience with bureaucracy. [continues 799 words]
The District Is A Step Closer To Getting A Tool It Needs To Fight HIV/AIDS. OF THE 36 congressional riders that cluttered the appropriations bill for the District of Columbia, the ban on the use of local funds for needle-exchange programs was the most harmful. With intravenous drug use accounting for about one-third of new AIDS cases each year, the District has had to watch from the sidelines as the scourge with no cure claimed more and more lives. That congressionally enforced inaction might be coming to a merciful end with the House's vote last week to repeal the prohibition. [continues 154 words]
Inside District of Columbia
