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Hello? Mexico on the Verge on Decriminalizing Drug Possession...

...and nobody north of the Rio Grande seems to have noticed. Last week, I wrote that the Mexican decrim bill had passed the Senate, but on the afternoon before we published that report, the bill also passed the Chamber of Deputies. Now it awaits only the signature of President Calderon. While a Dallas Morning News blogger wrote that it is unclear whether Calderon will sign the bill, it seems likely to me that he will. The bill, after all, was pushed by his ruling PAN party, and unlike 2006, when a similar bill passed only to be vetoed by then President Fox in the face of US threats and bluster, there have been no threats and bluster from Washington this time. And, of course, the situation in Mexico is much worse than in 2006, thanks largely to Calderon's war on the cartels. The bill is not great: The personal use quantities are tiny, and it allows for the states to prosecute low-level trafficking offenses (currently, that is the province of the feds, with the result being that being low-level traffickers are never tried because the federal prosecutors and courts are overwhelmed with serious trafficking cases). But it is decriminalization, and right on our border, not an ocean away, like Portugal. I'll be talking to people on both sides of the border this week about this bill and what it means and I'll have a feature article on it Friday. In the meantime, here's the lone Reuters article on these momentous events:
Mexico passes bill on small-scale drugs possession Fri May 1, 2009 8:39pm EDT MEXICO CITY, May 1 (Reuters) - Mexico's Congress has passed a bill decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs, from marijuana to methamphetamine, as President Felipe Calderon tries to focus on catching traffickers. The bill, proposed by Calderon after an attempt by the previous government at a similar bill came under fire in the United States, would make it legal to carry up to 5 grams (0.18 ounces) of marijuana, 500 milligrams (0.018 ounces) of cocaine and tiny quantities heroin and methamphetamines. The lower house of deputies passed the bill late on Thursday. It already has been approved by the Senate and is expected to be signed into law by Calderon in the days ahead. Mexico's Congress passed a similar proposal in 2006 but the bill was vetoed by Calderon's predecessor, Vicente Fox, after Washington said it would increase drug abuse. The United States recently pledged stronger backing for Calderon's army-led war on drug cartels, whose turf wars have killed some 2,000 people so far this year in Mexico, as the drug violence is starting to seep over the border. The new bill also allows Mexican states to convict small-time drug dealers, no longer making it a federal crime to peddle narcotics, a move that should speed up those cases. U.S. President Barack Obama praised Calderon's drug war efforts in a visit to Mexico last month and promised more agents and southbound border controls to curb the flow of guns and cash to the cartels. (Reporting Miguel Angel Gutierrez; Editing by Bill Trott)

Why has Russia said no to Methadone?

Despite having nearly a million heroin addicts, with HIV spreading rapidly through that population, Russia's government has very tragically said no to methadone maintenance. According to a short video posted by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU), 80% of all new HIV cases in Russia are due to needle sharing by injection drug users. Check out the video here: Check out HCLU here.

Marijuana: UK’s Police and Drug Policy Experts Object to PM’s Reefer Madness

Finally making good on his proposal nearly a year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reclassification of marijuana as a class B drug is so obtuse and such poor public policy that the police are refusing their newly-given power:
Nearly six out of 10 cases of cannabis possession used to be dealt with by arrest and formal caution before it was downgraded. But police chiefs are not expected to return to such a practice, blamed for wasting thousands of officers' hours that could be spent on other crime-fighting duties. The Association of Chief Police Officers told the Guardian: "The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting."
When police go so far as to reject an increase in their power, especially when it comes to drugs, it should be clear that your policies are laughable. Adding to his obtuseness, PM Brown rejected the recommendation of his own panel of 23 highly-qualified drug policy experts when they ruled harsher reclassification was the wrong thing to do. It’s doubtful, but hopefully the combination of objections by UK law enforcement and drug policy experts will finally make him realize, and admit, that the policy is flawed. Making this reclassification even more ridiculous, the government is having major problems keeping drugs out of the hands of prisoners:
DRUGS worth more than £100million are being traded in prisons every year, it was revealed yesterday. The claim was made by a former drugs treatment chief who said half of all prisoners are addicts. As much as 44lb (20kg) of narcotics, mainly heroin, were smuggled into jails every week said the former official, Hussain Djemil.
It seems there should be more pressing concerns for British drug policy officials. If they can’t keep hard drugs out of the prisons (which come complete with strip and body cavity searches, drug dogs, prison guards, constant surveillance, etc.), what’s the point of increasing sentences for a soft drug like marijuana? Of the millions of cannabis users, some of those who will be caught will go to jail for even longer where they will be exposed to a 100 million dollar industry that will provide them cheaper drugs! Once again, how and why is reclassification going to be an effective deterrent? Police refusing to adhere to the reclassification policy is a wonderful sign. It sets a good precedent of dissonance toward misinformed or abusive authority that is rarely seen directed toward elected officials over drug policy matters. If more police chiefs would follow this example, drug prohibition would be in greater jeopardy. Hopefully this will lead to more reasonable people standing up in civil disobedience against drug policies that they know to be immoral and ineffective.

Bloody Culiacan

As we reported on Friday, Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, was the scene of a two-day forum last week, the International Forum on Illicit Drugs, where there was much criticism of the Mexican drug war and the planned escalation of it envisaged by Plan Merida, the $1.4 anti-drug aid package cooked up by the Bush and Calderon administrations. The so-called "narco-violence," which might more accurately be called "prohibition-related violence," was, unsurprisingly, a central concern of presenters at the forum. In the year and a half since President Calderon took office and unleashed the Mexican military on the narcos, some 4,000 people have been killed. As if to punctuate that concern, just as the conference was wrapping up Wednesday, a series of armed confrontations broke out in central Culiacan. Sparked by a joint military-federal police sweep that was attacked by AK-47-wielding narcos in a Chevy Tahoe, gun battles broke out across the city as narcos swooped in to lend aid to their colleagues being harassed and captured by the law and other, rival narcos intervened. In one shoot-out between rival narco factions, two men were killed. In another shoot-out, between narcos and state police, two cops were killed. The military and police arrested 13 presumed cartel gun-men and seized a huge arsenal of heavy weapons, cash, and drugs. Thursday morning, military pick-ups and Hummers were cruising the streets of Culiacan, soldiers at their posts in back with heavy machine guns. Military helicopters buzzed over the city, although it was unclear whether they were supporting urban ground operations or were on their way to search for marijuana and poppy fields in the nearby mountains. (I apologize for not having any photos of this stuff. My camera battery went dead Tuesday morning, and having brought with me the wrong bag of electronic stuff, I couldn't recharge it. I went to five different camera stores in Culiacan looking for either a new battery or a charger, to no avail. I finally found a store in Mexico City Friday that charged it for me, so I have lots of photos of Saturday's Global Marijuana March in Mexico City. They will show up in a blog post later today.) The heavy military and law enforcement presence didn’t do much good. Friday night, the narcos struck back, ambushing a federal police patrol in the heart of Culican, killing four officers and leaving three other seriously wounded. But it wasn't just narcos vs. cops and soldiers Friday night. As reported by the Mexican news agency Notimex, a little after 11 Friday night, at least 60 armed men broke into three houses in a city neighborhood and seized five men, then took off in a 15-vehicle convoy, which was in turn attacked, leaving one man dead at that scene. At the same time, two other shoot-outs erupted in different neighborhoods of the city, while simultaneously, on the outskirts of town, presumed narcos shot and killed two Culiacan city police. It's not always easy to figure out who is killing whom. There are local, state, and federal police, any one of whom could be working for the cartels. There's the army. Then there are the competing cartels themselves. In Culiacan, long controlled by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel, Guzman and his group are being challenged by the Arrellano Felix Juarez cartel, which wants to take over "la plaza," or the franchise, as the local drug connection is known. Just to complicate things further, the Juarez cartel is allegedly being aided by the Zetas, the former elite anti-drug soldiers turned cartel hit-men, who usually work for the Gulf cartel. And this is just in Culiacan. There are other prohibition-related killings every day, soldiers and police being assassinated every day. On Saturday, the Mexican secretary of public security held a ceremony to honor the nine federal police killed by the narcos in the last few days. Another was gunned down in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan Friday night, too. All of this pathology, of course, is a direct result of prohibitionist drug polices aggressively pursued by Washington and Mexico City. And what is their response? Let's have more of the same, only more so.

Dia Mundial de la Marijuana (Global Marijuana Day), Mexico City

Here in Mexico's capital, several thousand people gathered at the Alameda Central, a large park in the historic center of the city, to celebrate Global Marijuana Day. Punks, Goths, hippies, and members of all the other "urban tribes" that constitute the youth counterculture of one of the world's premier cities came together for a day of respect, tolerance, music, and above all, to call for the legalization of the sacred herb. Of course, it's not just the youth cultures of Mexico City that we're talking about here; it's the global cannabis culture. Cannabis Nation knows no boundaries. In many respects, I could have been standing in Memphis or Malmo or Madrid or Mombasa or Minsk--the t-shirts and slogan are the same, the concerns roughly identical. I'll say this for the global prohibition of marijuana: It has created a global culture of resistance that supercedes national identities or barriers. The music and musicians were spot-on, but lyrically and rhythmically. Some of the songs were pure celebration:
We're going to the beach and I wanna smoke We're going to dance and toke
Some of the songs were highly politicized and, naturally, critical of the US. One rapper compared Bush ("creating hell on earth") with Hitler and Hernan Cortes, placing him squarely in a particularly Mexican pantheon of villains. Speaking of politics, one of the great battles going on in Mexico right now is over the government's efforts to privatize Pemex, the state oil monopoly. For many Mexicans, Pemex is a symbol of the Revolution a century ago that overthrew foreign domination. After the Revolution, the Mexicans expropriated the foreign oil companies; now they fear the government is going to give the national oil industry back to the foreigners. One sign at the march tied that struggle to the struggle for marijuana legalization:
Mariguana y petroleo Eso es nuestro patrimonio Marijuana and Oil That's our patrimony
The police presence was minimal, and as far as I could see, there were no problems and no arrests, although pot-smoking was open and frequent throughout the day. I took lots of photos, as you can see. (Sixteen more below the fold.)Sadly, my memory stick got full, and I missed some of the potentially most impressive shots, when the multitude was marching down Avenida Juarez, past the Bellas Artes palace and in front of some of the old colonial buildings in the city center. Still, Global Marijuana Day in Mexico City was a trip. Enjoy the photos, and look for a full report on the action in the Chronicle later this week.

European Pressure: Turkey Must Fight Drug War, or Else

EDITOR'S NOTE: Kalif Mathieu is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. His bio is in our "staff" section.

I traveled to the city of Istanbul last week to stay for a few days with my school program of Peace and Conflict Resolution. Istanbul (and Turkey as a whole) is the perfect conduit for heroin being produced in the middle-east to reach Western European markets. Heroin and other drugs are commodities like anything else, and travel through the same general trade routes as other goods. Turkey is so strategically placed that according to Le Monde diplomatique in 1995 “An estimated 80% of the heroin on the European market is being processed in Turkish laboratories." (La Dépêche Internationale des Drogues 1995, Nr. 48)

So you might ask, “what’s so special about heroin traveling through Turkey? It’s just like any other trade between the middle-east and Europe.” The troublesome point is who controls the trafficking through the country and receives the profits of the trade. This happens to be the PKK, or Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a militant organization with a 30-year history of fighting the Turkish government to establish a separate Kurdish state. “According to Interpol […] the PKK was orchestrating 80 % of the European drug market” back in 1992, and “[o]ther sources similarly indicate that the PKK controlled between 60 % to 70 %” in 1994 reported the Turkish Daily News.

The state of Turkey has been increasing its process of Westernization recently in its desire to join the EU, and this has meant adopting a Western policy on drugs. Turkey has been very successful recently in increasing its police and border control effectiveness and eliminating corruption. The Turkish Daily News gave some convincing numbers: “According to the deputy customs undersecretary, there was a 400 percent increase in drug-operation success in the period between 2002 and 2006, when compared to the 1999-2002 period.”

However, even though Turkey has been, in recent years, dealing more and more forcefully with both the PKK militants and the drug trade, has this actually reduced the trafficking of drugs and the profits of the PKK? In the Turkish Daily News: “[t]he annual revenue made by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has increased to 400-500 million euros, a top Turkish general said late Tuesday.” If the PKK’s revenue has increased, then it is logical to assume Turkey’s military campaign against them may not be considered a huge success. Not only that, but “200-250 million euros of [the PKK’s] revenue comes from drugs […] Gen. Ergin Saygun, deputy chief of General Staff said.” That makes drug trafficking 50% of the organization’s income!

The Turkish state has had a history of valuing the effectiveness of force. It was born from war, and the constitution has a controversial but often-utilized article that allows the Turkish army to organize a coup to eliminate the possibility of having a religious party in power. What is the point of these so-called ‘hard-line’ approaches to dealing with the nation’s problems if they are rather ineffective? Very little of course. The trouble comes from what the state could say to its citizens, to the international community, if it negotiated with the violent PKK or began to take the drug trade into the light by moving it towards legalization and either private or state control? If Turkey tried to clean up its smuggling and black market in such a way the majority of Europe, if not the greater ‘global community,’ would probably condemn the entire nation of betraying humanity and literally becoming evil. The reaction of many Turkish citizens would be perhaps lighter, but of a similar nature if the state sat down to negotiations with the ‘terrorist’ PKK. These are strong influences on the Turkish state, and severely limit its options. Therefore it seems Turkey doesn’t have much of a choice but to pursue the same policy of force it has pursued for more than 30 years, whether it benefit the people or not.

British PM Ignores Experts, Set to Increase Penalties for Pot Smokers

Editor's Note: Shane G. Trejo is an intern at StoptheDrugWar.org. His bio is in our "staff" section.

As touched upon in Friday’s edition of the Drug War Chronicle, United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to reclassify marijuana as a Class B drug. This would restore its pre-2004 classification and change the penalties of marijuana possession from an already draconian two year maximum sentence to five years:

Gordon Brown said: "I believe that if we're sending out a signal, particularly to teenagers – and particular those at the most vulnerable age, young teenagers – that in any way we find cannabis acceptable, given all we know about the way that cannabis is being sold in this country, that that is not the right thing to do. "There's a stronger case now for sending out a signal that cannabis is not only illegal, it's unacceptable."
What is with all these politicians wanting to send a message to youth that certain activities are bad? It shouldn’t be the government’s job to act like the mommy and daddy of its citizens. And as always, the push for increased toughness has been sparked for no good reason and without any rationality:
The mental health charity Rethink said Mr. Brown should heed the committee's advice. The charity spokesman Paul Corry said: "Gordon Brown should put aside his personal views on cannabis and accept the fact that it does not make sense to reclassify. "Use of the drug has gone down since it was downgraded in 2004 and research by Rethink shows that only 3% of users would consider stopping on the grounds of illegality." … Steve Rolles, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, told the Today programme reclassification was not the most effective way to alert people to the dangers associated with cannabis. He said: "Class C is still illegal. No one is saying it's harmless. I don't think increasing the prison sentence from two years to five years for possession is necessarily the way to do it. I think if we want to send out messages to young people, rather than mass criminalisation of millions of young people, I think the way to do it would be in effective, targeted public health education."
This message-sending nonsense is not only disgusting, it is ineffective. It should be common sense to know that while young people mature, some of them tend to rebel against authority. Taking a hard-line stance on marijuana is only going to make it seem cool and increase its usage amongst young people. In Switzerland, medicalization and harm reduction strategies related to heroin not only reduced crime, reduced usage and allowed addicts to be able to live functional lives but also managed to make the drug less cool to youth. From Issue #439 of the Drug War Chronicle:
And the Swiss may have succeeded in making heroin boring, the researchers suggested. "As the Swiss population supported this drug policy, this medicalization of opiate dependence changed the image of heroin use as a rebellious act to an illness that needs therapy," Drs. Nordt and Stohler wrote. "Finally," they add, "heroin seems to have become a 'loser drug,' with its attractiveness fading for young people."
You’d think politicians in general would try to become informed on the issues that they are deciding. But they often don’t, and some of them actually pride themselves on being uninformed. Here is a very telling quote from Conservative Party leader David Cameron:
"The Conservative party has a very clear view that it should be class B. People have had enough of reviews and the prime minister should stop dithering and get on and make a decision."

I am continuously shocked by the attitudes of people like these. Wouldn’t you want to wait for reviews and studies to happen before making a decision? This is a decision that will potentially put otherwise law-abiding citizens who happen to smoke pot in jail for up to five years. Wouldn’t you want to be as informed as possible before making a decision that could destroy lives and waste precious law enforcement dollars?

A disturbing trend amongst some politicians is the belief in state-enforced morality. This misguided belief keeps them from thinking rationally. Out of the issues he could possibly be worried about, PM Brown is worried about pot smokers? His moral grandstanding has made him seemingly oblivious to the fact that the result of marijuana reclassification will be potentially three more years in prison for a completely nonviolent personal act.

State-enforced morality is based on the faulty premise that the law needs to protect a societal purity. That is why that in spite of it being obvious that the war on drugs is a failure, it still continues to rage on. The message must be sent at any cost.

Skunk Weed Causing Outbreaks of Mad Brit Disease

With British Prime Minister Gordon Brown poised to reclassify marijuana as a more serious drug subject to stiffer penalties, the United Kingdom appears to be in the grip of an outbreak of Reefer Madness that would make Harry Anslinger blush. Bizarrely, much of the British concern about marijuana is centered on the dreaded "skunk." The Daily Mail, which makes the New York Post look like the New York Times, has been a leading proponent of skunk mania. In an article headlined Cannabis: A deadly habit as easy for children to pick up as a bag of crisps, after blaming marijuana for the problems of British youth culture and prohibition-related violence, the Mail breathlessly reports that skunk isn't your father's marijuana. (Haven't we heard this one before?)
The other problem for the Government and others who urged the then Home Secretary David Blunkett to downgrade cannabis in the run-up to 2004, is that the drug on sale to young people on the streets today is very different from the one ministers thought they were downgrading. Doctors believe that this new strain has the potential to induce paranoia and even psychosis. Some of those we met who work with young criminals link the advent of the new drug with the growth and intensity of street violence. Uanu Seshmi runs a small charity in Peckham, where gun crime is rife, which aims to help boys excluded from school escape becoming involved in criminal gangs. He has seen boys come through his doors who are "unreachable" and he blames the new higher strength cannabis sold on the streets as "skunk" or "super skunk" for warping young minds. "It isn't the cannabis of our youth, 20 or 30 years ago," he told me. "This stuff damages the brain, its effects are irreversible and once the damage is done there is nothing you can do.
This new strain of marijuana? Skunk? Odd, since it's been around since the 1970s (read the description of Skunk #1) and is just another of the countless indica-sativa hybrids. Thankfully, we have "drug experts" like Mr. Seshmi to raise the alarm about its irreversible effects. There's more from the Mail, which apparently has made reclassifying cannabis its moral crusade of the day. In another article, How my perfect son became crazed after smoking cannabis, the Mail consults an unhappy mum whose child ran into problems smoking weed. Last fall, the Mail was warning of--I kid you not--"deadly skunk". Here are some more skunk headlines from the Mail in recent months: "Son twisted by skunk knifed father 23 times," "How cannabis made me a monster," "Escaped prisoner killed man while high on skunk cannabis," "Boys on skunk butchered a grandmother," and "Teen who butchered two friends was addicted to skunk cannabis." While one expects such yellow journalism from the likes of the tabloid press, even the venerable Times of London is feeling the effects of skunk fever. Under the headline Cannabis: 'just three drags on a skunk joint will induce paranoia', the Times managed to find and highlight some guy named Gerard who doesn't like that particularly variety of pot:
I smoke around six joints of regular cannabis every week, mostly at the weekends. What I like about smoking hash or weed is that it keeps me calm and gives me a more amusing outlook on life. With skunk, it’s a completely different story. Just three drags on a skunk joint will induce paranoia on a massive scale. I’m not talking about the difference between a beer and a vodka shot. I’m talking about being unable to get out of bed in the morning because you feel paralyzed, about being incapable of holding a conversation. I would like to think I’m a pretty lucid guy, but after smoking skunk I find myself struggling to string a sentence together. In the skunk haze of my student days, I would sometimes find myself unable to leave the house at all. It’s like a mild form of dementia. Once, a friend passed me a skunk joint before going to a birthday party. After just a few drags, I went into a room full of people, barely able to talk. I headed straight for the bar and drank as much alcohol as possible to counteract the effects. It helped, but using one vice to neutralize another is not exactly ideal.
My advice to Gerard (and it's something he apparently still has the brain cells left to figure out by himself despite smoking the evil skunk): If you don't like it, don't smoke it. But more broadly, what does the Times piece tell us? Nothing except this guy doesn't like skunk. Honestly, I don't understand this British mania over skunk. Something similar is going on in Australia, only down under, it's not skunk but the dreaded "hydro" that is causing murder, mayhem, and madness. Blaming a particular cultivation technique is about as stupid as blaming one variety of cannabis. I think this is something I'm going to have to write about in a feature article this week. I'll consult cannabis cultivation experts, media critics, and the latest science to try to get a handle on this.
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