The World Wide War on Drugs #9 - Legal Highs are Go!

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Op zaterdag 26 maart 2016 01:25 schreef heiden6 het volgende:
Help Make MDMA a Legal Medicine

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Op zondag 27 maart 2016 14:21 schreef venomsnake het volgende:
War on Drugs, War on Cancer, War on Terror..

Schiet lekker op met die wars .

The Nature of War and Truth

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Nixon Aides Suggest Colleague Was Kidding About Drug War Being Designed To Target Black People

Former officials are disavowing decades-old comments attributed to adviser John Ehrlichman saying the war on drugs was racially motivated.

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Former aides to President Richard Nixon disavowed a recently published, provocative quote from a colleague about the racial motivation behind the war on drugs, and suggested that the colleague was being sarcastic.

The statement — attributed to Nixon’s chief domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman — alleged that the administration’s drug war was meant to cripple black communities and the “antiwar left.”

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They added that Ehrlichman was “known for using biting sarcasm to dismiss those with whom he disagreed, and it is possible the reporter misread his tone ... John never uttered a word or sentiment that suggested he or the President were ‘anti-black.’”

Erhlichman may have never said anything to suggest this, but Nixon himself was taped referring to the “little Negro bastards“ on welfare and stating that they “live like a bunch of dogs.”

The former officials also noted that the Nixon administration established drug education and addiction treatment programs. While this is true, Nixon also signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which gave law enforcement the right to conduct “no-knock” searches, allowing them to enter premises without notifying occupants. This is presumably what Ehrlichman was referring to when he allegedly said the drug war gave authorities the license to “raid [the] homes” of black people and hippies.

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Betogers met joint van 17 meter langs het Witte Huis | NOS

In Washington hebben enkele honderden mensen gedemonstreerd voor liberalisering van de Amerikaanse drugswetgeving. Ze willen dat het gebruik van cannabisproducten als hasj, wiet en marihuana wordt toegestaan. Om hun eisen kracht bij te zetten liepen ze over Pennsylvania Avenue voor het Witte Huis langs.

De demonstranten hadden een enorme, 17 meter lange opblaasbare joint mee, maar die mocht niet mee langs de ambtswoning van president Obama. Het meevoeren ervan werd door agenten van de Secret Service tegengehouden op basis van een wet die ook het vliegen met drones rond het Witte Huis verbiedt.

De betogers lieten de joint toen leeglopen en slaagden er in om ermee langs de veiligheidsagenten te komen. Vlakbij het Witte Huis bliezen ze hem weer op, waarna ze er toch mee langs de ambtswoning konden lopen.

De demonstranten noemden Obama hypocriet omdat hij de drugswetgeving in de VS niet verder wil legaliseren. De president heeft toegegeven dat hij op de middelbare school ook wel eens marihuana heeft gebruikt. Een aantal staten heeft de wetten rond het gebruik van softdrugs de afgelopen jaren versoepeld, maar de betogers willen dat de federale overheid stappen zet. Cannabis staat nu nog op dezelfde lijst als harddrugs als heroïne en lsd.

Om tien voor half vijf lokale tijd, ofwel 4.20 uur, staken de deelnemers aan het protest massaal een joint op. In Noord-Amerika is 4.20 een begrip dat verwijst naar het gebruiken van cannabis. 4/20 ofwel 20 april is ook een dag waarop op veel plaatsen openlijk softdrugs worden gebruikt.

De politie schreef een aantal bekeuringen uit. In District of Columbia, waar de hoofdstad Washington onder valt, is marihuana vorig jaar gelegaliseerd, maar het mag niet in het openbaar worden gebruikt.

Het begrip 4.20 (420 of 4/20) vindt zijn oorsprong in een groep studenten in San Rafael in Californië. Zij spraken begin jaren zeventig af om om 4.20 uur samen te komen om marihuana te gebruiken. Ze noemden zich de Waldo's omdat hun ontmoetingsplek bij een muur (wall) was. Geleidelijk werd 4.20 (fourtwenty) synoniem voor het gebruiken van softdrugs.

Bron: nos.nl

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The DEA will decide whether to change course on marijuana by July

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In a lengthy memo to lawmakers, the Drug Enforcement Administration said it hopes to decide whether to change the federal status of marijuana "in the first half of 2016."

Marijuana is currently listed under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning that for the purposes of federal law, the drug has "no medical use and a high potential for abuse" and is one of "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence." Marijuana shares Schedule 1 status with heroin, and it is more strictly regulated than the powerful prescription painkillers that have killed more than 165,000 people since 1999.

First set in 1970, marijuana's classification under the Controlled Substances Act has become increasingly out of step with scientific research, public opinion, medical use and state law. Citing marijuana's potentially significant therapeutic potential for a number of serious ailments, including chronic pain and epilepsy, organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have called on the DEA to change the drug's scheduling status.

But the DEA has rebuffed numerous previous attempts at rescheduling, sometimes after decades of stonewalling, and in at least one case overrode the recommendation of its own administrative judge. The current petition before the DEA was initiated by then-governors Christine Gregoire of Washington and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island in 2011. In a previous letter to lawmakers, the DEA indicated it had all the information it needed to make the decision as of last September.

The current memo, written in conjunction with the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, also provides a detailed look at how the federal government provides marijuana to researchers. Currently, the government grants a monopoly on marijuana production for research purposes to one program at the University of Mississippi. "Because of this monopoly, research-grade drugs that meet researchers’ specifications often take years to acquire, if they are produced at all," a Brookings Institution report argued last year.

According to the memo, in the years between 2010 and 2015, the government provided marijuana for research purposes to an average of nine researchers per year. Given the rapidly changing marijuana policy landscape, experts say that level of support is nowhere near enough to keep up with research demand.

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Das Kapital: Logisch! Gedoogbeleid coffeeshops is weer verder uitgebreid



Het Nederlandse gedoogbeleid ten aanzien van een joint slaat nergens op. Verkopen mag, blowen mag, maar alles rond de achterdeur heeft de wetgever nooit willen regelen. Wietteelt, opslag en de inkoop blijven vaag. Een meerderheid in de Tweede Kamer (CDA, VVD, PVV, ChristenUnie, SGP en een paar van die Wilders-would-be-partijtjes) wil dat niet regelen, want bang voor het buitenland (hoi VS!) en om allerlei andere goedbedoelde christelijk/humanistisch/paternalistische redenen. Helaas werkt het niet om je kop in het zand te steken. Want als Den Haag het niet regelt, dan regelen we het zelf wel, roepen onze rechters. Gisteren nog maar eens een keer, toen een eigenaar en twee toeleveranciers van een coffeeshop uit Den Bosch voor het strafbankje stonden. Die waren aangehouden omdat in de woning van n van de verdachten '30 kilo hennep en 15 kilo hasjiesj' was aangetroffen. Dat mag dus niet, omdat er in de Opiumwet twee dingen staan: a) 'de Opiumwet stelt het telen, bewerken, verwerken, inkopen, opslaan, vervoeren, afleveren en verkopen van (meer dan 30 gram) softdrugs strafbaar'. En b) het is onder zeer strikte voorwaarden toegestaan dat een coffeeshop een voorraad van 500 gram softdrugs aanhoudt. Nu wil het geval dat de coffeeshop in casu per dag 1 kilo softdrugs verkoopt. En het aanvullen van die voorraad kan, zoals n van de verdachten verklaarde 'niet steeds op gezette tijden (...) geschieden, nu daarvoor immers niet naar legale leveranciers kan worden gegaan'. Er moet dus ergens een voorraad worden aangehouden. Voor het overige is van belang dat de coffeeshop al 25 jaar bestaat, niet voor overlast zorgt en de verdachten niks op hun kerfstok hebben. Dus dacht de rechter na en kwam met het volgende: '[het is] voorstelbaar dat er een externe opslaglocatie wordt gebruikt voor de bevoorrading van de coffeeshops, waarbij de rechtbank vaststelt dat de omvang van die voorraad in relatie tot die exploitatie als acceptabel kan worden beschouwd'. Een rechter moet zich aan de wet houden, dus de verdachten zijn strafbaar (want > 30 gram), maar evenzo biedt de wet de mogelijkheid om een straf achterwege te laten (artikel 9a Wetboek van Strafrecht). Dat deed de rechter dan ook, want waarom zou je iemand straffen die zijn winkel fatsoenlijk wenst te runnen? Kortom, weer een mooi stukje jurisprudentie over opslag en vervoer erbij en het wordt tijd dat de labbekakken in Den Haag met degelijke wetgeving komen, want anders blijven politie, OM, coffeeshopbazen en rechters mekaar volstrekt nutteloos van het werk afhouden. Doe eens volledig legaliseren van softdrugs, dat werkt best goed.

Het zou nog logischer zijn om al het drugs uit het strafrecht te halen op grond van het zelfbeschikkingsrecht zoals dat is bepaald in de grondwet.

Maar ja, dan heeft de halve politiekorps, OM en de rechtelijke macht niets meer te doen en dat moeten we kennelijk niet willen met zijn allen.

Bron: daskapital.nl

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Photos: Colombia’s “lost city of marijuana”

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The jungle around Toribío in southwestern Colombia is filled with vast pot plantations that stretch as far as the eye can see. At night, the greenhouse lights glow like a sea of fluorescent plankton.

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The old global consensus on the war on drugs is crumbling - LA Times

Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs — and up to now, they've always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is “drug-free.” They've consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly by the United States, which require every country to arrest and imprison their way out of drug-related problems.

But at this year's meeting in New York City later this month, several countries are going to declare: This approach has been a disaster. We can't do this anymore. Enough.

The drug war is now the subject of a raucous debate within the U.S. — and if you look at the stories of three influential people who will speak on behalf of their countries for change at the U.N., they might sound strangely familiar. The reasons why U.S. citizens are rejecting the war on drugs are, it turns out, also the reasons why it is being rejected all over the world, from the Caribbean to Europe to South America.

Outdated drug policies around the world have resulted in soaring drug-related violence, overstretched criminal justice systems, runaway corruption and mangled democratic institutions. After reviewing the evidence, consulting drug policy experts and examining our own failures on this front while...

Outdated drug policies around the world have resulted in soaring drug-related violence, overstretched criminal justice systems, runaway corruption and mangled democratic institutions. After reviewing the evidence, consulting drug policy experts and examining our own failures on this front while...

In August 2014, the justice minister for Jamaica, Mark Golding, had to make a phone call no government official ever wants to make. He had to explain to a mother that her son was dead. Mario Deane was picked up on the street because he was smoking a spliff, put into custody and beaten to death.

It was, for Golding, a moment that made him realize he could no longer support his country's drug laws. All over the world, the criminalization of cannabis has been used as an excuse to harass unpopular minorities (in Jamaica's case, the poor), and, he told me, it has “worsened the relationship between those young men and law enforcement.” So he persuaded the Cabinet to decriminalize cannabis for personal possession. “We wanted to take ganja out of the picture,” he says, “as a medium through which the police would use hard or heavy policing against younger men.”

Existing U.N. drug treaties allow decriminalization of drugs in small amounts for personal use. But they don't allow countries to create regulated structures for buying and selling drugs, which would drive the drug-dealing gangs out of business. Jamaica is therefore still required to wage a futile war on people who sell cannabis, and farmers who grow it, meaning there is still an armed conflict between police and the young men whom they accuse of dealing.

“A country should be in a position to design its own regime,” Golding will argue at the U.N. “The eradication of drugs hasn't happened, despite decades of war waged on it.” It is, he believes, unjust: “Why is it that people can buy a bottle of rum or a bottle of wine … but you can't do that for cannabis?”

In the Czech Republic, the official responsible for drug policy is Jindrich Voboril. As a teenager on the streets of communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, Voboril was guzzling opiates and amphetamines and was, he told me, a “hardcore experimenter” with almost any substance he could find.

“I was growing up on the streets, so I was a typical street kid,” he says. He was trying to escape an abusive home life where his father was an alcoholic, and a public life dominated by communist tyranny. “I was on the path of developing a serious drug problem,” he says, and before long, he was watching his friends die of overdoses or suicides.

One thing that pulled Voboril away from addiction was his discovery of the democratic resistance. When he became an activist in the Czech underground he felt a new sense of meaning and purpose, and it saved him.

Soon after the dictatorship fell, he set up the first major drug treatment program in the Czech Republic. He wanted to create practical policies that would help addicts find purpose and save people like his friends — only to find compassionate policies were discouraged, or outright banned, by the global drug war, which is built instead on punishment. The drug war, it seemed to him, was based on ideology, not results, just like the communist system he had fought successfully to overthrow. If you put pledges for a “drug-free world” in a different font, he says, it could be a Stalinist slogan.

He believes that in the real world, addicts are mostly people with mental health problems like depression, or people trapped in terrible environments. Punishing them only makes the problem worse. Accordingly he wants to see a global transfer of resources — from punishing addicts to helping them turn their lives around. Such alternatives work.

In the 15 years since Portugal decided to decriminalize drug use and invest instead in treatment and prevention services, use of injected drugs has fallen by 50%. Since Switzerland legalized heroin for addicts more than a decade ago, nobody has died of an overdose on legal
heroin.

A key figure in shaping Colombia's strategy at the upcoming U.N. conference is Maricio Rodriguez, an economist and diplomat. The drug war, he told me in Cartagena, is “the worst tragedy we have ever lived in, in Colombia and probably all of Latin America.” The combined death toll from the Latin American drug war exceeds even the war in Syria. “Every day that goes by is a day in which we are losing hundreds of people and we are losing hundreds of millions of dollars,” he explains.

Like most Colombians, he has relatives who were murdered when narco-traffickers were taking over the country. “Everybody has a story,” he says.

To explain why this carnage is happening, Rodriguez cited the late Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economist Milton Friedman, who grew up in Chicago under alcohol prohibition, and learned there what happens if you ban a popular substance. It doesn't matter whether the government targets whiskey or cocaine; a ban forces legal businesses out of the market — and armed criminal gangs take it over. They then go to war to control the trade. But once the prohibition ends, so does the violence. (Ask yourself: Where are the violent alcohol dealers today?)

Ranged against reform-minded countries at the U.N. conference will be governments that want to maintain or even intensify the global war, including Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China. Although the U.S. has historically been the most hard-line country, this time, its representatives will arrive at the conference in breach of U.N. drug treaties. The drug laws require a war on cannabis, but four U.S. states and the District of Columbia have now fully legalized the drug. Nobody knows what the result of this U.N. meeting will be, but nobody will ever be able to say again that the world is united behind the idea of a drug war.

Voboril, the Czech Republic's street user turned government minister, told me he is itching to tell the U.N. a simple truth: “This is reality: This is hundreds of thousands of people dying … for one simple reason — some governments just don't want to change. Nothing else.”

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs — and up to now, they\'ve always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is “drug-free.” They\'ve consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written...

Bron: www.latimes.com

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Uitstoot giftige stoffen in woonwijk Tilburg door drugslab | NOS

Bij de illegale productie van drugs in een oude fabriek in Tilburg zijn weken, misschien wel maanden lang giftige stoffen uitgestoten die omwonenden waarschijnlijk hebben ingeademd. Dat heeft de politie ontdekt na ontmanteling van een drugslab in die fabriek vrijdag.

De politie kwam het drugslab op het spoor na meerdere tips. De 54-jarige beheerder van de fabriek is aangehouden. De politie verwacht nog meer mensen te arresteren.

In het drugslab trof de politie enkele kilo's amfetamine en honderden liters chemische stoffen aan, die gebruikt kunnen worden voor het maken van amfetamine. De stoffen stonden naast elkaar in een vriezer. Als de chemicaliën met elkaar in aanraking zouden komen, had dat kunnen leiden tot een grote explosie.

Criminelen gebruikten de schoorsteen van de fabriek om giftige dampen die ontstaan bij de productie van de drugs af te voeren. Experts hebben uitgerekend dat er minimaal 100 tot 150 kilo amfetamine is geproduceerd en dat dat zeker een paar weken, misschien wel een paar maanden heeft geduurd.

Al die tijd zijn de giftige dampen via de schoorsteen in de buitenlucht terecht gekomen. Omdat de schoorsteenpijp relatief kort is, zijn de stoffen waarschijnlijk neergedaald in de directe omgeving.

De politie spreekt van een gevaarlijke situatie, omdat de fabriek midden in een woonwijk staat waar ook veel kinderen wonen. "De combinatie van het explosiegevaar en de uitstoot van giftige stoffen in het midden van een woonwijk is zeer zorgelijk", zegt een woordvoerder van de politie.

Bron: nos.nl

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War on drugs: UN challenged by Colombian president | World news | The Guardian

Juan Manuel Santos calls for ‘more effective, lasting and human solution’ – and says his government will work alongside former bitter enemies Farc

The president of Colombia will present a plan for the complete and radical overhaul of global policy towards drug trafficking and organised crime at a special session of the United Nations general assembly.

Unveiling his proposals in the Observer, Juan Manuel Santos said urgent measures were needed to bring about “a more effective, lasting and human solution” to the misery and crisis of narco-traffic.

Related: The UN’s war on drugs is a failure. Is it time for a different approach?

The most sensational element in Santos’s presentation is the announcement that his government will – as a result of a four-year peace process soon to bear fruit as a peace treaty – be implementing its own domestic struggle against narco-traffic alongside its bitter enemies, the Marxist guerillas of Farc. The group admits to having funded its war by what it calls “taxation” of narco-profits.

Santos says: “Colombia is close to reaching an agreement to end the 60-year armed conflict with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [Farc, the world’s longest-running guerilla insurgency] an agreement which is of special relevance to this discourse on the ‘war on drugs’.

“In post-conflict Colombia, Farc will change from being an obstacle for effective action against drugs to a key ally of the government in contributing to illicit crops substitution, provision of information on routes and production facilities and de-mining efforts to facilitate eradication of coca production. That in itself is a game changer.”

The president’s wider appeal to the UN demands a fundamental rewriting of global policy on drugs, drug-dealing and the laundering of drugs money. “We have done much,” he says, “but this cannot be an effort by one country alone. Vested with the moral authority of leading the nation that has carried the heaviest burden in the global war on drugs, I say I can tell you without hesitation, that the time has come for the world to transit into a different approach in its drug policy.”

His first point turns current thinking entirely on its head: he calls for leaders “to frame policy on drugs with a context of human rights, which stops victimising the victims of drug abuse”.

“Under this principle,” he says, “we expect to progress in preventing stigmatisation against drug users, abolishing death penalty for drug related offences and obligatory treatments for drug abusers, among other measures.”

A second proposal aims to make it easier for nations to reform their drug laws in accordance to specific needs and threats to populations, rather than being straitjacketed by international conventions. Though such reforms may “occur outside the international conventions, controlled experiments in regulating the drug markets should continue to develop, and be monitored by UN agencies” . This opens the way to legalisation or relaxation of laws on punishment and possession.

The third element to the proposals challenges the global community to adopt “a more comprehensive approach” to the drugs crisis. “We need a transition from a purely repressive response to introduce a public health framework to the treatment of drug consumption focusing on prevention, attention, rehabilitation and resocialisation of drug abusers,” says Santos.

He calls for “alternative measures other than prison” and “prioritising an effective rehabilitation and resocialisation of offenders”. In countries such as Colombia, where many livelihoods depend on drug production, Santos urges “social and economic alternatives” that will “create the necessary conditions to bring them back to legality”.

A fourth point insists that member states “persist in combating transnational organised crime”. Colombia, Santos says, “will continue to offer its expertise and capabilities in combating these criminal enterprises to any country in the world that can benefit from our hard-earned experience”.

The Colombian ambassador to the UK, Néstor Osorio Londoño, said: “The world can no longer afford to continue tackling this issue exclusively with a repressive response. There is an urgent need to come around with a more comprehensive approach that incorporates socioeconomic and public health considerations along with reinforced international cooperation against organised crime. The pressing realities that five decades of war on drugs have left behind are the most powerful evidence that change is needed.”

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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A viral video shows North Carolina police enter a home without a warrant on April 8, claiming they had smelled marijuana.

The home’s residents became upset about being violated and pandemonium ensued when the officers realized they were being recorded.

Vera McGriff, who initially posted the viral video, said police came to her door and demanded to search the house.

When she refused because the officer did not present a search warrant, eight cops barged in anyway and began terrorizing the household.

“I told the officer, No you cannot come in my house without a search warrant. The officer put his foot at the bottom of the door and four of them bum rushed me …”

After barging in without a warrant, Durham police claimed two of their officers were assaulted, but McGriff and the video tell a different story.

“Everybody was tased, one officer hit my son in the face with his Glock 9, we were choked, kicked, thrown down on the floor,” McGriff stated, according to Opposing Views.

When they arrived, police did not have a warrant at 10:30 pm.

Only after they were already inside of the home, and had everyone detained, did they find a judge, returning with a warrant at 12:50 am.

“We all sat in handcuffs for 4-5 hours while they waited for the search warrant,” McGriff wrote on Facebook.

In the warrant, Officer J.M. Foster said he received information from another officer that Khadir Cherry was selling drugs, which was why he arrested him on April 4.

Foster stated that he was just conducting a follow up investigation at the home of Cherry when he encountered Raynell Hall in the driveway and asked to talk to the homeowner, Vera McGriff.

He stated that when Hall opened the door and walked inside, he smelled marijuana.

He wrote in the warrant petition, “through my training and experience I know that the only thing that smells like marijuana is marijuana.”

That’s when police decided to “seize the house” and conduct “safety sweep for suspect,” according to the petition for the warrant.

Wil Glenn, a spokesperson for Durham police, explained why residents in the home were tasered:

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Nick Clegg accuses Theresa May of tampering with drug report | Politics | The Guardian

Home secretary tried to alter 2014 study that found no link between tough laws and illegal drug use, says ex-deputy PM


Nick Clegg has accused the home secretary, Theresa May, of attempting to delete sentences from a Whitehall report after it concluded that there was no link between tough laws and the levels of illegal drug use.

The former deputy prime minister also said senior Conservatives, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, have failed to act on drug reform because they saw the issue as a “naughty recreational secret” at Notting Hill dinner parties instead of a public health crisis.

In an interview with the Guardian before a major UN conference on the global drug problem, Clegg said the Conservative government was failing to listen to warnings that the war on drugs had failed.

The Liberal Democrat MP and former party leader, who sits on the Global Commission on Drugs Policy, called for sweeping changes that would take the control of cannabis out of the hands of criminals, and also ensure that the users of harder drugs receive health treatment rather than jail sentences.

When the prime minister first became an MP he appeared open-minded to drug reform, but Clegg said he showed no interest in the issue when the pair worked together during the previous coalition government.

Related: What are the true risks of taking cannabis?

“If you are asking if I saw any evidence that David Cameron was prepared to grapple with this – none,” said Clegg, claiming he came up against the same lack of interest from the chancellor, George Osborne.

“I think part of the problem is that for some of them when you say drugs to them, they think of Notting Hill dinner parties. They think it is all a slightly naughty recreational secret. They don’t think of whole countries, like Colombia that has been brought to its knees. They don’t think of some very unscrupulous criminal gangs who are preying on people who we should be protecting rather than chucking in jail.”

A Conservative source described the intervention as a “desperate attempt by Nick Clegg to make himself relevant” after the Lib Dems’ poor election results.

Clegg, who sits on the commission alongside former UN general secretary Kofi Annan, and the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, also hit out at the home secretary. Speaking before he travels to New York for a special session of the UN on new approaches to tackle the issue, the former deputy prime minister described May as “spectacularly unimaginative” on the issue.

He claimed that the home secretary and her aides tried to alter a 2014 study before publication because “they didn’t like the conclusions”.

The Home Office report’s finding that there was “no obvious” relationship between a zero-tolerance approach to drugs and levels of consumption triggered calls for a fresh debate over decriminalisation.

It concluded that the factors driving drug use were complex, but did cite “considerable” health improvements in Portugal since the decision to treat possession as a health issue rather than a criminal one.

Clegg said the original draft had been subject to an “endless wrangle between Lib Dem ministers and Theresa May about the fullness of what would be published”, arguing that there would be no change whatsoever as long as she led the Home Office.

A Home Office spokesperson said the UK’s approach to drugs was to prevent use and help individuals recover, while also enforcing laws.

“We have seen a reduction in drug misuse among adults and young people over the last 10 years and more people are recovering from their dependency now than in 2009-10,” they said. “Decriminalising drugs would not eliminate the crime committed by their illicit trade, nor would it address the harms and destruction associated with drug dependence.

A spokesperson also rejected the idea that the report, known as the International Comparators Study, said there was no link between tough penalties and drug use. They said: “It makes clear that approaches to drugs legislation and enforcement of drugs possession are only one element of a complex set of factors that affect drugs use, including prevention, treatment and wider social and cultural factors.”

Clegg insisted that he was not soft on crime. “I don’t come at this with some uber-libertarian approach,” said Clegg. “I am a dad, I don’t want my kids taking drugs, drugs are bad for people. I just think the war on drugs has been proven to be a stupid way of reducing harm.”

He said he shared the objectives of a lot of people who wanted tough anti-drug laws, saying it was terrible that one in five young people tried illegal drugs last year.

“Alcohol is bad for you. Drugs are bad. Tobacco is bad. You don’t reduce the harm by placing the whole industry into the hands of criminals. Since when has industrial scale criminality been the answer to a public health problem?”

Critics point to links between cannabis use and psychosis, which last week led to calls for global public health campaigns from experts who said young people were particularly vulnerable.

Clegg said he believed there was a link to the use of skunk, a particularly toxic form of cannabis, but he argued that it was flooding the market precisely because of prohibition.

Related: Cannabis: scientists call for action amid mental health concerns

“When alcohol was prohibited in the US, the bootleggers didn’t bootleg beer, they bootlegged the hardest stuff, and it is exactly the same with drugs. If you put the production of drugs into the hands of criminals, guess what they will do? They will peddle the most potent stuff for the fattest profits.”

He said he was not optimistic about this week’s UN session driving a new international approach because of resistance from Russia and countries in Asia. However, he claimed there was a revolution unfolding in “state after state in the United States, in Uruguay, the Czech Republic and Portugal”.

The prime minister has expressed support for a different approach to drugs in the past, when as part of the Home Affairs select committee he signed up to a 2002 report claiming that policies based mainly on enforcement were destined to fail.

Then MP for Witney, Cameron wrote a piece for the Guardian, in which he said the drugs report was the most interesting and satisfying achievement of his first year as an MP. “Drugs policy has been a no-go area for most politicians, with a few notable – and brave – exceptions,” he wrote, calling himself an instinctive libertarian on the issue.

Cameron said decriminalisation would leader to greater availability, but added: “Authoritarians have to accept that the world has changed and hounding hundreds of thousands – indeed millions – of young people with harsh criminal penalties is no longer practical or desirable.”

In his interview, Clegg said that some Conservatives were quite thoughtful about the issue in 2010, when the coalition was formed, but that stopped after they became “freaked out” by Ukip.

“Over the five years I saw a Conservative party move from a party that was still in the after-glow of huskies and rose gardens; a party that flirted for a moment with being a modern Conservative party. But very quickly the shutters came up and they felt the route to government was to return to signature tunes on immigration and clearly on Europe and crime and so on. Taking a thoughtful approach on drugs didn’t fit into that.”

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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'War on Drugs' has made no difference to number of users and actively harms public health, major study concludes | Science | News | The Independent

The five-decade long international “War on Drugs” started by US president Richard Nixon has harmed the public health and should be scrapped in favour of a process of decriminalisation, a major new report has concluded.

Anti-drug policies and laws have had “no measurable impact on supply or use” and cannot be justified on scientific or public health grounds, according to the authors of study commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Ivy League university and The Lancet.

The report presents “compelling evidence” that countries such as Portugal and the Czech Republic have decriminalised non-violent minor drug offences with positive results, including “public health benefits, cost savings, lower incarceration [rates] and no significant increase in problematic drug use”.

Urging action from countries such as the US and UK which still have highly strict drugs policies, the authors called on governments to consider “regulated markets” for cannabis like those in Uruguay and the US states of Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Alaska.

Looking at evidence from around the world, the study found drug laws had been applied in a way that was “discriminatory against racial and ethnic minorities and women, and has undermined human rights”.

And it identified prison terms for minor drug offenders as the single “biggest contribution to higher rates of infection among drug users” with diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C.

Farmers destroy cannabis plantations under Moroccan police supervision in the northern Moroccan Larache region, pictured here in 2006

Growing business: Cannabis on sale at River Rock Wellness

Oaksterdam in Oakland, California, is the world's only university dedicated to the study and cultivation of cannabis

A cannabis smoker marks the start of the new law by the Space Needle in Seattle

Cannabis growing wild in China, where it has been used to treat conditions such as gout and malaria

Uruguay has voted to make the country the first to legalize marijuana

A groundswell of support from the public led to full legalisation in Colorado

A man smokes licenced medicinal marijuana prior to participating in the annual Hemp Parade, or 'Hanfparade', in support of the legalization of marijuana in Germany on August 7, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. The consumption of cannabis in Germany is legal, though all other aspects, including growing, importing or selling it, are not. However, since the introduction of a new law in 2009, the sale and possession of marijuana for licenced medicinal use is legal.

The UK latest figures show 2.3 million people used cannabis in the last year

Tourists visiting Amsterdam will not be banned from using the city’s famous cannabis cafes

These 25 cannabis plants, seized in Merseyside police, could have generated a turnover of £40,000 a year

April 20, 2012: People smoke marijuana joints at 4:20 p.m. as thousands of marijuana advocates gathered at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. The event was held on April 20, a date corresponding with a numerical 4/20 code widely known within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana.

A cannabis users' association will pay the town of Rasquera more than ¤600,000 a year for the lease of the land

Dr Chris Beyrer, from Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, said prohibition was the basis for many national drug laws - “policies based on ideas about drug use and dependence that are not scientifically grounded”.

“The global 'war on drugs' has harmed public health, human rights and development,” he said.

“It's time for us to rethink our approach to global drug policies, and put scientific evidence and public health at the heart of drug policy discussions.”

Bron: www.independent.co.uk

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Colombia to use glyphosate in cocaine fight again | World news | The Guardian

Use of herbicide suspended last year due to cancer concerns, but will now be applied manually, not by crop dusters

Use of herbicide suspended last year due to cancer concerns, but will now be applied manually, not by crop dusters

Colombia will resume using weed killer to destroy illegal coca crops less than a year after suspending its use due to cancer concerns, the government said Monday.

Related: Colombia says rise in coca cultivation shows why it was right to stop spraying

The defense minister, Luis Carlos Villegas, said instead of dumping glyphosate from American-piloted crop dusters, as Colombia did for two decades, the herbicide will now be applied manually by eradication crews on the ground.

“We’ll do it in a way that doesn’t contaminate, which is the same way it’s applied in any normal agricultural project,” Villegas told La FM radio, adding he hoped final approval to initiate the work would be completed this week.

President Juan Manuel Santos last year banned use of glyphosate following a World Health Organisation decision to classify it as a carcinogen. The ban was heralded by leftists and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who have long compared the program to the United States’ use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

But conservative critics warned that without glyphosate Colombia would soon be awash in coca.

After six straight years of declining or steady production, the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia jumped 39% in 2014 and 42% more last year to 159,000 hectares (392,000 acres), according to the US government.

Related: Last flight looms for US-funded air war on drugs as Colombia counts health cost

Villegas did not say why the government was switching gears or under what circumstances the weed killer would be applied. But he said a surge in coca production would have a ripple effect on the entire cocaine supply chain, both in Colombia and abroad.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a French-based research arm of WHO, reclassified the herbicide as a carcinogen last year, citing evidence that it produces cancer in lab animals and more limited findings that it causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans.

Monsanto and other manufacturers of glyphosate-based products strongly rejected the ruling. They cited a 2012 finding by the US Environmental Protection Agency that the herbicide is safe.

Many drug experts have long questioned the cost and effectiveness of glyphosate as coca growers moved to national parks and other areas that are off-limits to its use. Applying the herbicide manually is also expensive since heavily armed police patrols must escort eradicators in dangerous areas dotted with land mines and dominated by criminal gangs.

A better eradication strategy, the experts insist, is the one already in place and which the government has been promising to scale up. In that approach, work crews pull up coca bushes by the roots, thus ensuring plants can’t grow back as happens after exposure to glyphosate.

The decision on glyphosate use comes before a United Nations conference this week in New York to debate global strategies in the drug war.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

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No consensus at UN summit on ending global war on drugs | World | News | The Independent

The first United Nations special session on illegal drugs in more than a generation appeared headed for the reefs yesterday as world leaders arrived with clashing visions on the best way forward and hopes of a consensus on reversing the old policies of crack-down and criminalisation faded.

When the three-day meeting ends on Thursday, delegates will leave New York with little more than a sprawling 24-page “outcomes” document paying occasional, vaguely-worded lip service to the notion that the global war on drugs declared by the UN in 1998 may have failed while still upholding all existing interdiction treaties and making scant concrete commitments on a change of approach.

Still, that there will have been any discussion at all on the world stage of alternatives to the previously accepted dogma of elminate and incarcerate will nonetheless be seen by some as a step forward.

“All sorts of seeds were planted that will mature and blossom in coming years,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, said of the outcomes document, which was largely negotiated more than a month ago in Vienna.

His group orchestrated the release on the eve of the summit of an open letter to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, urging an end to the war on drugs. Signed by figures such as Richard Branson and presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders, it stated: “The drug control regime that emerged during the last century has proven disastrous for global health, security and human rights.”

On Tuesday, activists dressed in clothes from the 1920s Prohibition era in America greeted delegates to the summit on New York’s First Avenue with copies of a faux newspaper called the ‘Post-Prohibition Times’ that carried the letter on its front page and the names of all the signatures inside.

Countries in Central and South America are among those most urgently seeking a change of direction, not least because the interdiction policies attempted so far have disproportionately hurt their societies.

“In this so-called war on drugs, countries such as Guatemala have borne the brunt, by coping with the unfair burden of the loss of human lives,” President Jimmy Morales Cabrera of Guatemala told the meeting. “One of the most important changes that the current drug policy needs is that we give priority to demand reduction rather than focusing solely on supply reduction. We must make the balance and comprehensiveness of drug policy a reality.”

On the other end of the spectrum, however, China made its own attachment to repressive anti-drugs regimes abundantly clear. “The Chinese government attaches great importance to anti-narcotics,” State Councilor Guo Shengkun declared in the UN’s General Assembly chamber. “For years, we have carried out the people's campaign against drugs and achieved notable progress. In the past decade, we cracked down on more than one million cases of drug crime and seized 751 tons of drugs.”

Russia also led resistance to any serious reconsideration of the UN’s original mission set in1998 of ridding the planet of drugs. The faltering progress will be especially disappointing to those focused on expanding treatment and assistance options for drug abuse and moving away from criminalising it.

“The emphasis needs to be on helping people getting out of the problem of drug use rather than punishing them for being in it. I think the opportunity has been 100 per cent missed,” Charles Gore, president of the London-based World Hepatitis Alliance, who was attending as an observer, lamented.

He was dismissive of the final document. “It represents a tinkering around the edges more than a fundamental reshaping of where we need to get to as a world on drug policy. They talk about this as if it’s about individual and public health when in fact the truth is it’s still about crime and criminalisation.”.

Bron: www.independent.co.uk