An undercover narcotics investigation touted by the government as a significant blow to a notorious haven for drug dealing has been left in tatters after damning revelations about an informant, among them that he was using the same sort of drugs he was buying for the police.

The U.S. attorney's office in the District said it has dropped or is preparing to drop charges against 13 of 23 people charged in a five-month investigation in and around the Woodland Terrace public housing complex in Southeast Washington. The cases collapsed less than five months after the arrests were announced.

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Ron Daniels runs what is perhaps the most controversial effort in the District's fight against AIDS: a needle exchange program. Drop off your dirty works at his mobile outreach unit, and he'll give you all this in return: new needles, sanitized cookers, vials of sterile water, alcohol swabs and cotton balls. Everything but the dope.

The van was parked in a drug hot spot near 21st and H streets NE one recent afternoon, and about 20 people showed up. They looked like the living dead, some with poorly bandaged abscesses, others with amputated limbs -- all casualties of a heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine addiction that, sooner or later, destroys mind, body and soul. Buy This Photo John Turner, left, an outreach worker, confers with Ron Daniels, director of PreventionWorks!. (By Courtland Milloy -- The Washington Post) Save & Share ArticleWhat's This?DiggGoogledel.icio.usYahoo!RedditFacebook

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WASHINGTON - - The District of Columbia's health director has launched a campaign to address what has been called an AIDS/HIV crisis in the nation's capital.

Today, one in 20 District residents is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus - the virus that causes AIDS - and about one in 15 residents is living with AIDS. The rate of infection in the city is far above the national rate.

Last month, Dr. Gregg Pane took control of the health department's troubled HIV/AIDS Administration from Marsha Martin, who announced her departure only hours after new Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was sworn into office. Pane is realigning the administration and using its resources to tackle a series of "critical tasks" within 90 days.

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Former associate attorney general and convicted felon Webb Hubbell, now working for an insurance agency, has an important message for marijuana smokers: You don't have to quit to get life insurance.

"If you've been declined for life insurance or are paying above-market premiums or simply want to know" about life insurance for "responsible" marijuana smokers, then give him a call, he says on an "audio message" he made for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws' Web site to explain its new life insurance program.

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When The Hatchet began investigating the story of a student who was arrested for possession with the intent to distribute marijuana last week, background material was just a click away.

The fact that Student Judicial Services and other campus offices use Facebook and other online sites to monitor student behavior should not be surprising, especially when access to potentially incriminating evidence is so easy. Numerous reports over the past two years have shed light on instances in which administrators use Facebook to investigate student behavior. Students should realize that they are liable for content posted on the Internet.

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Poppies and Afghan Recovery Can Both Bloom

Once, the British Empire fought a war for the right to sell opium in China. In retrospect, history has judged that war destructive and wasteful, a shameless battle of colonizers against the colonized that in the end helped neither one.

Now, NATO is fighting a war to eradicate opium from Afghanistan. Allegedly, the goals this time around are different. According to the British government, Afghanistan's illicit drug trade poses the "gravest threat to the long term security, development, and effective governance of Afghanistan," particularly since the Taliban is believed to be the biggest beneficiary of drug sales. Convinced that this time they are doing the morally right thing, Western governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars bulldozing poppy fields, building up counternarcotics squads and financing alternative crops in Afghanistan. Chemical spraying may begin as early as this spring. But in retrospect, might history not judge this war to be every bit as destructive and wasteful as the original Opium Wars?

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The corner is a staple of street life, that rare piece of real estate that can't be purchased. Occupy it, claim it, it's yours. Anthony Marcellus James is a corner celebrity, a paradox of menace and charm. He is leaning against a fence, next to a vacant lot, in the Brentwood neighborhood of Northeast where he once was feared, as he put it, by people who would whisper: "That's A.J. Man, you don't want to [expletive] with him. He kills."

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The claimed 23 percent reduction of teen drug use from 2001 to 2006 is technically true but is still very small ("Teens' use of illegal drugs drops," Page 1, Friday). For example, high-school problem smokers (those who smoke every day) fell to 4 percent from 5 percent. That's 25 percent, according to data from monitoringthefuture.org.

Because the drug war gets the credit, let's look at the other side of the ledger. First, the annual $10 billion spent to house half a million drug prisoners and $20 billion spent by the federal government on the drug war. Also, the unintended consequences: Perjured testimony by government witnesses; women and low-level dealers imprisoned because they have no information to offer prosecutors. Consider how the exorbitant profit of the illegal market attracts unskilled men to run "meth labs" and sell drugs on the street. Finally, those suffering from illnesses who use narcotics to relieve pain are sent to prison because they cut corners to get the relief denied them by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

That 23 percent reduction is really a 1 percent decline in problem smokers. Even if the drug war gets all the credit, it is a bad deal for Americans.

JOHN CHASE, Palm Harbor, Fla.

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CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's president on Wednesday backed Ecuador's president-elect Rafael Correa in his fight against U.S.-funded spraying of Colombian drug crops, accusing Washington of hypocrisy in its war on drugs.

President Hugo Chavez also accused the United States of using its anti-narcotics drive to gain a military foothold in Latin America and charged the American envoy in Caracas with lying when he said drug smuggling was soaring in Venezuela.

"The battle against drug smuggling has been an excuse that imperialists have used for several years to penetrate our country, trample our people and justify a military presence in Latin America," Chavez told reporters at Caracas' airport during a visit by his leftist ally Correa.

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Kevin A. Sabet's prescription for a "third way" on drug laws [op-ed, Dec. 4] sounds a lot like the status quo. Reducing the gap between penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine possession while still leaving the arbitrary disparity intact is not the answer.

There is a viable middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalization.

Switzerland's heroin maintenance program has been shown to reduce drug use, disease, death and crime rates among chronic users. Providing addicts with standardized doses in a clinical setting eliminates many of the problems associated with heroin use.

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Regarding the Dec. 3 news story "Afghanistan Breaks Records for Opium Production": The Post reported that "after the overthrow of the Taliban government by U.S. forces . . . the Bush administration said that keeping a lid on production was among its highest priorities." And yet the flow of opium, nearly eliminated by the Taliban just a few years ago, is greater than ever. If this defines American effectiveness in pursuing one of the country's "highest priorities," one can only imagine what our record looks like with respect to other goals.

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In arguing for a modest reform of cocaine sentencing laws, Kevin A. Sabet presents a false choice between "strict prohibition or lax legalization," and suggests that the only alternative to these extremes is to fine-tune the current drug war.

But at least in the case of marijuana, a "third way" exists: regulate marijuana as we do tobacco and alcohol, with licensed, taxed and regulated producers and merchants. To keep their licenses, such businesses would have to obey strict rules against selling to kids and would be subject to standards for labeling, purity and potency. Instead of the marijuana market being controlled by unregulated criminals, we'd know who and where sellers are and could monitor their operations.

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A Clemency Case Not Even President Bush Can Ignore -- or Can He?

THE SUPREME Court this week declined to review the case of Weldon Angelos, leaving in place his obscene sentence of 55 years in prison for small-time marijuana and gun charges. The high court's move is no surprise; the justices have tended to uphold draconian sentences against constitutional challenge. But it confronts President Bush with a question he will have to address: Is there any sentence so unfair that he would exert himself to correct it?

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Some say that the state of Michoacan, deep in south Mexico, is where the "war on drugs" really started, back in 1985. It was there that Mexican drug lords upped the stakes by burying in a shallow grave the body of a young Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique Camarena, whom they had kidnapped and killed. The U.S. Congress responded months later with strict anti-drug laws, including a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for anyone trafficking in five grams of crack cocaine or 500 grams of powder cocaine.

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"He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord" -- Proverbs 19:17

From the Heart Back to Basics is a church for the homeless, the drug addicts, the criminals, the mentally ill, the hopeless and the lost.

"Isn't this what Christianity is supposed to be about?" asks the Rev. Milt Matthews, 59, its founding pastor. "Aren't we supposed to be seeking the lost, helping the poor and getting people functional? If we can't change people, then why are we Christians?"

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The United States' international policies regarding the War on Drugs are hurting the environment and spreading anti-American sentiment throughout Central and South America while doing little to reduce drug use in the U.S., according to a panelist of drug policy experts who spoke at the national Students for Sensible Drug Policy conference Saturday.

The panelists voiced doubt about both the U.S.'s eradication policy, which includes spraying an industrial herbicide on coca crops with crop-dusting planes, and alternative development, which gives farmers incentive to grow crops other than coca.

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Roughly 300 high school and college students came to Capitol Hill on Friday to lobby Congress to reverse a higher education law that denies financial aid to an estimated 200,000 students with drug convictions. The students were in Washington, D.C., for a conference of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a nonpartisan, grass-roots group that seeks drug policy reform.

After a "Lobbying 101" session, students dispersed to 85 meetings with Members and staff, said SSDP Campaigns Director Tom Angell.

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Students Protest Federal Law Cutting Aid To Minor Drug Offenders

Nathan Bush had the bad luck of being a passenger in a vehicle pulled over by police who uncovered a small stash of marijuana inside. The political science major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was charged with felony drug possession.

Craig Selken, now a senior majoring in history at Northern State University in South Dakota, was charged with a misdemeanor when officers found a small amount of marijuana in the common area of the dorm room he then shared with two roommates.

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Residents of Bojaya in the impoverished Colombian province of Choco know misery -- flooding for four months of each year, electricity two to three hours every couple of days, drinking water obtainable only through rain collection. Their one thing of value -- the town's location along the Atrato River -- landed them in the middle of a 10-year battle between the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the country's right-wing United Self-Defense Forces (AUC) as the groups vied for control of an important transit zone for illegal drugs and weapons.

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Dear Editor,

Thank you for raising awareness of the Higher Education Act's (HEA) denial of student loans to youth convicted of drug offenses. Instead of empowering at-risk students with a college degree, HEA limits career opportunities and increases the likelihood that those affected will resort to crime. Speaking of crime, convicted rapists and murderers are still eligible for federal student loans. Most students outgrow their youthful indiscretions involving drugs. An arrest and criminal record, on the other hand, can be life-shattering.

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