Hashish found in van owned by David den Otter

EDMONTON - An Edmonton man who spent 70 days in a Spanish jail last year after being caught with 22 kilograms of hashish in his van has learned he no longer faces prosecution.

David den Otter, 33, was in Edmonton Tuesday for a business meeting when he heard the heartening news. It came in a phone call from his wife, Jacquie, who was in Tangier, Morocco, where the couple live with their eight children.

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The conservative Spanish government of Prime Minister Jose Aznar and his Popular Party is moving to rein in that country's lively cannabis culture. Although cannabis use and possession is not a crime in Spain, for the last six months Interior Minister Angel Acebes has been spearheading the effort, which includes proposals to shut down marijuana grow shops and seed sellers, as well as an attack on Spain's leading pro-cannabis publications, Canamo and Yerba, as "apologists" for pot-smoking among teenagers. A government panel is expected to make recommendations for the cultural offensive in March.

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Every summer, hundreds of thousands of young Europeans flock to Ibiza's rave parties.

It's 3 a.m. on a Sunday, and the narrow streets of this pretty island are jammed with 20-somethings throwing fried chicken at one another. Hundreds of others are jumping up and down to the jackhammer beat of techno music; others line up to get into clubs. A brunette in a sequined silver halter top is passing out on the pavement.

Ibiza has become synonymous over the past two decades with the drug- infested clubbing, or raving, subculture. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of young men and women from around Europe - Britain in particular - - come here not to sun themselves, but to escape into drugs, alcohol, nonstop dancing, and anonymous sex.

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Spain is setting up a pioneering network of radar and sensitive night-sight cameras along its southern coast in a hi-tech attempt to crack down on the trafficking of drugs and immigrants from Morocco.

The scheme, said to be the first of its kind in Europe and costing E142m (UKP90m), will enable Civil Guard paramilitary coastal patrols to spot vessels up to 12 miles from the Spanish coast, the government said. The aim is to detect the small wooden pateras and rubber dinghies that smuggle thousands of would-be immigrants from Morocco to Spain each year. With the Integrated External Vigilance System (SIVE), infra-red cameras and radar capable of detecting the presence of a person or an outboard motor will alert officials stationed along the coast.

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BARCELONA, Spain - Former President Clinton and South African leader Nelson Mandela called on world leaders Friday to recognize that the AIDS epidemic is a threat to international peace and economic stability.

"We cannot lose our war against AIDS and win our battle against poverty, promote stability, advance democracy and increase peace and prosperity,'' Clinton told a Barcelona audience that cheered wildly as he and Mandela embraced.

"One hundred million AIDS cases means more terror, more mercenaries, more war, destruction, and the failure of fragile democracies,'' Clinton said at the close of the 14th International AIDS Conference.

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BARCELONA, Spain -- Former President Clinton acknowledged, "I was wrong" about one of the most controversial AIDS decisions of his presidency: his refusal to lift the ban on federal funding of needle-exchange programs.

A government panel advised him at the time that the practice, used to slow the spread of HIV among injection-drug users, was effective and didn't promote drug abuse. But Mr. Clinton sided with his drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who opposed it, Mr. Clinton said Thursday, because of "the message it would send on the drug front."

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ARCELONA, Spain, AIDS will claim an additional 65 million lives by 2020, more than triple the number who died in the first 20 years of the epidemic, unless more countries vastly expand their prevention programs, says the United Nations' first long-range forecast of the epidemic.

The forecast is a departure from earlier estimates, which had predicted that the epidemic may have reached its peak in some countries by 2000. It is part of a grim report that was issued today in advance of the 14th International AIDS Conference, which begins here on Sunday.

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MADRID - Spanish police seized a Venezuelan fishing boat in mid-Atlantic on Saturday and landed a haul of almost two tons of cocaine, authorities said.

Police boarded the boat some 550 miles west of the Canary Islands and arrested its seven Venezuelan crew in the early hours, a Spanish government official said.

The seizure -- Spain's largest so far this year -- was the result of a year-long police, customs and navy operation which involved the arrests of 12 Spaniards.

Interior Ministry official Gonzalo Robles, who heads Spain's anti-drug agency, told reporters that the ramshackle fishing vessel had been bound for the northern Spanish fishing port of La Coruna and the drugs were in 76 bundles on the ship's deck.

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Lima, Mar 29 (EFE).- Peru is studying the possibility of issuing special sovereign bonds in the international markets to finance the war on drugs, according to presidential drug enforcement adviser Ricardo Vega Llona.

In statements published Friday in the daily La Republica, Llona said Peru urgently needs at least $1.2 billion to carry out development programs promoting alternative crops to replace coca leaf, the raw material of cocaine.

Outlining the scope of the initiative, he said the funds raised through sale of the bonds "would be used for a specific program through a trusteeship held by a major institution such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank or the Andean Development Corp."

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Spanish Pressure Groups Demand Action To Educate Clubbers On Drug Risks

The deaths of two young people after taking ecstasy at a mass rave in Malaga have set off a national debate about drugs, with calls for their complete legalisation and a campaign to educate young Spaniards about their dangers.

In Spain it is not illegal to consume drugs of any kind in private, but people can be fined for consumption in public and trafficking carries a prison sentence. Drug use is slightly lower than in Britain.

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Spanish prosecutors began investigating three judges and a prison psychiatrist yesterday after one of the country's most notorious alleged drug traffickers was allowed out of prison on bail and immediately skipped the country. Carlos Ruiz Santamaria, whom the prosecution want jailed for 60 years and fined UKP280m on charges of smuggling drugs into Spain, disappeared late last month after paying an UKP18,000 bond to get out of prison.

Outraged politicians, newspapers and the police blame the judges.

But a psychiatrist had recommended his release because he was suffering severe depression and the three judges in the national court in Madrid - roughly equivalent to Britain's high court - gave him bail on humanitarian grounds.

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The sprawling shanty town of Las Barranquillas is a dusty 20-minute walk along a bumpy dirt track from the nearest bus stop on Madrid's southern fringes.

It is also the nearest thing Europe has to a state-sanctioned drug hypermarket. Up to 5,000 Spaniards come every day to buy heroin and cocaine from a dealer's slum. Whatever the hour, people trail by on foot; many bent double. Others arrive in unofficial taxis driven by drug users who charge a fare equal to the price of a dose.

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Police Back Ecstasy Quality Control At Raves

In a square in the north-eastern Spanish town of Olot, Barcelona-based disc jockey Micky Molino is on a stage, mixing his own-brand techno-house while hundreds of people dance. Micky's show may be organised by the town council, but this is as close as you get to a full-blown rave in a quiet country town best known for its snails.

Not that the young people of Olot are far behind their big city cousins in their party habits. There are plenty of drugs here: cocaine, hash and ecstasy are all readily available, fuelling the dance fever.

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MADRID, Spain -- Spain has called in Colombian police officers to help curb an outbreak of violence in Madrid after seven people were killed in eight days in street shoot-outs and revenge attacks among international drug traffickers.

The Colombian police, hardened by years of war between cocaine cartels in their country, were drafted in after the latest gun battle, which saw three people killed and one injured last week.

All the victims were young Colombian men. One of them, a 25-year-old from the cocaine capital of Medellin, had been in Spain for only two weeks.

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Spain has called in Colombian police officers to help curb an outbreak of violence in Madrid after seven people were killed in eight days, in street shoot-outs and revenge attacks among international drug traffickers. The Colombian police, hardened by years of war between cocaine cartels in their country, were drafted in after the latest gun battle, which saw three people killed and one injured on Tuesday night.

All the victims were young Colombian men. One of them, a 25-year-old from the cocaine capital of Medellin, had only been in Spain for two weeks.

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BARCELONA, Spain -- Police have broken up a global Ecstasy smuggling ring based here, arresting 23 people around the world in the culmination of a yearlong international investigation, authorities said Thursday.

Since May, authorities in Spain, the United States, Holland, Canada and Australia have seized a quarter-million Ecstasy pills linked to the ring. This week, the authorities rounded up the people suspected of running the operation, including 11 Israelis, six Spaniards, and two Moroccans.

The investigation, called "Operation Israel," was launched about a year ago after Barcelona police noticed a group of Israelis with no obvious sources of income living extravagantly in local resorts.

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Catalonia And Andalusia May Initiate Experimental Treatments This Fall

In less than 90 days, Andalusia, Catalonia and the other communities that wish to will be able to conduct clinical studies that dispense heroin as a treatment for addicts. The Heroin Committee, comprised of the Ministry of Health, independent experts and representatives of Spain's autonomous communities, yesterday gave the final research authorization, which will be supervised by the Spanish Agency of Medicine. Research subjects are limited to heroin addicts who have failed in other attempts at rehabilitation.

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All five political parties in the Catalan parliament in Spain have signed a proposal to legalise the use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes. The agreement asks the Catalan government to negotiate with the Spanish authorities so that cannabis--either as a drug or as a standardised extract of the plant--may be used to treat medical disorders.

Once the bill is approved in the Catalan parliament, it may be submitted to the Spanish parliament for discussion and eventual voting.

The initiative came from a collective of 300 women with breast cancer called the "Agata group" (after Saint Agata, who had her breasts removed under torture) and from a journalist, Nuria Nogueras, who recently died of the disease and who found the drug helpful during chemotherapy. Since last September, the Agata collective has held meetings with representatives of the five Catalan parties, as well as with the Catalan health department and oncologists and pharmacologists.

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MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Spanish police said they seized about 5 tons of cocaine yesterday in a major anti-drug operation.

The drug was found on the ship Abrente when it was boarded before dawn, some 350 miles west of Spain's Canary Island archipelago. Officials said 13 suspects were arrested.

The government said customs police had been watching the vessel during the past year as it docked frequently in the Canary Islands and on mainland Spain to unload fish.

Last month, the ship sailed to an unspecified place in the south Atlantic to pick up the cocaine, which came from Colombia, the ministry said.

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Europe's biggest drug operation has ended in fiasco, with British and Spanish police in Las Palmas giving up the search for a huge cargo of cocaine on the Panamanian-registered Privilege.

The failure to find what was originally claimed to be ten tonnes of cocaine left police facing awkward questions about what happened to the drugs that the British had said were loaded by a Colombian cartel known as Los Mellizos, or "The Twins", in the Orinoco River, Venezuela, last month.

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