The Interior Ministry has warned farmers in the northern Bekaa and Hermel they face stiff penalties if caught cultivating drugs.

Leaflets were dropped over the area by an army helicopter stating that whoever grew cannabis would face life sentences with hard labor and fines of up to LL100 million.

They also said that mukhtars who concealed any drug cultivation in their villages would face prison sentences and fines of up to LL2 million.

Drug cultivation was prohibited in 1992, but Bekaa farmers had threatened to resort to growing cannabis, claiming the government did not provide them with alternative crops.

[end]

Capers, Walnuts And Hazelnuts Are Some Of New Cash Crops Displacing Cannabis

The United Nations' office in Baalbek for promoting alternative crops may have closed its doors, but efforts to carry on the fight against drug cultivation are continuing with the help of the Internal Security Forces and a local agricultural expert.

An office for promoting substitutes to drug cultivation has begun the free distribution of 15,000 imported pistachio saplings from Syria to revive agriculture in Baalbek-Hermel.

The office is expecting to receive other types of saplings from different countries every week until next March, amounting to about 500,000 saplings.

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A delegation of Baalbek-Hermel officials on Friday discussed with former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri the production of fruit and vegetables as an alternative to drug crops.

According to the head of the Substitute Cultures Program, Hassan Makhlouf, the project is aimed at producing quality fruit and vegetables such as jojoba, caper buds, nuts and other commercially viable crops. The scheme is designed to encourage the impoverished farmers of Baalbek-Hermel to stop growing drug crops such as poppies and cannabis.

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Officers from the Customs Department and the Internal Security Forces began a 14-day training program on Tuesday to learn the latest techniques for combating the traffic and abuse of narcotics.

The course is sponsored jointly by the United Nations' Drug Control Program and the ISF. Two UN-assigned British officers have been flown in to supervise the workshop, in which 20 Lebanese officers are taking part. The UN Drug Control Program has also granted the ISF four new four-wheel drive vehicles for drug-enforcement-related missions at a price tag of $75,000.

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Drug abusers should be treated as patients, not criminals, and rehabilitation programs should replace imprisonment, according to experts addressing the need to curtail the illegal use of drugs.

Physicians from the region's health ministries and hospitals convened at the Marriott Hotel for a three-day World Health Organization conference exploring the problem of drug use and HIV infection. The conference ended on Saturday with a list of recommendations to be implemented at a country-wide level.

"Drug users are humans, too, and have rights," said M.T. Abu Saleh, clinical director for sddiction services at the St. George's Medical School in London. "The Universal Declaration for the Mentally Ill enumerates their human rights. They're entitled to the best healthcare and shouldn't be treated as criminals."

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BEIRUT - Lebanon has succeeded in curbing cultivation and trafficking of illicit drugs but needs financial aid to support farmers who depended on the trade for decades, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday.

"We came up with a positive impression after we visited the Bekaa Valley and met Lebanese leaders. Lebanon has achieved real progress in fighting drugs," Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) told Reuters in an interview.

"The problem now is how to boost agricultural development in this area so that farmers will not need to go back to growing cannabis and opium," he said.

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Thanks for an excellent piece on the drug war (“Why Washington has lost its war on drugs,” The Daily Star, Feb. 22). If you haven’t seen it already, you should take a look at http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer

There you will find a collection of the major studies of drug policy over the last 100 years, including the largest studies ever conducted by the governments of the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. You will also find historical documents covering the history of the drug laws from their inception.

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There you will find a collection of the major studies of drug policy over the last 100 years, including the largest studies ever conducted by the governments of the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. You will also find historical documents covering the history of the drug laws from their inception.

If you are new to the online library, I recommend you start with The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, which you will find under Major Studies of Drugs and Drug Policy. It is probably the best book ever written on the subject.

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Politicians have spiritual problems. It seems that people like Al Gore, Bill McCollum, and (of course) B.J. Clinton are the ones with the

“Spiritual Problem.” Why don’t they leave us and our young people alone? Typical of the politicians of today, they are jumping on the severe-punishment anti-constitution bandwagon to build their careers by claiming this war on our rights (oops, “war on drugs”) is “for the kids.” Wouldn’t want to appear soft on crime, wouldja Al? How about it Bill? Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler would be proud of your lack of mercy.

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BEIRUT, Lebanon, Feb. 23 (UPI) - A security official says Lebanon has become ``almost clean'' of drug cultivation and has adopted measures to prevent money-laundering despite its bank secrecy laws.

Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Ibrahim, director-general of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, said today that Lebanon had exerted great efforts in recent years to combat drug cultivation and trafficking, which flourished during the 1975-90 civil war.

At a news conference at United Nations headquarters in Beirut, Ibrahim said, ``Lebanon, which was a drug producer and exporter, especially hashish and heroin, and an importer of cocaine, has become almost clean.''

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America’s policies on illicit narcotics have long displayed evidence of having been crafted by people who give the appearance of having dabbled in a few recreational pharmaceuticals themselves.

When the amount of U.S.-bound cocaine intercepted in the Gulf of Mexico dropped off after a few years of steadily increasing hauls in the 1980s for instance, Washington’s Drug Enforcement Agency took the statistics to indicate that it was winning its “war on drugs.” It took several years for the hapless drugbusters to realize that many of their adversaries had simply adopted a roundabout route, taking advantage of Canada’s endless coastline and then shipping their wares overland through the porous entry points on the world’s longest unprotected border.

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Lebanon's eradication of drug farming in the Bekaa valley is threatened by the government's failure to deliver promised aid to farmers, reports David Sharrock in London's liberal Guardian.

Under U.S. pressure, Lebanon began destroying its drug crops in 1993. By early 1998, Lebanon was removed from the U.S. State Department's list of drug-producing countries.

But the drug trade was a major pillar of the Lebanese economy -- especially in the Bekaa -- and replacement crops yield a tiny fraction of the profits once provided by cannabis or opium. Little agricultural aid has arrived. The resulting economic depression led to violent confrontation last year [see Regional Reports, WPR, April, 1998].

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Money Woes Wither Substitution Program

Baalbek, Lebanon

One recent afternoon in the Bekaa Valley, Ali Shreif plucked a small branch from an oak tree and illustrated the technique that made him a rich man during the height of Lebanon's civil war.

"You dry the leaf in the sun," he explained, pressing on his impromptu model. "Then, when the cold comes, you scrape off the residue and make it into powder."

The end result of that simple process-when applied to the cannabis plants Shreif grew - is hashish that can be sold on the street for $1,500 a kilo. With 25 acres of fertile land in his family's possession, Shreif says he produced as much as 500 kilos of the drug each year during the 1975-91 war.

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SIDON, Lebanon, Aug 30 (AFP) - A grocer selling alcoholic beverages was murdered Sunday and another seriously wounded in the first anti-liquor attacks in the Sidon area for a year, Lebanese police said.

Two men burst into Wajih Ramadan's shop in Wadi Zayne, five kilometres (three miles) north of Sidon, and opened fire with a machine gun, killing Ramadan instantly.

The pair then fled on a motorcycle to Ramile, just outside Sidon, where they entered the store of grocer Abu Fadi Abbas and shot him also, police said.

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AALBEK, Lebanon - During Lebanon's long civil war, the Bekaa Valley flourished as one of the world's most fertile regions for growing cannabis for hashish and poppies for heroin. In 1992, as it struggled to emerge from more than a decade of self-destruction and lawlessness, Lebanon successfully controlled its illicit drug crops, with the support of the United States. But in the process it left tens of thousands of farmers indigent.

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Family Planning Body Lectures Soldiers On Substance Abuse

Lebanese army officers yesterday began a "refresher" training seminar on combating drug addiction in order to lend a hand to a national campaign by non-governmental organisations.

Almost 40 male and female officers attending the three-day seminar and workshop at the Choueifat Women's Association offered their assessment and noted the difficulty of applying theoretical concepts.

General secretary of the Lebanon Family Planning Association (LFPA) Toufic Osseiran said training the army yields better results due to soldiers' sense of commitment, dedication and discipline. "University students gave up very quickly. Soldiers are devoted to things they set their minds to. This itself proves our mission is on the right track," Osseiran said.

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A television crew from American news giant CNN today found itself under a hail of gunfire from drug growers in the heart of Lebanon's marijuana plantations, CNN bureau chief in Beirut Brent Sadler said.

The British Sadler and his team of German cameraman Christian Streib, Lebanese producer Nada Husseini and their driver were escorted by the owner of a cannabis plantation and his agricultural engineer in the eastern Bekaa valley, the hub of the country's drug trade.

Suddenly they stumbled into an ambush.

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