Heroin Addiction On Rise, Tehran Official Warns Britain Points To Decrease In Land Used For Cultivation Young Iranians are paying the price for NATO's "failure" to curb opium production in neighbouring Afghanistan, according to the Iranian government. Iran's deputy foreign minister, Mehdi Safari, made the complaint at the end of a three-day visit to Britain, after talks with the foreign secretary, David Miliband, and other Foreign Office and Downing Street officials, in an attempt to improve relations. One of the few areas of cooperation between Iran and Britain is counter-narcotics, but Safari expressed frustration at what the Iranian government sees as a lack of progress. [continues 407 words]
Poppy Production Increased By 25% Last Year British Switch Focus From Farmers To Traffickers A haul of drugs - mostly heroin - confiscated in Afghanistan by the Kabul-based Criminal Justice Task Force. Photograph: Julian Borger The two men ruefully scrutinising their shoes in the dock said they were simple labourers, though they had allegedly been found with 27kg of opium in their kitchen, worth a potential UKP250,000 in the west. In almost any other country, that would count as a significant drugs bust. In Afghanistan, the poppy-growing hub of the world, where drug exports are worth more than UKP1.5bn a year and where seizures sometimes exceed a tonne at a time, it was just another unremarkable day in the drug war. [continues 950 words]
Unit Accused of Abusing Drugs and Alcohol Officers Relieved of Duty After Killing of 24 Iraqis The marine unit involved in the killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha last November had suffered a "total breakdown" in discipline and had drug and alcohol problems, according to the wife of one of the battalion's staff sergeants. The allegations in Newsweek magazine contribute to an ever more disturbing portrait of embattled marines under high stress, some on their third tour of duty after ferocious door-to-door fighting in the Sunni insurgent strongholds of Falluja and Haditha. [continues 659 words]
US/Canada Border Patrols Struggle To Stop Smuggling Of Marijuana and Guns It is a sunny spring day; the water is sparkling, dotted with the white sails of jauntily leaning yachts and the green islands that speckle the US-Canada border. Welcome to the frontline of a vicious multibillion-dollar drug war. A high-powered grey patrol boat with a three-man crew from the US department of homeland security buzzes across this Pacific idyll like a frenetic killjoy, boarding sailboats, disrupting jolly outings on family motor launches and even accosting tiny sea kayaks. [continues 1349 words]
After bombing Taliban tanks, headquarters and troops, pilots from the United States were given a supplemental list of targets deemed to be almost as important to American and European security -- opium-processing laboratories, US officials said last week. The bombing sorties have helped to disrupt the production of heroin from the opium harvest, which had already been reduced by the Taliban edict against poppy cultivation last year. A US state department official last weekend confirmed that the opium and heroin industry was one of the strategic targets of the bombing campaign. 'To the degree where we knew where the processing laboratories were, they were taken out -- if they were in areas which were not close to anywhere where collateral damage would occur,' the official said. [continues 412 words]
After bombing Taliban tanks, headquarters and troops, American pilots were given a supplemental list of targets deemed to be almost as important to US and European security - opium processing laboratories, US officials said yesterday. The bombing sorties have helped to disrupt the production of heroin from the opium harvest, which had already been reduced by the Taliban edict against poppy cultivation last year. A state department official yesterday confirmed that the opium and heroin industry was one of the strategic targets of the bombing campaign. [continues 451 words]
President George Bush speaks some Spanish. His accent is as broad as Texas and his grasp of vocabulary rarely stretches to complete sentences, but his country's neighbours to the south still appreciate the effort. For Latin American leaders, the new president has demonstrated a lively interest and even a smattering of knowledge about the region, which came as a relief after eight years of occasional glances from Bill Clinton. But for those with concerns about human rights - and memories long enough to recall the last time the United States was deeply involved in the affairs of the rest of the continent - the new-found interest is cause for some anxiety. [continues 904 words]
The trend towards reducing the size of government by farming out its operations is now almost universal in the industrialised democracies. It is supposed to save money and impose some market discipline on bureaucracy's natural tendency to swell. The problem is that by "downsizing" government and "outsourcing" its work, the profit motive begins to take the place of public policy. When the issue is delivering the post or cleaning the streets, the government can set standards and monitor the work of its private contractors. But what happens when an administration starts "outsourcing" its conduct of foreign and defence policy, and the contractors deal not in stamps, postcards, brushes and brooms but lethal force? [continues 884 words]
When a small plane carrying US missionaries was shot down a few weeks ago in Peru, killing a young woman and her seven-month-old baby girl, it first seemed to be a tragic case of trigger-happy policing by the Peruvian air force. But as more details emerge from the Andean jungle, it is clear this apparently isolated incident has a far greater significance. The deaths have helped yank the covers from the secret side of America's billion-dollar drug war in Latin America. [continues 1370 words]
A leading US Democratic senator has denounced Washington's billion-dollar anti-drug policy in Colombia as an expensive failure which has boosted rightwing paramilitaries while achieving negligible' results. Condemnation of the policy came amid reports that the area in Colombia used for the production of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine, dramatically increased last year despite extensive crop-spraying and military operations. In a broad attack on the US's Plan Colombia, an ambitious anti-narcotics strategy to which it is contributing more than a billion dollars, Senator Patrick Leahy criticised the exemptions granted the Bogota government from human rights conditions on the disbursement of aid. [continues 459 words]
President George Bush tried to reinvigorate America's controversial war on drugs' yesterday by appointing a hardliner to the position of drug czar', defying critics' claims that imprisonment and military action are failing to stop the spread of narcotics. The new drug czar, John Walters, was the deputy head of drug policy in George Bush Sr's administration, and has long been a firm advocate of mandatory prison sentences for drug users. Acceptance of drug use is simply not an option for this administration,' the president said during the announcement of Mr Walters' nomination. John Walters and I believe the only humane and compassionate response to drug use is a moral refusal to accept it. We emphatically disagree with those who favour drug legalisation.' [continues 322 words]
Washington diary Julian Borger In Latin America last week is likely to be remembered as the week that the United States held its nose and plunged cheque-book first into Colombia's civil war under the emotive banner of an anti-drug crusade. The Senate voted to spend about $1 billion on mostly military assistance to the Colombian army. After talks with the even more gung-ho House of Representatives, this was raised to $1.3bn, making Colombia the third-biggest recipient of US aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt. [continues 937 words]
Juvenile Offenders Are Increasingly Ending Up In Adult Prisons The day's consignment of young suspects arrives by van at a side entrance of Baltimore's monolithic courthouse and they clank through the corridors, each shackled to the inmate ahead, like a noisy, disconsolate centipede. They are almost all black, mostly under 18, and are heading for the adult courts where, despite their age, they will be tried and sentenced as adults. It is a practice increasingly common in a country that is less and less inclined to view youth as a mitigating factor for serious crimes. [continues 699 words]
The dissection of personal scandals has become as intrinsic to United States presidential campaigns as bumper stickers and corporate finance, and so it was last week that the 2000 campaign began in earnest with a storm over what had or had not been up George W Bush's nose. The issue is cocaine this time. Had it been sex again, it would arguably not have won so much attention from a public sated by Bill Clinton's Oval Office escapades. For the time being at least, drugs are more politically interesting than sex. [continues 1001 words]
The George Bush campaign juggernaut hit the first serious pothole of its cash-fuelled drive to the presidency yesterday, as the Texas governor tried in vain to fend off questions about whether he had used cocaine as a young man. Mr Bush abandoned the aloof "none-of-your-business" tactics he has used so far in his attempt to be the Republican party's presidential nominee, declaring that he would have passed the background checks used on staff by the FBI when his father was president - implying he had not used cocaine or other illegal drugs for at least 15 years. [continues 693 words]
The FBI and the US drug enforcement administration (DEA) said yesterday they had smashed a ring which had smuggled vast amounts of cocaine and marijuana by truck and train from Colombia through Mexico into the US. In a year-long investigation codenamed Southwest Express, 2,700kg of cocaine, 1,800kg of marijuana and more than $1.1m were seized. Raids were carried out in the early hours of yesterday morning in 14 cities in seven states, from Texas to Chicago, resulting in 70 arrests. [continues 61 words]
As US forces closed the latest of a network of bases in Panama yesterday, concerns were raised in congress that the accelerating withdrawal from the central American outpost would leave dangerous holes in America's defence against drug-smuggling. The shutdown of the Fort Clayton army base marked the last main phase of troop withdrawals, and represented the latest step in the implementation of a 1977 treaty by which the US will relinquish its hold on the Panama canal by the end of this year. [continues 397 words]
Florida environmentalists voiced their anxiety yesterday about government plans to start testing a new marijuana-eating fungus as a possible weapon against the drug plantations hidden among the state's famous swamps. The fungus, Fusarium oxysporum, was cultivated in the laboratories of a Montana bio-engineering firm, and is designed to attack marijuana while leaving other plants untouched. But ecologists are concerned that it might mutate if sprayed on the fertile wetlands. Florida's newly appointed "drug tsar", Jim McDonough, stressed that no decision had been taken so far to use the fungus, but expressed optimism that it would pass safety tests. [continues 263 words]
Increasing numbers of prisons in the US are controlling their inmates with the use of electric shock weapons, which are frequently activated accidentally or used arbitrarily as instruments of torture, Amnesty International alleged in a report published yesterday. The British-based human rights organisation called for the stun belt to be banned, describing it as "a weapon that is worn by its victim". A box at the back of the belt, which is triggered by remote control, administers an eight-second shock of 50,000 volts, temporarily incapacitating the wearer with pain. [continues 546 words]
Do the teenagers you know talk excitedly about inequality, racial discrimination or pollution? If so, according to a pamphlet doing the rounds in the United States, they may be exhibiting the first symptoms of drug addiction. The pamphlet by Gerald Smith, a criminology professor in Utah, vividly describes these warning signs for the benefit of parents worried that their children may be regular users of marijuana and other drugs. The affected youth may "avoid the family while at home", the 66-page booklet says, and show "excessive preoccupation with social causes, race relations, environmental issues etc". [continues 210 words]
