Farmers in Jamaica Are Offering a Different Kind of Travel Experience. (AP) - Call them ganja tours: smoky, mystical - and technically illegal - journeys to some of the island's hidden cannabis plantations. The tours pass through places like Nine Mile, the tiny hometown of the reggae legend and famous pot lover Bob Marley. Here, in Jamaica's verdant central mountains, dreadlocked men escort curious visitors to farms where marijuana plants grow. Similar tours are offered just outside the western resort town of Negril. [continues 90 words]
Along the plains of eastern Colorado, on a patch of soil where his father once raised alfalfa, Ryan Loflin is growing a leafy green challenge to the U.S. drug laws. His fields are sown with hemp, a tame cousin of marijuana that was once grown openly in the United States but is now outlawed as a controlled substance. Last year, as Colorado voters legalized marijuana for recreational use, they also approved a measure laying a path for farmers like Mr. Loflin, 40, to once again grow and harvest hemp, a potentially lucrative crop that can be processed into goods as diverse as cooking oil, clothing and building material. This spring, he became the first farmer in Colorado to publicly sow his fields with hemp seed. [continues 958 words]
Human rights abuses in the war on drugs are widespread and systematic. They must be stopped. This week, representatives from many nations will gather at the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna to determine the appropriate course of the international response to illicit drugs. Delegates will debate multiple resolutions while ignoring a truth that goes to the core of current drug policy: human rights abuses in the war on drugs are widespread and systematic. Consider these numbers: Hundreds of thousands of people locked in detention centers and subject to violent punishments. Millions imprisoned. Hundreds hanged, shot or beheaded. Tens of thousands killed by government forces and non-state actors. Thousands beaten and abused to extract information, and abused in government or private "treatment" centers. Millions denied life-saving medicines. These are alarming figures, but campaigns to address them have been slow and drug control has received little attention from the mainstream human rights movement. [continues 530 words]
Regarding "An ugly truth in the war on drugs" by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ruth Dreifuss (Views, March 11): Rather than ignoring the issue, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is doing everything possible to ensure that drug control does not lead to human rights abuses. In doing so, we are pursuing our primary purpose, which is drug control, in tandem with the three pillars of the United Nations: peace, security and development, and human rights. The authors of the article have quoted us selectively. They say that while the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledges that drug users are pushed to the margins of society, we have failed to note that these people's human rights have been ignored. Not true. The same report quoted in the article also highlighted the human rights of drug users. [continues 77 words]
There is nothing clandestine about Julian Rojas's coca plot, which is tucked deep within acres of banana groves. It has been mapped with satellite imagery, catalogued in a government database, cross-referenced with his personal information, and checked and rechecked by the local coca growers' union. The same goes for the plots worked by Mr. Rojas's neighbors and thousands of other farmers in this torrid region east of the Andes who are licensed by the Bolivian government to grow coca, the plant used to make cocaine. [continues 1312 words]
MEXICO CITY - Mexico's outgoing president, Felipe Calderon, was never much loved. His election in 2006 was overshadowed by claims of fraud by a leftist challenger. He then struggled with a deep recession brought on by the global financial crisis. And throughout his term he sponsored an army-led "war on drugs," which has left a death toll variously estimated at between 65,000 and 100,000. Little wonder that most Mexicans are eager to see him leave office on Saturday. [continues 831 words]
Anthony Orozco, a 19-year-old community-college student, was driving home from a Walmart store with a few friends in this western U.S. state one day recently when he was pulled over by the police. After an officer found marijuana in the car, he was issued a summons for possession and drug paraphernalia - petty offenses each carrying a $100 fine - and given a court date. "We get treated like criminals," Mr. Orozco said. But is he one? In the recent American elections, residents of Colorado and Washington State broke a longstanding taboo and voted for the legalization of recreational marijuana use. As the first American states to treat small amounts of marijuana like alcohol, they are poised to become national test cases for drug legalization. But no one said it would be simple. [continues 989 words]
WHENEVER I've interviewed Mexican cartel killers, the aspect that I've found most disturbing about them is that they appear to be sane. Even though they have described to me such unfathomable actions as hacking off the heads of still-living victims, it is something other than mental illness that drives their violence. Their sanity is disconcerting because, if they were simply mad, it would be easier to accept horrific actions like leaving piles of headless corpses in town squares. [continues 794 words]
Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution. by Doug Fine. 319 Pages. Illustrated. Gotham Books, $28; Ukp17. "Too High to Fail" is a good rebuttal to those who say stoners never accomplish anything. Doug Fine did. He has written a well-researched book that uses the clever tactic of making the moral case for ending marijuana prohibition by burying it inside the economic case. We've become a ruthless society, and almost everything (I'm looking at you, Environment and Health Care) has to be sold as "first, it's good for business." To his credit, Mr. Fine doesn't do what so many of us do and scream, "Can't we just stop jailing potheads because that would be the right thing?" Also to his credit, he never admits he's one of them. [continues 936 words]
Vancouver in British Columbia, Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico and Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan are unlikely cousins. But together these three places and their ilk have wrought a remarkable change in one of the world's most important debates over the past two years. For decades, the idea of legalizing narcotics was supported by only a small minority. But as global markets in illicit drugs have expanded exponentially since the early 1990s, policy makers and law enforcement agencies alike have been overwhelmed by the challenge posed by the prohibition of a long list of drugs. Markets have spread to places that for decades had no significant drug problem, like China and Indonesia, while the numbers of addicts in countries like Iran have grown hugely. [continues 794 words]
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that the federal government will no longer prosecute dispensers of medical marijuana if they comply with state law. That should bring relief to people who need marijuana for health reasons and free up law enforcement resources for more important work. There is considerable evidence that marijuana can be useful in treating pain, nausea, weight loss and other symptoms associated with chemotherapy and H.I.V. and other illnesses. Thirteen states, including California, have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, which remains illegal under federal law. [continues 185 words]
Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an interview released by Austrian weekly Profil that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiralled out of control last year. "In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital," Costa was quoted as saying by Profil. "In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor." The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," Costa was quoted as saying. There were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." [continues 51 words]
MADRID: One of Colombia's most notorious drug lords, Leonidas Vargas, was shot dead in his Madrid hospital bed on Thursday, Spanish police said. At least one person entered the room in Madrid's October 12th Hospital where Vargas was being treated for a serious illness, and shot the drugs kingpin four times just before 8 p.m. local time, police said. Spanish newspaper El Mundo said the assassin asked another patient who was sharing the Colombian's room if he was Vargas. [continues 172 words]
MEXICO CITY: Mexican congressmen called for a federal investigation of potential drug cartel ties to the nation's beauty pageants Friday, days after a 23-year-old beauty queen was detained on suspicion of drug and weapons violations. Congressional leaders warned that cartels may have infiltrated contests to launder money, and said a full investigation was needed. To many, former preschool teacher Laura Zuniga, named Miss Sinaloa in the drug-plagued northern state's annual beauty contest, symbolizes declining ethics in Mexico. [continues 404 words]
LONDON - A group of senior British scientists has condemned the government's push to toughen the penalties for possessing marijuana, saying in a letter published Tuesday the move ignores scientific evidence. Britain's House of Lords voted to reclassifying the drug Tuesday, and the House of Commons, Britain's powerful lower house, already approved the measure earlier this month and the Lords' vote is seen as a formality. The Home Office said it expected the change to come into effect in January. [continues 275 words]
Marijuana may be something of a wonder drug -- though perhaps not in the way you might think. Researchers in Italy and Britain have found that the main active ingredient in marijuana -- tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC -- and related compounds show promise as antibacterial agents, particularly against microbial strains that are already resistant to several classes of drugs. It has been known for decades that Cannabis sativa has antibacterial properties. Experiments in the 1950s tested various marijuana preparations against skin and other infections, but researchers at the time had little understanding of marijuana's chemical makeup. [continues 121 words]
SEATTLE - The American travel writer and public television host Rick Steves is a certain kind of innocent abroad - benignly suburban to the core, with a bit of a paunch and the ever-quizzical look of someone who would try raw squid for breakfast and not complain about it. At 52, he has spent a third of his adult life living out of a suitcase, ever in search of that bargain room with a view, encouraging his fellow Americans to become "temporary locals." His influence is vast and one of the reasons U.S. citizens aren't more hated abroad in Bush's final days. [continues 699 words]
A man being held in a Dutch police cell on suspicion of growing cannabis got an unintended treat in his lunch -- a piece of hashish-laced cake, a spokesman said Thursday. "It was an accident," said Alwin Don, police spokesman in the southern province of Zeeland. The hash cake had earlier been seized by police in an unrelated investigation and stored in a refrigerator -- close to lunch packets served to suspects being held in cells at the police station in Goes, 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Amsterdam. [continues 118 words]
Cannabis remains the most widely used drug in Europe, but cocaine abuse rose sharply last year despite record amounts of the drug being seized, an annual report by the EU drugs agency said Thursday. Heroin use and drug injecting were declining, the report said, but the number of drugs-related deaths remained high at 7,000-8,000 people in the EU's 27 member states and Norway in 2005, the last year for which data is available. [continues 220 words]
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: The Dutch Health Ministry announced plans Wednesday to extend its experimental medical marijuana program for five years, despite setbacks. Under the program, launched in 2003, standardized marijuana is grown by government-licensed growers under controlled conditions and sold by prescription in pharmacies. But few patients, even armed with a doctor's prescription, bought the regulated weed since they could buy it at a third of the price in "coffee shops," where it remains illegal but tolerated if sold in small amounts. [continues 474 words]
