Cannabis is obtained from the plant of the genus Cannabis. Cannabis is the only drug that grows in Sri Lanka. It is grown illicitly, mostly in the dry zones of the country (in the Eastern and Southern provinces). Cannabis causes euphoria, "high" feeling, pleasurable state of relaxation, impaired performance, sleepiness, confusion and hallucinations. Cocaine Cocaine, which is obtained from the plant of genus Erythroxylon coca, is available as a paste, or "Crack" hard white rocks or flaky material. Cocaine is smoked, sniffed or injected. It causes euphoria and alertness and postpones hunger and fatigue. [continues 991 words]
Drug Crop Eradication Devastates the Environment and Forces Producers Underground, Often to Areas With Fragile Ecosystems. UNITED NATIONS, (IPS) - As the call for the decriminalisation of drugs steadily picks up steam worldwide, a new study by a British charity concludes there has been no significant reduction in the global use of illicit drugs since the creation of three key UN anti-drug conventions, the first of which came into force over half a century ago. "Illicit drugs are now purer, cheaper, and more widely used than ever," says the report, titled Casualties of War: How the War on Drugs is Harming the World's Poorest, released Thursday by the London-based Health Poverty Action. [continues 688 words]
CANNABIS use in Western Australia fell markedly after it was decriminalised - contrary to comments by Police Minister Rob Johnson that it had grown "extensively". Mr Johnson told reporters today that when former WA Labor premier Geoff Gallop decriminalised the smoking, possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana in 2004, he presided over a surge in drug use. "We became known as the cannabis capital of Australia and we saw cannabis use grow extensively," Mr Johnson said. "If you start decriminalising it, what you see is an increase in use." [continues 358 words]
Hannah isn't just the girl next door. She's a teacher who cultivates cannabis on the side. Meet the middle-class growers with a taste for easy money and uneasy morals Meet Alex. He is 26, handsome, privately educated, and, for most of his week, a freelance director of documentaries. His wardrobe is immaculately shabby: designer jeans, cast-off T-shirts and vintage trainers. The kitchen of his boutique Victorian terraced house is decked with a vast, chrome Smeg refrigerator, a dining table for 12, and two sinks so deep you could bathe in them. He's just had Velux windows put in, so the room catches the morning light. He also has big plans for the garden. [continues 3020 words]
THE medical benefits of marijuana are only marginal - although worth having for the seriously ill ("On the quiet, the US is legalising marijuana", Andrew Sullivan, News Review, November 1). However, this side of marijuana is being widely abused in California as a semi-legal way of obtaining the drug. The hazards of smoking marijuana remain. Cannabis smoke contains higher concentrations of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons than tobacco smoke, and smokers generally inhale more smoke for longer, depositing more than four times as much tar in their lungs as cigarette smokers. A heavy smoker of cannabis-and-tobacco joints (more than 10 a day), substantially increases their risk of contracting lung disease including cancer, as well as heart attacks and stroke. [continues 64 words]
I can only add this to Sullivan's excellent analysis on the end of marijuana prohibition: public safety will improve. During my 18 years of police service in the USA, I saw the use of alcohol being the proximate cause of about 1,300 calls. These included murder, suicide, rape, assault, child abuse and spouse abuse. The use of cannabis generated zero calls, and the use of cocaine, one. My colleagues currently waste more than 10m road patrol hours searching several million cars in order to bust someone for 1-20 grams of cannabis. Meanwhile, the drunk drivers sail past. Howard Wooldridge Citizens Opposing Prohibition Washington DC, USA [end]
A good friend of mine, an almost lifelong heroin user who, more recently, has diversified into crack cocaine and therefore requires a quick blast from an oxygen cylinder before going for a walk, rang me not so long ago with a warning: "Rod, I'm worried about your drinking," he said. "You've really got to look after yourself." I couldn't speak for a few moments, out of incredulity and indignation; I consume on average half a bottle of wine per day, which is too much, sure - but to be lectured by a crack-addled skaghead with half a lung and the facial complexion of that character in Munch's The Scream seemed, to me, pushing it. [continues 603 words]
The head of Britain's leading medical research organisation rounded on the government yesterday for sacking its principal drugs adviser. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, said scientists must be allowed to give "unfettered advice without the fear of reprisal". His criticism followed the abrupt dismissal of David Nutt on Friday. This weekend Nutt said many of his colleagues on the advisory council on the misuse of drugs, which he chaired, could resign in protest. "I wouldn't be surprised if some of them stepped down," he said. "Maybe all of them will." [continues 267 words]
The Humble Joint Can Save Lives. We Look Forward to the End of Senseless Prohibition You know things are shifting in America when Fortune magazine, the bible for business journalism, runs a cover story titled "Is pot already legal?". You also know it when Barack Obama's Department of Justice publishes a long-expected memo signalling that the federal government will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries if they are legal under state law. That happened formally this month. It was not, moreover, a symbolic gesture. Marijuana for medical reasons -- to tackle chemotherapy-induced nausea or Aids-related wasting or glaucoma, among other conditions -- is now legal in 13 states, including the biggest, California. Next year, 13 more states are planning referendums or new laws following suit. Last week a California legislative committee held the first hearings not simply on whether medical marijuana should remain legal, but on whether all marijuana should be decriminalised, full stop. The incentive? The vast amounts of money the bankrupt state could raise by taxing cannabis. [continues 888 words]
Mr Barnett says the Government will introduce legislation this week to repeal WA's Cannabis Control Act of 2003. He will also seek to make changes to the 1981 Misuse of Drugs Act and the Young Offenders Act of 1994, saying it will send a clear message that the Government does not endorse illicit drug use. Mr Barnett said the cannabis-related legislation was the first in a series of steps the Government would take to send a clear anti-drugs message to the community and toughen penalties for people who broke the law through drug-related offences. [continues 714 words]
HEMP Resources is suing the WA Government for $255 million in its latest stoush with the Department of Agriculture and Food. In 2004, shortly after lobbying the government to pass the Industrial Hemp Act, Hemp Resources applied for an industrial hemp licence from the registrar of hemp, Mark Holland. The licence was denied on grounds that two of the company's directors, Kim Hough and Luu Phoc Nguyen, had minor criminal convictions. But the convictions were more than 10 years old and quashed under the Spent Convictions Act. Hemp Resources received its licence in February 2006. [continues 539 words]
A BRITISH agent has thrown the war against drug traffickers into chaos by leaving top secret information about covert operations on a bus in South America. In a blunder that has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and put scores of lives at risk, the drugs liaison officer lost a computer memory stick said to contain a list of undercover agents' names and details of more than five years of intelligence work. It happened when the MI6-trained agent left her handbag on a transit coach at El Dorado airport in Bogota, Colombia. Intelligence chiefs were forced to wind up operations and relocate dozens of agents and informants amid fears the device could fall into the hands of drugs barons. [continues 134 words]
The Panic Spread Fast When an Undercover British Officer Mislaid Key Secrets in a Colombian Airport AS the plane from Ecuador began its descent into the Colombian capital of Bogota, Agent T must have felt a shiver of excitement about her new assignment. She was being posted to the drugs capital of the world - where she had secured a role gathering intelligence in the war against the global cocaine trade worth UKP 50 billion a year. An undercover customs officer with Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), she would be responsible for dozens of undercover agents providing vital information on Colombia's drugs cartels. The job involved liaising with MI5 and MI6, the British security and intelligence services, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). [continues 1004 words]
WITH its backdrop of snow-capped mountains facing the Pacific Ocean and relaxed life-style, Vancouver was once bracketed among the world's most desirable cities. It has been ranked with Zurich and Vienna as having the highest quality of living and sits alongside Cape Town and Sydney for its natural beauty. Not any more: with shootings on the rise and drug gangs fighting over turf, the city's image is suffering just before it hosts the Winter Olympics. Criminologists are calling it Vancouver's "year of the gun". [continues 638 words]
In the museum of organised crime, Pablo Escobar deserves a room of his own. He was the first gangster billionaire, listed by Forbes magazine in 1989 as the world's seventh richest man; in the late 1980s he offered to pay Colombia's national debt as a way of fending off the ever-present threat of extradition to America. The rise of his cocaine-trafficking organisation, the Medellin cartel, triggered a period of mayhem unprecedented even by the standards of Colombia's modern history. [continues 811 words]
Imagine a single policy measure that could wipe out criminal gangs, improve the health of the nation, transform the Irish legal system, empty our prisons, deal a blow to international terrorism and boost government tax revenues. I'm talking about legalising drugs. Yet, extraordinary as it seems, there is little or no support for such a measure. I suspect that will change in the next few years. Ireland has a drug prohibition policy that isn't working. The latest report on Irish crime statistics from the CSO shows crime levels in every category falling with one obvious exception: controlled drug offences. Indeed, many of the worst crimes in other categories - gangland killings, for example - are a consequence of our failing prohibition policy. [continues 631 words]
Guns Are Pouring South Of The Border While Murder And Kidnap Are Flowing North BY THE hair-raising standards of torture, murder, kidnapping, extortion and other drug-related mayhem that has become tragically routine along the US border with Mexico, the inspection of a battered red Ford pickup truck travelling south through the Arizona desert this month hardly seemed worth recording. US border patrol agents stopped the vehicle as it headed towards Mexico through the Organ Pipe Cactus national park. A search quickly uncovered seven assault rifles - two of them Russian-made AK47s - a couple of handguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. [continues 918 words]
Suspicion Grows That Heroin Dealer Was 'Permitted' To Import Hard Drugs The Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) is examining scores of drug seizures, arrests and covert operations involving Kieran Boylan, a convicted heroin dealer whose relationship with the force is the subject of a collusion inquiry following an expose by The Sunday Times. The garda ombudsman now suspects that Boylan was "permitted" to import huge quantities of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, which he supplied to low-level dealers, who were later arrested, while he continued to wholesale drugs to other criminal gangs. [continues 383 words]
Brandon Muir's Tragic Death Will Not Be The Last Of Its Kind We can put a name to the grainy face of the toddler in the news last week because of the way he died. But in Scotland today there are tens of thousands of children like Brandon Muir living chaotic, violent and perilous lives because of their parents' drug and alcohol addiction. Brandon was killed by Robert Cunningham, the boyfriend who had moved in with mother Heather Boyd just 18 days before the boy's death. The couple were heroin addicts. Glasgow high court heard Cunningham hit the two-year-old so hard in the abdomen, his intestine ruptured. But the child did not die until the next morning, and in that time Boyd took him to a party where he was left in a toilet, ignored by the drunk and drug-using adults. [continues 1048 words]
The Author Vilified For Kicking Out Her Drug-User Son - And Writing About It - Says Tough Love Cuts Both Ways Julie Myerson looks like a broken sparrow. "This has been a terrible week, today has been a terrible day and yesterday was one of the worst days," she says tremulously, raking a hand through her pale gold hair. Her fingers shake; she is on the verge of tears. She has reason. Last week she set off a storm when she revealed that her new book, The Lost Child, features a detailed account of her son's five-year struggle with cannabis and her own traumatic decision, when he was 17, to turn him out of the family home and change the locks. [continues 2595 words]
