Authorities in South Yemen have banned the sale of the mild narcotic khat on weekdays, but said it will be allowed into the city of Aden and its suburbs on weekends. Checkpoints were set up on Monday around Aden to stop khat shipments from entering the port city. Patrols roamed markets to enforce the ban on its sales. It will only be permitted on Thursdays and Fridays. The statement said the ban was prompted by complaints from citizens and because of "security, social and health" concerns. It added that khat markets also caused traffic jams. [continues 214 words]
But it would take a government with insight and compassion to implement the necessary remedies Sometimes, as a journalist, the sadness that follows the information you seek is almost unbearable. The story in question was to get to the root of Cape gangs. And there was time: two years. That's a long while to research a single topic - a chance you seldom get. With that sort of time you inevitably go beneath the skin of daily journalism and the epidermis of weeklies to muscle and bone. Down that deep came a discovery: gangs are merely a symptom of a profoundly disturbing youth problem that's getting worse. [continues 1235 words]
African regulatory authorities such as the South African Medicines Control Council should consider applications to approve medicinal cannabis for the treatment of chronic pain. This is especially needed in the case of patients who are not responding well to conventional medication and where the use of medicinal cannabis may have a positive effect on its own or as an adjunct to existing medications. But regulatory bodies must be guided by good evidence rather than by anecdotal reports or pressure from recreational users promoting a legalisation agenda. [continues 634 words]
As tourists stroll languidly through the narrow streets of Stone Town, the romantic city hums with life. Vendors sell oriental spices and colourful fabrics, while children play soccer between crumbling walls and men hurry in long gowns towards the mosque. But when darkness descends over the historic town, Zanzibar's capital takes on a different life. Formerly bustling alleys are transformed into dim, shady passages where drug addicts hover to get their longed-for heroin fix. The town's dark secret: the island is a heroin stronghold. [continues 883 words]
Chijioke Stephen Obioha (29), came to Singapore in November 2005 to try out for the football club Sporting Afrique, the paper said. He did not make the cut and instead made a living selling electronics. Obioha was found guilty on Tuesday of trafficking 2,6kg of cannabis. Singapore's drug laws are among the world's harshest. Anyone caught carrying more than 15g of heroin, 30g of cocaine, 500g of cannabis or 250g of methamphetamines faces a mandatory death sentence, carried out by hanging. Penalties for consumption are also strict, including up to 10 years in jail, a $13 740 fine, or both. [end]
Rabat, Morocco - Morocco, which has slashed cannabis cultivation by nearly half over the past four years, hopes to eradicate the main remaining area of cultivation in the northern Rif mountains by opening up the region and introducing substitute crops. The eradication programme encourages farmers to switch to other crops, especially on fertile land where the growing of cannabis is a recent development, said Khalid Zerouali, a senior official at the Interior Ministry. "In the ... [Rif mountain chain] we are centring our efforts on non-agricultural infrastructure and activities such as rural tourism," he said. "Opening these areas up plays an important role in reducing cannabis." [continues 362 words]
South Africans are changing their hard-drug habits, but the fallout from substance abuse remains the same: the destruction of lives, families and communities. Heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine abuse has risen substantially in the past few years, while the use of once-popular drugs such as Mandrax has waned, according to a recent report by South Africa's Medical Research Council (MRC). The findings have raised concern about the spread of HIV/Aids through practices such as needle sharing among drug users, and incidents of serious crime by users looking to bankroll their addiction. [continues 1161 words]
Younger children are experimenting with drugs more than ever in the history of South Africa, and it appears to be widely spread over the racial, cultural and economic sections of society. This is according to Superintendant Lobo das Neves, who presented a paper on the subject to teachers and parents at a seminar in Johannesburg earlier this month. "Children as young as 10 and 11 become addicted to heroin and 'tik'. No statistics are available as most schools and parents deal with their drugging kids outside the legal system. This is illegal. Research at various rehabilitation centres will show the decline in ages of their patients," says Das Neves, who worked in the South African Police Narcotics Bureau for 14 years, and has been responsible for some of the biggest cocaine busts in the country. [continues 968 words]
In contrast to the rest of Southern Africa, intravenous drug users have become the group most vulnerable to the transmission of HIV in Mauritius. This has led the Mauritian government to introduce a syringe- and needle-exchange programme in a bid to stem HIV infection among Mauritian drug users. Sexual transmission among heterosexuals is the most common way of HIV infection in Southern Africa, the region that has become the centre of the international HIV/Aids pandemic in recent years. Mauritius is unusual in the region as the HIV prevalence rate among its population of 1,2-million people is less than 0,5%. Since 1987, 162 Mauritians have died from Aids-related illnesses. Currently, at least 2A 345 Mauritians are living with HIV/Aids, according to official figures, but some social workers estimate the number to be about 10A 000. [continues 913 words]
An unprecedented wave of attacks by a notorious drug gang in South America's largest city, Sao Paulo, entered into its fourth day on Monday, with reports of at least 20 more killings that raised the death toll to more than 70. Masked gang members, apparently enraged at the prison transfer of leaders, hurled grenades at police stations and sprayed them with automatic weapons over the weekend, then turned their rage on the city's buses on Sunday night and on Monday, torching dozens and stranding thousands of commuters. [continues 733 words]
The smugglers trail crosses salt-encrusted plains, scrabbly farmland and hundreds of blossoming poppy fields. Suddenly a fortress-like structure looms. The high-walled mansion belongs to Haji Adam, an opium smuggler, locals say. Tales of his wealth are legion. "When he became sick he was flown straight to Germany," said a man in the next village, Garmser, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Even helicopters have landed at his house," said another. Yet, like every Afghan drug lord, Haji Adam has little to fear from the law. Since the Western-led war on drugs started four years ago, only two major smugglers have been arrested -- Haji Baz Muhammad, who was extradited to the United States last October, and Bashir Noorzai, who was arrested in New York six months earlier. But the remainder are apparently untouchable. [continues 681 words]
Pretoria, South Africa The Scorpions have been given permission to confiscate a farm in Mpumalanga where the drug tik-tik, or ice, was manufactured, the National Prosecution Authority said on Friday. Spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said the Pretoria High Court gave the order on Thursday. The farm had already been placed under curatorship in terms of an order of the Pretoria High Court in December last year, he said. A raid on the farm, outside Machadodorp, in 2004 netted enough ingredients to produce tik-tik worth an estimated R11,3-million on the street and 270g of the finished product with an estimated street value of R67 500. [continues 111 words]
One of the world's leading cannabis legalisation campaigners, a magazine publisher known as the "Prince of Pot", faces an extradition hearing on Friday in Vancouver as United States drugs agencies seek to put him on trial in the US. His supporters claim the move is a first step by US authorities to prosecute foreigners who challenge the US laws on cannabis. Marc Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture, faces charges of trafficking in marijuana seeds and money laundering. His supporters have been demonstrating outside Canadian embassies in more than 30 countries during the past week to urge Canada's authorities not to yield to pressure from the US and hand him over, arguing he could face a lifetime in prison if they did so. [continues 353 words]
Scientists have unveiled an unlikely weapon in the battle against the bulge: cannabis. More specifically, one of its key ingredients, which has been found to suppress appetite. Anyone who has ever inhaled will know the feeling: an inescapable desire to eat everything in sight, a state called the munchies. It stems from the action of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the active ingredients in cannabis, on specific appetite-control receptors in the brain. The chemical also causes the body to lay down more fat. [continues 357 words]
A smartly-dressed young mother, the head of the healthy children's committee, stands before the parent-teacher association to demand that fizzy drinks be removed from the school vending machines. Moments later she is negotiating a deal to buy a large quantity of marijuana to sell to teenagers and their parents. Welcome to Weeds, the latest sitcom to delve into the dark side of American suburbia. But where Desperate Housewives deals with the fantasy of life and death in a gated community, Weeds, set in the fictional Californian town of Agrestic, sticks closer to the real world -- and is likely to make conservative America seethe. [continues 439 words]
Victor Greene* has stopped replacing the rear brake light bulbs of his ageing car as youngsters from his working-class suburb in southern Cape Town kept on stealing them to smoke tik, the latest drug being consumed by the city's youth. "If they can get it [the light bulb] for free, they can save some rands for tik," he shrugs. It costs between R20 and R40 for a hit of tik (methamphetamine) packaged in a drinking straw. The drug is emptied into a light bulb, from which the metal thread is removed, heated with a lighter and smoked through the straw. The "tick-tick" sound the drug makes as it is smoked, gave it its name. [continues 696 words]
The spiralling use of the drug "tik" in South Africa, especially among the youth, came under the spotlight in Parliament on Tuesday, with Minister of Correctional Services Ngconde Balfour vowing to "break the back" of those peddling the deadly substance. "The pushers and dealers are in our communities, wreaking havoc," he said, opening debate on his department's Budget vote in the National Council of Provinces. Thousands of youths and school-going children, especially in the Western Cape, are caught up in using the habit-forming drug. [continues 408 words]
Snow drifted across the sawtooth peaks of Tora Bora, the mountain redoubt where three years ago Osama bin Laden wriggled through an American dragnet as soldiers reached his secret cave complex. Today, the al-Qaeda leader is on the run and his Taliban allies have scattered. But further down the wooded slopes a potent new threat to Afghanistan's future is quietly pushing to the surface. Tens of thousands of tiny green poppies, sown in the winter soil last month, are growing fast. The innocent-looking plants are the raw material for a drugs boom that experts say could turn Afghanistan into a lawless narco-state. [continues 936 words]
Italy - Antonio de Luise saw them coming. Police say the 20-year-old was a vedetta, or drug pusher's lookout, someone on the lowest rung of the ladder of organised crime in Naples. In panic, he turned into the nearest shop, a delicatessen hung with hams and salamis. But the two men followed him in and shot him several times in front of staff and customers. One of the bullets lodged in De Luise's skull. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital as a police helicopter swept low overhead searching for the killers. Witnesses said they escaped on a motorbike. [continues 976 words]
All Southern African countries need to outlaw money laundering because it is costing their economies several billion dollars a year, says a specialist researcher. Charles Goredema of the Institute for Security Studies said Angola, Malawi and Lesotho are some of the countries in the region that still do not have in place legislation criminalising money laundering, which is hampering law enforcement in the region. Stolen vehicles from South Africa, Botswana and Namibia are being smuggled to Angola, where they are exchanged for diamonds, or paid for with cash realised from the sale of illegal diamonds or hard currency, according to a book co-authored by Goredema, Profiling Money Laundering in Eastern and Southern Africa. [continues 322 words]
