According to the White House, this country is scoring big wins in the war on drugs, especially against the cocaine cartels. Officials celebrate that cocaine seizures are up — leading to higher prices on American streets. Cocaine use by teenagers is down, and, officials say, workplace tests suggest adult use is falling.

John Walters, the White House drug czar, declared earlier this year that “courageous and effective” counternarcotics efforts in Colombia and Mexico “are disrupting the production and flow of cocaine.”

This enthusiasm rests on a very selective reading of the data. Another look suggests that despite the billions of dollars the United States has spent battling the cartels, it has hardly made a dent in the cocaine trade.

While seizures are up, so are shipments. According to United States government figures, 1,421 metric tons of cocaine were shipped through Latin America to the United States and Europe last year — 39 percent more than in 2006. And despite massive efforts at eradication, the United Nations estimates that the area devoted to growing coca leaf in the Andes expanded 16 percent last year. The administration disputes that number.

The drug cartels are not running for cover.

Mexico and parts of Central America are being swept up in drug-related violence. Latin Americans are becoming heavy consumers of cocaine, and traffickers are opening new routes to Europe through fragile West African countries. Some experts argue that the rising price of cocaine on American streets is mostly the result of a strong euro and fast-growing demand in Europe.

Workplace drug tests notwithstanding, cocaine use in the United States is not falling. About 2.5 percent of Americans used cocaine at least once in 2006, the same percentage as in 2002, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

While cocaine use has fallen among younger teenagers, 12th graders are using more: 5.2 percent used cocaine last year — up from 4.8 percent in 2001 and 3.1 percent at the low point in 1992, says a Monitoring the Future survey done by the University of Michigan.

All this suggests serious problems with a strategy that focuses overwhelmingly on disrupting the supply of drugs while doing far too little to curb domestic demand.

Washington spent $1.4 billion on drug-related foreign assistance last year — mostly to equip Colombia’s security forces and spray coca crops in the Andes. It spent another $7 billion on drug-related law enforcement and interdiction efforts at home and abroad. It spent less than $5 billion on education, prevention and treatment programs at home to curtail substance abuse.

The counternarcotics effort has produced some successes. Marijuana use in the United States has declined since 2002, the earliest year for which the government has comparable data. Teenage use of other drugs, like methamphetamine, has fallen sharply. With American aid, Colombia’s armed forces have severely weakened the FARC guerrillas, a major player in the drug trade.

The next administration should continue to help Latin American governments take on the traffickers. But it must learn from the current strategy’s shortcomings.

Eradication efforts are most likely to have more success if more money is spent on programs to wean coca growers from the business and improve the lives of their families and communities. Mexico, in particular, is in deep trouble, and the next American president should build on the Bush administration’s plans to provide counternarcotics aid. There needs to be a different mix: less money for equipment for security forces and more for economic development and programs to reform and strengthen Mexico’s judicial system.

Above all, the next administration must put much more effort into curbing demand — spending more on treating drug addicts and less on putting them in jail. Drug courts, which sentence users to treatment, still deal only with a small minority of drug cases and should be vastly expanded. Drug-treatment programs for imprisoned drug abusers, especially juvenile offenders, must also be expanded.

Over all, drug abuse must be seen more as a public health concern and not primarily a law enforcement problem. Until demand is curbed at home, there is no chance of winning the war on drugs.

HERE

While on tour in Denmark and Holland, John Mayer made a pot-stop in Amsterdam at the Freedom Coffeeshop. Yes, that's him in the hoodie. We don't know what he purchased or smoked, but we do know his next stops were shows in Birmingham, Manchester, Brixton and London for Saturday's huge Hard Rock Calling concert in Hyde Park with Eric Claption, Sheryl Crow, Robert Randolph and Jason Mraz..

In 2006, Mayer puffed from a vaporizer during a Rolling Stone interview.

for more pics here

]Barack Obama made history by becoming the first major party's presidential nominee with an identifying trait that once would have automatically disqualified him for the job.

No, I'm not talking about his African American heritage-- I'm taking about his past illegal drug use. Not just of who-cares marijuana, but of coca*ne, a drug that carries a felony penalty in many states. It's both encouraging and appalling that he's getting a pass for doing something that has gotten thousands of other Americans thrown in jail.

As Obama blithely acknowledges in his autobiography, he used drugs for a while, didn't like them, quit and moved on. No harm done-- not to himself, anyone around him nor, obviously, his career prospects. Same goes for newly installed New York Governor David Paterson, who has also admitted to smoking weed and sniffing bl*w.

Neither case seems like a big deal in a country where, according to the federal government's own figures, more than 35 million Americans have tried coca*ne at least once, and nearly 98 million have sampled marijuana or hashish. Once, confessing to toking was enough to scuttle Douglas Ginsberg's nomination for a Reagan-era US Supreme Court seat. Things had clearly loosened up by the time Bill Clinton's hilarious claim that he "didn't inhale" was considered an adequate fig leaf. By George W. Bush's candidacy, we were ready to excuse his past pot use; the only issue was whether he had done coca*ne. Now, we give such indulgences a wink and a shrug.

Except, that is, for that minority of drug users who get caught. Thanks to harsh mandatory minimum sentencing and "Three Strikes" type laws, the number of Americans locked up for narcotics offenses has exploded in the last 20 years. There are now an estimated 500,000 people locked up for drug crimes-- more than the total of all prisoners in 1980.

Most of them aren't exactly kingpins, either. A federal survey found that more than half of all state prisoners doing time for drug offenses had no record of violence or high-level drug involvement; 43 percent were convicted of simple possession. Over 40,000 people nationwide are locked up on marijuana charges.

And as much as Obama's ascendancy shows how far we've come as a nation toward genuine racial equality, the way we're waging the War on Drugs shows how far we still have to go. The recent roundup of San Diego State students made headlines not because it's shocking that college kids take drugs, but because it was so exceptional for middle-class white kids to be arrested for doing so.

Study after study has shown that blacks are more likely than whites to be arrested, convicted, and given longer sentences for drug offenses. A report released in April by the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project found that since 1980, the rate of drug arrests in the nation's largest cities increased by 225 percent for African Americans, while that for whites grew by only 70 percent. A Human Rights Watch report the same month found that African Americans are more than ten times as likely to be sent to prison on drug charges than whites. All this, even though federal government surveys show that whites use drugs at the same rate blacks do.

Of course, many drug offenders have committed other crimes. Many are dealers. Many deserve to be locked up. But many, many others are no different than the young Barack Obama, or millions of other Americans like him-- curious kids experimenting with intoxicants for kicks. They just had the bad luck to get arrested and charged.

If an undercover cop had happened to be among Obama's party buddies back in his wild days, it's a safe bet he wouldn't be where he is now. Who knows what other potential activists, teachers, and leaders we have derailed by throwing so many people in jail? Obama's example proves that by locking up so many petty drug users, we all lose.

here

http://www.abovetheinfluence.com/stoners/#

By Jenny Loweth »


An illegal Vietnamese immigrant who was paid to look after and harvest the crop at a Bradford cannabis factory has been jailed for 21 months.

Trong Vu, 30, was arrested by officers in the Bradford District Drugs Team when they raided a five-bedroom house in Park View Road, Heaton, and found more than 1,000 skunk cannabis plants being grown.



Prosecutor Michael Collins told Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC that the plants could have produced cannabis valued at almost £185,000 and that Vu had admitted being paid £1,200 to work at the house.

Mr Collins told Bradford Crown Court today that Vu had found himself homeless after being released from an immigration detention centre.

After meeting a woman in London he was brought to Bradford and given instructions about how to farm the cannabis plants.

Mr Collins said police became suspicious about activities at the house and in January they executed a search warrant at the rented property.

“A search of the property confirmed the officers’ original suspicions,” he told the court.

“This was in fact a cannabis factory. They found 1,078 skunk cannabis plants.”

Vu admitted a charge of being concerned in the production of cannabis earlier this year and yesterday his barrister Nikki Peers said he was anxious to get back to Vietnam because of his wife’s ill health.

She explained that her client had been trying to save up £2,000 to pay for his flight home.

“He felt trapped once he realised what he had got himself into,” said Miss Peers.

“In the past he had seen violence committed against others...and he was afraid that similar things would happen to him if he extricated himself.”

Judge Durham Hall confirmed that Vu would face deportation following the completion of his prison sentence.

“I am satisfied that you were recruited off the street to mind the cannabis factory which lies behind the charge which you have pleaded guilty to,” the judge told Vu.

source