BETH HALE

Briton заключенный в тюрьму на 4 лет в Дубай после таможен находит, что cannabis весит чем зерна сахара под его ботинком

A отц--3 было найдено при микроскопическая пылинка cannabis вставленная к дну одного из его ботинок был присужен до 4 лет в тюрьме Дубай.

Кейт коричневеет, офицер развития молодости совету, перемещало через Объединенные эмираты на его дороге back to Англия когда он был остановлен по мере того как он погулял через авиапорт Дубай GLAVNый.

Поиск должностными лицами таможен расчехлил пылинку cannabis веся справедливое 0.003g - поэтому мало он был бы незрим к нагому глазу и весить чем зерно сахара - на проступи одного из его ботинок.

Международный аэропорт Дубай будет главным hub для The Middle East и тысячи Britons проходят через его каждый год к празднику в glamorous haven пляжа и покупкы.

Но много из тех туристов и путников дела правоподобн для того чтобы быть незнающ только политики снадобиь нул-допуска в cUae.

Один человек даже был заключен в тюрьму для владения 3 маковых семенен налево сверх от крена хлеба, котор он съел на авиапорте Heathrow. Кодеин Painkiller также запрещен.

Если подозрительно путника, должностных лиц таможен смогите использовать high-tech оборудование для того чтобы расчехлить даже самый небольшой след снадобиь.

Г-н Коричнев был задержан и арестован в сентябре в прошлом году и держался в клетке с 3 другими людьми в тюрьме города ever since.

Эта неделя работник молодости, который имеет 2 маленьких ребенк и соучастника дома в Smethwick, западные Midlands, был присужен до 4 лет в тюрьме.

25 year-old Briton был найден с подобной пылинкой в одном кармане по мере того как он приехал на праздник ждет предложения с ноября.

Между тем экзекьютив TV большого брата до тех пор держится без обязанности на 5 дней после быть арестованным для обладать melatonin дополнения здоровья.

Авторитеты требуют открыть 0.01g гашиша в его багаже.

Брат Ли га-н Коричнев вчера сказанное его случай «defied верование».

“For that sort of amount common sense should prevail, from where it was found it was obviously something that had been crushed on the floor - it could have come from anywhere.”

Rastafarian Mr Brown had been returning from a short trip to Ethiopia, where one of his children lives and where he owns property.

He was travelling with his partner Imani, who was also stopped and detained for more than a week.

Normally he flew direct to and from the UK, but decided to stop off in Dubai.

“He was incensed when he called me,” said driving instructor Lee, 57. “It would be funny if the circumstances weren’t so unpleasant.

“Bugs are crawling out of his mattress when he’s sleeping. His family are frantic with worry and can’t call him.”

Last night campaign group Fair Trials International advised visitors to Dubai and Abu Dhabi to “take extreme caution”.

Chief Executive Catherine Wolthuizen said: “We have seen a steep increase in such cases over the last 18 months.

“Customs authorities are using highly sensitive new equipment to conduct extremely thorough searches on travellers and if they find any amount - no matter how minute - it will be enough to attract a mandatory four-year prison sentence.”

Mrs Wolthuizen added: “We even have reports of the imprisonment of a Swiss man for ‘possession’ of three poppy seeds on his clothing after he ate a bread roll at Heathrow.

Held: A campaign is underway to secure the release of Cat Le-Huy from a Dubai jail

“What many travellers may not realise is that they can be deemed to be in possession of such banned substances if they can be detected in their urine or bloodstream, or even in tiny, trace amounts on their person.”

Only two months after Mr Brown was stopped economics graduate Robert Dalton was detained in almost identical circumstances.

Mr Dalton, from Gravesend, on Kent was with two friends when he was stopped and asked to empty his pockets.

Officials found 0.03g of cannabis in a small amount of fluff. He is currently on trial and if convicted, is likely receive a four-year prison sentence.

Last night his brother Peter, 26, told how it took 24 hours to find out why he had been stopped.

“As we understand, the amount of cannabis was barely visible to the human eye and was at the bottom of the pocket of an old pair of jeans.

“He’s not a drug user, but he goes clubbing and the speck was so small.”

Last week Cat Le-Huy, a London-based German national, was arrested on arrival at the airport.

Mr Le-Huy, 31, head of technology with Big Brother production company Endemol, was arrested on suspicion of possessing illegal drugs after customs officers found melatonin, a health supplement used for jet lag available over the counter both in Dubai and in the US.

Authorities also claim they discovered fragments in one of his bags which they believe to be hashish. Fair Trials International said the amount was 0.01g.

After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure

 Ben Wallace-Wells

1. AFTER PABLO On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ­ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio’s rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar’s. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre, enchanting ­detritus, the raw stuff of what would ­become his own myth: the photos of ­himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA’s assistant administrator for operations, “filled with DEA reports” - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency’s repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

“He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things,” Coleman tells me. “It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he’d figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing.”

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. “We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they’d just plead guilty,” he says. “What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they’d send copies back to Medellín, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him.”

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar’s office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they’d just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellín believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. “We had an endgame,” Coleman says. “We were literally making the greatest plans.”

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar’s portrait. “We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go,” recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control ­office. “There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it’s not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs.”

Man by man, sixteen red X’s eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. José Santacruz Londoño, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn’t seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piñata you could reach out and smack. Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. “We were moving,” he says, “from success to success.”

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.

2. THE MAKING OF A TRAGEDY

For Cañas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world’s entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics “public enemy number one in the United States,” he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan’s plaintive urging to “just say no,” and her husband’s decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine’s production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack’s corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. “Two words sum up my entire approach,” Bennett declared, “consequences and confrontation.” Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was “absolutely nothing” that examined “how each program was or wasn’t working,” says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn’t. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn’t been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn’t. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

“What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,” says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. “The other guys were learning just as we were learning,” Coleman says. “We had this hubris.”

3. BRAINIACS AND COLD WARRIORS

“At the beginning of the Clinton administration,” Cañas tells me, “the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now.” It was, he means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract, generational struggles that the country launched itself into after finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that abstractions could be beaten. “It was really a pivot point,” recalls Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four different presidents. “We started to look carefully at our drug policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense.” The man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him to be the nation’s drug czar in 1993. He had started out working narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big, shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple insight: Cops can’t do much without the trust of people in their communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and making allies.

“When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers,” Brown tells me. “When you’re in that position, you see very quickly that you can’t arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, ‘What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.’ ”

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy - known as community policing - had made Brown a national phenomenon. The Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things when they retook power. “There were basic assumptions that Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been challenged,” says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became Brown’s legislative liaison. “The way Lee Brown looked at it, the drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of time, and there wasn’t enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted to take a different tactic.”

Brown’s staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon. Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting for other government projects that might need its brains. It found the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group’s signature project: dividing up the federal government’s annual drug budget of $13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and what didn’t when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

“If you had asked me at the outset,” Everingham says, “my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America” - that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. “It’s not a magic bullet,” says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, “but it works.” The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham’s team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. “What we began to realize,” says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, “was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it’s still a really great deal.”

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. “It’s still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship,” says Reuter. “Yet as well as it’s stood up, it’s never really been tried.”

To Brown, RAND’s conclusions seemed exactly right. “I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, ‘This is crazy,’ ” he recalls. ” ‘This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we’re just doing nothing.’ ”

The federal budget that Brown’s office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America’s drug war required a brilliant sales job. “And Lee Brown,” says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, “was not an effective salesman.” With a kind of loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355 million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. “There were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus,” says Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who ­opposed the reform bill and serves as co-chair of the Senate’s drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown’s tenure as drug czar still lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made sense. “Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it,” says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. “But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were largely ignored by the Clinton administration.” When Brown tried to repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of drugs in the schools ? a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert. Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on drug reform and get tough on crime. “The feeling was that the drug czar’s office was one of the weak areas when it came to the administration’s efforts to confront crime,” recalls Leon Panetta, then Clinton’s chief of staff.

4. THE YOUNG GUNS

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken office, Cañas - who headed drug policy at the National Security Council - had been summoned to brief the new president’s choice for national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation’s narcotics policy in Latin America. “I figured, what the hell, I’m going back to DEA anyway, I’ll tell him what I really think,” Cañas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United States through the Caribbean by a bunch of “swashbuckling entrepreneurs” with small planes - “guys who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert.” In 1989, in the nationwide panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and said, “Cheney thought he was running for president.”) The U.S. military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Cañas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Cañas, pleased. “That’s what we think as well,” Lake said. “How would you like to stay on and help make that happen?”

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the coca leaf was being grown and processed. “Our idea was, Stop messing around in the transit countries and go to the source,” Cañas tells me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop’s growers and processors. The cops were not polite - Human Rights Watch condemned the murders of?Bolivian farmers, blaming “the heavy hand of U.S. drug enforcement” - but they were ­effective, and by 1996, coca production in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight - they had girded for the fallout from the drug lord’s death. What they had not expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. “What ended up happening - and maybe we should have predicted this would happen - was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups,” says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. “You suddenly had all these new guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic.”

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with the Medellín cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the disruption caused by the new front in America’s drug war presented a business opportunity. But with the DEA’s shift from the Caribbean into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a production problem. So some of the “microcartels,” as they became known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem: Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500. In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the border and the price goes up to $17,500. “What the Mexican groups started saying was, ‘Why are we working for these guys? Why don’t we just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits ourselves?’ ” says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico country attache.

The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel, DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the Mexican groups and then be done with it. “This wasn’t just happenstance,” says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for special operations. “This was the Colombians saying they were willing to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of the supply chain changed.”

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York. Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers - many of them loaded with drugs - suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. “A thousand trucks coming across in a four-hour ­period,” says Steve Robertson, a DEA special agent assigned to southern ­Texas at the time. “There’s no way we’re going to catch everything.”

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style, and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In the border town of Ciudad Juárez, the cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. “He brought in middle-class people for the first time - lawyers, accountants - and he developed a transportation division, an acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a modern corporation,” says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. “Think of it like a business, which is how these guys thought of it,” says Guy Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. “Why pay for the widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?” Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren’t right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, “Here, try some of this stuff - it’s a similar effect.”

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jesús Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders. “Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose business is wrapped up in a single drug,” says Tony Ayala, the senior DEA agent in Mexico at the time. “They became trafficking organizations - and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most profit from.”

5. THE LOBBYISTS & THE MAD PROFESSOR

It is only in retrospect that these moments - the barrels of ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked its way into the cocaine supply chain - take on a looming character, the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs - marijuana, LSD - that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border - even then, we wouldn’t have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA’s top-ranking administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic. Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying every country in the world that produced the drug’s active ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was present the moment when the United States lost the war on methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California - a decade before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic drug in America. “The thing is, methamphetamine should never have gotten to that point,” Haislip says. And it never would have, he believes, if it hadn’t been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators, Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress should pass a law to regulate the drug’s precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world. “We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before,” Haislip tells me. “You could see we were on the verge of something if we didn’t get a handle on it.”

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn’t pay them much attention. “I wasn’t concerned with them,” he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the Commerce Department cut him off. “Look, you’re way ahead of us,” the official said. “We don’t have anything to suggest or add.” Haislip left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn’t know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. “Quite frankly,” Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, “we appealed to a higher authority.” The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip’s dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry’s profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas: The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had traditionally distributed the drug. “We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine,” says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, “but it turned out they realized they’d make more money by working together.” Second, responding to a dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started, the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering rehab facilities doubled, and the drug’s purity on the street rose by twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, “was always coming from the same lobbying group.” In 1993, when he persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form, the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine. Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. “Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one,” says Heald. “But we’re not dealing with normal people - we’re dealing with meth freaks. They’ll stay up all night picking their toes.”

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels, which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. “Very complicated numerical modeling,” says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, “cost us eight or nine years.”

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source - those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs - remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight the cocaine problem, and failed - racing from source to source, trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and then racing to the next one. “We used to call it the Pillsbury Doughboy - stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the Doughboy’s stomach just pops out somewhere else,” says Rand Beers. “The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there’s a good chance that in solving one problem, you’ll screw something else up.”

6. THE GENERAL & THE ADMAN

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to look tougher. “A lot of people didn’t think Brown was a strong leader,” Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking about who would be the opposite of Brown. “We wanted to get someone who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way symbolically,” Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic, bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed many in the Pentagon’s establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean, stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation that the general would be his next drug czar. “To succeed, he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before,” Clinton said. “He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this team.” McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It was one of the president’s biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey’s office, “the General” was everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been. “It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably be able to get things done,” says Bergman, Brown’s former liaison. “One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was - he wasn’t a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of sentencing laws on African-American men.” McCaffrey imported his own staff from the Southern Command - mostly men, all military. They lent the White House’s drug operation - previously a slow place - the kinetic energy of a forward operating base. “We went to a twenty-four-hour clock, so we’d schedule meetings for 1500,” one longtime staffer recalls. “His people sat down with senior staff and told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs.”

The General’s genius was for publicity. “He was great at getting visibility,” Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out of date - and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in popularity. “We are in an optimistic situation,” McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar’s office develop a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee that drug use would continue to decline. “The data suggested very strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives, but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had much worse outcomes,” says McCaffrey’s deputy Don Vereen. So the General decided to focus the government’s attention on keeping kids from trying pot.

The “gateway theory,” as it became known, had a natural appeal. Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana, and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey’s office commissioned the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded that marijuana “does not appear to be a gateway drug.” RAND, after examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is “not the best explanation” of the link between marijuana use and hard drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the government’s resources to going after kids. “We have already clearly committed ourselves,” he declared, “to a number-one focus on youth.”

“That decision,” Bergman says, “was where you could see McCaffrey begin to lose credibility.”

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the Partnership for a Drug-Free America - the advertising organization best known for the slogan “This is your brain on drugs.” “Burke personally was very hard to resist,” one of his former colleagues tells me. “I’ve seen him sell many conservative members of Congress and also liberals like Mario Cuomo.”

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of teenagers who used drugs - especially marijuana - declined during that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was climbing sharply - to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the other. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure,” one staffer at the Partnership tells me, “that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey.”

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of McCaffrey’s conviction and charisma, he didn’t have much in the way of facts. “That was all we had - no data, just this one chart - and we had to go and sell Congress,” Carnevale recalls. But Congress proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. “At some point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and some things are wrong,” says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of the measure. “And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong.” To the Partnership’s delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert, who had become the GOP’s de facto leader on drug policy. The former wrestling coach struck few as charismatic - his joyless and drudging style, his form like settled gelatin - but his experiences in high schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, “had become extremely poignant.” Hastert wasn’t quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions. “We felt if you didn’t get at the nub of the problem, which was prevention and treatment, you weren’t going to do any good,” says John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem of “apathy” through “parent training” and “messages from the pulpit.”

But with McCaffrey’s emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere, in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind medical marijuana as a “Cheech and Chong show.” In 1997, voters in Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the state. “I’ll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after the Oregon initiative was announced,” Bergman says. “McCaffrey was furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn’t believe they’d gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press.” As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were “all being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros,” the billionaire investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey’s philosophy, the theatrics seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America’s youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent now than it was a generation ago. “It didn’t track with the conclusions our researchers came to,” says Bergman. “It felt like he was trying to manipulate the data.”

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General’s allies in Congress were appalled. “I can’t tell you how many times I went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings,” Bergman recalls. “Members said to him, ‘What in the world are you doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.’ McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing.”

Continued…

Hemp helps with green movement

Lucas Coppes

As environmental consciousness increases, a plant with great potential to accommodate our generation’s awareness has re-emerged, but its negative associations leave some obstacles to overcome.

Hemp, which is too often associated with marijuana, does come from the same family of plants, but yields a fraction of the active ingredient, THC.

Hemp has the uncanny ability to help in solving many of the world’s major dilemmas from nutrition problems to the greenhouse effect.

In 1938, Popular Mechanics named hemp the first “billion dollar crop” for the U.S., which it could use to produce everything from fuel, paper and oil to medicine and dynamite. According to Jack Herer in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, if we still used the same process being used in 1916 to produce hemp paper today, it could replace 40 to 70 per cent of all pulp paper.

Today, hemp will produce 4.1 times more pulp for paper over a 20-year rotation compared to trees. For example, supermarket paper bags from trees and chemical-based plastic bags would be replaced with a biodegradable, more durable paper that’s acquired from an annually renewable source: cannabis hemp.

In the U.S., 82 per cent of spending goes towards energy to maintain a home or to produce its products. Development in biomass energy has exploded in the last few years, and cellulose from things like corn and sugar cane can be converted to methanol and then to a high-octane lead-free gasoline.

Hemp prevails again, as it produces the most net biomass, and has from four to 100 times more cellulose than other products currently in use. This variation is due to inadequate research, but suggests hemp’s equivalent potential to corn and sugar. This idea is not as novel as it seems; Ford Motor Co. was operating this process in the 1930s using tree cellulose, and Henry Ford himself partially constructed a car using hemp.

Both paper and fuel show major benefits for combating the greenhouse effect, as we would keep trees alive and allow them to grow and keep 10 times more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Hemp is an annually renewable resource, such that the carbon dioxide it emits when used as gasoline is recycled to keep the plant alive during its next generation. In the ground it expels oxygen and recycles the carbon for our energy uses.

The seed of the hemp plant also offers critical support to humanity, as it is one of the most complete sources of nutrition. It provides all the essential amino acids that provide support for our immune system, skin, hair and thought processes. It can also be made into butter, much like peanut butter. As Udo Erasmus, a PhD nutritionist and lecturer, said, “Hemp butter puts our peanut butter to shame for nutritional value.”

Since hemp can grow in virtually any climate including northern and dessert climates, it offers nutritional support and protein for developing countries.

These are only a few of the countless benefits of hemp. It’s about time we opened our minds and implemented some thoughtful solutions to secure humanity’s future on mother earth.

It’s time for my annual rant on the stupidity of marijuana eradication and although it goes on nationally, in no place is it better illustrated than California where they’ve just completed their yearly attack on harmless plants.

[T]he annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting had uprooted some 3 million plants, wiping out an estimated $11.6 billion worth of weed. That is more than twice the value of the state’s largest legal agricultural commodity, milk and cream, which was worth $5.2 billion in 2005, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture. It is nearly four times the value of the state’s largest legal cash crop, grapes, which was worth $3.2 billion.

This is only a fraction of the state’s outdoor crop. Using past state and federal government figures, they failed to eradicate some 14 million plants. And that’s just the outdoor crop. It doesn’t include a prodigious indoor cultivation industry which is increasing as outdoor growers are moving into suburban homes to avoid detection.

Marijuana Policy Project sums up the futility of it all.

“The Department of Justice has confirmed everything we’ve been saying about CAMP all year,” said Bruce Mirken, San Francisco-based director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “If you want criminal gangs moving in next door to grow marijuana, if you want to make those criminals unbelievably rich, and if you want to guarantee that marijuana becomes more potent, current policies are working perfectly. If you think that’s crazy, then it’s time for California to regulate marijuana production just like we regulate wine.”

In 5,000 years no one has died as a direct result of ingesting cannabis. In contrast, 7,600 people died in a single year from aspirin overdose and hundreds of thousands have died of alcohol abuse and tobacco use. Yet we spend tens of billions of tax dollars every year making war on a harmless weed when we could be reaping possibly hundreds of billions in tax revenues from a regulated legal industry. How dumb is that?

http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/11/moronic-marijuana-policies.html

Marijuana compound shows promise in fighting breast cancer

Machines Like Us

A compound found in cannabis may prove to be effective at helping stop the spread of breast cancer cells throughout the body. That’s the finding of a new study published in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

The study, by scientists at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, is raising hope that CBD, a compound found in Cannabis sativa, could be the first non-toxic agent to show promise in treating metastatic forms of breast cancer.

“Right now we have a limited range of options in treating aggressive forms of cancer,” says Sean D. McAllister, Ph.D., a cancer researcher at CPMCRI and the lead author of the study. “Those treatments, such as chemotherapy, can be effective but they can also be extremely toxic and difficult for patients. This compound offers the hope of a non-toxic therapy that could achieve the same results without any of the painful side effects.”

The researchers used CBD to inhibit the activity of a gene called Id-1, which is believed to be responsible for the aggressive spread of cancer cells throughout the body, away from the original tumor site.

“We know that Id-1 is a key regulator of the spread of breast cancer,” says Pierre-Yves Desprez, Ph.D., a cancer researcher at CPMCRI and the senior author of the study. “We also know that Id-1 has also been found at higher levels in other forms of cancer. So what is exciting about this study is that if CBD can inhibit Id-1 in breast cancer cells, then it may also prove effective at stopping the spread of cancer cells in other forms of the disease, such as colon and brain or prostate cancer.”

Unlike cannabis or THC, an ingredient also isolated from marijuana that is used in some medical treatments, CBD does not have any psychoactive properties, so using it would not violate any state or federal laws. However, the researchers point out that this is not a recommendation for people with breast cancer to smoke marijuana. They say it is highly unlikely that effective concentrations of CBD could be reached by smoking cannabis.

The study was primarily funded by the California Breast Cancer Research Program.

Tell the truth about cannabis and maybe we’ll get somewhere

Is there any wonder at all that everything which surrounds cannabis information-wise, is mixed up and confused?

To illustrate this lets take a look at some news published this week through the worlds press.

Cannabis far more toxic to the adolescent brain
Just yesterday, a report was published by ‘The Independent’ newspaper in Ireland, as anti-cannabis an organisation as you’ll ever find, in which the publication loudly proclaimed that cannabis is far more toxic to the adolescent brain, than it is to a flaky old 41 year old brain such as mine.

This story is nothing new in fairness and the majority of the anti-cannabis parade have been banging this particular drum for the majority of 2007. But does the story hold any water?

Lets face it if our young people are to make a balanced judgement on the risks involved with using cannabis, its likely that the reports they read in newspapers are going to play a big part in that decision making process. Its only fair then, that we expect these newspapers to tell the truth, and without the added embelishments necessary to sell more newspapers.

Another New Study
“Studies into cannabis, running in tandem, point to a difference in the way the brain operates for cannabis users and non-cannabis users.”

No sh*t sherlock?

Its called getting stoned and I’m sure when an alcohol abuser gets drunk his or her brain works a little differently to when they are sober. But the research also suggests that the drug is more toxic to youngsters. A point I would like to take issue with.

I mean..toxic? Is that the right word to use in this instance?

Cannabis has been in the service of mankind for over 10,000 years in one guise or another, and whilst I have heard many descriptives used when communicating on the topic, toxic isn’t one that would automatically spring to mind.

To quote this new report, “Dr Hugh Garavan, who is leading one of the studies, is examining the prefrontal cortex which is used for decision making, and the hippocampus which is used for memory”.

I have to say at this stage my own decision making pre-frontal cortex is popping and jumping as it comes up with the decision never to buy a newspaper which has The Independent written on the front page but I digress..

“We are finding differences with cannabis users. The hippocampus is being driven to work harder, perhaps to overcompensate for the drug.”

Memory loss, psychosis and paranoia are some of the symptoms that might be linked to these skewed brain pictures.

Dr Garavan added that the hippocampus is one of the last regions to develop properly.

“Adolescents are more likely to experiment but their brains may not yet be mature.”

So let me get this right Dr Garavan. The Hippocampus in adolescents is one of the last regions in the brain to develop, and therefore could be damaged permanently?

Ok I think I’m getting the gist.

..or so I thought
The following day, November 6th, another news report, sourced in Switzerland reads, “Teenagers Who Smoke Marijuana But Not Tobacco Are Different From Other Teen Groups”.

Get this. A Swiss study suggests that teens who use only cannabis appear to function better than those who also use tobacco, and are more socially driven and have no more psychosocial problems than those who abstain from both substances.

“The gateway theory hypothesizes that the use of legal drugs (tobacco and alcohol) is the previous step to cannabis consumption,” the authors write. “However, recent research also indicates that cannabis use may precede or be simultaneous to tobacco use and that, in fact, its use may reinforce cigarette smoking or lead to nicotine addiction independently of smoking status.”

So lets just get this straight. This new report tells us that cannabis use could lead to nicotine addiction in otherwise socially well rounded young people?

From a personal point of view I can see how this works.

Not so fast, NicoTine
I’m sure you would agree that the steps which have been taken to shield our kids from tobacco products is only now starting to pay dividends.

It wasn’t all that long ago that no matter which TV channel you decided to watch, you were force fed pictures of your favourite rock stars, race drivers, actors etc, influential people in the eyes of the Great British youth, all of whom would be smoking as they were filmed doing their thing.

Coronation Street, and the old actors and actresses from days gone by, who played parts such as Bet Lynch, Stan and Hilda Ogden, Mike Baldwin, Deidre Barlow etc, would often be seen puffing on a cigarette as they acted out their scene.

Back when Murray Walker was the King of Formula 1, every single race car on the track, was emblazened with cigarette manufacturers logo’s. The all important sponsorship deals which no race team could operate without, and Guns & Roses rock legend Slash was never without a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he killed his latest guitar solo stone dead.

These days of course things are very different.

But would that be the case if tobacco was an outlawed, underground substance like cannabis?

No of course it wouldn’t because black market tobacco use would be as rife as cannabis use is today.

If we wish to educate our young people to the real risks involved with cannabis use, as well as teaching an attitude of tolerance, knowing your limits etc, we need to guarantee the information they are exposed to is truthful and factual.

Young people today are more in control of the information they are exposed to than ever before.

By feeding them with mis-guided information its the fastest way to get them to slam the door right in FRANK’s face and with figures showing 50% of our 15-24 year olds using cannabis regularly, its time to face facts.

Prohibition doesn’t work. Its time for change.

Join us and help make it happen.

http://cannazine.co.uk

There are millions of regular pot smokers in America and millions more infrequent smokers. Smoking pot clearly has far fewer dangerous and hazardous effects on society than legal drugs such as alcohol. Here is High Times’s top 10 reasons to marijuana should be legal, part of its 420 Campaign legalization strategy.

10. Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana. The government has tried to use criminal penalties to prevent marijuana use for over 75 years and yet: marijuana is now used by over 25 million people annually, cannabis is currently the largest cash crop in the United States, and marijuana is grown all over the planet. Claims that marijuana prohibition is a successful policy are ludicrous and unsupported by the facts, and the idea that marijuana will soon be eliminated from America and the rest of the world is a ridiculous fantasy.

9. Arrests for marijuana possession disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics and reinforce the perception that law enforcement is biased and prejudiced against minorities. African-Americans account for approximately 13% of the population of the United States and about 13.5% of annual marijuana users, however, blacks also account for 26% of all marijuana arrests. Recent studies have demonstrated that blacks and Hispanics account for the majority of marijuana possession arrests in New York City, primarily for smoking marijuana in public view. Law enforcement has failed to demonstrate that marijuana laws can be enforced fairly without regard to race; far too often minorities are arrested for marijuana use while white/non-Hispanic Americans face a much lower risk of arrest.

8. A regulated, legal market in marijuana would reduce marijuana sales and use among teenagers, as well as reduce their exposure to other drugs in the illegal market. The illegality of marijuana makes it more valuable than if it were legal, providing opportunities for teenagers to make easy money selling it to their friends. If the excessive profits for marijuana sales were ended through legalization there would be less incentive for teens to sell it to one another. Teenage use of alcohol and tobacco remain serious public health problems even though those drugs are legal for adults, however, the availability of alcohol and tobacco is not made even more widespread by providing kids with economic incentives to sell either one to their friends and peers.

7. Legalized marijuana would reduce the flow of money from the American economy to international criminal gangs. Marijuana’s illegality makes foreign cultivation and smuggling to the United States extremely profitable, sending billions of dollars overseas in an underground economy while diverting funds from productive economic development.

6. Marijuana’s legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions. Canada and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. As US energy policy continues to embrace and promote the development of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil dependency and a way to reduce carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source - especially since use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not increase demand and prices for food, such as corn. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

5. Prohibition is based on lies and disinformation. Justification of marijuana’s illegality increasingly requires distortions and selective uses of the scientific record, causing harm to the credibility of teachers, law enforcement officials, and scientists throughout the country. The dangers of marijuana use have been exaggerated for almost a century and the modern scientific record does not support the reefer madness predictions of the past and present. Many claims of marijuana’s danger are based on old 20th century prejudices that originated in a time when science was uncertain how marijuana produced its characteristic effects. Since the cannabinoid receptor system was discovered in the late 1980s these hysterical concerns about marijuana’s dangerousness have not been confirmed with modern research. Everyone agrees that marijuana, or any other drug use such as alcohol or tobacco use, is not for children. Nonetheless, adults have demonstrated over the last several decades that marijuana can be used moderately without harmful impacts to the individual or society.

4. Marijuana is not a lethal drug and is safer than alcohol. It is established scientific fact that marijuana is not toxic to humans; marijuana overdoses are nearly impossible, and marijuana is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or tobacco. It is unfair and unjust to treat marijuana users more harshly under the law than the users of alcohol or tobacco.

3. Marijuana is too expensive for our justice system and should instead be taxed to support beneficial government programs. Law enforcement has more important responsibilities than arresting 750,000 individuals a year for marijuana possession, especially given the additional justice costs of disposing of each of these cases. Marijuana arrests make justice more expensive and less efficient in the United States, wasting jail space, clogging up court systems, and diverting time of police, attorneys, judges, and corrections officials away from violent crime, the sexual abuse of children, and terrorism. Furthermore, taxation of marijuana can provide needed and generous funding of many important criminal justice and social programs.

2. Marijuana use has positive attributes, such as its medical value and use as a recreational drug with relatively mild side effects. Many people use marijuana because they have made an informed decision that it is good for them, especially Americans suffering from a variety of serious ailments. Marijuana provides relief from pain, nausea, spasticity, and other symptoms for many individuals who have not been treated successfully with conventional medications. Many American adults prefer marijuana to the use of alcohol as a mild and moderate way to relax. Americans use marijuana because they choose to, and one of the reasons for that choice is their personal observation that the drug has a relatively low dependence liability and easy-to-manage side effects. Most marijuana users develop tolerance to many of marijuana’s side effects, and those who do not, choose to stop using the drug. Marijuana use is the result of informed consent in which individuals have decided that the benefits of use outweigh the risks, especially since, for most Americans, the greatest risk of using marijuana is the relatively low risk of arrest.

1. Marijuana users are determined to stand up to the injustice of marijuana probation and accomplish legalization, no matter how long or what it takes to succeed. Despite the threat of arrests and a variety of other punishments and sanctions marijuana users have persisted in their support for legalization for over a generation. They refuse to give up their long quest for justice because they believe in the fundamental values of American society. Prohibition has failed to silence marijuana users despite its best attempts over the last generation. The issue of marijuana’s legalization is a persistent issue that, like marijuana, will simply not go away. Marijuana will be legalized because marijuana users will continue to fight for it until they succeed.

http://www.hightimes.com/ht/news/content.php?bid=1375&aid=24

The Observer

Benefit claimants and job seekers could be forced to take lie detector tests as early as next year after an early review of a pilot scheme exposed 126 benefit cheats in just three months, saving one local authority £110,000.
Last May, the Department for Work and Pensions asked Harrow council in London to undertake a year-long, £63,000 pilot of the ground-breaking Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) technology.

‘We will wait until the end of the formal evaluation period to make a final decision about rolling the technology out across the country but this early review by the council is very positive,’ said a spokesman for the DWP.

Article continues

‘If our own review comes to similar conclusions to Harrow’s, we would like to see this technology rolled out across Britain as soon as possible.’
VRA technology works by measuring slight, inaudible fluctuations in the human voice known as ‘micro-tremors’ that indicate when a speaker delivers words under stress, and when those moments of stress are generated by an attempt to deceive. Voice patterns are analysed and displayed on a computer.

Normal speech ranges in frequency from 8 to 12 hertz. When they are being honest, the average sound is below 10 hertz. When they lie, the stress causes the frequency to rise to above 10 hertz.

‘This technology is successfully used in the insurance industry and analyses changes in a caller’s voice, giving an indication of the level of risk that they are lying,’ said Richard Sheridan from Capita Group which owns the technology and is helping implementation for Harrow council. ‘These changes are measured against the caller’s “normal” voice which is recorded at the beginning of the phone call, ensuring that nervousness or shyness is not a trigger. If the technology flags up a caller as being suspicious, they will be asked to provide extra evidence to support their claim.’

The technology is being tested on people claiming housing or council tax benefit but will be extended at Harrow Jobcentre for other benefits this year. The government claims the technology also improves services.

‘Operators trained in intelligent questioning and behavioural analysis will use the system to identify suspect cases at the start of the claim process, enabling low-risk claimants to be fast-tracked,’ said a DWP spokesman.

Over the past two years the procedure for claiming benefits has been reformed. The claim often begins with a telephone interview, after which people may need to provide evidence and sign forms.

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said the system ‘adds to the demonisation of claimants’.

‘Whatever their views on welfare policy, anyone who cares about science and reason should also be alarmed: lie detectors do not work, they are as likely to finger the innocent but nervous as the genuinely guilty,’ he said. ‘Innocent people will account for a majority of those whose claims are delayed while they provide extra evidence.’

Experts in America, where the most comprehensive scrutiny of the technology has taken place, warn that the technology is far from failsafe.

David Ashe, chief deputy of the Virginia Board for Professional and Occupational Regulation, said, ‘The experience of being tested, or of claiming a benefit and being told that your voice is being checked for lies, is inherently stressful.

‘Lie detector tests have a tendency to pass people for whom deception is a way of life and fail those who are scrupulously honest.’

Under Bush, terror has become a justification for any and every abuse of power.

By Scott Thill

Last time we checked in on the bizarro nexus between cannabis and terrorism, it was none other than actor/director Tommy Chong who was feeling the Bush administration’s post-9/11 wrath. In fact, the stoner icon, whose fabled act was concurrently resuscitated for Fox’s drugged and confused comedy hit That 70s Show, was being slapped by John Ashcroft with a nine-month prison bid, a $20,000 fine and over $100,000 in seized assets for selling bongs. The terrorism connection? He was sentenced on Sept. 11, 2003. And if you think that’s a specious connection, it’s only gotten worse since. In fact, over the last few years, “terrorist” has become an epithet for all seasons.

In 2003, Iraq occupation architect Richard Perle slapped investigative journalist Seymour Hersh with the term, saying, “Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.” As if filing a story about the doomed occupation of a sovereign state in the pages of the New Yorker was the same thing as flying a 747 into the World Trade Center.

In 2004, Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, “a terrorist organization” because of what Paige defined as the “obstructionist scare tactics” used by its lobbyists. Because we all know it’s every educator’s dream to buck the systemby blowing themselves up in front of their students.

And just this month, the Bush administration decided to employ the term to legally target the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a sovereign nation’s standing army numbering in the hundreds of thousands. When you want a war that badly, you’ll pretty much do or say anything to get it.

So how does the Bush administration get away with crying terrorist at every opportunity? Say hello to the Military Commissions Act. Thanks to this 2006 piece of legislation, terrorism has become the basis of American foreign and domestic policy. Yes, the term has become equivalent to everything from ideologically driven violence to petty theft, and can be used to incarcerate, exterminate or character assassinate anything in sight.

It’s no wonder then that federal officials are now revisiting their previously failed effort to link terrorism to cannabis, the only real cash cow in the government’s so-called War on Drugs. Only difference is, this time, they don’t have Tommy Chong as a scapegoat.

Unable or unwilling to solve the nation’s crippling meth addiction or its hypocritical dependency on prescribed narcotics like oxycontin, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) recently rang the terrorism alarm to nail pot growers in Redding’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest in California. Along the way, ONDCP “czar” John Walters showed off not only the Bush administration’s love of twisted terminology but also its subcultural savvy by coining a memorable phrase of his own.

“We have kind of a reefer blindness,” Walters explained during a Redding press conference on the ONDCP’s Operation Alesia, a cannabis-eradication program coordinated by the California National Guard’s Counterdrug Taskforce and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. Walters followed that clever turn of phrase with the reliable terrorist designation to describe the armed growers cultivating cannabis in Shasta County. “These people are armed; they’re dangerous. [They’re] violent criminal terrorists.” He even went so far to argue that the “terrorists” growing weed in Shasta County, as the Redding Record Searchlight reported, “wouldn’t hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.”

Except there seem to be a couple major problems with Walters’ characterizations. For one, Walters declined to explain during the press conference what Operation Alesia’s specific goals were. More importantly, he didn’t offer up any concrete names of the terrorists or their ideological objectives. What legalization advocates and law enforcement authorities alike were left with was yet another hazy strategy based on loose terminology whose only purpose it seems is to confiscate as much pot as possible from Shasta County’s public lands.

A noble pursuit to be sure, but counterterrorism? Hardly.

Especially when rural Shasta County’s biggest problem is meth, not marijuana, addiction. Further, Walters’ coded terminology, when unmasked, is not employed to raise awareness of al Qaeda’s grand cannabis cultivation strategy to destabilize the American government, but rather to inflame regional biases against, you guessed it, Mexicans. Especially the undocumented variety, who are “the other terrorists” Walters mentioned looking to get into the country and, what again? I asked Mike Odle, public affairs and communications officer for Shasta-Trinity National Forest’s Northern California Coordination Center to elaborate on what was behind the increase in cultivated cannabis on Shasta’s public lands.

“Most of the increase can be attributed to the proliferation of foreign Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs), mostly Mexican in origin, which operate in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and throughout California and much of the United States,” Odle explained to me by email. “Frequently using illegal aliens residing outside the United States, or recently smuggled across the [sic] boarder, these Mexican criminal groups establish, maintain and protect an increasing number of clandestine operations.”

Yet, predictably, Odle couldn’t explain what made them terrorists.

“Some DTOs have been linked by law enforcement and investigations to terrorist organizations and pose a substantial and increasing threat to national security,” he added in a subsequent email. “Our primary concern here on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is the safety of our forest visitors and agency employees and the negative impacts marijuana has on the environment and natural resources, no matter what name is given to the DTOs that are illegally growing marijuana on America’s public lands.”

No matter what name is given? Easy enough if you’re the one doing the naming. If you’re the one being flippantly tagged a terrorist? Not so much.

Plus, there are enough holes in the argument to plant your own cannabis seeds. To start with, cannabis may be many things, but it is far from an environmental negative. It has been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years, can grow in almost any climate, and is a naturally occurring dioecious perennial. (In other words, it’s not fossil fuel.) Further, Odle’s claim that safety is Shasta’s first concern is understandable, but he offered no examples of violent activity by any of the area growers to legitimize the ONDCP’s inflammatory language. Sure, the fact that “some” DTOs have been linked to terrorist organizations is educational, but as with everything the ONDCP touches, specifics are elusive and generalizations are everywhere.

I pressed Odle for further clarification on the terrorism question. But instead of al Qaeda, all I got was more obfuscation. And more Mexicans.

“Do [sic] to ongoing investigations, I am limited in what I can share,” Odle explained in another email. “When we do the investigations we try to get up as far as we can into the food chain. We work closely with the DEA, FBI, ICE and other law enforcement agencies that have the capabilities to identify who these folks are and what links they may or may not have.”

Fair enough. It’s out of his hands. Any concrete local examples?

“I can [sic] site an example in a case we are now finished investigating. The Forest Service was heavily involved with the eradication of marijuana gardens associated with the Magana drug cartel. The Magana drug cartel operation and investigation occurred throughout National Forests in California, Utah and Arkansas, with direct ties to Mexico. Investigators in the Magana case said cartel leaders brought in illegal workers from the Mexican states of Michoacan and Jalisco.”

In short, terrorism isn’t the real problem here, it’s illegal immigration. Not convinced? When you get a chance, search Google for “Magana drug cartel” and let me know if you can find anything. Even better, try the ONDCP, and let me know if anything unrelated to cocaine shows up. Even if you give Walters, Odle and other so-called counterterrorism experts their due on the Magana drug cartel or other so-called terrorist organizations who the ONDCP cannot actually name (making sure to look up the definition of “cartel” in the process, if you want to be exhaustive about it), what you end up with are cannabis traffickers and cultivators operating illegally on public lands using undocumented immigrants.

Illegal activity? Fine. Terrorism? Are you high?

The Bush administration’s hypocritical bait-and-switch between terrorism and immigration is clumsy for certain, but it is especially glaring in light of a recent Washington Times article criticizing none other than President Bush himself. According to the piece, a “2006 audit showed federal, state and local governments are among the biggest employers of the half-million persons in the U.S. illegally using ‘non-work’ Social Security numbers — numbers issued legally, but with specific instructions that the holders are not authorized to work in the U.S.” And that charge was leveled by Iowa Republican and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee Rep. Steve King, in a politically conservative publication founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader of the Unification Church.

Even the Moonies think that Bush needs to start throwing what the president’s own drug czar would call terrorists out of his own White House, before he starts worrying about anyone else. After all, according to the audit, his own government is a much worse offender than the ragged Magana cartel growing cannabis in the forests of Redding.

By the time the ONDCP’s talking points touched on other byproducts of commercially cultivated cannabis terrorism — “fire violations, unsanitary conditions, littering, smoking, building unauthorized structures, unauthorized camping and cutting trees without a permit to name a few,” in Odle’s words — I began to more fully understand the power of language. By capitalizing on a nationally manufactured fear and simply merging words into each other, the Bush administration has created from its hyperreal imagination a living policy that can have real-world ramifications for those trampled beneath its fluid terminology.

The good news is that the Democrats in Congress are at least trying to make up for their heinous complicity in the Military Commissions Act, whose passage helped enable this linguistic nightmare in the first place. As recently as July 2007, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chairman Rep. Henry Waxman wrote Walters asking why American taxpayers have been footing the bill for ONDCP officials to travel around the country with Republican candidates stumping for election at the behest of Karl Rove. Striking hard at Bush administration politicization of the ONDCP is a good start, but stopping their ability to label anyone anything they want would go much farther to restoring sensible policy, on drugs and everything else, for the rest of our new millennium.

We’re going to need help soon, if the recent white papers on drug abuse from the ONDCP are any indication. Because they’ve enlisted God for help in beating back the devil weed, as their fact sheet “Marijuana and Kids: Faith” explains: “Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can lead to marijuana and substance use. … Other studies show that teens who don’t view faith as important are up to four times more likely to use marijuana.”

In other words, smoke up, heretical terrorist! You’re not only fueling al Qaeda’s mass murder by purchasing weed cultivated by illegal Mexicans in the rural public lands of the world, but you’re also turning your back on God in the process. As well as replacing the Bush administration’s real world with your selfish virtual reality in which cannabis is a relatively harmless, naturally occurring plant that can chill you out as much as it can fill you out. A massive, multiplayer simulation where pot is a viable medicinal alternative to synthesized painkillers like oxycontin, which ease your agony by killing you off altogether.

According to the Bush administration and its politicized ONDCP, you need to unplug from that moonbat matrix and start praying. Fast. Or else.

By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

A new Dutch law which comes into force in July 2008 will ban smoking in all Amsterdam coffee shops, the government decided on Friday.

Amsterdam is a hot spot for tourists as relaxed laws allow the possession of soft drugs, such as Cannabis. Although Cannabis is officially banned in the Netherlands, consumers are allowed to carry less than 5 grams in their possession.

Coffee shop owners believe the laws will not effect their business as it applies to tobacco and Cannabis can be smoked pure.

“Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses. They will be smoke-free,” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told NOS television.

“It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.”

“Employees should not have to work in an environment were they are constantly exposed to the harmful effects of smoking,” Balkenende said after the cabinet’s decision on Friday.

However customers will be allowed to smoke in separate rooms or glass partitions to protect staff from second hand smoke.

David Edwards

Laughing At The New Generation

I am fascinated by the differences that separate peoples and cultures. If human beings are the animal for which life is a problem requiring an answer — liberated, as we are, from the autopilot of instinctual programming — then what could be more interesting than answers to life developed by radically different cultures over thousands of years?

Other cultures, after all, provide us with an entry point for investigating the nose-on-our-face problems, the nose-on-our-face mistakes that bedevil us individually and as a society. In one of his most telling observations, Thoreau wrote:

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.” (Thoreau, Walden, Penguin, 1983, p.68)

When we encounter, and quite possibly laugh at, foreign cultures, the precious opportunity also arises of laughing at our own. This is a laughter of liberation — not just from the disco flares and bowler hats of “the old fashions,” but from the worship of the flag, of the “fatherland”, from hatred of the official ‘enemy’. As I will discuss below, it is also an opportunity to laugh at our notions of how best to make ourselves happy.

The Internationally Famous Cabbage Dish

In late 2005, I visited South Korea for the first time. I was delighted to sit on floor cushions around low restaurant tables to be confronted by dozens of small dishes of food, most of it unknown, almost all of it devilishly spicy. Equally delightful were the loud noises made by my endlessly polite and kind Korean hosts as they slurped their noodles and guzzled their soup. The part of me that remains forever ten-years-old felt at last vindicated by the fact that a whole society deemed civilized and polite the same behaviour that had earned me fierce looks as a child. Thoreau again:

“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” (Ibid, p.53)

I also enjoyed slurping the mysterious, traditional herbal teas with curious objects bobbing about in them; the fruits I’d never seen before; the ornate rice cakes and other mysteries of the ancient Korean culture. I feel there is something heart-warming about seeing difference and thinking: ‘That’s how they like it — that’s what they enjoy,’ even when what they enjoy means nothing to me. I find it wonderful that Koreans are deeply proud of their spicy pickled Chinese cabbage, kimchi, the national dish. A guidebook declares with typically supercharged Korean enthusiasm:

“Visitors cannot really say they have been to Korea if they have not tasted kimchi, the internationally famous cabbage dish . . . These days kimchi is gaining popularity worldwide for its nutritional value and disease-prevention effect.”

In Seoul there is even a kimchi museum!

A few years ago I went with my Japanese girlfriend to an English pub for the first time. As we sat down, she took out two small, folded towels and placed them next to her glass on the table — one to wipe her glass, as required, and one to dab her face. The joy of seeing that little ritual carried out in the middle of a spit-and-sawdust pub is exactly what I have in mind. Difference reminds us of the uniqueness of others, of their preciousness, transience, and in fact of their fundamental aloneness in the world.

A sense of fellow feeling and compassion can also be found in a sense of unity beneath difference — others may do things differently, but we can understand what it is they like about it; we can empathies with their happiness in doing things ‘just so’ in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in the world.

By contrast, there is something depressing and dehumanizing about the thought of people as anonymous crowds, as blank “masses” of humanity. I’ve always recoiled from the title of John Carey’s book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. Regardless of the contents of the book, the title always reminds me of the sense, which many “intellectuals” seem to have, that a select few brainy types are real, serious individuals, while the rest of us are mere “masses”, “proletarians”, a kind of human porridge.

But what exactly is an “intellectual”? If someone describes themselves as an “intellectual”, I cringe, much as I do when I hear someone describe themselves as “a celebrity” or “famous”. I greatly enjoyed reading this description of an intellectual upper class in H.G. Wells’ novel The First Men In The Moon:

“These beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labors fall, form a sort of aristocracy in this strange society, and at the head of them, quintessential of the moon, is that marvelous gigantic ganglion the Grand Lunar . . . The unlimited development of the minds of the intellectual class is rendered possible by the absence of any bony skull in the lunar anatomy, that strange box of bone that clamps about the developing brain of man, imperiously insisting ‘thus far and no farther’ to all his possibilities.”

By some quirk of fate, Wells’ description finds amusing and contradictory echoes in Noam Chomsky’s analysis of the role of liberal intellectuals in our own society:

“[W]hat’s not recognized is that the role of the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go — ‘this far, and no further’”. (Chomsky, The Big Idea, BBC2, 1996)

In opposition to individual and cultural arrogance, it seems to me a far happier and more rational thing to recognize that the world is full of interesting ways of being — possibilities that may well be improvements on our own — than to think that our culture has all the answers, all the best solutions. It is brutal and foolish to look down on others, to dismiss their ways of living and loving developed over millennia as ’primitive’. Surely all human cultural responses to the extraordinary problem of living — even those we find unpalatable — are worthy of our interest and respect.

Certainly, when it comes to evaluating foreign cultures, little is as it seems to our prejudiced eye. During the Vietnam war, the American GIs referred to their Vietnamese enemy as ‘Gooks’, a term that has become synonymous with dehumanizing racism. How tragic and poignant that American use of the word in fact originated in the Korean War — guk is a Korean word which means ‘people’. The Koreans call themselves Hangukin, which means ‘the people of the Han river.’

Or to consider an extreme example, could anything be more alien to Westerners than the act of suicide bombing? Although it has almost never been reported, there had never been a suicide bomb attack in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. The UN’s IRIN news network reported on March 8 that a 41 year-old Iraqi woman, Um Abdallah, was learning how to turn herself into a suicide bomber. Revulsion, horror, incomprehension — isn’t her decision the epitome of the ‘alienness’ of foreign culture to many Britons? And yet IRIN fills in some of the background:

Um Abdallah is one of thousands of Iraqis who have lost their relatives in the past four years. Her two boys and one girl were killed during a US military attack in her neighborhood.

“My husband was killed four months ago by Iraqi forces. Killed alongside him were my son-in-law and his two children. I cannot even remember how many bullets the children had in their bodies,” she said.

She does not know exactly when she is going to detonate herself but she is sure she will be ready whenever she is asked.” (IRIN, “Killings drive women to become suicide bombers,” March 8, 2007)

Is Um Abdallah really such an alien being? She has lost her sons and daughter, her husband, and other loved ones besides. She has lost everything. Is her response really so impossible to comprehend? Is not our response to wish we could somehow do something to relieve her suffering and protect her from her own plan precisely because her suffering is so comprehensible? And yet, if our media are to be believed, our reaction should simply be one of loathing for this ‘alien’ product of an ‘alien’ culture.

So much of what we are taught to hate is actually the product of suffering — real, comprehensible and very human — rather than of some weird, mystical phenomenon called ’evil’. And far too much of that suffering originates with our own lack of compassion, our own system of domination and exploitation preaching hate. As Nietzsche said so well:

“Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong!”

West Is Best…. Ignored!

In 1955, the British governor of Kenya, declared:

“The task to which we have set our minds is to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state.” (Quoted, John Pilger, “Iraq is a War of National Liberation,” The New Statesman, April 15, 2004)

In “civilizing” the country, the British army killed 10,000 Kenyans for the loss of 32 European lives.

In a March 2000 Guardian article, Polly Toynbee wrote in similar vein:

“In our political and social culture we have a democratic way of life which we know, without any doubt at all, is far better than any other in the history of humanity. Even if we don’t like to admit it, we are all missionaries and believers that our own way is the best when it comes to the things that really matter.” (Toynbee, “The West really is the best,” The Observer, March 5, 2000)

Unfortunately, this arrogance appears to be a common theme among the “beings with big heads, on whom the intellectual labours fall.”

Happily, the people that Westerners deem in a “very primitive moral and social state” do not share their view. Historian John Bodley reported:

“According to Captain Cook’s account of his first landing on the Australian mainland, Aborigines on the beach totally ignored both his ship and his men until they became obnoxious . . . a complete lack of interest in white people’s habits, material possessions, and beliefs was characteristic of Aborigines in a variety of contact settings.” (John Bodley, Victims of Progress, Mayfield Publishing, 1982, p.16)

In his book Re-Enchantment, Jeffrey Paine described a common Asian view of Westerners in 1912:

“Many Asians then thought that white people, though wizards at technology, were otherwise mentally deficient.” (Paine, Re-Enchantment, Norton, 2004, p.31)

If ever there was a shocking challenge to some key nose-on-our-face assumptions about the world, then this surely is it. Aren’t Third World people supposed to share Toynbee’s view of the magnificent West? Alas, there is more bad news. Paine added of a particular group of Asians:

“Tibetans had tended to view Caucasians as idiot savants, preternaturally good at, say, constructing engines but otherwise dumb to the subtleties of the spirit.” (Ibid, p.56)

Tibetan Buddhist teachings, in particular, were deemed completely beyond us: “One does not teach the precious dharma to Westerners,” was the operating assumption. (Ibid p.59)

Big ships, big engines, big buildings — small impression!

This might seem remarkable at first sight, but actually the reasoning is not so strange — Tibetans appreciated that Westerners were more or less completely bewildered when it came to matters of psychological understanding. Consider, for example, the issue of psychological health and happiness.

Living Life To The Full

Contemporary Western culture assumes that happiness can best be achieved by gathering to ourselves as many pleasurable experiences as possible. When we talk of “making the most of life” and “living life to the full”, we mean a life filled with pleasure. Our focus is therefore, of course, very much externally directed. The psychologist Erich Fromm asked:

“What is meant by happiness? Most people today would probably answer the question by saying that to be happy is to have ‘fun,’ or ‘to have a good time’ . . . What does this fun consist in? Going to the movies, parties, ball games, listening to the radio and watching television, taking a ride in the car on Sundays, making love, sleeping late on Sunday mornings, and traveling . . . we might say that the concept of happiness is, at best, identified with that of pleasure.” (Fromm, The Sane Society, Routledge, 2002, p.194)

What is so remarkable is that, as we are doing all this, we give barely a thought to the condition of the inner, psychological ‘receptacles’ into which these experiences are, as it were, poured and in which we hope happiness will arise — our minds! How sophisticated would we judge a farmer who eagerly planted seeds without giving a thought to the quality of the soil in which those seeds were sown?

Up until quite recently, many people in the West gave little thought even to the importance of physical fitness for health — the concern struck many of us as an effete indulgence, a symptom of hair-shirted hypochondria. But how many people today recognize the need, or even possibility, of maintaining psychological fitness and health beyond taking time out to relax? How many of us even believe it is possible to train our minds, much less for some version of mental or emotional fitness? Neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison comments:

“There is a tremendous lacuna in our worldview, where training is seen as important for strength, for physical agility, for athletic ability, for musical ability — for everything except emotions.” (Quoted, Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, Ballantine, 2007, p.231)

As it turns out, for all the accumulation of pleasurable experiences, the Western crop of happiness is blighted by psychological weeds, toxic mental soil and ideational frosts. For the truth is that the untrained human mind is almost guaranteed to be filled with suffering — a statement of obvious fact for many Asians, but an almost meaningless comment in the West.

Psychologist Oliver James reports that almost a quarter of Britons currently suffer from serious emotional distress, such as depression and anxiety, and that another quarter are on the verge of such conditions — that‘s half the population! James believes that much of this emotional distress is rooted in what he calls “affluenza”:

“It entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous.” (James, Affluenza, Vermilion, 2007, p.vii)

These values, in turn, are all oriented towards external pleasurable experiences. So to what extent do they deliver happiness, for example for people who are maximally ‘successful‘?

One survey found that over one-third of a sample of super-rich people (those with net wealth of £70 million or more) were less happy than the national average. A second study found no difference between the happiness levels of lottery winners and comparison samples of people with average incomes, or even of paraplegics. (Ibid, p.34)

In truth, as the statistics make very clear, we in the West are tormented by the fact that our minds are more or less out of control. Who amongst us has not been kept awake at night by a storm of angry, fearful, craving, jealous, or grieving thoughts? From the moment we wake up, to the moment we fall asleep, day after day, thoughts can completely tyrannize the mind. Our emphasis, in response, tends to be on ‘action’ — by which we mean external action. We believe that doing something, going somewhere, seeing someone, drinking something, can bring peace of mind, control. Quite often none of this really helps.

I think one of the most shocking realizations we have as we reach adulthood is the dramatic power of the uncontrolled mind, the sheer intensity of psychological suffering, in the event of some kind of crisis. The feeling that nothing can be done, that we are helpless in the face of our own thoughts — often interpreted in the West as a belief that there’s nothing we can do about ‘life’ — is a cause of incalculable misery.

But it seems to me that our suffering is pointing us towards a solution. Indeed, I think this is a perfect example of how we can benefit greatly from opening our minds to non-Western cultural solutions. As ever, doing so requires the humility to see that we are not all-powerful, that we do not stride the world as giants among intellectual and cultural pygmies.

If we are tormented by uncontrolled thoughts, then perhaps answers can be found by asking the obvious question: Can some kind of control be gained over destructive thoughts? Can something be done?

Part 2 will follow shortly…

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The first Media Lens book, Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media, is now available (Pluto Books, London, 2006). Visit the Media Lens website (www.medialens.org) and consider supporting their invaluable work.