After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation

‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’
October 2009.

Things at Transform have been hectic recently as we prepare to publish our new book ‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ which will be launched on November 12th in the UK Houses of Parliament. 

The book is also being launched in mainland Europe, North and South Americas, Australasia and Asia. 
There is a growing recognition around the world that the prohibition of drugs is a counterproductive failure. However, a major barrier to drug law reform has been a widespread fear of the unknown – just what could a post-prohibition regime look like?

For the first time, ‘Blueprint’ answers that question by proposing specific models of regulation for each main type and preparation of prohibited drug, coupled with the principles and rationale for doing so. 

We demonstrate that moving to the legal regulation of drugs is not an unthinkable, politically impossible step in the dark, but a sensible, pragmatic approach to control drug production, supply and use.

‘Blueprint’ – available to download from our website. 

http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blueprint%20download.htm

Translations of the executive summary will also be available in Spanish and Portuguese. 

Heroin Century

En af de bedste og mest detaljerede bøger om heroin – virkelig læseværdig:

Heroin Century

Af Tom Carnwath, Ian Smith

http://tinyurl.com/8q3kvx

Heroin first saw the light of day a century and a quarter ago in a laboratory in Paddington Station, London. Since then it has spread across most parts of the world in fits and starts, temporarily held up here or blocked there, but pushing on with a persistence that has eventually overcome all obstacles. Despite the reach of heroin, the information on which public debate about heroin is based is quite often wrong.
Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith have written The Heroin Century to set the record straight. Their fascinating account of the development and use of this twentieth-century drug provides a wealth of factual information alongside some informed insights into the future for heroin in the twenty-first century. Topics include: methods of heroin production and distribution; types of heroin and methods of consumption; government attempts to control the spread of heroin; patterns of heroin use; heroin and its relationship to creativity; physiological and medicinal effects of heroin; the relationship between heroin and crime; and treatments for heroin use.

Flere oplysninger

Heroin Century
Af Tom Carnwath, Ian Smith
Edition: illustrated
Udgivet af Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415278716, 9780415278713
216 sider

Shooting Up Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs

Terrorism, Transnational Security Threats, Counternarcotics Policy

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Brookings Institution Press 2009 c. 273pp.

Cloth Trade, 273 pages
978-0-8157-0328-0, $28.95

Your online order will be processed by The Hopkins Fulfillment Service.

Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up.

Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support.

Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world’s most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations—including Peru’s Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan—have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma.

While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeted at major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.

Heroinberoende

Af Johan Kakko

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Heroinberoende förklarar mekanismerna bakom heroinberoende och hur en framgångsrik behandling kan se ut. Vi vet att heroinberoende leder till en medicinsk störning som rubbar hjärnans stressreglering, en störning som kan behandlas effektivt med underhållsbehandling. Här redovisas hur denna behandling med fördel kan bedrivas.

Boken är indelad i tre delar där del 1 ger de nödvändiga neurovetenskapliga grunderna, del 2 tar upp underhållsbehandling och del 3 belyser problematiken ur både ett brukar- och anhörigperspektiv. Ett kapitel tar även upp den komplicerade frågan om underhållsbehandling vid graviditet.

De allra senaste vetenskapliga rönen inom underhållsbehandling av heroinberoende presenteras och det ges en utförlig översikt av den internationella forskningen på området. Genomgången visar vilka de verksamma behandlingskomponenterna är och de vinster dessa skapar för både samhället och de drabbade. Priset gäller för varje separat artikel i serien.

http://www.bokus.com/bok/9789147099283/heroinberoende/

Bruce Alexander’s Globalization of Addiction Website

Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.

History shows that addiction can be rare in a society for many centuries, but can become nearly universal when circumstances change – for example, when a cohesive tribal culture is crushed or an advanced civilisation collapses. Of course, this historical perspective does not deny that differences in vulnerability are built into each individual’s genes, individual experience, and personal character, but it removes individual differences from the foreground of attention, because societal determinants are so much more powerful. Addiction is much more a social problem than an individual disorder.

This site is about the relationship between addiction on the one hand, and global economic and political realities on the other. Documents, videos, audio recordings, and links may be submitted by anyone using the “contact” feature, and will be added to the site if they are relevant and carefully edited. This site was initially based on the work of Bruce K. Alexander, Ph.D., who is the site administrator.
http://www.globalizationofaddiction.ca/my-books/globalization-of-addiction.html

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“I do not easily give superlatives in my praise of books but this one is truly exceptional … I think that the study could prove of momentous importance in how we view the world in the 21st century. If only its message were to be taken to heart, we could spare an immense amount of human suffering. Professor Alexander delivers a convincing case that we are manufacturing addiction by the process of economic globalization and the social dislocation that inevitably goes with it.”
– Frederick M. Toates, Professor of Biological Psychology, Open University.

“Dear Mr Alexander,
I am presently reading your book titled Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. As a person who was addicted to opiates for over 25 years (now over a decade without a physical dependence on opiates) I really felt your book provided an insight into addiction that I have never before seen in addiction literature (and I am in my fourth year of studying psychology, so have read a book or two on the subject). My interest on inequality and the distress that modern market societies produce was first aroused by the Spirit level book Why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
But it was only really after reading your book that my own experiences made sense. As an addict I was a continually preocupied with my self. This has continued even with the absence of drugs. Although I remain abstinent through personal choice i find myself just as much an addict as when I was physically addicted to heroin. I still have the same gnawing emptyness inside and a terrible desire for recognition and protaganism. This I do keep at bay using a spiritualy based 12 step program of which I am the typical grateful recovering addict as my present life cannot be compared to my former life. But I certainly do not feel cured and have never liked the desease model (please don’t tell my fellow 12 stepers ha ha) I always felt my addiction was adaptive and very much the way a obsessive compulsive person will wash their hands to cope with stress, I used heroin. Adaptive and functional…
I, of course like any self respecting addict seek fame, fortune and recognition in the addiction field and am continually disapointed that my word is not taken as gospel :) I have the pleasure of knowing several former physically dependent addicts who have left their physical addiction behind but have launched themselves into an equaly addictive behaviour in their new field Journalism or IT computers.
Anyway I’m going to leave it here, as you can see it is a subject that I find pasionate and could keep writing for hours in my obsessive addicted way.”
thank you so much, chris neill

“Professor Alexander’s work addresses important local and global issues, and gives another perspective on addiction. The intense disapproval it has generated should make thinking people want to take a look at just what he’s saying that could be perceived as so dangerous.”
– Chair, Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy Committee

Book Review by Teodora Groshkova
Bruce Alexander is best known for the ‘Park Rat’ experiments he conducted in the 1970s, in which drug consumption increased dramatically when laboratory animals were dislocated from their natural group. The present book sets out to draw out the implications of Alexander’s research for our understanding of addiction. Generally, the book challenges the construction of addiction as an individual, progressive, relapsing disease caused by drug use that can only be addressed by professional treatment. While this conventional perspective on addiction serves as a useful doctrine in some therapeutic situations, Alexander believes it is too focused on the individual—and is thus failing to cope with the rising flood of mass addiction that is enveloping the modern world. Read more…

NOW AVAILABLE in paperback!

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American diplomats paint scathing picture of Mexican army, branding it as unfit to combat drug traffickers,

US has lost faith in Mexico’s ability to win drugs war, WikiLeaks cables show

WikiLeaks cables are a bleak contrast to Mexican insistence that the state is prevailing in the drugs war declared by President Felipe Calderón in 2006. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/AP

The US has lost confidence in the Mexican army’s ability to win the country’s drugs war, branding it slow, clumsy and no match for “sophisticated” narco-traffickers.

Classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks also reveal a growing sense of alarm within Mexico‘s government that time is running out in the battle against organised crime and that it could “lose” entire regions.

The memos detail blunders in the fight against drug cartels and a desperate search for a new strategy to save President Felipe Calderón’s administration from a bloodsoaked fiasco.

The assessments, made in a cable to Washington earlier this year, are bleak contrast to Mexican insistence that the state is prevailing in a war declared by Calderón in 2006. Four years later drug-related violence has killed more than 28,000 people and brought cities such as Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana to the brink of anarchy, with mayors, police chiefs and ordinary people gunned down with impunity and beheadings shockingly common.

Geronimo Gutierrez Fernandez, the undersecretary for governance, told US diplomats that “pervasive, debilitating fear” had infected even relatively safe parts of the country. “He expressed a real concern with ‘losing’ certain regions.”

US diplomats painted a scathing picture of Mexico’s armed forces, singling out the army as bureaucratic, parochial, outdated and unfit to combat drug trafficking organisations (DTOs).

“Mexican security institutions are often locked in a zero-sum competition in which one agency’s success is viewed as another’s failure, information is closely guarded, and joint operations are all but unheard of. Official corruption is widespread, leading to a compartmentalized siege mentality among ‘clean’ law enforcement leaders and their lieutenants.”

The cable laments that only 2% of those detained for organised crime-related offences were brought to trial and said the army was “incapable” of processing information and evidence for judicial cases. “It has taken a serious beating on human rights issues from international and domestic human rights organizations, who argue with considerable basis, in fact that the military is ill-equipped for a domestic policing role.”

It was a stinging verdict on the decision of Calderón, a White House ally, to deploy tens of thousands of troops, especially in Ciudad Juárez where narcos ran rings around them.

“The DTOs are sophisticated players: they can wait out a military deployment; they have an almost unlimited human resource pool to draw from in the marginalised neighborhoods; and they can fan complaints about human rights violations to undermine any progress the military might make with hearts and minds.”

The diplomats also criticised the “dysfunctionally low level of collaboration” between Mexican military and civilian authorities along the border.

They praised Mexico’s navy as a nimbler force which took down the drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva but even that risked a downside of making the army, the navy’s institutional rival, more defensive and risk-averse.

The classified cables reveal the depth of US concern about its neighbour and partly explain why in September Hillary Clinton compared Mexico to insurgency-plagued 1980s Colombia and floated the possibility of US troops intervening. Mexican officials indignantly rejected the secretary of state’s comments.

Privately, Gutierrez Fernandez admitted to US officials that Mexico bungled the early phase of the Mérida Initiative, a security pact between the US, Mexico and central America, by focusing too much on equipment rather than competent personnel and institutions.

“Gutierrez went on to say, however, that he now realizes there is not even time for the institution building to take hold in the remaining years of the Calderon administration.” If there was no tangible success within 18 months the next government would have difficulty sustaining the drugs war, said the minister.

Gutierrez and Jorge Tello Péon, the national security system coordinator, said despite setbacks Mexico would “stay the course” and asked the Americans to aid a new strategy focusing on the most violent cities.

“If we could turn around Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and one other city such as Culiacán, it would solve 60% of the violence, and send a signal to the Mexican people that the war can be won,” reported the cable. It urged Washington to back the strategy.

The US diplomats noted that Mexico’s president had recognised the failure of army deployments and replaced troops with federal police. “Calderón has openly admitted to having a tough year … and contacts have told (political officers) that he has seemed ‘down’ in meetings.”

Last month, in an interview with the BBC, Calderón insisted that as long as the US remained the biggest consumer of drugs in the world, the terror wrought by the drug cartels in Mexico would continue.

“They [the Americans] have a clear responsibility in this because they are providing the market for the drug dealers and the criminals,” President Calderón said. “They need to do a lot more in terms of reducing the consumption of drugs and to stop the flow of weapons towards Mexico.

Indian Court overturns mandatory death penalty for drug offences; first in the world to do so

Supreme-Court_51Mumbai: In an unprecedented decision, the Bombay High Court struck down the mandatory death penalty for drug offences, becoming the first Court in the world to do so. Announcing the order via video conferencing, a division bench of Justices A.M Khanwilkar and A.P Bhangale declared Section 31A of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS Act) that imposes a mandatory death sentence for a subsequent conviction for drug trafficking ‘unconstitutional’.

The Court however, refrained from striking down the law, preferring to read it down instead. Consequently, the sentencing Court will have the option and not obligation, to impose capital punishment on a person convicted a second time for drugs in quantities specified under Section 31A.

The decision brings some reprieve to Ghulam Mohammed Malik, a Kashmiri man sentenced to death by the Special NDPS Court in Mumbai in February 2008 for a repeat offence of smuggling charas [cannabis resin]. Because of the mandatory nature of the punishment under Section 31A as it stood then, Malik was sentenced to death, without consideration of individual circumstances or mitigating factors. The High Court’s verdict came in response to a petition filed by the Indian Harm Reduction Network (IHRN), a consortium of NGOs working for humane drug policies, who assailed mandatory capital punishment as arbitrary, excessive and disproportionate to the crime of dealing in drugs.

Reacting to the order, Director of the Lawyers Collective, Anand Grover, who led the case for IHRN, said – “the order marks an important advance in drug policy and anti-death penalty campaigns. We will examine the decision fully to assess whether striking down the death penalty, as was done by the Supreme Court for Section 303 of the Indian Penal Code[1] <#_ftn1> would have been more appropriate””

Across the world, 32 countries impose capital punishment for offences involving narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances. Of these, 13 countries (including India until today) prescribe mandatory death sentences for drug crimes. In countries like Iran and China that actually carry out executions, drug offenders constitute the vast majority of those executed. In May last year, the Court of Appeal in Singapore upheld the mandatory death sentence imposed upon a young Malaysian for possession of heroin.“This is a positive development, which signals that Courts have also started to recognize principles of harm reduction and human rights in relation to drugs” remarked Luke Samson, President, IHRN.

Welcoming the decision, Rick Lines, Executive Director of Harm Reduction International, a UK based agency that specializes in drug control and human rights and the author of ‘The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: A violation of International Human Rights Law’ (2007), said ““The Court has upheld at the domestic level what has been emphasised for years by international human rights bodies – capital drug laws that take away judicial discretion are a violation of the rule of law. India’s justice system has affirmed that it is entirely unacceptable for such a penalty to be mandatory. This will set a positive precedent for judicial authorities in the region, which is rife with draconian drug laws.”

The judgment will be made available shortly at www.lawyerscollective.org

Tripti Tandon

Lawyers Collective

www.lawyerscollective.org

heroin

CN BC: When Heroin Hits Home

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Media Awareness ProjectPubdate: Fri, 16 Jun 2000. Vancouver Sun (CN BC)CN BC: When Heroin Hits HomeAuthor: Rebecca Wigod

WHEN HEROIN HITS HOMETwo couples have responded to their sons’ addictions by championing the expansion of prevention, treatment and recovery facilities in B.C. If personal grief brought them to their cause, they brought to it professional abilities and connections.Rob and Susie Ruttan and Ray and Nichola Hall long ago set aside feelings of shame and failure over their sons’ addiction to heroin. Hammering their grief into action, the two Kerrisdale couples have emerged as crusaders for more treatment programs for drug- addicted youth.B.C.’s failure to provide long-term residential treatment for young people is a disgrace, they say.

The Ruttan’s son, now 18, languished for months on a waiting list in B.C.

Rob, A Crown prosecutor, and Susie, a former teacher, watched in horror as the boy – the grandson of a B.C. Supreme Court judge – sank from smoking heroin to shooting it to injecting heroin and cocaine twice a day.

While waiting for treatment that never materialized, he also contracted hepatitis C.

“When I heard [he had hepatitis C], I was just overcome with grief and rage against my government for not giving my son this essential health service,” Rob said.

There are only three residential treatment centres for drug-addicted youth in B.C., and one – the only one exclusively for adolescent girls – is closing because its funding has been cut.

The Ruttans finally got their son to Ontario and a treatment program called Portage, where he received 24-hour professional care for seven months.

“It saved his life,” said Rob.

But when their son came back to B.C., he couldn’t get much in the way of after-care.

“After two months or so, he had a relapse,” Rob said. “We managed to get him back to Portage for a cleanup week, and since then he’s had a series of relapses and clean stretches as he struggles.”

Rob believes it’s scandalous that in B.C. – which has the worst drug problem in the country – addicted young people have to go out of province for care.

He, Susie and the Halls also say it is time drug addiction was recognized as a health problem that can hit people in every socio-economic group – even the children of loving, attentive parents.

The Halls’ sons had easy access to marijuana at the elementary school they attended in a leafy neighbourhood where, as Susie puts it, every family has a golden retriever and drives a Dodge Caravan.

Twelve is the average age at which B.C. kids first try marijuana, according to the Kaiser Youth Foundation. In the last five years, marijuana use has doubled among B.C.’s 13-year-olds, according to the McCreary Centre Society’s 1998-99 adolescent health survey.

Marijuana doesn’t always lead to heroin, but it did for the Halls’ two sons, now 19 and 23.

Growing up, they were risk-takers by nature. They smoked marijuana as young teenagers and were persuaded by friends to try heroin.

Somehow, they crossed the boundary between what is safe and what is dangerous. They haven’t yet been able to get back.

Nichola, who works at the University of B.C., said her older son is in a methadone program for the second time.

“Relapse is part of recovery ,” she said. “This is something our treatment centres have yet to learn. They kick people out the minute they show any signs [of relapsing].”

Ray, a filmmaker and University of B.C. emeritus professor of theatre, film and creative writing, excused himself from his family’s kitchen table to take a phone call from his older son, who was at work and couldn’t pick up his methadone.

Ray spoke to him with concern ending their conversation with the words, “I love you.”

The Halls have reached an understanding of addiction. Because they know it is a kind of sickness, they are understanding and supportive of their sons in situations where others might just get mad.

For example, they have learned to lock their money and valuables in their bedroom. Even so, their sons have broken the door down when desperate for money to feed their addictions.

Leveraging their position as solid, respectable citizens, the Ruttans and Halls have formed a pressure group called From Grief to Action.

“We realized we had some credibility with politicians and the public that people on the Downtown Eastside don’t have,” Nichola said.

About 160 parents of young drug users packed St. Mary’s Anglican church in Kerrisdale when From Grief to Action held its first public meeting last month.

They have received masses of e-mail from anguished parents of middle-class kids with drug problems.

Susie, who answers it, said, “Every day, I get another e-mail with a story chillingly similar to ours.”

From Grief to Action has joined forces with other groups pressing for a more extensive network of prevention, detox treatment and recovery facilities in B.C.

The Ruttans and Halls have also come to appreciate activists who are arguing for controversial harm-reduction measures such as safe injection sites.

“We pray every day that our son won’t use,” said Rob. “But if he does use, we don’t want him dying in an alley.

“He has hep-C. We don’t want him to get HIV. We don’t want him to die of an overdose.”

MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart