photo Mario Ossaba "Mama Coca 2002"
MAMA COCA

It's going to be about women tonight and continuing with the ongoing narrative I want to tell you about an extraordinary one, Maria Mercedes Moreno, co-ordinator of Mama Coca, who I met at the DPA conference. Her involvement in the international arena only begins here. She advocates for sanity in drug policy and basic human rights across three continents and does her work within influential political circles, yet she is unpretentious and approachable. We spent quite a lot of time together over the course of those three days. She's a charming intelligent woman and a tireless worker for many humanitarian causes.

Mama Coca is a project formed in reponse to the havoc that Plan Columbia specifically and US poitical intervention generally has caused to the indigenous societies of Latin America. The opening statement explains:

The publication of this journal is a manifest attempt at promoting a think tank through which we might exchange valuable information with our fellow academics, activists, analysts and journalists with the aim of furthering the understanding required to put forward collective, regional, feasible, peaceful proposals for the American Hemisphere.

The site also offers the best explanation of why the native populations continue to grow this nutritious and medicinal plant. Coca is not Cocaine offers clear reasons why the criminalization of coca leaf makes no more sense than the illegality of cannabis.

Let the people have their leaf.

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WOMEN IN CHAINS

One of the more overlooked statistics in the WODSU is the number of women, many of them mothers, who are currently incarcerated mainly for small time non-violent drug offenses. From an article in Press of Atlantic City,

The number of New Jersey women getting busted for drugs is skyrocketing - so much so that the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, built in 1913 as a reformatory for "wayward women," is bursting at its seams.

"It's like a mini city here," said William Hauck, associate administrator at the prison.

The prison's capacity is 825, but it currently houses 1,167 inmates. Seventy percent of them are in for drug-related offenses, Hauck said. Almost 80 percent of them are mothers, separated from their children, officials said.

"It's happening nationwide," said Jane Siegel, a criminologist at Rutgers University. "The war on drugs seems to have managed to sweep up a lot of women."

According to a recently released FBI report, 1.9 million women were arrested in the United States in 2002, 50 percent of them for drug offenses.

In 1979, one in 10 women in American prisons was serving time for drugs; by 1998, it was one in three, according to Meda Chesney- Lind, a women's studies professor at the University of Hawaii.

Other criminologists said laws such as the No Early Release Act and mandatory-minimum sentencing have had a greater effect on women.

"The law left judges with no option but to incarcerate," said Drew Humphreys, another Rutgers University criminologist. "Before the judges were more likely to give probation to women with children, now the scope of both the police and the judges has been reduced. Women drug offenders are more likely to be picked up and once they are in the system they are more likely to be incarcerated."

Easy targets for all predators, and you can be sure the majority of these women are poor and received school zone enhancements to their sentences because it's almost impossible to live in the inner city and not reside in one.

What happens to their children? How will they feel about the law when they see their parents in jail for years for small amounts of drugs and Rush Limbaugh gets caught with thousands of pills and is sentenced to a month in an overpriced rehab spa and a triumphant return to the airwaves? Why wouldn't they want to use drugs themselves in order to escape the reality of that kind of injustice?

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photo news.com.au
MISTAKEN IDENTITY

New Idea magazine editor Sue Smethurst, who travelled here for an exclusive interview with Olivia Newton-John was handcuffed and and detained for 12 hours before being deported yesterday. She was also body searched by Los Angeles airport security staff.

Ms Smethurst says she will lodge a formal complaint with US authorities after she was treated as a threat to national security and deported back to Australia after more than 12 hours of interrogation and detainment.

"I was marched through the airport with my hands handcuffed behind my back," she told Channel Nine news.

"I was body searched, I've had every part of me groped beyond belief.

Is this supposed to make me feel safer from terrorists? It doesn't. The airport security thing is out of control and somehow I don't think this incident will improve US foreign relationships with Australia.

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TELL ME ABOUT IT

Last word goes to Danielle Chynoweth, founder of the Urbana-Champaign IMC, that's become the indymedia project you find all over the world today. From a transcript from an excellent speech on how to foster local, independent
media.

The IMC network was born out of the necessity to cover non-violent acts of resistance to corporate controlled globalization. If they won't cover it, we will.

Her advice works for any group effort.

Just start.
Keep it simple, decentralized, and low to the ground.
Empower those who work, not those who just talk.
Groups that have been shut out or misrepresented are your natural membership base.
Give folks the tools and training to report their own stories.
Help people realize the value of their stories.

Talking to each other is how we are going to reach a common understanding of the public good.

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