I had a discussion recently on one of the comment boards on Tim Blair, about whether direct aid or trade agreements are more effective in solving the problem of third world poverty. The right wingers love to tout the WTO free trade spin, but I just can't buy it. Like I told them, I'm all for fair trade but what they're proposing is a free ride on the backs of the indigineous third world for the benefit of the multicorp's profit margin.
I'll believe in free trade when countries are allowed to export what they are capable of producing independently at a profit. Case in point is Ghana, a reasonably peaceful and relatively stable country in sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana has a cash crop that could promote upward economic mobility in a democratic manner among its poorest citizens and would eliminate the need for US aid (and oversight). That crop is cannabis and the country's economy already rests to some extent on what they call ganja.
Marijuana grown in Ghana is of good quality, plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Twenty neatly rolled sticks of pot, or about half an ounce, sell for about $3.
That's right, good pot sells for $6 an ounce in Ghana. Here is the highest stage of capitalism - the free market - in action.
Ghana is not involved in dangerous drugs. It contributes only to the cannabis consumers' economy and is a living example of what legal cannabis cultivation might look like. Africa is a violatile continent rife with political unrest. Not so there.
Ghana is one of the most peaceful countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The country rarely sees any violence (a benefit of pot-smoking?), has a democratically elected government and boasts one of the freest societies in Africa. Pot has been grown and smoked in the country for decades, drawing little comment. In Accra, the coastal capital of Ghana, people smoke discreetly, to be sure, because the sale and possession of pot is technically illegal. But pot is easy to purchase, arrests are rare, and smoking is popular, especially among American and European aid workers in the country.
And the next time the prohibitionists tell you how dangerous marijuana is, please consider this. The author, having lived there himself for two years notes:
... I never saw any signs of pot ripping apart the fabric of Ghanaian life. There are no drug lords in Accra, no gun-toting bodyguards or pot addicts strewn across the city's derelict roads.
Just the opposite is occurring, actually. Pot is giving a people starved for economic opportunity a chance to participate in the global economy. Ghana is one of the losers in the world's experiment with widening trade. Goods flood into Ghana from China, Brazil, Mexico, even the U.S. And not just manufactured products either. Butter is imported from France, pasta and canned tomatoes from Italy, rolled oats from Germany and rice from the U.S. Because the cost of producing and shipping these foods is subsidized by European, U.S. and Canadian governments, their cost in Ghana is sometimes less than it is in the country of origin. And even if it isn't, these imports ruin the lives of African food producers. American rice, imported into Ghana, sells for substantially less than rice grown in Ghana.
There's that US sudsidized rice again. A major staple of the third world and the US producers own the market. The same thing is happening all over Central and South America. The only cash crops that any of these countries can competitively produce are those that keep to market without spoiling. Keep in mind that goods still travel by goat cart, if not by foot, over makeshift bridges and deeply rutted dirt roads. Crops like cannabis and coca leaf are almost the only ones that fit that bill and they do have legitimate medicinal and agricultural applications within civil society.
Nonetheless, my government has deemed the elimination of these two innocent plants to be of the highest priority. Ignoring the generations-old traditional and ritual uses of these herbs, they deem them to be so dangerous as to justify poisoning the planet with herbicidal warfare.
Against this menace stands the DEA. About six months ago, the agency privately persuaded the government of Ghana to accept its advice and mount a campaign of resistance against pot production and distribution. The DEA offered the carrot of "technical assistance" - jargon in foreign-aid speak for equipment and cash that African police, who are woefully underpaid, long for.
For now the DEA-inspired move against Ghana's pot growers has resulted in publicized destruction of fields, some arrests – and more aid for Ghana from a grateful U.S. government.
Coincindentally the consumption markets are not under the control of multinational corporations but they do have a lock on the market for weapons of mass eradication.
Unfortunately US aid in the form of weapons of mass suppression will not benefit the Ghananians either, and will no doubt eventually destablize the country but draw your own conclusions. Read the whole article.
DARE claims its program informs the students with the truth, with facts such as this:
Most teens do not realize that their first attempt at recreational drugs can lead to death.
I'm not saying that's not true, the problem is DARE preaches it as a major consequence and the reality of the young people's experience will be that most of the people they know who are taking drugs do not die - the first time or anytime thereafter. You can't fool most teenagers with half-truths.
Carla however seems convinced. She's a state level team leader of the DARE Youth Corps and travels around the state for speaking engagements. Or maybe she just likes attending the conference; it's her second year and it sounds like a non-stop prohibitionist's frolic.
Carla and her mother, Karen, stayed in the dorms at the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) training headquarters. After individual introductions and group activities, the two spent days in classroom settings observing videos of drug parties known as "raves" and learning about what effects specific drugs have on the body. In addition, they spent time with the FBI and DEA agents who enacted drug raids, explained their raid and protective equipment, demonstrated their sharp shooting skills at the shooting range and offered information to parents on supporting and communicating with teens and other parents. Nighttime activities included tours of various memorials in Washington, D.C., and a visit to the DEA museum near the Pentagon.
I'd like to remind you that DARE is funded with public money. Carla's little junket was no doubt funded out of the 3.5 million of the Ohio taxpayers' dollars allocated to the program from the state's coffers. You could restore a lot of decimated arts and physical education programs in the school systems with that kind of money, which would be a much more effective deterrent to drug abuse.
Teenagers do drugs for many reasons but one of the largest is simple boredom. I believe if the schools were able to provide more avenues for kids to excel at something, drug abuse would diminish accordingly. Given a choice I'd bet my tax dollars on it. Maybe it's time the voters demand that option.
He discovered that DARE had lied to him and that it was possible to engage in occasional use without suffering negative lifelong consequences as a result of his youthful experimentation. In fact science would suggest he was benefited by it.
"The policy of the Centre for Addiction and Mental health is that drug use isn't a no-no right across the board," says Dr. David Wolfe, RBC chair in children's mental health at the Centre... "A certain amount of drug experimentation is developmentally normal."
Not only is it normal, it can actually be a good thing. "There's some research that suggests that kids who don't experiment at all have some other social adjustment problems," says Wolfe. "It's one of those cases where too much is a bad thing and too little doesn't mean that you're necessarily healthy either."
Hutsul is only 26 years old but offers remarkably mature insights on responsible, recreational use of consciousness enhancing substances. His closing statement sums it up.
The very fact that the question is on the table tells me that drugs might not be as evil as they once told us. And it's okay to "Just Say Maybe."
This is what DARE should be teaching. Rather than preaching the unattainable 'Just Say No', our children would be better protected by teaching them when to say yes. Warning them is fine, but misinforming them contributes nothing to their safety.
Pete is back from his holiday hiatus and I was happily catching up on Drug War Rant this afternoon. He is also nominated and I had logged onto the site intending to vote for him and TalkLeft, who I was certain would also be on the list. What a delightful present to see our own humble blog there as well.
Whoever nominated me, thanks a bunch. I've never been up for an award before and as trite as it sounds, I know we can't possibly win but it really is cool to find our name on that roster. I mean gee whiz, we were next to Lessig.
I use the editorial 'we' a lot here and it's because although the nuts and bolts of Last One Speaks is a sole enterprise, the content - if you'll excuse the pun - is a joint venture. The news here does not come from paid aggregators, (we operate on a zero budget). I gather and distill from listservs and two dozen newsletters. It's many voices of reason that raise one united call for change here and if I was giving an acceptance speech, I would be sure to thank Preston Peet for hosting all the folks breaking the news on the drugwar.com list and Jules Siegel for the same at NewsroomL.
Feeling lucky to be alive tonight and by the way, thanks for checking in.
The workshop was fabulous. Now having been to dozens of these teachings, this one is in the top three and if The Real Cost of Prisons Project is hosting a gathering in your neighborhood, I recommend you attend. I am not a numbers kind of person; I have an aversion to absolute values. However, Mark Brenner, (holding sole court because Eduardo Velazquez was out of the country), in an impressively organized presentation, delivered the statistics in an engaging and thoroughly comprehensible manner and the timing and content of the passouts almost eliminated the need to take notes. I actually wished it had been longer.
I learned some things I didn't know and I'll have more to say about that later. However, the stellar program content aside, this project bills itself as vehicle to draw activists together into the common cause and I don't want to let the moment pass without saying how really cool it was to put a face on the local fellowship of my hitherto unknown kindred souls.
It's a small valley and we all wear more than one hat. I realized as the day went on that I knew almost everyone in attendance in another context and although we came to the table with diverse agendas, we found much common ground.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the economic arguments for reform, an area where my knowledge is thin and also the opportunity to network with local activists. Oddly, I have many more contacts internationally than I do here in the Valley.
It's an archived piece, but Carroll's points are still fresh. Framed within the context of the current political climate in our legendarily liberal Massachusetts he details the brutal nature of the justice system in these times. It's not a pretty picture.
The death penalty was imposed here for first time since 1947, and the grisly murder of convicted child rapist Father John J. Geoghan brought to the light the lawless conditions with which prisoners are virtually tortured. Many voiced the thought Geoghan deserved his fate but indifferent guards and sadistic long timers who run the inmate hierarchy are also endangering the multitude of non-violent drug offenders that currently swell the prison population. This is not a punishment that fits the crime.
Looking at it nationally, yet another judge speaks in support of change.
...Robert A. Mulligan, chief administrative judge of Massachusetts, noted current characteristics of U.S. criminal justice. The American prison population recently went over 2 million for the first time, putting the United States ahead of Russia as the world capital of incarceration. Add to that number those on parole or probation and the total under "correctional" control grows to 7 million. Thirty years ago, one in 1,000 Americans was locked up; today, almost five are. In famously liberal Massachusetts, the prison population has grown, since 1980, from under 6,000 to almost 23,000. In 2003, for the first time, the amount of money Massachusetts spent on prisons was more than what it spent on higher education.
And for anyone who doesn't think this war is racist.
Mulligan, for one, points to the "war on drugs" as key, a war that has seen the rate of imprisonment of drug offenders jump by 700 percent since 1980; a war that depends on narrowly targeted law enforcement and on mandatory prison sentences. In 2002, 80 percent of those receiving such sentences were minorities.
The article also reports there are more African-American men under the supervision of the courts than there are in college. Was this the Bush administration's idea of equal opportunity education when they entered the affirmative action Supreme Court case?
The police routinely allow supporters to line the presidential motorcade route and segregate the protesters far from sight and mind. The storm troopers evoke security reasons for this suppression of legal dissent, which is patently absurd, any assassin could simply pretend to be a Bush supporter. What they really want are photo ops for the press, uncluttered by that untidy freedom of speech thing. Wouldn't want to upset George with a lot of anti-Bush signs in the footage. I know he's admitted he doesn't actually read anything but I bet he sometimes looks at the pictures.
And I sure am glad they spent my hard earned tax dollars protecting our Commander in Thieves from these obvious deviants who refused to be herded into the free speech interment camps:
65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us."
.....three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone.
.....a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, "War is good business. Invest your sons."
.....Christine Mains and her 5-year-old daughter .... Police arrested Mains and took her and her crying daughter away in separate squad cars.
Am I just getting old or didn't they used to kiss babies instead of arresting them during election years?
``I realized it is in the best interest of Stratford High School and of my students for me to make a change,'' George McCrackin said in a statement.
True enough. He'll be much too busy preparing to defend the two lawsuits filed by those students he was so diligently watching to properly attend to his other duties.
I don't often rejoice in other's misfortune but in this case, he committed a disgraceful act and it feels like justice that he suffers some disgrace in return.
To support his habit, Howell later admitted to stealing cocaine from investigations he was involved in. Gonzalez points out that if he had the cocaine on him while he was working at the old T.B.I. building in South Nashville, he would have been in possession of a drug within 1,000 feet of Tennessee Preparatory School. And we already know he had been distributing cocaine as well. So why wasn't he prosecuted under the same statute used against the Hispanic defendants? In fact, all Howell got after pleading guilty to two counts of tampering with evidence was three years probation.
"What this says," Gonzales charges, "is that the district attorney's office will prosecute Hispanics who come within 1,000 feet of a school but not the law enforcement officers who likewise have drugs within 1,000 feet of a school."
Some pain doctors are organizing to push back, and in recent months a loose national movement has been formed to contest what some call the "war" being waged against pain doctors, pharmacists and suffering patients. A new group called the Pain Relief Network is organizing a march on Washington in April to protest the prosecutions and has hired an attorney to develop a legal strategy for appealing some of the convictions.
Always a nice time of year to visit our nation's capitol. The cherry trees should be blooming.
``Under federal law, marijuana is contraband, and by policy we destroy contraband,'' said U.S. attorney's spokesman Dick Weatherbee. ``There is obviously a dilemma here.''
The feds seem unconcerned about the potential fines or jail time while they thus defy the court's order. Why should they be? It seems unlikely they would be incarcerated and any fines would be paid with our tax dollars anyway. All the same, we await the ruling on this one with great interest.
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Finally, in Wisconsin, State Rep. Gregg Underheim made an abrupt about-face once confronted with his own diagnosis of prostate cancer. Thankfully his was a happy ending and he beat the disease without chemo, however it got him to thinking.
The Oshkosh Republican has decided to go against his party's leadership and introduce a bill that would let doctors prescribe marijuana for medical reasons.
Underheim acknowleges he faces an uphill battle in the legislature but armed with the insight of someone who has faced down death he had this to say on the subject.
Underheim said he doesn't think the average person would object to his bill.
"I think the public is much more comfortable with this than policy-makers are right now," he said.
He's right about that. Mr. Underheim, I'm sorry it took such an unpleasant experience to get you to buy your ticket, but welcome aboard the drug policy reform train.
One wonders why they didn't want this news to hit the front page.
...while most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism.
The Bush Administration and its Congressional allies tucked away these new executive powers in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, a legislative behemoth that funds all the intelligence activities of the federal government. The Act included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."
Could it be because the public might be upset that deceitful Dubya just eliminated the judicial oversight necessary to protect the Fourth Amendment? Forget about the flap over your library records in Patriot I, this new piece invasive legislation allows the FBI to explore every aspect of your material records and not only do they not have to justify the investigation, they don't even have to tell - anyone - that they're doing it and the keepers of your records are not allowed to tell you they were released.
Somehow this doesn't sound like the democracy they taught me about in elementary school.
In Columbia, Mama Coca's petition in protest of irresponsible eradication policy is picking up more signatures. The count is currently at 1,938 and the list is becoming a veritable who's who of the biggest players in the international reform movement. This is just a little reminder to add your name to this growing roll call to protect the lungs of our planetary ecosystem.
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My dear friend Paul von Hartmann has a new blog to showcase his unifying strategy to end Cannabis prohibition in 2004. Working from France, Paul is a one-man NGO dedicated to the acceptance of cannabis in its rightful place as the most beneficial plant on earth. His many ongoing projects including Project Peace, The Project Peace blog and Between The Dreams function as a one stop shop for an education on every aspect of this magical botanical.
Which reminds of something I read today pointing out the futility of eradicating the innocent plants when it's the chemical derivatives that are dangerous and by the way the chemicals used in processing the drugs generally come from US corporations. If the prohibitionists were really serious about eradicating the drugs, they could simply eliminate the source of those processing chemicals. Of course that would mean smaller dividends for the stockholders in the chemical corporations instead of the windfall they enjoy from the sales of the eradication agents with which they are currently poisoning the planet.
Does anybody think these companies really don't know that their product is being used to support a black market enterprise? I'm pretty certain the CEOs have at least guessed.
You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You're the best kind of weblogger. Way to go!
Which is a crock. I have no social life unless you count the 40 hours a week I spend toiling at the law firm and the 45 minutes I spend at City on the way home. Speaking of City, I want to welcome its new owner John Riley who tells me he's joined the ranks of our regular readers.
While I'm at it, let me welcome all of the new readers who have been visiting our humble home. I only have a free hit-counter so I get no statistics, and usually have no idea where the spike in my counts come from. I'm often curious however about how you found me, so if you feel so inclined, please drop me a line and introduce yourself.
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