Latest news on drug policy issues in the international media

 

  • Coca Leaf: The Heritage of the Andes

    Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU)
    April 8, 2008

    A film by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU)

  • Cannabis dreams drift away

    Authorities in Switzerland are clamping down on cannabis
    Swissinfo (Switzerland)
    Tuesday, April 4, 2008

    Following decades of rising cannabis use and talk of liberalisation, Switzerland had appeared poised to become the marijuana capital of Europe. The country still boasts some of the highest rates of cannabis use in Europe, but Switzerland's pot movement has taken a hit in the past few years: proposed liberalisation did not come to pass, enforcement has been on the rise and use among the country's youth has decreased. Enforcement varies widely from canton to canton, but cannabis remains an illegal narcotic throughout the country. Possession, use and distribution are punishable by up to three years in prison, and thousands of offences are recorded each year.

  • Coca Leaf Defended by Growers, Scientists… and Taxi Drivers

    Bernarda Claure
    Inter Press Service (IPS)
    March 24 , 2008

    "They will have to kill us to make us stop planting coca," Bolivian coca grower Luis Mamani told IPS in response to a call from the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) to prohibit traditional uses of the plant like coca leaf chewing. "It is a historic error to try to ban coca. We are not going to allow it," Mamani vehemently stated.

  • Fighting for the Right to Chew Coca

    Time Magazine (US)
    Monday, March 17, 2008

    The Bolivian delegation was the first to issue what it called an "energetic protest" against the INCB's recommendations during the agency's annual meeting this week in Vienna. It also put forward a proposal to remove coca from the U.N.'s narcotics list. That's not likely to happen. The big question is whether the U.N. will adopt the INCB proposal — which would essentially leave Bolivia and Peru in breach of international law if they continue to allow coca's non-narcotic use and commercialization. That in turn could result in the U.N. calling for commercial or other embargoes against them.

  • Bolivia to defend coca leaf at UN

    BBC News
    Monday, March 10, 2008

    Bolivian officials at a conference on illegal drugs in Vienna are planning to ask the UN to remove the coca plant from its list of dangerous drugs. The UN's International Narcotics Control Board has called on Bolivia to ban coca chewing, and the use of the plant in products such as tea. Bolivia says such a ban would be an attack on its culture.

  • UN needs to chew on its drug policy

    Steven Edwards
    National Post (Canada)
    Thursday, March 6, 2008

    We don’t ban beer and spirits because some folk abuse alcohol. Yet as part of its bid to stamp out illicit cocaine consumption, the United Nations drug watchdog is telling millions of indigenous South Americans to ditch their millennia-old coca-chewing and coca tea-making traditions — and calling on their governments to criminalize the activities.

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  • The Wire's War on the Drug War

    Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon
    Time Magazine (US)
    Wednesday, March 5, 2008

    If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

  • Just Say Coca

    Jimmy Langman
    Newsweek (US)
    October 30, 2006

    Bolivian president Evo Morales recently implored the United Nations to give the coca leaf a new life. A former coca farmer himself, Morales asked the General Assembly to focus on coca's possible future as the raw material for a lucrative consumer-goods industry--not its nefarious present, as the source of the international cocaine trade. "This is the coca leaf, it is green, and not white like cocaine," Morales lectured, waving one limp little leaf at the hall of surprised dignitaries. Why, he demanded, is it "legal for Coca-Cola" but not other consumer or medicinal uses?

  • Study finds no cancer-marijuana connection

    The Washington Post (US)
    Friday, May 26, 2006

    marijuana-studyThe largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years. Marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.

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