Global Drugs - Legalization of Drugs

Rev: January 23, 2012  

If you keep doing it the same way you keep getting the same results. For 41 years U.S. drug laws make the U.S. President and U.S. Attorney General keepers of illegal drug classifications of the Controlled Substance Act (of 1970) “Schedules”; resulting is too many drugs are improperly medically classified as to individual harms while solutions to criminal drug use are ignored. Illegal drugs are another situation where self serving politicians and lawyers control the Judaical, legal, and medical industry in response to the needs of criminal industry and needs of self serving politicians. Reform of illegal drugs and the illegal drug industry involves medical determinations (no longer criminal determinations) as to how to legalize, regulate, and educate regarding the use of drugs of potential abuse.  

“U.S. Should Legalize Marijuana to Curtail Mexican Drug War and Curb Illegal Immigration”

By Melissa Freemanin

Global, Latin America

What does the United States have to do with the Mexican drug war? More than you think. Over 22 million Americans age 12 and older use illegal drugs, and most don’t know or care where they come from. In many cases, U.S. drug addictions are fueling the drug cartels in Mexico, and contributing to the almost 50,000 people killed in drug wars over the last five years.

The number of deaths, however, doesn’t include the thousands who have disappeared, or the tens of thousands of children who have been orphaned by the violence. The U.S. needs to stop seeing itself as separate from Mexico’s drug wars and increase its efforts to end them, in part by rethinking its policies on drug legalization and regulation.

The connection of Mexican drug cartels to American drug use has been growing rapidly in a very short amount of time. The presence of Mexican cartels in U.S. cities has grown to more than 1,000 cities in 2010, up from 230 cities in 2008, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Not only that, but the National Drug Intelligence Center assesses with “high confidence” that Mexican-based transnational crime organizations “control distribution of most of the heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine available in the United States.” While the violence has remained mostly in Mexico, there have been investigations of abductions and killings that authorities suspect to be tied to cartels in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and other states.

These factors indicate that the U.S. is closely tied to the drug cartels of Mexico. Not only are we affected by the importing of drugs, but also by the effects on the Mexican population, which in turn affects immigration to the U.S. The more the violence across the border escalates, the more likely it is to increase on American soil, as well.

The cartels are driven by the immense profit of both producing their own drugs and also smuggling them from other parts of Latin America into the U.S. Authorities believe that the top organizations make $39 billion in wholesale profits annually. These profits would not be possible if the U.S. had better policies of regulating drug use in the within our borders.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recommended that governments consider new policies for legalizing and regulating drugs as a way to deny profits to drug cartels. They urged the Obama administration to end “the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others.”

But the U.S. and Mexico refused to consider the recommendation. The U.S. government unwillingness to even look into a change in its policies is a mistake. The expansion of Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. is clear evidence that the tactics we have been using in recent years aren’t working. While the U.S. has opened new law enforcement and intelligence outposts across Mexico over the last several years, they have made little more than a dent in dismantling the cartels –– killing or capturing only about two dozen high-ranking and mid-level drug traffickers.

As Daniel Robelo, a research associate for the Drug Policy Alliance argues in the Los Angeles Times, the root cause that needs to be addressed by the U.S. is drug prohibition. He writes, “These murders are not drug-related, they are prohibition-related –– committed by cartels that were spawned by drug prohibition, that derive their power from the inflated profits of prohibited but highly demanded commodities, and that operate in an underground economy in which violence is routinely employed to resolve disputes or remove business opponents.”

Legalizing marijuana, which 50% of Americans already support according to a Gallup poll, would sharply cut into cartels’ profits and the amount the U.S. spends in tracking down, prosecuting, and jailing dealers who handle the drug. Regulation would be easier to manage and revenue could be used in education campaigns to prevent hard drug use and in the rehabilitation of addicts.

Instead, current U.S. policies towards drug use encourage the perpetuation of underground drug cartels and indirectly contribute to the unacceptable numbers of people dying just across the border. Ignoring a possible solution to drug wars in favor of ineffective policies that support the status quo should not be an option. Mexican drug wars are, at least in part, our problem, and we will need to make changes if we are going to solve them.

Fin  

Russia proposed a plan to the international community to destroy Afghan drug production. Any attempt to destroy drugs produced in one location just installs a drug cartel government or relocates drugs to another location. The suppressing violence and drugs of a country like Mexico results in drug relocated to other countries (like Africa) caused by too much demand for illegal drugs and too much illegal money to be made from illegal drugs. The only solution for illegal drugs is for politicians to make them legal and medically regulated.        

“War on Drugs declared 100 years ago – and still going”

Mikhail Aristov

Jan 23, 2012 21:27 Moscow Time

Voice of Russia

The first ever international agreement on drug control was concluded one hundred years ago. A conference of 12 countries, including Russia held in The Hague, signed the International Opium Convention on the 23 of January 1912, which formulated its main principles as the use of opium exclusively for medical and scientific purposes and rendering assistance to the countries in their fight against drug abuse.

Later, another three conventions were worked out. The last one, Convention against Illicit Traffic in Drugs and Psychotropic Substances was adopted by the United Nations in 1988. These conventions provide the legal basis for establishing international control over drugs. In fact, last year, the UN Special Commission released a controversial report, which insists that it’s useless fighting against drug trafficking and moreover, it proposes to legalize several kinds of drugs. However, the opinion of the commission is not a UN statement, says head of the Russian Drug Control Service, Viktor Ivanov.

The war on drugs has not started at the global level yet. At present, we must state that it is going on at the regional level. The world drug sale is estimated at about 800 billion U.S. dollars annually.

A recent meeting on the ministerial level in Paris has legally qualified the transatlantic cocaine traffic and transnational heroine traffic from Afghanistan as a world drug crime structure. Such a formulation paves the way for the international community to use additional resources, including armed forces, if the government either cannot or has no desire to fight against drug crimes.

A member of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, Alexander Mikhailov has this to say concerning the spread of drugs.

Russia has adopted severe measures, including imposition of jail sentences up to 20 years for the sale of drugs. On the other hand, a primary drug preventive system is being actively implemented in Russia. It’s aimed at lowering the demand for drugs.

Afghanistan is the main supplier of drugs in the Eurasian region. The organized criminal groups across the world get one hundred billion U.S. dollar revenue annually. Afghan heroin is feeding international terrorism and organized crimes. Consequently, without destroying Afghan drug cartels, the fight against drug trafficking will be ineffective.

The Afghan economy is not growing and as a result, production and the sale of drugs is the only way for the survival of the country’s residents. Americans are not fighting against Afghan drug dealers. They directly say that the Afghan problem is a problem for Russia, while their problem is Bolivia and Colombia.

Two years ago, Russia put forward a concrete plan to the international community to destroy Afghan drug production. The plan provides for upgrading the Afghan drug production problem up to the level of threat to international peace and security by adopting a UN Security Council resolution. Unfortunately, so far, there is no noticeable progress in implementing the plan.

Fin

It would be simpler to legalize drugs if Congress removed congressional barriers to discussion about drug reform. There is one officially recognized congressional caucus -- the ‘Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control,’ established by law in 1985. Senate International Narcotics Control is a 26-year obstacle to illegal drug reform. U.S. politicians are the ones who want to retain a high level of global criminal drug activity with increasing U.S. illegal drug trafficking and increasing money laundering. U.S. Congressional politicians promote the corruptions of illegal drug industries. Come November 2012, voters need to indicate their displeasure with Washington DC politicians.