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Editorial:
International
Singularity
4/25/03
David Borden, Executive
Director, [email protected], 4/25/03
As usual, this week's drug
policy news lacks not in examples of US federal power exerted to protect
our government's drug war ideology abroad and at home. From Peru
to Canada, from California to Baja California, Washington's economic, diplomatic
and legal pressure subverts the ability of democracies to enact drug policies
in line with their preferences and interests:
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Peru's president goes straight
to the US embassy after meeting with demonstrating coca growers.
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Mexico's military involves itself
further and further in civilian law enforcement, spurred by US drug war
subsidies.
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Canada's leaders and citizens,
desiring marijuana decrim, fret as US drug czar John Walters threatens
border crackdowns exceeding those of the war on terrorism if Canada proceeds.
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Medical marijuana providers
in California face severe mandatory minimum federal drug sentences for
helping the seriously ill, despite voter and municipal sanction.
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Advocates at a conference discuss
the drug czar's illegal campaigning against ballot measures and the practical
effect of the government's anti-marijuana ads as prohibitionist advocacy.
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Crowning it all, narcocrats
around the globe gather in Vienna to reaffirm the drug war's policy stranglehold,
under the auspices of the US-dominated UN drug war bureaucracies.
And of course, many other examples if we looked only slightly further or
farther.
It's not that the democratic
process has no room for give or take with outside interests. In principle,
the interaction of different levels and nationalities of government can
serve to inform and improve the democratic process, resulting in better
outcomes than a single region or people might achieve based on their own
narrow information, interests or politics. We are, after all, one
world, and brought closer together by modern travel, trade and communication.
The problem is the sheer
singularity of it. US international drug bureaucrats, aided and abetted
by their soul-mates in fellow major international donor nations Sweden
and Japan, have locked the entire world into a complex and entrenched system
that guarantees the continuation of, and non-variance from drug prohibition
in virtually every nation. And federal power within our borders,
expanded by willing courts far beyond the levels authorized in the Constitution,
stomps hard against the will of voters and the rights of patients in states
and cities that wish merely to allow medical marijuana. In DC they
wouldn't even let us obey our own election laws to vote on it!
A growing international movement
is rising to challenge the prohibitionists, working internationally and
nationally, reaching across borders, political ideologies, cultures and
language, to break the stranglehold of the international drug treaties.
Bringing the global drug control regime into the sunshine and exposing
its true inner workings is one part of moving the issue forward and ending
drug prohibition in the 21st century.
-- END --
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Issue #284, 4/25/03
Editorial: International Singularity | Vienna: UN Reaffirms Prohibitionist Path, Cracks Appear in the Consensus as Clamor for Change Grows | Peru: Coca Farmers Claim Partial Victory After Meeting With President | If It's 20-Apr and We're in San Francisco, This Must Be NORML | California County, Patients Sue Federal Drug Warriors Over Medical Marijuana Raids | Newsbrief: Lying Tulia Undercover Cop Indicted for Perjury | Newsbrief: Canadian Government to Unveil Marijuana Decriminalization Bill in June, Newspaper Says | Newsbrief: Brazilian Health Ministry Proposes Legalization of Drug Possession | Newsbrief: Russia Declares War on Drug Barons | Newsbrief: This Week's Corrupt Cop Story | New WOLA Report on Mexico's Military in the War on Drugs | The Reformer's Calendar
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