Human Rights

At a conference last week, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda bluntly accused the Mexican military of murdering members of the so-called drug cartels to avenge its own losses in the country's bloody wave of prohibition-related violence.

Drug users are organizing in Asia. After two years of meetings, the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD) has been created in the vein of "nothing about us without us."

Indonesia has a new drug law, but it looks pretty much like business as usual for Southeast Asia, home of some of the world's harshest drug laws.

The drug policy wheel is turning, and the US and its hard-line repressive drug policies are becoming increasingly isolated in the hemisphere as in the past week alone 150 million Latin Americans came under one form of decriminalization or another.

The US is employing a new tactic in Afghanistan: Killing or capturing drug traffickers linked to the Taliban (though not those linked to the Karzai government). Is that even legal under international law? The US military says it is, but not everyone agrees.

As part of the Merida Initiative to provide Mexico with more than a billion dollars in anti-drug aid, Congress imposed human rights conditions on Mexico. Now, Human Rights Watch is urging the Obama administration to withhold some of that aid until Mexico deals with human rights abuses by its military.

Mexico's prohibition-related violence is very ugly, and it's not just the narcos committing atrocities. The Mexican military has been accused of more than 2,000 human rights abuses, ranging from theft and robbery to rape, torture, and murder as it wages war on the so-called cartels.

You see it all the time: A kindergartener arrested for kissing a classmate, a middle school student strip-searched in a desperate hunt for Ibuprofen, a high schooler jailed for bringing a joint to school. It's all part of the "War on Kids," according to a new documentary by that name. We review it this week.

As the United Nations issues its annual World Drugs Report, UNODC head Antonio Maria Costa finally notices his anti-prohibitionist critics and fights back. The critics are glad to engage. More importantly, Costa's attack signals that the legalization movement is gaining momentum.

At least 16 Asian nations and an equal number of others, including the US, apply the death penalty to certain drug offenses. It's time for that to stop, said human rights and harm reduction organizations, and they are using UN anti-drug day to pressure both the international community and offending countries to act now.