For years, former Mexican President Vicente Fox has suggested that drug legalization needs to be on the agenda when discussing how to resolve prohibition-related problems like the wave of violence

Latin America: Mexico Ex-President Fox Lashes Out at President Calderon Over Drug War

For years, former Mexican President Vicente Fox has suggested that drug legalization needs to be on the agenda when discussing how to resolve prohibition-related problems like the wave of violence plaguing Mexico. Now, he's getting personal and political, as he attacks sitting President Felipe Calderon for what Fox is describing as a "failed" effort to send the military after the so-called drug cartels.

Fox and Calderon are both members of the conservate National Action Party (PAN), and Calderon replaced Fox in the Mexican presidency in December 2006. With Mexico already stricken by violent conflict among the cartels and between the cartels and Mexican law enforcement, Calderon called out the military to join the fray, but matters have only gotten worse. An estimated 14,000 people have been killed in the conflicts since Calderon sent in the soldiers, with 2,000 being killed in one city—Ciudad Juarez—this year alone.

Addressing reporters at the annual conference of the conservative European Popular Party in Vienna last weekend, Fox said Calderon's efforts against the cartels had gone astray and the military should return to the barracks. "The use of army in the fight against drug mafia and organized crime, the use of force against force gave no positive results. On the contrary, the number of crimes only grows," Fox told journalists on Saturday. "It's time to think of alternative ways to fight the crime," Fox said, adding that police and governments of Mexican states should be charged with anti-drug efforts on their territory, instead of federal forces.

Not that Fox himself had much better luck against the cartels, nor was he averse to using the military. While Fox was president between 2000 and 2006, he deployed troops to Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, and other states, especially after 2003, when violence began escalating. By 2005, nearly 1,400 were reported killed in the drug wars, and 2,000 more in 2006.

But those levels of violence, which once seemed extraordinary, would now be a welcome relief after nearly three years of Calderon's campaign and the harsh response from the cartels. This year's toll in Ciudad Juarez alone matches the toll nationwide for the last year of the Fox era.

Fox was also critical of the United States, saying it needed to do more to control arms trafficking, money laundering, and drug use. But he again questioned whether drug prohibition is the best way to attain those ends. "Drug consumption is a personal responsibility, not one of government, Fox said."Perhaps it is impossible to ask government to halt the supply of drugs to our children."

The British Home Office announced Tuesday that it is planning to ban several "legal highs," includ

The British Home Office announced Tuesday that it is planning to ban several "legal highs," including "Spice," the club drug GBL, and the stimulant drug BZP. The substances will be added to the British list of controlled substances by year's end, said Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

"There is a perception that many of the so called 'legal highs' are harmless, however in some cases people can be ingesting dangerous industrial fluids or smoking chemicals that can be even more harmful than cannabis," said Johnson. "Legal highs are an emerging threat, particularly to young people, and we have a duty to educate them about the dangers."

"Spice" is a sort of synthetic cannabinoid which is currently sold legally as a spray to apply to herbal cigarettes. It has already been banned in France and Germany. It will become a Class B drug--in the middle tier of the British classification scheme--like amphetamines or marijuana.

GBL (Gamma-butyrolactone) and a similar chemical, which are converted in to the Class C drug GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) in the body and often used as weekend party drugs, will become Class C drugs, the least serious drug classification. So will BZP (Benzylpiperazine) and related piperazines, which are stimulants taken as an alternative to amphetamine.

Under Britain's Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971, possession of Class C drugs can earn up to two years in prison, while possession of Class B drugs can earn up to five years. Dealing in either Class B or Class C drugs is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

The Home Office has announced an education campaign around these newly classified substances. It is set to start at the beginning of the school year next month.

In the past few years, Colorado-based activist Mason Tvert has taken the notion of comparing marijuana to alcohol and used it to great success, first in organizing college students around equalizin

The Tarheel State is about to become the latest to ban salvia divinorum, the potent but fast-acting hallucinogen that has become increasingly popular among young drug experimenters in recent years.

Just Chiming in, I Thought Prohibition was supposed to save us from ourselves? To protect us in some way?

Last week, 136 people died in the Indian state of Gujarat after drinking tainted alcohol, and the incident has stirred debate over the state's alcohol prohibition policy, in existence since 1960.

As the Rhode Island General Assembly rushed to adjourn last Friday, the Senate approved a resolution introduced that same day to create a nine-member commission to study a broad range of issues aro

As the world marks the end of the first century of drug prohibition -- the first international anti-drug convention was signed in Shanghai in 1909 -- the global anti-drug bureaucracy finds itself o

The Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy presents its third national conference, hosted by Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

Supposed free-market conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who is also an MD, called last week on the Senate floor for cigarettes and other tobacco products to be outlawed.

For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, residents of the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula have partaken of khat, an evergreen plant native to the region.

Phillip S. Smith, Writer/Editor

The Cato Institute invites you to a Capitol Hill Briefing -- Is It Time to End the International War on Drugs?

In an example of legislative reflex response similar to that around salvia divinorum, legislators in Colorado are moving to ban the designer drug N-benzylpiperazine, better known as BZP, despite li

Bismarck, North Dakota, resident Kenneth Rau, the first person arrested in the US on salvia divino

Media Advisory
For Immediate Release: April 14, 2009
Contact: Eric Friedman at (212) 382-6754 or Christina Bruno at (212) 382-6656

New York City Bar Committee Calls for Dialogue on Controlled Substances Act and Drug Prohibition

Committee on Drugs and the Law Releases Statement and Organizes April 29 Forum

The New York City Bar Association's Committee on Drugs and the Law has released a statement titled "A Wiser Course: Ending Drug Prohibition, Fifteen Years Later," referring to the Committee's 1994 report concluding that the costs of drug prohibition were too high to justify it as a policy. In the new statement, the Committee writes that "we are no closer to a drug-free society, and the problems associated with the illegal drug trade are worse than ever," and calls for a dialogue focusing on the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970. The statement is available on the home page of www.nycbar.org

The statement questions the logic of placing drug control in a medical paradigm controlled not by medical authorities but by the Department of Justice, and the specific placement of marijuana in Schedule I of the CSA, which is the most highly restrictive category and reserved for substances with a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety even under medical supervision. "Today, it is inexplicable that cocaine, fentanyl, methadone, and morphine are in Schedule II and thus available by prescription but marijuana is not," the Committee states. Until this issue is resolved, the statement suggests, there will continue to be a "medical marijuana" controversy.

On April 29th, the Committee is presenting a forum titled "Pleasure, Pain, Physicians and Police: The Law of Controlled Substances and the Practice of Medicine." Experts in law, medicine and history will discuss the CSA and its relationship to science, medical practice and the Commerce Clause.

What: Pleasure, Pain, Physicians and Police: The Law of Controlled Substances and the Practice of Medicine

Who: Marcus Reidenberg, MD, FACP, Professor of Pharmacology, Medicine, and Public Health, Head, Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Weill Cornell Medical College; Joseph Spillane, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History, University of Florida; Buford Terrell, JD, LLM, Professor of Law (ret.), South Texas College of Law.

When: Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 6:30 p.m.

Where: New York City Bar, 42 West 44th St., New York NY 10036

About the Association

The New York City Bar Association (www.nycbar.org), since its founding in 1870, has been dedicated to maintaining the high ethical standards of the profession, promoting reform of the law and providing service to the profession and the public. The Association continues to work for political, legal and social reform while implementing innovative means to help the disadvantaged. Protecting the public's welfare remains one of the Association's highest priorities.