Last week, the British government announced it was returning marijuana to Class B drug status, signaling an end to the four-year experiment that saw the herb downgraded to a less serious Class C dr

The Vietnamese National Assembly is considering legislation that would make drug use an administrative violation -- not a crime.

The only officially-sanctioned safe injection site in North America, Vancouver's InSite will have to close its doors June 30 if the Canadian feder

More than 100 people, including at least 20 police officers, died in prohibition-related violence in Mexico in the past week as drug trafficking organizations -- the so-called cartels -- shot it ou

Lawmakers in the United States this week took the first steps toward approving a $1.6 billion dollar, three-year anti-drug assistance package for Mexico that is heavily weighted toward aid for the

Countries around the world, but particularly in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, continue to resort to the death penalty for drug offenses.

Saturday was the first Saturday in May, which for more than 30 years has been marked by marches and demonstrations in support of marijuana legalization.

As has been expected for months, the British Labor government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Wednesday that it will reclassify marijuana as a Class B drug, theoretically subjecting users

Marijuana is big business in the Netherlands, if estimates from the Dutch TV program Reporter are to be believed -- and no one

Iran Wednesday accused the US and NATO of indifference to Afghanistan's booming opium trade and called on the West to help fight smuggling of opium and heroin across the border the two countries sh

Finally making good on his proposal nearly a year ago, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reclassification of marijuana as a class B drug is so obtuse and such poor public policy that the police are refusing their newly-given power:

Nearly six out of 10 cases of cannabis possession used to be dealt with by arrest and formal caution before it was downgraded. But police chiefs are not expected to return to such a practice, blamed for wasting thousands of officers' hours that could be spent on other crime-fighting duties.

The Association of Chief Police Officers told the Guardian: "The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting."

When police go so far as to reject an increase in their power, especially when it comes to drugs, it should be clear that your policies are laughable. Adding to his obtuseness, PM Brown rejected the recommendation of his own panel of 23 highly-qualified drug policy experts when they ruled harsher reclassification was the wrong thing to do. It’s doubtful, but hopefully the combination of objections by UK law enforcement and drug policy experts will finally make him realize, and admit, that the policy is flawed.

Making this reclassification even more ridiculous, the government is having major problems keeping drugs out of the hands of prisoners:

DRUGS worth more than £100million are being traded in prisons every year, it was revealed yesterday.

The claim was made by a former drugs treatment chief who said half of all prisoners are addicts.

As much as 44lb (20kg) of narcotics, mainly heroin, were smuggled into jails every week said the former official, Hussain Djemil.

It seems there should be more pressing concerns for British drug policy officials. If they can’t keep hard drugs out of the prisons (which come complete with strip and body cavity searches, drug dogs, prison guards, constant surveillance, etc.), what’s the point of increasing sentences for a soft drug like marijuana? Of the millions of cannabis users, some of those who will be caught will go to jail for even longer where they will be exposed to a 100 million dollar industry that will provide them cheaper drugs! Once again, how and why is reclassification going to be an effective deterrent?

Police refusing to adhere to the reclassification policy is a wonderful sign. It sets a good precedent of dissonance toward misinformed or abusive authority that is rarely seen directed toward elected officials over drug policy matters. If more police chiefs would follow this example, drug prohibition would be in greater jeopardy. Hopefully this will lead to more reasonable people standing up in civil disobedience against drug policies that they know to be immoral and ineffective.

[Courtesy of Hands Off Cain]

In this issue:

IRAN. 12 CONVICTS HANGED
NORTH CAROLINA (USA). DEATH ROW INMATE WALKS FREE-129TH EXONERATION
DRC. FIGHTING TO ESTABLISH THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE DEATH PENALTY
SAUDI ARABIA. 3 PAKISTANIS EXECUTED FOR HASHISH SMUGGLING

IRAN. 12 CONVICTS HANGED

Drug traffickers after being executed in Iran

May 5, 2008: Iran has hanged 12 convicted criminals, including nine drug traffickers and three rapists, the latest in a growing number of executions in the Islamic republic, reports said. Nine drug traffickers were hanged, one of them in public, in the northeastern city of Bojnourd, Kayhan newspaper reported, without giving the date of the executions. This appears to be the first report of a public execution in Iran since judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi ordered in January that there should be no more public executions without his approval. "One person was hanged in public," said Kayhan, without giving further details. Shahroudi's decree came after a growing number of public executions in Iran, including the hanging of two convicted murderers in the centre of Tehran. It was not clear if he had approved the reported public execution in Bojnourd. Meanwhile, three criminals convicted of kidnapping and raping at least 11 girls were sent to the gallows in the southwestern city of Ahvaz on May 3, the Quds newspaper reported.
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NORTH CAROLINA (USA). DEATH ROW INMATE WALKS FREE-129TH EXONERATION

May 2, 2008: The state of North Carolina dropped all charges against Levon Jones, and he was freed after spending 13 years on death row. U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle overturned Jones's conviction two years ago, but he was held in prison awaiting a possible retrial until prosecutors announced that they were dismissing all charges. Judge Boyle criticized Jones's defense attorneys for "constitutionally deficient" performance, noting their failure to research the history and credibility of Lovely Lorden, the prosecution's star witness. The judge noted, "Given the weakness of the prosecution's case and its heavy reliance on the testimony of Lovely Lorden, there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different." In April, Jones's new defense team filed an affidavit in which Lorden said, "Much of what I testified to was simply not true." She also stated that a detective coached her on what to say. Additionally, she collected $4,000 from the governor's office for offering the clues that led to the arrest of Jones. Jones's retrial was set to begin May 12th, 2008. Duplin County District Attorney Dewey Hudson decided to ask the judge in the case to drop all charges. Jones was originally convicted of robbing and shooting a bootlegger named Leamon Grady. Levon Jones is the 129th inmate to be exonerated and freed from death row since 1973. He is the 8th such inmate freed from North Carolina, and the 6th person in the country exonerated in the past 12 months.
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DRC. FIGHTING TO ESTABLISH THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE DEATH PENALTY

Liévin N'Gondji

May 1, 2008: ongoing penal code reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo is giving abolitionists the chance to have the death penalty recognised as unconstitutional. The current Democratic Republic of Congo constitution, in place since early 2006, recognises the "right to life" and the "inviolable nature of human beings". A proposition for an article explicitly abolishing the death penalty was rejected by the national parliament during the text's elaboration in 2005. "We have submitted two requests, one to the director of public prosecutions' office and a second to the Ministry of Justice" to formally establish the unconstitutionality of the death penalty, explains Liévin N'Gondji, a lawyer and president of Culture for Peace and Justice (CPJ), member of the World and Congolese Coalitions against the death penalty. Thanks to international aid, the DRC's judicial system is being reformed and donors financing the project have invited CPJ to participate in the joint justice Commission, principally responsible for revising the penal code. N'Gondji estimates that "approximately three quarters of those present were in agreement" with his position on the unconstitutionality of capital punishment. According to N'Gondji, the Commission will make its recommendations to the government by the end of May. The latter should then make a decision quickly. "The next three months will be crucial", he believes.
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SAUDI ARABIA. 3 PAKISTANIS EXECUTED FOR HASHISH SMUGGLING

May 1, 2008: Zargar Sadajan, Roajan Sodajar, and Naik Mohammed Malak Mohammed, all Pakistanis, were executed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after being convicted of receiving large quantities of hashish. A statement released by the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed that the men were convicted by the court, and the verdict was approved by the Cassation Court and the Supreme Judicial Council.

Here in Mexico's capital, several thousand people gathered at the Alameda Central, a large park in the historic center of the city, to celebrate Global Marijuana Day. Punks, Goths, hippies, and members of all the other "urban tribes" that constitute the youth counterculture of one of the world's premier cities came together for a day of respect, tolerance, music, and above all, to call for the legalization of the sacred herb.

Of course, it's not just the youth cultures of Mexico City that we're talking about here; it's the global cannabis culture. Cannabis Nation knows no boundaries. In many respects, I could have been standing in Memphis or Malmo or Madrid or Mombasa or Minsk--the t-shirts and slogan are the same, the concerns roughly identical. I'll say this for the global prohibition of marijuana: It has created a global culture of resistance that supercedes national identities or barriers.

The music and musicians were spot-on, but lyrically and rhythmically. Some of the songs were pure celebration:

We're going to the beach and I wanna smoke
We're going to dance and toke

Some of the songs were highly politicized and, naturally, critical of the US. One rapper compared Bush ("creating hell on earth") with Hitler and Hernan Cortes, placing him squarely in a particularly Mexican pantheon of villains.

Speaking of politics, one of the great battles going on in Mexico right now is over the government's efforts to privatize Pemex, the state oil monopoly. For many Mexicans, Pemex is a symbol of the Revolution a century ago that overthrew foreign domination. After the Revolution, the Mexicans expropriated the foreign oil companies; now they fear the government is going to give the national oil industry back to the foreigners. One sign at the march tied that struggle to the struggle for marijuana legalization:

Mariguana y petroleo
Eso es nuestro patrimonio

Marijuana and Oil
That's our patrimony

The police presence was minimal, and as far as I could see, there were no problems and no arrests, although pot-smoking was open and frequent throughout the day.

I took lots of photos, as you can see. (Sixteen more below the fold.)Sadly, my memory stick got full, and I missed some of the potentially most impressive shots, when the multitude was marching down Avenida Juarez, past the Bellas Artes palace and in front of some of the old colonial buildings in the city center. Still, Global Marijuana Day in Mexico City was a trip. Enjoy the photos, and look for a full report on the action in the Chronicle later this week.

As we reported on Friday, Culiacan, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, was the scene of a two-day forum last week, the International Forum on Illicit Drugs, where there was much criticism of the Mexican drug war and the planned escalation of it envisaged by Plan Merida, the $1.4 anti-drug aid package cooked up by the Bush and Calderon administrations.

The so-called "narco-violence," which might more accurately be called "prohibition-related violence," was, unsurprisingly, a central concern of presenters at the forum. In the year and a half since President Calderon took office and unleashed the Mexican military on the narcos, some 4,000 people have been killed. As if to punctuate that concern, just as the conference was wrapping up Wednesday, a series of armed confrontations broke out in central Culiacan.

Sparked by a joint military-federal police sweep that was attacked by AK-47-wielding narcos in a Chevy Tahoe, gun battles broke out across the city as narcos swooped in to lend aid to their colleagues being harassed and captured by the law and other, rival narcos intervened. In one shoot-out between rival narco factions, two men were killed. In another shoot-out, between narcos and state police, two cops were killed. The military and police arrested 13 presumed cartel gun-men and seized a huge arsenal of heavy weapons, cash, and drugs.

Thursday morning, military pick-ups and Hummers were cruising the streets of Culiacan, soldiers at their posts in back with heavy machine guns. Military helicopters buzzed over the city, although it was unclear whether they were supporting urban ground operations or were on their way to search for marijuana and poppy fields in the nearby mountains.

(I apologize for not having any photos of this stuff. My camera battery went dead Tuesday morning, and having brought with me the wrong bag of electronic stuff, I couldn't recharge it. I went to five different camera stores in Culiacan looking for either a new battery or a charger, to no avail. I finally found a store in Mexico City Friday that charged it for me, so I have lots of photos of Saturday's Global Marijuana March in Mexico City. They will show up in a blog post later today.)

The heavy military and law enforcement presence didn’t do much good. Friday night, the narcos struck back, ambushing a federal police patrol in the heart of Culican, killing four officers and leaving three other seriously wounded. But it wasn't just narcos vs. cops and soldiers Friday night. As reported by the Mexican news agency Notimex, a little after 11 Friday night, at least 60 armed men broke into three houses in a city neighborhood and seized five men, then took off in a 15-vehicle convoy, which was in turn attacked, leaving one man dead at that scene. At the same time, two other shoot-outs erupted in different neighborhoods of the city, while simultaneously, on the outskirts of town, presumed narcos shot and killed two Culiacan city police.

It's not always easy to figure out who is killing whom. There are local, state, and federal police, any one of whom could be working for the cartels. There's the army. Then there are the competing cartels themselves. In Culiacan, long controlled by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel, Guzman and his group are being challenged by the Arrellano Felix Juarez cartel, which wants to take over "la plaza," or the franchise, as the local drug connection is known. Just to complicate things further, the Juarez cartel is allegedly being aided by the Zetas, the former elite anti-drug soldiers turned cartel hit-men, who usually work for the Gulf cartel.

And this is just in Culiacan. There are other prohibition-related killings every day, soldiers and police being assassinated every day. On Saturday, the Mexican secretary of public security held a ceremony to honor the nine federal police killed by the narcos in the last few days. Another was gunned down in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan Friday night, too.

All of this pathology, of course, is a direct result of prohibitionist drug polices aggressively pursued by Washington and Mexico City. And what is their response? Let's have more of the same, only more so.

This week, high-level US and Mexican officials spoke out in favor of Plan Mérida, the three-year, $1.4 billion anti-drug package designed to assist the Mexican government in its ongoing battle wit

The conservative Dutch cabinet last Friday formally proposed a ban on the sale of psychedelic mushrooms. The proposal now goes before the Dutch parliament, where it is expected to pass.

In a ruling last Friday, the Canadian Supreme Court held that the use of drug-sniffing dogs in a random s

Media Release 28 April 2008

Cops up the Ante on Nimbin Mardi Grass

Police today informed the organisers of the Nimbin Mardi Grass that they will be making an application to close the Nimbin Museum and the Hemp Bar for 72 hours over Mardi Grass. 

"The police are using a piece of archaic legislation (Section 15C of the Restricted Premises Act 1943) to, in effect. close two of Nimbin's most significant tourist attractions during the busiest weekend of the year," said spokesperson for the Nimbin Mardi Grass Organising Group and Nimbin Museum, Michael Balderstone.

The application will go before a magistrate in the Lismore court on Friday morning.

Balderstone described the action as "antagonistic and provocative."

"The police keep assuring us they want a safe Mardi Grass," he said. "What's the closing of the Museum and the Hemp Bar during Mardi Grass got to do with safety?"  

"If one wanted a safe weekend in Nimbin, one would close the pub," he said.

"But it's another day in Nimbin and another day of Drug War harassment by the Lismore Area Command," said Balderstone.

"The public money being wasted by the local police trying to suppress Australia's second most popular tourism destination is as stupid as it is appalling," he said.

"Recent media debate about trial-ing some kind of legalised cannabis supply has clearly shown the north coast community of NSW, if not all of Australia, is ready for it," he said.

Further information

Michael Balderstone 02 6689 1848

Inspector Steve Clark 02 6626 0799

"Too many police and too little justice."

Hans van Duijn, head of the Dutch police union, told Radio Netherla