News Brief

A poll conducted last month by the Angus Reid Global Monitor found that a plurality of Britons -- 41%--believe people caught possessing marijuana for their personal use should face the penalties associated with Class C drugs. Another 27% said marijuana possessors should face no penalty at all.

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of Class C drugs (marijuana, tranquilizers) is punishable by up to two years in prison, possession of Class B drugs (amphetamines, barbiturates) garners up to five years, and possession of Class A drugs (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine) is worth up to seven years. Marijuana was down-scheduled to Class C in 2005, but the Labor government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown is hinting broadly that it will reschedule it back to the more serious Class B in the near future.

But according to the Angus Reid poll, while 68% of respondents favored either the status quo or some form of decriminalization or legalization, only 13% supported treating marijuana possession as a Class B drug offense, and only 11% supported subjecting pot smokers to the seven years in prison associated with Class A drugs. Nine percent of respondents had no clue.

Oddly enough, Angus Reid itself spun the poll results as suggesting support for a tougher line on marijuana. "Most Britons Want Jail for Marijuana," read the headline of its release. While that headline is factually accurate -- 65% think marijuana possession should be punished as a Class A, B, or C drug offense -- it is misleading because a plurality supports the status quo -- not an increase in penalties -- and a sizeable minority supports having no penalties at all.

In one of the most depraved cases of corruption in the Colombian armed forces in recent years, a Colombian court Monday convicted an army colonel and 14 soldiers of massacring 10 members of an elite, US-trained anti-drug police unit and an informant at the behest of drug traffickers. A judge in Cali found Col. Bayron Carvajal and his soldiers guilty of aggravated homicide for the May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near Cali. The men will be sentenced in two weeks.

The soldiers bushwhacked the police unit as it was about to seize 220 pounds of cocaine that the informant had told them was stashed inside a psychiatric facility in the town of Jamundí. The soldiers fired hundreds of rounds at the police and attacked them with hand grenades. Six of the police officers were found to have been shot at close range. No drugs were recovered.

During the trial, more than a hundred witnesses testified. Some of them linked Carvajal to both leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers. Carvajal claimed his troops were attacking leftist rebels working with drug traffickers, but that didn't fly. Neither did the military's original explanation that the deaths were accidental. The military later conceded that its inquiries suggested links between the soldiers and drug gangs operating in the region.

Under Plan Colombia, the US has sent an average of $650 million a year in recent years to fight the drug trade and the leftist guerrillas of the FARC. Most of that money has gone to expand, equip, and train the Colombian military and police. Part of the rationale for that aid was that it would reduce corruption and human rights abuses in the Colombian armed forces.

The Carvajal case is not the only one to tarnish the image of the Colombian military lately. In the last two years, high-ranking military officers have been accused of selling secrets to drug traffickers to help them escape capture and planting fake bombs to advance their careers. Killings of noncombatants by the military are also reportedly on the increase after decreasing during the early years of Plan Colombia.

Meanwhile, for all the billions spent, that Colombian cocaine just keeps on coming.

Vietnam has generally appeared in these pages in recent months because of its penchant for using the death penalty on drug traffickers, but now Vietnamese authorities have taken a step in a different direction, at least when it comes to users. Last Friday, officials in the capital, Ho Chi Minh City, announced that a methadone maintenance program for opiate users will be getting underway there.

In remarks reported by VietnamNet, Ho Chi Minh City Health Department Deputy Director Le Truong Giang announced that the Ho Chi Minh City AIDS Committee will start providing methadone to heroin users beginning next month. The one-year program sponsored by the World Health Organization will operate out of community counseling centers in several districts in the city, Giang said.

The program in Ho Chi Minh City will be the second to operate in Vietnam. For the past year, some 700 drug users in the northern port city of Haiphong have been participating in a pilot program funded by the US and British governments. That program will end at the end of this year.

Giang said that results from methadone maintenance programs in Australia, China, and Indonesia all showed that providing heroin users with access to methadone maintenance therapy would dramatically reduce crime. Methadone is provided for free to users, he added. If the Ho Chi Minh City and Haiphong programs are proven to be effective, they would be expanded, Giang said.

With nearly 7,500 people behind bars in Idaho -- more than half of them for drug offenses -- the Idaho legislature is finally beginning to move away from the "tough on crime" posturing and infliction of mandatory minimum drug dealing sentences that helped create the current crisis. A bill with bipartisan support that would give Idaho judges the option to send people convicted of drug distribution offenses to treatment instead of mandatory prison terms if they are found to be addicts is on the move in Boise.

House Bill 516, sponsored by three Republicans and one Democrat, is in line for a full hearing at the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee this session. The bill would mark a departure for Idaho, which for years has responded to illegal drug use and sales by ratcheting up penalties.

But even the bill's sponsors are still playing to the punishment choir, if the Associated Press got it right. Rep. Nicole LeFavour (D-Boise), a cosponsor of the bill, told the committee Monday most people convicted of drug distribution offenses deserved harsh sentences. But, she said, those involved in small-time dealing because of their addictions should get a chance at treatment instead. "For these rare instances, this will allow for an alternative sentence by judges," she said. "If treatment is provided, that provides the best chance of recovering."

Under current Idaho law, most drug dealing convictions require mandatory minimum sentences of three to five years. Some methamphetamine and meth precursor offenses carry 10-year mandatory minimums, though.

The bill "ain't a bad idea," Rep. Dick Harwood (R-St. Maries) told the AP. "Our prisons are pumped full. It would be nice to give judges discretion about whether to send somebody to prison or to some other treatment program. In reality, they're the ones that are sitting on the front lines, not the legislators who are making the laws."

There is also a another bill aimed at sentencing reform in Idaho. Rep. Jim Clark (R-Hayden) has introduced a bill that would expand misdemeanor drug courts. It is aimed at stopping minor offenders from developing full-blown substance abuse problems. If these bills are truly harbingers of a new approach in the Gem State, it's about time.