Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica has certainly gotten attention on the world stage since his country legalized marijuana commerce last week, and not all of it has been favorable. The United Nations bureaucrats charged with maintaining adherence to global drug prohibition have been quick to criticize, and now Mujica and his wife, Uruguayan Senator Lucia Topolansky, have fired back.
Uruguayan President Mujica strikes back at critics, and so does his wife. (gob.uy)
But it was the INCB that leveled the harshest criticisms, and it was INCB that drew the barbed retorts from Montevideo's first couple.
"Uruguay is breaking international conventions on drug control with the cannabis legislation approved by its congress," INCB complained in a press release last Wednesday. The INCB qualified itself as "surprised" that Uruguay had "knowingly decided to break the universally agreed and internationally endorsed legal provisions of the treaty."
In the statement under the signature of INCB head Raymond Yans, the INCB also "regrets that the government of Uruguay did not respond to INCB to engage in a dialogue prior to further consideration of the law."
"Tell that old man to stop lying," Mujica retorted in an interview Saturday with Uruguay's Canal 4. "Let him come to Uruguay and meet me whenever he wishes… Anybody can meet and talk to me, and whoever says he couldn't meet with me tells lies, blatant lies. Because he sits in a comfortable international platform, he believes he can say whatever nonsense," he added.
Mujica also accused the INCB of relative quiescence before the legalization of marijuana in two US states and accused him of having double standards. "Does he have different rules: one for Uruguay and other for the world's strong countries?" he asked pointedly. [Ed: INCB did criticize the Colorado and Washington votes.]
Neither was Sen. Topolansky one to sit quietly by while her husband was under attack.
"Who is this fellow that likes to call names to countries?" she said of Yans. "I think he crossed the line, but anyhow, I believe that he has had problems with other countries, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and they will be meeting him sometime in March."
Topolansky was presumably referring to recently leaked documents revealing deep divisions on what to do about drug policy among UN members, where a number of countries have asked that the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs be opened to discussion of paradigm-shifting reforms.
It's not as easy being the head of a UN anti-drug bureaucracy as it used to be.
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Comments
U.N. Drug Control
What kind of International " control " does the U.N. have on global drug supply ? Are they involved ? Maybe they`re just collecting a paycheck . The 1961 pact is dead . Austerity is coming for the prohibition folk`s . They are circling the wagons . Cockroaches in the light .
In reply to U.N. Drug Control by kickback (not verified)
rights
I just don't get it why fight to keep marijuana illegal when it is not a bad medicine it does so much good and the president of Uruguay is smart for doing this and the UN needs to look at other countries to put in check,Cannabis is here to stay like it or not,,,,
In reply to rights by steve baranick (not verified)
cannabis
WAKE UP! Your question IS the answer..."They" do not want it Because it is just Too GOOD for so many things
Some simple facts
* Our policy regarding drugs is in the hands of frauds, liars and two bit crooks, and until they are in handcuffs, poverty will increase, injustice will prevail and perversity will rule the planet.
* In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. This has resulted in the number of people infected with HIV who are drug addicts dropping from 50 per cent to 20 per cent, and new diagnoses of HIV among addicts dropping from approximately 3,000 to below 2,000 annually. The number of drug overdose deaths declined from 400 to 290 a year between 2001 and 2006, and “problematic” drug use and drug use among adolescents has decreased.
* Prohibitionists have always been murderous parasites: In 1926, during alcohol prohibition, the federal government began a campaign of deliberately poisoning vats of liquor with kerosene, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, acetone, methanol, and several other deadly toxins. Estimates place the body count above 10,000.
* Illegal Drug Cartels cannot operate without the support of politicians, bureaucrats, and police officers.
* Keeping various psychoactive plants and their derivatives illegal and unregulated means robberies, home invasions, murders, broken families, shattered lives—all mostly done by law enforcement agencies. Add to that list: environmental devastation, poisoning of lands, streams and wildlife—all preventable by regulated legalization.
* Prohibition has been a slow but relentless degradation (death by a zillion cuts) of all our cherished national and international institutions that will leave us crippled for numerous generations.
* The US federal government is now the most dangerous and corrupt corporation on the planet; it is solely comprised of traitorous, lying hucksters who spy on us—in the MPICIC (military/police industrial corporate intelligence complex), the 99% are all probable suspects.
* In 1989, The Kerry Committee found that the United States Department of State had made payments to drug-traffickers. Concluding, that even members of the U.S. State Department, themselves, were involved in drug trafficking. Some of the payments were made even after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies - or even while these traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies.
* The involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, and Cocaine from Central America, has been well documented, by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott and the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Gary Webb.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it's own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by all the other worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use & addiction rates than most other countries.
* As with torture, prohibition is a grievous crime against humanity. If you support it, or even simply tolerate it by looking the other way while others commit it, you are an accessory to a very serious moral transgression against humanity.
* The United States re-legalized certain drug use in 1933. The drug was alcohol, and the 21st amendment re-legalized its production, distribution and sale. Both alcohol consumption and violent crime dropped immediately as a result. And very soon after, the American economy climbed out of that same prohibition engendered abyss into which it had foolishly fallen.
Who Next
Canada could be next.
In reply to Who Next by Paulpot (not verified)
Not while Harper keeps racking up his 40% landslides
because his more economically and socially liberal opposition is split 4 ways - Liberals, New Democrats, Quebec nationalists, and Greens.
Who elected these UN Shills?
No One voted for this shill. Yan is a Prohibitionist Parasite, of the highest order, p[ropped up by other Prohibitionists. WHAT has the UN done in Mexico, where 70K died because of the failed policy of drug prohibition. It's time to end this morally bankrupt policy and Yans Trumped Up job. I'll bet Yan takes more money in a month, from the UN than Mujica has taken in his whole political career.
UN "control"
UN "control" for half a century has meant megabucks for gangsters; megabucks for paramilitary policing; rising consumption of peddled, adulterated drugs; incarceration of non-violent citizens for longer periods than murderers, rapists, robbers, etc.; corruption of all mechanisms of governments; . . . and worse.
We can certainly do without this UN version of "control".
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