Allan Clear continues his reporting from the International Harm Reduction Association conference in Warsaw, this time covering days two and three. Click the "read full post" link below or here to read the whole thing. Day 2 On the morning plenary, Fabio Mesquita provided two case studies of the national responses to HIV among injectors in Brazil and Indonesia. Fabio was instrumental in altering the landscape for drug injectors in Sao Paolo and Brazil as whole. He now works in Indonesia. A couple of notable points were that 28% of the population of Brazil have taken an HIV test and the phenomenal scale up of syringe exchange in Indonesia, from 17 to 129 over two years. The INPUD drug user session was extremely well attended. Bijay Pandey talked about his organizing in Nepal. As NDRI's Sam Friedman pointed out it's hard enough to organize around user's lives in general. To do so during a civil war is particularly impressive. Like all specific user organizing the future of the work is in jeopardy but the effort has been put in. Perhaps there's no more supportive drug researcher than Sam Friedman. A tireless advocate for drug users, Sam provided a Marxist Leninist dialectical critique of global socio-economic substructural micro organized community ventures that help diffuse the totalitarian oppression we all live under in this post soviet imperialistic world. User dominated of course. Alexander Rumyanzev talked about the way drugs are used to affect social movements and oppress drug users. There has been a long line of very articulate drug user activists in the history of harm reduction - John Mordaunt, Matt Southwell, Annie Madden, Jude Byrne, Louis Jones, Bill Nelles, for example – and one of the most articulate drug user activists for the last decade has been the USA's Paul Cherashore so it was good to see him back on form. He urged drug users to strike back at the system. He wasn't clear on a strategy for doing so but made valid comparisons between gay rights and drug user rights using the San Francisco gay community's response to the murder of Harvey Milk and later talked about the Stonewall riots as flashpoints that eventually changed policy and society as a whole. more...

The nomination of Gen. Douglas E. Lute as the new White House "war czar" raises the old question of what a "czar" is and why they are needed.

According to Wikipedia, a "czar" (sometimes "tsar") is basically an emperor:

Originally, and indeed during most of its history, the title tsar meant Emperor in the European medieval sense of the term, i.e., a ruler who has the same rank as a Roman or Byzantine emperor due to recognition by another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch).

Ralph Peters at The New York Post explores the latter question, arguing that the appointment of various "czars" is an indulgent and frivolous exercise. Unfortunately, just as I'm nodding in agreement, Peters' train of logic leaps the tracks and nosedives into a perplexing abyss:

I worked for the most effective "czar" of the past half-century. As director of the Office for National Drug Control Policy, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey did a remarkable job of getting the government's cats and dogs (and not a few monkeys) to work together for the common good.

But the major players could blow off even McCaffrey. The general could beat our nation's deadly enemies, but not the Washington bureaucracy.

Here we go again. Drug war supporters talk about Barry McCaffrey like conservatives talk about Ronald Reagan, an unfortunate but necessary absurdity now that the name John Walters has become highly toxic even within Congress and the anti-drug community.

Apparently, it really is necessary to point out that America wasn't drug-free from 1996-2001 and that Barry McCaffrey's legacy would be considered disastrous outside the accountability-free sphere of revisionist drug war history.

Of course, it's also possible that Peters knows "our nation's deadly enemies" are far from beaten and is merely shielding himself from the wrath of accused war criminal Barry McCaffrey. In either case, this article, which questions the efficacy of appointing various war czars, while simultaneously casting Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey as a glorious hero, is a confusing thing to have bothered writing.