No more pre-employment marijuana testing in Philly starting next month, Malta is set to become the first country is Europe to legalize weed this week, and more.

assassinated Haitian President Jovunel Moïse

Philadelphia Ban on Pre-Hire Marijuana Testing Takes Effect on January 1. An ordinance passed by the city council in April and signed into law by Mayor Jim Kenney (D) that bars employers from requiring potential hires to submit to pre-employment testing for marijuana will go into effect on January 1. The ban does not address testing of current employees, nor does it stop employers from firing people for being high on the job or having marijuana at the workplace. There are some exceptions to the ban: law enforcement positions, jobs requiring a commercial drivers license, and child care and health care workers.

St. Louis Mayor Signs Bill Repealing Marijuana Laws. Mayor Tishaura Jones (D) has singed Board Bill 132, which repeals the city's laws related to the possession of small amounts of marijuana and paraphernalia. "We are seeing a major shift in the way our country sees not just marijuana, but how it connects to public safety, incarceration, and economic opportunity in our communities," said Mayor Jones. "This law will help reduce racial disparities in our policing, make our city safer, and make St. Louis more competitive in hiring for city positions." Of 600 people arrested on marijuana charges in the city in the last three years, nearly 500 were black, the mayor's office said.

International

Haiti's Leader Kept a List of Drug Traffickers; His Assassins Came for It. Assassinated Haitian President Jovenal Moïse was moving against drug and arms smugglers, and that may be what is behind his murder, The New York Times reports: "Before being assassinated in July, he had been working on a list of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti's drug trade, with the intention of handing over the dossier to the American government, according to four senior Haitian advisers and officials tasked with drafting the document.

The president had ordered the officials to spare no one, not even the power brokers who had helped propel him into office, they said -- one of several moves against suspected drug traffickers that could explain a motive for the assassination." When the gunmen who killed him burst into his residence, they stayed long enough to search through his files for his list of suspected drug traffickers, which one of the captured gunmen said was a key target.

"I would be a fool to think that narco-trafficking and arms trafficking didn't play a role in the assassination," said Daniel Foote, who served as the US special envoy to Haiti before stepping down last month. "Anyone who understands Haiti's politics or economics understands this." Some of the traffickers are linked to former President Michel Martelly, and his brother-in-law, Haitian businessman Charles Saint-Remy, at whom many fingers are being pointed, has been named by the DEA as a suspected drug trafficker.

Malta Set to Legalize Marijuana This Week, Would Be First in Europe. The Maltese parliament is set to approve a marijuana legalization bill Tuesday that the president has already promised to sign into law. People 18 and up could possess up to seven grams (a quarter ounce) and grow up to four plants. Home growers could possess up to 50 grams of their harvest at home. The bill does not envision commercial sales, but instead would allow for non-profit cooperatives to grow and distribute marijuana to members.

Renewed clashes between prison gangs linked to rival drug cartels left at least 68 more dead over the weekend, an Oklahoma marijuana legalization initiative gets hit with a nuisance lawsuit, and more.

The Pennsylvania ACLU says a proposed parental drug screening bill is unconstitutional. (Creative Commons)

Indiana Democratic Party Calls for Marijuana Legalization. The Indiana Democratic Party, has announced its full support for marijuana legalization and called on the General Assembly to get the job done. They also called on Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) to rescind his opposition to legalization. Bills to legalize marijuana have so far gone nowhere in the GOP-dominated legislature, but the Democrats said legalization "would provide the opportunity to create an additional revenue stream for the state, create good-paying jobs, develop a long-term cash crop for Indiana's ag and business communities, provide medicinal opportunities for people like the state's veterans and seniors, and could start the process of expunging records for simple possession across the state."

Oklahoma Marijuana Legalization Initiative Hit with Legal Challenge. A marijuana legalization initiative sponsored by Oklahomans for Responsible Cannabis Action is being challenged in court by an incarcerated person, Paul Tay. Tay's lawsuit raises numerous claims about the constitutionality of the initiative, including challenging the validity of signatures gathered in Indian County. "We believe that we have a really strong case," ORCA Director Jed Green said. "[The man filing this challenge] wants attention… this is the second time that he's done this." Green called the lawsuit "a shotgun challenge," going after multiple points and seeing if any of them stick. Green says the challenge is what he calls a shotgun challenge, going after multiple points and seeing if any of them stick. "We don't believe that a lot of it is really pertinent," he said. There will be a hearing on the challenge on December 14.

Drug Testing

Pennsylvania ACLU Opposes Bill to Compel Parental Drug Screening in Abuse and Neglect Cases. The ACLU of Pennsylvania has come out against HB 1737, which would allow county children and youth services (CYS) agencies to obtain court orders to compel parents to undergo drug and alcohol testing during child welfare investigations if there is evidence that impairment due to drug or alcohol use is a contributing cause of alleged abuse or neglect. "Because drug testing is considered a search, both the Pennsylvania and United States Constitutions require the government to show that it has probable cause before it can compel an individual to undergo a drug test," the group said. "HB 1737 would permit unconstitutional intrusions on parents' privacy rights because it does not contain a requirement that a CYS agency have probable cause to believe that an act of child abuse or neglect has occurred and that drug testing the parent will reveal evidence relating to such abuse." The bill passed the House last week.

International

Ecuador Prison Clash Leaves at Least 68 Dead. In the latest outbreak of fighting among prison gangs linked to international drug trafficking groups, at least 68 prisoners were killed in an hours-long gun battle Saturday inside the Litoral Penitentiary, the country's largest prison. This is the second major outbreak of violence at Litoral in less than two months. In September, 119 prisoners were killed in gang-related clashes there. Another 79 prisoners were killed in clashes last February. So far this year, more than 300 prisoners have died in the violence. The prison violence comes amid a national state of emergency decreed by President Guillermo Lasso in October that empowers security forces to fight drug trafficking and other crimes. The country's prisons hold some 40,000 inmates, including 15,000 jailed awaiting trial, and are filled way above capacity.

Chronicle Book Review: The Afghanistan Papers: The Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock (2021, Simon & Schuster, 346 pp., $30 HB)

While the book is about the war effort as a whole, for devotees of drug policy, it has two chapters specifically to opium production, its role in the war, and American and allied efforts to suppress it. More on that below.

The author, Craig Whitlock, is an investigative journalist with The Washington Post who spent the last two decades covering the global war on terror and has won prestigious journalistic awards for his efforts. In 2016, he learned of the existence of hundreds of interviews with war participants -- civilian and military alike -- conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) under the rubric Lessons Learned.

For reasons that would become obvious upon their release, SIGAR did not want to release them, but the Post sued under the FOIA Act, eventually prevailing and producing a series of stories based on them in 2019. Here, Whitlock supplements those Lessons Learned interviews with oral history interviews of officials who served at the US embassy in Kabul conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, interviews with more than 600 Afghanistan war veterans conducted by the Army's Operational Leadership Experience project, as well as hundreds of previously classified memos Pentagon head Donald Rumsfeld drafted between 2001 and 2006.

Woven together in Whitlock's narrative, the interviews and documents present a devastating indictment of American hubris, cluelessness, and fecklessness as general after commanding general came and went, all proclaiming "progress" even as the war effort slipped deeper and deeper into the Afghan morass and the body count -- both allied and Afghan civilians -- grew ever higher.

"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," said Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, war czar under Bush and Obama.

"We did not know what we were doing," said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration's top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

"There was no coherent long-term strategy," said British Gen. David Richards, who led US and NATO forces in 2006 and 2007.

Yet officials like these, and many, many more, spent the war years playing up illusory successes, minimizing real defeats, and always proclaiming "progress" was being made. But after about 2005, the only progress really being made was by the Taliban, which had returned from defeat to begin an insurgency that would slowly, year by year, envelop ever more of the country until in August it swept into Kabul and once again took control of the country.

The American project to do nation-building in Afghanistan, always half-baked and half-hearted project failed despite the billions upon billions of dollars poured into the country. Or perhaps because of it. As one interviewee noted, the only thing the US managed to build in Afghanistan was "massive corruption."

Enter the opium economy. Not only were leading members of the American-backed Afghan government stacking up personal fortunes out of the US largesse, they were also deeply implicated in the illicit, but economically dominant, opium economy. Even when the Afghan or Americans developed solid cases of drug trafficking, connections inside the government ensured that traffickers remained protected. The Taliban profited from the trade, but so did everybody else.

And even when the Americans managed to snag one of the traffickers, things tended to go screwy. In 2008, they lured an alleged Afghan trafficker named Haji Juma Khan to Jakarta, where Indonesian authorities extradited him to New York to face trafficking charges brought by a federal grand jury. But when he got to court, his defense attorney mentioned in open court that he was an informant for the CIA and DEA, the judge cut her off and later sealed the legal proceedings. His legal proceedings then vanished into a black hole. He was never convicted of any charges but still spent 10 years in US custody before being released in 2018. That tale ought to raise some Orwellian fears.

Whitlock provides a concise history of our efforts to suppress the opium economy as well as the profound contradiction at the heart of the effort: Any attempt to suppress the opium economy undermined the counterinsurgency project. In other words, you could have your war on terror or you could have your war on drugs, but you couldn't have both.

Not that the US and its allies didn't try. In 2003, the British offered to pay farmers to eradicate their crop in one province, but the farmers just took the money and harvested the crops anyway. In 2006, the Bush administration launched Operation River Dance, siccing tractors and weed whackers on the poppy fields of Helmand province. The tractors broke down, the hand eradicators quit and worked harvesting poppies whey they got better pay, and corrupt local officials ensured that only disfavored farmers got raided. Not only was the operation a flop -- despite the de rigueur press releases announcing "progress" -- it was severely counterproductive to the war effort because it enraged the opium economy-dependent population of the province, already a Taliban hotbed, and turned them decisively against the Americans and their Afghan allies in Kabul.

The Obama administration tried a different tack: Alternative development, along with crackdowns on smuggling and trafficking. That didn't work either; between 2002 and 2017, Afghan acreage devoted to opium production quadrupled, even as the US spent $9 billion to stop it. The Trump administration reverted to Bush-style tactics, although in 2017 instead of going after poor peasants, it unleashed high-tech bombers and fighter aircraft on "heroin laboratories" that turned out to be mostly easily replaceable mud huts. The destruction of those mud huts was yet another sign of "progress" that was soon forgotten.

If the American withdrawal from Afghanistan this fall was a debacle, it has many fathers. Joe Biden just got to clean up the mess left by his predecessors, and as Whitlock makes achingly clear, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Britain's Labor leader rejects drug decriminalization, Spain's ruling Socialists reject marijuana legalization, Peruvian coca growers protest, and more.

British Prime Minister Says He Will Examine Latest Advice on Legalization of Psilocybin. In response to a question in Parliament from Tory MP Crispin Blunt, who said the drug had "exciting potential" and urged him to review the law to allow more research into psilocybin's therapeutic qualities, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Thursday he would: "I can say that we will consider the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recent advice on reducing barriers to research with controlled drugs such as the one he describes, and we will be getting back to him as soon as possible." Psilocybin is currently a Schedule I substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act, which means it requires a Home Office license to conduct research, and Blunt and other campaigners want it moved to Schedule 2 to make it easier to conduct research.

British Labor Party Leader Says He Would Not Decriminalize Drugs. Asked if a Labor government would either decriminalize drugs, Labor Party leader Sir Keir Starmer said it would not. The comment comes after Scotland's Lord Advocate called for diverting from prosecution people caught with small amounts of drugs. Starmer criticized the notion even as he accused the Scottish National Party of having an "appalling" drug overdose death. When asked about the Lord Advocate's advice made sense, Starmer said: "The Lord Advocate has set up principles and we have not seen the detail yet, which will come out shortly. I do not think what happens in Scotland should be a general application across the UK. One of the benefits of devolution is to allow each of the nations to look separately in context to the challenges they have. But if I was prime minister of the UK I would not be introducing that."

Canadian Prime Minister Urged to Decriminalize Drug Possession. Nearly 70 organizations across the country, including the HIV Legal Network, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and the National Association of Women and the Law, have written a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau asking him he make drug policy reform a priority for his newly re-elected Liberal government. Even though  Trudeau's Liberal Party approved a decriminalization resolution in 2018, Trudeau has so far rejected the move, but pressure is rising along with the number of drug overdose deaths. The groups are calling for immediate drug decriminalization and a safe drug supply, saying that the overdose deaths are driven by "a contaminated drug supply and the stigma associated with drug use."

Costa Rica Congress Approves Medical Marijuana. The Congress on Tuesday approved the legalization of medical marijuana over opposition from President Carlos Alvarado. The law allows for the cultivation and processing of marijuana for medical use but does not allow for recreational use. Lawmakers are calling on Alvarado not to veto the bill. If he does, the bill would have to be passed again with a supermajority.

Peru Coca Farmers Protest Goverment Crop Eradication. Hundreds of coca leaf growers are in the fifth day of a highway blockade as they protest the destruction of their crops by the government. The protest began with the eradication of coca fields in Carabaya province, in the Puno region. Growing coca leaf is legal for farmers who are on a registered government list, but that list has not been updated since 1978. The demonstrators, who mainly voted for President Pedro Castillo, are calling on him to stop the eradication of unpermitted crops.

Spanish Socialist Party Votes Against Legalizing Marijuana. The ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) joined with rightist opposition groups in opposing a bill to legalize marijuana that was sponsored by its coalition partner Unidas Podemos. In opposing the measure, the Socialists aligned themselves with the conservative Popular Party and the extremist right Vox Party. That tactical alliance was able to defeat the bill 263-75. "This is not a question of the right or the left, it is a question of public health," said PSOE lawmaker Daniel Vicente in Congress, adding: "We are a government party."