Drugs, Law and Conflict

Photo courtesy of Boston.com Bringas

It seems that the 2009 UN World Drug Report, available here, has inspired The Boston Globe to come up with a compelling photo essay chronicling the War on Drugs and its effects throughout the world – definitely worth a look.

**Opium sap drying during processing in Afghanistan.

TIME has a great photoessay on heroin, drug trafficking, and drug use available on its website.

Mexico City’s historic center. Photo via Luis A. De Jesus R.

President Calderón finally signed a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs yesterday, four months after Mexico’s congress approved it. This law, while viewed by many as controversial, is not a surprise: it was even proposed by ex-president Vicente Fox, before he vetoed it under pressure.

See news coverage from the AP, and in Spanish from El Universal. Also, policy analysis from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Penales (in Spanish), and the UK-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

This new book on the lives of homeless drug addicts in San Francisco, “Righteous Dopefiend,” looks just spectacular. I’m disappointed, but also pleased, that every copy in the county library is checked out, with holds already placed!

**Mexican soldiers bury their fallen comrades in Guerrero. Photo courtesy of the AP.

• Decapitations in Mexico’s drug war spread to Guerrero, with eight soldiers and one former director of the state preventive police found dead near Chilpancingo, the state capital. Washington Post coverage of the deaths includes a great quote from Friday’s meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Patricia Espinosa, in Washington:

[Rice] said she saw no connection between a 2004 decision by the Bush administration to let a ban on assault weapons expire and the escalating violence in Mexico, which often involves assassinations by military-style commandos armed with automatic weapons… “I follow arms trafficking across the world, and I’ve never known illegal arms traffickers who cared very much about the law,” Rice said.

• Abuse of prescription drugs among Iraqi troops up, thanks to a booming black market, reports the New York Times.

• Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute challenges the claims of the recent DEA report and asks, “What is the DEA Smoking?”

• The New York Times has a nicely-written article on drug rehabilitation in the US and the move toward evidence-based treatments. The author cites two interesting legal changes to support more effective treatment for addicts:

1) The Mental Health Parity Act of 2007, passed by Congress, “which for the first time includes addiction treatment under a federal law requiring that insurers cover mental and physical ailments at equal levels.”

2) In Oregon, the state legislature passed Senate Bill 267 in 2003, requiring that programs receiving state funds use evidence-based rehabilitation practices. While the article focuses on Oregon, it also highlights “practice-based evidence,” such as the incentive program designed by the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health. In Delaware, “clinics could earn a bonus of up to 5 percent, for instance, if they kept a high percentage of addicts coming in at least weekly and ensured that those clients met their own goals…”

Deserving of an article in itself is the estimate cited by the Times of American drug users who could benefit from treatment but aren’t getting it: 20 million.