21/8/09; (3 Items)
Mexico has decriminalised the possession of small amounts of cocaine, heroin and marijuana, as part of an attempt to focus a police crackdown on drug producers and traffickers. The new law, which also covers LSD and methamphetamine possession, will also offer addicts free treatment, in order to tackle the domestic demand for drugs. “This [new law] is not legalisation, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty,” Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the attorney-general’s office, said. The law, which was enacted on Friday, sets maximum “personal use” amounts for the listed drugs. Anyone found possessing those narcotics within the limit will not face criminal prosecution
See: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/08/200982118315790550.html
Others pay dearly for our cheap thrills
David Penberthy; 22/8/09
On the present sickening trend, the number of Mexicans killed in the drug-related bloodshed that has paralysed the country since January 2007 will hit 10,000 within the next few weeks, possibly even days. To put that in perspective, an estimated 3500 people died in the 30-year period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It also eclipses the number of US troops killed in the war in Iraq, which at the latest count stands at 4333. Australia’s sizeable cokehead community – even the casual users who had a discreet line in the loo last night at some groovy Sydney wine bar – should give themselves a quiet pat on the back for the role they’ve played in the death of all these people. And every celebrity who revels in the attention of their pathetic battle with substance abuse and who uses their “brave” decision to go into detox as some kind of fashion statement should also take some of the credit. What’s happening in Mexico is a simple case study in supply and demand. A dignified and sophisticated country has gone totally off the rails because its political class, its police force and sections of its judiciary, through greed or unimaginable fear, have become the vassals of the most despicable criminal gangs on earth.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25963106-7583,00.html
Unholy alliance of the good, bad add ugly
Kathy Gannon; The Australian; 22/8/09; No Internet Text; Kathy Gannon, author of I is for Infidel, has been the Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan for the past 20 years.
Seeds of Terror; Gretchen Peters; St Martins/Thomas Dunne
In Afghanistan, opium has bankrolled the good, the bad and the ugly. It has often been difficult to tell them apart. First there was the good. In the 1980s, opium- using and opium-funded holy warriors, backed by the US, fought invading Russians in the last Cold War battle. Even the CIA was said to be involved in the drug trade then, using poppies (from which opium is made) to finance the insurgency and, it was rumoured, to get Russian soldiers hooked on drugs. Then came the bad. In 1992, the holy warriors came to power when the Russians left Afghanistan. They grew poppies at a phenomenal rate and used the profits to underwrite their internecine killing, support terrorist training camps and fatten their overseas bank accounts.
In 1996, they were thrown out by the ugly, the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban’s core membership was made up of some of the same holy warriors. Yet when the Taliban was ousted, it had wiped out opium production, perhaps to drive prices up and make a windfall, perhaps to win UN approval.
Today, the good, the bad and the ugly all flourish in Afghanistan, sometimes together, sometimes apart. But it’s not clear who is benefiting most from the drug trade. Is it the Taliban and al-Qa’ida or members of Afghanistan’s US-backed government?
Statistics vary wildly, but the UN estimates that drugs bring in upward of $300 million annually to the Taliban’s coffers. That still leaves billions unaccounted for.
In Seeds of Terror, Gretchen Peters makes a valiant attempt to dissect this difficult subject, but even her exhaustive research leaves a lot of
questions unanswered. She cites documents from US intelligence sources and the Drug Enforcement Agency that portray the US and its allies as reluctant partners with bad guys who routinely exploit their country’s poppy crops for various purposes. Alliances with the unsavoury, the reasoning goes, can be used to fight for a greater good: beating the Soviets in the 80s, beating back the resurgent Taliban now.
But such a claim obscures the uncomfortable truth that the US and the international community have had a direct role in putting the unsavoury in power.
In Seeds of Terror, the claim appears to be corroborated, but by false information.
“The Northern Alliance swept into Kabul installing its people … in key security posts,” Peters writes, referring to late 2001. “To cobble together support for his weak coalition government, the US appointed leader Hamid Karzai, who began handing out important positions like they were trophies.”
But the Northern Alliance didn’t sweep into Kabul. It was put there by the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom. And it wasn’t Karzai who handed out the trophies but the UN, with the backing of Washington, at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001.
The Bonn agreement decided who would occupy the new governments key posts, including key security posts and the presidency (which went to Karzai). Thus many in Afghanistan today say the West is culpable for Afghanistan’s bad governance — and for its increasing poppy production — because the US and its allies returned to power the warlords and drug kingpins who had given rise to the Taliban in the first place.
A great deal of misinformation has emerged since the collapse of the Taliban in 2001 and it is repeated so often that it is taken for truth.
An example from Seeds of Terror: that the Taliban’s one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was linked to Osama bin Laden before the Taliban took over Kabul in September 1996.
To make that connection, Peters says that Omar belonged to a mujaheddin group, the Hezb-e-Islami, under the leadership of Yunus Khalis, that sheltered bin Laden when he fled Sudan for eastern Afghanistan in early 1996.
But Omar belonged to Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi’s Harakat-e Islami group, which had no affiliation to bin Laden. During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 80s, Omar fought in southern Kandahar and didn’t know bin Laden before the Taliban takeover.
At first blush this would seem to be a minor error. Yet it is highly significant because the men who welcomed bin Laden when he reached Afghanistan from Sudan were the same men who the US and its allies in Enduring Freedom put into power once the Taliban had been driven out. These same new rulers have led the long hunt for bin Laden. No surprise that he hasn’t been found.
The installation of the unsavoury into power may also explain how Afghanistan went from being essentially opium-free in 2001 to producing more than 4000 tonnes of opium during just the first two post-Taliban years.
Those in power, supported by the US and its allies, then did exactly what they had done before the Taliban took over. They set up little fiefdoms and extorted money from the international community to stop producing drugs. Yet all the while they were also planting poppies in previously poppy-free areas.
Some in the Afghan military and anti- narcotics ministry have drug-dealing reputations that go back decades.
It is Peters’s belief that, ultimately, opium is at the heart of al-Qa’ida’s and the Taliban’s financing and that following the drug money trail and choking it off is central to winning the war on terror.But the answer to the big question is more important.
Who has the deepest involvement in the drug trade, the Taliban or the Western-allied government?
Is the lawlessness that has made winning the peace in Afghanistan so elusive rooted in the government’s participation in the drug trade?
At some point, the US and its allies will have to clean out relationships that have been built on nefarious ties between Kabul’s government and its patrons.
Such an effort is a key to Afghanistan’s future and to the value of Afghanistan’s elections this week.
Tags: Afghanistan, Drugs, Mexico, Trade, USA