US LEADERS CALL ON ANNAN TO COMBAT "RACIST WAR" ON DRUGS

More than 150 prominent US citizens urged the UN on Wednesday to use
next month's conference on racism to condemn what they called the
racist anti-drug campaigns by the United States and others.

"In one country after another we see racial and ethnic minorities
targeted and persecuted in the name of the 'war on drugs',"
celebrities, civil rights, business and religious leaders wrote in a
letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

They urged him to "place this issue on the agenda of the United
Nations for open and free discussion," at the week-long conference
against racism, which opens in Durban, South Africa, August 31.

The letter said the number of people jailed for drug law violations in
the United States had increased ten-fold, from about 50,000 to almost
half a million since 1980.

"The United States incarcerates more people on drug charges than all
of western Europe (with a larger overall population) incarcerates for
all criminal offenses," it read.

Noting that blacks account for 57 percent of those incarcerated for
drug felonies, it said "the war on drugs is rooted in racial bias, is
racially unequal in its implementation, and racist in its
disproportionate impact."

Those signing the letter included the 1976 Nobel laureate for
economics, Milton Friedman, actor Harry Belafonte, former US surgeon
general Joycelyn Elders, actor Danny Glover, feminist writer Gloria
Steinem, and four members of the US Congress.

"We call on all member governments of the United Nations -- most
especially the US -- to end the 'war on drugs' and remedy its
discriminatory and oppressive consequences," they wrote.

"You can't talk about race in the US without talking about the war on
drugs," said Deborah Small, director of public policy at the
Lindesmith Center -- Drug Policy Foundation in New York, which
published the letter.

"This is not a war on drugs. It's a war on people of color," she
added.

Small is to lead a delegation of 10 members representing the Campaign
to End Race Discrimination in the "War on Drugs" to the Durban conference.

Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said the UN had not yet officially
received the letter, but said US incarceration rates were discussed
during a recent meeting in Geneva of the Committee on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination.

"It is on the agenda of the United Nations," Eckhard said, but it
would be up to member states to decide whether to open the Durban
conference to discussion of that issue.