ANTI-DRUG STRATEGY CRITICIZED

The United States and United Nations are promising to throw billions
of more dollars into yet another escalation of the international war
on drugs, apparently not hearing the message from organizations that
come into contact with the victims the world over.

The UN three-day conference is targeting six specific areas for
action: reducing demand; elimination of illicit crops and alternative
development; money laundering; judicial cooperation; and control of
the movement of precursor chemicals necessary to drug production.

Leaders of the alternative action plan do not have a problem with the
overall UN focus, but argue the use of proven failed methods will lead
inevitably only to more and deeper failures.

They argue that the Prohibition-style war on drugs started 30 years
ago has done little to check the flow of drugs into the U.S. or to
reduce usage, but has succeeded in flooding the countryB9s prisons,
fuelled the AIDS crisis and made billionaires out of the criminal
heirs of the 1920B9s rum-running gangsters.

B3Drug-control policies should focus on reducing drug-related crime,
disease and death, not the number of casual drug users,B2 said Ethan
Nadelmann, the founder of the New York-based Lindesmith Institute and
author of A Common Sense Drug Policy.

The Lindesmith Institute, a drug-policy institute bankrolled by
billionaire philanthropist George Soros, says the UN is manipulating
numbers to prove the hardline, zero-tolerance policies advocated by
the U.S. are working. The UN drug control program says cocaine
production in the Andean region, one of the worldB9s biggest
producers, is down as much as 100 tonnes from last year.

And it points to programs in which Andean coca and poppy farmers have
been convinced to grow alternative crops such as onions.

But the Lindesmith Institute counters with a 1997 study from a
different UN agency that shows global opium production has in fact
doubled since 1987 and that the eradication of coca fields each year
is equal to only abut 10 per cent of coca cultivation and that there
has been no movement to close the gap in more than s decade.

Checked-by: (trikydik)