From: "Bulletin Antiprohibitionist" <liafax@...>
To: tents444@...
Subject: Liafax [EN] N. 12
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:37:22 +0200

	Sign the appeal to reform the UN Conventions on Drugs e-Newsletter on the world campaign for the reform of the UN Conventions on Drugs #.12 - YEAR II - 30 March 2005 Published in   NEWS FROM THE IAL :                                                                                                                                                    _ CAMBODIA AND THE UN Marco Perduca has spoken out against the new and draconian anti-drug policies adopted by Cambodia along the UN line of ‘reducing demand’. Foreseen are even tougher penalties of traffickers and ‘an all but uncontrolled and, given the quality  of  Cambodia’s democratic institutions,  uncontrollable power of the police’. ITALY Irene Testa, secretary of the Radicali ad-hoc association ‘The Unknown Prisoner’ (Il Detenuto Ignoto), a propos of the inauguration of the first gaol with greater liberties for addicts in Castelfranco in Emilia:  ‘This is a positive development because it provides detainees with an alternative to prison’, but she goes on to underline several serious doubts, ‘especially those about the inmates receiving no pay for work they are obliged to do, which is a cover-up for forced labour’. NEWS FROM THE WORLD :                                                                                                                                            _ 3990     17/03/2005 NORTH AMERICA / USA CONSUMPTION AP Federal researches show that almost one child among twelve in the twelve-to-thirteen-year-old group has sniffed glue or shoe polish for a ‘high’ –– a phenomenon gravely underestimated by parents, only four per cent of whom think that their offspring would do such a thing, whilst twenty-two per cent admit to having done it themselves. 3988     17/03/2005 SOUTH AMERICA / CHILE JUSTICE LA TERCERA The Santiago Appeal Court has confirmed the acquittal by a lower court of a forty-one-year-old male AIDS sufferer who had grown and used cannabis for pain relief. He had been charged with illegal drug cultivation and trafficking. His physicians had prescribed Marinol for him, but because this is an illegal medicinal in Chile it was impounded by customs. The sufferer then began his cannabis cultivation as an alternative. 3983     20/03/2005 SOUTH AMERICA / BRAZIL – Rio de Janeiro JUSTICE O GLOBO In default of the state’s authority, Rio’s favelas dwellers have organised their own system of taxation to maintain an effective task force against drug traffickers. Eleven armed groups, six of them commanded by volunteer members of the army’s Military Police, are said to have struck severe blows against organised drug dealers in forty-two favelas. 3989     19/03/2005 EUROPEAN UNION / UNITED KINGDOM LEGALISATION THE TIMES (London) A year after the declassification of cannabis, Home Secretary Charles Clarke wrote to the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs asking for a review of the theory that ‘frequent use of cannabis does not create health problems’ –– new studies are said to cast doubts on that. Tories tout this as ‘a humiliating recognition of Labour’s drug policies'. 3984     19/03/2005 EUROPEAN UNION / ITALY PERSONALITIES L'UNITA' Nobel Literature Prize laureate Dario Fo said during an interview with l'Unita' that ‘we must remember that in Cuba the prevailing South American game of massacre doesn’t exist, nor are there any abandoned children in the streets, nor is there a drug problem because there is no drug market’. 3993     17/03/2005 EUROPE / SWITZERLAND POLITICS NEUE ZUERCHER ZEITUNG On 16th March the States Council approved with a vote of thirty-three to zero the UN convention on illegal addictive substances, but with reservations on personal cultivation, trade, possession and consumption, the UN rules being more restrictive than those currently in effect in Switzerland. 3986     22/03/2005 ASIA / KIRGHIZISTAN POLITICS TICINONLINE Demonstrators against President Askar Akayev accuse him of electoral fraud, whilst his spokesman Abdil Segizbayev says that in the south of the country a coup-d’état is being organised by ‘a third force’ allegedly composed of ‘criminal elements tied to the drug trade’. Representatives of the Opposition, he said, ‘have lost control of the situation’. 3987     20/03/2005 SOUTH AMERICA / PERU PRODUCTION RPP-NOTICIAS Big-time traffickers ‘move’ about seven billion dollars yearly through the country’s institutions, and amount equal to about half the state’s budget –– thus says the National Commission for the Advancement of Life Without rugs (DEVIDA).  Peruvian coca leaf production yields 165 metric tonnes of cocaine yearly, or about a fourth of the world total. 3985     22/03/2005 ASIA / PAKISTAN RELIGION AP Fifty religious leaders and students of religion in the north-western Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have issued an edict that defines opium and hashish traffic as ‘un-Islamic’, and petitioned the government for more effective laws on extirpation of drug cultivation and commerce. 3992     16/03/2005 EUROPEAN UNION / UNITED KINGDOM PUBLIC HEALTH MEDICALNEWSTODAY A study published by the International Journal of Clinical Practice, says that sixteen per cent of all users of marijuana for therapeutic purposes are following suggestions from their physicians. Of 947 subjects examined, thirty-five per cent said they resort to the substance six or seven times a week, and sixty-eight per cent derive relief from it. 3991     18/03/2005 EUROPE / RUSSIA ADDICTION ANSA At least 3,500 people die each year of overdoses, say the official data of the federal anti-narcotics services (FSKN) –– but the dark-side estimate by the same organisation puts the death toll from long- and short-term drug use at about seventy thousand.   --------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor in Chief: Marco Perduca Director: Vincenzo Donvito Layout & Distribution: C.E.D. Roma The Liafax is published with a contribution from the Open Society Institute To SUBSCRIBE To UNSUBSCRIBE If you wish not to receive this bulletin, send a message without modifying the object of the email . Important: please send a message from the email address that you want to delete from our emailing list.

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