Treating Addiction: A Top Doc Explains Why Kind Love Beats Tough Love

AFP / Getty Images

Drug users at Canada's Insite injection room in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Dr. Gabor Mate is renowned in Canada for his work in treating people with the worst addictions, most notably at Vancouver’s controversial Insite facility, which provides users with clean needles, medical support and a safe space to inject drugs.
Canada’s Conservative government has tried to shut Insite down, but the country’s Supreme Court ruled late last year that doing so would contravene human rights laws because the program has been shown to save lives.
In Mate’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, he advocates for the compassionate treatment of addiction, a position that is increasingly receiving international attention. Healthland recently spoke with Mate about the causes and consequences of addiction and what to do about the problem.
How do you define addiction?
Any behavior that is associated with craving and temporary relief, and with long-term negative consequences, that a person is not able to give up. Note that I said nothing about substances — it’s any behavior that has temporary relief and negative consequences and loss of control.
When you look at process or behavior — sex, gambling, shopping or work or substances — they engage the same brain circuitry, the same reward system, the same psychological dynamic and the same spiritual emptiness. People go from one to the other. The issue for me is not whether you’re using something or not; it’s, Are you craving, are you needing it for relief and does it have negative consequences?
Do you believe all addiction results from trauma?
I think childhood trauma or emotional loss is the universal template for addiction. It also depends on how you want to define trauma: if you want to define it as something bad happening, then it’s true that not every addict [has experienced trauma], in the sense of a death of a parent or violence in the family or child abuse, or any of the usual markers of trauma.
But there’s another [way to define it]. D.W. Winnicott [the late British child psychiatrist] said that there are two things that can go wrong in childhood: things that happen that shouldn’t happen — that’s trauma — and things that should happen that don’t happen. Children are equally hurt by things that should happen and don’t as they are by things that shouldn’t happen but do. If the parents aren’t emotionally available, [for example], no one will define that as trauma, but it will be for the child. If a mother has postpartum depression, that’s not defined as trauma but it can lead to emotional neglect and that interferes with child brain development.
(MORE: How Childhood Trauma Can Cause Adult Obesity)
It’s impossible for a parent to be emotionally available all of the time, however.
The parent doesn’t have to be perfect. In our society, it’s not [just] a question of whether parents are doing their best or love their kids or not, it’s that parents are often isolated and stressed or too economically worried to be there. What I’m saying is that early emotional loss is the universal template for all addictions. All addictions are about self-soothing. And when do children need to sooth themselves? When they are not being soothed.
You practice a harm-reduction approach to addiction, in which you provide clean needles and safe spaces for addicts to inject drugs. Americans have long tended to see this as “enabling” and typically view it as a bad thing because it doesn’t require addicts to be abstinent to receive care.
The question is, Is it better for people to inject drugs with puddle water or sterile water? Is it better to use clean needles or share so that you pass on HIV and hepatitis C? This is what harm reduction is. It doesn’t treat addiction, it just reduces harm. In medicine, we do this all the time. People smoke but we still give them inhalers to open airways, so what’s different? You’re not enabling anything they’re not already using.
Some critics claim that it prevents addicts from “hitting bottom” and getting off drugs entirely.
I worked for 12 years in the Americas’ most concentrated area of drug use, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. People live there in the street with HIV and hepatitis and festering wounds: what more of a bottom can they hit? If hitting bottom helped people, there would be no addicts at all in the Downtown Eastside. ‘Bottom’ is very relative, so it’s a meaningless concept. For me as a doctor, rockbottom might be losing my medical license, but what is a bottom for a person who has been abused all her life and lives on the street? It’s meaningless and false. People don’t need more negative things to happen to them to give it up. They need more positive things to happen. In 12 years of work on the Downtown Eastside, I didn’t meet an [addicted] woman who was not sexually abused as a child.
[Addicts] relationship to authority figures is one of fear and suspicion. How will it help if I punish them more? They need the very opposite. We end up punishing them for self-soothing. It makes no sense at all. Harm reduction is not an end in itself. Ideally, what it is is a first step towardsa more thorough-going [recovery], but you have to begin with where people are at.
When I’ve visited harm-reduction programs, it seemed that the clean needles and other tools weren’t the most important thing they provided. Rather, it was the message that ‘I believe you are worth saving, even though you are still using drugs.’ That touches people and opens doors.
That’s the key. Quite apart from clean needles and sterile water, the most important factor is for the first time saying to someone who has been rejected all their life, ‘We’re not going to judge you based on how you present your needs at the present moment.’ Harm reduction is much more than set of practices; it’s a way of relating to people. We’re not requiring you to stop using or do anything, we’re just trying to help you get healthier. At least you’re not going to suffer an infection of the bone marrow because you’re using a clean needle: is that not worth something? We’re here to reduce suffering. They may not get better in the sense of giving up the addiction, but that’s not a limit of harm reduction — that’s a limit of the treatment system.
[There are a lot of things] we can’t do in the context of a war on drugs. When people are attacked and stressed, we can’t hope to rehabilitate them [well]. That’s not a valid criticism of harm reduction; it’s a failure of the medico-legal approach we have right now to addiction.
People describe addicts as behaving compulsively in the face of negative consequences, but the same could be said of our drug policy.
It’s almost an addiction because we keep doing something with negative consequences and don’t give it up, and it gives a kind of emotional relief because people feel a lot of hostility towards addicts. Seeing someone jailed certainly provides some satisfaction and relief, but it’s not an evidence-based [treatment for addiction]. There are also a lot of other consequences we experience as a society by avoiding the connections between trauma and illness. Trauma is the basis for not just mental illnesses and addiction specifically, but also often for cancer and all kinds of other conditions [due to the effects of early childhood stress on the brain and immune system]. Society doesn’t look at it. We look at the effects and blame people for the effects but we don’t look at causes.
Why?
Because we live in a culture that promotes addiction, left, right and center. Addiction essentially is trying to get something from the outside to fill a gap and soothe pain. The entire economy is based on people seeking soothing from outside. The addict symbolizes all of our self-loathing.
The expression “the scapegoat” is very specific. The term in the Bible means a goat on whom the community symbolically imposed all its sins and then chases it into the desert. That’s what we’re doing with addiction. All the desperation to soothe pain and fill in emptiness from the outside that characterizes our culture, the addict represents. We hate to see that so we scapegoat them and think that way we are getting rid of our own sins.
So what can we do?
First of all, I would recommend that prevention has to begin at the first prenatal visit. Stress during pregnancy — contrary to the genetic view — has a large impact. Second, in the U.S., [you need] yearlong paid maternity leave. In other words, I would provide support and emotional nourishment for the child — and that comes from support for parents.
In term of addictions, first of all recognize that these people are traumatized and what they need is not more trauma and punishment but more compassion.
(MORE: 10 Reasons to Revisit Marijuana Policy Now)
What most surprised you in working with some of the most severely addicted people?
What’s most astonishing is just how people survive, no matter what. Even amid drug dealing and mutual ripoffs, there’s still a tremendous amount of caring. The same people who rip each other off would sometimes also go to great lengths to help each other. Despite all the pressure and suffering, to see people reach out to each other like that was the most astonishing thing I saw. When someone was sick, how people gathered around and helped, how they would share food with each other and some would volunteer and go at night and look after the young sex trade workers to make sure they were not getting hurt. There is that acceptance and community, and people need community. Especially for people who have not had emotional support, that community is very powerful.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Source

Important Videos Before the end of 2011

Snorting cocaine 'threatens Colombian national security'

20 November 2011 Last updated at 19:10 ET

Colombia's president is calling on foreign governments to take more responsibility for illegal drug use in their countries.

President Santos, who is in the UK for a two-day visit, told the BBC that "as long as people in London, New York and Paris are sniffing cocaine, we will suffer".

He described it as a matter of national security for Colombia and said drug consumption overseas helped finance both local mafia and political groups involved in a decades-old violent struggle to overthrow the government.

Mr Santos claimed a victory earlier this month when the leader of the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or Farc, was killed.

He told the BBC's Alastair Leithead that it was an important step towards peace in his country.

Source Go to link to see VIDEO

The Narco-Killer's Tale: Confessions of a Justified Sinner

The Narco-Killer's Tale: Confessions of a Justified Sinner

By Ioan Grillo

In his comprehensive and compelling new book, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, British correspondent Ioan Grillo, who also reports for TIME, narrates the Mexican underworld's "radical transformation from drug smugglers into paramilitary death squads ... a criminal insurgency that poses the biggest armed threat to Mexico since its 1910 revolution." Grillo outlines both the Mexican and American policy failures that fostered the crisis, which has produced 40,000 murders south of the border since 2006. More important, he offers a rare and unsettling look into the lives of ordinary Mexicans and other Latin Americans "sucked into [the drug war] or victimized by it." An excerpt:

It all seemed like a bad dream.

It may have been vivid and raw. But it felt somehow surreal, like Gonzalo was watching these terrible acts from above. Like it was someone else who had firefights with ski-masked federal police in broad daylight. Someone else who stormed into homes and dragged away men from crying wives and mothers. Someone else who duct-taped victims to chairs and starved and beat them for days. Someone else who clasped a machete and began to hack off their craniums while they were still living.(See photos of a siege in Cuidad Juárez.)

But it was all real.

He was a different man when he did those things, Gonzalo tells me. He had smoked crack cocaine and drunk whisky every day, had enjoyed power in a country where the poor are so powerless, had a latest model truck and could pay for houses in cash, had four wives and children scattered all over ... had no God.

"In those days, I had no fear. I felt nothing. I had no compassion for anybody," he says, speaking slowly, swallowing some words.

His voice is high and nasal after police smashed his teeth out until he confessed. His face betrays little emotion. I can't really take in the gravity of what he is saying — until I play back a video of the interview later and transcribe his words. And then as I wallow over the things he told me, I have to pause and shudder inside.(Read about how Mexico's drug war may become its Iraq.)

I talk to Gonzalo in a prison cell he shares with eight others on a sunny Tuesday morning in Ciudad Juárez, the most murderous city on the planet. We are less than seven miles from the U.S. and the Rio Grande that slices through North America like a line dividing a palm. Gonzalo sits on his bed in the corner clasping his hands together on his lap. He wears a simple white T-shirt that reveals a protruding belly under broad shoulders and bulging muscles that he built as a teenage American football star and are still in shape at his 38 years. Standing 6 ft. 2 in., he cuts an imposing figure and exhibits an air of authority over his cellmates. But as he talks to me, he is modest and forthcoming. He bears a goatee, divided between a curved black moustache and gray hairs on his chin. His eyes are focused and intense, looking ruthless and intimidating but also revealing an inner pain.

Gonzalo spent 17 years working as a soldier, kidnapper and murderer for Mexican drug gangs. In that time he took the lives of many, many more people than he can count. In most countries, he would be viewed as a dangerous serial killer and locked up in a top security prison. But Mexico today has thousands of serial murderers. Overwhelmed jails have themselves become scenes of bloody massacres: 20 slain in one riot; 21 murdered in another; 23 in yet another: all in penitentiaries close to this same cursed border.

Within these sanguine pens, we are in a kind of sanctuary — an entire wing of born-again Christians. This is the realm of Jesus, they tell me, a place where they abide by laws of their own "ecclesiastical government." Other wings in this jail are segregated between gangs: one controlled by the Barrio Azteca, which works for the Juárez Cartel; another controlled by their sworn enemies the Artist Assassins, who murder for the Sinaloa Cartel.

The 300 Christians try to live outside of this war. Baptized Libres en Cristo, or "Free Through Christ," the sect founded in the prison borrows some of the radical and rowdy elements of Southern U.S. Evangelicalism to save these souls. I visit a jail-block mass before I sit down with Gonzalo. The pastor, a convicted drug trafficker, mixes stories of ancient Jerusalem with his hard-core street experiences, using slang and addressing the flock as the "homies from the barrio." A live band blends rock, rap and norteño music into their hymns. And the sinners let it all out, slam-dancing wildly to the chorus, praying with eyes closed tight, teeth gritted, sweat pouring from foreheads, hands raised to the heavens — using all their spiritual power to exorcise their heinous demons.

Gonzalo has more demons than most. He was incarcerated in the prison a year before I met him, and bought his way into the Christian wing hoping it was a quiet place where he could escape the war. But when I listen carefully to his interview, he sounds like he really has given his heart to Christ, really does pray for redemption. And when he talks to me — a nosy British journalist prying into his past — he is really confessing to Jesus.

"You meet Christ and it is a totally different thing. You feel horror, and start thinking about the things you have done. Because it was bad. You think about the people. It could have been a brother of mine I was doing these things to. I did bad things to a lot of people. A lot of parents suffered."

Read about activists marching against Mexico's drug war.

"When you belong to organized crime you have to change. You could be the best person in the world, but the people you live with change you completely. You become somebody else. And then the drugs and liquor change you."

I have watched too many videos of the pain caused by killers like Gonzalo. I have seen a sobbing teenager tortured on a tape sent to his family; a bloodied old man confessing that he had talked to a rival cartel; a line of kneeling victims with bags over their heads being shot in the brain one by one. Does someone who has committed such crimes deserve redemption? Do they deserve a place in heaven?(Read about Mexico bracing for a deadlier drug war after a bombing.)

Yet, I see a human side to Gonzalo. He is friendly and well mannered. We chat about lighter issues. Perhaps in another time and place, he could have been a stand-up guy who worked hard and cared for his family — like his father, who, he says, was a lifelong electrician and union man.

I have known angry, violent men in my home country; hooligans who smash bottles into people's faces or stab people at soccer games. And on the surface, those men seem more hateful and intimidating than Gonzalo as he talks to me in the prison cell. Yet they have killed nobody. Gonzalo has helped turn Mexico at the dawn of the 21st century into a bloodbath that has shocked the world.

In his 17 years in the service of the mafia, Gonzalo witnessed extraordinary changes in the Mexican drug industry.

He began his career in Durango, the mountainous northern state that is the proud birthplace of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. It is also near the heartland of smugglers who have taken drugs to America since Washington first made them illegal. After dropping out of high school and abandoning his hopes of becoming an NFL quarterback, Gonzalo did what many young tough nuts in his town did: he joined the police force. It was here he learned the highly marketable skills of kidnapping and torture.(Read to see if Mexico's narcos are fighting scared.)

The path from policeman to villain is alarmingly common in Mexico. Major drug lords, such as the 1980's "Boss of Bosses" Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, began as officers of the law, as did notorious kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, alias the Ear Lopper. Like them, Gonzalo left the police after a reasonably short stint, deserting when he was 20 years old to pursue a full-time criminal career.

He arrived in Ciudad Juárez and did dirty work for an empire of traffickers who smuggled drugs along a thousand miles of border from east of Juárez to the Pacific Ocean. The year was 1992, glorious days for Mexico's drug mafias. A year earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed and governments across the world were globalizing their economies. A year later, Colombian police shot dead cocaine king Pablo Escobar, signaling the beginning of the demise of that country's cartels. As the 1990s went on, Mexican traffickers flourished, moving tons of narcotics north and pumping back billions of dollars amid the surge in free trade created by NAFTA. They replaced Colombians as the dominant mafia in the Americas. Gonzalo provided muscle for these gangster entrepreneurs, pressuring (or kidnapping and murdering) anyone who didn't pay their bills. And he became a rich man, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But by the time of his arrest 17 years later, his job and his industry had changed drastically. He was leading heavily armed troops in urban warfare against rival gangs. He was carrying out mass kidnappings and controlling safe houses with dozens of victims bound and gagged. He was working with high-ranking city police officers, but fighting pitched battles against federal agents. And he was carrying out brutal terror, including countless decapitations. He had become, he tells me, a man he did not recognize when he stared in the mirror.

"You learn a lot of forms of torture. To a point you enjoy carrying them out. We laughed at people's pain — at the way we tortured them. There are many forms of torture. Cutting off arms, decapitating. This is a very strong thing. You decapitate someone and have no feeling, no fear."

Understanding the Mexican drug war is crucial not only because of morbid curiosity at heaps of severed-brain cases — but because the problems in Mexico are being played out across the world. We hear little about communist guerrillas in the Americas these days, but criminal uprisings are spreading like bushfire. In El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha forced bus drivers into a national strike over anti-gang laws; in Brazil, the First Command torched 82 buses, 17 banks and killed 42 policemen in one coordinated offensive; in Jamaica, police clashed with supporters of Christopher "Dudus" Coke, leaving 70 dead. Are pundits going to insist this is just cops and robbers? The Mexican drug war is a frightening warning of how bad things could get in these other countries; it is a case study in criminal insurgency.

Many Salvadoran gang bangers are the sons of communist guerrillas — and call themselves combatants just like their fathers. But they don't care about Che Guevara and socialism, just money and power. In a globalized world, mafia capitalists and criminal insurgents have become the new dictators and the new rebels. Welcome to the 21st century.

From El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. Copyright© 2011 by Ioan Grillo. Published by Bloomsbury Press.

See photos about coming to age in Ciudad Juarez.
Read about Mexico's lost generation.

Source

'Magic Mushrooms' Can Improve Psychological Health Long Term

By Maia Szalavitz

---

Getty Images

The psychedelic drug in magic mushrooms may have lasting medical and spiritual benefits, according to new research from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The mushroom-derived hallucinogen, called psilocybin, is known to trigger transformative spiritual states, but at high doses it can also result in "bad trips" marked by terror and panic. The trick is to get the dose just right, which the Johns Hopkins researchers report having accomplished.

In their study, the Hopkins scientists were able to reliably induce transcendental experiences in volunteers, which offered long-lasting psychological growth and helped people find peace in their lives — without the negative effects.

(PHOTOS: Inside Colorado's Marijuana Industry)

"The important point here is that we found the sweet spot where we can optimize the positive persistent effects and avoid some of the fear and anxiety that can occur and can be quite disruptive," says lead author Roland Griffiths, professor of behavioral biology at Hopkins.

Giffiths' study involved 18 healthy adults, average age 46, who participated in five eight-hour drug sessions with either psilocybin — at varying doses — or placebo. Nearly all the volunteers were college graduates and 78% participated regularly in religious activities; all were interested in spiritual experience.

Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.

Critically, however, the participants themselves were not the only ones who saw the benefit from the insights they gained: their friends, family member and colleagues also reported that the psilocybin experience had made the participants calmer, happier and kinder.

Ultimately, Griffiths and his colleagues want to see if the same kind of psychedelic experience could help ease anxiety and fear over the long term in cancer patients or others facing death. And following up on tantalizing clues from early research on hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, mescaline and psilocybin in the 1960s (which are all now illegal), researchers are also studying whether transcendental experiences could help spur recovery from addiction and treat other psychological problems like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

For Griffiths' current experiment, participants were housed in a living room-like setting designed to be calm, comfortable and attractive. While under the influence, they listened to classical music on headphones, wore eyeshades and were instructed to "direct their attention inward."

Each participant was accompanied by two other research-team members: a "monitor" and an "assistant monitor," who both had previous experience with people on psychedelic drugs and were empathetic and supportive. Before the drug sessions, the volunteers became acquainted enough with their team so that they felt familiar and safe. Although the experiments took place in the Hopkins hospital complex in order to ensure prompt medical attention in the event that it was needed, it never was.

As described by early advocates of the use of psychedelics — from ancient shamans to Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead — the psilocybin experience typically involves a sense of oneness with the universe and with others, a feeling of transcending time, space and other limitations, coupled with a sense of holiness and sacredness. Overwhelmingly, these experiences are difficult to put into words, but many of Griffiths' participants said they were left with the sense that they understood themselves and others better and therefore had greater compassion and patience.

(MORE: A Mystery Partly Solved: How the 'Club Drug' Ketamine Lifts Depression So Quickly)

"I feel that I relate better in my marriage. There is more empathy — a greater understanding of people and understanding their difficulties and less judgment," said one participant. "Less judging of myself, too."

Another said: "I have better interaction with close friends and family and with acquaintances and strangers. ... My alcohol use has diminished dramatically."

To zero in on the "sweet spot" of dosing, Griffiths started half the volunteers on a low dose and gradually increased their doses over time (with placebo sessions randomly interspersed); the other half started on a high dose and worked their way down.

Those who started on a low dose found that their experiences tended to get better as the dose increased, probably because they learned what to expect and how to handle it. But people who started with high doses were more likely to experience anxiety and fear (though these feeling didn't last long and sometimes resolved into euphoria or a sense of transcendence).

"If we back the dose down a little, we have just as much of the same positive effects. The properties of the mystical experience remain the same, but there's a fivefold drop in anxiety and fearfulness," Griffiths says.

Some past experiments with psychedelics in the '60s used initial high doses of the drugs — the "blast people away with a high dose" model, says Griffiths — to try to treat addiction. "Some of the early work in addictions was done with the idea of, 'O.K., let's model the 'bottoming-out' crisis and make use of the dark side of [psychedelic] compounds. That didn't work," Griffiths says.

It may even have backfired: other research on addictions shows that coercion, humiliation and other attempts to produce a sense of "powerlessness," tend to increase relapse and treatment dropout, not recovery. (And the notorious naked LSD encounter sessions conducted with psychopaths made them worse, too.)

Griffiths is currently seeking patients with terminal cancer to participate in his next set of experiments (for more information on these studies, click here); because psychedelics often produce a feeling of going beyond life and death, they are thought to be especially likely to help those facing the end of life. Griffiths is also studying whether psilocybin can help smokers quit.

Griffiths and other researchers like him are hoping to bring the study of psychedelics into the future. They want to build on the promise that some of the early research showed, while avoiding the bad rep and exaggerated claims — for example, that LSD was harmless and could usher in world peace — that became associated with the drugs when people started using them recreationally in the 1960s. The resulting negative publicity helped shut down the burgeoning research.

This time around, caution may be paying off. Dr. Jerome Jaffe, America's first drug czar, who was not involved with the research, said in a statement, "The Hopkins psilocybin studies clearly demonstrate that this route to the mystical is not to be walked alone. But they have also demonstrated significant and lasting benefits. That raises two questions: could psilocybin-occasioned experiences prove therapeutically useful, for example in dealing with the psychological distress experienced by some terminal patients?

"And should properly-informed citizens, not in distress, be allowed to receive psilocybin for its possible spiritual benefits, as we now allow them to pursue other possibly risky activities such as cosmetic surgery and mountain-climbing?"

The study was published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

Source

Obama's Misguided Crackdown on Medical Marijuana

By Maia Szalavitz

Getty Images

Why is the government cracking down on medical marijuana, a $1.7 billion business in California alone — and one of the few that seems to be thriving in a moribund economy?

In early October, the Justice Department announced it would be targeting medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Calling large dispensaries "profiteers" that "hijacked" California's medical marijuana law and were "motivated not by compassion but by money," the state's four U.S. attorneys announced the arrests of two major dispensary owners and a lawyer they accused of making millions from growing the drug.

It was a reversal of President Obama's campaign promise to end the previous administration's legal pursuit of medical marijuana. Although Obama's justice department had previously abided by a memo, which said that prosecuting marijuana providers and patients who followed state law was not an "efficient use of federal resources," over the summer the administration changed tactics, expressing concern about "an increase in the scope of commercial cultivation, sale, distribution and use of marijuana for purported medical purposes." It began sending letters to dispensaries and their landlords threatening forfeiture of the property if marijuana sales did not stop.

The IRS has also begun its own crackdown on California dispensaries. It now claims that the dispensaries owe back taxes because all of their business deductions are illegal. In addition, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms recently warned gun dealers not to sell to users of medical marijuana.

MORE: More Evidence That Marijuana-Like Drugs May Help Prevent PTSD

Ironically, national support for medical marijuana is currently at a high, at about 70%, and more and more advocates are calling for total legalization of the drug. For the first time ever, Gallup found last week that more Americans support making marijuana use legal: 50% of Americans support legalization, with 46% opposed. That's up from just 12% in favor in 1969.

Support for legalization is even higher in younger age groups: 62% of those aged 18 to 29 want legal marijuana, while just 31% of those over 65 favor changing the current law. As boomers and even more weed-friendly Gen-Xers age, pro-legalization sentiment continues to grow.

Now add to that, support for legalization from the California Medical Association, the state's largest group representing doctors, with some 35,000 members. In this context, medical marijuana doesn't seem like a crime voters are clamoring to prosecute.

It's not likely that the federal crackdown will actually affect marijuana consumption, either. Studies repeatedly find little effect of law enforcement spending on demand for drugs. Indeed, a recent marijuana price analysis by a collective of geographers called The Floating Sheep (you can't make this stuff up!) — based on crowd-sourced data on the street value of marijuana by quantity, quality and location — found no correlation between the local cost of marijuana and the number of arrests for dealing or possession in the state.

MORE: Medical Marijuana Sales Grow to Rival Viagra's: New Report

Rather, price is correlated with location. As the Atlantic's Richard Florida describes it:

Their main finding is that marijuana prices rise the further a location is from the major center of production. Decreased supply leads to a rise in transportation costs and risk. Clearly pot prices are as low as they are in the Pacific Northwest and Florida for the same reasons that potatoes are cheap in Idaho and corn is cheap in Iowa — because they're close to the source, the places where the product is either grown, imported, processed, or all three.

(Incidentally, the nationwide average price for an ounce of high quality smoke: $377.02)

It seems unlikely that spending scarce federal dollars during a recession on a medical marijuana crackdown is going to win any awards for "efficient" use of government resources from either the right or the left. In fact, I seem to recall that there's a Senate committee desperately seeking quick budget cuts around now: in view of these facts, do you think they should slash schools, meals for seniors, health care spending, cancer research, unemployment benefits, firefighter or police salaries — or the war on medical marijuana?

MORE: U.S. Rules That Marijuana Has No Medical Use. What Does Science Say?

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Source

Inside Story - Is Mexico losing the war on drugs?

Is Mexico losing the war? Yes.

What is the answer? Legalize, Tax, regulate, and control the supply. Don't let organized crime flourish.

Again I ask any sane person which would you prefer:

1. Organized crime - More innocent people killed in Mexico than Iraq/Afghan wars.
2. Legalized drugs

The answer is obvious. Legalizing drugs is much less harmful than organized crime.

Legalizing drugs doesn't kill families and children while destabilizing the government.

As a student of history, let's learn from the past. Alcohol was banned and constitutionally removed and then allowed again simply because of Organized crime.

Prohibition didn't work, why would it work now?

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Global war on drugs has 'failed' say former leaders

Opiate use increased by 35% worldwide from 1998-2008, in spite of anti-drug efforts

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Will legalising marijuana fix California's problems?
• Drugs laws around the world
• The price of Mexico's 'drugs war'

The global war on drugs has "failed" according to a new report by group of politicians and former world leaders.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

The White House rejected the findings, saying the report was misguided.

The 19-member commission includes the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, the former President of Colombia Cesar Gaviria, and the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won”

Global Commission on Drug Policy

The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, the former US Secretary of State.

'No harm to others'

Their report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.

It cites UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%.

The authors criticise governments who claim the current war on drugs is effective:

"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won," the report said.

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

Adam Mynott BBC News

It is a damning indictment. The group of world leaders, including former Presidents of Mexico and Colombia which are blighted by the trade in illegal drugs, says urgent changes are overdue.

Their report says current policies to tackle drug abuse and the crime that preys on it are clearly not working, but result in thousands of deaths and rampant lawlessness.

It calls for an end to the 'criminalisation, marginalisation and stigmatisation of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others'.

The leading international figures behind the report do not pull their punches. They say sensible regulation of drugs is working in some countries but they accuse many governments around the world of pretending that the current war on drugs is effective when they know it isn't.

Drugs need to be decriminalised, they say, and addicts need to be treated as patients, not villains.

Instead of punishing users who the report says "do no harm to others," the commission argues that governments should end criminalisation of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organised crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users.

It calls for drug policies based on methods empirically proven to reduce crime and promote economic and social development.

The commission is especially critical of the US, saying it must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in healthcare and human rights.

"We hope this country (the US) at least starts to think there are alternatives," said the former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria.

"We don't see the US evolving in a way that is compatible with our (countries') long-term interests."

The office of White House drug tsar Gil Kerlikowske rejected the panel's recommendations.

"Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated," said a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe."

Source

No police in Mexico town after last officer kidnapped

The US border region is the centre of Mexico's drug smuggling operations

Continue reading the main story

MEXICO'S DRUGS WAR

• Charting Mexico's violence
• Q&A: Mexico's drug violence
• 'No alternative' to Mexico's drug war
• Battling the cartels

The Mexican border town of Guadalupe has been left with no police force after the last officer was kidnapped.

Erika Gandara's house was set on fire by unidentified gunmen before she was abducted last week, according to the state prosecutor's office.

All her colleagues had resigned or were killed in the region's drug war.

More than 30,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 when the President announced a crackdown on the cartels.

Ms Gandara, 28, had patrolled the town of 9,000 inhabitants on her own since June.

"Nobody wants to go into policing here, and the budget just isn't there anyway," she told AFP news agency earlier this year.

Guadalupe is about 5km (3 miles) away from the US border and 60km (40 miles) from Ciudad Juarez, the centre of drug smuggling operations into the United States.

It is also close to the hamlet of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerreror, where a 20-year-old college student got the job of police chief in October because no one else applied.

The Mexican government has sent soldiers to patrol Guadalupe and to investigate the kidnapping of Ms Gandara.

Source

Mexico's drug war: Number of dead passes 30,000

The fight against drugs is exacting a heavy toll

Continue reading the main story

MEXICO'S DRUGS WAR

• Charting Mexico's violence
• Q&A: Mexico's drug violence
• 'No alternative' to Mexico's drug war
• Battling the cartels

More than 30,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon took office four years ago, the government says.

Almost 12,500 have been killed so far this year, a sharp increase on 2009.

Mexico's attorney-general said the number of deaths was "regrettable", but showed that the security forces were having success in their fight against the drugs gangs.

President Calderon has sent thousands of troops to battle the cartels.

The latest figures were announced by the attorney-general, Arturo Chavez.

He said 12,456 people had been registered killed in drug-related violence so far this year, compared to 9,600 in 2009, bringing the total to 30,196 since President Calderon took office in December 2006.

But he said the figures reflected the "desperation" of the cartels in the face of pressure from the security forces.

Mr Chavez said the government had seized record quantities of arms and drugs and captured or killed 10 of the 24 most wanted drug traffickers.

The Mexican government says many of the deaths are the result of fighting between rival gangs over territory and smuggling routes into the US.

Most of the killings are concentrated in certain regions, particularly the northern border states.

The border city of Ciudad Juarez alone has seen 3,000 killings so far this year, ten times more than in 2007.

Critics of Mr Calderon's policies say they have increased the level of violence without reducing the flow of cocaine and other drugs into the US.

Human rights groups have also raised concerns that using the military has exposed civilians to possible abuse.

Source

~~~~~~~~~~

Commentary

The Drug war's pain is seen on 3 front:

1) Firstly it supports one of the largest prison populations in the world. America is addicted to throwing drug addicts into prison where they aren't properly treated and are thrown into and out of the system like a spinning top. That's not how a Just society should treat it's most vulnerable citizens.

2) Secondly the war on drugs causes pain at home with the gangland style fights that are so common in Los Angeles, leaving a trail of bodies of innocent women and children. The Bloods and the Crypts would have nowhere and nothing to fight over if they were defunded and weren't making record profits off illegal drugs.

3) Finally the pain is felt in Mexico where the cartels show the government who really calls the shots.

They lost 3 (9/11's) worth of citizens this year, more than 9,000 people total.

That's 10 (9/11's) worth if you count these last 4 years. Where is their war on terror? Where are their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why are they neglecting these terrorist attacks on their homeland?

~~~~~~~~~

On a philosophical and fundamental level, it is not my place to stop people from ingesting substances. I may suggest a better path or an alternative one, but it's not my place to stop them from walking down a dangerous road.

By trying to circumvent that axiom or universal construct, we have created a problem that disturbs the lives of millions of people.

A Just society aims to reduce death and violence, even if it cannot aim to reduce people from taking dangerous paths.

That's why we legalized Alcohol, a horrible substance that is just as deserving of a ban as any other drug is.

Marijuana: Retired Cops, Judges and Lawyers Push to Legalize

By: Chris Gentilviso (6 mins ago)

Topics: illegal immigration, marijuana, California, Legal System, Proposition 19

REUTERS/Nir Elias

Pot proponents usually highlight medical reasons to argue for the removal of the illegal tag. Several ex-officials in California turned to a different lens in their support for Proposition 19.

The AP reports that a group of former law enforcement professionals pushed their support for state's marijuana ballot measure on Monday. Largely comprised of former/retired police officers, judges and prosecutors, their endorsement for Prop 19 centers on its ability to aid congestion in the state's courts. Less backlog from petty marijuana cases could lead to more efficient processing for larger-scale crimes.

(More on TIME.com: Photos of cannabis conventions around the country.)

If Proposition 19 were approved, California adults could legally carry up to one ounce of marijuana. Local governments would also stand to benefit from the freedom of taxing its sales. Yet, former Drug Enforcement Administration officials still stand on the other end of the argument, likening legal marijuana to Arizona's current illegal immigration initiatives.

Source

On the front line of the Colombian drugs war

by Vanessa Buschschluter BBC News, Villavicencio, Colombia

Production is down in the world's biggest cocaine-producing country. Ten years ago, Colombia churned out almost 1,000 tonnes of cocaine annually, now it is down to less than 300 tonnes.

"It's still one of our country's biggest problems," says Col Jose Angel Mendoza, deputy head of the Colombian anti-narcotics police force. "But we're on the right track."

In pictures: A raid in Villavicencio

However, success has brought its own problems, the colonel says. "A couple of years ago you'd find a 30-hectare (74-acre) coca field and you'd use a plane to spray it with herbicides.

"Now, the coca fields are much smaller, hidden in dense jungle and hard to access. Often, the plants have been booby-trapped, and the surrounding area is mined, making it risky to eradicate them by hand."

Elite force

The enemy, too, has changed, Col Mendoza says. The big drugs cartels have been broken up, smaller criminal gangs which are harder to target have taken their place.

And after the capture and death of many of the top leaders of the Farc, Colombia's main rebel group is also becoming more fragmented, making it in some ways harder to fight.

Our mission is to combat the drugs trade, and we're trained to fight and survive in the most inhospitable areas of the country Sgt Nino, anti-narcotics police

So, the battle goes on. Dressed in combat gear and armed with M4 rifles, the anti-narcotic force's 7,200 agents look more like soldiers than police officers.

They even have their own 600-strong special operations force, the Jungla, or jungle squad.

Sgt Alfredo Nino is one of them. Soft-spoken and a little shy, he seems an unlikely candidate for an elite fighting force.

Sitting next to his wife in their neat home in Villavicencio, 55 miles (90 km) south of Bogota, he talks about his decision to join the police at the age of 18.

Sgt Nino's wife Liliana supported his decision to join the special ops force

"No-one in my family had been in the security forces, so I don't know why it grabbed me. I just saw an ad and it looked like a good career path," he said.

The initial training took him far from home. He adapted well, he insists, but the first time his father came to visit, he wanted to leave with him and rejoin the family. "But the guards stopped me."

But he soon took a liking to the work of the special operations team.

He joined Copes, a police group specialising in urban combat. A natural sharpshooter, he became an instructor teaching others to shoot, among them his future wife, Liliana Martinez.

When they got married, he joined her squad in Villavicencio, which provided police escorts for politicians. Three years ago, Liliana left the force to look after their two children, aged 12 and six.

Sharp end

After a while as a bodyguard, Sgt Nino volunteered for the Jungla.

Sgt Nino carries a pistol at all times

"Our mission is to combat the drugs trade, and we're trained to fight and survive in the most inhospitable areas of the country for days, weeks, months, whatever it takes," he said.

Liliana backed his decision but found the three years he spent with the Jungla tough for the family.

"He'd call me in the morning from Bogota, and a couple of hours later he could be at the other end of the country, deployed on some highly dangerous mission," she said.

Sgt Nino says it was a privilege to be a Jungla. "You know your colleagues are as well trained as you are and you are always on the frontline of the battle."

But the missions could be relentless and there were times when he didn't come home for six months. "When I finally did return and wanted to embrace my 18-month old daughter, she didn't recognise me and ran away crying," he recalls.

That's when he decided something needed to change, and he asked for a transfer from the Jungla to an anti-narcotics group in Villavicencio.

Sitting in his windowless office at police HQ filing fuel expenses, Sgt Nino still wears combat gear, and always has a Beretta pistol strapped to his thigh. "I always carry a gun," he says, "you never know whom you may have crossed in my line of work."

We could inflict much more damage, if we had three times as many helicopters Col Mendoza, deputy head Anti-narcotics Police

He has no regrets about taking on a job with more administrative duties. "I have spent nine years at the sharp end of the war, I've done my bit, now I'm taking it easy for the sake of my children," he says.

Then his eyes light up: "But when there is a raid, I'm the first one to be called. Once a jungla, always a jungla!"

When the call comes, Sgt Nino puts on his flak jacket and helmet, picks up a rifle and leads his team into another raid on a cocaine lab in the jungle or a drug bust in the city.

And it is not just drugs they are looking for. These days, the unit seizes arms and ammunition too.

Network of informants

While I am with them, they get a tip-off about a suspected Farc rebel hiding in a local hotel.

They believe he could be an explosives expert and are keen to catch him, as an increasing number of their colleagues are being maimed and killed by bombs planted by the Farc to protect their illicit coca crops.

The suspect is apprehended with two illegally held weapons and Farc propaganda material, but no explosives.

It could be enough for a sentence of one to two years, but not quite the coup they had been hoping for.

Is it worth the risks they take, I ask the men conducting the raid. Nationwide, the anti-narcotics police force may have arrested 60,000 people last year but are they not just replaced by new people keen to profit from the lucrative drugs trade?

"It's not a job, it's a vocation!" they insist.

And Col Mendoza is convinced his force is making serious inroads. They are building up a network of informants, both paid and unpaid, which is helping them target even the smallest dealers.

But money is always short, the Coronel say, and with US financial support for the war on drugs gradually being cut back, Colombian taxpayers are increasingly having to foot the bill.

I ask him if there is one thing which could tip the balance in this protracted conflict.

The answer is: helicopters.

"We could inflict much more damage," he says," if we had three times as many helicopters to take my men to the ever more remote frontline of the drugs war."

Source

California mulls legalising marijuana

Emilio San Pedro BBC News

The Bulldog Cafe is allowed to sell marijuana for medicinal purposes

In 1996, voters in California approved a referendum that made it legal for the first time in decades in the US for people to consume cannabis for medicinal purposes.

More than a dozen states have followed suit since and several others - the most recent of which is Massachusetts - have approved laws decriminalising the possession of small amounts of the drug.

Now, there are moves afoot in California to go further to fully legalise marijuana.

Evidence of the impact that the approval of medicinal marijuana has had on some areas of California is clear in Oakland.

Across the bay from San Francisco, it has come to be known as Oaksterdam, in a nod to the symbolic global capital of marijuana deregulation, Amsterdam.

The relaxed approach to marijuana use in this part of Oakland has led to the opening of several marijuana dispensaries.

They are establishments in this once deprived area of town which sell a broad array of cannabis related products, from food products such as brownies and cereal bars laced with cannabis to traditional marijuana for smoking.

Oaksterdam University

"This is where it all started," says Richard Lee, a leading advocate for the legalisation of cannabis, pointing to a building where the first ever dispensary was opened in 1996.

His sense of excitement is palpable as he shows me around Oaksterdam, which beyond dispensaries is also home to a facility where state residents can go through the process of getting the ID needed for their right to use cannabis for medical purposes.

Richard Lee runs Oaksterdam University which opened in 2007

The area is also home to the Oaksterdam University, which Mr Lee runs.

He shows me around the student union of the university, which he describes as a trade school for all of those interested in finding a place in the thriving cannabis trade that medicinal marijuana has spawned.

Mr Lee tells me that making cannabis use legal makes economic sense but would also help in the fight against the Mexican drugs cartels.

"According to some estimates, the Mexican cartels get about 60-70% of their money - their profit - from cannabis," he tells me.

"So if we cut that out of the equation then theoretically 60-70% of the violence they perpetrate would be cut out, because they'd have less money for the guns and weapons and ammunition to kill people and to spend on bribing officials and all the rest," Mr Lee says.

Trailblazing

That perspective, along with the fact that the California state authorities estimate that marijuana could bring in nearly $1.5bn a year in much needed tax revenue if it were legalised, has led to an increased support among the state's voters for the full legalisation of the drug.

And, politicians like Tom Ammiano, who represents one of the most liberal districts of San Francisco in the California state assembly, have been paying close attention.

Mr Ammiano came into politics as a trailblazing gay rights activist in the 1970s and has long advocated greater tolerance for cannabis use.

Earlier this year, he took that approach one step further and introduced a bill in the California state assembly, which, if approved, would grant cannabis the same legal status in the state as alcohol and tobacco.

We like to say prohibition is chaos and regulation is control Tom Ammiano California State Assemblyman

That would put California ahead of even Amsterdam, where marijuana use is tolerated but not altogether legal.

Sitting with him in his office in the state government building in San Francisco, with its sweeping views of the city, it becomes very clear that his proposal is far from a flight of fancy.

He tells me he has been finding that more and more of his colleagues in the state assembly are coming around to seeing why moving towards legalisation makes perfect sense.

'Lighten up'

"People across the board, whether they're conservative or liberal, have come to realise that the so-called war on drugs has failed and failed miserably," Mr Ammiano says.

"In fact, it's costing us money instead of saving us money. This new approach would be a way for the policing efforts to be focused on the big bad guys, the cartels, with their violence and murder, and lighten up on the more minor offenses. We like to say prohibition is chaos and regulation is control," he adds.

"On the streets a drug dealer does not ask a kid for his ID before selling him cannabis," he concludes with an acerbic, humorous tone that serves as proof that he has, beyond politics, also had some success in his other career as a stand-up comedian.

But, despite his optimistic tone, Mr Ammiano says that he knows that those who oppose his proposal, including key figures in the medical and law enforcement community, are armed with statistics pointing to the damaging long-term effect of the drug and have the stamina and resources to wage a major fight to ensure that the bill never gets signed into law.

One of those opponents of the proposal is Ronald Brooks, the president of the National Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition, which represents more than 70,000 narcotics enforcement officers in the US.

We meet in the town of Redwood City, south of San Francisco, and as I get in his car, we drive past what appears to be a nondescript office building.

'Seriously flawed'

However, he tells me that, in the 1980s, it was a bank - the place where his partner on the police force was killed in front of him by a ruthless marijuana dealer, who was carrying out a bank robbery to fund his drug business.

He says experiences like that have strengthened his resolve that America can't allow itself to take on a more lenient approach to marijuana.

"This argument of freeing up law enforcement so that we can take on the cartels is seriously flawed," he tells me.

Ronald Brooks is firmly against the proposed change in the law

"This is really a hoax being perpetrated on the voters of California to authorise their political agenda - that is to legalise marijuana as one step to legalise drugs in America because they simply don't think that the government ought to control drugs," he adds.

"The people who are going to lose if this gets approved are the taxpayers because we're going to have increased costs associated with this, both healthcare and law enforcement costs, and the people who have to drive on the state's highways who are going to be in danger from being hit by someone intoxicated from using cannabis. This is simply a reckless public policy," he concludes.

Back across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland, specifically Oaksterdam, the patrons of the Bulldog Cafe are enjoying their legally sanctioned right to consume marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Emerging industry

Gary has travelled from Texas for the weekend to attend a seminar on the cannabis trade at the Oaksterdam University across the street.

He is in his 50s, but says he is hoping to take the information he has picked up in his course on the cannabis business and make a life-transforming move in the coming months to California.

"My girlfriend and I are interested in moving to California from Texas to become a part of this here. We're not quite sure where we fit in but we want to get into the business itself. We feel it's an emerging industry, and this is where I feel compelled to come," he tells me as the smell of cannabis wafts through the room.

Like Gary, there are hundreds of others participating in the courses at the Oaksterdam University on any given week.

Beyond that, there are more than 200,000 people in the state registered as consumers of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

As for Mr Ammiano's proposal to legalise marijuana in the state, that is still making its way through the California state assembly and it is difficult to say whether it will succeed or not.

What is clear, however, is that whatever the outcome of the legalisation proposal, the medical marijuana law and the multi-million dollar industry it has spawned appear to be here to stay in California.

Source

Why Does Taxing Pot Make So Much Sense?