Bonnette said that if children don't have the right attitude as they move into the higher grades they will be more likely to experiment with drugs.

"Children are exposed to new friends, new pressures and new peer and social norms when they move into junior high," he said.

The study appeared to dovetail with a new ABC-Washington Post news poll released Monday and finding that while 52 percent of parents rate drugs in the schools as a crisis or serious problem, only 34 percent of teen-agers do.

The telephone poll was conducted Feb. 20-24 among random national samples of 527 teen-agers and 618 parents of teen-agers, most from the same household. The margin of sampling error was 4.5 percentage points.

UN Confirms Drug Use Up Among US Youths

Why Is Drug Education Failing?

The Drug Reform Coordination Network's Web site is currently featuring an exploration of the drug education issue - specifically, the general failure of current modes of drug education, the establishment's resistance to change, and the government's attempts to suppress critical research on the topic. Please visit http://www.drcnet.org and follow the link to "Why is Drug Education Failing?"

Sections include:

If you are not already on DRCNet, please visit our "quick-signup" form at http://www.drcnet.org/signup.html.

Eugene Teachers Oppose Drug Testing Proposal

Medical Marijuana Group Charges PDFA With Railroading Amtrak-Conrail 'Hoax'

March 2, 1997

An Open Letter to ABC affiliates

Please, don't air commercials from Partnership For A Drug-Free America that spread lies and hate towards medical marijuana patients such as myself. We are only trying to stay alive, using a medicine that our doctors tell us is helping. Every time you air a commercial from Partnership For A Drug-Free America, you place medical marijuana patients in grave peril.

Remember the 1987 Amtrak-Conrail train accident, in Harrisburg Pennsylvania? Fifteen people were killed and another 176 were injured in the worst accident in Amtrak's history. Partnership For A Drug-Free America aired millions of dollars worth of free radio spots which proclaimed: "They say marijuana doesn't kill, but I lost my wife and two children in a train accident caused by marijuana."

It was all a hoax. Dr. Delbert J. Lacefield, chief of the Federal Aviation Administration's forensic toxicology unit, later admitted to falsifying blood test results in the Amtrak-Conrail crash, as well as numerous other crashes. Lacefield's claims that THC had been found in blood samples taken from railway employees were exposed as fraudulent in court. Court records show that Lacefield never even performed the laboratory analysis required to detect THC. No one was ever found guilty of using pot and there is no evidence that pot is related to any increase in railway accidents. Since drug testing was instituted, as a federal response to the alleged use of pot in the Amtrak crash, there has been no decline in railway accidents. The engineer accused of smoking pot was, in fact, drunk and had been convicted of driving under the influence a few months earlier.

Partnership For A Drug-Free America is also the group that got caught lying about dysfunctional brain waves from a fictitious marijuana smoker. Their record of lying about drugs sends the wrong message to kids, who want the truth, not lies.

Stop the Lies! Please!

Sincerely,

Steve Kubby
Director
AMMO

America's International Drug Strategy Online

69 Percent Of US Thinks Marijuana Should Remain Illegal (The 69 Percent Allowed To Sit On Juries)

[The misleading nature of polls that ask whether marijuana should be "legalized" has been noted here previously. To reiterate just one problem - marijuana is technically illegal even in the Netherlands - or California for that matter - so what makes our system of illegality better than the systems of illegality elsewhere? And when will the Roper Center start asking people if they know how much they will have to pay in taxes to lock up the 7.8 percent of the population that uses illegal substances? (In the West, according to the latest, 1995 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse posted at http://www.health.org/pubs/95hhs/ar18txt.htm.) However, the real question is, if American marijuana defendants are really entitled to a jury representing the community at large ("of one's peers"), how does the government get 31percent of jurors to subjugate their consciences to the state's? Why aren't Americans guaranteed freedom of conscience? If 51 percent of the population wants to sanction all gay people or women who have late-term abortions, for example, would the rest of us get excluded from juries in those cases? - ed.]

Solving The Riddle Of Medical Marijuana

The tactic the Clinton Administration has chosen to head off the medical use of marijuana in California- threatening doctors who recommend marijuana to their patients- is a dangerous and unwarranted interference with free speech and a patient's right to hear the truth from a doctor. In its effort to enforce Federal narcotics laws, the Administration needs to make clear that it will do nothing to prevent doctors from delivering their best medical judgments to their patients.

Proposition 215, approved by California voters last November, makes it legal under state law for a seriously ill patient to possess and cultivate marijuana for medical purposes if a doctor has advised, either orally or in writing, that the use of marijuana is medically appropriate.

The Administration has not challenged the legality of the state statute directly in court. Nor has it brought new prosecutions against buyers' clubs that provide marijuana to the seriously ill or against patients suffering from AIDS, cancer and glaucoma who smoke marijuana for relief from nausea, vomiting and pain.

Instead, the Federal government has said that it would clamp down on physicians. Threats of losing their right to prescribe drugs, exclusion from participation in Medicare and Medicaid, and Federal criminal prosecution have silenced many doctors. Last December the California Medical Association advised its members to make no recommendations on marijuana lest they be prosecuted.

A recent lawsuit brought by prominent AIDS and cancer physicians in California argues that the Administration's threats violate their First Amendment rights and intrude on physician-patient communications. Last Friday the Administration issued a statement saying that doctors may discuss the pros and cons of medical marijuana, but may not intentionally make oral or written statements or "recommendations" that enable patients to obtain it. That formulation seems to mean that, even if a doctor thinks marijuana the best treatment for a particular patient, he cannot say so because, under California law, a patient may use a doctor's recommendation as a defense against state prosecution for possession of marijuana. This is an improper restriction on medical judgment. After all, a doctor's recommendation does not place marijuana in a patient's hands. It is still the patient who procures the drug.

Thousands of doctors have recommended marijuana to cancer and AIDS patients in past years. A 1990 Harvard survey of more than 2400 oncologists found that 44 percent of those responding has recommended marijuana to cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Doctors making similar statements in California now could become targets of Federal investigations and punishment.

The Administration's policy issued last December said that any "action of recommending" marijuana would trigger Federal sanctions. Now Justice Department lawyers, facing a fierce counterattack from the medical community, are blurring the issue, saying that only doctors who make recommendations with intent to help patients get marijuana are liable. But how can one distinguish intent to help patients obtain the drug from intent to tell them the best therapy to use? The plaintiff doctors are right to press for clarity on this issue.

The Administration says it does not want to gag doctors, but its stated policies lead in that direction. If there is truly no gag rule, then doctors should be free to say what they want, including advising the use of marijuana, without fear of reprisal, as long as they do not otherwise assist patients in getting the drug, which remains illegal under Federal law.

Public Health Director Debunks Califano's 'Laetrile' Analogy

The Washington Post, March 3, 1997, p. A18

As a longtime activist against health frauds such as laetrile as a cancer treatment and as a former director of drug abuse prevention programs, I read Joseph Califano Jr.'s op-ed piece "Medical Marijuana and the Lesson of Laetrile" [Feb. 17] with great interest - and outrage.

Just as drugs can be abused, so can analogies. Comparing medical marijuana to laetrile is an example of analogy abuse. Consider:

1. While there has never been a scientifically plausible basis for the extraordinary medical claims made for laetrile, as far back as 1982 the National Academy of Sciences noted "[marijuana has] shown promise in the treatment of a variety of disorders."

2. Laetrile failed miserably when tested under controlled conditions and never received FDA approval. THC, the major active ingredient in marijuana, is, in capsule form, already an FDA-approved drug, even though capsules deliver THC less efficiently than marijuana smoking.

3. Laetrile's toxicity is well documented; it causes cyanide poisoning. Marijuana was described as "one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man" by the Drug Enforcement Administration's own administrative law judge in 1988 following two years of hearings.

Mr. Califano insists that there is no scientific evidence that marijuana is superior to currently available therapies.

But, why does marijuana have to be proven superior to other therapies to be considered a viable option?

Considering that marijuana is inexpensive and relatively nontoxic, and it obviously provides relief to sick people, Mr. Califano's insistence that marijuana now pass stringent tests of its medical efficacy is inhumane.

Increase Of Prescriptions For Marijuana In The Netherlands

Corruption In The United States Resembles Mexico's

In retrospect, that one marijuana cigarette Bill Clinton famously did not inhale has cost America plenty. It left the president with the unfortunate image of being some sort of 1960s-era liberal, and it left the country with a drug policy that Clinton can scarcely afford to question. If only he hadn't had that one nondrag, America might now have a drug policy that made some sense.

It doesn't at the moment, though. The government continues to concentrate mostly on law enforcement both at home and abroad, going after the bad guys in a wonderfully telegenic but ultimately futile effort to put all the drug biggies in jail. At home we have stacked the jails with petty pushers and the occasional kingpin. Abroad, we have inadvertently managed to corrupt the police and the military - Mexico and Colombia being the two most prominent examples.

Mexico, it now seems, is one vast Chicago, circa 1929. Police corruption is rampant. Last month, the director of the National Institute to Combat Drugs, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for corruption - which is like Eliot Ness being on the take. What's more, the good general had recently been briefed by U.S. anti-drug officials.

The war on drugs is a good fight, but it is a stupid one as well. It would be good to rid the world of drugs, lock up all the narco-banditos and rehabilitate all the addicts. But the folly of that effort is in the math. A Mexican police commander earns around $900 a month, a cop around $300 and a soldier a little more than half that. In contrast, U.S. News & World Report says that a narcotics bodyguard makes $2,000 to $3,000 a week and probably gets to wear those swell Ray Bans as well.

The logic of the war on drugs must be hard for your average Mexican policeman to understand. For the sake of Newark or Detroit, Washington or Los Angeles, he's supposed to turn down the sort of money that could keep his family in groceries for a very long time. When, for instance, the Mexican police arrested the cocaine drug lord Oscar Malherbe de Leon last week, he was said to have offered the arresting officers a mere $2 million to be let go. The cops declined, leading me - cynic that I am - to conclude that Mr. de Leon did not have the cash on him.

But who can believe that, in due course, de Leon's place in the gulf cartel will not be taken by someone else - or that another cartel will step into the void. The profit in cocaine is so huge that the Mexican barons are estimated to spend $500 million a year on bribes. Should you like to compare numbers, that's about 50 percent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's annual budget.

It's utterly naive to believe that non-Americans will turn down great riches, or even, moderate bribes, so that American drug users will have to pay a bit more - maybe even go without drugs. After all these years of the so-called war on drugs, you would think we had learned a thing or two about corruption. A better policy has to be developed.

But it is clear by now that the Clinton administration will not develop it. Back before the last presidential election, the administration moved to immunize itself against charges that it was soft on drugs. In fact, it had been - not in law enforcement, whose efficacy is in doubt, but in its education effort, which is a different matter entirely. The world's most famous non-inhaler clearly had an understandable problem with the entire subject and did not - until he was pressed - tape a single public service anti-drug message.

Bob Dole and the GOP campaign opened fire anyway. Once again, we saw that grainy video of a younger Clinton laughing off his one-time marijuana experience. The result has been sadly predictable. Clinton became Narc-in-Chief, and when California and Arizona passed referendums permitting the medicinal use of marijuana, the administration proved that it would not allow a little scientific knowledge to sully its new anti-drug image. Never mind that some scientists favor the medicinal use of marijuana, the Clinton administration was opposed. For the sake of a failed drug policy, a certain number of people will not get a drug that possibly might help them.

Given that, it's too much to expect that the administration will re-examine U.S. policy toward the countries we used to call "our friends south of the border." If it is true that only a certified anticommunist like Nixon could have gone to China, then only an anti-drug zealot or a truly brave politician could change the U.S. drug policy. Wherever that man is, he's not in the White House.

Rebuffing US, Colombia Halts Drug Eradication Program

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, Wednesday suspended all aerial eradication of drug-producing crops in a sharp rebuff to the United States.

The move was an unexpectedly swift and forceful reaction to the Clinton administration's decision to include Colombia on a list of nations not fully cooperating with the United States in the fight against drugs. In suspending the flights, Colombia shelved what American officials viewed as a cornerstone of its anti-drug programs.

Joaquin Polo, Colombia's anti-drug czar, announced the decision in a radio interview Wednesday afternoon in which he said Colombia was reviewing any further cooperation with the United States on any anti-drug programs.

"The work of fumigation is temporarily suspended while, as the government announced, the entire subject of international cooperation with the government of the United States is reviewed," Polo said.

In Washington, a senior State Department official said that the United States learned of the Colombian government's decision to suspend aerial eradication only Wednesday morning.

"We have not received any explanation for this decision, but hope that it has been taken for technical and not for policy reasons," said the official, who declined to be identified. "We urge the Colombian government to resume eradication operations as soon as possible."

Polo said Colombian officials did not notify American Ambassador Myles Frechette of the decision in advance.

Clinton administration officials have said the decision last week to decertify Colombia was largely a repudiation of President Ernesto Samper, who has been linked to drug traffickers. For his part, Samper consistently framed the American rebuke as a national insult.

The aerial spraying of fields growing coca and poppies is a risky tactic in which helicopters escorting the planes must sometimes fire at the ground to deter attack from the growers. The United States has continued to finance virtually the entire fumigation effort in Colombia even though it decertified the country last year. It supplies all of the planes and helicopters, technical aid and training for Colombian pilots.

When a country is denied certification as a U.S. ally in fighting drugs, it loses access to most American military and economic aid and may face trade sanctions. But the law exempts humanitarian and anti-drug aid.

Some pilots and gunners in Colombia's last eradication flight Wednesday in the mountains of southern Colombia appeared discouraged by the poor marks the United States had given their country.

"We're out here every day, fumigating and putting our lives at risk and the U.S. says we're not doing enough," said one pilot, who spoke on condition his name not be used.

In its report, the United States criticized both Samper and the Colombian Congress, which cleared its president of charges he took $6 million in campaign contributions from Cali drug lords. The report said that coca crops last year had increased by 32 percent, despite fumigation efforts. The United States also estimated Colombia had fumigated 40,000 acres of illegal crops, rather than the 47,000 acres Colombia claimed.

While the disparity in figures seemed minor, Polo said Wednesday afternoon that it was the main reason for breaking off all eradication efforts.

"They work with our police hand-in-hand all year long, and then when it comes time for an evaluation there's a total ignorance of what we've done," Polo said in a telephone interview. "They have to value the work that we do together."

According to State Department figures, more than half the cocaine-processing laboratories and 90 percent of the coca eradicated in Colombia since 1990 were destroyed during the administration of Samper, who took office in August 1994. But analysts described the suspension of aerial spraying as a thinly veiled retaliation for Washington's decertification and a way to divert attention from American criticism of Samper.

"Suspending fumigation is mainly a way to turn what is really just a problem of Samper into a problem of the country," said Fabio Castillo, a Colombian drug expert and author of "The New Horsemen of Cocaine."

While Colombia had warned that it would review the terms of its anti-drug cooperation with the United States, few here expected a decision so quickly. A spokesman said Samper and a close circle of his associates had decided to suspend the flights at a meeting earlier Wednesday.

Colombian police and military commanders complain that decertification has meant they can no longer obtain ammunition from the United States to battle drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies.

In the 1996 fiscal year that began last October, the State Department budgeted $44 million to give Colombia to fight drugs, of which $19 million was allocated for aerial eradication of coca and poppy fields.

Pilots spraying the steep mountainsides where poppy is growing were clearly resentful at the American decision. One pilot said he had been shot at 15 times in the five years he has been spraying.

Each time he flies, the pilot said, his single-seater plane is surrounded by three helicopters, with heavy guns trained on the ground below.

Colorado Juror Laura Kriho Fined $1,200

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Drug Policy Foundation Questions Harvard On Award For Drug Czar

4455 Connecticut Ave., NW
Suite B-500
Washington, DC 20008-2302 USA
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E-Mail: dpf@dpf.org

The Great Zinberg/McCaffrey Debate

On March 7, The Harvard Medical School will be presenting its Zinberg Award for career achievement in the medical and scientific study and treatment of drugs to General Barry R. McCaffrey.

Gen. McCaffrey has spent his career in the military. He helped plan the invasion of Panama in 1989 and led the notorious U.S. Army Southern Command before his appointment as Drug Czar. In Latin America he specialized in drug interdiction, counterinsurgency, and clandestine military operations.

Norman E. Zinberg, M.D., was a pioneering investigator into the effects of drugs, and particularly the way that attitudes, expectations, and social setting affected their use. He was a critic of American drug laws, and a founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

Instead of receiving an award in Zinberg's name, McCaffrey should be learning what drug abuse and sensible drug policy are by studying Norman's writings, which he has obviously neglected to do. We therefore offer the General the benefit of Norman's words, as culled from his books "Drug, Set, and Setting," and "Drugs and the Public" (written with John Robertson). Once he sees the fundamental conflict between his approach and Norman's, he will obviously choose to decline the award (or else adopt reasonable attitudes and a sensible drug policy!).

McCaffrey: We must acknowledge that drugs are wrong. They're not wrong simply because they're illegal; they're wrong because they destroy you physically, mentally, and morally. So we're going to have our law enforcement authorities uphold the law.

Zinberg: Are the limitations on liberty that present drug laws impose essential to an overriding social purpose? In our view, not only are they not essential, but present laws do not even deal with the harm that undoubtedly flows from drug use. In fact, we suggest that the law itself imposes social as well as legal costs much graver than those of the drug use it seeks to prevent.

McCaffrey: McCaffrey's view on legalization: "Nonsense!"

Zinberg: Certainly decriminilization of marijuana should be extended beyond those few states which have adopted it, and federal penalties for use should be dropped.

McCaffrey: There is no question that we will move ruthlessly to attack this threat to the American people.

Zinberg: The overinclusive, punitive, and other condemnatory features of the law...conflict with existing knowledge about drugs and, more importantly, conflict with the practice of millions of users who find drugs to be something less than the monolithic horror defined by the law.

McCaffrey: There is no reason why we can't return America to a 1960's level, a pre-Vietnam-era level of drug use.

Zinberg: Society must learn to tolerate a reasonable amount of drug use by those members willing and able to make that decision.

McCaffrey: Over 20,000 Americans die from illicit drug use each year.

Zinberg: The addict who is a 'walking death' has been brought to that condition by the present state of the law.

McCaffrey: 2/3 of the 100,000 people in the federal prison system are there for drug-related offenses.

Zinberg: We have a vast self-fulfilling prophecy: by defining a huge number of people as antisocial (criminal), we change their motives and create hatred, disruption, and true rebellion.

McCaffrey: 1.5 million Americans are incarcerated, many for drug violations. No nation in the world has a higher incarceration rate.

Zinberg: Failing to take into account the problems created by the law causes the situation to deteriorate; this in turn leads to the call for more and stronger laws. This is the vicious cycle that we must break.

McCaffrey: Dealing with the problem of illegal drug abuse is more akin to dealing with cancer.

Zinberg: The hopes people place in policeman and doctors have a basis in reality when it comes to a crime like a holdup or a disease like cancer. But when we come to a crime whose victim is thought to be society, and a medical problem which consists in otherwise normal, law-abiding people ingesting a substance thought to be harmful, are we not asking policeman and doctors to do things that fall outside their professional role?

McCaffrey: We have made $1 million available to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences to ask physicians and scientists for all that is known about smoked pot, and what questions need to be asked about it.

Zinberg: The misconception is that we must be able to give a drug a clean bill of health - a 'final verdict' - before we stop criminalizing people who use it, and further that research can technically provide that answer.

[By] Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky

MOUNTAIN VIEW - Mountain View police returned an AIDS patient's medicinal marijuana crop Friday, two days after seizing the plants, a plant-growing light and a doctor's letter explaining his medical condition.

Edward Willis' distraught wife had frantically sought a return of the six marijuana plants, saying her husband suffers from AIDS-related dementia that occasionally makes him violent. She said she had been told that the grow light, books, pipes and other paraphernalia would be held as evidence.

But Friday afternoon, police reversed their position. Angelica Willis said a detective telephoned to say he wanted to return her husband's property. She drove to the Mountain View Police Department to pick up the items, including now-dead marijuana plants.

"It's going to make him so happy," said an elated Angelica Wills. "This is so great."

The change came at the direction of Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney Karyn Sinunu, who said the county will not prosecute anyone who cultivates marijuana solely for medicinal purposes.

And it shock medical marijuana advocates, who said they know of no other police agency that has returned the drug after seizing it.

"If they give back the marijuana it would be a first, and it would be a violation of federal law," said William Panzer, an Oakland attorney who co-wrote Proposition 215, the medical marijuana initiative that passed in November. Growing and smoking marijuana is still against federal law, although the government said Friday that it will allow physicians to recommend medical marijuana to their patients.

"Legally, I don't think there's a basis for demanding return of the marijuana, but if the cops do give it back, I think that's wonderful," Panzer said. "I applaud them."

Sinunu said she does not think the police are on legally shaky ground. "This is a state law," she said. "We're just concerned about the state law."

Edward Willis, 43, is a union electrician who began to get sick about a year ago. When his wife tried to buy him a life insurance policy, he was tested, and learned he had AIDS in August. The disease is full-blown, Angelica Willis said, but he has not yet developed the infections that are usually associated with AIDS.

The dementia is the most severe manifestation of Willis' disease. "He's like a very old person. He agitates easily," his wife said. Marijuana helps calm him and also helps him gain weight.

In a letter dated Nov. 6, Dr. Deborah Shih of Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara, said she would consider prescribing marijuana for Willis if she were legally able to do so.

Before the Willises began growing the drug, they obtained it through the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Co-operative, but having their own supply saves money, she said.

In January, Willis attacked their 20-year-old daughter. Since then, he has been under a psychiatrist's care at Kaiser, and Angelica Vrillis said he has been more rational lately.

After her husband left the hospital, Kaiser asked the Mountain View police to make occasional "welfare" checks at his home, to ensure that he was not harming his family.

That was why officers visited the Willis apartment on Shoreline Boulevard Tuesday night. They seized six healthy plants, saying the crop appeared to be more than enough for personal use. Willis was taken to the police station, but was never charged with a crime.

It took more than two days for investigators to verify Willis' condition with his doctor, according to Mountain View Police Sgt. Tony Lopez. Dr. Shih is on maternity leave and detectives' calls apparently went unreturned.

"That has been the hang-up in this entire case," Lopez said. He added, "Obviously we haven't had a lot of experience with the new law."

Finally, on Friday, Sinunu recommended the officers return Willis' marijuana and growing accessories.

"We respect the voters' call that, in certain circumstances, upon a doctor's recommendation, we will honor a patient's right to use marijuana for medical purposes," Sinunu said. "It's a controlled substance now, and we have to make sure it's used only for that legal purpose."

After The Bailout, A Flood - Mexico Is Drowning, But The US Won't Admit It

There they go again: by certifying that Mexico is fully cooperating with the United States on drug enforcement, the Clinton administration has shown that it intends to pursue long-standing American policy toward Mexico, no matter how obsolete. Given the choice of propping up the PRI regime, whatever the cost or consequence, or risking a transition which would put an end to PRI's 75 years of one-party rule, Washington will always choose the first option.

No matter how much evidence is unearthed on corruption or the absence of the rule of law; no matter that the current system guarantees political instability, U.S. policymakers look the other way.

And it's not just policymakers. For reasons that sometimes defy the imagination, the U.S. media and establishment continue to find silver linings behind every Mexican cloud. Yet poll after poll in Mexico shows that Mexicans have exactly the opposite sentiment; they believe few things are improving in the country. The Mexicans are right.

We can start with the case of the celebrated loan repayment. The government of President Ernesto Zedillo won Bill Clinton's and the U.S. media's applause for paying back early the 1995 U.S. loan that helped them out of a monetary crisis. Yet all that Mexico did was to borrow the money on the European bond market and send it to the U.S. Treasury. Granted, the refinancing saves Mexico some interest, and Clinton some political heat, but it should not be viewed as a reflection of Mexico's economic recovery.

This is only a small part of the current economic predicament. The U.S. loan represented 2.5 percent of an astronomical total foreign debt. At slightly more than $180 billion, that debt is a higher percentage of the national economy than in 1982, when Mexico's inability to meet payments inaugurated the Latin American debt crisis. If the country was over-indebted then, it is so in spades now.

The good news in the Mexican economy is the export sector, which is showing impressive growth of 20 percent per year. But this, too, masks a much deeper problem. The domestic economy, completely decoupled from this thriving export enclave, remains stagnant. Domestic demand last year grew only 2 percent in relation to 1995, which was the worst economic year in the last half-century in Mexico. Beer sales, for example - a traditionally faithful indicator of consumption - only grew 2 percent in 1996; that's less than the expansion of the "beer-drinking" population. The domestic economy employs more than 80 percent of the job-holding population. Thus the export performance, which strongly influences aggregate statistics, has little impact on most Mexicans' lives. Those 80 million other Mexicans continue to see their incomes, standard of living and quality of life stagnate at best, and, in many cases, seriously deteriorate. Mexico's per capita income today, in constant dollars, is less than it was in 1980.

No wonder then that so many Mexicans say they are worse off today than ever before; they are.

The reasons go beyond the economy. Mexico is suffering a breakdown of law and order on the street and at the highest levels of government. Many mid-size communities in the provinces are spared this plague; life in cities from Aguascalientes to Merida is as safe and placid as ever. But in Mexico City, in the states of Morelos and Chihuahua, in Guadalajara and Torreon, crime and impunity have simply overwhelmed local inhabitants and authorities.

In Mexico City (the world's largest city), kidnappings, bank holdups, automatic teller machine robberies and taxicab assaults are now commonplace. This is true not only in the shanty towns, but in middle class neighborhoods and in the wealthier areas - where tourists visit and magnates wine and dine. Kidnappings have become a business, and bodyguards are a status symbol. The explanation for this striking state of affairs - Mexico City was a safe place to live in and travel to just a decade ago - lies in two factors: the economic crisis, and the disintegration of the Mexican police and justice system.

Joblessness, falling incomes and lack of opportunities are not new in Mexico, but they have gotten worse, and they have lasted too long. The incentive to survive through illicit means has soared. The corruption and incompetence of the Mexican police - local, state and federal - has created a situation where the risks of crime are increasingly low, and the rewards ever greater.

The sense of chaos is exacerbated by political violence. There is virtually no likelihood that the various guerrilla groups in the country will ever pose a serious military threat to the government or to overall stability. But that does not mean that they are incapable of inflicting severe damage to the army or to the country's image abroad.

The Zapatista threat in Chiapas has been largely neutralized, even though the political and cultural ramifications of the conflict in the indigenous communities continue to reverberate through Mexican society. But the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR) that burst forth in the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Hidalgo and Mexico last summer is a much more serious affair. The group has money - probably from the widely publicized kidnappings of 1994 - and guns - purchased from the drug cartels - and people able and willing to use them. Over the past few months, sources within the government confess that over 50 members of the armed forces have been executed by the EPR, some in gruesome circumstances. Several helicopters, including one carrying the commanding general of the Guerrero military zone, have been shot down.

No matter how strongly the Mexican press and the government seek to limit news of the EPR's existence and activities, it is quite likely that during the approaching election campaign the group will seek to disrupt the process, or in any case to hold it hostage to its demands. It will make itself noticed.

None of these problems stems directly from the exhaustion of Mexico's one-party political system. But the absence of a functioning political system makes it much more difficult to put in place the many necessary reforms. This is perhaps President Zedillo's greatest failure so far, in an administration that has few successes to show for itself. Initially hopes were high on two fronts: reform of the judiciary and of the electoral system. Both have foundered.

The nation's three largest political parties negotiated new electoral legislation for almost two years. Finally, last summer, they reached agreement on a broad series of changes that still left intact the current party system and made it likely that the PRI would retain a majority in the congress. But when the time came to vote on the details, the consensus collapsed. Consequently, the degree of acrimony and mistrust between the opposition and the PRI is probably greater today than at any time since 1988.

Official intolerance and governmental intimidation of critics and dissidents are also back to pre-Zedillo levels. Would-be PRI splinter group leaders are thrown in jail on corruption charges; publishers of critical newspapers are prosecuted for tax evasion; the president himself lashes out at critics, denouncing their "intellectual dishonesty" and publicly lambasting them for "entertaining foreign correspondents in their weekend homes and offering an inaccurate and negative image of Mexico." These are not quite the traits one would expect to see in a successful regime leading the country back to economic prosperity and democracy.

It is on the issue of judicial reform that the Zedillo administration has most disappointed the country, with the embarrassing fiasco surrounding the Raul Salinas de Gortari affair providing the best example. It has made even the most jaded Mexicans more cynical.

First, former president's Carlos Salinas de Gortari's brother, Raul, was arrested on charges of masterminding the assassination of a top party official. Then shocking revelations of hundred-million-dollar bank accounts and false identities surfaced; finally the presumed skeleton of the chief plotter of the murder was dug up in Raul's garden. It now turns out, however, that the skeleton had nothing to do with the murder, and that the witnesses who testified to his involvement were bribed by the police. To top it off, the federal prosecutor who built the case may well be jailed for trumping up the charges. Yet the former president's brother will surely remain in jail until this year's election, since freeing him would doom the PRI's already dim prospects. Thus the accused and accuser will be both be in prison.

Mexicans tend to conclude one of two things, both equally damning to the Zedillo administration. Either the Salinas brothers are guilty of everything they are suspected of, but they are not being punished. Or the Salinas brothers are scapegoats for the current regime's incompetence and failure. Which version is correct is less important than the terrible reflection they both provide of a country and a government slowly but surely sinking into disorder and despondency.

Why the Clinton administration continues to put the best light on all of this is a mystery. What is clear, though, is that it makes little sense for other Americans to keep pretending that nothing is wrong in Mexico, or that things are improving. They are not, no matter how often the American president claims they are, nor how upset the Mexican president becomes when his critics speak their mind.

Jorge Castaneda is professor of political science at the National University of Mexico.

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - As more reports of corrupt dealings between narcotics traffickers and top Mexican officials emerged last week, another, more open form of drug dealing continued to flourish along the border here.

On a street steps away from the bridge linking this city's downtown with Laredo, Texas, up a narrow flight of stairs with exposed wiring leading to a bare bulb, was a doctor's office to which a visitor had been referred by a pharmacy around the corner.

"Valium?" said a woman in a white doctor's jacket, who didn't seem at all to be the physician named Horacio whose name appeared on her prescription forms. The visitor confirmed his request with a nod.

She filled out two forms, one for the drugstore, one for United States Customs. "Ten dollars, please," she said.

She changed a twenty. Was she a doctor too, or perhaps a nurse? "The doctor's assistant," she said.

Back on the street, half a dozen drugstores could be found nearby during a three-minute stroll, along with several more doctors' offices, at the ready to dispense prescriptions for American customers.

They are outlets in the other, less-publicized Mexican-American drug trade. American retirees and pill-popping youths have becomes mules of a sort in a market with some of the same dynamics as the violent trade in illicit drugs.

There is robust demand on the American side, cheap and ample supply on the Mexican and a casual regard for legal niceties.

Though nobody keeps precise records, one recent study estimated that visitors legally brought back about 4 million Valium tablets through Laredo alone in a one-year period, along with large quantities of drugs like Halcion, Ritalin and Percodan.

Law enforcement officials say that while some customers buy just for themselves, others go across day after day, stocking up on pills for pennies to resell illegally for $5 each back home.

Traditionally, the buyers have been ailing elderly Americans whose Medicare insurance doesn't cover drugs and who can afford essential medicines only at Mexican prices. They sometimes ride buses for 14 hours or more each way, from as far away as Louisiana. Increasingly, however, the customers are hard-partying, drug-dealing youths in their own cars.

Jose A. Garcia, a top Customs Service official in Laredo, said inspectors are nearly weaponless against such young buyers in what he calls the "pill war." Especially on weekends, swarms return from trips to Nuevo Laredo with 90-day supplies (the legal maximum) of drugs like Valium, each brandishing the Mexican doctor's prescription needed to make the purchase legal.

"Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah - you can't touch me," he said, loudly mimicking their attitude. "They look you right in the eye and say, 'I'm 19 years old and I have had a nervous breakdown.' "

By now, Garcia looked like he needed some Valium himself. "There's nothing I can do," he said.

Mexico has long been a destination for Americans seeking pleasures harder to obtain back home. Nuevo Laredo has a red-light "zona de tolerancia" and the old Cadillac Bar (albeit renamed in an ownership feud), a dusky refuge dating back to Prohibition.

In border towns like this, however, the hawking of pharmaceuticals to Americans has become the growth industry, the more so since the peso's crash two years ago made drugs even cheaper for those with dollars.

At Benavides Pharmacy in Nuevo Laredo, 90 Valium tablets come to $9.58. At a chain drugstore in Dallas, the same supply would cost $68.57. Fifty tablets of Zantac, the ulcer medication, costs $73.59 in the United States with a prescription, but only $23.74 in Mexico, no prescription needed.

Explaining lower prices south of the border, drug companies point to lower production costs in Mexico, adding that they have to recoup research and development expenses in the more lucrative United States market. Many critics say these costs are overstated.

Under Mexican regulations, all but mood-altering drugs are generally available without a prescription. And new, experimental and even doubtful drugs are approved more readily than they are in the United States.

Decades ago, American cancer patients come south of the border for sham treatments like Laetrile. In the late 1980s, AIDS victims came to buy promising drugs that the Food and Drug Administration was slow to approve. Since then, the agency has speeded its approvals; the most advanced drugs are now available only in the United States.

Three years ago, several American pharmacists' associations, smarting from their Mexican competition and eager to denigrate it, hired scholars from the University of Texas College of Pharmacy to study Customs declarations at Laredo.

The 14 drugs most often purchased through the year ended June 1995 were all what the United States somewhat vainly calls controlled substances. Valium was the most popular, followed by Rohypnol, or "roofies" - a powerful anxiety-relief medication used in the commission of so many "date rapes" that the Drug Enforcement Administration banned the tablets a year ago.

More than 60 percent of the buyers were men, median age 24.

With such traffic growing over the last few years, Texas has been applying its own laws banning controlled substances not prescribed by a doctor licensed in the state. So those who clear the Feds at the border can still be pulled over and arrested by state troopers.

As Sgt. Charles A. Haight of the Texas Highway Patrol, put it, "It's not grandma and grandpa getting their heart medicine out here."

Colombian Jail To Crack Down On Courier Pigeons

What Mexico Gave Up

James Hammett writes:

One of the recent objectives of US negotiations, with Mexico, has been to get permision for DEA agents to carry guns in Mexico itself. Mexico had been opposed to this idea. (Something to do with soveriegnty and armed US agents on their soil. (Anyone remember Poncho Villa?) It looks like they might have agreed to allowing this, in exchange for certification.

The Washington Post, March 2, 1997, p. A24
By Roberto Suro and Pierre Thomas
Washington Post Staff Writers

Mexico promised to allow U.S. drug enforcement agents to carry guns on cross-border operations under agreements reached in last-minute negotiations with the Clinton administration before the White House announced Friday that it had certified Mexico as a full-fledged ally in the drug war, administration officials said yesterday.

Mexico also offered formal promises of greater cooperation in extraditing drug lords, shutting down money-laundering operations and attacking corruption in its government, the officials said.

Mexico's frequent failure to deliver fully on these promises in the past figured prominently in congressional criticism of the certification decision. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and dozens of other prominent legislators declared they no longer trust such pledges from Mexico and have vowed to overturn the certification.

President Clinton defended his decision in his weekly radio address yesterday, saying, "make no mistake about it: Mexico has a serious drug problem, but Mexico's leaders recognize that problem and they have the will to fight it."

In apparent recognition of the agreements reached late last week, Clinton said, "We will continue to press our Mexican partners to take tough actions that will protect all our people from drugs."

The diplomatic talks resolved a matter of bitter frustration for U.S. law enforcement agencies when the Mexican government reversed itself and agreed to allow U.S. officials to carry guns in Mexico when they take part in joint task forces operating in the border region, administration officials said.

As drug-associated violence mounted in Mexican border cities last year, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies participating in the task forces insisted their officers needed to be armed for their protection. But, until last week, the Mexican government had rejected the request as unnecessary and a violation of diplomatic practice.

A high-level Mexican foreign ministry official said yesterday that negotiations over the arming of the task forces were still underway and denied there had been any quid pro quo for the U.S. certification. The Mexican government has insisted throughout the process that it was fully engaged in the drug fight out of self-interest.

Loss of certification would have obliged the Clinton administration to cut off economic aid and oppose loans to Mexico from multilateral organizations, such the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Rather than seeking a deal with Mexico that involved setting conditions for certification, administration officials said yesterday that the United States had used the certification process as a means of pressuring Mexico to pledge stepped-up cooperation on matters that have been the subject of long discussions.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said Friday that full certification had been granted with "firm expectations of further progress in the near term." Mexico, she said, would be expected "to work with us to meet a series of objectives that have emerged from our cooperation in the past."

The extradition of drug traffickers is expected to develop as one of the touchiest and most sensitive measures of Mexican cooperation in the future, according to administration officials and critics of the certification decision.

In 1996, Mexico extradited 13 persons, including six for narcotics offenses. In 1995, Mexico extradited five, Justice Department statistics show, but how many of those were for drug-related offenses was not spelled out. Feinstein criticized the Mexican extradition record, noting recently that the United States has 52 outstanding requests for extraditions on drug-related charges.

The extradition debate, like several others, has a familiar refrain. Last March, following U.S. certification of Mexico, Clinton administration and Mexican officials developed high-level working groups. Among their goals: better joint investigations of traffickers and extradition of known criminals.

The Mexicans also committed to following through on prior pledges to step up the fight against money laundering by drug lords, including enactment of regulations requiring banks to report large and suspicious currency transactions.

Within the federal government, Mexican pledges of cooperation are greeted most skeptically by law enforcement officials, and they often cite the border region task forces aimed at disrupting drug traffickers as a disillusioning example of broken promises.

Although the concept of the task forces developed over two years of negotiations and was formalized in a signed agreement last May, "it never really got off the ground," said DEA Administrator Thomas A. Constantine in an interview last week.

The task forces were supposed to identify drug traffickers and deny them the ability to shift back and forth across the border to elude arrest. The Justice Department proclaimed the task forces, "one of the best ways we have to make inroads against the Mexican-based criminal drug organizations."

However, Constantine said. the Mexican government never fully funded its side of the operation, leaving a crew of enthusiastic young Mexican police officers without proper training or resources to do their job. Also, he said the Mexican government kept switching, sometimes quarterly, the police leadership at Monterrey, Tijuana and Juarez, three cities that are key distribution centers for the drug cartels.

When the Mexicans refused to allow U.S. officers permission to carry weapons despite death threats against them, Constantine decided to pull the plug on the operation. "I have suspended travel authority for all DEA special agents to Mexico to participate in counter-drug investigations until they are provided appropriate protection that is commensurate with the risks inherent in these dangerous assignments," Constantine said in congressional testimony last week.

Eduardo Ibarrola, Mexico's deputy attorney general for international relations, said in an interview, "I understand he [Constantine] is pretty mad. Probably if I were in his position, I'd be mad, too. But we have to work together with all of this."

Foreign correspondents Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson in Mexico City contributed to this report.

Caption: Albright says United States has "expectations of further progress."

Worker Fights Dismissal For Medical Marijuana Use

LOS ANGELES - When the letter from the Orange County government arrived the week before last, Rod Dunaway knew what it said even before opening the envelope.

A heavy-equipment operator from Mission Viejo who smokes marijuana to relieve pain from glaucoma, Dunaway, 38, had recently taken a random drug test under a 1991 federal law that requires random testing of many transportation workers. He tested positive for marijuana, and is now being dismissed by the county.

But this was no routine dismissal. After voters in a controversial statewide referendum last year approved the use of marijuana for medical purposes when recommended by a doctor, Dunaway became the first person in California claiming to use marijuana for pain relief to lose his job as a result.

On Monday, Feb. 24, he filed for an arbitration hearing through his union, a local of the Service Employees International. The county has two weeks to respond, but anticipating that his dismissal will not be reversed, Dunaway said he had already taken steps to sue the county in state court for discrimination.

"It seems like they wanted to ignore 215," Dunaway said in an interview, referring to the proposition known as the Medical Marijuana Initiative, which was approved with 56 percent of the vote in November. "But maybe this will force the federal government and the state to sit down and put in guidelines that make sense."

With evidence that marijuana has been helpful in controlling nausea in cancer patients on chemotherapy, reducing weight loss in people who have AIDS and easing pressure on the eyes of people with glaucoma, California and Arizona last year became the latest states to decide by referendum to legalize marijuana use in some medical circumstances. Other states, including Florida, Idaho, Ohio and Washington, have done the same through legislation.

But Dunaway's case reflects a possible clash between state initiatives benefiting people who have exhausted other means of seeking pain relief and federal regulations intended to protect public safety. Also, it comes as the Clinton administration, led by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the president's chief adviser on drug policy, is fighting efforts to make access to illegal drugs easier.

While Californians now have the right to use marijuana for medical purposes on a doctor's recommendation, and a bill introduced the week before last in the state Senate seeks $6 million to study the drug as a viable medical therapy, buying and selling marijuana remains illegal in all states under federal law.

In addition, the IRS recently ruled that the cost of marijuana could not be deducted as a medical expense.

For the last decade, Dunaway earned as much as $32,000 a year driving a 10-wheel dump truck, bulldozers, front-end loaders and other heavy equipment. A husband and father of two daughters, ages 13 and 4, he described himself as "a very conservative individual who believes strongly in family values."

He said he began using marijuana to ease pain from glaucoma in 1980, at the suggestion of a friend who had tried it for the same reasons and found success. Until then, Dunaway had taken conventional medications prescribed by his doctor. None brought him relief, he said, and some made him feel worse, with side effects like an increased heart rate, headaches and blurred vision.

The marijuana, he said, provided almost instant relief. He told his doctor about it, and for the next 15 years, just before going to bed, Dunaway said he lighted a small pipe with marijuana and inhaled three or four times. The pain relief around his eyes, he said, lasted all the next day and never left him feeling the effects of the drug that recreational users typically seek, like euphoria or giddiness.

"I always did my job effectively," Dunaway said. "And I never smoked at any other time of day."

In early 1995, Dunaway said, the county began random testing of employees whose jobs could affect public safety. A screen of his urine produced a positive result for marijuana, and he was suspended for 30 days without pay and put on a one-year probation. He was told that if he tested positive again, he would lose his job, and as a further condition of his probation, he agreed to be tested once every two months.

For more than a year, Dunaway said he avoided using marijuana and tried fighting his pain with conventional drugs, only to suffer side effects again. By last October, a month before the proposition passed and with his doctor's recommendation, he said he returned to using marijuana.

When Proposition 215 passed, he assumed he was on safe legal footing. But the measure tacitly acknowledges federal transportation safety laws by saying that the referendum does not "supersede legislation prohibiting persons from engaging in conduct that endangers others."

After Dunaway tested positive a second time, the county began taking steps to discharge him, which culminated in the week before last's dismissal.

"You can't be impaired in any way, driving something like that," said John W. Sibley, the director of the department, referring to the size of a dump truck that Dunaway drove, often along federal and state highways.

Sibley, who described Dunaway as an otherwise competent employee, said that if Dunaway had notified his superiors that he was using marijuana for medical reasons, the county would have assigned him to a job that did not involve public safety.

But Dunaway said he chose not to inform the county because his use of marijuana for medical purposes "was none of their business."

Bill Zimmerman, who led the state campaign for Proposition 215, said the resolution of Dunaway's case would probably depend on his ability to show that his marijuana use had no bearing on his job.

"He said he only smoked at the end of the day," Zimmerman said. "Marijuana can stay in your system for 30 days, but its psychologically active effects only last a couple of hours."

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Mounties Bust Harm Reduction Club

On Friday, February 28 at about 4:30pm, the "Dutch Embassy" storefront location of the Harm Reduction Club was raided by Burnaby RCMP.

[See "Canada's First Marijuana Store Opens" in the Jan. 16, 1997 Portland NORML Weekly News Release. - ed.]

Organizer David Malmo-Levine, co-worker Derrick and a customer were arrested. The customer was released after being harassed, Derrick spent the night in jail and was released on a promise not to go within 10 blocks of the Dutch Embassy, a 10pm curfew and to not communicate with David Malmo-Levine.

David himself is still in Burnaby prison as of Monday evening, possibly to be released on a $4,000 bail bond tomorrow, if he will agree to whatever conditions the judge sets upon his release. Note that it is common practice for police to make this kind of "harassment bust" on a Friday afternoon, so that victim must spend the weekend in jail before a hearing can be held.

The Dutch Embassy has remained open and active since the bust, although they've cut back their hours and supplies are limited at the moment.

This is the first police bust at this location, which has been open and busy since December 20, 1996. They have been robbed by armed thieves four times at this location though, the last time the thieves came their was a scuffle with club members defending themselves, and that's how the club discovered the thieves' gun was loaded with blanks.

It's worth mentioning that although the RCMP didn't pull their triggers like the thieves did, their guns are loaded with real bullets.

[End]

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